Jeffrey Epstein was never a fee-paying member of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida but routinely received home visits from staff members sent to provide massages and manicures, a new report has alleged.
Former employees of Trump’s Palm Beach estate have told The Wall Street Journal that the house calls took place around the late 1990s and early 2000s and “went on for years,” even as young female employees warned each other about Epstein’s predilection for “being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments.”
The former staff members told the WSJ that the house calls were an occasional service offered to spa members. Although Epstein was not a member, they said, they alleged that Trump had told them “to treat him like one” and that Epstein had an account, where appointments were booked for him by Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice and then-girlfriend.
Maxwell reportedly frequented the club herself, making use of Epstein’s account, and “used the spa to recruit young spa workers for side jobs, which weren’t authorized by the club.”
However, Epstein’s relationship with Mar-a-Lago ended abruptly in 2003, according to the WSJ’s sources, when an 18-year-old beautician returned to the club and told its human resources team that he had pressured her for sex.
A manager responded by sending Trump a fax relaying the employee’s accusations against the wealthy financier and urged him to ban Epstein, to which the future president replied by saying it was a good letter and agreeing it was appropriate to sever ties. The beautician’s complaint was never passed on to Palm Beach police.
Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, who took his own life in a New York City jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, but has faced consistent pressure this year to explain their past friendship.
The account supplied by the WSJ tallies with Trump’s claim that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago around 2004 for being a “creep.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the newspaper Tuesday it was “writing up fallacies and innuendo in order to smear President Trump.”
“No matter how many times this story is told and retold, the truth remains: President Trump did nothing wrong and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar a Lago for being a creep,” she said.
The Independent has reached out to the White House for further comment.
The WSJ report goes on to allege that Trump and Epstein “continued to cross paths” after he was banned from Mar-a-Lago and that the pair found themselves in direct competition for a Palm Beach property up for auction in late 2004, with Trump coming out on top in the bidding process.
The pressure on the president to provide justice for Epstein’s victims ramped up in July when the Department of Justice and the FBI issued a joint memo stating that there was no “client list” in existence detailing the late pedophile’s powerful friends and that conspiracy theories alleging he was murdered in jail were false.
The memo only served to revive interest in the case, however, and set in motion a call for the DOJ to release all government files on Epstein, which resulted in the Epstein Files Transparency Act near-unanimously passing Congress in November and the first tranche of documents and photographs being made available via the department’s website on December 19.
A second, much larger tranche was published on December 23, and the DOJ has since said it has uncovered “over a million more” documents possibly tied to the Epstein case and that it will take weeks to release them all.
Trump is suing the WSJ for reporting on the existence of a lewd 50th birthday letter he allegedly sent to Epstein in January 2003, which was subsequently uncovered by the dead man’s estate in response to a subpoena by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
The president has denied authorship of the letter, but the newspaper has argued its reporting was accurate and is seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed.
