Jeffrey Epstein continued to be a member of Donald Trump’s luxury private members club for more than a year after the billionaire financier was indicted, according to Mar-a-Lago membership documents seen by the authors of a book.
The president told reporters that he cut ties with Epstein after the pedophile “stole” female workers from his exclusive Florida members club, but the revelation that Epstein was allegedly still a member of the club seven years after Epstein poached Virginia Giuffre from the spa at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 raises questions over Trump’s version of events.
Epstein was a member of the club until October 2007, more than a year after he was indicted and released on bail, according to The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency. In the footnotes of their book, the team of Miami Herald journalists Sarah Blaskey, Caitlin Ostroff, Nicholas Nehamas, and Jay Weaver reported: “The authors viewed a membership list showing that Epstein’s account had been closed.” The book reports that the “membership log shows his account at the club was closed in October 2007.”
A report in the New York Post in the same month quoted a source saying he had been banned. “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” a source told Page Six. “Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.”
Guiffre’s attorney Bradley Edwards stated in a 2009 court filing that Epstein had been banned by Trump from Mar-a-Lago “because Epstein sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club,” although he did not specify when the assault was alleged to have happened. Edwards was approached for comment.
It is not known whether Epstein visited Mar-a-Lago while on bail. The New York Post said in the same article that Epstein denied he was banned even then and told them that he had “recently [been] invited to an event there,” although he did not name the event.
The banishment of Epstein came 15 months after he was indicted by a Florida grand jury and surrendered at the Palm Beach precinct to be charged in July 2006. Only one count of soliciting prostitution was filed against him at the time, but the case drew widespread media coverage, which disclosed allegations of his sexual contact with minors.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported on July 26, 2006, that Epstein had been accused of “fondling and—in one case—having sex with underage girls whom he paid for massages.”
It added that detectives had recommended he “be charged with four counts of committing an unlawful sex act on a minor and one count of lewd and lascivious molestation.”
Florida’s Palm Beach Post reported extensively on the case—at least 14 times, according to newspaper cuttings service Factiva—in the 15 months between his July 2006 charge and October 2007, when Epstein was reportedly culled from Mar-a-Lago.
In total, Factiva records 175 stories about Epstein in that same period. Many of the reports stated that Epstein had been released on a $3,000 bail bond. The New York Post and Fox News were among the outlets to report that girls as young as 14 had been targeted. Trump is known to be a voracious consumer of both outlets.
The Daily Beast asked the White House and Mar-a-Lago whether Trump and the club had been aware Epstein had been charged and been on bail in the 15 months prior to his being removed from its membership list. They were also asked whether Epstein had attended, or been invited to, Mar-a-Lago while on bail, as he had claimed. At the time of publication, neither had offered a comment on the record.
Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre—who took her own life earlier this year—said in a deposition for a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell that she worked at Trump’s club in the summer of 2000 when she was 17.
It was later reported that Giuffre had been paid $1,866.50 by the resort that year, suggesting she was only employed briefly. The New York Daily News reported in 2015 that, a day after her first appointment with Epstein, she “quit her job to become a full-time ‘masseuse.’”
When she first made her complaint against Epstein, Giuffre was unsure if it was 1999 or 2000 when she had worked at Trump’s club. “When I got my records from Mar-a-Lago, I was able to find out that it was 2000,” she said.
Trump confirmed last week that Giuffre had been hired by Epstein after being approached at Mar-a-Lago.
“I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa, I think so, I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, none whatsoever,” he said.
The president said he had fallen out with Epstein, who formerly described the president as his best friend, after learning that the financier was poaching people from Mar-a-Lago.
“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!’”
