President Donald Trump scolds yet another reporter for daring to press him about his relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The Epstein scandal embroiling Trump just won’t go away. He can’t seem to escape it amid MAGAsphere anger over his refusal to release the Epstein files after long promising to do so. He’s been asked all week about different aspects of the sex trafficking case against Epstein and his former girlfriend, also a convicted sex offender, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Conspiracy theorists, reporters, opponents and even MAGA supporters want to know what Trump knew about Epstein in the years before Trump’s relationship with Epstein ended and when he knew about it.
Questions about the files and his relationship with Epstein have come up at almost every single public event Trump has attended over the past weeks.
Thursday was no different. As Trump’s Mar-a-lago connection came up again.
“The family of Virginia Giuffre released a statement overnight in response to some of the comments you made this week. You said that Jeffrey Epstein ‘stole’ people from Mar-a-Lago. At the time, did you know why he was taking those young women, including Virginia Giuffre?” ABC News reporter Rachel Scott asked, as Trump started to talk over her.
“No, I didn’t know. I figured it would be ABC fake news that would ask that question—one of the worst. But no, I don’t know really why, but I said, if he’s taken anybody from Mar-a-Lago, he’s hiring or whatever he’s doing, I didn’t like it. And we threw him out.”
A day earlier, Trump said Giuffre may have been one of his employees at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, resort, “stolen” by Epstein.
“I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people,” the president said when asked about it. “He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know, none whatsoever.”
Giuffre was one of the most high-profile accusers of Epstein, Maxwell and Britain’s Prince Andrew. She took both civil and criminal action against all three, hoping for justice and raising awareness about the huge reach Epstein, who authorities said died by suicide in jail in 2019, had at one point in abusing young girls and trafficking them out to mostly wealthy and famous men.
Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, wasn’t “stolen” by Epstein, her family said in a statement after Trump’s remarks Wednesday.
“We would like to clarify that it was convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell who targeted and preyed upon our then 16-year-old sister, Virginia, from Mar-a-Lago, where she was working in 2000, several years before Epstein and President Trump had their falling out,” according to Giuffre’s family.
Giuffre’s family went on to say it was “shocking” to hear Trump say he was aware Giuffre was “stolen.” They said it made them wonder what Trump knew about Epstein and Maxwell’s actions at the time.
“It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side . . . no doubt about it,’” the family said, referring to a quote by Trump about Epstein in a 2002 New York Magazine profile of the disgraced financier.
“We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this,” the statement added.
According to Bloomberg, Trump’s name was among those redacted from the final set of FBI documents related to the billionaire child sex trafficker. The bombshell report, released on Friday, based on multiple sources familiar with the matter, says the FBI’s FOIA review team intentionally shielded the former president, then a private citizen, along with other “prominent public figures” from public scrutiny in the lead-up to the DOJ’s conclusion that Epstein’s death was a suicide and that further disclosure was unnecessary.
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