President Trump offered new details Tuesday about his split with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, telling reporters that Epstein had used the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to prey on young women.
“Everyone knows the people that were taken, and it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad,” Trump told reporters he flew back to Washington after spending five days in Scotland. “But that story has been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes, they were.”
On Monday, the U.S. president said he expelled Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after the disgraced financier “stole people that worked for me.” Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, while awaiting federal trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world, at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa, hired by him,” Trump recounted aboard Air Force One. “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.’”
One of the victims Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell encountered at Mar-a-Lago was Virginia Giuffre, who later made international headlines by alleging she had sex with the UK’s Prince Andrew when she was just 17, the New York Post reported.
“I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he stole her,” Trump said of Giuffre, who committed suicide in April. “And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.
Giuffre, who publicly came forward with her allegations against Epstein in 2011, had worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, where her father was employed as a maintenance manager.
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In 2000, when she was 16, Giuffre met Maxwell, who offered her a job as a traveling masseuse for Epstein, The Post reported.
Giuffre later won a defamation lawsuit against Maxwell in 2017, settling for an undisclosed amount.
Documents from that case were later ordered unsealed, with the first batch released on August 9, 2019—just one day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell.
Some observers have noted inconsistencies in Giuffre’s accounts of her time with Epstein and Maxwell. In 2022, she settled a defamation suit filed by former Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz, publicly acknowledging that she “may have made a mistake in identifying” him as one of her abusers, noted The Post.
Trump has faced three weeks of intense scrutiny over his past ties to Epstein following the release of a July 6 memo from the Justice Department and FBI, which concluded that the convicted sex offender most likely died by suicide and did not possess an “incriminating client list” naming powerful individuals who had sex with underage girls, some as young as 14.
Last week, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell for two days of questioning related to the case, as her attorney publicly pushed for a presidential pardon or commutation of her sentence.
“Nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it,” Trump told reporters on Monday after he was asked about the possibility of a Maxwell pardon.
During the same press availability, Trump acknowledged that “for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, for years, because he did something that was inappropriate.”
“By the way, I never went to the island,” Trump said, referring to Epstein’s Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the site of many alleged acts of abuse.
