Virginia Giuffre spent years advocating for justice for survivors of sex trafficking, drawing from her own experience as one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. She sued Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell for defamation, who Trumpworld is currently discussing a pardon for, and the case was settled in Giuffre’s favor for an undisclosed sum in 2017. When her first batch of court documents were released to the public on August 9th, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his prison cell the next day.
Giuffre’s father worked as a maintenance manager at Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, and he got her a job there as a spa attendant when she was 15 years old in 1999. She said that this is where she met Ghislaine Maxwell and was immediately offered a job working for Epstein, who was lying down naked on her first day at work. This is perhaps the most direct known connection between Epstein’s network of horrific sex crimes and Donald Trump’s fiefdom, and today, the president confirmed Giuffre’s story.
Trump: People were taken out of the spa, hired by Epstein… I told him we don’t want you taking our people, whether it’s spa or not spa. He did it again, I said out of here.
Reporter: Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?
Giuffre committed suicide in April, a somber marker of the gravity of this subject that Trump’s shambolic unseriousness makes difficult to center. He began this Q&A by saying that Epstein “took people, I said don’t do it anymore—they work for me. He took some others and once he did that, that was the end of him.” Reporters then asked about Giuffre and he claimed “he stole her,” creating a conflicting timeline for this excuse as to why he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago.
Giuffre said she met Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in mid-2000, and Trump claims this ordeal with Giuffre and others was what led him to kick Epstein out. The problem with this explanation is that in a 2002 New York Magazine article, Trump said that “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. 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.” Epstein’s 50th birthday present that the Wall Street Journal reported on with a lewd drawing and cryptic words from Trump came in 2003, and in 2019, Trump said he hadn’t talked to Epstein in fifteen years, seemingly referencing a property bidding war they had in 2004 where there is little public record of their relationship afterwards.
A book called The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago and the Selling of the Presidency came out in 2020 and reported that Trump revoked Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago membership months before Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida state criminal charges in 2008, stemming from an incident where Epstein hit on a teenage daughter of a member of Mar-a-Lago. So if Trump is claiming that Epstein “stole” Virginia Giuffre and others from his spa in 2000 and that’s why he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago, why did he say such nice things about Epstein in 2002 and 2003? Or is his melting brain combining the events from 2000, 2004 and 2007? With a madman who lies like most of us breathe, it is truly impossible to tell what he is thinking here.
One can’t help but wonder why Trump repeatedly says “I’m allowed to do it” when talking about a pardon for Ghislane Maxwell, who Virginia Giuffre said ran the sex trafficking scheme that Trump now claims led him to kick Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago. There’s also the strange saga of the video of the night Epstein died with a minute missing, metadata which revealed that minute marked a few missing minutes per Wired’s reporting, and now a Trump administration source is telling CBS they have the full video of the night Epstein died, yet none of us have seen it. Also, why did Epstein assert his 5th, 6th and 14th Amendment rights when asked in a deposition “Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?” The dates and motivations here are all fuzzy with this new bizarre Trump admission, but one big way it advances the story forward is the president confirmed Giuffre’s account that Epstein was recruiting women and girls at Mar-a-Lago for his sex trafficking operation. The question is when did Trump find out and what did he do about it, because the dates in his story don’t line up.
