How NY real estate's late Mean Queen slammed Donald Trump's credibility

The late Leona Helmsley on Jan. 14, 2003. She died... — The late Leona Helmsley on Jan. 14, 2003. She died in 2007. Credit: Robert Mecea

By DAN JANISONdan.janison@newsday.comOctober 5, 2015

As fellow grandees from inherited New York real estate, Donald Trump and the late Leona Helmsley did their share of tabloid feuding in the 1980s.

The woman known as the Queen of Mean is reported to have said she wouldn't believe Trump "if his tongue were notarized."

Author Kateri Drexler later wrote that someone else first spoke the line, but Helmsley was "happy to claim authorship." This appears in Drexler's two-volume work, "Icons of Business: An Encyclopedia of Mavericks, Movers, and Shakers."

Trump said after Helmsley died in 2007: "Leona was a mean woman, but she liked being that way." He made the remarks on Neal Cavuto's program on Fox News, linked here.

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