A one-time friend of Jeffrey Epstein has laid bare the extraordinary way he tried to impress Donald Trump.
Cleo Glyde, a model who knew Epstein in the 1980s and 1990s, before his horrific crimes came to light, spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast Podcast about how Epstein used her and a close friend as “trophies on display” during a bizarre encounter with Trump.
Glyde told podcast host Joanna Coles how she met Epstein through a mutual friend when she was 22 years old. At that time, she said, the financier’s reputation was “way more James Bond than Darth Vader.”
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“He was a high society A-lister—a sort of an enigmatic Great Gatsby figure,” Glyde said.
The two struck up a friendship, spending time together at his office on Madison Avenue and his now-infamous Upper East Side mansion.
Glyde, who said Epstein would often boast about his friendship with Trump, described how the billionaire once hatched an idea to show her and her friend off to the future president.
“I had this white wraparound dress and [Epstein] said, ‘Oh my God, you look just like a nurse,’” Glyde recounted.
Epstein suggested that she and her friend, who introduced them, both wear white dresses and come with him to Trump Tower.
“Why don’t we both go over to Donald’s and you both look like nurses, and I’ll just knock on the door and we’ll go to Trump Tower and it’ll be hilarious,” she recalled him saying.
When the trio arrived at Trump Tower, Glyde remembers feeling like Epstein clearly wanted to impress his real estate mogul pal.
“He probably was showing off Donald to us and us to Donald,” she said.
Glyde said that Trump “smiled and laughed” when they came in. “Obviously, Jeffrey’s thinking, ‘I’m literally walking down Fifth Avenue with two nurses… [Trump] laughed, but not in a way that made me uncomfortable at the time.”
When asked for comment by the Daily Beast, the White House called Glyde’s testimony a “hoax,” a description Trump has increasingly used to fight off the Epstein scandal.
“This is just more stupid, fake news playing into the hands of the Democrat Hoax trying to link President Trump and Epstein,” a White House spokesperson wrote in part in a statement to the Daily Beast. “Democrats and the media knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”
The statement contrasts a bombshell claim made by Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday that Trump was an “FBI informant” on Epstein, which would suggest that they were so closely linked that the now-president had information about Epstein’s crimes.
Glyde isn’t the first woman to speak about having an awkward experience when Epstein and Trump got together.
Stacey Williams, a former model and one-time girlfriend of Epstein, told The Daily Beast Podcast last month that Trump groped her in his Trump Tower office, right in front of Epstein.
“[Trump’s] just moving his hands sort of up and down my body and like smiling at him and Jeffrey smiling back,” she said.
Glyde told The Daily Beast Podcast that her friendship with Epstein began to unravel when he groped her on his private jet.
“He was able to put his hand between my legs at the knee and then started to kind of get rough,” she said. “And [he] put his hand on my breast and put his hand on my leg and, like, creeping up to my underwear.”
“I kind of teared up and I was like, ‘Jeffrey, why are you doing this? I thought we were friends… I really don’t want to do the whole Jeffrey Epstein roadkill thing.’ And he kind of stopped and then he dropped it, like, completely.”
Later, however, Glyde visited Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse with a friend. During that encounter, Glyde said that Epstein pulled her friend into a closet and whispered suggestive things to her.
“He dragged her behind the door and they disappeared. And she said he was just whispering all these filthy things.”
Glyde never contacted Epstein again. While a Department of Justice investigation concluded that Epstein died by suicide in his prison cell, Glyde believes that he could have been murdered.
“There is no way on God’s green Earth, obviously, that we’ve gotten to the bottom of all the players that were involved,” Glyde said.
Earlier this week, several Epstein victims spoke at a press conference in which they demanded transparency from the government about their abuser.
Coincidentally, the noise from a ceremonial flyover organized by President Trump to honor a fallen Polish air force pilot drowned out Epstein victim Chauntae Davies as she was being asked about Epstein’s “biggest brag”; his friendship with Trump.
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