President Donald Trump on Tuesday confirmed that “young women” who worked at his Mar-a-lago golf resort were recruited away from their jobs by Jeffrey Epstein.
When asked aboard Air Force One if the stolen workers included young women, Trump said, “The answer is yes.”
“Well, I don’t want to say, but everyone knows the people that were taken,” the president said as he traveled back to the United States from a trip to Scotland. “And it was the concept of taking people that work for me, is bad, but that story has been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes, they were in the spa. People that work in the spa.”
“I had 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,” Trump continued. “And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people,’ whether it was spa or not spa. I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said, out of here.”
Trump’s statement came as he was pressed on comments he made the previous day in Turnberry in which he said Epstein “stole people that worked for me” when the two men were friendly in the early 2000s.
Trump on Tuesday went on to point to Virginia Giuffre, who has accused Epstein and his associates of sexually abusing her. Giuffre, who committed suicide earlier this year, had alleged she worked at Trump’s Mar-a-lago resort before being recruited as a sixteen-year-old to serve as Epstein’s “masseuse” by his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
When asked for confirmation about whether Giuffre worked at his Palm Beach golf resort before being spirited away by Epstein, Trump initially said, “I don’t know,” before answering in the affirmative.
“I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us as, you know, none whatsoever,” he told reporters.
Trump was one of the many influential figures with whom Epstein was connected for decades. A 2002 New York Magazine report is among the many detailing Epstein’s relationship with Trump, the Clintons, Nobel Prize–winning scientists, and powerful business leaders.
Trump had a fallout with Epstein around 2004, which he mused on during a Monday meeting in Scotland with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at Trump’s golf property in Turnberry.
“That’s such old history,” Trump said. “Very easy to explain, but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it. But for years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein … 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 never 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,” Trump continued.
Curiosity about who Epstein was has circulated for decades, as some observers speculated that allegations he was a serial sex trafficker and pedophile, while true, represented only one layer of a complicated identity. A New York financier known for his enormous wealth, manufactured through a supposedly mysterious “client list,” the now-dead Epstein has long been rumored to be tied to the intelligence community, such as the United States’ CIA or Israel’s Mossad, who used him as a construct to monitor and influence societal structures, including in scientific, academic, political, and celebrity circles.
Those allegations, although unverified and firmly rebuffed by Israel, have been raised again in recent weeks, including by Trump-adjacent figures such as Steve Bannon.
Giuffre, who alleged Epstein groomed her to perform sexual services for global associates such as Great Britain’s Prince Andrew as his traveling masseuse, has also accused the New York financier of being a government agent.
“I think a strong argument can be made Epstein was indeed an Intelligence agent who helped run a blackmail/honey pot operation (that is most likely still running to this day),” she wrote in 2023. “What better way to control the elites than to catch them doing something heinous and then hold it against them for life.”
Prosecutors alleged during Epstein’s 2019 trial, just months before he died in a New York jail, that he had travelled overseas under an alias, stating he possessed a foreign passport using a different name. His country of residency on the passport, which was acquired from Austria in the 1980s, was named as Saudi Arabia, according to prosecutors. Epstein used the passport and a personal protection team while traveling in the Middle East due to concerns about kidnapping, hijackers, and terrorists, they said in court.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of deliberately slow walking the release of federal files related to Epstein’s case, which they say could shed further light on his identity and clear up speculation that he was involved in a shadowy deep state operation.
Trump and his Justice Department are shielding the full release of the files to the public because they hold potentially damaging details about his relationship with Esptein, they say.
On Monday, Trump again reiterated his conviction that the whole Epstein saga is a plant by Democrats designed to sabotage his administration. Narratives about the files were built by former Attorney General Merrick Garland and former FBI director James Comey, he alleged during his Scotland trip.
“It’s a hoax that’s been built up by those, way beyond proportion. Those files were run by the worst scum on earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by Biden. Those files were run for four years by those people,” Trump said. “The whole thing is a hoax. They ran the files. I was running against somebody that ran the files. If they had something they would have released.”
