Exclusive: Inside Alina Habba’s UNGA-week wedding to Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon

Trump-world darling Alina Habba, 42, and Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon, 25, married Saturday in a $10 million wedding at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City — blowing away US and world leaders in attendance, multiple guests exclusively told The Correspondent.

The wedding was scheduled strategically on the last day of United Nations week in the Big Apple so that diplomats in town with foreign visas could attend, according to a Habba confidant.

Those international leaders included Ghana President John Dramani Mahama — part of an extraordinary guest list that brought some of the highest reaches of Washington together with foreign presidents, ministers, business magnates and other international power players for a private celebration in Manhattan.

On the American side, Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, Vice President JD Vance’s chief of staff Nick Luna, White House Counsel Will Scharf, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and White House aide Margo Martin, were among the guests invited, according to attendees.

Topping it off, 2000s rap icon Nelly performed for the elite guests in attendance.

In addition to Mahama, the wedding guest list included the finance ministers of both Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo; the president and speaker of the DRC’s National Assembly; a son of Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi; Turkey’s minister of energy and natural resources; and a former prime minister and defense minister of Qatar.

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris was also there.

So were former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and Spanish golf star Sergio García.

It made for an unusual scene even by the standards of UN week: some of the most powerful members of the Trump administration celebrating in the same ballroom as foreign officials who had arrived in New York for one of the world’s largest annual diplomatic gatherings.

And some of the international attendance carried another layer of significance.

Mildon is CEO of his family’s Miller Holding, a Turkish conglomerate with extensive international construction, infrastructure and investment interests — including major projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Its subsidiary Milvest has undertaken some of the DRC’s most prominent public developments, including the massive Kinshasa Congress and Financial Center.

That meant Saturday’s wedding brought Mildon together not only with his new wife’s extraordinary network in Trump-world, but with senior government figures from countries where his family’s business empire has forged substantial commercial relationships.

The result was something closer to a miniature international summit — albeit one conducted under chandeliers and surrounded by roses rather than behind diplomatic nameplates.

And the scale of it was particularly remarkable because, for many of the people in the room, the wedding itself had come as a surprise.

Habba and Mildon had been dating for just months before walking down the aisle, and multiple guests told The Correspondent they were surprised by how suddenly the nuptials came together.

The two met earlier this year at an event at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Public reporting has since also placed the beginning of their relationship there.

The Correspondent first broke the news Tuesday that Habba and Mildon were engaged and preparing to marry Saturday — just four days before they exchanged vows.

The couple managed to turn that whirlwind romance into a $10 million international affair timed to capitalize on one of the few weeks of the year when so many of their disparate worlds were already concentrated in one city.

And inside the Waldorf, the scale of the affair was impossible to miss.

Guests entered through a darkened passage almost completely engulfed in deep-red roses, with massive floral arches stretching overhead and rows of candles lining a glossy black mirrored floor, photographs obtained by The Correspondent show.

The effect was dramatic and almost tunnel-like: successive walls and arches of crimson roses framed the path into the celebration.

“I don’t know how they found enough florists in all of New York City,” one attendee told The Correspondent.

But the ceremony itself offered a striking contrast.

The ballroom was transformed into a much brighter landscape of white and pale-pink flowers, with flowering trees towering over both sides of the aisle beneath enormous crystal chandeliers.

Dense arrangements of white flowers blanketed the edges of a mirrored aisle, while rows of candles traced the path toward a towering floral wall at the altar.

The sheer quantity of flowers — about 900,000 in total sourced locally and from around the world — became one of the night’s defining features: photographs obtained by The Correspondent show floral installations stretching from the floor nearly to the ceiling, with virtually every sightline framed by blossoms.

Outside reporting has estimated the ballroom, floral arrangements and music alone could have approached $1 million — before hotel rooms or other event spaces were factored in.

But sources familiar with the celebration told The Correspondent the total wedding cost was roughly $10 million.

Habba walked down the mirrored aisle in a sparkling gown.

On her hand was another showstopper: a 21-carat diamond ring reportedly purchased from a museum that had previously belonged to Prussian royalty, The Correspondent has learned.

The celebration marked the third marriage for both Habba and Mildon.

It also came together at remarkable speed. Other reporting says the elaborate affair was organized in roughly three months, a timeline consistent with what guests told The Correspondent about their surprise at the sudden wedding.

Mildon’s age has also been widely reported incorrectly.

Numerous news organizations have identified the Turkish businessman as 29. But Mildon is 25, according to official records filed with the British government’s Companies House and reviewed by The Correspondent.

The British corporate registry lists the birth month and year of Turhan Mildon, a director of Milvest International Construction UK Limited, as December 2000 — making him 25 at the time of Saturday’s wedding. The discrepancy has also begun to be noted in other reporting.

Mildon is a third-generation executive in the family behind Miller Holding, whose companies have pursued international projects spanning construction, infrastructure and other industries, including significant operations in Africa.

Habba, meanwhile, became one of Trump’s most visible personal attorneys during his legal battles before joining his second administration as counselor to the president and later serving as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey.

Saturday night brought those two worlds together in a way few private events could.

Figures entrusted with running some of the most powerful institutions in the U.S. government celebrated alongside presidents, ministers and other senior foreign officials — including representatives of countries where the groom’s family has cultivated significant commercial interests.

Around them were billionaires, athletes and members of the couple’s international social circle.

For a romance that began less than six months ago and a wedding that caught even some guests by surprise, Habba and Mildon assembled a room that would have been difficult to replicate on almost any other weekend of the year.

They picked the one weekend when the world was already in New York.