CLEVELAND — In her mid-30s and slowed by injuries, Ms Meredith McIver, a classically trained ballerina who had danced under the limelight with Balanchine and the ensembles of Broadway musicals, decided to pursue her passion for writing.

She tried her hand at short stories and poems in the style of Dylan Thomas before finding work writing advertising copy. “She was always very, very interested in writing as an art form,” said an ex-boyfriend, Stephen Palitz. He said Ms McIver brought a dancer’s discipline, precision and rigour to her work. “She’s adept at crystallising phrases and saying things in an elegant straightforward way.”

This week, Ms McIver returned to centre stage for her writing, but not in the manner she might have hoped.

“My name is Meredith McIver and I’m an in-house staff writer at the Trump Organisation,” began an extraordinary statement she released on Wednesday morning (July 20) in which she took the blame for the disastrous plagiarism of Mrs Michelle Obama in Mrs Melania Trump’s prime-time speech Monday at the Republican National Convention.

In the statement, Ms McIver, a 65-year-old co-author of several books with Mr Donald Trump, said that as she and Melania Trump were preparing her speech, Trump mentioned that she admired Mrs Michelle Obama and read to McIver parts of the first lady’s 2008 speech at the Democratic convention.

McIver said she had inadvertently left portions of the Obama speech in the final draft. “This was my mistake,” she wrote. She wrote that she had offered her resignation, but that the Trumps had rejected it. “Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences.”

“I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs Obama,” Ms McIver wrote. “No harm was meant.”

But harm was of course done.

After a Twitter user discovered the plagiarism, the story of the cribbed lines hung over the convention and eclipsed the otherwise positive response to Mrs Melania Trump’s speech. Her husband’s warring advisers pointed fingers at one another. His family was furious. The campaign chairman said that he believed Mrs Melania Trump wrote the speech herself, as she asserted, and that it would be “crazy” to think she would crib lines when all of America was watching.

Ms McIver, a registered Democrat with no known political experience, was suddenly at the centre of the biggest political story in the country. Mr Palitz, a lawyer who has remained friends with Ms McIver for decades, said that knowing her generally meticulous attention to detail, “it sounds like she sort of stepped up and fell on her sword”.

The daughter of ballroom dancers, Ms McIver, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, grew up in Northern California, before coming to New York at age 14 on a Ford Foundation scholarship for dance. She studied at the School of American Ballet, the official school of the New York City Ballet, from 1965 through 1970. She then went to dance out west, Mr Palitz said, and enrolled at the University of Utah. An English major, she graduated magna cum laude in 1976.

She returned to New York and in 1981 danced in the company of the revival of “Can Can” at the Minskoff Theatre in New York. It closed after five performances. (“It is tireless in its attempts to please the audience,” The New York Times wrote in its review. “But mediocre material, no matter how it’s sliced, is still mediocre material.”)

She settled on the Upper West Side, and her fashionable dress, dancer’s figure and green eyes turned heads at the grocery. She travelled to the Netherlands and France. In How to Get Rich which she co-wrote with Donald Trump, she thanked Mr Alain Bernardin, the owner of a famed Paris striptease saloon, the Crazy Horse.

But dancing eventually took its toll, and after writing lyrics with Mr Palitz, a classical guitarist, she joined her sister Karen, the art director at the advertising firm Lotas Minard Patton McIver. Around the time Ms Karen left the firm more than a decade later, her sister entered Mr Donald Trump’s orbit.

In 2004’s How to Get Rich, Mr Trump wrote: “This book could not have been written without Meredith McIver, a writer of many talents. She served her apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet, worked on Wall Street, and for the past two years has been an executive assistant at The Trump Organisation, stationed at a desk outside my office.”

“As you know, my door is always open, so Meredith has heard everything, and she’s taken good notes. She’s done a remarkable job of helping me put my thoughts and experiences on paper. I am tremendously grateful to her.”

And Ms McIver, who Mr Trump also called “fast, responsible, and insightful”, seemed grateful to Mr Trump and to his future wife. In 2005’s Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, Ms McIver, again a co-author, took the opportunity to acknowledge “Melania Knauss for her kind assistance”.

As she had once dreamt, her name appeared on the covers of books, and she sent copies of them signed by Mr Donald Trump and inscribed with her own notes to friends, including Mr Palitz.

“Meredith was a go-to person for a lot of projects — I often heard her name,” said Mr Adam Eisenstat, who wrote for a blog and online newsletter under Mr Trump’s name for Trump University in 2005 and 2006. “Like, ‘Meredith will take care of it.’ She had an omnibus role in his editorial projects.”

Ms Georgina Levitt, an associate publisher at Vanguard Press, which published a collection of Donald Trump’s essays called Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life in 2010, recalled Ms McIver — a voracious reader often seen with a bob haircut, tailored blazers and red lipstick — as a helpful liaison to Mr Trump.

“She obviously was a very strong editorial voice,” Ms Levitt said. “It seemed like there was a history, an element of trust between them.”

Today, Ms McIver is considered part of the extended Trump family. “She is terrific, she’s a terrific woman,” Donald Trump said in an interview Wednesday. “She’s been with us a long time and she just made a mistake.”

“She came in and she said, ‘Mr. Trump, I’d like to say what happened.’ I thought it was such a nice thing. Who knew this was going to be a big story?” THE NEW YORK TIMES