Trump’s Mar-a-Lago admission raises questions about what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein
Donald Trump’s admission that he was aware Jeffrey Epstein “stole” young women from the spa of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort should serve as a pivotal moment in the Epstein saga when we look back on it.
Of course, things don’t always work as they should. The MAGA world, once in a tailspin over Trump’s refusal to release more of the Epstein investigation records, seems wholly less interested in getting to the bottom of what the man who is now president knew.
Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1997.Credit: Getty Images
Trump was good friends with Epstein in the 1990s. They moved in the same circles, attended the same parties, flew together on Epstein’s plane, and in the US president’s telling, shared a similar taste in “beautiful women”.
Then they apparently fell out. The exact circumstances remain vague, but once the heinous allegations of sex trafficking were publicly ventilated and a disgraced Epstein faced charges, Trump was resolutely “not a fan”.
In 2019, The Washington Post revealed the two men were pitted against each other when they competed to buy a waterfront property in Palm Beach, Maison de l’Amitie, in 2004. In 2007, The New York Post reported Epstein had been banned from Mar-a-Lago.
These days, the White House says Trump banned Epstein from the club “for being a creep”. That is the same reason he gave his former aide Sam Nunberg in 2014, before he first ran for president, according to the Post’s 2019 story.
Trump and his future wife, Melania, with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in 2000.Credit: Getty Images
Trump now says he knew Epstein “stole” young women from the Mar-a-Lago spa, namely Virginia Giuffre, who escaped the clutches of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell by marrying an Australian she met in Thailand in 2002, and moving to Australia. Tragically, she took her own life earlier this year.
The question Trump hasn’t been asked, and therefore hasn’t answered, is: what did he think Epstein was “stealing” these young women for? Trump suggests he was upset about Epstein depriving him of his employees.
“I have one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago and people were taken out of the spa. Hired, by him. In other words: gone. Other people would come and complain: ‘This guy is taking people from the spa.’
“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.’”
Donald Trump arrives at the White House on Tuesday. Credit: Bloomberg
But is that really all there is to it?
Asked today about the discrepancy between his new reason for barring Epstein and his old reason – that Epstein was a creep – he said they were “sort of a little bit of the same thing”.
That is very close to an admission that he knew, or at the very least suspected, Epstein was up to no good with these young women he poached from Mar-a-Lago. Yet in 2002, two years after Giuffre met Maxwell, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a terrific guy. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
In the years since, Trump has maintained he had “no idea” about Epstein’s nefarious activities.
It would be completely in character for Trump to have turned a blind eye even if he suspected something. Even today, his instinct when asked about the now-deceased Giuffre was defensive and self-regarding. “She had no complaints about us,” he said, referring to Mar-a-Lago. “None whatsoever.”
But this drip feed of new detail about what Trump knew of Epstein’s behaviour, as far back as the year 2000, warrants a fuller and more honest explanation from the president. Especially since his Justice Department is now talking to Maxwell, and her lawyers have made clear they see this as a route to a presidential pardon.
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