PALM BEACH, FL—Saying she was still coming to terms with what she had seen several days earlier, Melania Trump told reporters Monday she was left deeply shaken after discovering a secluded attic room in the Mar-a-Lago estate filled with haunting and grotesque self-portraits painted by her husband.

The 46-year-old spouse of Donald Trump, who reportedly opened a door she had never before noticed in a seldom-visited wing of the sprawling seaside mansion, is said to have walked into a studio filled with scores of graphically rendered paintings in which the Republican presidential nominee appears badly disfigured, covered in welts and oozing sores, with severely burnt flesh, or screaming in extraordinary agony.

“It was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” said a visibly upset Melania, who recalled stifling a gasp at the sight of an ornately framed painting in which the man she married sits behind his desk with half his facial skin torn off to reveal the bone and musculature below while black bile pours from his mouth. “At first, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at, but once I got closer and saw how many times he’d drawn himself with dark, empty holes where his eyes should be, I nearly fainted. They were just so…so disturbing. In one, he’s wearing clown makeup and has this completely vacant smile spreading across his face.”

“And there are so many of them,” she continued, trembling. “He must be up there painting every night.”