One of Trump’s preternatural abilities is his apparent animal instinct to lie on the spot whenever he senses he might be cornered. His initial Pavlovian training by his mob lawyer Roy Cohn and subsequent experience in more than 4,000 lawsuits and countless scandals seem to have ingrained in him that lying, the more outrageous the better, buys him time, plays to his credulous followers as insouciant defiance, and wears down his accusers.
When Trump’s distractions failed to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files, he offered a story without missing a beat to distance himself from any taint. In his tale, he was traduced by Epstein. Trump was taken advantage of, violated, despoiled. There could be no guilt by association; Trump was a victim, too.
Perhaps, after claiming to no effect that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the former FBI director James Comey had fabricated the files, he felt that he had at last found ground where he could gain some traction. Trump always designates a scapegoat, but neither Tren de Agua nor Hunter Biden would fit with Epstein. All along, Trump has missed the easiest and most obvious scapegoat. Why not blame Epstein for Epstein? Trump just needed to invent a story.
He began by blurting on 28 July: “But for years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help, and I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place – persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it. I’m glad I did, if you want to know the truth.”
After establishing the premise of his story, he added more detail the next day. “People that work in the spa – I have a great spa, 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. And other people would come and complain, ‘This guy is taking people from the spa.’ I didn’t know that. He took people that worked for me. And I told him, ‘Don’t do it any more.’ And he did it. I said, ‘Stay the hell out of here.’”
A reporter followed up to ask if any of those employees were young women, an opportunity for further Trump story enhancement. “The answer is yes, they were in the spa,” Trump said. “I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa’ … And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again.”
Then Trump was asked if one of those young women was Virginia Giuffre, who was exploited by Epstein beginning at age 16 in 2000 until she escaped his clutches in 2002, eventually filing lawsuits against him that helped break the case open. “I think she worked at the spa,” Trump replied. “I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her.” He added, “And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know – none whatsoever.”
Trump’s self-defensive remarks were an accumulation of lies and distortions, each one at risk of tumbling on the next. Unfortunately, it was contradicted by the factual timeline. And his comments about Giuffre, the tragically abused child who bore witness, for whom he offered not a word of sympathy, depicting her as stolen property, offended the Giuffre family, who came forward to denounce his heartlessness. “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago,” read the family’s statement. This was not the public relations success that Trump had hoped for to lay the Epstein scandal to rest.
Trump suggested in his story that Giuffre was only one of the “people” Epstein had poached from him. In his telling, he first warned Epstein before he “stole” Giuffre. In fact, it was Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and accomplice, who recruited Giuffre and participated in her sexual abuse. There is no record of others than Giuffre recruited from the Mar-a-Lago spa. Trump’s story of multiple “people” and his warning to Epstein are baseless.
Still, the ever reliable White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated: “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club for being a creep to his female employees.” Trump went on Newsmax to praise her, the press secretary, as if she were the winner of a modeling contest: “She’s become a star. It’s that face, it’s that brain, it’s those lips, the way they move, they move like she’s a machine gun.”
It was true Trump had not spoken “for years” to Epstein. But there his truthfulness ended. Three years after Trump claimed he had cut his ties to Epstein for stealing Giuffre, in 2003, Trump sent him a risqué poem celebrating his 50th birthday inside his drawing of a naked woman, signing his name to represent pubic hair, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey … A pal is a wonderful thing … and may every day be a wonderful secret.”
According to the Washington Post, their relationship ruptured not in 2000 as Trump claimed, but in 2004 over a real estate rivalry to purchase a Palm Beach estate. Trump, whose casinos went bankrupt that year, somehow found the cash to outbid Epstein. Four years later, Trump sold the estate to a Russian oligarch closely tied to Vladimir Putin for double the price, at $95m. “Don’t say Russian,” Trump told a reporter from the Palm Beach Post. He urged the reporter just to write “foreign”.
Trump and Epstein socialized together for years with “young women”, some underage, and often with models, including a party for “calendar girls” at Mar-a-Lago in 1992, where the two were the only other guests, and Trump’s alleged groping of the model Stacey Williams in Trump Tower with Epstein present in 1993. Trump denies these allegations.
“Epstein enjoyed hanging out backstage at beauty pageants and fashion shows with his Palm Beach and New York neighbor and friend Donald Trump, former models said,” the Miami Herald reported. Trump himself owned three beauty pageants. He described going backstage on the Howard Stern radio talk show in 2005: “You know they’re standing there with no clothes … And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
Trump created Trump Model Management, also known as T Models, in 1999. T Models recruited girls as young as 14 to the US on tourist visas with lavish promises of fame and fortune, and once they arrived paid them minimally. “It is like modern-day slavery,” said one of the models, Rachel Blais. “Honestly, they are the most crooked agency I’ve ever worked for, and I’ve worked for quite a few.”
Epstein wanted a modeling agency of his own. He admired Trump’s T Models and sought to replicate it. He invested in one based in Paris operated by Jean-Luc Brunel, a model agency head who was also accused of sex trafficking. Courtney Powell Soerensen, a model, told the Miami Herald: “Epstein had to have his slimy peons and Brunel was the ideal person to do the job.” Brunel had been the subject of a 60 Minutes exposé as an alleged sexual abuser of models in 1988. In New York, in the 1990s, Brunel lived in Trump Tower. “The modeling agency was the perfect vehicle for Epstein to get more victims,” Giuffre said. Heather Braden, a model, told the Miami Herald she saw Brunel, Epstein and Trump at parties together frequently in the early 1990s. Brunel was charged with rape in 2021 and died by apparent suicide in a French prison in 2022, about two years after Epstein’s apparent suicide.
Trump had never before told his self-exonerating story about how he had broken with Epstein over Giuffre. But he had spoken publicly about his relationship with Epstein in 2002, when he rejoiced in their friendship to New York magazine: “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. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Little remarked upon in the citation of this quote was that Trump’s response to the writer appears intended to offer a more positive and vivid picture of Epstein, at least in Trump’s eyes, than the reclusive and serious image Epstein was trying to promote. Trump’s description was preceded in the article by this set-up: “Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges.”
Trump, always seeking to elevate himself, preened in talking about Epstein as following his example as a Casanova. Now he continues to stonewall the public over the Epstein files. Days after Maxwell was interviewed by the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche in her Florida prison, she was granted transfer to a minimal security penitentiary in Texas. Her move heightens the intrigue surrounding her deposition, which the administration is keeping secret despite calls by Democratic senators for its release.
By invoking Giuffre, Trump has activated her family. They were enraged by the favor suddenly granted to Maxwell and wonder whether it is part of a deal. “President Trump has sent a clear message today: pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter,” read their statement. “This move smacks of a cover-up. The victims deserve better.” Trump’s ill-conceived story about Giuffre has undermined rather than bolstered him in maintaining control of the storyline.
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Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist
