In a candid exchange aboard Air Force One on July 29, 2025, President Donald Trump disclosed new details about his fallout with Jeffrey Epstein, emphasizing that the late financier’s repeated poaching of young female spa employees from Mar-a-Lago was the core reason their long association soured.
Trump described how Epstein hired away workers from the resort’s spa despite explicit warnings. “People were taken out of the spa, hired by him—in other words, gone,” Trump told reporters. He recounted confronting Epstein: “I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people.'” When it happened again, Trump banned him from the club, calling the behavior “creepy.”
Pressed on specifics, Trump confirmed the poached staff included young women and explicitly named Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers. “He stole her,” Trump said, acknowledging Giuffre had worked as a teenage locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in summer 2000. Giuffre, who tragically died by suicide in April 2025 at age 41, alleged in court documents that Ghislaine Maxwell—Epstein’s convicted accomplice—recruited her there under the guise of massage training, leading to years of alleged abuse.
This account marks Trump’s most direct linking of the rift to staff poaching, framing it as a personal betrayal over business ethics rather than prior reports of a 2004 property dispute or inappropriate conduct toward a member’s daughter. Trump once praised Epstein as a “terrific guy” in 2002 but has long distanced himself, claiming no contact for 15 years before Epstein’s 2019 death.
Giuffre’s family rejected Trump’s wording, stating Maxwell “targeted and preyed upon” the then-16-year-old, not that she was merely “stolen” as an employee. They raised questions about what Trump knew of Epstein’s activities.
The revelation has fueled renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past ties to Epstein amid calls for full release of related files, underscoring lingering mysteries in one of America’s most infamous scandals.
Leave a Reply