Donald Trump has hit out at Jeffrey Epstein for “stealing” young women from his staff at Mar-a-Lago, including Virginia Giuffre, the sex trafficking victim who accused Prince Andrew of assaulting her.
As the firestorm over the Epstein files continues, Trump acknowledged for the first time that Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most high-profile victims, had been recruited from the grounds of his estate in Palm Beach, where she worked at the spa when she was 17.
“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump told reporters who asked if she was one of the employees the now-deceased Epstein “took” from him.
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“I think that was one of the people. He stole her.”
“Other people would come and complain, this guy is taking people from the spa,” he added. “I didn’t know that. 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 you to take our people. And he was fine, and then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said: out of here!”
Department of Justice sentencing documents show that Giuffre was 17 when Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her from Mar-a-Lago around 2000, as she and Epstein “entered a new phase of their scheme to sexually abuse teenage girls.”
“Over the next several months, Virginia was paid to provide Epstein with sexualized massages at his Palm Beach residence, in exchange for hundreds of dollars in cash for each massage,” says the 2022 memo from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
“Virginia also traveled with Epstein and Maxwell to other locations, including New York and the Virgin Islands, on Epstein’s private plane.”
Giuffre, who died by suicide in Australia earlier this year, was one of the earliest and loudest voices calling for criminal charges against Epstein and his enablers.
She rose to prominence after accusing Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager. He has consistently denied the claims, but agreed to an out-of-court settlement in which he paid an undisclosed sum to Giuffre and made a donation to her charity.
But while her story is largely on the public record, it is the first time Trump has acknowledged his former staffer since the scandal over the Epstein files erupted this month.
For weeks, the president has been at pains to distance himself from Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.
But Trump on Monday revealed that the pair had fallen out because Epstein was poaching his employees, which led to him being kicked out of Mar-a-Lago.
On Tuesday, he elaborated on his comments with reporters as he returned to Washington from Scotland, acknowledging that the people who were “stolen” were young staffers who worked at his spa.
“It’s 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,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments come as the Epstein saga continues to grip Washington, and as the president refuses to rule out pardoning Maxwell.
The convicted sex offender met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last week, where, according to her lawyer David Markus, she was quizzed on ‘more than 100 different people’ connected to Epstein.
One of those people is likely to be the president, who spent years partying with the disgraced financier but insists he had nothing to do with his sex trafficking of young women and girls.
