Maryanne Trump Barry, a former federal judge who was an older sister of Donald Trump and served as both his protector and critic throughout their lives, has died at 86.

She died at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of them said police were called to the home early Monday. None of the people specified a cause, and all spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Barry had been on the federal bench in New Jersey, a position that Trump’s fixer, the lawyer Roy Cohn, was credited with helping her attain during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in the 1980s.

Trump seemed to heed the words of few people as much as he did his eldest sister’s, according to confidants. But their relationship suffered a significant fissure in the final year of his presidency, when their niece Mary Trump, who was promoting a memoir about their family, released recordings of her aunt speaking harshly about the president.

A Republican, Barry was appointed to the District Court in New Jersey by Reagan in 1983 and to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

She was the widow of John Barry, a veteran trial and appellate lawyer in New Jersey.

She stepped down from the bench in 2019 after The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s to increase the inherited wealth of Trump and his siblings. Barry not only benefited financially from most of these schemes, the Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

At the time, she had been listed as an inactive senior judge for two years. Her retirement made the court investigation moot because retired judges aren’t subject to judicial conduct rules.

In 2020, Mary Trump filed a lawsuit accusing the president and his siblings of cheating her out of her inheritance.

Maryanne Elizabeth Trump, a granddaughter of German immigrants, was born April 5, 1937, in New York City to Fred and Mary (McLeod) Trump. Her father, Fred Trump, the real estate mogul and the wellspring of the family’s wealth, developed thousands of apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. Her mother was a Scottish immigrant.

The family lived in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens. Barry once recalled: “The first time I realized my father was successful was when I was 15 and a friend said to me, ‘Your father is rich.’ We were privileged, but I didn’t know it.”

She attended the private Kew-Forest School in Queens and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1958. She earned a master’s in public law and government from Columbia University in 1962.

After 13 years as a homemaker, she enrolled in law school at Hofstra University, on Long Island, where she was editor of its law review.

She graduated in 1974 and went to work for the government, becoming an assistant federal prosecutor in New Jersey. She was chief of the civil division from 1977 to 1982 and first assistant U.S. Attorney from 1981 to 1983, placing her, at the time, among the highest ranking women in the office of a federal prosecutor.

Her marriage to David Desmond in 1960 ended in divorce in 1980. They had a son, David William Desmond.

She married John Barry in 1982. He died in 2000.

In addition to her son and brother, her immediate survivors include a younger sister, Elizabeth Trump Grau.