President Donald Trump this week spoke at length about his relationship with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but his accounts raise new questions about when exactly the two fell out and why.
Trump said on Monday that his relationship with Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking young girls and women, soured because Epstein poached some employees after he explicitly warned him not to do so.
Trump on Tuesday went on to say that Epstein “stole” young women who worked at the spa at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. “People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
One of those workers, Trump said, was Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein accuser who said she was recruited by his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, when Giuffre was an underage teenager working as a locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000. Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking minors and now serving a 20-year prison sentence, has denied the allegations. Giuffre died by suicide this past April at age 41.
“I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa, I think so, I think that was one of the people,” Trump first said when asked about Giuffre before going on to say more definitively, “Yeah, he stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, none whatsoever.”
