Authorities have questioned whether Simona Mangiante, George Papadopoulos' new wife, is whom she claims to be, asking if she speaks Russian or has traveled to Moscow.
While she tells ABC News she is tired of the false assumptions, Mangiante did herself no favors last week when she presented the network with an altered photo of her passport.
Mangiante acknowledged on Monday that she altered the date of birth on the photograph to disguise her age. She now says she is 37, not 34, years old.
"I did happen to lie about my age," Mangiante said in a statement to ABC News. "I don’t owe anyone an explanation about it."
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On Monday, Mangiante acknowledged altering the passport photo after she faced pressure online from an independent journalist who has raised persistent questions about her identity. The journalist, Scott Stedman, reported on Twitter that he had obtained a copy of Mangiante’s marriage certificate, where the date of birth listed differed from the one on the passport photo provided to ABC News. Her date of birth also differed on an Italian legal database, as ABC News noted in its reporting last week.
Mangiante said she altered the date in order to appear younger — which she considered an age-old desire of women everywhere, but especially in Hollywood, where she has moved to pursue an acting career. She argued that the discrepancy is proof of nothing more malicious than a bit of vanity, but felt it was important now to come clean.
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The questions came in part because she and Papadopoulos had independent ties to a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud. Prosecutors have alleged that an unnamed professor -- later identified by sources as Mifsud -- was acting as an agent for the Russian government in April 2016 when he told Mangiante’s future husband George, then a volunteer foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Mifsud denied those allegations, but he has since gone underground and has not been seen or heard from in public.
During a September appearance on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Papadopoulos said even his parents "thought that she might have been some sort of Russian spy ...
[Mangiante] says she studied law, and although ABC News was not able to verify her law degree, an Italian legal database shows her registered to practice in Italy until 2010, when she says she moved to Brussels.
She worked as a lawyer on international child custody and abduction cases in the European Parliament, she says, before moving to London to work for Mifsud. But when she stepped into the spotlight to defend her husband – the first person indicted in the Mueller probe – she was immediately confronted with doubts about her history. She says people have told her the that even the work she did for the European Parliament sounded like a cover story.
“I used to work as a diplomat at the European Parliament for a few years and this could be a red flag because many officials at European Union actually -- it’s a cover-up for spy jobs,” Mangiante told ABC News last year.
Wife of sentenced former Trump aide seeks to end speculation that she is a Russian spy (ABC News)
For wife of sentenced former Trump adviser, a doctored passport photo stokes new questions (ABC News)