Former Real Housewives of Pretoria star Melany Viljoen has endorsed USA president Donald Trump and repeated unfounded and false claims that South Africa has race laws that are discriminatory towards white people.
Viljoen recently moved to the US against a massive lawsuit. In 2024, Tammy Taylor, the US-based founder of Tammy Taylor Nails, filed a $100 million (R1.7 billion) lawsuit against Viljoen and her husband in April 2024 in California.
In June 2025, the court ordered the Viljoens to pay $4 million (approximately R71 million) in statutory damages for trademark infringement and breach of contract.
Now, the Ultimate Girls Trip SA has gone full Make America Great Again (MAGA), singing Trump’s praises. She said that she is ‘taking the Afrikaner case to the USA’.
“Trump is right about everything. I’m from South Africa where there are race laws against white people and where white people are getting killed,” she said on TikTok. “News (media) doesn’t want to write about it.”
She claimed to be testament of all that Trump has accused South Africa of.
Activist Pieter Kriel accused the Viljoens of spreading propaganda and lying about having to flee South Africa.
“What they did was repackage the country’s realities, crime, corruption, inequality into a political export for the American right,” Kriel said. “They feed the false Trump narrative that white South Africans are under attack.”
He went on to say South Africa’s racism is rooted in poverty, landlessness and is an aftershock of apartheid.
“The people who are the most unsafe in this country are the poor, not wealthy business owners with bodyguards and gated homes. When the Viljoens land in America and cry danger, they’re not telling the story of South Africa, they’re telling America what it wants to hear.”
The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) has long refuted claims of white people being persecuted.
“The idea that a particular race is being targeted on crime also not founded on any evidence,” International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola’s spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri said in May.
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