A Mar-a-Lago employee whom disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “stole” from President Donald Trump’s resort was one of Epstein’s prominent survivors, the president told reporters Tuesday.
Trump talked with reporters on Air Force One on a return trip from Scotland to Washington, D.C., when he faced more questions about Epstein.
Epstein, who died in a Manhattan prison in 2019, has been in the news in the weeks after the Department of Justice and the FBI released an unsigned memo stating that Epstein committed suicide, despite conspiracy theories suggesting he was murdered, and that he did not have a client list with the names of high-profile people, supposedly including Trump, on that list.
“He took people that worked for me,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “And I told him, ‘Don’t do it anymore.’ And he did it. I said, ‘Stay the hell out of here.’”
Trump also confirmed that Epstein “stole” spa employees, including prominent Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre.
“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump told reporters. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her, and by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know, none whatsoever.”
Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, filed a lawsuit in 2015 against Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, which led to criminal charges and Maxwell’s conviction for sex trafficking underage girls.
Trump also told reporters that he believes Giuffre and added that she “had no complaints about us, as you know.”
But Trump’s remarks were met with scrutiny online, particularly over Epstein’s poaching of Mar-a-Lago employees instead of Epstein’s criminal activities.
Journalist and podcaster Jim Stewartson said Trump is “imploding” in a post on X.
“This is a malignant narcissist with a deep, penetrating wound to his most precious asset, his image in the eyes of his cult,” Stewartson wrote. “Nothing is working to fix it, and he’s imploding. Donald Trump says Epstein ‘stole’ Virginia Giuffre, who just took her own life. He will rupture, soon.”
“Trump’s new story is that he fell out with Jeffrey Epstein because Trump’s most valued employees preferred to go work for a notorious sex offender rather than stay with Trump,” David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote in an X post.
In a video shared on X, Tim Miller from The Bulwark said Trump’s remarks were “mindbogglingly heinous stuff.”
“My favorite genre of Trump defender is the one where they defend Trump (‘he cut off Epstein when he found out about the child abuse’) and then Trump throws them under the bus (‘he stole people who worked for me’),” Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief of Zeteo, posted on X.
—Ryan Mancini, masslive.com (TNS)
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