Maryanne Trump Barry, retired judge and Trump's sister, 86, dies

MARYANNE Trump Barry, a former federal judge who was the older sister of Donald J. Trump and served as both his protector and critic throughout their lives, has died. She was 86.

She died at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of them said the police were called to the home early Monday morning. None of the people specified a cause, and all spoke on the condition of anonymity. A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

Judge Barry had been on the federal bench in New Jersey, a position that Mr. Trump’s fixer, the lawyer Roy M. Cohn, was credited with helping her attain during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in the 1980s. She retired in 2019 after she became the focus of a court investigation stemming from an investigation by The New York Times into the Trump family’s tax practices.

A Republican, Judge Barry was appointed to the District Court in New Jersey by President Reagan in 1983. President Bill Clinton elevated her to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1993. She was the widow of John J. Barry, a veteran trial and appellate lawyer in New Jersey.

She stepped down from the bench after The Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s to increase the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of these schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

At the time, she had been listed as an inactive senior judge for two years. Her retirement mooted the court investigation since retired judges are not subject to judicial conduct rules.

Judge Barry’s scathing remarks about her brother were made in a series of audio recordings surreptitiously recorded by Mary Trump in 2018 and 2019 while Ms. Trump was working on the book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” (2020).

The audiotapes, made available to The Washington Post, included criticism that went beyond other caustic comments contained in Ms. Trump’s book.