Donald Trump dodged an easy question Monday about his rift with alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
During a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, the president was asked to explain what caused the “breach” between the president and his Palm Beach neighbor. Trump’s answer only skimmed the surface.
“That’s such old history. Very easy to explain, but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it,” Trump said.
“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,’” Trump said.
“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,” Trump continued. “Persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it. I’m glad I did, to tell you the truth.”
Trump’s supposedly “easy” answer isn’t all that easy to understand.
Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, has said she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to become Epstein’s traveling masseuse while she was working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in 2000. She was 16 at the time.
But Trump and Epstein reportedly didn’t have their falling out until four years later, when they fought over an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that they both wanted to purchase—with Trump ultimately winning out at auction, according to The Washington Post. Four months later, a woman filed a police report alleging that Epstein had paid her 15-year-old stepdaughter $300 to massage him while partially undressed.
Trump later claimed he’d banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for misconduct, calling him a “real creep,” former Trump aide Sam Nunberg said in 2019.
During the press conference Monday, Trump weirdly said he’d “never had the privilege of going to [Epstein’s] island,” and that he’d turned down the offer in one of his “good moments.”
Trump’s defense of his friendship with Epstein has only gotten increasingly baffling since the Justice Department claimed at the beginning of the month that Epstein kept no client list—after previously promising to release such a list. In the intervening time, evidence has continued to mount that Trump and Epstein had a close relationship, as the president has maintained he was not involved in the sex offender’s alleged sex trafficking ring.
But perhaps Trump’s defense isn’t as “easy” as he’s made it out to be.
In 2023, Epstein’s brother Mark said that he’d seen an unaired interview between Jeffrey and Steve Bannon, in which the disgraced financier claimed he’d “stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”
And this is far from the first inconsistency. In 2016, Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten claimed that the two had no relationship: “They were not friends and did not socialize together,” he said of his boss and Epstein. But in August 2017, Epstein described himself as the president’s “closest friend” during an interview with biographer Michael Wolff.
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