The president has been asked repeatedly how his close friendship with child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein ended. We got an answer Tuesday.
Trump knew Epstein was hunting teenage girls at Mar-a-Lago. So far, the media has been remarkably blasé about his stunning admission.
The White House initially claimed that Epstein was banned from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for “being a creep.” Trump’s assertion in a press conference that he broke up with Epstein, because he was poaching staff from Mar-a-Lago, seemed like a new and contradictory explanation for how they fell out after over a decade of friendship.
But an old item from the New York Post shows that the poaching and the creeping were two sides of the same coin.
On Tuesday, a reporter asked Trump whether any of the poached employees were young women. "People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone,” Trump said on Air Force One.
"And other people would come and complain, 'this guy is taking people from the spa.' I didn't know that," he continued. "And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.' I don't want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, 'out of here.'"
Trump tried to make the falling out sound like a G-rated business dispute, as if Epstein were simply hiring away valued employees with in-demand skills. Trump may have played up the poaching angle to deflect attention from his longstanding knowledge of Epstein’s deviant behavior, as he considers whether to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s highest-ranking and most notorious co-conspirator.
Trump’s story matches a contemporaneous account of Epstein’s exile from Mar-a-Lago reported by Page 6, the New York Post’s gossip column.
“He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” an anonymous source told Page 6 in October 2007. “Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.”
That source was almost certainly Trump, who was notorious for laundering his version of reality through Page 6, either anonymously or under the pseudonym “John Barron.”
In any event, someone at Mar-a-Lago knew that Epstein was luring girls from the club to sexually abuse them.
Like Trump on Air Force One, the tipster spoke of an ongoing pattern, namely, that Epstein “would use the spa to try and procure girls.”
Aboard Air Force One, Trump acknowledged that Virginia Giuffre was one of the teens taken from his club.
Giuffre was a 16-year-old towel girl who was recruited at Mar-a-Lago by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000. Giuffre would go on to become one of his most outspoken victims, until her death by suicide in April.
Ghislaine is now serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.
According to journalist Michael Wolff, her family leaked the birthday greeting Trump gave Epstein on his 50th birthday as a warning to Trump that she has incriminating evidence on him. Wolff said the No. 2 at the Department of Justice interviewed her to find out more.
Giuffre was lured in 2000, but Epstein wasn’t kicked out of the club until seven years later, after he had been arrested for soliciting underage sex in Florida. (Trump denied that Epstein was a member, but four Miami Herald reporters obtained a registry of members, confirming his membership a decade before his arrest.)
Page 6, Trump’s journalistic North Star, covered Epstein’s prostitution case in great detail, so Trump would have been well aware.
According to Trump, he told Epstein to knock it off after he was warned that people – plural – had been taken from Mar-a-Lago. Then Epstein allegedly did it again. This suggests there were at least three victims: Giuffre, one other girl, and a member’s daughter. In their 2020 book, The Grifter’s Club, the Miami Herald reporters said Epstein was banned after “harassing” the daughter of a member .
Moreover, Trump recalled that Epstein resumed his predatory behavior “not too long after” after being told to stop. A seven-year gap after Giuffre would be quite long after. This is another reason to suspect there was an ongoing pattern of predation that Trump was well aware of – before Epstein went after a member’s daughter and risked a scandal.
Did Trump call the police when he learned that an alleged sex offender had been using his spa as a hunting ground for teenage girls?
Did he ever warn employees about Epstein?
Did he do anything to rein in Ghislaine Maxwell, who approached Giuffre and others? Or did he let her keep prowling the spa for Epstein?
Why did he have teenage masseuses at Mar-a-Lago, anyway?
We can all guess the answers to these questions, but someone should ask the president for the record.
Trump aborted the long-promised release of the FBI’s Epstein files after learning that his name appeared therein. The president has reason to be cagey. He and Epstein were best friends for a decade and their friendship was centered around chasing girls.
The nation has been consumed by speculation about what dark secrets the files might hold about Trump. Trump’s admission that Epstein used Mar-a-Lago as a hunting ground may provide a critical clue.