Timothy Mellon, the millionaire donor and Trump backer who gave $130 Million to pay American troops, married three times: All about his wives, family, education and relationships

The anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown was Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and major financial backer of President Donald Trump, the NYT reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

While announcing the donation on Thursday night (October 23, 2025), Trump had refused to identify the person who provided the funds, only calling him a "patriot" and a friend. The identity was revealed by two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the donation was private. They identified him as Mellon.

Timothy Mellon: Personal life, education, and marriages

Mellon has been a longtime backer of Trump, and he gave millions of dollars to groups supporting the US president's campaign in 2024. Known as a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, Mellon made a $50 million donation to a super political action committee supporting Trump, according to NYT News Service. It was reportedly one of the largest single contributions ever disclosed.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1942, a grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Timothy Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Trump and the Republican Party.

Mellon, who lives primarily in Wyoming, is known to keep a low profile despite his prolific political spending. His father’s name was Paul Mellon. According to Vanity Fair, Paul’s wife, Mary, had died in 1946, leaving him with their nine-year-old daughter, Catherine, and four-year-old son, Timothy. Two years later, when he married Rachel Lambert Lloyd.

At the age of 10, he was enrolled at Fenn, near Boston, then continued his education at Milton Academy and Yale, according to I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold’s recent biography of Bunny, whose original name was Rachel and who was the stepmother of Timothy Melon, as reported by Vanity Fair.

“Paul agreed with Bunny that Tim was a very difficult child.” Boarding school offered one solution, according to the biography.

Timothy Mellon married three times. Before his freshman year of college, he proposed to his girlfriend, Susan Tracy. She was a Bryn Mawr girl and the daughter of the president of Esso Standard Oil. According to Vanity Fair, Rachel, also known as Bunny, tried to put an end to the wedding. At the end of Timothy’s junior year, the couple got married. After graduation they moved into a simple house in Guilford, Connecticut.

In the early 1980s, following his divorce from Sue, Timothy married Louise Whitney, an Upperville, Virginia, native who had been a childhood friend. After she and Tim divorced in the early 1990s, Tim married Patricia Trenary Freeman, who was recently divorced from Charles “Chas” Freeman Jr., a classmate of Tim’s at Milton and Yale.