On the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention, Melania Trump, in a highly anticipated speech plagiarized from Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. ^[1]

The plagiarism was first discovered by Jarrett Hill, an interior designer and writer for The Huffington Post; the story broke upon his tweeting of the incident.

In an interview earlier that day with Matt Lauer of NBC, Melania had said about her speech, "I wrote it, with as little help as possible."

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law commissioned Melania's speech from Mr. Scully and Mr. McConnell and praised their draft.

Melania ripped up the speech since she felt uncomfortable with the text and left only a small fraction of the original speech. Melania Trump wrote an almost completely new draft the speech with the help of Donald Trump ghostwriter, Meredith McIver.

There is a conspiracy theory that the plagiarism was included on purpose by someone in the Trump camp loyal to ousted former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski who wanted to sabotage Trump for ousting Corey. Further evidence is that a line from Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" - often used on the Internet for prank Rickrolling- was included in the speech. The line was: “He will never, ever give you up. And most importantly, he will never, ever let you down.”