Proof of Devilry, Book 2: The Crimes of Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein
The available evidence places Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell at the heart of a multistate and multinational child sex-, sex- and human-trafficking ring whose discovery could change the course of history.
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{Author’s Note: This book-length report serves as Book 2 of the 1,200-page nonfiction epic of the Trump-Epstein Scandal, Proof of Devilry. Book 1 is here, Book 3 is here, Book 4 is here, and Book 5 is forthcoming shortly; Book 6 has been written and is in the editing stage. Proof of Devilry is, in toto, the seventh book in the New York Times-bestselling Proof Series, and for the time being is only available—like the fourth, fifth, and sixth books—here on Substack.}
Table of Contents
Introduction
Book One (Link)
Length: 159 pages.
Chapter 1: The Epstein-Wolff Tapes
Chapter 2: Why the Trump-Epstein Friendship Actually Ended
Chapter 3: Sex Game—Seducing Your Best Friend’s Wife
Chapter 4: Sex Game—Performative Sexual Assault
Chapter 5: Sex Game—The Meat Market
Chapter 6: Sex Game—Partner-Sharing
Chapter 7: Sex Game—Getting Underage Girls Into Illegal Situations
Chapter 8: Sex Game—Pimping
Chapter 9: Trump, Epstein, and the Presidency
Chapter 10: The Big Picture
Book Two (Link)
Length: 264 pages.
Chapter 11: Trump and Conspiracy Theories
Chapter 12: The Epstein Files
Chapter 13: Trump Changes His Story in Response to the Epstein Files
Chapter 14: The Evidence That Trump Went to Little St. James Is Growing
Chapter 15: The Big Secret About Little St. James Island
Chapter 16: Helicopter Redux
Sidebar: So What Happened During “Period 2”?
Chapter 17: The May 2025 Trump-Bondi-Blanche-Patel Summit
Chapter 18: Why the Epstein Files Endanger Trump
Chapter 19: The Virginia Giuffre Tragedy
Sidebar: The Katie Johnson Tragedy
Chapter 20: Melania, Paolo, and Jeffrey
Chapter 21: Was Epstein Ever Banned From Mar-a-Lago?
Chapter 22: On Stuart Pivar
Chapter 23: “The Pussy Committee”
Chapter 24: The Recess
Sidebar: The Dershowitz Angle
Chapter 25: On Ghislaine Maxwell
Chapter 26: The Department of Justice Is Plunged Into Its Worst Scandal Ever
Chapter 27: The July 2025 Trump-Maxwell Summit
Chapter 28: The Kremlin Appears to Have Horrifying Kompromat on Trump
Chapter 29: The Alaska Summit
Chapter 30: What Comes Next Is Worse Than What Came Before
Chapter 31: The Coming Pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell
Chapter 32: The Coming Civil War
Chapter 33: The Evidence
Conclusion
Disclaimers
Book Three (Link)
Length: 88 pages.
Introduction
Chapter 34: The Red Sea Conspiracy
Chapter 35: Epstein As Foreign Agent, Part I
Chapter 36: Epstein As Foreign Agent, Part II
Chapter 37: The Fake “Epstein List”
Chapter 38: The 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign
Chapter 39: The Spring 2015 Trump-Epstein Summit
Chapter 40: The Twist
Book Four (Link)
Length: 365 pages.
Introduction
Chapter 41: The Red Sea Conspiracy (Redux)
Sidebar: The Leon Black Mystery
Chapter 42: The Funding of the Red Sea Conspiracy—and Its Coverup
Chapter 43: Enter Pam Bondi
Chapter 44: Enter Armies of Attorneys and Agents
Chapter 45: Kathryn Ruemmler
Chapter 46: The Global Consultancy
Chapter 47: Creating An Epstein-Red Sea Conspiracy Timeline
Chapter 48: Trump’s New “Big Lie” About a Presidential Election
Sidebar: Trump, Epstein, and the Rule of Law
Chapter 49: Jeffrey Epstein and The Kushners
Chapter 50: The Newly Minted Convict Epstein Makes His Move
Chapter 51: The Secret Consultancy
Chapter 52: Donald Trump’s Forever Wars
Chapter 53: The Sex Piece, Part I
Chapter 54: The Great Shift of 2014
Chapter 55: The New “Grand Bargain”
Chapter 56: The Second Red Sea Conspiracy Meeting
Sidebar: Kazakhstan
Chapter 57: The Sex Piece, Part II
Conclusion
Book Two
Chapter 11: Trump and Conspiracy Theories
“Jeffrey mentioned he had dirt on people. He didn’t tell me what he knew, but he said—he led me to believe—he had dirt on people.
In the 2016 election, we were talking about the election and Jeffrey told me that if he said what he knew about the candidates [Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton], they would have to cancel the election. And that is a quote. That is exactly what he told me: ‘They would have to cancel the election.’ He didn’t tell me what he knew, but that’s what he said.
Donald Trump and [my brother] were very close. He used to fly on my brother’s plane, he was in Jeffrey’s office many times. And there are witnesses that can testify that he was in Jeffrey’s office, so I don’t know why [Trump] said he was never in Jeffrey’s office. That’s a blatant lie.”
— Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein (Audio)
If conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie, Donald Trump is, in the bleakest sense imaginable, the consummate American of this era. Trump has seemingly rarely stumbled across a conspiracy theory about his personal or political rivals that he didn’t soon leap to endorse, no matter how bigoted or comfortably beyond belief it is.
Among the few topics Donald Trump speaks passionately and almost earnestly about, and therefore in speaking of appears to an educated person as a passable liar—rather than a wholly transparent one—are Washington’s various conspiracy theories du jour.
Some of these tall tales he devised himself, but most he drew from the darkest corners of the internet. Such toxic digital cubbyholes, which are generally the last places mass murderers visit before unloosing their horrors on our nation, are now being regularly watched by either the President of the United States or his most trusted agents.
What do they seek? Any nugget of tawdry disinformation that could win them an election, destroy the livelihood of an opponent, or distract Americans from the second Trump administration’s incompetence.
Most of these lies, as one might expect given their seedy points of origin, are directed at women and/or nonwhites. For instance, the false claim that former Democratic President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim; the false claim that President Obama is secretly a foreign national; the false claim that former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is hiding a massively debilitating long-term medical issue that somehow there’s been no sign of since Trump first informed us of it a decade ago (in doing so deliberately miscasting a bout of pneumonia as something more); the false claim that former Democratic president Bill Clinton is a serial rapist (Clinton has been accused of sexual misconduct four times to Trump’s sixty-seven allegations, with Trump also being a federally adjudicated rapist with many uninvestigated Rape allegations and Clinton facing one oft-recanted allegation from Juanita Broaddrick); false claims that former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has worked with Iran against the interests of the United States (even as Trump pardoned his ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for proven allegations of similar conduct, and did so post-conviction); false claims that former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a drunk and false claims that Democratic president Joe Biden is so dementia-addled that he “doesn’t know he’s alive”—despite President Biden’s ability to consistently give interviews more coherent than many Trump political events.
The lies go on and on. And the fact that they’re lies—premeditated ones—is shown not only by instant analyses of their veracity, but by the identities of their intended targets. If any person opposes Trump in politics or business, they’re quickly assigned by him not only a nickname but a conspiracy theory or two that dovetails with that moniker. It’s a rhetorical scheme Trump has repeatedly used to great success—and the fact that it’s also authoritarian-style disinformation appears to only little trouble America media, which covers Trump lies just as much (and perhaps even more avidly than) those vanishingly rare occasions when one of his political attacks is truthful.
By now it’s become clear, too, that the purpose of every Trump conspiracy theory—all of them qualifying as unlitigated Slander, Libel, and/or Defamation torts, with some far worse than this due to the fact that they also endanger the lives of their targets—is advancing Trump’s financial, personal, and/or political interests. As we saw supra, Mr. Trump has regularly lied about his friends to get their wives to sleep with him; often lies about business projects to attract customers, investors, and banks whose custom he doesn’t deserve (leading the New Yorker to understandably ask, “Is Fraud part of the Trump Organization’s business model?”); and even went so far as to bizarrely accuse (as part of a conspiracy with his friend David Pecker) then-rival Senator Ted Cruz’s father Rafael of being involved in The Kennedy Assassination just to achieve minute and possibly wholly illusory advantages in his public dealings. As most know by now, Donald Trump told over 30,500 lies during the first Trump administration.
What’s remarkable about all the foregoing is how rarely Trump victims fight back.
Ted Cruz became an ardent Trump supporter. Biden scrupulously stayed as far from possible from any and all federal criminal investigations of Trump, even to his own political detriment and the detriment of the nation. And Trump has authored a brutal, years-long, unprecedented attack on the American justice system even as its judges and prosecutors routinely give him breaks that working attorneys have never seen middle- or working-class clients get—and wouldn’t even dare to dream of (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, certainly most harrowingly of all, here).
All Washington knows—yes, including Donald Trump’s “allies” (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; candidly, one could find thousands of reports saying the same—that the man is a lifelong fraudster, failed businessman, and serial sexual predator who would praise and even seek to emulate any class of disreputable person, from a mobster to a foreign autocrat, if members of that class were to praise him or, better still, reach out to him with a bevy of fabulously lucrative clandestine deals (as, for instance, the Kremlin did during the 2016 presidential campaign, as politicians of both parties agree).
So why do Trump’s enemies play by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules? Why, say, did major media spend years on Monica Lewinsky—sufficient to get 61% of America to support a censure of President Clinton even as only 34% of America supported the impeachment process that launched that censure debate (a classic bait-and-switch, in which political bad actors get rewarded with unearned major-media coverage after well overshooting their mark)—but seem to avoid almost entirely news of Trump’s personal and professional debaucheries that would make for considerably more entertaining (and, much more importantly, accurate) corporate media fare? By way of example, now that Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, why is he not repeatedly designated as such in news coverage, as corporate media would do for anyone else who held such statuses?
Why is his criminal record not mentioned even when corporate media is covering his alleged anti-crime initiatives? Why is it not journalistically relevant to note that Trump has been found liable for hundreds of millions in Fraud when he goes on long public jeremiads against… Fraud?
Why did The Epstein Scandal discussed infra not lead to a wall-to-wall revisiting by media of the 67 allegations of sexual misconduct against him, all of which would seem to be crucial context at a moment tens of millions of Americans are trying to decide what if anything Donald Trump has to hide on the subject of… sexual misconduct?
Why did American voters get such wall-to-wall coverage of a jetlagged Biden having a single terrible debate (coverage that ended his political career) even as a 2018 research finding that “Trump speaks at the level of an eight year-old” got virtually no traction in American media?
No one knows.
Now some whisper, with unwarranted faith, that something has seemed to change in 2025—that Big Tech titans or Big Media moguls or GOP scions have finally decided that it’s time for Trump to exit national politics stage left and be replaced by VP J.D. Vance. They even intimate (in part inspired by Elon Musk’s fanning of Epstein-news flames) that that’s what explains the seemingly unnatural lifespan of The Epstein Scandal in an era when most scandals sink below the horizon in a news cycle or less.
But what’s actually happening is much more interesting.
Because since mid-2016 Donald Trump had owed his spate of narrow political wins to one conspiracy theory in particular: the cartoonishly deranged idea that a transnational cabal of Marxist, often Jewish child sex traffickers and literal vampires are plotting a “New World Order” fueled by Child Rape, Human Trafficking, and Sexual Assault as well as a global disinformation network. And all this, the self-described QAnonists say, only one man chosen by God—Donald John Trump—is powerful enough to stop.
Over 40% of Republicans say QAnonism is “good” for the country, which seems fewer than expected until one considers that these are the most militant Trump supporters—the ones who buy his merch, attend his rallies, and proselytize their neighbors into both MAGAism generally and Trumpism specifically. Their enthusiasm is infectious in their communities, and it comprises a popular-vote floor that has protected Trump from ever having to run toward the nation’s political center in elections. While most QAnonists wisely couch their support for Trump (in public at least) in other terms, it’s nevertheless the case that many of the most stalwart and ostensibly non-QAnonist or QAnon-ambivalent components of the Trump mythos find their origin in QAnonism: from “Trump as the Chosen One” (link) to his “Evil Enemies” rhetoric (link), from the “I Alone Can Fix It” meme (link) to the crypto-antisemitic “globalist” slur (link), from his fake War on Human Trafficking (which serves as cover for all the Trump policies that dramatically decrease policing of Child Sex Trafficking) to his equally fake Fight for Crime Victims (which he boasts of even as he tries to cut aid to crime victims and repeatedly ignores all of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims as The Epstein Scandal continues).
Never mind that Trump’s past and present social circle is filled with more known or credibly accused pedophiles, human traffickers, sex traffickers, child sex traffickers, serial sexual predators, and hostile foreign agents than all past presidents combined.
There’s a reason that Trump’s first response to the arrest of one of the two most notorious child sex traffickers in modern American history, his longtime friend Ghislaine Maxwell, wasn’t relief that such a monster had finally been captured and would be brought to justice but, “Did she say anything about me [to the police]?”
But what’s the use in itemizing all these compelling tangential links between Trump and QAnonism when not only has he endorsed it himself (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here)—even to the point of equating it with patriotism—but, far more to the point, and consistent with the MAGA Maxim (in its most common formulation, “Every accusation is a confession”), Trump is actually known to himself be all of a pedophile, a human trafficker, a sex trafficker, a child sex trafficker, a serial sexual predator, and even, per a former top KGB official, an Russian foreign agent code-named “Krasnov”?
In other words, the droid MAGAs claim to have been looking for all this time has always been right under their noses. So why did they miss it, and why do they miss it still? Because the coordinated thrust of nearly all far-right media since the 1990s has been to get its watchers to either ignore or categorically mistrust the professional major-media journalistic operations that have carefully and ethically reported such news.
The result: legions of Trump fans who claim to be obsessed with the protection of children believe, contra the available evidence, that their political hero is “merely” vaguely lecherous—which perspective they also quickly dismiss on the grounds that he’s also a righteous knight-errant for the Church (yet another self-indulgent fantasy given that the available evidence confirms that Trump has contempt for religion, religious people, and religious worship (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here; he’s also, not for nothing, a blasphemer and heretic). Trump gleefully takes God’s name in vain—all the time—and almost never goes to church. His open disinterest in church attendance (and his creepy attempts to fake same), his rejection of key points of Christian dogma, his hidden contempt for his Christian voters, his embrace of religious charlatanism, and his cynical monetization of his own mythos as an ersatz messiah figure have led to credible media allegations that he is in fact an atheist.
Meanwhile, his followers, aware of or interested in exactly none of this, work daily to try to inject into common parlance their QAnonist belief that many or even most Democrats are Satanists (by way of seeking to popularize the slurs “Demon Rats” or “Demon-crats”) and Marxists (by surfing happily on the corporate-media tide of journalists erroneously calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party,” a slur whose origin lies in Republican efforts to obliquely dub all Democrats Communists).
All this is an attempt to situate Democrats as major villains in the QAnonist mythos, when the real enemy of these FBI-confirmed “domestic terrorists”—if they believe in anything they’re saying at all, and if they care about children at all—is Donald Trump.
Just so, when Trump—after falsely promising America that he would never talk about the Butler Incident in public following the RNC speech he made shortly afterward (“I will tell you exactly what happened [in Butler], and you’ll never hear it from me a second time because it’s actually too painful to tell”)—Trump instead made the oddly lightly investigated incident (not even hospital records were released) the center of his political persona, repeatedly saying “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Putting aside that this is blasphemy; putting aside that it suggests that God had little to no interest in the life of a volunteer firefighter who sheltered his family with his body during the Butler Incident (Corey Comperatore) over a known rapist (essentially a grotesque inversion, by Trump, of the Biblical events of Matthew 27); the fact remains that Trump’s ceaseless writings on and remarks about QAnonism confirm that when the oddly politically felicitous events in Butler occurred Trump quickly but also with great premeditation sought to cloak himself in QAnon rhetoric framing him as an anti-Child Sex Trafficking messiah.
And he did this, we now know, during a 2024 U.S. presidential campaign in which he hoped to recover the magic of his successful 2016 U.S. presidential campaign—during which campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Trump biographer Michael Wolff that the Trump campaign’s biggest fear was that Trump would come to be associated with the subject of Child Sex Trafficking through his longtime friend, Jeffrey Epstein. The so-called “miracle in Butler” (which amounted to Thomas Matthew Crooks being a bad shot who was startled by a local police officer seconds before firing into a crowd) thus was instantly deployed to cover a known vulnerability.
We might note, too, the surprisingly perfect overlap between Trump’s political targets—i.e., the subjects of his vile conspiracy theories—and the perceived villains within the QAnonists’ dark mythology: certain Democratic politicians (e.g., Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton); Hollywood actors and actresses (especially those known to have ever donated to the Democratic Party or progressive causes); and left-leaning and/or licentious foreigners, particularly if they’re Jews and/or nonwhite (e.g. Ehud Barak and Naomi Campbell, though the broader category would also fit a man like Prince Andrew).
In spreading the notion that Barack Obama had had a secret life as a non-American Muslim; and Bill Clinton had had a secret life full of sexual perversions; and Hillary Clinton had had a secret life as a chronically ill enabler of her husband’s perversions; and John Kerry had had a secret life as an Iranian agent; and Joe Biden had long been an addled man secretly puppeteered by—you guessed it—rich “globalists,” Trump was methodically table-setting a decade-long and Kremlin-aided domestic disinformation operation that imagined every Democratic official as having a devilish secret life they hide from voters. It was critical to have the Kremlin’s help in spreading this nefarious lie, given that every piece of evidence then and now confirms that Donald Trump has in fact hidden for a decade a devilish secret life of exactly this sort: one he lived in for a quarter-century, from the mid-1980s through his 2005 marriage to Melania Trump.
More than this, when Trump spent the four years of the Biden administration again and again implying—sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, sometimes via verbal slips and sometimes via what genuinely seemed like “senior moments”—that the current president was actually Barack Obama, or that Hillary Clinton was secretly waiting in the wings to run for POTUS again, or that one rich foreign Jew or another (usually George Soros) was in fact controlling the Democratic Party, he was aware that in doing so he was doing no more than alluding, without evidence (or even an effort at evidence) that America is being secretly controlled by a Marxist, Satanic, Child Sex Trafficking cabal of foreign vampires and wealthy Jews that he alone can save it from.
But in situating The Epstein Scandal against the backdrop of ten years of Trumpist-QAnonist cooperation, we needn’t be as literal as all this. Frankly there are few Trump conspiracy theories, howsoever constructed and wheresoever directed, that don’t in some instantly painfully obvious way advance his personal interests—whether business-related or political. Even his recent slight calling the French president Emmanuel Macron, with whom he’s arguably had a decent working relationship, “a different kind of a guy”—a weirdly vague statement, however you take it—was a vile if oblique reference to his top supporter Candace Owens’ outrageous (and now to be litigated) insistence that Mr. Macron is secretly gay because his wife Brigitte is secretly a man. (And since, in QAnonist mythology, transgender rights are a key cause célèbre for The Cabal, Trump is also here winking at his most dangerous supporters to suggest that, yes, he too thinks Macron a crypto-weirdo). It would seem preposterous to think that Trump thrives on a daily diet of conspiracy theories that he then warps his public rhetoric to echo with… but in fact we already know that that’s exactly what he does.
{Note: If you think this is a stretch, don’t. Consider that Trump’s top agents gleefully spread false rumors that Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi is gay and that an assassination plot against Mrs. Pelosi was actually a dispute between Paul Pelosi and a gay lover; then, months later, he attacked Nancy Pelosi as a “disgusting degenerate” and Paul as an “interesting” husband—the coy implication being that Paul was hiding his sexuality and that Nancy was and is a “degenerate” for being knowingly married to a gay man. Not coincidentally, this claim not only echoes the Macron slur but also his false claims that the Clintons’ marriage is a sham and Hillary is in a lesbian relationship with Huma Abedin. So this is how Trump operates.}
It must be said, too, that QAnonism overlaps significantly with another, even more popular MAGA conspiracy theory: Great Replacement Theory.
GRT—which has always been far more dangerous to American cultural cohesion and public safety than Critical Race Theory (CRT) ever was or could be, having inspired terror attacks all over the world—holds that (and this may sound familiar) a shadowy Cabal of “globalist” Marxist Jews, some in the United States and some abroad, have conspired to flood the United States with non-white immigrants in order to dilute the cultural influence and eventually the voting power of American caucasians. This vile philosophy is why, during the 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville (at the so-called Unite the Right Rally that Trump insisted had “good people on both sides”) the chant from the tiki torch-wielding, Sieg-Heiling fascists was, “Jews will not replace us!”
The reality, of course, is that it was always the other way around: since the U.S. Civil War, during which what we now know as Republicans were Democrats, it has been white conservative voters who have sought to systematically dilute and/or suppress, including with violence, the votes of non-white U.S. citizens—and, moreover, push non-whites to the periphery of American culture. This is why, at the direct instruction of Donald Trump, Republicans in the State of Texas just amended their congressional districts so that it now takes five Black Texans or three Latino Texans to achieve the voting power of one white Texan.
And again, this is a direct order from the President of the United States—one made explicitly to hold the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections, and not even because Trump or anyone in his party perceives white Texas to have been mistreated. It’s pure, unadulterated, unprovoked racial aggression and election interference.
It also comes against the backdrop of it having long been a felony for immigrants to vote in federal elections; the Democratic Party having made no move whatsoever to give immigrants who are non-citizens federal voting rights; and illegal immigration to America having been a problem for so many decades now that if there had been some nefarious plot even distantly echoing The Great Replacement Theory it surely would have won at least one public victory in all that time. Instead, no such effort is afoot—and a president who complained about Voter Fraud that somehow none of his own commissions could find while he openly encouraged his fans to commit Voter Fraud by voting multiple times has again shown historians, academics, and the public at large where the real danger lies in American culture by ordering a reduction in the value of non-white votes in one of the largest states in the country by as much as 80%. He does this, moreover, while enacting an anti-immigration policy that, as the New York Times has just written, takes its cues from “far-right….extremist” groups, “people with a history of making racist or antisemitic remarks,” “[people] who look favorably on the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” “a belief that migration to the United States is all but synonymous with a military invasion,” and “language and ideas about immigrants that echo statements by violent extremists.” As the Times further notes, far-right demonstrations in the U.S. have almost disappeared under the second Trump administration because, as summarized by convicted Seditious Conspirator, leader of the white-supremacist domestic-terror group the Proud Boys, and Trump pardonee Enrique Tarrio, “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?”
While there’s certainly no one-to-one linkage between The Epstein Scandal and the unprecedented immigration crackdown Trump is now overseeing—which includes a plan to imminently deploy federal troops in “blue” cities without any evident federal authority to do so—what conjoins these two phenomena is the fact that, while both may be alienating some right-wing populists, Trump can rest assured that the bulk of his base continues to be with him in both instances. Moreover, combined with other, more esoteric administration efforts now underway (such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth largely purging non-whites and women from military leadership) we can see a through-line emerging: an unmistakable march toward a predominantly white ruling class that treats women, Jews, and non-whites as second-class citizens and enforces what it perceives to be the natural racial and religious hierarchy in America by force.
QAnonism, Great Replacement Theory, and Trump edicts covering the length and breadth of the federal executive branch—as well as those components of other U.S. branches that Trump seeks to consume—point toward this medium-term outcome.
Yet as noted above, Trump’s deployment of conspiracy theories is as much a defensive maneuver as an offensive one; it obscures his own misdeeds to the same degree that it advances them, thereby pulling an essential (if thoroughly underhanded) double duty.
Under the MAGA Maxim, if a MAGA leader is launching an accusation against an opponent there’s a much-higher-than-random chance that she or he is employing MAGA’s key rhetorical set-piece: weaponized hypocrisy. So yes, if we look at the crimes and other forms of misconduct Donald Trump most frequently accuses others of, it reads as a roster of what we know from public reporting he himself has done (see the full Proof Series, here and here, for more): sex crimes; Bank Fraud; Wire Fraud; Mortgage Fraud (his newest favorite political weapon, see, e.g., here, here, and here); insider trading (ditto); paying for rally attendees (ditto); spying on unsuspecting parties; Bribery; illegally interfering in (or inviting illegal interference with) U.S. elections; coordinating Election Fraud; inciting Voter Fraud; Incitement of mob violence; politicizing and weaponizing our justice system; working against America in cahoots with its most hostile enemies; weaponizing our immigration system; undermining our Constitution; not accepting any of America’s core values or principles—in short, if Trump has accused you of something, really anything, odds are you have never done it and he almost certainly has. (This makes it especially unnerving when he comes close to accusing enemies of Murder and exhibits glee at ordering illegal assassinations.)
All of which is to say that avid Trump supporters almost definitionally don’t consume media that would inform them that Trump’s inner circle includes many sex pests and accused criminals and even pedophiles, or that Trump’s own history casts a very long shadow over his modus operandi of accusing others of what he himself has done. Much of that history exists now only in far-flung domestic and international reports that it requires curatorial journalism to compile in coherent fashion; on a day-to-day basis, this information is as absent from U.S. mainstream media as it is from American far-right media. As for independent left-leaning media, it may as well not exist at all for most MAGAs, given their preferred “news” diet (apart from the remaining left-leaning Twitter media feeds, which they mainly use, these days, as skills practice for trolling).
Nor are Trump supporters generally inclined to believe that Trump has ever done anything so untoward that God himself hasn’t already washed it clean by elevating him to the presidency—twice (it’s unclear why He let him lose in 2020)—and by saving him from assassination attempts (twice) and from impeachment attempts (twice). God is also, apparently, a student of criminal justice, ensuring that his vessel on Earth would be convicted of 34 felonies but not go to prison and be found liable for Fraud but not pay any fine, be adjudicated as a rapist but find ways to drag out the appeal of his fine for years and be caught cheating on his wife and violating the Ten Commandments repeatedly but never suffer the indignity of any divorce he didn’t want to see happen.
Yet despite all this, MAGA is still discernibly angry at Trump right now. Why is that?
The present right-wing anger at Trump follows the general outline of what we might call a “failed crusader” narrative: (1) Trump’s heart has always been in the right place; (2) he genuinely wants to bring down pedophiles as much as any man alive, the fact that sex trafficking prosecutions plummeted precipitously during his first term in office and his continued friendship with (and public defenses of) numberless sex pests notwithstanding; and (3) what’s happening right now is that a crusade Trump has long been earnestly committed to is suddenly failing because either (a) he’s suddenly lost his nerve due to the awesome combined power of the leftists opposing him, (b) he’s lost his focus because there are so many other noble goals he wants to achieve for the American people, or (c) he’s lost his direction not due to a lack of will but simply because God has a different plan for him than his voters and supporters anticipated.
What his voters and supporters do not believe, on the evidence of thousands of social media posts reviewed by this author, is that President Trump is sitting on hundreds of gigabytes of Epstein evidence because he himself is a pedophile, or because he remains embarrassed about innocuous long-ago associations he’s since come to earnestly rue, or because (at the outside) he’s protecting persons who remain important contributors to his political war chest, and therefore his whole political agenda—which agenda, in the view of his voters and supporters, comprises many equally righteous crusades that the president has every reason to want to protect.
The simplest explanation—the Occam’s Razor explanation—that Trump is now, and has always been, what all the evidence of his life confirms him to be, which is a serial sexual predator sexually attracted to teens, simply isn’t in the cards for many MAGAs.
This, despite the following BuzzFeed News report from late November 2016:
The explanation of the situation by BuzzFeed News suggests that (at “best”) a lawyer at the Post decided not to risk the ire of a just-elected POTUS, or (at “worst”) Cohen’s pal begged him to remove even an unattributed quote because any quote would lead Trump to him and Trump was capable of anything. (Certainly, we know that in response to author Michael Wolff urging Jeffrey Epstein to reveal the photographs he had—and showed to both Wolff and another bestselling Trump biographer, Craig Unger—of Trump cavorting with topless preteens by Epstein’s pool, Epstein replied, “I may be a pervert, but I’m not crazy. Trump is a man without any scruples.” This would be as close as Epstein ever got to telling Wolff Trump was capable of committing murder to hide his pedophilia, and Wolff got the message loud and clear: “A chill went up my back,” the author now says, in response to Epstein’s euphemistic reference to Trump having anyone who might reveal his sexual deviancy killed.)
{Note: On a related note, Wolff here details, in a video interview, what a Trump confidant recently told him about a Summer 2025 conversation that the confidant with the president. “People say I had Epstein killed. I didn’t have Epstein killed,” Trump said to his friend. “Well, do you think that he was killed?” the friend asked Trump. Trump would only reply, opaquely, “A lot of people wanted him dead.” Given that the primary suspects for an assassination of Epstein executed at Trump’s behest or to aid Trump while Epstein was in Trump’s custody include Trump associates in organized crime, Trump associates in several foreign nation-states, Trump associates in various paramilitary groups. anyone seeking a pardon directly from Trump, or any agent of any person in any of the four foregoing categories, and given that Trump is historically most likely to go out of his way to issue a denial when he knows he’s guilty of something, his statement to his confidant is, indeed, in the view of this Donald Trump biographer, just as in the view of fellow Trump biographer Michael Wolff, “chilling.”}
In any case, whether it’s Trump asking a confidant, “Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your [13-year-old] daughter than your wife?” or the countless statements Trump has made about children from the ages of ten all the way down to a literal baby (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here), the point is that the now-sitting President of the United States had always been—at a bare minimum and all at once, too—incest-curious, Statutory Rape-curious, and pedophilic in his sentiments and urges (whether or not he’s acted on the latter sentiments being the sole outstanding question, though it must be said that he’s indeed been accused, at great length, of acting upon them).
Republicans voters writ large either haven’t seen this mountain of evidence; have only heard it through the filter of Trump’s own, notoriously deceitful mouth; have memory-holed it; or have explained it away in ways none of them would do even if such words came from the mouths of their own friends or family. And then, of course, there are the QAnonists, who perceive all these corroborated facts to be a mere “Cabal” psy-op.
For Democrats, centrists, and bona fide independents, it’s a different story altogether.
Many voters in these sectors of the American electorate are just now tuning into past Epstein reporting from the United States and around the world, particularly England, and seeing in that reporting what candidly any media-literate person would: Donald Trump is a sex criminal—and not a newly minted one, either. He’s a man who’s been a serial sexual predator since the 1970s, at the very latest. Moreover, what they are still hearing, too, and often enough in Trump’s own words, is that at every age he’s been in his nearly eighty years of life he’s been primarily attracted to teens and young women in their very early twenties.
{Note: One of many personal revelations that I’ve experienced as a Trump biographer and presidential historian for the last decade is that the man is very much a surface-level thinker. Often literally. He’s fascinated by the phenomenon of telegenicism; he loves getting deeply, even obsessively engrossed in the interior design of the spaces he inhabits, to the point that as his business empire was crumbling in the late 1980s and early 1990s he was just sitting around looking at fabric swatches while others did the work of trying to save his businesses; and as a man who’s functionally illiterate due to unacknowledged and untreated severe dyslexia—to avoid admitting this fact fully to himself, he’s for decades simply avoids reading when possible—he often makes choices based on visuals rather than text. So it’s consistent with the pseudo-adult persona he’s spent half a century trying to perfect that he’d be less interested in the age of consent in a jurisdiction (especially as he doesn’t care about legal restrictions, viewing most as functionally enforceable against rich men with ready access to teams of lawyer) than what a girl looks like. And as a man obsessed with “model”-style beauty, Trump likes girls without wrinkles, blemishes, or any signs of aging at all. In this apparent view, it doesn’t really matter if a girl’s actual age is 13, 14, or 15, or for that matter 16, 17, or 18; if a girl looks pubescent or post-pubescent and she’s telegenic, Trump’s history suggests that he’s almost instantly hooked.
For the foregoing reasons, it’s hard to distinguish between the three most prominent faces of Trump’s sexual deviance: his pedophilia, which tracks his sexual attraction to girls 12 and 13, whether acted on or “merely” fantasized about; his hebephilia, a term that references a sexual attraction to pubescent but still underage girls (also a term that can technically overlap with pedophilia, inasmuch as, depending on the expert being consulted, it encompasses girls from ages 12 to 15; and his ephebophilia, a term that applies to Trump’s unmistakable and clearly unwavering sexual attractions to teens generally—though the focus of the term ephebophilia is on adolescents, meaning teens aged 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19, so a percentage of this large group are clearly neither minors nor under the age of consent for sexual congress. A portion of such ephebophilic sexual contact is therefore technically legal, making pursuit of such teens by a forty-, fifty-, or sixty-something man “merely” grotesquely antisocial, unambiguously immoral, and profoundly unethical, given the life-experience, power, and wealth gap between a middle-aged man and a teen. Even a middle-aged man who’s “merely” an ephebophile would likely be shunned by most denizens of a civilized society, as it’s a definitionally predatory practice when encountered in a middle-aged man, such that, at the very outside, and this is charitable well beyond reason, it suggests a man incapable of relating to any brain or heart but one as yet still immature. Certainly, making an ephebophile a President of the United States is unthinkable.
All of the sex pedophiles desire is Child Rape. All of the sex hebephiles desire is Child Rape. And a significant percentage of the sex ephebophiles desire is Child Rape. Donald Trump has evinced all three of these sexual appetites, and a single public joke to Howard Stern and angry private retort to Jeffrey Epstein notwithstanding—the former a jest about a 12 year-old being too young to have sex with but only because it’d be likely to get one in trouble, the latter a very clear statement by Trump that he feels entitled to pursue sexually any girl 16 or older—he has never been known to focus on the ages on his sexual targets. As discussed supra, his procurer Andy Lucchesi has told The Daily Beast that Trump routinely had sex with teens are parties where girls weren’t checked for their ages and girls as young as 14 years old were present. It is worth noting that Trump’s habit of consorting inappropriately with children appears to have always occurred on private property he owned, underscoring his fear of either law enforcement attention or the simple sort of safety threats that arise when a middle-aged man is seen in public with a teenager he is clearly in a sexual relationship with. There’s a possibility that in such cases a Good Samaritan might fear a Kidnapping and conduct an ad hoc child welfare check that could quickly turn ugly.}
Trump’s attraction to a specific age-range of teenager—approximately 13 to 17—is substantiated by his actions, his words, videos and photos from his life, observations from friends and acquaintances, and even a misogynistic philosophy that he recently expounded upon at length at (of all things) the White House Faith Luncheon. At that event, Trump told a crowd of well-heeled men and women that if the economy goes south in America, the unattractive men in the crowd “will be totally busted. Let’s see how long your wife stays with you….she’ll stay with you for about three weeks and then she’ll say, ‘Darling, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it anymore, darling, I’m leaving you.’” According to Trump, he even tells friends of his he considers to be “very, very unattractive” that—because all they have going for them (he believes) is that they’re “smart” and “rich,” if their bank account takes a hit “You better hope [Republicans] get [Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy] passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes [if not].” Such thinking about relationships between men and women being categorically predicated on money and sex is deeply disturbing.
As Geralyn Fortney, a licensed professional counselor and regional clinic director at Thriveworks, recently told HuffPost, Trump’s notions of how men and women relate are defined by “long-standing sexist tropes” that include ideas such as “women are incapable of love without strings attached” and they “are unable to have [financial] success on their own.” Professor Kari Winter of University of Buffalo, an American Studies scholar, concurs, saying of President Trump’s bizarre Faith Luncheon speech that in addition to “incessantly sexualizing women” and exhibiting “a core belief that women marry only for money,” Trump “conjures absurd, non-sequitur images of patriarchal marriage to sell his disastrous economic policies,” doing so “like a crude, cliched commercial that uses women’s bodies to sell cars or booze.” Yet such ideas are presumably not uncommon among hebephiles or ephebophiles, given that if a serial sexual predator like Trump (or for that matter, his late best friend Epstein) wants a mate who relies entirely on him financially, in the modern world it is easiest to manufacture that situation with a teen who has not yet entered into any career or is an early twenty-something who has just come to the United States without any money.
{Note: Epstein researchers have noticed such a pattern with both men. Ivana Zelníčková was a struggling twenty-something model from the Soviet Bloc when Trump met her; he married her a year later. One of four unindicted Epstein co-conspirators from the 2000s investigation in Florida was Adriana Musinska, who came to America as a teenage Soviet Bloc model repped by Trump and Epstein’s friend John Casablancas and his Elite Model Management. Another of the suspected Epstein co-conspirators during the 2000s investigation in Florida was Nadia Marcinakova, a Soviet Bloc teen model Epstein once boasted he’d purchased as a “sex slave.” And of course readers will know that in the late 1990s Trump was introduced to a struggling twenty-something model from the Soviet Bloc named Melanija Knavs, who became the second struggling twenty-something model from the Soviet Bloc Trump would marry. Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife, met the fabulously wealthy businessman when he was almost forty and she was a twenty-year-old struggling beauty-pageant contestant. The pattern, here—one that is also seen among Donald Trump’s many mistresses, which include then-teen athlete Gabriela Sabatini, then-teen model Kylie Bax, and several obscure then-twenty-something models, is very clear: Trump cannot be with anyone he doesn’t enjoy a significant power imbalance over.}
As Professor Winter notes, in view of both the Faith Luncheon monologue and Trump recently—and bizarrely—warning recent West Point graduates about the dangers of shopping for “trophy wives,” “In his repetitive use of the ‘trophy wife’ trope, we can see that underneath his arrogance and delusions of grandeur is an unhappy man who doesn’t believe that he’s worthy of love. Maybe he doesn’t even believe that love is a thing.”
These sexual and/or relationship philosophies have clearly been with Donald Trump for decades, and help explain why (1) so many of his relationships have arisen from his business activities, and (2) why so many of those same business activities in the first instance appear to have been devised in order to get him close to vulnerable young women who may be experiencing immigration and/or financial instability (a Trump kink we will return to infra): these businesses include, as remarked on elsewhere in this text, the Miss Teen USA pageant; the Miss USA pageant; the Miss Universe pageant; Trump Model Management; The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice reality shows (whose attractive female contestants Trump either had a hand in picking or, at a minimum, falsely represented to women he wanted to court he had a hand in picking, as Stormy Daniels detailed); the many beauty contests that Trump co-judged, (from Hawaiian Tropic to Elite Model Management’s “Look of the Year” contest); and others more esoteric, including businesses run by associates whose operations Trump could falsely align himself with (e.g., The National Enquirer) to advantage himself. Even setpieces as simple as the Mar-a-Lago spa, private Trump jets, and Trump-branded hotel and casino bars were used by Trump as a stalking ground to seek out vulnerable prey. Consider this horrifying Trump monologue, which was actually caught on video:
Now, I had a case, it was very interesting. A beautiful girl who was 17 or 18 applied to be a waitress [at one of my casinos].
So beautiful.
She's like a world-class beauty... [and] my people came and said, “But Mr. Trump, she has no experience.” So I interviewed her anyway—because she was so pretty. And I said, “Let me ask you, do you have any experience?” She goes, “No, sir.” I said, “When can you start?”
[NB: As Trump tells this story at the 2007 Real Estate & Wealth Expo, the video of it shows a young-looking audience member named Juliette asking Trump what it would take to get a job as a flight attendant on one of his planes. Trump calls her up to the stage so he can grab, hug, and ogle her on camera. The first sentence below is said to Juliette as she’s still alongside Trump; the rest is said as she’s walking away from him and leaving the stage.}
You know, you can work on my plane any time.
See, now if she worked on my plane, that's like a death wish for me, right?
That [hiring Juliette] is like [giving alcohol to] an alcoholic.
I have many friends. They’re wonderful people. They’re alcoholics. You [can’t] put Scotch in front of them. It's like this [hiring Juliette] would be my form of alcoholism.
In other words, this is Trump—in public, no less—analogizing his immediate lustful feelings toward “Juliette” to a past situation in which he hired a 17- or 18-year-old teen to be a waitress (which teen, to be clear, may actually have been 15 or 16, as Trump is not known to check the ages of employees he sees as modeling prospects) on the basis of his ephebophilic sexual urges.
But it’s worse than that, actually.
Trump’s further implication, above, is that that 17- or 18-year-old waitress would in short order have been seized by Trump for his own sexual gratification, in the same way, Trump admits, a crazed alcoholic grabs a drink to get their daily fix. As analogies go, this one is disturbingly sociopathic; assuming Trump isn’t here admitting to satyriasis (the psychological condition an Epstein friend claimed, without evidence, Epstein had; see infra) he’s comparing his sex drive with respect to teens to a substance addiction, suggesting that he can’t be stopped from making passes at his own employees no matter what their age. This is consistent with Professor Winter’s observation of Trump as someone who is categorically disinterested by romance, love, or marriage, and is focused instead on what the woman-of-the-moment hanging on his arm looks like. Young girls look like young girls, and as we know from Trump’s involvement in pageants he believes a girl can begin to be sexualized and objectified by the time she’s 14. There’s no evidence he failed to bring this philosophy from one side of his business life (e.g., his pageants) to any other (e.g., making hires at the Mar-a-Lago spa, such as Virginia Giuffre, an attractive teenager Trump hired who was in short order recruited from the spa to be a Child Rape victim of Trump’s closest friends, club fixtures Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell). Even in the most public-facing confession about his sexual predilections he ever made, Trump seems to have deliberately chosen the age at which a teen is just above (even if only by a day) the age of consent in most jurisdictions.
A man who in public calls 17 the singular, “just great” age for a female quite likely has a different view of matters he’ll share in private, if this author’s years of experience representing scores of defendants charged with major sex crimes is any indication.
But the above monologue is significant for another reason, too. Donald Trump is here admitting that he hired teens for jobs they weren’t qualified for because he liked to look at them and—if his comment about “Juliette” is to be believed—also because he had an interest in pursuing them sexually. As readers try to understand how so many young, attractive teenagers ended up working for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the 1990s, only for some of them to be (like Giuffre) quickly swept up in the serial rape factory that was then being run by Trump’s friends Jeffrey and Ghislaine, it’s worth considering that, whether or not Trump orchestrated these recruitments or was simply indifferent to the fact that they were happening, he did make the decision to hire attractive teens at Mar-a-Lago in the first instance with a knowledge of what might soon become of them.
At best—and the phrase “at best” is truly inapt, here—Trump made this decision, his own words suggest, because he was willing have teens formally in his employ get raped if he could, until that eventually arrived, have the pleasure of looking at them as they worked for him, fantasizing about them, and perhaps making a pass at them himself.
At worst, Trump’s supposed anger at Epstein recruiting as sex-crime victims attractive teens of exactly the sort we above see Trump admitting he hired just so he could make advances on them was merely anger that these teenagers were recruited to be raped by Epstein before Trump could sleep with them himself. The fact that Mr. Trump did not apparently (see infra) ever ban Epstein from Mar-a-Lago until Epstein went to jail for sex crimes seems to confirm that Trump knew what was happening to his employees for years and chose to do nothing about it. Had he already slept with the ones that he wanted to sleep with? Did he implicitly admire Epstein’s gumption? Was he helping his friend and favorite “wingman”? We don’t know—we only know that Trump made a decision not to protect his teen employees, then spent years and years lying about that indifference to anyone who would listen.
Certainly, the knowledge Trump admits to above—that attractive teens were hired by his companies purely on the basis of their looks, and that among the dangers these teens thereafter faced at work were him and men like him—was the same knowledge we now know he had with respect to every attractive teen model he had his model procurer Andy Lucchesi bring to his Plaza Hotel property for what Trump knew were sexual advances by old men (men who, as sexual predators, needed to illicitly ply their intended teenaged targets with illegal alcohol, hard drugs, and possibly money, first).
We can’t understand the sort of deranged sexual psychology Professor Winter has attributed to Trump based on what we know about his public and private conduct if we can’t also see that almost every major Trump enterprise—from his planes to his casinos, his hotels to his pageants—was not just generally a potential intersection of sex and money but at its core was first and foremost a sex trap for teens in exactly the way that Jeffrey Epstein’s creepy “lairs” in Palm Beach and New York City were.
President Trump can act the clown at video-recorded events like the 2007 Real Estate & Wealth Expo and pretend that a clear trendline in his sprawling business portfolio and (un)professional conduct therein is merely funny—which is what he does in the video clip linked to above—but among the many revelations the Epstein Scandal has deeded us as a country is that when it comes to making sexual advances against teen employees, Trump is deadly serious. It is, as he frames it himself, akin to an addiction.
And if the 67 known instances of Donald Trump sexual misconduct we know of are illustrative of the man’s methods of predation, we shouldn’t be surprised that he has so often wanted attractive teens in his employ and social circle—as teens are far less likely to understand that they’re being preyed upon than adults are. Just so, Trump’s views on women generally and marriage specifically, as remarked upon by Professor Winter supra, are consistent with those of a man who doubts his ability to attract, charm, or hold the admiration of a grown woman—and hides this inability (or this fear that he harbors such an inability) behind (1) transient sexual encounters-cum-sex crimes, (2) a philosophy on love that elevates the “trophy wife” from a misogynistic meme to a serial ambition, and (3) a marked preference for teens as sexual partners.
Note here that Winter’s observations on Trump are deemed non-controversial in the psychology community.
Experts are perpetually trying to play catch-up in warning parents about men who want to spend time alone with teens to commit Rapes or Sexual Assaults upon them, in so doing combatting the sort of predatory environment Trump deliberately creates on his planes and in his places of business: a false sense that older men who hang out with teens are cool rather than pathetic, and that teens who hang out with older men are therefore themselves cool. This is a precursor to sex crimes that is well understood by psychologists who deal with hebephiles and ephebophiles, and for that matter by the public defenders tasked by our nation’s justice system with representing indigent accused sex criminals.
More broadly, most neurotypical Americans (and for that matter most neurodiverse Americans) understand that men 40 or older who “date” of-age teens or even women in their early to mid-twenties are often concerned that age-appropriate women would see through their bravado to the scared and unloved boys beneath. Given that we now know that Trump, as a boy, infamously received almost no affection whatsoever from either of his parents—but particularly his mother—and given that Trump lacks many of social and intellectual skills (e.g., as already noted, reading; speaking above a third-grade level; or focusing on conversations without aid from secretly snorted Adderall) that allow an adult to form a deep attachment with other adults, in retrospect it seems a fait accompli that Trump would end up being some form of serial sexual predator (if we understand, also, that, from the time of his very early childhood, he had a marked inclination to violence).
So with Trump expressing, as we’ve seen supra and infra, sexual attraction to all of (a) 12- and 13-year-olds (pedophilia), (b) 14- to 17-year-olds (hebephilia), (c) 18- and 19-year-olds (the higher end of ephebophilia)—not to mention (d) repeated age-appropriate liaisons in which Trump is thirty or more years older than the object of his lust and is dramatically advantaged in terms of wealth and experience—we shouldn’t be surprised to also hear from Trump, as we did above during the White House Faith Luncheon, a theory—call it a conspiracy theory—that everyone secretly agrees with him that women only marry for money, are only attracted to conventionally handsome men, and would always choose to be with significantly older men if possible. In convincing himself to believe in this fractured reality, Trump ensures that he won’t feel like he’s being either a deviant or a stalker in harboring such views. We might even add that just as Trump often states his criminal schemes outright to launder them—as how could a scheme be dastardly if it’s hatched in public?—Trump has also been known to openly discuss his sexual deviance on the Howard Stern Show and considerably less seedy venues as a way of defanging what would otherwise be immediately be understood as dangerous sociopathy.
But on some level Donald Trump must know the truth.
To say he doesn’t is to attribute to him not merely sociopathy but psychopathy, which even to this perpetually haunted “deep-dive” Trump researcher sits one step too far.
All this is why the Epstein Scandal presents something unique in the life of Donald Trump: an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force in a confrontation it seems no mere lie can prevent. Trump’s years and years of depraved sexual predation—to include sex crimes—alongside his late best friend Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophilic rapist and child sex trafficker, make it impossible for him to pretend at normalcy, which means that as a malignant narcissistic sociopath they’re things he categorically can’t easily be made to look at at all. Meanwhile, the tens of millions of Trump fans who made his objectively preposterous mid-2010s political ambitions—America has never had a president who’s lived as proudly debauched a life as Trump has—have a conception of both who Trump is and who was “really” controlling the United States under Joe Biden (and what Donald Trump was Heaven-tasked with doing about it) that they now embrace with a religious extremism they can’t or won’t back away from.
As between Trump’s pathologies and his fans’ stolid cultishness, it seems like a game of “Chicken” likely to end in some public horror or even sustained violence (see infra).
Unless.
Unless Trump can meet his most ardent fans in the middle by fully adopting their theory of the case: that America is secretly controlled by a Cabal of leftist pedophiles who he is committed to fighting to the death. But since that’s not actually what’s happening, Trump is now being forced to stage a series of fraudulent, grotesque public spectacles that create the appearance of reality in a fanatical fantasy with no hold on reality at all.
No wonder that, in the crudely orchestrated and staged “J’accuse!” that Trump and his lawyers just set up for Ghislaine Maxwell—the transcript of which just dropped—she makes sure to hit every single QAnonist fantasy, from associating a member of the Jewish Rothschild Family (the focus of nearly every antisemitic conspiracy theory now extant worldwide) with the late (also Jewish) Epstein to a former Democratic Party comptroller in New York (a city Trump has sought to crush the spirit of ever since it began rejecting him culturally), from a scion of Johnson & Johnson (whose affiliates supported Kamala Harris over Trump by a 90% to 10% split in the 2024 U.S. presidential election) to ex-Barclays CEO Jes Staley, a pro-DEI executive who has given money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Meanwhile, she says of Trump, preposterously, “I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way….President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him. So that is the sum and substance of my entire relationship with him….He’s a gentleman in all respects.” Sixty-seven sexual misconduct victims of Trump—for a start—would disagree with that nakedly pardon-seeking assessment.
{Note: Maxwell provides too many names of Epstein associates to list them all here, but it does bear underscoring that nearly all of those she chooses to acknowledge—whether she’s telling the truth or not—are persons President Trump would want her to acknowledge or point a finger at as at least knowing the infamous pedophile Epstein because they’re all associated with political, academic, or other institutions Trump deems his “enemies.” These include the late Harvard University dean Henry Rosovsky, whose naming is perfectly timed given Trump’s current war on Harvard; Democratic congressman Thomas McMillen, whose utility to Trump as an Epstein associate, whether or not he ever did anything wrong on any Epstein property, is self-evident; Thomas Pritzker, a businessman who is a cousin of likely 2028 Democratic Party presidential candidate and current Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (a well-timed association for Trump as he prepares to illegally invade Chicago, the Pritzker Family’s hometown, with an unknown contingent of federal troops); and a slew of men with identifiably Jewish last names sure to please any and all antisemitic QAnonists, from Goldsmith to Abramson—no relation—and Lipper to Minsky. But for all this, somehow Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz isn’t even mentioned by Maxwell as a known associate of Epstein, despite being his lawyer and friend.
Maxwell’s transparently counterfactual assessment of the Trump-Epstein relationship holds so many known falsehoods as to be staggering. Readers must remember that Maxwell was warned at the outset of her conversation with Trump’s lawyer that she could be charged with a federal crime, Making False Statements to Law Enforcement, for lying—so the fact she lies so boldly suggests she was warned in advance that this threat was an empty one. During her discussion with Blanche, detailed much more infra, she falsely says that Trump wasn’t close with Epstein, falsely says Trump never went to any of Epstein’s homes, falsely says the two men were only together at public social events, falsely says that she’s not aware of any photographs in which Trump appears with underage girls, falsely says that Trump never did “anything inappropriate with anyone…in her world [in Palm Beach],” falsely says she never recruited Epstein masseuses from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, falsely says that—despite Epstein’s repeated claims that Trump and Melania had sex on one of Epstein’s plane—no sexual activity of any kind ever occurred there, and other similarly clumsy fabrications, including a profoundly offensive one alleging that Jeffrey Epstein was “duped” into underage sex by his manipulative underage masseuses.}
Chapter 12: The Epstein Files
All of which brings us to The Epstein Files, a key focus of Book Two of Proof of Devilry.
It’s these files Trump had his lawyers stage a chat with Maxwell—and file motions to unseal grand jury transcripts that they knew in advance were doomed—to avoid ever revealing. As federal judge Richard Berman put it in becoming the third and last jurist to quickly put the kibosh on the Trump administration’s apparent transcripts-instead-of-files push, “The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice. The Government is the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein Files. By comparison, the instant grand jury motion appears to be a ‘diversion’ from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the Government’s possession.” In other words, as with Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump and his lawyers are playing transparent political games that no criminal justice professional (as opposed to a Trump lawyer merely play-acting at being a neutral government official) wants to get anywhere near.
Yet for all this, Donald Trump has done a superb job of surrounding himself with so many personal attorneys masquerading as disinterested, objective public servants that even if the federal judicial branch has no interest in playing along with Trump’s tired political games, there appear to be no shortage of members of the federal executive branch who will. Indeed, Donald Trump’s greatest allies in the matter of The Epstein Files and their continued withholding from American voters are Trump sycophants and—far more significantly—legal advisers, legal advocates, and attorneys he’s placed in select positions across the upper echelons of the federal government with an apparent mission to obstruct the release of those Files for as long as possible. Trump’s personal lawyer Pam Bondi is the U.S. Attorney General; his personal lawyer Todd Blanche is the Deputy U.S. Attorney General; his personal lawyer Kash Patel is the FBI Director; his personal lawyer Alina Habba is the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey (one of the four states or districts—with the District of Columbia, New York, and Florida—Trump has residential properties in); his legal adviser Jeanine Pirro is now the U.S. Attorney for DC, another of those locales; Trump personal lawyer D. John Sauer is the Solicitor General of the United States; and his personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan is Special Assistant to the President.
To install one of his sycophantic political appointees atop the District for Northern New York—New York being yet another U.S. state of sometimes residence for him—Trump engaged in an imperial action no one has seen before or even contemplated, one that involved ignoring judges and risking a constitutional crisis. Trump personal lawyer Emil Bove is now one the primary federal judges in Washington, a jurist who could hear major cases involving Trump’s malfeasance while in office. The Attorney General of Florida, Trump’s official state of residence, is an attorney from the first Trump administration. The one non-Trump-lawyer in Trump’s inner circle, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, is now slowly being pushed aside, with Trump hiring the first known co-Deputy FBI Director in FBI history. And who is this man? Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, infamous for being so desperate to become Trump’s personal attorney that he actually tried to intervene before the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump’s criminal Fraud trial in New York (yes, you read that correctly; he’s a Missouri attorney who sought to get involved in a state case in New York). Bailey is also linked to Trump personal lawyer D. John Sauer, as the two men worked together in Missouri. So it isn’t much of a stretch to say that before long every top official at both DOJ and the FBI will be, in effect, someone bound to act as Trump’s personal Roy Cohn—the old demand we heard from Trump throughout his first administration, namely that he wanted unscrupulous fixers willing to do anything to protect him, not public servants.
This roster of highly coordinated Trump-lawyer placements could go on and on, in fact. The above accounting is non-exhaustive. The upshot is that Trump has ensured that any federal agent who could hold him accountable for any crimes he commits in office—not actions broadly defined as being part of his presidential duties under the unprecedented 2024 Trump v. United States ruling that effectively makes Trump a king, but actual crimes—is a Trump sycophant who wouldn’t dare cross him. And all this is by Trump’s explicit design.
Indeed, Trump made it clear throughout his first presidential term that, his yearning for a taxpayer-funded fixer aside, his view of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the federal courts and their many areas of responsibility was inconsistent with the post-Watergate order established by bipartisan consensus half a century ago. Instead—but only when he’s president—he wants a “unitary executive,” which is MAGA-speak for “authoritarianism” in the same way “originalism” and “textualism” have long been MAGA-speak for far-right judicial activism within the American justice system. And for those who recall the earlier, rather less fascistic era of Unitary Executive Theory, know that Trump’s is wildly different; instead of merely seeking dictatorial control over the entirety of the federal executive branch, President Trump aims to redefine every federal government function—from taxing to spending, criminal justice policy-making to war-making, determining the time and place and manner of U.S. elections to more or less anything that touches upon Immigration, Crime, National Security, International Diplomacy, or the Economy—as an “emergency” prerogative of the executive branch and therefore a non-time-limited presidential prerogative. You’ll notice this leaves hardly anything for the rest of government to control or work on.
Trump’s most vociferous and widely reported first-term execution of the philosophy described above came amidst his outrage at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Trump-Russia investigation at DOJ. It was in the wake of this wholly ABA-compliant ethical determination by Sessions, one that permanently wounded Trump’s relationship with his handpicked Attorney General—a man who’d been one of the top advisers on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, indeed one of the Trump advisers with the most covert contacts with Kremlin agents—that Trump was first heard to demand aggressive, Cohn-like fixers atop America’s FBI and DOJ rather than sober, Constitution-bound government lawyers with no dual loyalties.
{Note: Besides the disgraced, disbarred, and deceased Cohn—a man deemed as evil as any in D.C. in his day, but who died declaring that Trump “pisses ice water” after his longtime friend abandoned him as he was dying of AIDS—Trump was heard in private and in public recalling the familial relationship between President John F. Kennedy and his brother/Attorney General Robert Kennedy as ideal. The wisdom of some pre-Watergate appointments notwithstanding, it stunned many to hear a POTUS squarely in the twenty-first century opine that he wanted the same tribal protection from his DOJ that he believes President Kennedy had 65 years ago.}
In creating within the American government the same size legal army he had outside it—in so doing ensuring a firewall against any leak of The Epstein Files—Mr. Trump was well-served by the fact that he’s fast approaching 5,000 total lifetime lawsuits (a figure that makes him among the most litigious Americans in our nation’s history, if not the most litigious), which means that the stable of personal lawyers committed to him through attorney-client privilege and possibly even large retainers is truly enormous.
It’s in this way, and for this reason, that Trump has successfully magicked most of his personal legal agents into ersatz public servants with a speed and shamelessness that has caught both American corporate media and the United States Congress off-guard.
What Trump knew as he began his second term, and what Proof also knew from years of watching failed corporate-media coverage of Trump, is that respectability politics and subcultural conservatism (the latter quite different from political conservatism) have so poisoned round-the-clock corporate news since its advent in the 1980s that it’s now impossible for the largest U.S. media outlets to refer to Trump’s personal lawyers as anything but public servants who occupy the roles he’s installed them in. Therefore, even as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and the rest of Trump’s legal team do nothing to indicate they’ve changed their conduct as public servants from how they acted when they were working as personal lawyers for Trump, outlets from CNN to MSNBC and the New York Times to the Washington Post will dutifully refer to Bondi as the Attorney General and Patel as the FBI Director whether or not they’re doing any of the public-service work associated with those positions.
(Consider, for instance, that as part of a bid to remove FBI oversight from the areas Trump is a longtime specialist in—white-collar crime, foreign corruption, national security breaches, election interference, organized crime, and other crimes in similar veins to the extent that mostly rich men commit them—Trump lawyer Kash Patel has lowered FBI standards to the point that those without college degrees can be FBI agents and gain that title with less than half the training previously required. Patel’s stated goal is to refocus the FBI on street crime rather than the sorts of crimes (a) the FBI was created to protect Americans from, (b) Mr. Trump has historically been involved with directly or indirectly, and (c) that have the highest cost in lives, public monies, and economic impact of any crimes. It’s this transmutation of public service into private enterprise, a transmutation major media struggles to acknowledge or speak of, that now daily allows Trump to engage in actions so far outside conventional presidential duties that even Trump v. United States may not protect him from a federal criminal investigation—which is why he sees a need for his personal lawyers to do so instead.)
It’s with this in mind that we’ve now seen Trump openly take bribes from the crypto community, openly perpetuate his own open-air crypto scam, coordinate the False Imprisonment and Kidnapping of millions of American residents—including some citizens and naturalized citizens—order the military to engage in illegal domestic law enforcement activities, defy federal judges in acts of Contempt that in any other era would lead to Trump agents’ instant incarceration, and in short do more or less as he likes. It’s this last premise that’s become the season-long narrative arc of the scariest daily streaming program in American history; even those roles in the U.S. government normally responsible for determining when a Special Counsel who is not beholden to the President of the United States must be appointed are now filled by Trump lawyers, ensuring that a second Jeff Sessions-style “betrayal” would be a virtual impossibility.
So what does all this have to do with The Epstein Scandal? Everything. No suspected criminal in the history of the United States has ever had this degree of control over the levers of justice, which makes even circumscribing Trump’s ability to control his own destiny here almost beyond the reach of conventional justice system concepts or lingo.
We’re now, unlike ever before, reliant on non-government-held evidence to find mere traces of what fundamentally—by necessity—must be a U.S. government investigation.
Thus, for instance, the immediate significance to independent journalists and other Trump-Epstein researchers of footage showing Jeffrey Epstein refusing to say under oath whether he and Donald Trump ever “socialized” (quite the euphemism, in this context) with females 17 or younger. And why did he refuse to answer the question? On the grounds he might incriminate himself—which America’s Fifth Amendment protects him from being compelled by a government agent (e.g., a U.S. judge) to do.
But this is of course a mere taste of the sort of evidence all of America has been looking for for almost three months now (or, in the case of avowed Epstein case-watchers, far longer). Fortunately, we needn’t guess all the names of those Epstein associates who show up in The Epstein Files. For starters, the Independent (UK) has published a useful list of many of the names we already know appears at various points in the Epstein case files, which list unsurprisingly exhibits some overlap with the abbreviated and seemingly self-interested list Ms. Maxwell just provided (see supra).
While not a “client list” per se, a number of those on the list below at some point or another socialized with a man who was at the time operating (perhaps without their knowledge) as one of the most diabolical child sex traffickers in American history.
At a minimum, some of those on the list below knew they were socializing with a man who sometimes appeared at social gatherings at his home with inappropriately young women; who surrounded himself with such teens at all his properties; who was known (even to those who never received inappropriate massages) to employ a veritable fleet of attractive young women as “masseuses” (a red flag for anyone who knows or even can guess at the practices endemic to actual Physical Therapy), who owned an island outside the reach of U.S. law with a creepy “temple” on it, and who was known to loudly interrupt serious scientific debates with the words, “What does that have to do with pussy!?” There’s a reason we so often hear Epstein’s victims say that “everyone” in his social circle knew or at a minimum suspected what he was up to: because it was impossible to be enmeshed in Epstein’s social circle at any point in the 1990s or much of the 2000s and not know something odd was going on. So to the extent The Epstein Files contain, Epstein “associate lists” of sorts (including his black book of contacts, which is already publicly available) those are all people we’d expect state and federal law enforcement to want to speak to immediately to determine what if anything they know about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sex crimes Epstein and Maxwell allegedly committed that have no statute of limitations. Such interviewers would ask hard-hitting questions of these persons, such as how many times they socialized with the era’s preeminent child sex trafficker, where they socialized with him, whether they went to his island(s), what rumors they heard about his criminal activities, and how frequently they saw him surrounded by teenagers who appeared to be his girlfriends but thereafter said and did nothing besides continue spending lots of time with him.
With that preamble—and the additional note that there are 225 names on just a partial list of Epstein victims, so a full accounting of all the people associated with the Epstein case would likely top 1,000—here is the Independent list of those whose names are known to appear in The Epstein Files, understanding that with the info that law enforcement has at present we can’t know if these people engaged in wrongdoing. It’s a near-certainty that most did not; each name below identifies in short-form who each person is in order to help make such distinctions readily. {Note: the list is alphabetical by last name; descriptions from the Independent are included where available, while other names remain under independent OSINT investigation to ensure that the correct person is identified.}
Eva Andersson-Dubin, former Miss Sweden (wife of Epstein friend Glenn Dubin)
Juan Alessi, worked at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, Florida
Maria Alessi, worked at Epstein’s home in Florida (wife of Juan Alessi)
Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, brother of King Charles III
James Michael Austrich
Alec Baldwin, actor
Janusz Banasiak, Epstein’s former Palm Beach house manager
Doug Band, Bill Clinton aide who says he urged Clinton to cut ties with Epstein
Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister
Victoria Bean
Rebecca Boylan
Dana Burns
Cate Blanchett, actor
Richard Branson, British billionaire and business magnate
Jean Luc Brunel, French model agency boss and alleged Epstein co-conspirator*
Naomi Campbell, British model
Noam Chomsky, linguist and political philosopher
Sharon Churcher, British journalist
Bill Clinton, former President of the United States
Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State of the United States
John Connelly, police detective-turned-Epstein case investigative journalist
David Copperfield, magician
Anouska De Georgiou, a model who accused Epstein of rape
Alan Dershowitz, lawyer (has represented both Epstein and Trump)
Dr. Mona Devansean, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Cameron Diaz, actor
Leonardo DiCaprio, actor
Alexandra Dixon, unknown person listed in Epstein’s “little black book”
Dr. Chris Donahue, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Glenn Dubin, hedge fund manager who was friends with Epstein
Ron Eppinger, sex trafficker
Daniel Estes
Annie Farmer, accused Epstein of sexual assault
Maria Farmer, accused Epstein of sexual assault (sister of Annie Farmer)
Frédéric Fekkai, celebrity hairstylist
Alexandra Fekkai, son of celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai
Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, former wife of Prince Andrew
Ralph Fiennes, actor
Anthony Figueroa, Virginia Giuffre’s former boyfriend
Crystal Figueroa, sister of Anthony Figueroa
Jo Jo Fontanella, Epstein’s butler
Louis Freeh, former FBI director
Eric Gany
Meg Garvin, represented Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre
Dr. Scott Robert Geiger, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Sheridan Gibson-Butte
Robert Giuffre
Virginia Giuffre, née Virginia Roberts, accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault**
Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States
Ross Gow, press agent for Ghislaine Maxwell
Fred Graff
Lesley Groff, Epstein’s ex-secretary, named as co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal but reportedly will not be charged
Philip Guderyon
Alexandra Hall
Dr. John Harris, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Joanna Harrison
Shannon Harrison
Stephen Hawking, British physicist
Dr. Carol Hayek, psychiatrist who treated Virginia Giuffre
Victoria Hazel
Brittany Henderson
Brett Jaffe
Forest Jones
Bianca Jagger, activist (wife of Mick Jagger)
Mick Jagger, musician
Michael Jackson, musician (deceased)
Stephen Kaufmann
Sarah Kellen, former Epstein aide named as unindicted co-conspirator in 2008
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., United States Secretary of Health & Human Services
Carol Kess
Bella Klein, former accountant in Epstein’s New York office
Heidi Klum, German-U.S. model
Dr. Karen Kutikoff, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Ricardo Legorreta, Mexican designer listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private jet
Wendy Leigh, author
Judith Lightfoot, psychologist who treated Virginia Giuffre
Peter Listerman
Courtney Love, musician
George Lucas, film director
Tom Lyons
Dr. Darshanee Majaliyana, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Nadia Marcinkova, alleged Epstein friend named an unindicted co-conspirator in 2008
Ghislaine Maxwell, former Epstein girlfriend, convicted of Sex Trafficking in 2021 in connection with Epstein’s activities
Bob Meister
Jamie Melanson
Lynn Miller, mother of Virginia Giuffre
Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer
Donald Morrell
David Mullen
David Norr
Donna Oliver, physician assistant who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr. Steven Olson
Joe Pagano
May Paluga
Stanley Pottinger
Tom Pritzker, tycoon and philanthropist
Detective Joe Recarey, former Palm Beach police officer who investigated reports of sexual abuse against children by Epstein
Chief Michael Reiter, responsible for investigation of sexual abuse against children by Epstein
Bill Richardson, former Governor of the State of New Mexico (deceased)
Rinaldo and Debra Rizzo, husband and wife who worked for Epstein’s alleged friend Glenn Dubin
Kimblerley Roberts
Sky Roberts
Lynn Roberts
Haley Robson, named as a “teen recruiter” for Epstein in police documents
Chris Rock, comedian and actor
Dave Rodgers, private jet pilot for Epstein
Alfredo Rodriguez, Epstein’s former household manager, jailed in 2012 for hiding and trying to sell Epstein’s “little black book”
Adriana Ross, Epstein’s former assistant, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal
Scott Rothinson
Forest Sawyer
Dough Schoetlle, investigator
Johanna Sjoberg, claims she was sexually abused while underage by Epstein and also claimed that Prince Andrew touched her breast
Kevin Spacey, actor, was found not guilty of sexual assault in 2023
Kelly Spamm, unknown person listed as flying on Epstein’s private jet
Cecilia Stein
Dr. Michele Streeter, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Marianne Strong
Mark Tafoya
Emmy Taylor, former personal assistant to Ghislaine Maxwell
Brent Tindall
Kevin Thompson
Donald Trump, President of the United States
Chris Tucker, actor and comedian
Ed Tuttle
Les Wexner, founder of L Brands and a former business partner of Epstein
Abigail Wexner, wife of Les Wexner
Cresenda Valdes
Emma Vaghan
Anthony Valladares
Christina Venero, licensed massage therapist
Maritza Vazquez
Dr. Wah Wah, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Vicky Ward, investigative journalist and author who claims she was blocked from covering Epstein’s misdeeds while working at Vanity Fair
Jarred Weisfield
Sharon White
Courtney Wild
Bruce Willis, actor
Daniel Wilson
Mark Zeff, interior decorator
*Died under suspicious circumstances while awaiting trial—just as Epstein did.
**Deceased (suicide).
For all the names that appear above and in Ghislaine Maxwell’s recent discussion with Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, however, an equally important addendum is offered by former ABC News and Politico journalist Tara Palmeri—now a podcaster and Epstein case expert—who observes that America doesn’t need a “client list” from The Epstein Files because we already have it. As she explains, “They keep saying, ‘Release the Epstein List!’….[but] there was no [formal] ‘list.’ The victims had lists [of all their attackers]. Why are they [the Trump administration] going to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison and trying to cut a deal with her, when they should be just talking to the victims? They have all the secrets.”
Palmeri is correct. The Trump administration doesn’t want to see, and clearly doesn’t want to release, the names of every Epstein-affiliated rapist the victims of Epstein have identified, because of course, by way of example, that list would include the name of Donald Trump, who is accused of Child Rape by Katie Johnson, one of the subjects of Chapter 19 of this book. What Trump and his agents at the FBI and DOJ really seem to want is a curated list of Democratic and left-leaning political targets Maxwell can be pointed at like a loaded gun—with the apparent aim of flipping the script of The Epstein Scandal and using it to win the 2026 midterm elections. That is what Trump’s QAnonist fans are clamoring for, not full transparency regarding Epstein’s sex crimes.
As for Epstein’s victims, they were infamously ignored by future Trump Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta in the 2000s, infamously ignored by future Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi in the 2010s, and are now being ignored by a veritable army of Trump lawyers in top positions at DOJ and FBI (who have been seeking the release of Epstein transcripts in three closed cases without any input or approval from victims) for the same reason that Donald Trump has been ignoring them ever since his feud with Epstein, which apparently lasted only from 2007 through 2012, was over: if he and his political party put crime victims at the forefront of criminal justice policy in the Epstein case as they’ve claimed an intention to do in every other criminal justice setting—a statement of intent honored almost exclusively in the breach—one of those potentially at first of indictment would be be the sitting President of the United States.
Since that can’t be allowed, we’re left—as Ms. Palmeri observes—begging for a formal Epstein client list that doesn’t actually exist, one that The Epstein Files (even if they were released, which they won’t be willingly) can’t offer, and that Maxwell has now offer an ersatz version of to save herself from a twenty-year prison term (see supra and infra).
Yet even with all this in mind, we can learn something from the non-exhaustive list of people involved in some way with the Epstein investigation that appears above. For instance, beyond simply providing many names of victims, journalists, members of law enforcement, and others who aren’t suspected of any wrongdoing with respect to Jeffrey Epstein (but which nevertheless help establish the investigation’s awesome scope), we can also take all of the following lessons from the list above, at a minimum:
Epstein was a collector of people, but not politicians specifically. There were many politicians in Epstein’s social circle, but to hear QAnonists tell it the man’s sole occupation was blackmailing elected officials. That doesn’t seem to be right; not only is there little evidence Epstein ever tried to blackmail anyone—which is not to say he couldn’t, but simply to answer the question of whether he did—and only a small number of his associates were politicians. Influential people? Yes, absolutely. Epstein was obsessed with being around others as rich as him and/or even more famous and powerful. But many of those in his circle were Hollywood celebrities, scientists, noted philanthropists, or people retired from their various professions but still well-connected to others in their former industries. The idea that Epstein was regularly attended upon by dozens of Democrats or Republicans doesn’t seem borne out by what we know of those he surrounded himself with.
While Epstein could at times be reclusive and had few close friends, his number of acquaintances was large. According to this Politico report, “People who knew Epstein in Palm Beach described him as ‘very odd’ and said ‘he didn’t go out much,’ [whereas] those who know Maxwell described her as ‘vivacious,’ ‘warm’ and ‘effusive.’” Epstein’s lack of close friends may have been a product of the fact that he allegedly demanded to be brought to orgasm at least three times a day; to be pathologically deviant to this degree is to be per se antisocial, as a man with Epstein’s supposed daily regimen can’t readily function as a regular member of any community. That Trump was one of Epstein’s best friends for over a decade is therefore telling, given that Trump is known to mistreat and betray friends and—candidly—doesn’t appear to have more than a handful he actually cares about and is cautious about harming. In other words, Epstein’s social scene was broad but shallow, one that relied on Maxwell as a procurer of both new victims and new associates, which fact underscores that the number of people who truly had entré into the world of Epstein’s deranged sexual fantasies may have always been small. On the other hand, the number of people in a position to see that something wasn’t quite right was considerable; as too many witnesses to name have said, to go to an Epstein property was to see oddly young and notably attractive young women everywhere, unsettling décor, and the expensive lifestyle of a man whose means of making money was unclear and whose purpose in “collecting” acquaintances was likewise obscure. The result: a very large number of people with reason to suspect Epstein of something untoward and to therefore avoid him altogether, but likely a much smaller number who understood the darkness he was in fact enmeshed in.
The foregoing only underscores what a major figure Donald Trump was and remains in the story of Jeffrey Epstein. In being one of Epstein’s close friends and someone who regularly interacted with him both at his creepy properties and in public settings, Trump was the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, Trump’s false claim that he only knew Epstein “how everyone in Palm Beach knew him” (a false claim that Maxwell, in seeking a pardon from him, has now echoed almost verbatim) appears calibrated to disappear Trump into the vast swath of Epstein acquaintances who transiently intersected with his milieu but didn’t know him intimately. But in fact, besides Maxwell, Donald Trump may have known Epstein better than anyone. Consider, for instance, that Epstein girlfriend Stacey Williams told media (see supra) that every single time she saw her boyfriend he spoke of Trump. Meanwhile, self-described longtime Epstein “friend” Stuart Pivar, whose semi-exculpations of Epstein (see infra) are contemptible, is nevertheless a compelling exemplar of the sort of acquaintance Epstein tried to surround himself with in the 1990s: intelligent; articulate; opinionated; desperate for funding for professional projects from Epstein; off the beaten path philosophically; and almost entirely cut off from Epstein’s social life (with the exception of some large-scale dinner parties that did not involve orgies). It’s because the list above includes so many celebrities and so many notable figures in various industries that Trump believes he can play-act at being just another “recognizable” name on Epstein’s list of associates and acquaintances. But in fact the list above, and what we know about Epstein’s time (or lack of time) with many of those on it, gives the lie to Trump’s hoped-for alibis.
For all this, the fact that so many of the names above belong to victims, family members of victims, journalists, and members of law enforcement underscores that the full scope of Epstein’s social (and antisocial) activities was never really investigated properly, and might well not appear in The Epstein Files proper. It’s telling that Ghislaine Maxwell says she wasn’t contacted by law enforcement about Epstein at any point in the 2000s. It’s telling that she says she wasn’t made aware that she was being looked at for criminal charges until after Epstein died. It’s telling that a recent New York Times investigative report pulling back the curtain on Epstein’s Manhattan “lair” reveals so many faces in clearly cherished Epstein photographs that don’t correspond to the identities of men and women often associated with Epstein. For instance, while Proof has reported extensively on the fact that Epstein had a fake Saudi passport in his safe at the time he told a Forbes journalist in December 2017 that he was investing for an extremely rich and famous Saudi—investing in an amount that all but confirmed the client had to be Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman or a family agent of his—many journalists, indeed even those at the New York Times, seem to not yet realize the staggering significance of Epstein being financially linked to one of the five men who helped illegally finance a pro-Trump foreign election interference campaign from abroad in 2016. Just so, Proof has now for years written about Elon Musk as a man seeking to set up a cabal of billionaires whose eldritch philosophies and appetites are crushingly sociopathic, making it unsurprising that a photograph of Musk would be among Epstein’s prized possessions—even as many journalists have been exponentially more invested in the idea that Epstein sometimes partied with a feckless and powerless British royal (Prince Andrew). So one thing we learn from the list above, by virtue of its very incompleteness, is that media appears to be focusing on the wrong pals of Jeffrey Epstein. And that perhaps none of the several Epstein investigations were ever as thorough or aggressive as they claimed to be. In other words, the question now isn’t whether Bruce Willis’ name appears once in The Epstein Files—who cares?—but whether Epstein had a years-long, clandestine financial- and possibly intelligence-related connection to one of the most dangerous men alive, a man (MBS) Trump has appeared unwilling to cross in any particular his entire political career. The question is why Ghislaine Maxwell, who comes from a family steeped in foreign intelligence activities (see infra) was all but ignored by investigators for years and years, even as Bill Clinton’s name has been thrown about the Epstein case willy-nilly (despite no allegations, from anyone, that he was engaged in any misconduct with respect to Jeffery Epstein).
Here are some of the relevant “Manhattan lair” photos from the New York Times:
Chapter 13: Trump Changes His Story in Response to the Epstein Files
While abroad in Europe in late July—touring his personal properties on American taxpayers’ dime and cheating (virally) at golf—Trump made his first substantive comments about Jeffrey Epstein since The Epstein Scandal began. From a CNN report:
It was a statement many Epstein researchers immediately saw as self-incriminating.
Here’s why: it’s an entirely new version of the course of his relationship with Epstein.
And it’s one that changes everything about our understanding of how the relationship ended and why (or whether) it remained “ended”—a dramatic about-face on Trump’s already incomplete alibi for the citations of his name in The Epstein Files that comes in the face of Trump being aware that portions of the Files are now being released to members of Congress. Such releases implicitly demand that Trump amend some of his most abiding lies regarding Epstein and his extremely friendly relationship with him.
By way of example, Trump and his lawyers are now confronted with two new pieces of information that they must “retcon” reality to address. These pieces of information are: (1) evidence in The Epstein Files apparently indicates that Epstein and Maxwell spent the late 1990s and early 2000s trying to recruit underage girls from Trump’s country club (a country club Epstein helped Trump finance during its conversion from being Trump’s private residence), and specifically indicates that Maxwell recruited future rape victim Virginia Giuffre from the inappropriate Mar-a-Lago position Trump had given the underage girl near adult locker rooms Maxwell frequented (which area was where Maxwell recruited Giuffre just days after Trump put her there); (2) evidence not in the Files but contained in this publication and on social media to the effect that Trump went to Epstein’s home in Palm Beach to see him in December 2017. {Note: This publication—Proof—and the social media feed in question were mentioned more than once in the Trump-WSJ lawsuit that Mr. Trump was discussing in the quote above.}
Whereas—as indicated and sourced in prior Proof reports on Trump and Epstein—before his recent European presser Trump gave one of two answers as to how and why his friendship of 17 years with Jeffrey Epstein ended (either he told media it “didn’t matter” and therefore refused to disclose the reason, or else said it was over Epstein making a “creep[y]” advance at the daughter of a club member), now, in light of Giuffre allegations he would’ve been briefed on in May by three of his personal lawyers (Bondi, Patel, and Blanche, see infra), he’s suddenly describing the Giuffre recruitment as one he was livid about at the time: “For years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk — because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help [from the Mar-a-Lago spa], and I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that work for me [like Virginia Giuffre]. I said, ‘Don’t ever 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.” (Trump has since confirmed, in an Air Force One press gaggle, that he was indeed speaking of Virginia Giuffre here.)
Trump has a long history of taking stories in which he’s the villain and re-inventing them to make himself the hero. Surely aware that, as the summer progresses, media will be reporting regularly on how Epstein “hired help” from Mar-a-Lago to work for him—that is, be raped by him—Trump knows that the current and coming releases from The Epstein Files could make his claims that he barely knew Epstein even more unsustainable than they currently are. Thus we see a dramatic shift from Trump only knowing Epstein “how everyone in Palm Beach knew him” to Trump being a victim of Epstein who was well aware of Epstein’s predations and tried to stop them. And thus we now hear, for the first time ever, Trump discussing Epstein “stealing people that work for me.”
{Note: A similar phenomenon is happening with Ghislaine Maxwell right now, albeit for a different reason. Aware that parts of The Epstein Files may soon leak to the public via House Republican Caucus demands for them, Maxwell is providing an alternate history of events that can be used by Trump or others named in the Files to suggest that the entire Epstein affair is a “she said, she said” scenario. (In such a scenario, dueling and terminally contradictory witness testimonies create a level of confusion amongst the public and arbiters of the facts that the result is many observers throwing up their hands and deciding that the “truth” can’t be known.)
Consider that in her recent pseudo-deposition with Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, Maxwell both (a) sought to date the very first potentially inappropriate or “forced” sexual massages ever received by Jeffrey Epstein to 2002—15 years into Trump’s friendship with Epstein, and under two years before their friendship (apparently only temporarily) ended—and also (b) blame the arrival of such potentially criminal events in Epstein’s milieu on one of her and Epstein’s chief rape victims, the aforementioned Virginia Giuffre. This is what Ms. Maxwell, who’s alleged to have been participating in sexual misconduct with Epstein for much of the 1990s, now says spurred the very beginning of such conduct in 2002 (critically, near the time she says that she had mostly withdrawn from Epstein’s society): “I think [Epstein began getting inappropriate massages] because in December of 2001, he met [Giuffre]. And I think [she] was responsible for that in its entirety. And the reason I believe that…[is that] she was a—self-confessed—having been sexually abused as a young girl, and was trained—her words I’m quoting now, not mine—in all the arts of whatever that is, the sex program [advanced] by a man called Ron Eppinger, who was her pimp from when she was 14, I believe, or 15, I don't know.” Putting aside how grotesque it is to blame your own deceased rape victim for the crimes you committed against her and have been convicted for—it’s monstrous beyond measure—the fact remains that testimony like this is what Trump and his team were prospectively “paying” Maxwell for by moving her to a federal camp that’s hardly a prison at all once she agreed to speak with the Trump legal team.
It appears that what Trump wanted from Maxwell was not only exoneration for positioning Virginia Giuffre at Mar-a-Lago in such a way that she would be recruited by his child-rapist friends, but something darker and more disturbing: he wanted his surviving child rapist friend to accuse his own former Mar-a-Lago employee of being the actual mastermind behind a child sex trafficking ring she herself was a victim of. Perhaps better than anything, this attempted reversal of the facts being orchestrated by Trump and Maxwell underscores the stakes here, and the sick things some will say and do to try to emerge from The Epstein Scandal unscathed.
In her ersatz depo, Maxwell appears to be singularly focused on erasing over thirty-five years of data on her and Epstein by fully exculpating, in order of vehemence: (1) herself, (2) her good friend Prince Andrew, (3) her former good friend and likely future pardoner Donald Trump, (4) her former friend (without pardon powers now) Bill Clinton, and (5) her deceased ex-boyfriend.
Maxwell’s intensity in claiming innocence is directly proportional to how close the individual is to her and what they can do for her. Yet her exculpations are—and this author writes this as a former longtime criminal defense attorney—among the most unusual and arguably absurd this lawyer has seen. In explaining how it’s impossible that her friend Andrew could possibly have received a blowjob from Virginia Giuffre in the bathroom of her three-story London house, she first asserts that the number of mirrors in the bathroom would have been far too distracting for Andrew to climax or even participate in sexual misconduct. She then sputters, incredibly, the following words as alleged proof that Andrew couldn’t be a sex pest: “He's so English. He’s so—he had a tie on. [So] absolutely on—no way—no how, absolutely not.”}
From a certain perspective, as a political and (analogically speaking, at least) “plea-bargaining” matter, Maxwell’s conversation with Blanche had to be exculpatory without exception. Whenever President Trump decides to go beyond transferring Maxwell from a “prison” to what’s effectively a taxpayer-funded, yoga-and-puppy playground and putting her in a position where she’s eligible for work release contra Bureau of Prisons regulations on sex offenders—in short, whenever Trump decides to issue his pardon of Maxwell, whether it comes now or at the hypothetical end of his second presidential term, should he leave office willingly—he will need to be able to point to the Maxwell-Blanche Transcript as “proof” that Maxwell deserves a pardon.
He can’t do this if Maxwell admits to any crimes. His political base likely wouldn’t accept a confessed violent criminal (besides a pro-Trump political activist) getting clemency under such circumstances. So Maxwell, one of the most notorious child sex traffickers in U.S. history, must use her talk with Blanche, and the transcript of same, as a public relations campaign for a future pardon whose arrival date she can’t know.
Just so, Mr. Trump must use the transcript as a public relations campaign advancing his own claims of innocence as to the Epstein-Maxwell Child Sex Trafficking Ring.
Thus we find, in the Maxwell-Blanche Transcript, not only little evidence from Mr. Blanche that he has any intention of getting clear answers from Maxwell across hundreds and hundreds of transcript pages—candidly, it’s difficult to even see the evidentiary value of anything she says, so muddled is much of it—but much evidence that Blanche wants the Transcript to be replete with not just Maxwell’s but his own exculpations of Trump and other rich and powerful men who are friends with him.
For instance, who exactly is Blanche speaking of, for, or about in suddenly declaring, on pg. 153 of the Transcript, “There is so much information in the public sphere about you and Mr. Epstein and others around, and some of it is definitely true and some of it is definitely false.” There’s no investigative, legal, strategic, tactical, or journalistic value in Blanche making such a claim, but for the Transcript’s apparent value as a public relations artifact.
Chapter 14: The Evidence That Trump Went to Little St. James Is Growing
In a bizarre statement President Trump made while he was in the United Kingdom touring his golf courses, Trump astonished the world by saying (emphasis supplied), “I never had the privilege of going to his [Jeffrey Epstein’s] island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down.”
Each of the highlighted portions above would qualify as an implicit partial confession in the view of either a former criminal defense lawyer, which this author happens to be, or a former federal criminal investigator—ditto—provided that such a person had also spent over a decade researching Trump’s life and public statements (again, ditto).
First, Donald Trump now says that it would have been a “privilege” to go to an island he knows children were ritualistically raped at. Though this is a creepy, inappropriate, and historically foul thing for a President of the United States to say, Proof does not assign to these words the classification of “implicit partial confession” on those bases. Rather, it’s that this sort of statement fits an unambiguous pattern of Trump denials in the past—and specifically public denials that are subsequently proven to be false.
Trump’s apparently pathological, observable, much written-on tendency is to include in statements of negation seeming non sequitur statements about the hypothetical appropriateness of the circumstance or situation that he’s simultaneously negating. The construction almost always follows this pattern: “I didn’t do that—but it would have been fine if I had.” Trump falls into this line of revealing patter under circumstances in which either (a) his negation is false, or (b) he believes that regardless of his negation (and its veracity) he’ll be associated with the said circumstance or situation regardless.
By way of recent example, when asked if he planned to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell if she agreed to speak to his lawyers, Trump repeatedly said he hadn’t thought about it—suggesting it wasn’t worth giving thought to, despite Maxwell having already appealed to him for a pardon, and it therefore being something he technically had to think about; by deciding not to think about it he thus discarded the possibility as patently unserious—but then chose to add, to each negation of even thinking of a Maxwell pardon, that he could give one if he wanted to. The end result was that, over and over, Trump matched his dismissiveness in saying he hadn’t thought about a Maxwell pardon with what could only be seen as an implicit acknowledgment that he has thought about it and thinks there would be nothing wrong with it. This, then, acts as a moving of the Overton Window to bring into the realm of public discourse the possibility of that very pardon.
In 2017, Trump defended accurate allegations that he told then-FBI Director James Comey not to investigate or charge his National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, for secretly colluding with a hostile foreign power (Russia) during the 2016 presidential election season with these words (emphasis supplied): “And there would be nothing wrong if I did say it, according to everybody that I’ve read today. But I did not say that.” (In fact, he did say it, and it was a serious federal crime, Obstruction, to do so.)
In 2018, Trump defended secretly negotiating the largest business deal of his life directly with the Kremlin while he was running for president under the most forceful pro-Kremlin U.S. foreign policy in generations with these words (emphasis supplied): “I mean, we were very open with it. We were thinking about building a building. I guess we had—in a form, it was an option. I don’t know what you’d call it. We decided—I decided ultimately not to do it. There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it. If I did do it, there would have been nothing wrong. That was my business.” (In fact, Trump hid the negotiations; signed a Letter of Intent to build Trump Tower Moscow; only didn’t do it because the Kremlin backed out; and would have been guilty of an impeachable offense, Bribery, had he been able to convince the Kremlin to proceed.)
In 2019, Trump defended committing the impeachable offense of linking U.S. foreign aid to personal benefits—in the former of illegal foreign election interference—by insisting, as the New York Times reported (emphasis supplied), “‘No, I didn’t—I didn’t do it,’ Trump told reporters. But just moments before, he suggested that there would be nothing wrong with linking American funding for Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that is fighting Russian-backed separatists, to a corruption inquiry about Biden and his family.”
Trump insisting that he “turn[ed]…down” an invite to Little St. James Island but also that the invite itself was a “privilege”—implying that he could easily be forgiven for indulging in that proffered honor and going to Epstein’s island—is consistent with all of the circumstances itemized above and scores of identical ones, in which Trump denied doing something unethical, impeachable, and/or illegal that he in fact was later found to have done.
In repeatedly using this easily caught rhetorical device, Trump ensures that by the time he decides—and in the case of a Maxwell pardon, he’s almost certainly already decided—that the denied act is one he wants to take, that act will already have been transformed into a reasonable one in the eyes of (at a minimum) his case. While we could put this, as above, in terms of moving the Overton Window, in trial advocacy terms we’d call it something else that’s likely more illuminating: “the long hello.”
In trial advocacy, if a criminal defense attorney is forced into an unwinnable trial by either a recalcitrant client who can’t or won’t enter a plea deal no matter how bad the facts against them are—ironically, Trump himself is a good example of the sort of criminal defendant who either refuses to take responsibility for his actions or believes he has too much to lose professionally, personally, and/or financially to ever enter a guilty plea—or by a prosecutor whose plea offer is so bad (for instance, the maximum penalty for the offense) that there’s no point in not going to trial and put the inevitable punishment in the hands of the judge, the attorney for the defendant will often put on what’s called a “long goodbye” defense.
A “long goodbye” occurs in Criminal Law when the outcome of a trial seems already assured—a guilty verdict, along with some sort of sentence involving incarceration—so the defendant’s attorney uses the trial as a means of humanizing the defendant before both judge and jury (the latter on the Hail Mary chance of jury nullification, a being a situation in which the jury believes the defendant is guilty as a matter of law but not guilty as a matter of morality or ethics, and the former on the grounds that judges understandably give more lenient terms of incarceration to defendants whose actions they have had the entire course of a jury trial to come to better understand).
So in view of this, what’s a “long hello”? Well, when a possible or even likely future criminal defendant believes their actions will eventually be caught out, they may be tempted to use their status as a public figure (if they have such a status) to slowly pave the way for that inevitable future public revelation. Thus, when Trump says he never had the “privilege” of visiting Epstein’s island, what he’s doing is opening the door to the future revelation that he did make such a visit but that it was an honor rather than a disgrace.
{Note: I’ll here add the original next sentence in this chapter, which had to be amended once Trump took the next step in his “long hello” regarding visiting Little St. James Island by adding to his “privilege” remark, “A lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island.” With this aside, and with his subsequent mention of one specific type of person he says he knows went to the island—an American president like himself, Bill Clinton—Trump can now be said to have issued a “partial implicit confession” that he in fact was always willing to go to Little St. James Island and will decide at a later date whether to reveal the truth of matter. His present denials must consequently be seen as effectively self-negated.}
While Trump can’t now know for certain if his island visit(s) will later be uncovered, what he does know that he’s launching this preemptive “long hello” self-exculpation at a time when the probability of such a future revelation is at its highest. The attention of not just America but the world is focused on The Epstein Scandal, including many obsessive historians and journalists and researchers like this author, so Trump senses a danger now that he didn’t before.
Trump’s second “implied partial confession” arrives in his new insistence that while he did receive an invite from Epstein to Little St. James Island, he “turned it down.”
This statement is a full-on retreat from past Trump remarks on this subject. Trump has never previously acknowledged receiving an invite by Epstein to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Instead, he simply discussed the topic, directly or indirectly, via various forms of negation, such as, “That island was really a cesspool, there’s no question about it, just ask Prince Andrew, he’ll tell you about it, the island was an absolute cesspool, and he’s been there…many times” (Bloomberg, 2015); or “I was never there” (CNN, 2019); or “Other people, they went all over with [Epstein]. They went to his island. They went all over the place. He was very well known in Palm Beach. His island—whatever his island was, wherever it is—I was never there. Find out the people that went to the island” (Marine One presser, 2019); or “A lot of big people went to that island, but fortunately I was not one of them” (The Lex Fridman Podcast, 2024).
In other words, before he regained presidential immunity in January 2025, Trump’s claims about Little St. James Island included all of the following: (1) he didn’t know what the island was for (“whatever his island was”); or (2) he knew all about it and was consistent in condemning it (“that island was really a cesspool, there’s no question about it”); or (3) he didn’t even know where his then-best friend’s Caribbean home was (“wherever it is”); or (4) he had an intense interest in the list of people who went to the island, was impressed with the names on the list, and was ready and willing to talk about that list at length; but (5), once he gained the power to release documents that would establish the list, he suddenly decided that under no circumstances would he do so.
So what explains this wild swing in Trump responses regarding Epstein’s island?
To begin with, it’s only recently that American media has successfully broken through the cordon of lies Trump set around his relationship with Epstein—specifically, on the subject of whether the two men were ever close. Back when President Trump was pretending that the two hardly knew one another, it was sufficient to say “I was never on the island,” as no one would’ve expected him to be if he was only as close to Epstein “as everyone in Palm Beach was” (putting aside that Trump often spoke of the large number of people who visited Epstein’s island by noting how many people in Palm Beach knew him, Trump included). Yet once it was revealed that the men had in fact been good friends for 17 years and best friends for over a decade, even some casual observers of the Epstein affair likely began finding it inconceivable that Epstein wouldn’t have extended an invite to his Caribbean home to his longtime close friend.
As a result, Trump finally had to take what might be regarded as his first step toward admitting that he did visit the island: admitting that he was offered the chance to go.
But that admission created for Trump a problem that didn’t exist when he was merely telling media and voters that he never went to Little St. James Island. Namely, what possible reason could he have had for turning down his invite? After all, over the course of his 17-year friendship with Epstein the two men often went to one another’s homes to socialize. So on what basis would Trump have deemed it a no-brainer to avoid the nicest and most unique property his good friend had ever possessed? (In fact, as we’ll see infra, Trump regularly vacationed just a short helicopter ride from Little St. James Island, so if he really never went there his commitment to not doing so would have been (to put it candidly) one of the strongest displays of needless willpower in his life.
Proof writes “needless” here for the simple reason that either Trump knew Little St. James Island was a rape emporium or he didn’t. If he didn’t, he had no reason at all not to go visit his friend’s home, and him not doing so would be inexplicable (again, especially given Trump’s established fondness for visiting Caribbean islands in just that part of the region). Meanwhile, if he did know what Little St. James Island was—which he has often implied he did, for instance in calling his good friend’s home “an absolute cesspool,” why in the world was he friends with him at all? Keep in mind, here, that when Trump now admits that he received an invite to Epstein’s island but “turned it down” he is suggesting that he knew at the time that it was a “cesspool.” It is therefore inexplicable that Trump would have remained friends with Epstein for eight years after his purchase of the island. Who remains best friends with a man who runs an island-sized rape emporium?
We thus return to the idea that Trump’s facially nonsensical statement that he “turned [the invitation] down” is a second “implicit partial confession.” Maxwell told Blanche that her then-boyfriend and employer Epstein bought Little St. James Island in 1996, and we know that group flights there for leisure stays began in 1998 at the very latest. So Trump continued to be best friends with Epstein for at least six more years after he would have been aware that his island was a “cesspool”? That makes no sense. Worse still, Trump’s long friendship with Epstein—and even the sexualized nature of it, see supra—all but confirms that he would have been one of the first island invites, so if he really did turn it down because he already knew it was a “cesspool” that would mean, (and this is actually consistent with all currently known evidence) that Epstein almost immediately began using the island for his sex crimes and did nothing to hide that fact from Trump.
{Note: Trump’s lies are so multi-layered that it’s easy to miss their most subtle contours. In this case, one question that seems to have slipped through the cracks is this: How did Trump come to learn that sex crimes were happening on Epstein’s island? His self-exculpation implies that he learned this almost immediately upon the island’s opening, when the island had thus far had few guests… so who told him about it? Epstein? Maxwell? Someone linked to foreign or U.S. intelligence, who warned him that the whole island was a “honey trap”? Someone who committed unreported sex crimes there? All these possibilities would in some way inculpate Trump, yet major media has never deigned to get a firm answer on how Trump came to learn, and when he came to learn, information about Epstein’s island that he’s been quite boisterous about saying he knew. And keep in mind that if he should answer such a query, in a desperate act of self-defense, by saying that he only learned about the dangers of the island from media coverage of it, we then immediately return to the catch-22 Trump appears to be caught in: why did he refuse to go to his best friend’s island in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 if he had no reason to think there was anything untoward happening there?}
And then there’s the even starker reality: Trump has repeatedly said that he had no inkling, for the entirety of his friendship with Epstein—1987 to 2004—that Epstein had ever engaged in any sex crimes, which means that either that was a lie or it’s a lie that he “turned down” an invite to Epstein’s island at all points in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. It doesn’t seem that both statements could be true.
For those thinking there might be some hidden, esoteric, logical escape hatch from Trump’s catch-22, there doesn’t seem to be. He loved Epstein. He loved the islands of the Caribbean. He loved attractive young women. He loved sex. He had ample leisure time to visit the Caribbean. The climate on Little St. James Island is Trump’s favorite type of climate. He often socialized with Epstein, including around attractive young women. He admits to being invited to the island. He admits to thinking that it would be a “privilege” to go. He admits that “big names” often went to the island—making going there a status symbol of sorts in Palm Beach. Trump was friendly with some of those who went to the island (including, incidentally, his then-friend Bill Clinton). If he was worried about Melania, who he began dating in 1999 after meeting her at the tail end of 1998, (a) it wouldn’t explain him not going to the island in 1997 or 1998, (b) he could readily have brought Melania along with him given that she was friendly with both Maxwell and Epstein, (c) that sort of hesitation wouldn’t be consistent with the fact that Trump has cheated on Melania and every women he has ever been with with regularity, and (d) he could easily have gone to the island and simply behaved himself there—which, according to all accounts, is what his friend Bill Clinton did.
None of this makes any sense, then, from the standpoint of a criminal attorney or a criminal investigator. Something’s definitely very wrong about what Trump is saying.
So as a former federal criminal investigator and former criminal defense attorney with significant experience in sex-crime defense, I’ll outline here the possible explanations (in the order of most likely to least likely) for Trump’s apparent two-facedness on this critical component of The Epstein Scandal:
Trump in fact visited Epstein in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He’s trying to hide this fact for as long as he possibly can, as if he does eventually declare martial law and become the autocratic leader of an election-free America, this truth won’t matter. (Or it will matter, but no one will be able to do anything about it, so keeping it hidden for as long as possible is—from Trump’s perspective—an inherent good).
Trump turned down the Epstein invitation because he knew his best friend was raping kids on the island, and believed it would incriminate him if he traveled there. This explanation is somewhat less likely, as it presumes that Donald Trump perceives himself as someone the long arm of the law can reach, which he doesn’t, and further presumes he was worried about U.S. law enforcement policing an area outside its jurisdiction, which he wouldn’t have been. Moreover, it would presume that Trump had some kind of issue with Epstein’s quickly oscillating pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia, which is a highly unlikely scenario given that (a) Trump is also a sexual deviant of precisely this sort, (b) he has no moral compass (and indeed likes to use knowledge of others’ misdeeds to gain leverage against them), (c) he’s a misogynist who’s unmoved by the pain women suffer, as we know from his decades of raping, assault, and harassing women. There’s also at least a possibility that (d)—Trump has actually raped kids himself—is in play here. But all this said, even a practicing pedophile might have been smart enough to stay away from Epstein’s home in the U.S. Virgin Islands, at least if the pedophile had political ambitions, as Trump then did. Trump certainly has a modicum of caution and self-preservatory instinct—though not more than a modicum, candidly.
No invitation was ever issued to Trump, even though—or perhaps because—he knew what was happening at Epstein’s home in the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is unlikely for the reasons noted above, primarily the closeness of the relationship Trump enjoyed with Epstein, but it’s certainly possible. Trump would of course be able to lie with impunity in 2025 about receiving an invitation from Epstein because Epstein is dead, so the truth of the matter can’t be proven now (unless documents exist, for instance in The Epstein Files, that we haven’t yet seen but whose production Trump now effectively controls). Epstein could have declined to issue an invitation to Trump because he knew that some of the sex practices ongoing in the U.S. Virgin Islands would be deemed disgusting by the sometimes germaphobe Trump; because Trump didn’t like to have sex in the presence of other adults (as, if indeed this is true, Epstein would have cause to know, as he and Trump regularly shared their views on women, teens, and sex); or Epstein was aware that Trump was gearing up for a presidential run—which ultimately did happen during their friendship, when Trump ran for the 2000 Reform Party nomination—making such an invitation one Epstein knew in advance Trump would (and should) decline. Under this theory of the case, Trump is now inventing an invite that never came because (a) it gives the appearance of candor and having nothing to hide, (b) he’s seen the Epstein “associate list,” such as it is, and doesn’t like the idea of so many famous people being associated with Little St. James Island but not him, (c) he’s calibrating what harmless “confessions” he can make that will entertain the public (as he insists on being the center of attention even in cases where being so is self-destructive), or (d) this is some byzantine preparation for future revelations (even from The Epstein Files) Trump but knows are coming.
Trump was warned from the island by an intelligence agency. Occam’s Razor demands that this been seen as the least likely scenario—but it’s certainly not an impossible one. Trump is known to have sought to work with law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence community as a means of (a) getting revenge on enemies, and/or (b) gaining himself leeway in engaging in misconduct of his own. And as we will see infra, the ties between Epstein, Maxwell and some foreign intelligence apparatuses (most notably those of Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia) generate a possibility that these nations—at least two of which, Russia and Israel, have sought to build ties with the Trump Family since the 1980s—might have wanted Trump protected from getting caught up in an intelligence operation they themselves were part of. Proof of Devilry investigates this eldritch possibility in considerably more detail infra, allowing us to see that it is, in fact, not entirely unlikely.
Readers will note that the idea of Trump never receiving an invite and not knowing what was happening on the island isn’t listed above. Why? Because, as discussed supra, that would be… a nonsense. It’s not an impossibility—the world is sometimes chaotic and superficially preternatural, so everything is technically possible if physics permits it—but experienced investigators or attorneys know that the closer you are to any scenario in which people could go to prison for the rest of their lives for what they’re doing, the more base human motivations and instincts are brought to the fore and the less pure randomness plays a role. Besides, Trump has a long enough history of malfeasance—and in each case, what begins as a malfeasance denied soon becomes a malfeasance grudgingly admitted and then one that Trump finds a way to turn into a net positive—that the “coincidence” angle isn’t one a talented investigator or attorney would pursue in a case like this one anyway. Perhaps not even as a last resort.
What readers will see in the four possibilities that are above is that all of them indict Trump in some way—if not legally, then morally. In all three scenarios, Trump knows his best friend is a serial child rapist and child sex trafficker and has no problem with it. He simply opts be cautious (in three of the scenarios detailed above) about being associated with what Epstein is doing, not on moral grounds but “professional” ones.
In just one of the scenarios above—albeit the most likely one—Donald Trump almost certainly did commit serious sex crimes on Little St. James Island. As that’s quite a serious prospect, it’s reasonable to ask whether the two statement excerpts analyzed itemized are our only evidence of this. Fortunately, they are not, for several reasons.
First, there’s the matter of the third (and perhaps most important) implicit partial confession in the longer Trump statement supra: the words “In one of my very good moments, I turned it down” (emphasis supplied). This author suspects that many a shrewd investigator and attorney would deem this not a partial indirect confession but something approaching a direct one. The only other possibility would be that this was an accidental misstatement by Trump—though such misstatements are rare when they comprise what investigators and attorneys call a statement against interest (as most people, and particularly a lifelong charlatan like Trump, are especially cautious about making statements that could lead to future disgrace, bankruptcy, and imprisonment).
Consider the situation, as Trump has summarized it to date: in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when he and Epstein were friends and he had no reason to believe his best friend was the foremost child sex trafficker in the United States, that best friend invited him to his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands—just as he had, in the past, invited Trump to his homes in New York and Florida—and Trump surprised him by turning him down. He turned him down because it was in “one of my very good moments.”
The clear implication in such a remark is that Trump has a self-admitted weakness—as we have seen supra, not committing sex crimes against very young women he finds attractive—and by refusing to go to Epstein’s island, Trump felt that he was proudly exhibiting unusual willpower: he knew the island would offer him easy access to sex with very young women, and he was nevertheless turning it down.
Of course, this doesn’t quite make sense. In 1997 and 1998, Trump was dating regularly and clearly didn’t feel his relationship with Marla Maples was an impediment to doing so. If he believed that the sex on offer at Epstein’s island was legal, consensual sex between of-age adults—in Trump’s view, but not every state’s, this means any girl or woman 16 or older—it wouldn’t have required Trump to be having a “good moment” to turn Epstein down. Indeed, Trump would, maybe even understandably, perceive no moral component at all to accepting an island invite under such circumstances. So it seems, instead, that what Trump is referring to here is something quite different: an instinct, as a man who knows he’s engaged in criminal or borderline criminal conduct in the past, that sometimes it’s simply not worth taking the risk to act in that way.
Donald Trump is infamous, among his biographers, for almost never turning down an opportunity for personal or financial advantage—even if it involves questionably legal activity. So Trump acknowledging, in the quote excerpt above, that he mostly has “bad” moments as to a certain unstated instinct, but here was having a “good” one fits far better with his “general risk assessment” patterns than anything having to do with him seeing his womanizing or adultery as a “bad” tendency (as he did not and does not see such habits in this way, and has made that clear over decades of public statements).
Which leaves us with a sense that what Trump is referring to here are sex crimes.
He knew that they were happening on Epstein’s island, and he chose not to risk being associated with them—surprising himself in coming to that decision rather than a different one, and moreover, in so surprising himself, implicitly conceding that sex crimes aren’t a dealbreaker for him. Nor would they have been; by 1997 Trump had for many years been throwing parties at the Plaza Hotel in which girls as young as 14 were pimped out to friends. So deciding not to engage in the same sort of behavior on another’s man property that he had for years been engaging in on his own is exactly the sort of self-preservationist caution we can imagine Trump congratulating himself for.
The question, then, is what this says about Trump. If he knew what Epstein was doing in 1997 or 1998, why didn’t he end their friendship? Why did he wait to call the police on Epstein, as he apparently did, until the two were in a feud many years later (in the mid-2000s)? Why did he let Epstein continue to visit his club? Why didn’t he protect underage Mar-a-Lago employees like Virginia Giuffre from being recruited by a man he knew to be a child sex trafficker? Why didn’t he end his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell? Why did he continue to allow himself to be photographed—alongside his future wife, no less—with two child sex traffickers?
The only readily discernible explanation for any of this would be that either (1) Trump is utterly indifferent to Child Rape, Sex Trafficking, Human Trafficking, and Child Sex Trafficking despite being in positions to stop it pre-presidency and still, in which case he’s essentially QAnonist’s version of The Antichrist, or (2) he doesn’t care about Child Rape, Sex Trafficking, Human Trafficking, and Child Sex Trafficking because he’s been involved in such illicit pursuits himself.
This Book continues by considering the second possibility.
Chapter 15: The Big Secret About Little St. James Island
Careful news consumers will note that Donald Trump always makes one weird verbal slip when he discusses Jeffrey Epstein’s two homes in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Little St. James Island and Great St. James Island: he pretends Epstein only had one island rather than two. That consistent misrepresentation may mean more than many realize.
The by-far most often used of Epstein’s two islands, Little St. James, was purchased, as noted above, many years before the Trump-Epstein friendship ended, at a time the two men were very close. The other island, Great St. James, was purchased long after their friendship had ended, after Epstein had gone to jail for sex crimes, after Trump had launched his 2016 run for the presidency. All of these are reasons we would never have expected Trump to have gone to (or even been invited to) Great St. James Island.
So when Trump says, repeatedly, “I never went to the island” and (now) “I was never invited to the island,” it’s true that he’s most likely referring to Little St. James Island but isn’t telling the truth—or not the whole truth, in any case. But there does remain a possibility that he’s being coy and referring to Great St. James Island, which (again) he probably has never visited or been invited to. Certainly, a more complete denial of the question before Trump about him and Epstein’s island would be this: “I never went to the islands” or (now) “I was never invited to the islands.” While this may be a small observation, it gestures at a larger one: Mr. Trump has consistently, and deliberately, understated what he knows not only about Epstein but also Little St. James Island.
Whether or not this author or you the reader know that Epstein owned not one but two islands in the Caribbean, we can be sure that Trump did know and still knows it. Epstein has long stood as one of the most important people in Trump’s life, rivaling even the late Roy Cohn, so any effort by Trump to dissemble how much he knows of Epstein—whether it be with respect to his islands, his membership status at Mar-a-Lago, his past recruitments from the Mar-a-Lago spa, his engagements with Trump’s Plaza Hotel, or any other Epstein trivia or marginalia—is worth remarking upon.
Trump’s curious rhetorical elimination—over and over again, with a consistency that seemed studied—of an entire Epstein island is important for another reason that’s more than figurative, semantic, or hypothetical. Rather, it has to do with material evidence.
As investigators considered, over the last two decades, who went to Epstein’s islands and when, they had to bifurcate the question, from the outset, into two questions—“Who stayed on Little St. James?” and “Who visited Great St. James Island?” (as the latter has a bay one can luxuriate in for the day, even if it has none of the luxuries of Epstein’s other island)—which realization would have come with another: that they would have to deal with flight logs and mobile pings from two very different periods in history. For Little St. James Island, that period was the latter half of the 1990s, the entirety of the 2000s, and the first half of the 2010s; for Great St. James Island, it was simply the latter half of the 2010s, as Epstein died in 2019.
These two periods are even more distinct than the above breakdown makes them seem, however. Epstein’s late 2000s arrest, conviction, and incarceration becoming public—if primarily locally—would have meant that many people might have gone to Little St. James Island during what we can call “Period 1” (from Epstein’s purchase of the island in 1996 to Epstein’s publicly, if lightly, announced conviction in 2007; in other words, exactly a decade inclusive) even as we would have expected very, very few people to have been willing to visit Great St. James Island during “Period 2” (from Epstein’s purchase of it in 2016 to his arrest in 2019, a period of well under three years).
Whereas there’s no chance Trump went to or was invited to Great St. James Island in Period 2, as already observed there’s no earthly reason for him not to have visited Little St. James Island during Period 1. And as nearly all Epstein’s sex crimes were committed during Period 1, this is the period investigators are most interested in, in any case. It was during Period 1 that Epstein would have invited all his friends to his (then only) island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; it was during Period 1 that no close Epstein friend except those who knew he was a sex criminal would have had any reason to refuse an island invite from him, as (we must recall) Epstein hadn’t been identified as a pedophile yet; and it’s during Period 1 that Epstein would have realized—because he at least knew what was happening on Little St. James Island—that he’d have to find a different mode of transportation to the island that didn’t create material evidence for law enforcement’s future use (e.g., flight logs). This new means of transportation would’ve been essential for two types of Epstein island guests in particular during Period 1:
Close friends who didn’t know Epstein was a pedophile, but who’d learn this if or when they came to the island. These were people who, once they learned what Epstein was once they got on the island, would be horrified and angry at him—and inclined to seek revenge against him for compromising them—unless he could assuage their fears by saying that their travel to the island had been untraceable and would likewise be untraceable on the return home.
Close friends who did know pre-visit that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile, and who therefore would’ve refused an invite to the island—because of concerns about such a visit providing material evidence to the FAA that could be revealed later in court or via subpoena—unless Epstein could convince them that their travel to the island was untraceable. This second group of close Epstein friends—a far more culpable group, and one that Trump was likely part of—would’ve only gone to Little St. James Island if they knew there was going to be no paper trail of that visit. Ever.
Why do these distinctions matter? Because we do, in fact, know that Jeffrey Epstein devised a way to evade the creation of a paper trail for his visitors, which fact instantly devalues—almost into nothingness, really—any Epstein friend’s proud boast that they never went to Little St. James Island. Epstein would eventually have assured anyone who came to his island, whether they knew in advance what it was (Group 2) or didn’t (Group 1) that great care had been taken to preserve their anonymity. We’ll return to this topic in a moment, once some additional important context has been established.
The New York Times reports that “Between 1993 and 1997, while Trump and Epstein remained friendly, Mr. Trump’s name appeared seven times in Mr. Epstein’s flight logs.” What’s odd about this is not that Trump so often flew on the plane of the most notorious child sex trafficker in American history—after all, they were best friends—but rather that the records of Trump flying on Epstein’s plane stop dead in their tracks in 1997, even though the men remained best friends for at least seven years after that.
What exactly causes a man who’s best friends with another man to suddenly cold-quit flying on that man’s private plane even as they remain best friends? Did Epstein get rid of his plane after 1997? No. Did the nature of Trump and Epstein’s socializing change? According to photographs and videos of the two men from the 1990s on, no, not really.
So what happened between 1997 and 1998? Well, many things.
Trump met Melania Trump—through her sketchy agent Paolo Zampolli—in 1998.
Jeffrey Epstein began putting structures up on Little St. James in 1997, and appears to have begun inviting people to the island late in that year.
Trump bought his first-ever personal private jet, a 727, in 1997, meaning that 1998 was his first full year of never needing to fly anyone else’s plane if he didn’t want to. This also means that 1998 was the first year in which Trump—a pathological liar and a habitual scofflaw—could doctor, hide, or destroy his own flight logs as he wished in order to hide (if imperfectly) where he was going and who he was going there with.
But certainly this wouldn’t have allowed him to hide going to Little St. James Island once Epstein began using it as a sort of child-rape emporium in 1997 or 1998? Well, yes, actually, it would have.
First, it would have made Donald Trump ever appearing on the flight logs of Epstein’s so-called “Lolita Express” unnecessary. Trump’s contemporaneous awareness of the then-underage Virginia Giuffre’s sex-slave recruitment in 1997 (see supra) would, at a minimum, have made Trump cautious about ever appearing on those flight logs—if indeed he hadn’t been given reason to be cautious years earlier, and if indeed Epstein ever kept accurate flight logs when his friends were aboard (and indeed, media reports suggest that sometimes Epstein’s private pilots “missed” names on their flight logs).
Second, and more importantly, there’s the matter of the helicopter—which is best explained by beginning with this rather curious report published by the Telegraph (UK) in 2021:
Jeffrey Epstein transferred tens of millions of dollars to Ghislaine Maxwell over eight years, some of which was used to purchase a helicopter, a New York court heard on Monday.
{NB: Maxwell recently lied to Blanche, under potential penalty of a new felony charge, by telling him that her starting salary with Epstein was $25,000 and that she maxed out at a $250,000 annual salary nearly twenty years later. She further told Blanche, falsely, that she had no family money whatsoever, and lived exclusively on her modest salary from Epstein.}
Bank statements shown for the first time detailed wire transfers of $18.3 million in 1999, $5 million in 2002, and $7.4 million in 2007, in evidence that offered an extraordinary insight into how the heiress [Maxwell] financed her lifestyle.
….
The transfers show Epstein cashing out shares and wiring to accounts in the name of both Maxwell and Air Ghislaine Inc. The latter payment, in June 2007, came from an account linked to Epstein in the U.S. Virgin Islands and was transferred from Maxwell’s personal account with J.P. Morgan to a company called Air Ghislaine Inc.
That company purchased a green Sikorsky S-76C helicopter and downpayment on an “executive finish.”
Putting aside the stunning fact that Trump’s friend Epstein paid Trump’s friend Maxwell over $30 million in just eight years to (among other tasks) procure sex slaves for him—which comes out to $3.75 million annually, and these aren’t believed to be the only payments Epstein ever made to Maxwell—there’s the obvious additional questions to be asked here: why did Maxwell have a helicopter? And what is “Air Ghislaine”?
One indication of what’s being discussed here is found in this Independent report, which details how Maxwell often sat alongside the pilot of the “Lolita Express,” and how guests to Epstein’s Little St. James traveled there approximately every ten days but, critically, never flew directly to the island. Instead, Epstein’s plane would fly guests to St. Thomas, and they’d take a helicopter, thereafter, to a helipad on the island.
{Note: Epstein had four private jets from 1998 to 2000—i.e., his first few years owning Little St. James Island—and as Insider reports, for years many entries were missing from the logs the FAA had previously made available to media, making it possible that there were flights made during that period that we still do not know about and perhaps may never learn about at all.}
Jeffrey Epstein had, in the 2000s, quite a fleet of helicopters, and in 2007 he paid for Ghislaine Maxwell to get her helicopter pilot’s license. After that point, she ferried sex slaves and other island guests on a helicopter Epstein bought for her called Air Ghislaine 2.
What’s confusing about this is that, if this timeline is accurate, Ms. Maxwell became Epstein’s primary helicopter pilot after his release from jail in 2008—during a period that she just told Todd Blanche she had virtually no contact with Epstein at all—and that in fact, contra what many might have expected, Epstein continued his child sex trafficking unabated post-conviction. According to this timeline, all Epstein did to try to ensure he wouldn’t be arrested again—or place any of his friends in legal danger—was use his co-conspirator Maxwell to pilot his most controversial flights to Little St. James. (Needless to say, as a devoted sex trafficker herself, Maxwell would have had no concerns about failing to file a flight plan, doctoring her passenger manifests, or doing anything else needed to keep her and Epstein’s joint criminal enterprise going.)
Of course an obvious question here is, if “Air Ghislaine 2” began flying around 2007 or 2008, when was “Air Ghislaine 1” in service? And for that matter, why have we heard from Epstein’s usual (non-criminal-co-conspirator) pilot that, even during the 1990s, Ghislaine often flew on the Lolita Express in the cockpit? This certainly leaves open the possibility that (1) Maxwell already knew how to fly in the 1990s but didn’t have a license yet, (2) Maxwell did have a pilot’s license in the 1990s, but not a helicopter license, and (3) “Air Ghislaine 1” (a helicopter) was indeed in service in the 1990s, and Maxwell was perfectly capable of flying it, she doesn’t didn’t have the license needed to do so legally. In this view, Epstein had Maxwell get her helicopter pilot’s license in 2007 purely to avoid unnecessary post-conviction run-ins with state or federal authorities, even as Maxwell was in fact able to fly a helicopter (if not legally) during the period that Little St. James Island first opened its doors to potential child rapists in 1997 or 1998.
It’s with all this in mind that we find a 2020 interview with former Maxwell confidant Christina Oxenberg that suggests Maxwell was flying helicopters much earlier than we know or than she was properly licensed to do so. Oxenberg, speaking of Maxwell, says the following with respect to her and the late Jeffrey Epstein (emphasis supplied):
She’s the big fish here. She’s really evil, she's caused so much hellish damage for a human being, she will now try and find a way to wriggle out of it. Jeffrey paid her a lot of money to do this, she was patted on the head, she did it willingly, she didn’t have a gun to her head. My point of view is Ghislaine is the problem. I’m so glad she’s been arrested, and I really hope there is some justice and she does some time.
[Prince Andrew] is one of many [Epstein] Johns, all of whom were video-taped by Ghislaine.
[Andrew] is not a victim here, but Ghislaine was never his friend, she was taping him.
….
That behavior [Epstein reportedly receiving 12-year-old triplets as a ‘birthday gift’ from now-deceased modeling agent and child sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel] is criminal sex-trafficking. Brunel is a monster on the scale of Ghislaine, and he is who needs to be gone after next. He provided the children to be abused.
….
I will definitely be [at Maxwell’s trial] to remind her that in 1997 she told me copious amounts [about her operation]. I spoke to the FBI in April 2019, and they asked me, “If it comes to trial, would you testify?” and I said “Yes.”
It takes a while to even believe that a female would do that to little girls; it’s just heartbreaking."
In 1997 she told me with bravado what she was doing, she also told me [Epstein’s private] plane was wired [for recordings] to the gills. Why do you do that kind of thing? [There are] so many tells in terms of she knew it was wrong. I did not like her, I thought she was a nut job.
She described to me Jeffrey's need for three orgasms a day, she drove herself into the trailer parks and found girls she knew he’d like.
Ghislaine got her helicopter pilot’s license so she could take people to the island [of Little Saint James] for total privacy, she told me that—so they could control who knew, and who was going there.
Oxenberg’s reference here to a pilot’s license creates some confusion, as she appears to be describing a 1997 conversation at the end of the excerpt above, but (as we have seen) Maxwell reportedly didn’t get her pilot’s license until ten years later, in 2007.
Before we address that critical disconnect, two other items from the excerpt above are well worth noting: (1) Maxwell confided in a close associate that when and as she was personally piloting Epstein guests from St. Thomas to Little St. James Island, it was to ensure “total privacy” with respect to “who was going there” and “who knew [who was going there]”; and (2) that by 1997, around the time Little St. James Island opened for (as it were) “business,” Maxwell—and therefore likely Epstein as well—were already telling their close associates (which for Maxwell included Oxenberg and for Epstein would likely have included Trump) that the jet that would take the rich and powerful to Epstein’s new island would be “wired to the gills.”
If Maxwell was in 1997 telling someone who wasn’t even her best friend this latter fact—there’s rather more evidence to suggest that Ivana Trump was Maxwell’s best friend—there’s no reason to think Epstein would have hidden the fact that the Lolita Express was wired for sound from his best friend, Donald Trump. Which means that when, in 1998, the Lolita Express began to be expressly used to ferry pedophiles to Child Rapes on Little St. James Island, Trump would have known not to fly on it anymore. From this vantage point, the sudden cessation of his trips on the Lolita Express in the very year taking those trips became definitionally incriminating could be explained by Trump buying his own first personal luxury jet, or it could be explained by his knowledge of what was happening on Little St. James Island, or it could be explained by Epstein revealing the extent of his intelligence (blackmail) operations. Or some combination of all three.
In any case, given that Trump’s own flight logs have never been reviewed, and given that there was easy helicopter access to Epstein’s island from Trump’s regular vacation spot—see the next chapter—and given that at some point Trump’s friend Maxwell acquired the ability to easily pick up Epstein friends who were a short distance from the island (as Trump was every time he went to St. Martin, see infra) things start to get considerably more interesting.
Or, as the case may be, weirder. Because this is definitely where things get weird.
Here’s why: we know that Epstein and Maxwell at some point began having the latter fly island guests to Little St. James Island, via helicopter, from external locations a number of miles distant, like the Cyril King Airport in St. Thomas. And as discussed more in the next chapter, this means that Ms. Maxwell could just have easily handled helicopter trips from other nearby locations in the Caribbean, for instance St. Martin. But if indeed this practice only started after Epstein was released from jail in 2008, it would make it quite difficult to clearly connect Trump with any of this (as he and Epstein were not, so far as we know, still friends at that point). While Trump may have, see supra, at some point resuscitated his friendship with Epstein in the 2010s, it still would have been incredibly reckless to visit him at Little St. James at that point.
But what if Ghislaine started making her secret helicopter trips to the island as a pilot much, much earlier—for instance, when Trump and Epstein were still best friends?
If, in fact, Donald Trump ever made such a trip with Maxwell—a trip we know she eventually made hundreds of times; which Donald Trump admits that he had an open invitation to take; and which he says he declined taking, for no reason that makes any sense—it means that today, in 2025, Ms. Maxwell is in a position to potentially end Trump’s political career by confirming that he went to Jeffrey Epstein’s child-rape emporium after years and years and years of his swearing he didn’t and insisting that those who did (e.g., Prince Andrew) should be investigated to the ends of the Earth.
It would be difficult for Trump to come back from the revelation of that particular lie, so it’s vital to him that Maxwell never reveal if she flew him anywhere in a helicopter.
The good news for Trump would seem to be that what’s been reported thus far is that Maxwell didn’t get her helicopter pilot’s license until after Epstein got out of jail in 2008, with the reasoning for the timing, based on Maxwell’s statements to friends, being that Epstein desired to be more cautious about his post-incarceration crimes.
That timeline of events would be fantastic for Donald Trump, as there’s no indication that in 2008, 2009, or the early 2010s he was speaking with Epstein—and by 2013 he was in the planning stages for a presidential run that would have made contact with Epstein essentially professional suicide (though we ought not overstate this; Epstein had only been convicted of state crimes, his case was orchestrated to limit publicity, and his jail sentence had only been served at night, thereby making it possible for him to fool many people into not realizing he was serving a sentence at all; indeed, after his release he seemed to have limited difficulty re-accessing a place in high society).
Well, that’s the good news for Donald Trump. The bad news is that all the reporting to the effect that Ghislaine Maxwell didn’t learn to fly a helicopter until well after Trump and Epstein stopped speaking turns out to be a lie.
And what’s remarkable about this bad news is how it came to be uncovered.
As reported by The Independent, in a deposition taken not long before she died of an alleged suicide, Virginia Giuffre testified under oath to the effect that (as summarized by The Independent), “although [Bill] Clinton spent time on Epstein’s private island of Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, there was ‘no evidence’ he was involved in wrongdoing.” Indeed, Giuffre described in great detail a dinner at which Epstein seemingly tried to entice Clinton with two attractive 17-year-old brunettes, but the former president showed no inappropriate interest in them (or in Giuffre) whatsoever.
More importantly, in describing this dinner with Epstein and Clinton on Little St. James Island, “Giuffre claimed that she flew there with the former president in a helicopter piloted by Epstein’s former girlfriend and partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell.” Her testimony dates this incident—an instance of Maxwell flying a VIP and teen girls to Epstein’s island, exactly the sort of flight we’re looking for with respect to Donald Trump and teen girls—to when she (Giuffre) was still 17 years old, which puts it at 2001. At another point she refers to the dinner as occurring shortly after Clinton left office, which again would make 2001 a likely year for this Maxwell helicopter trip.
{Note: The now-deceased Giuffre had been recruited by Maxwell in 2000, as a 16 year-old, to be Epstein’s victim, though there are other accounts that put her recruitment in the late 1990s.}
This suggests that Maxwell was in fact ferrying celebrities and other powerful people to Epstein’s child-rape island during the period Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were best friends and during the period Trump had an open invitation to go to the island.
Moreover, per the prior statements made in confidence by Maxwell to her friends (see supra), she and Epstein would have been making clear to such celebrities and powerful friend invited by Epstein to his island—presumably, Donald Trump included—that any hesitation they had about going to the island (exactly the sort of hesitation Trump says he expressed to Epstein and/or Maxwell) should be relieved by the fact that there were ways to ensure no pilots ever saw them traveling there.
In fact, beginning in 1998 Trump had perhaps the best set-up of any Epstein friend to take advantage of exactly this opportunity. He could, and did, go to St. Martin often (see Chapter 16); he sometimes was alone there, it appears; and when he wasn’t he was partying with a very close friend of his who shared exactly his libertine mindset. This means that Maxwell could pick him up there and take him to Epstein without anyone even knowing he’d ever left St. Martin. This would have been made quite clear to him by Maxwell, whose job it was to make just this sort of pitch to just this sort of man on Epstein’s behalf.
And since, as we have already seen supra, Donald Trump was “crazy” about Maxwell and “best friends” with Epstein—with Politico adding that the Maxwell Family even “knew Trump before Epstein arrived on the scene”—it’s not a pitch that Mr. Trump would have had cause to doubt. The alternative for him was regularly being a guest at every Epstein home on the Eastern Seaboard but never, not even once, seeing his best friend’s most spectacular abode. That doesn’t fit with what we know of Donald Trump.
Where all this starts to get—as promised—particularly weird is that legal advocates seeking to attack Giuffre’s recollections of Clinton (comparatively innocuous as they were) contest her claim that Maxwell ever ferried Clinton anywhere, and then go even further than this to note that (1) there are no Secret Service records of any trip like Giuffre described in either 2001, 2002, or 2003, and (2) the Secret Service would never let a former president fly in a helicopter piloted by someone as inexperienced as Ghislaine Maxwell.
All of this would at first blush seem to be, once again, good news for Trump. Until, that is, you read what the legal advocates actually wrote:
That’s right: Ghislaine Maxwell got a pilot’s license in 1999, not a decade later.
In fact, she got her first pilot’s license not long after Little St. James Island opened.
This strongly suggests that she and Epstein knew they needed a pilot who was part of their criminal conspiracy to ferry VIPs to the island anonymously, and moreover knew this right away. (Note that the Politico report linked to above observes that “Ghislaine was the contact between Epstein and Clinton,” further emphasizing that while Trump and Epstein were best friends, it was Maxwell who was accustomed to acting as the social lubricant between Epstein and prominent male friends. (As Politico has written, “‘Ghislaine was [Epstein’s] path to social acceptance,’ said Thomas Volscho, a professor at the City University of New York who has been researching Epstein. ‘They don’t always accept you. Ghislaine was really a conduit for [Epstein] to start to socialize with people who are way beyond his level.’”)
As to the relationship between Trump and Maxwell, Politico has reported as follows: “‘[Trump] really likes her,’ said Steven Hoffenberg, a former mentor to Epstein who pleaded guilty in 1995 to running a massive Ponzi scheme, of Trump and Maxwell. ‘He was friendly with her father.’ In the 1980s, Trump and Robert Maxwell, the Czechoslovak-born owner of London’s Daily Mirror tabloid, rubbed shoulders on the high-flying Manhattan party circuit.”
Hoffenberg here underscores that Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell—as we will see infra, a known Israeli spy always on the lookout for seedy gossip as a tabloid magnate—would have had multiple reasons to keep tabs on Trump’s personal conduct during a period we now know Trump was cheating on Ivana Trump and assaulting women. Trump and Robert Maxwell would have had much to talk about, as well, given that both were obsessed with manipulating media for personal ends and both had bought their yachts from the same Saudi arms-dealing family the Khashoggi Family.
After Maxwell died suspiciously on his yacht in 1991—during Trump’s now-infamous “Plaza Hotel years”—Trump quickly took to CNN to declare the late spy “My kind of guy.” (Politico notes, moreover, that Maxwell was already trying to squeeze her way into Donald Trump’s social circle even before her father died, begging her dad to let her try to sell “corporate gifts” to Trump through a business entity she’d created to explore that niche subindustry.)
All of which suggests that Donald Trump’s flights with Epstein ending just as soon as Epstein bought Little St. James Island is suspicious more so than exculpatory, and that Trump’s claim that he never went to Little St. James Island is likewise largely meaningless because, beginning in 1999 at the very latest, he could easily have gone there with at most only three of his closest friends in the world knowing about it: Epstein, Maxwell, and, as we’ll discover in Chapter 16, businessman Steve Hilbert.
And since Trump was able to go to Hilbert’s property in St. Martin even when Hilbert wasn’t present—and since Jeffrey Epstein is now dead—the only person who could conclusively tell the United States Congress whether Trump ever did something that could end his political career…
…is helicopter pilot Ghislaine Maxwell, who Donald Trump is about to pardon despite her being the most notorious child sex trafficker in contemporary American history.
Chapter 16: Helicopter Redux
Would Trump knowing what was happening on Little St. James Island have stopped him from going there? No, particularly given that he could have traveled there at any time and simply—as noted above—behaved himself as well as Bill Clinton apparently did. After all, Trump owned a fleet of commercial luxury jets starting in the early 1990s, so it was his decision to switch to a non-commercial, private luxury jet in the very year his best friend bought an island designed to facilitate the systematic rape of children and in the same twelve-month period we now know that the Epstein-Maxwell axis was revealing to close associates that the Lolita Express was heavily bugged. It was, in short, an incredibly fortuitous time for the notoriously frugal Trump to buy his first largely untraceable—given his willingness to lie to officials and doctor documents—private mode of transport, a mode of transport he easily could have purchased years earlier had he wished to.
But he didn’t. Apparently, he didn’t see the need. Until, suddenly, he did. In 1997 or 1998.
Even if Trump had never traveled to Little St. James Island prior to him getting his first untraceable non-commercial luxury jet, by 1998 it would have become clear to him, as Epstein’s best friend, that it was no longer safe—as a matter of legal liability—to continue flying on Epstein’s jet for any reason. The heat likely to one day come down on Epstein for his means of achieving orgasm three times daily wasn’t worth the risk to Trump, surely. (Though we must add a caveat here: Trump and Melania didn’t sleep together until, at the earliest, 1999; and Epstein says their first sexual congress occurred on his jet; but there are no records of Trump being on any Epstein jet after 1997; so either Epstein was lying to Michael Wolff in a way that would have been silly and unnecessarily dangerous for him or by 1999 Epstein and Maxwell had stopped keeping proper flight logs and Trump knows it, which again means that only Maxwell is left alive to give the lie to his many claims of never going to Little St. James Island.)
So let’s return, now, to the for-now still-notional “Air Ghislaine 1.” If that helicopter indeed existed, when did it fly? Certainly, sometime prior to 2007. If it was flown, who flew it? One presumes, given its name and the fact that Maxwell spent a lot of time in the Lolita Express’s cockpit in the early to mid-1990s learning how to fly, it was Ms. Maxwell herself (after all, the flight from St. Thomas to Little St. James Island was a very short one, and even Epstein’s normal pilot has described, in depositions, Maxwell seeming very comfortable in the cockpit of a roughly-as-hard-to-fly 727). While pilots say learning to land a helicopter is a unique challenge, we know from Epstein’s pilot’s depositions that Maxwell joined Epstein’s pilot not just in the cockpit of his 727 but also his helicopter. So did it really take Epstein and Maxwell until 2007 to realize that Maxwell flying the helicopter from St. Thomas to Little St. James made the occupants of that trip undetectable to the authorities (because Maxwell, unlike Epstein’s pilot, was a known co-conspirator in his crimes, and therefore would do anything she could—including commit crimes—to hide her most important passengers’ real identities)?
That seems unlikely. So the possibility of Air Ghislaine 1 being a sub rosa, illegally Maxwell-piloted helicopter in use from 1998 to 2007 seems a distinct possibility. It would then certainly have been understandable if, after spending slightly over a year’s worth of nights in jail, Epstein would simultaneously (1) have been unwilling to cease his pathological serial sexual predations, but also (2) have been interested in finding ways to legitimize Maxwell as a helicopter pilot in order to avoid enhanced scrutiny from state and federal officials following his period of (rather ersatz) incarceration.
Another point about Epstein, Maxwell, Trump, and helicopters must be made here: that Donald Trump owned helicopters, too.
And his usage of those aircraft during the period in question is extremely telling.
Beginning in 1988, Trump owned three helicopters, which he used to transport rich and powerful men from a major airport (in Trump’s case LaGuardia, just as Epstein was using, for a similar purpose, the 1.6 million passengers/year Cyril E. King Airport in St. Thomas) to a helipad on his private property; in Trump’s case that private site was Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, whereas for Epstein it was of course his helipad on Little St. James Island.
Trump began orchestrating these charter flights in 1989, not long after he first met Jeffrey Epstein. Those who have spent a great deal of time researching both men will note that Epstein—the man who couldn’t go an hour with then-girlfriend Stacey Williams without boasting of his friendship with Trump—often modeled his own business operations on those he’d already seen Trump develop, a pattern evident in the early 2000s (when Epstein was trying to launch a modeling agency modeled after Trump Model Management) that may also have inspired Epstein’s development of Air Ghislaine as a way to ferry very rich and powerful men from an airport to his private property. (Another example of this pattern was Epstein using a gauzy association with business associate Leslie Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret to meet and grope women—a scheme essentially identical to how Trump used his rather more formal association with a trio of beauty pageants: Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA.)
But Donald Trump’s association with the sort of helicopters that could easily have gotten him to Epstein’s Caribbean home from nearby locations goes much deeper than this.
From 1989 to 1992, Trump ran a luxury Hamptons helicopter service that would have required precisely the same sort of discretion about ferrying influential figures that his best friend Epstein thereafter sought, beginning just a few years later, when he started ferrying persons of this sort from St. Thomas to Little St. James Island. Trump’s helicopter service—just like his shuttle service—launched during the period of his most avid public camaraderie with Epstein; many of the videos of them together that most Americans have seen are from this period (the late eighties to the mid-nineties).
So what then was Trump doing, helicopter-wise, in 1997 and 1998, when having a helicopter for his personal use—just as he’d purchased, in 1998, his first luxury jet for personal use—could have allowed him to fly to and from Little St. James Island in total secrecy?
Well, in mid-2016 the New York Times reported that Trump at that point owned two jets and three helicopters, and that “four of the five” (including all of the helicopters) “are more than 20 years old.” So by 1995 at the very latest, Trump already had three helicopters with which to make a trip from St. Thomas to St. James Island—with the missing piece of such a trip being only a luxury jet to take him from Palm Beach to St. Thomas, a missing piece that he located… the very year Little St. James Island opened.
None of this is conclusive evidence that Trump went to Little St. James Island. What it does mean is all of the following:
Trump now admits that he received an invitation to make precisely that trip;
his supposed reason for declining to go is an obvious lie;
he is confirmed, now, to have had the means to make the trip secretly;
he acquired the means to make this trip secretly during the very period the island opened;
his flights on Epstein jets suddenly ended right as Little St. James Island opened;
he was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein for at least the first eight years that Little St. James Island was open to Epstein-approved visitors;
he and Epstein had a well-established habit of visiting one another’s homes;
Trump saw traveling to Epstein’s Little St. James Island as a symbol of success (i.e. a “privilege” that all the “big names” in his Florida community had enjoyed);
Trump, given the scores of Sexual Assault and Rape allegations against him and his history of teen-model pimpery, would have had no moral qualms about what was going on at Little St. James Island and therefore no reason to stay away from it (indeed, its activities were precisely up his alley as a matter of sexual deviance);
he now claims to have been aware—at the time—of what pastimes Little St. James Island offered guests (and in 2002 would associate, in a New York Magazine interview, his pleasure in spending time with Epstein with a euphemistic version of that very pastime, namely socializing with “beautiful women…on the younger side”);
by the year Little St. James Island opened to guests at the very latest, Trump knew that Epstein was a pedophile because of the Virginia Giuffre incident (see infra) and the fact that his ex-wife Ivana Trump had personally observed her good friend Ghislaine Maxwell recruiting sex slaves (see Book One);
it would be unusual for Trump to stay away from Little St. James Island given that it appears many rich and powerful men in his social circle went there, meaning either that he had a unique knowledge they didn’t have about the legal dangers of going to the island (in which case he did nothing honorable with that knowledge, and would now need to explain to Americans why) or he didn’t, in which case his decision to never go to the island would be forever inexplicable; and
if he did go to the island, it would have been possible for him to do so with only Epstein, Maxwell, and any Epstein victims on the island knowing—and of those three people Epstein is dead (having died under mysterious circumstances in Trump’s custody), Maxwell is in prison (having been prosecuted by Trump employees and now seeking a pardon from Trump that he’s considering giving), and, as to Epstein’s victims being potential witnesses to Trump staying at Little St. James Island, while we don’t know the names of all the girls who were on the island we do know that Trump’s 2016 campaign CEO Steve Bannon, during a period he was in regular contact with Jeffrey Epstein in mid-campaign, both (a) deemed Epstein to be the gravest threat to that presidential campaign, and (b) was aware that Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz had paid off at least a “hundred” women who Trump had in some way seriously wronged in the past, with it being possible, therefore, that the names of some such women had been provided to Bannon and Kasowitz by Epstein himself. (It’s worth adding, too, that Epstein paid many of his girls for their silence at the time; many of them were foreigners who wouldn’t necessarily have recognized Trump if they met him or remembered him afterwards; and Katie Johnson’s harrowing experience making a serious allegation against Trump, not to mention the experiences of his dozens of other accusers—experiences filled with death threats and other forms of intimidation—would understandably chill most women who might have thought to reveal what if anything Donald Trump did to them decades ago, when they were just teens.)
Keep in mind, too, that the list above ignores the tacit catch-all clause that must be appended to any statement of innocence made by Donald Trump: that the man may be the most shameless, infamous liar in all of American history. It’s therefore not just unwise to believe any Trump self-exculpation, but indeed there’s simply no reason to pay much attention to it in the first place. Only inductive investigations can arrive at truths about Trump’s sex crimes, violent crimes, and financial crimes; his words are immaterial unless they’re statements against interest that point toward incriminating evidence.
So for all this, is there evidence that Epstein flew on Trump’s jet once Trump had one in 1998—creating a massive lacuna in Epstein-related investigations (which have thus far only sought or gotten access to Epstein’s flights)?
Yes.
Per a CNN interview with Epstein’s brother Mark Epstein (emphasis added), “I know Donald was in Jeff’s office a lot back in the 1990s. It’s documented that Donald flew on Jeff’s plane a number of times. I don’t know if they ever checked, but I know Jeff flew on Donald’s plane. I don’t know if they’ve ever looked at his [Donald Trump’s] flight logs.”
To Proof’s knowledge, no one has. After all, this Mark Epstein revelation only came about a month ago.
Okay, but do we have evidence that Trump regularly flew his own jets to the area of Epstein’s Little St. James Island?
Actually yes, we do.
In 2013—when Trump and Epstein may well have been back in regular contact, now that Trump freely admits that their falling out in 2004 only meant they didn’t speak “for years,” not “never again”—Trump bought a property in St. Martin, Le Château des Palmiers, from longtime Trump business associate Steve Hilbert. It was one of Trump’s stranger purchases during the year we know he made his final decision to run for President of the United States in 2016.
So can one reach Epstein’s then-still-active child-rape emporium from Trump’s Le Château des Palmiers using an untraceable Trump helicopter?
Yes.
How long is the helicopter flight?
Just 40 minutes—only slightly over the average daily commute time for a New Yorker.
Here’s the relevant zoom-in via Google Maps:
And here’s an even more zoomed-in version, showing Trump’s home with a red pin in it and a distance legend in the bottom right-hand corner:
As can be readily seen here, the distance is about 100 miles. With the average travel speed for a helicopter in this region being 150 mph per OSINT, Trump could have been on Epstein’s doorstep in 40 minutes whenever he wanted while he was staying in St. Martin—and at no point during his trip to see his best friend would he have been required to fly over a major airport (as Trump’s takeoff would have been from the extreme western end of St. Martin, and Epstein’s former island home is southeast of St. Thomas).
But Trump purchased this luxurious Caribbean home from his longtime friend and business associate Steve Hilbert in 2013, and sold it when he became president—that is, right after the four-year period (i.e., early 2013 to early 2017) that he and his team apparently deemed his Caribbean neighbor Epstein to be the biggest threat to his 2016 candidacy. So isn’t the real question here whether Trump was in St. Martin from 1998 to 2013?
And the answer is yes—he was.
Often, in fact.
So when did Trump start going to St. Martin, a place just a 40-minute helicopter ride from his then-best-friend’s island home?
In 1998, the same year (per some tellings) Maxwell recruited Virginia Giuffre from Trump’s spa to be his rape victim. (Politico: “According to Filthy Rich, a 2016 book about Epstein by best-selling author and Mar-a-Lago member James Patterson, ‘Although Epstein had never properly joined the club, Trump’s friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell gave Epstein unlimited use of the facilities.’ Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former changing room attendant at Mar-a-Lago who has accused Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a minor, alleges in a lawsuit that she was first approached at the club in 1998 by Ghislaine Maxwell, who persuaded her to meet Epstein and joined him in the abuse.”)
In fact, Trump began going to St. Martin just a few months after Ghislaine Maxwell flew with him on one of his jets; just a few months after his second marriage ended—making him once again officially an eligible bachelor (of course he’s always acted as though he is, whether married or not)—and shortly before he met Melania Trump.
(Trump was in such dire financial straits when he began vacationing in St. Martin near Epstein—and was, we must remember, only 36 months removed from needing Epstein’s financial help to convert his Florida home into a country club—that at the time, as the New Yorker reports, citing a source “very close” to Trump, part of his urgency in divorcing Marla Maples was that he might struggle to weather the terms of their prenuptials if he didn’t ditch her before a certain, contractually predetermined date. It might also be worth noting that it was at this very moment that, per the New Yorker and Trump himself, the “Russian government” decided to “donate” a statue “six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty” with “$40 million worth of bronze in it” to a Trump property—the sort of thing that might cause a casual observer to believe that either Trump was then serving or had recently served an extremely valuable purpose to the Kremlin just as his closest friend was opening up Little St. James Island as arguably the largest Kremlin-style “honeypot” operation—a honey trap—on Earth.
Tellingly, the same report noted that Trump’s financial position and history in 1997 was such that, the Russians’ inexplicable largesse with him aside, “there aren’t many [bankers] who will soon be lining up to thrust fresh bazillions at him.” Trump told his New Yorker interviewer, cryptically, during the interview for this particular report, that “Whatever complicates the world more, I do. It’s always good to do things nice and complicated so that nobody can figure it out.” In short, Trump began staying in St. Martin regularly, a short helicopter ride from Epstein, at a time he was arguably in debt, literally or figuratively to the reputed Kremlin asset Epstein; was getting closer to potential Russian business associates ever since his much-ballyhooed 1995 trip to Moscow—a trip made the same year Epstein bailed him out as he tried to refashion Mar-a-Lago into a club, and a trip that involved help from mutual Trump and Epstein friend Leon Black (“Black had known Epstein since the 1990s, when Epstein was still partying with Trump and Black flew to Moscow to do a real estate deal with the future president”)—and had no reason not to indulge his uncontrollable sexual peccadilloes. As a Trump biographer, it’s hard to pinpoint any time-period in which Donald Trump would have been less likely to restrain himself or even be interested in restraining himself from having fun on Little St. James Island than the beginning 36 months of the 1990s’ second half.)
As the Washington Post reports, “Trump had been a regular guest at Chateau des Palmiers when it was owned by Hilbert, who headed the Indiana-based insurance company Conseco, according to court documents and the property's website at the time. In 1998, the two joined forces to purchase the General Motors Building on New York’s Fifth Avenue and soon were vacationing together in St. Martin and other locales.”
So starting in about 1998, Trump had his own luxury jet, his own private helicopter, and began regularly vacationing about 40 minutes from his best friend’s new home. And yet major media deems Epstein flight logs as solid proof on the subject of whether Trump stayed away from Little St. James Island as he now (improbably) claims. Why?
Chateau des Palmiers would seem to be a better starting point for an investigation of this question, given that Trump only owned it during the period that he most closely needed to manage the political threat Epstein posed to him, that when he put it on the market in 2017 it was deemed “overpriced by about $10 million [or 50%]” according to experts but was nevertheless scouted by an unnamed Russian investor apparently acting on behalf of an unnamed third-party Russian, and that it was deemed by ethics experts to be inappropriately on the market—suggesting that Trump was in a highly unusual “rush” to no longer be affiliated with it despite all the ethics issues raised by his sale of it while he was President of the United States. (We must keep in mind, too, that the temporary falling out between Trump and Epstein in the 2000s was over a property the latter believed Trump was using for Russia-related Money Laundering, see supra.)
Still odder is that during the period Trump was a “regular” at this Caribbean estate not far from Epstein’s it was, per a subsequent real estate listing, a hotspot for “many of the NBA’s greatest stars and some of the world’s most powerful people, including Donald Trump and many Hollywood celebrities.” This makes it sound like a sanitized version of Little St. James Island—in other words, a good starting point for those non-risk-averse fun-seekers looking to travel a mere forty minutes west by helicopter. Nor was the property one Epstein himself would have been unaware of; the Post described it as the twelfth-most expensive for-sale property in the entirety of the Caribbean at the time Trump became president
It’s against this backdrop that Trump had an open invite to a property just 40 minutes away, one that he could travel to in secrecy while staying at the home of another man who describes him as a “great friend”—meaning, presumably, someone Trump could trust to be discrete, given that they were business associates (having bought an $800 million building together in 1998) as well as great friends. Hilbert has named Trump one of the “three to five great friends” of his life. Indeed, the Hilberts and Trumps are so close that beginning in 2012, the year before Hilbert sold Chateau des Palmiers to Trump, Hilbert was in a business relationship with Melania Trump as well as Donald (a relationship that ended in a flurry of lawsuits between third parties that included a legal allegation by Hilbert’s wife of coerced swinging—an unwanted threesome—against another prominent businessman who, like Hilbert, is a very close “friend” of Trump’s).
Mother Jones even reported in 2016 that Trump’s now-infamous orange hue may in part be the work of Mr. Hilbert, who owns a sizeable number of tanning properties (emphasis supplied):
For nearly twenty years, Trump has had a close personal and business relationship with an Indiana businessman named Steve Hilbert, who in 2006 became CEO of New Sunshine, a maker of tanning beds, spray booths, and Kim Kardashian-branded tanning lotions and bronzers.
Hilbert and Trump have much in common. Both men are 70, have made and lost fortunes, and have cycled through multiple marriages. They enjoy outsize lifestyles and indulge garish decorating tastes.
And they share a similar orange skin tone that can result from the use—or overuse—of certain tanning products.
More importantly, the media outlet reported several details about Hilbert, Trump, their relationship, and their proclivities that would perk up the ears of any federal investigator, the oddness about “swinging” referenced supra aside (emphasis added):
[Trump’s St. Martin host from 1998 to 2013 Steve] Hilbert was famous for helicoptering to work—a commute of less than two miles. The businessman reportedly met his sixth and current wife in the early 1990s, when she jumped topless out of a cake at a party for one of his stepsons.
The cake story may be apocryphal, but Tomisue Hilbert, who is the same age as Melania, was indeed a 23-year-old topless dancer, [high-school dropout] and single mother when she married Steve.
….
Trump and Hilbert also socialized together. The Trumps attended Tomisue’s thirtieth birthday bash in St. Martin, where the Hilberts owned a palatial home, and stayed at Le Chateau [the Hilbert’s home in Indiana] for a NASCAR race and some golf.
The Hilberts stayed at Trump Tower during their visits to New York and vacationed at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort.
….
Melania’s skin care line {NB: The subject of one of three instance of Hilbert financially sponsoring an episode of Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice} wasn’t the only Trump-related deal Hilbert orchestrated while he was managing a private equity fund. Lawyers for [Wisconsin billionaire and Trump friend John] Menard found millions of dollars flowing out of the [Hilbert-managed] outfit into various Trump entities. They discovered that Entertainment Promotions, a company owned by the [Hilbert-managed] fund that sold coupon books, owed Trump companies $6 million.
Entertainment Promotions had sponsored a Celebrity Apprentice episode and underwritten a related Trump-centered sweepstakes contest in April 2012, at a time when the company was millions of dollars in debt.
Menard’s lawyers were suspicious of Hilbert’s relationship with Trump. According to court records, they believed the licensing deal Hilbert brokered with Melania was not made with the fund’s financial interests at heart but rather was intended to further the interests of the Trumps and Hilberts. The lawyers also questioned another Trump-Hilbert deal, one that occurred right in the middle of litigation over Melania’s skin care contract.
The Hilberts’ finances were a mess. In June 2013, the private equity management company they created to manage Menard’s money filed for bankruptcy, and they had been trying unsuccessfully for three years to sell their villa on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, which had been on the market for nearly $20 million. While Menard’s lawyers were in the middle of deposing the Hilberts, Melania, and other players involved in the deal, Hilbert asked Trump if he would buy it, and he did. The sale and its timing raised eyebrows among Menard’s lawyers, who tried to investigate the deal further to see whether it might have improperly influenced testimony in the case. But an Indiana federal judge blocked them from deposing Trump or further investigating Hilbert’s relationship with Trump.
That’s how close Trump and Hilbert are. And how controversial and (dare one say it) dodgy their personal and professional association was during the period that they were regularly partying together and just 40 minutes from Epstein’s own party palace.
Steve met his wife Tomisue when he was between the ages of 44 and 47 and she was an exotic dancer somewhere between the ages of 20 and 23—a point made here just to emphasize how little Hilbert would have been likely to judge Trump for wanting to (if he did want to) helicopter over to Little St. James Island to party with his best friend Jeffrey despite Epstein’s reputation for being an older man accustomed to pursuing dramatically younger females. Indeed, the fact that Hilbert put “a hand-painted mural ….depicting [him] toga-clad…[and] as an ancient deity” in his huge Indiana home also suggests a bent toward… well, classical Epicureanism.
Most notable in the excerpt above is the fact that the home-sharing the Hilberts and Trumps engaged in gives us every reason to believe that from 1998 to 2013 Trump could stay at Chateau des Palmiers whenever he wanted—making the notion that he stayed away from Little St. James Island for those fifteen years (for no reason he can articulate that makes any sense) seem even more improbable than it already did.
The New York Times, in reporting on the use of helicopters by Trump, notes that he had access to helicopters not aimed at his personal use throughout the 1990s via his commercial shuttle services; that “Most people who own aircraft do not have more than one or two; even those who can afford to own planes often lease or charter them instead, offering a layer of ease and anonymity”; and that of Mr. Trump’s three helicopters, one was acquired in 2012 and another in 2014, meaning that at least these two aircraft would also have been useful should Trump have had a need to meet with Epstein in the 2010s, as Epstein claimed he did in 2017—when their fates may have come to be entwined due to the Kremlin’s acquisition of ruinous kompromat on both men (see infra)—but would not have been available for his use from 1998 to 2004. Yet the fact remains that Trump did own at least one helicopter for all of the 1990s, and even has at least one documented instance in his FAA history of having sought FAA “authorization to fly to Nassau, in the Bahamas, from West Palm Beach.” In other words, we know that Trump did have an interest in using helicopters in the Caribbean.
{Note: This book is leaving out many of the new Trump-Kremlin connections that came to be revealed during the research for it. For instance, when a New Yorker journalist in 1997 went with Trump to a meeting with a Russian national then hoping to become President of Russia, the New York businessman “enlisted as an interpreter [for the meeting] Inga Bogutska, a [current Trump Organization] receptionist whose father, by coincidence, was a Russian general.” What are the chances that a man who repeatedly visited Moscow on KGB recruiting trips accidentally ended up with a receptionist whose father was a Russian general? As for the meeting itself, with Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed—a veteran of the Russian military—the New Yorker writes words that now seem prescient and harrowing all at once: “Trump introduced Lebed to [his friend] Howard Lorber, who had accompanied him a few months earlier on his journey to Moscow, where they looked at properties to which the Trump moniker might be appended {NB: Lorber was the one man Donald Trump Jr. is known to have called for advice as part of his secret meeting with Kremlin agents at Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign}. ‘Howard has major investments in Russia,’ Trump told Lebed, but when Lorber itemized various ventures, none seemed to ring a bell. ‘See, they [the Russians] don’t know you,’ Trump told Lorber. ‘With all that investment, they don’t know you. Trump they know.’ Some ‘poisonous people’ at the Times, Lebed informed Trump, were ‘spreading some funny rumors that you are going to cram Moscow with casinos’….‘We are actually looking at something in Moscow right now,’ [Trump told Lebed], ‘and it would be skyscrapers and hotels, not casinos. Only quality stuff. But thank you for defending me. I’ll soon be going again to Moscow. We’re looking at the Moskva Hotel. We’re also looking at the Rossiya. That’s a very big project; I think it’s the largest hotel in the world. And we’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.’ Lebed: ‘You must be a very confident person. You are building straight into the center.’ Trump: ‘I always go into the center.’ Lebed: ‘I hope I’m not offending by saying this, but I think you are a litmus testing paper. You are at the end of the edge. If Trump goes to Moscow, I think America will follow. So I consider these projects of yours to be very important. And I’d like to help you as best I can in putting your projects [in Russia] into life. I want to create a canal or riverbed for capital flow [from the United States to Russia].’”
Given how actively involved Epstein was in Russia—the man died with hundreds of millions of dollars in Kremlin-linked or Kremlin-controlled banks—are the late 1990s really a period in Donald Trump’s personal life and professional career when he would have ignored a cordial invite from Epstein? There is clearly much more going on here than Trump has yet revealed.}
Sidebar: So What Happened During Period 2?
Because Book Two is mainly focused on what’s above termed Period 1 in the lifespan of Epstein’s island(s) ownership, we’ll only briefly look into, via this sidebar, Period 2.
It’s a less interesting period, of course, because by the time Epstein purchased Great St. James Island in 2016, he was a known pedophile—even if it was also “known” that his legal troubles were “behind” him (or so he and everyone else would have thought at the time) and that he was once and possibly still close to the man who by November of that very year would have been elected President of the United States.
In 2024, a data broker leak allowed WIRED to get access to location data from the mobile phones of those who traveled to one or both of Epstein’s islands during what we’re here calling Period 2. As the tech-focused digital media outlet explained, “The coordinates that Near Intelligence collected and left exposed online pinpoint locations to within a few centimeters of space. Visitors were tracked as they moved from the Ritz-Carlton on neighboring St. Thomas Island, for instance, to a specific dock at the American Yacht Harbor—a marina once co-owned by Epstein that hosts an “impressive array” of pleasure boats and mega-yachts. The data pinpointed their movements as they were transported to Epstein’s dock on Little St. James, revealing the exact routes taken to the island.”
Here is the national map WIRED published:
And here is the local detail:
And below, for reference, is a Google Maps zoom-in of the area, so readers can see which island is Great St. James Island and which is Little St. James Island. The map below also allows readers to confirm that while there clearly are areas one can come ashore on the former island—as well as multiple bays where one could spend the day (or night) on a “pleasure boat” or “mega-yacht”—Little St. James Island was far more developed than its neighbor and was the main attraction in that part of the Caribbean.
What we can deduce from viewing all three of the maps above is that, while the data certainly shows most visitors going to (and onto) Little St. James Island, there is also some data suggesting that, even as nearly all mobile phones went past Great St. James Island, there were Epstein invitees who spent time in the large bay at Great St. James Island and in various spots around its coastline—presumably with Epstein’s explicit permission and/or at his invitation (and possibly even with him physically present).
In other words, there’s some evidence of people being “invited” to see Great St. James Island, even if it wasn’t their final destination. This confirms that Trump could say in the 2020s that he had never been “invited” to “the island” and could, if he chose, be referring to Great St. James Island. This would of course be a rather cheap bait-and-switch, however; Trump wouldn’t have been invited to the larger island for several reasons: (1) he wasn’t friends with Epstein (that we know of) at any point during the latter’s ownership of the larger island, (2) Epstein likely only rarely issued invitations for anyone to stay on Great St. James Island, and (3) even if Trump remained secretly friends with Epstein into and throughout the 2010s, Epstein still wouldn’t have invited him to Great St. James because by the time Epstein bought it in 2016 Trump was in politics and couldn’t risk going—not in a traceable fashion, at least—to the home of a convicted sex criminal.
It’s this last observation that offers one of the few genuinely interesting investigative leads from Period 2. If in fact Trump had stayed in contact with Epstein after 2004, as there’s ample reason to believe he did—see the aforementioned visit that Epstein says Trump made to his Palm Beach home in December 2017—he might not have visited either of Epstein’s islands himself, but he would certainly have sent his emissaries there.
Because the New Intelligence data was accidentally made accessible, no one whose data was captured would have had reason to know that such a breach would or could happen. This means that data we see above are the undisguised movements of people who are outside and don’t know they’re being tracked. So if we accept that this data is tracking users only when they’re outdoors; and if we believe Trump may have kept in contact with Epstein during his political career because he and his campaign CEO believed Epstein to be “the biggest threat” to the campaign (as Bannon opined to Epstein in one of their many face-to-face meetings); and if we know, as we do, that Trump Tower was the base of Trump’s political operations for the entirety of the 2010s, what an investigator would be looking for as mobile-data evidence that Trump stayed in contact with Epstein after he knew Epstein was a serial child rapist would be mobile data originating right outside Trump Tower or in a place—like, say, Martha’s Vineyard—that one of Trump’s personal lawyers (e.g. Alan Dershowitz) is known to reside.
Do we have evidence of that sort? WIRED answers this in the affirmative (emphasis supplied):
“Near Intelligence tracked devices visiting Little St. James from locations in 80 cities crisscrossing 26 U.S. states and territories, with Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, and New York topping the list. The coordinates point to mansions in gated communities in Michigan and Florida; homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts; a nightclub in Miami; and the sidewalk across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.”
That’s a pretty interesting piece of information. It’s interesting because the whole of Period 2 occurred after Epstein was a notorious sex criminal, at least in the circles he’d once run in in southern Florida. While many people in Michigan and maybe even Massachusetts—Martha’s Vineyard-dwelling Trump attorney Dershowitz excluded, as he represented Epstein in the 2000s—may not have read the news revealing that Epstein was arrested and convicted and sentenced in southern Florida in the 2000s (a story that didn’t really go national until 2018 or 2019), those who were part of the Palm Beach socialite class, like Donald Trump, could not have been involved with Epstein during Period 2 without being accused of explicitly ignoring his disgusting sex crimes.
Such wealthy Palm Beach socialites could have chosen to ignore those sex crimes because they simply don’t care about sex crimes, or because Epstein had leverage over them so they couldn’t shun him completely, but certainly any evidence from Period 2 pointing at contact by Trump or his agents with Epstein would be a moral indictment at a minimum. At worst, it could signal that a given Trump agent was an Epstein co-conspirator, was being blackmailed by Epstein, or more likely was acting as a covert go-between between Epstein and, say, the one person who clearly couldn’t speak to him at his island home… a man who was then the sitting President of the United States.
From this standpoint, the fact that there were trips to Epstein’s infamous child-rape emporium in the U.S. Virgin Islands that originated from Trump Tower and Martha’s Vineyard are extremely interesting, if still inconclusive.
But there’s still more we can learn about Epstein and his activities from this Period 2 data. For instance, it’s remarkable that, from 2016 to 2019—many years after the man had been convicted of sex crimes, become a registered sex offender, and spent more than a year in jail—the traffic to and from Little St. James Island and Great St. James Island remained steady.
This would certainly suggest to a criminal investigator that the level of traffic prior to Epstein’s fall from grace was actually significant.
So if we can get a handle on the patterns were see in mainland-to-Epstein traffic in Period 2, it might give us a sense of where to look with respect to the considerably more important Period 1 traffic—as we know what was happening on Little St. James Island in Period 1, and at scale, was Child Rape.
While the first of the three maps above is fascinating, it’s less useful than it could be because it includes a large number of isolated, one-off data signals. What would the map look like if those statistical outliers were removed?
Proof investigated this question and ended up (by editing the map above) with this:
Readers can clearly see, now, that even after Epstein became a social outcast in all of his home communities, traffic was coming to his island from just seven main sources.
In alphabetical order, these notable, consistent island-trip points of departures were:
Central and West Florida
Central Texas
D.C.
Detroit
Florida (Palm Beach area)
New York City area
Southern New England (mostly Cape Cod)
Only these seven locales—noting here that four of the seven, a majority, constituted Trump’s three home bases during Period 2 (D.C., Florida near Palm Beach, and the New York City area, including Bedminster in New Jersey) and a place one of his attorneys is known to live (Massachusetts’ Cape)—exhibited more than isolated traffic.
A fifth location, Central and West Florida, is chock full of Trump aides, associates, allies, advisers, attorneys, advocates, and acolytes. It’s very much “Trump Country,” particularly in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area.
Just two locations here are not known to be linked to Trump in any way: Detroit and Central Texas (as Trump has many close connections in Dallas, but not in the Austin-San Antonio area we see on the map above). Epstein is not known to have owned any homes in Detroit, and though the DeVos Family (which is very close to Trump and includes Erik Prince) resides in Michigan, they’re in western Michigan, not Detroit.
What can we make of the data above? Only so much. It’s telling that some of the data originates at Trump’s political headquarters and that other data hails from the lightly populated home area of an attorney of his who also had attorney-client privilege with Epstein—thus making him a perfect go-between between the two men—and also has been accused of misconduct linked to Epstein (giving him even more of a motive to try to keep the relationship between Trump and Epstein copacetic during Period 2). It’s also worth noting that Dershowitz, the Trump-Epstein lawyer referred to here, seems to have acted as a de facto or de jure go-between between Trump and Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in just the last few weeks (see Book One). And given that we know Bannon was working out of Trump Tower at points in the late 2010s, and that he was (per Michael Wolff) regularly corresponding with Epstein during that period, it’s certainly interesting that other mobile data points toward someone who was outside Trump Tower with a cell phone thereafter traveling to the very place in which Trump’s one-time best friend was raping children.
The data above also tells a sort of story about what we might have expected to see had mobile data from Period 1 (when mobile phones were not yet ubiquitous) been leaked as well. As already observed, we would have expected traffic from the mainland to the one island Epstein then owned—Little St. James Island—to be much higher. But also, given that Epstein during Period 1 lived and worked in New York City and Florida and had made many high-level contacts in D.C., we would expect traffic from those three locales to once again have been high in Period 1, per the data. This underscores—given the association that Trump had during Period 1 with all three of those areas—that during Period 1 many people in Trump’s social circles in D.C., Florida, and New York would have received island invites from Epstein. Indeed, Trump has (see supra) implied as much. So there is every reason to believe that Period 1 mobile data would even more closely link Donald Trump’s known haunts and Jeffrey Epstein’s dodgiest.
Chapter 17: The May 2025 Trump-Bondi-Blanche-Patel Summit
In March 2025, Trump’s personal lawyer Pam Bondi told Trump adviser Sean Hannity—in what’s become a common practice in right-wing media, that of people holding “interviews” with others whose political, comms, or legal teams they’re both on (e.g., Trump being “interviewed” by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Fox News)—that “Everything [in the Epstein Files] is going to come out to the public. The public has a right to know. Americans have a right to know.”
This was the official position of the Trump lawyer who was running DOJ as Spring 2025 began. She was confident enough in it to make it public, and moreover she was confident enough that the Files would become public in their entirety that she told this to Fox News viewers well after she had already told them that the “Epstein client list” was “on her desk.”
A sequence of key events had therefore, by Spring 2025, become clear: in January, Pam Bondi got control of The Epstein Files; in February, the Trump lawyer said that key data from the Files had been compiled and put on her desk for review; in March, she assured Americans that “everything” would “come out to the public” because “the public has a right to know. Americans have a right to know.”
What does America have a right to know? “Everything,” Trump lawyer Bondi said.
But as a personal attorney to the President of the United States, there was just one thing Bondi hadn’t done yet by the end of March: she hadn’t spoken to her client about the contents of The Epstein Files. At least not in a comprehensive or definitive way.
Though the Washington Post reports that Trump and Bondi speak “almost every day”—underscoring that Trump has violated all post-Watergate precedents with respect to the independence of the DOJ and FBI (something his predecessor never did, despite Trump’s numberless claims to the contrary). But apparently there was one subject Trump remained paranoid about across all those near-daily phone calls, a subject so sensitive that Donald Trump biographer Michael Wolff was once told, before a dinner meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, that he could ask Trump about anything—even the January 6 insurrection that had by then led Trump to face state and federal criminal prosecutions in multiple jurisdictions—but that if he so much as mentioned Jeffrey Epstein’s name, Trump would throw him out of his house. And immediately.
His late best friend was apparently a topic Trump felt he couldn’t comprehensively discuss with his lawyer Pam Bondi over the phone, so in May he organized a summit—not of DOJ and FBI officials, but of his personal legal team, all of whom were (by his own explicit design) by then working at DOJ and FBI. Trump allowed Bondi’s deputy at DOJ, Todd Blanche, to attend the meeting, because of course Blanche is also his own personal lawyer; he likewise allowed FBI director Kash Patel to the meeting due to the fact that Patel is also a Trump lawyer. But he apparently did not invite Patel’s deputy; Dan Bongino, the deputy FBI director, is not a Trump personal lawyer, and Trump therefore couldn’t be certain that anything Bongino might hear or say about Epstein in the Oval Office at the president’s May summit with his lawyers would be kept confidential via attorney-client privilege (the presidential communications privilege being a more amorphous protection, as Mr. Trump has learned from experience).
And apparently Trump planned to say some things at that summit that he didn’t want anyone who didn’t enjoy attorney-client privilege with him to hear.
In short, the May 2025 Trump-Bondi-Blanche-Patel Summit, billed as a briefing of the President of the United States with the leaders of the DOJ and FBI, was in fact nothing of the sort. It was a man with serious concerns that a developing situation could incriminate him—and I write this as an attorney who has attended literally thousands of such meetings—meeting with his lawyers to figure out how to stave off such an eventuality.
As the Post reports, this meeting saw “Bondi [telling] Trump in a May Oval Office meeting with Kash Patel [present] that the president’s name appeared multiple times in The [Epstein] Files….Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche also told Trump they did not want to release the files to protect the privacy of the victims in the files and because of the sexually explicit content in them.”
There’s a problem with this reporting—namely, that we know it’s untrue. While it’s not untrue that Trump met with his lawyers in the Oval Office in May, it is untrue that this was merely a “regularly scheduled briefings with the president,” as it appears that the roster of attendees for this particular meeting was specially abbreviated in order to reduce witnesses and, more importantly, preserve attorney-client privilege.
But the report is also inaccurate in a more significant way. Whereas the source inside the White House who spoke to the Post tried to convince D.C.’s newspaper-of-record that the move to hide The Epstein Files was Trump’s lawyers’ idea, this contradicts every piece of evidence we have on the subject. First, because it contradicts Bondi’s proud, public, unambiguous statement of intent just weeks earlier to the effect that “Everything is going to come out to the public. The public has a right to know. Americans have a right to know.” Second, subsequent reporting would see Trump’s personal attorneys at DOJ and the FBI confirm that it is Trump who has the sole power to decide whether he wants executive-branch files released to the public—and that they would never presume to control or even abridge that power. So the idea that, in May, Trump’s lawyers told him “we don’t want to release the files” is nonsensical. By their own self-professed standards of conduct, what they in fact would have done is present President Trump with information on the content of The Epstein Files and then await his order on how to proceed. And of course Mr. Trump had famously (a deceptive Fox News edit notwithstanding) by May 2025 long exhibited a lukewarm attitude on ever releasing The Epstein Files, with fears about his own and his friends’ potential exposure to embarrassment being an explicit reason to oppose transparency.
The result of the May summit between Trump and his personal lawyers was an early July joint declaration by the DOJ and FBI that not a single additional page from The Epstein Files would be released—as far from the “everything” Bondi had promised as could be imagined, which fact underscored how unlikely it was that Bondi had on her own accord changed her view from “everything” in March to nothing in May without a presidential directive to that effect.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s own actions confirmed that it was he who was scared of The Epstein Files, considerably more than even his lawyers were. Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, thereafter multiple times denied to the American people that he had been told by his lawyers that he was in the Epstein Files—a lie that he would have felt comfortable telling the American people because he had already ensured that the May summit only included those with whom he enjoyed attorney-client privilege.
Americans would eventually learn, of course—via a leak—that President Trump had indeed been told that he was in The Epstein Files. His lies to voters on this subject revealed just how thorny a topic he believed it to be for him, without revealing exactly what he was so afraid of. What his lies did do, however, was suggest that there were things about his past dealings with Epstein he hadn’t even told his top personal lawyers.
{Note: As a long-time criminal defense attorney, this author can say that when a prospective criminal defendant withholds information from his attorney over a long period of time, it’s almost always because that information would incriminate him—usually not on a minor offense (a misdemeanor or violation), but a felony, and usually not just as to a single offense but as to many. This isn’t a certainty, of course, but it’s a clear trendline in Trial Advocacy.}
The Post reports, with respect to the July FBI-DOJ Memo, that “[Trump personal lawyer and Deputy Attorney General Todd] Blanche has denied any disagreement between the Justice Department and the FBI in crafting the Memo’s conclusions…. he said he ‘worked closely’ with Patel and Bongino on the document and that all had agreed to its findings.” It’s interesting that there’s no mention of Bongino attending the May summit, but once that summit had produced its marching orders—from Trump—Bongino was again allowed to be (and be seen as) integral to the process. So it was, or at least so it would appear, the creation of those marching orders that Trump only wanted his personal lawyers to bear witness to.
The Post also reports that the July FBI-DOJ Memo said that “no more documents would be released in order to protect the privacy of victims.” This was, of course, another inexplicable statement by the White House; Bondi had been aware in March, when she promised the entire nation that “everything” in The Epstein Files would be released, that the privacy of victims could and would be handled via redactions. That she was suddenly pretending that releasing even a redacted version of the Files would violate victims’ privacy was—to put it bluntly—a non-legal assessment that couldn’t have come from a lawyer, even a seemingly incompetent one like Bondi. Rather, it’s either the sort of non-legal self-justification the comms team of a prospective criminal defendant makes to protect their employer’s interests or the sort of wild, groundless argument an extremely powerful defendant himself orders his lawyers to make despite it being preposterous on its face. (And readers should note that in the Epstein case in particular Trump and his legal and comms teams have a long and well-documented history of alluding to “victims’ rights” whenever it helps them do whatever they were already planning to do, and then callously ignoring Epstein’s victims at all other times.)
The evidence that Trump made all the decisions about The Epstein Files at the May summit, and did so without respect to anything his personal lawyers were telling him, only grows as we look closer at the summit and its immediate aftermath. For instance, the Post reports being told by a White House official (notably, it doesn’t say a lawyer, leaving open the possibility that a non-lawyer Trump political aide is being quoted) that over 90% of the Epstein Files are categorically unreleasable.
Yes, you read that correctly: The Epstein Files are 300 gigabytes in size; it’s common practice in Criminal Law to redact victim information in releases of investigative files; this is something DOJ and the FBI are experienced at doing and do every single day; there has never been a case file in all of American legal history in which “over 90%” of the material inside was redactable as protected victim information; and yet what appears to be a White House non-lawyer brazenly told the nation’s paper of record that it took the Trump administration months and months to come to the profound, sudden realization that, “Considering the nature of the files, they are replete with information not fit for public disclosure,” to include “personal identifying information, details on victims and other private data protected under federal law.”
In fact, this feature of The Epstein Files was known to the White House even before the Files were first opened by the second Trump administration in January 2025. To suggest that this was a surprise revelation months later is… catastrophically dishonest.
It’s certainly true that federal law protects certain disclosures, and that redactions were always going to be necessary with respect to The Epstein Files. But the idea that, as the Post was told, “fewer than a tenth of the documents [in The Epstein Files]” could legally be released under federal law is—well, “nonsensical” simply doesn’t cover it. It’s about as big a lie as any White House could tell. It is, put another way, a claim by the White House that if the “personal identifying information” of Epstein victims were redacted from the 300 gigabytes of The Epstein Files—meaning, names, ages, and descriptions of persons that unmistakably establish a victim’s identity (e.g. a distinct tattoo)—over 270 of those 300 gigabytes would have to be wholly blacked out.
This is a lie of such scope and audacity that this attorney—who has been exposed to some astounding bullshit in the course of his legal career—has never encountered its like. No honest lawyer would be willing to say these words to a judge, as such a lie to a tribunal would constitute a major bar violation and would surely lead to bar discipline.
And all this is true even without considering a necessary follow-up point: that victims can be asked to waive redactions; that many Epstein victims have already made their stories public, and therefore would have no problem waiving redaction; and that there is no evidence at all that Trump’s personal lawyers. at the May summit or thereafter, contacted even a single victim to see if they required that their identifying information be redacted. This is yet another piece of evidence that these lawyers didn’t act in the way unconflicted lawyers would act because they were under specific, explicit, and unbreakable orders from a client—the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
It was only after the July FBI-DOJ Memo caused an uproar across America, the Post reports, that Trump’s lawyers suddenly changed tack. Specifically (emphasis supplied), “…under direct instructions from Trump, they petitioned courts in Florida and New York to release grand jury transcripts from the investigations of Epstein and his imprisoned associate Ghislaine Maxwell.”
The problem here is that the leaders of the DOJ and FBI seeking immediate release of documents produced by the government “under direction instructions from Trump” must now apply equally to grand jury transcripts and The Epstein Files. Put another way, if Trump was in charge of the Epstein case situation to the extent that he could order his personal lawyers to seek grand jury transcripts related to Epstein, he was most certainly also in charge and making key decisions with respect to the release of the already-in-hand Epstein Files. Petitioning to get grand jury transcripts from three courts in two different jurisdictions—New York and Florida—is a considerably more complicated, fraught, unusual, and expertise-requiring executive-branch action than simply releasing documents that the executive branch already has. Therefore, if the non-lawyer Trump was supervising the latter process, he most certainly was the key decision-maker with respect to the former—even as he knew that his personal lawyers could and would never admit this in public. They were bound, in his and their view, to permanently keep privileged any discussion of the marching orders they’d received in May.
Further evidence that it was Trump, not his lawyers, running the Epstein Files cover-up comes from the fact that any lawyer knows that when petitioning a court for a federal grand jury transcript the court must hear from the petitioners that they have gotten the position of the victims in the case as to the release of that transcript. And given that the July FBI-DOJ Memo provided as its sole reason for not releasing The Epstein Files was a concern for victims’ rights, we might assume that—if such a false justification indeed originated organically from lawyers at DOJ or the FBI rather than Trump himself—the lawyers on the case would down the line be very sensitive to the rights of Epstein’s victims. So why is it that when Trump’s lawyers petitioned courts in New York and Florida for the release of grand jury transcripts in three Epstein cases, they contacted not a single victim to get prior permission of even a statement of position? That dereliction of duty calls to mind the earlier failure of Trump’s lawyers to ask even a single victim if they would agree to forego redactions so that a maximal percentage of the Epstein Files could be released, and offers us yet another indication that it is Trump himself—who didn’t care about Epstein’s victims in the 1990s or the 2000s and clearly doesn’t care about them now (witness his leniency to the monstrous Ghislaine Maxwell)—who’s running the show with respect to hiding The Epstein Files.
{Note: Trump’s team is so intent on protecting Maxwell that it is now actively punishing inmates who criticize his leniency toward her with transfers to higher-security prisons—an unprecedentedly callous and audacious institutional reprisal that calls to mind how Trump illegally tried to punish his former friend, fixer, attorney, and employee Michael Cohen back in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic or how Trump’s DOJ is now trying to punish the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by threatening to send him to war-torn Uganda rather than the previously offered Costa Rica if he doesn’t take a plea deal on a transparently weak and politically manufactured Human Trafficking case. The weaponization of the justice system under President Trump is yet another instance of the MAGA Maxim being in effect, given how often he and his allies have falsely accused political rivals of the very same thing.}
The second Trump administration’s handling of The Epstein Files has from Day 1:
Exhibited no apparent understanding of the law;
exhibited no apparent respect for Epstein’s victims;
maximized protection of Donald Trump;
given no attention whatsoever to the needs or rights of anyone else;
been replete with easily batted-away fabrications about core facts; and
exhibited a mercurial temperament that is foreign to American legal practice.
What do these things have in common? They’re all consistent with how Donald Trump thinks and acts, and entirely unlike how American attorneys thinks or act—with the exception, one supposes, of any American attorney who has that rarest type of client: one who is guilty, knows nothing about the law, is in grave jeopardy, has no respect for his attorneys, insists on making all the decisions on his case (even those that ABA regulations say an attorney is obligated to make), has no concerns about making his lawyers look like liars by forcing them to mouth ever-changing self-justifications and whims, and has the necessary power to make a lawyer violate his or her oaths to the Constitution, U.S. courts, and the legal profession out of a misguided personal loyalty.
Right now the known population of such clients in the United States is one—and the sole member of that class is Donald Trump. When the president didn’t want to see The Epstein Files released in May, he ordered his lawyers to say the very opposite, of that release, to what they had been saying just days prior. When DOJ and the FBI had no viable reason to oppose the release of The Epstein Files besides one they couldn’t say because of attorney-client privilege—that the President of the United States was so afraid of the Files that he wanted them hidden forever—they put out the July FBI-DOJ Memo, which reflected political rhetoric and personal sentiment from Trump, not anything a lawyer would write (for instance, by falsely claiming that over 90% of the Files had to be redacted, by fully ignoring their ability to seek limited redactions by contacting victims directly, and, more recently, by agreeing to turn over portions of the Files to Congress only to have this revealed as a “bait-and-switch” gambit—with the newly released portion of the Files being that portion already in the public domain).
And when the July FBI-DOJ Memo was, predictably, a public relations dud, Trump’s lawyers—as they admit—acted under Trump’s “direct” orders and sought grand jury transcripts that Trump knew would be useless to his political enemies because they were merely the words prosecutors in his employ in the first Trump administration had said in cases that (as Book One detailed) Trump’s employees deliberately abridged to ensure they didn’t focus on the period of time Trump was best friends with Epstein or include any allegations that would mention Trump at all. It would later be revealed that even had DOJ managed to get the transcripts in question, which in the event it was flatly refused, Americans fascinated by the Epstein case would only have been treated to mundane, bare-bones testimony from a couple of law enforcement officers—no victims or other percipient eyewitnesses.
All this indeed bears the hallmark of how one man in particular thinks of the Epstein case, Epstein’s victims, and candidly the whole legal system writ large: Donald Trump.
At a minimum, it reflects the machinations of political aides to Trump who are not lawyers and see their role, as overseen by Trump, as a bare-knuckle brawl to protect their party’s uncontested, authoritarian leader against people like… well, rape victims.
And where have we seen exactly this sort of contempt for sex-crime victims before? In the 2000s prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein that was overseen by federal prosecutor Alex Acosta, who just a few years later Trump would reward by making him Secretary of Labor. The scandal surrounding that 2000s prosecution centered on the fact that Trump’s Labor pick, Acosta, refused to keep victims apprised of what he was doing, so focused was he on ensuring a good outcome for a rich, powerful, Republican serial sexual predator from Florida. Now it’s 2025, and Americans again see prosecutors tied to Trump refusing to keep Epstein victims apprised of what they’re doing, so focused are they on ensuring a good outcome for a rich, powerful, Republican serial sexual predator from Florida. Anyone who wonders how Donald Trump might have reacted to learning that Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting his Mar-a-Lago employees to be rape victims in the 1990s, or to the knowledge he surely gleaned from Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct during their long friendship to the effect that Epstein was a dangerous sexual deviant, need look no further than how he’s treated Epstein’s victims in this decade.
Even the Trump lawyers involved in both time-periods are largely the same. In the 2000s, Epstein was represented by Alan Dershowitz; in the 2010s Dershowitz became a Trump lawyer, and now in the 2020s (see Book One) he brags about aiding Ghislaine Maxwell in getting the attention of the second Trump administration (the one run by his client). Trump’s personal lawyer Pam Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General when Epstein was America’s worst-ever child sex trafficker; she did nothing about that, and Trump rewarded her by first making her his personal attorney and then the Attorney General of the United States. Trump rewarded Jeffrey Epstein’s corrupt 2000s federal prosecutor with a huge promotion, and only let him go when the political fallout of his hire threatened to derail the new president’s first-term agenda. Trump’s personal lawyer Kash Patel may not have been involved in Epstein’s 2000s case in Florida, but his theatrically fanatical and supposedly earnest commitment to ensuring the release of all information on Jeffrey Epstein in the possession of the federal government literally evaporated the very day the second Trump administration started. Instead, the only person atop the FBI or DOJ who appears to have remained angry about what Epstein did—and the possibility that all the evidence of what he did will remain hidden—is Dan Bongino, who also happens to be the only person in all this who’s not a Trump lawyer and therefore not privy to what Trump may have told his lawyers about his own guilt. He’s also the only one of these officials who is, surely not coincidentally, likely on his way out now (as his replacement at the Bureau has just been hired by Trump).
Chapter 18: Why the Epstein Files Endanger Trump
So how could 300 gigabytes of Epstein case files that in significant part (or so it’s now believed) focus on the experiences and testimony of Epstein’s most famous victim—the late Virginia Giuffre—so endanger Trump that he’d try to block the release of the entire Epstein case file?
This is a riddle with two highly probable answers: either there’s something in the case file Trump was made aware of by his lawyers in May that immediately prompted him to veto their past plans—stated publicly—to release “everything” to America, or there was something in Virginia Giuffre’s story that Americans had missed and that Trump feared, when he issued his private veto in May, they would not miss for much longer.
Book One of Proof of Devilry included some aspects of the Giuffre Case that are well known to Epstein researchers but less known to the public because corporate media doesn’t know them or won’t report them. Most notable among these are the following:
Donald Trump had a friendly relationship with Giuffre’s father. Her father was a maintenance man who Trump personally wrote a letter of recommendation for—a very unusual occurrence that was deemed worthy of note at the time.
Virginia Giuffre got her job at Mar-a-Lago because Trump agreed to it after a request from her father. This constitutes a second indication that Trump was particularly fond of Virginia’s father.
Donald Trump solely got involved with Mar-a-Lago spa hires—and did so only because he treated that hiring process like he treats his beauty pageants, as a matter of attractiveness rather than experience, qualifications, or competence. This is critical to remember because it at once underscores what Trump saw his spa attendants as being for (to be ogled, harassed, and propositioned by his rich male cliente, not enjoyed for their professional skills as masseuses or attendants) and why he chose this component of Mar-a-Lago’s ops to be involved in to the exclusion, by his own admission, of any other component: (1) because in the 1990s and 2000s (and presumably still) he deemed himself to be an expert on the female form, in particular the attractiveness of the sort of very young women who were known to appear in his pageants (both Miss USA and Miss Teen USA), and (2) because he wanted, from the 1990s to the 2000s, to personally inspect incoming merchandise at Mar-a-Lago with an eye toward possibly sampling it himself (the sort of grotesque objectification of women we see in the Juliette Incident above, during which Trump analyzed nubile young Trump employees, including mere teenagers like Virginia Giuffre, to irresistible bottles of liquor).
Epstein, Trump’s longtime best friend, has provided ample testimonial evidence that Trump likes most to betray those who have come to trust him. This item surely speaks for itself, but one aspect of it must be emphasized: that Epstein says Trump derives genuine pleasure—an emotion Trump feels far less than many think, as all his biographers know—from first getting strangers to trust him and then hurting them. MAGAism is arguably that pseudosexual kink writ large, but back in the 1990s and 2000s Trump wasn’t President of the United States, so this kink could only be advanced and appeased by screwing over people one at a time. While doing so to the rich and powerful presented Trump with unique dangers, he was willing to take that risk; from this vantage point, his willingness to exploit the trust of a “mere” maintenance man like Virginia Giuffre’s father seems nearly a foregone conclusion.
When Virginia Giuffre was hired by Trump, she was underage. This is not in itself so bizarre; we do often find kids who are 14 or 15 or 16 taking odd jobs to make summer money: lifeguarding, babysitting, and so on. The point here is that as long as the job is an appropriate one for a younger teen and it doesn’t meet the definition of child labor (or forced labor of any kind), it’s fine. The question, rather, is whether Trump made a habit of hiring underage workers at Mar-a-Lago in the very same way he’s made a habit of hiring undocumented persons even as he rails against such “invaders.”
The job Trump gave to the underage Virginia Giuffre was wholly inappropriate. Giuffre was made a locker room attendant—the most inappropriate job that an underage worker could have at Mar-a-Lago, as put her in close proximity to naked adults on a daily basis. No explanation has ever been given for why this was the job Giuffre was given; a sprawling country club like Trump’s has numberless roles more suited to underage part-time workers.
Within mere days of Trump making the underage Virginia Giuffre a locker room attendant, she was recruited to be a sex slave. The fact that Giuffre was scooped up by the best friend of the owner of the club just a matter of days after he made her a locker room attendant would be considered a major break in the case by any federal criminal investigator or criminal defense attorney. Coincidences are always a possible explanation in criminal investigations, but they’re never a first presumption when two items within a fact-pattern align as these two do.
The recruiting was done directly by a friend of Donald Trump, the man who had put the underage Virginia Giuffre where a child sex trafficker found her. This fact can’t be overemphasized, as it pushes these events well beyond the level of mere coincidence. That is, Giuffre wasn’t recruited away from Mar-a-Lago by a random third party, later landing—by happenstance—with the best friend of the man who’d hired her at Mar-a-Lago, she was recruited by Trump’s very close friend Ghislaine Maxwell just days after Trump put her in Maxwell’s way as a locker room attendant. And she was put in Maxwell’s way at a time when Trump likely would have been aware that Epstein had Maxwell hitting the streets of Palm Beach on a daily basis looking for sex slaves; Trump would have been aware of this because his ex-wife Ivana, with whom he was still close, was Maxwell’s best friend and often observed her trawling local schools in this way. As detailed by Epstein victim Marie Farmer and discussed by Proof in Book One, Maxwell was almost frantic to find sex slaves for Epstein because (a) he “needed” to experience an orgasm three times a day, (b) his sex slaves were seen by him as having “aged out” of his service once they turned 18, and (c) she was doing so much of her vile “recruiting” right in the Palm Beach area that she quickly ran out of attractive teens to victimize—so much so that she was paying the sex slaves themselves to find new future Epstein sex slaves, a tragicomic child sex-trafficking Ponzi scheme of her own derivation. In short, Trump and Ivana’s good friend Ghislaine Maxwell was regularly at Mar-a-Lago and regularly on the hunt for sex slaves and Trump was not unaware of it. Indeed, he’s now admitted that he was aware at the time and that he knew Epstein and Maxwell were specifically targeting his spa (the one segment of his work force, it must be remembered, that he’d personally selected).
The recruitment happened in 1997 or 1998, and had nothing to do with the falling out between Trump and Epstein in 2004. Proof has already written, in Book One, about why and how Trump and Epstein fell out, and it had to do with a 2004 real estate deal in which Trump cruelly cheated Epstein. The notion that their 17-year friendship ended because of anything that happened in the century prior is preposterous; there’s no evidence whatsoever to support such a claim, despite Trump making it repeatedly for many, many years (almost two decades).
Trump has a history of directly pimping underage girls, and in fact that’s the very business he was in in 1998, when Giuffre was recruited by his good friend Ghislaine Maxwell. Book One establishes beyond any doubt that in the 1990s, including the late 1990s, Trump was running cocaine-and-underage-sex fueled parties at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, a hotel he owned. He had at least one man who procured teens for him, with the aim being to set them up with his rich and powerful friends. That man’s name was Andy Lucchesi. Lucchesi has since admitted that some of the girls were as young as “14” and that he never asked anyone’s age (one presumes, quite deliberately, given that these girls were being plied with booze and hard drugs as they were propositioned for sex by men three times their age). So were anyone to accuse Trump of using a Florida property, Mar-a-Lago, to pimp underage girls to his rich friends Epstein and Maxwell, a reasonable first reply would be that yes, this does fit his illicit modus operandi.
Trump has been accused of human trafficking before, and these allegations were always associated with his attempts to get into “modeling”—apparently as an excuse to gain access to unlimited teenage and young-twenty-something girls, not because he had any real interest in modeling per se. As Book One established, the 1999-founded Trump Model Management was merely a “date farm,” that is, a way for Trump to set up rich friends with young models for “dates” (a euphemism, often, for sex). Proof has also previously established that many Trump business associates, both in and out of the modeling industry, were confirmed human traffickers.
Epstein helped Trump to convert his personal home into the Mar-a-Lago club in the mid-1990s, assisting Trump financially during a period (1985-1994) he had lost a billion dollars. Book One explained that this is likely why Epstein didn’t have a “membership” at Mar-a-Lago per se, though he was a “fixture” there and could have afforded one, given his vast wealth, with his pocket change. But he didn’t require a membership because he was effectively the reason the club came to exist. By the same token, Trump could hardly stop Epstein from sending his agent Maxwell to recruit sex slaves at Mar-a-Lago because (a) Epstein was in the general sense of things, if not legally, a co-creator of Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s de facto business partner (certainly this is how we now know he was representing himself to the media whether it was true or not, creating a sense of this status even if it was nowhere mirrored in any contract signed by either man); (b) Epstein was aware Trump was using the Plaza Hotel to pimp underage girls, a fact that would leave Trump with no basis to dispute or contend with what Epstein was doing in southern Florida even if he had a problem with it; (c) Epstein knew, by 1999—the year after Giuffre’s recruitment—that Trump was also using the just-founded Trump Model Management to push teens on his rich and powerful friends, so here again Epstein would have understood that Trump had no basis to decry the same thing implicitly happening at Mar-a-Lago; and (d) given how much money Trump would have owed Epstein for his financial assistance in converting Mar-a-Lago to a club, it may have been that Trump was legally and/or financially not in a position to even have an opinion on what Jeffrey Epstein and his agent Ghislaine Maxwell were doing right out in the open at Mar-a-Lago.
With all this as a backdrop—and with the core premise of this chapter being that there’s something about the Virginia Giuffre case in particular Trump doesn’t want revisited, and feels he could be threatened by if millions of amateur sleuths across the United States are set loose on The Epstein Files—here are some key new pieces of information to consider:
The member of the Trump Family with the best line-of-sight on what Epstein and Maxwell and—it appears—Trump were doing at Mar-a-Lago and around Palm Beach was Ivana Trump, who died mysteriously in a fall. We can all say that the death of Ivana Trump wasn’t suspicious, but when someone falls in their own house with no witnesses and dies in a way that their ex-husband’s closest foreign ally (Vladimir Putin) tends to kill people, of course there should be some suspicion. And of course there must be suspicion when the decedent previously claimed she was raped by that same ex-husband, when that ex-husband honored her life and memorialized her death by turning her gravesite into a virtually unmarked piled of dirt on his golf course (one that allowed him to get tax breaks for using the course as a “cemetery”), and when her home had an elevator she could have used instead of stairs if she was feeling particularly fragile or unsteady on a given day (and here it’s worth noting that Ivana and her friends acknowledged the stairs to be “treacherous,” so she would have had good cause to ignore them as needed—even as this very treachery would also have provided hypothetical foreign agents an excellent excuse to use them as a backdrop for any foul play). But none of this is evidence of Ivana dying via homicide; it’s merely circumstantial evidence of a rather unusual death. But this changes if we consider, atop all this, the following: Ivana Trump was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein’s procurement agent, Ghislaine Maxwell, and in this capacity Ivana regularly observed Maxwell recruiting kids; Trump felt that Ivana hadn’t always been “loyal” to him, at least by his definition of that term, meaning that she was the only member of the family that he couldn’t entirely trust and he’s said in the past that he “loves getting even with people” (a distinction between Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, the latter of whom has long since converted to what almost seems to be a Trumpist religion); that Ivana died at her home without any witnesses just a few months before Trump launched a re-election bid that was intended to keep him out of prison over January 6, and died at a time Trump was already aware this run was coming and would, like his 2016 run, face possible obstacles relating to Epstein and Maxwell; and that during Trump’s 2016 presidential bid Steve Bannon said Jeffrey Epstein was the biggest threat to Trump, but since Epstein’s 2019 death in Trump’s custody the leading witnesses against Trump as he ramped up for another reelection bid in 2022 were Ghislaine Maxwell (who was in prison by the time Trump launched his campaign, and who he’s considering pardoning now) and Ivana. All this does raise questions about the manner of her death being identical to both primary means of homicide—(1) induced heart attack, (2) fall—used by the foreign intelligence services most set on ensuring Trump’s re-election in 2024, namely Russia’s intelligence services. (If Trump had his freedom on the line in the 2024 election, Russia had the result of an entire war at stake, giving it a reason to apprehend great danger from people like Ivana with incriminating Epstein-related knowledge.
Virginia Giuffre came to Mar-a-Lago through the same sort of modeling channels that Trump was at the time using at the Plaza Hotel. As Book One notes, Lucchesi—Trump’s procurer, i.e. his Ghislaine Maxwell, albeit with some critical differences discussed supra—said that he was mostly getting teen models for Trump from second- and third-tier modeling agencies, which was one of the reasons Trump’s Plaza Hotel parties were, per Lucchesi, treated by Trump as a means to ramp up to the creation of his own Trump Model Management in 1999 (though Lucceshi doesn’t say so in his interview with The Daily Beast, he strongly implies that the Plaza Hotel parties helped Trump create TMM because he could poach the prettiest teens and young twenty-somethings who came to his property in New York for alcohol, drugs, sex, and an illusory chance at stardom from their current, second- and third-tier modeling operations). As revealed in a 2019 Simon & Schuster book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the convicted Miami human trafficker and pimp who Virginia Giuffre lived with before ending up at Mar-a-Lago, Ron Eppinger, allegedly ran a front business for an international sex trafficking operation—and that front business was a modeling agency (Perfect 10). Perfect 10 was eventually raided by the FBI, and Eppinger later pleaded guilty to serious sex crimes and Money Laundering, while Giuffre ended up at Mar-a-Lago, a property owned by a would-be modeling agency head, Trump, who was at that very moment in the process of scooping up models from lesser entities like (one presumes) an ersatz modeling agency like Perfect 10. Indeed, once Trump finally founded TMM, it would face immigration and labor and “date farm” complaints reminiscent of the sort of illicit activities Eppinger (and, for that matter, many Trump associates) were involved in at the time.
Former Trump campaign CEO and top presidential adviser Steve Bannon’s long obsession with Jeffrey Epstein was predicated on his belief that Epstein was in fact a multinational intelligence operative engaged in “honey pot” operations—and Bannon’s conduct since Epstein’s death suggests that he seeks to involve himself even deeper with such operations, precisely the sort of operations that foreign intelligence agencies would indeed kill to keep secret. As Rolling Stone reports, since Epstein’s mysterious death in Trump’s custody “Steve Bannon has become a close to Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire living in New York who has been locked in a dispute with his homeland. Guo has accused Chinese Communist Party officials of corruption; China has accused him of bribery, fraud, and blackmail. At the same time, Guo has been accused by one of his former business partners and a Chinese media star of, among other things, sexual blackmail. According to a lawsuit filed in New York and reports in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Guo allegedly used prostitutes and hidden cameras to compromise powerful figures as a means of clout and control. A message sent to Guo’s representative seeking comment was not returned. Just as he helped elevate Epstein’s status, Bannon has attempted to legitimize Guo. He has served on the boards of companies and nonprofits linked to Guo, some of which are reportedly under federal investigation. He had been living on Guo’s yacht when he was arrested last year for defrauding donors to a group trying to build Trump’s border wall.” All this operates as a sort of déjà vu for Epstein researchers, with Guo’s alleged blackmail methods mirroring Epstein’s reputed ones, Bannon appearing to have information suggesting that the largest sexual blackmail rings worldwide are indeed tapped into dangerous foreign-intelligence operations, and Trump’s pardon of Bannon for crimes ostensibly unrelated to Trump implying that either (a) they actually do have something to do with Trump, or (b) Trump feels compelled to keep Bannon safe and happy at a time when his primary hobby involves immersing himself in the sexual blackmail milieu and, as Rolling Stone explains, all the seedy intelligence networks, American and foreign, connected thereto.
Jeffrey Epstein had a history of using entities he had invested in as a front for Child Sex Trafficking. Ghislaine Maxwell aside, the two most important people in Jeffrey Epstein’s life for almost the entire duration of his Child Sex Trafficking ring were Les Wexner (of Victoria’s Secret) and Donald Trump (of the Mar-a-Lago club and other Trump properties). As discussed in Book One, Epstein began using his supposed—but actually illusory—connection to Victoria’s Secret, once he had begun commingling his financial life with Wexner’s, as a front for commiting acts of Sexual Assault. If Trump pimping teens in New York in 1998 is one extremely strong indication that he would have had no moral qualms about doing the same thing at another one of his properties, something similar can be said of Epstein: if he used his close personal and financial ties to Wexner to advance serial sexual predations, and if he in fact helped Trump make Mar-a-Lago a club as he told a Forbes journalist in December 2017, why wouldn’t he have used his close personal and financial ties to Trump to systematically turn Mar-a-Lago into another site for advancing his sexual deviancy and sex crimes? For that matter, given that Mr. Trump has been dogged by credible rumors for many years that he had used his properties to gather information on foreign-national tenants he later transmitted to Russian or American intelligence agencies or both, wouldn’t that give Trump both (a) experience in using his properties for clandestine and illicit purposes and (b) give him a sense of invulnerability specifically with respect to illicit activity at his properties, not just the Plaza Hotel but also Mar-a-Lago? In short, if Trump has ever, as alleged, misused his properties for intelligence purposes, it makes it all but impossible for law enforcement to investigate Trump misusing any of his properties—as doing so might interfere with ongoing intelligence operations. He would know and understand this, and would understand how well it protects him.
Trump’s latest statements about Virginia Giuffre confirm both that he is scared of her case in particular and that therefore—and not coincidentally—the lies he had told about her case in particular are the most desperate and easily pierced. For years, as Book One tracked, Trump would give one of two false answers to the question of why he and Epstein had a falling out: (i) less commonly, he would say that he didn’t want to talk about it and that it wasn’t a big deal or an interesting story, both of which are of course false; (ii) more commonly, he would say that Epstein had made a “pass” or an “advance” at the “daughter” of a “club member” and that this immediately led Trump to “ban” Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. But both Proof and major media have often reported the truth: Trump and Epstein fell out over an extremely strange, Trump-Russia Scandal-related real estate deal in 2004. But on July 29, 2025, Trump introduced a fourth explanation—and the third one that he personally has provided—which is that Trump now says he and Epstein fell out because Epstein was stealing his employees. The problem for Trump, as the next chapter explores, is that when all its contours are understood, this bold statement amounts to an confession of premeditated Child Sex Trafficking.
All of these new facts bolster the theory of the case that holds that Donald Trump was for many years himself a child sex trafficker, a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein who was, while Epstein was still alive, threatened by Epstein’s continued existence. Why? Because if the two men were co-conspirators, whatever happened to Epstein could happen to Trump—and to the extent Epstein’s end of the operation had intelligence implications and therefore a potential geopolitical fallout, so too did Trump’s.
By way of example, if Epstein displeased his three primary nation-state partners (Russia, the Saudi-Emirati alliance, and Israel) those countries could burn him and Trump. Just so, pleasing those nation-state partners could (and did) enrich Epstein—and held the same potential for Trump. The riches could make anything possible for Trump business-wise and/or politically, even as the opposite reaction from these nation-states could end Trump’s political career, expose him as a potential asset (if not an agent) of foreign powers, endanger his life, put him at grave risk of investigation and prosecution and incarceration, and bring his entire international business empire to ruin. In short, Epstein’s secrets—and secret life—held Trump’s own in the balance.
And avoiding going down like that was worth—and is still worth—doing anything.
Chapter 19: The Virginia Giuffre Tragedy
Virginia Giuffre is one of the countless people in this saga who are no longer alive.
Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump “fell.”
Jeffrey Epstein “hanged himself” while in Trump’s custody.
A modeling agent, Jean-Luc Brunel, who helped Epstein bring girls to America—thus, an alleged co-conspirator of Epstein, who would also be a Trump co-conspirator if the theory of the case presented in this report is accurate—also “hanged himself” while in custody.
Of all the potential key witnesses against Trump, many are dead by mysterious means—or died, conveniently for Trump and every other Epstein associate, during the most critical and illuminating state and federal investigative processes in the Epstein case.
Leading Epstein biographer Wendy Leigh died from a “fall.” Detective Joseph Recarey of the Palm Beach Police via “sudden illness” in 2018. Leading Epstein investigative journalist John Connolly died from a “brief illness” in 2022. Former Epstein house manager Alfredo Rodriguez died of mesothelioma in 2015. Alleged Epstein client Marvin Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2016. Many of the most well-known Epstein victims have died from sudden drug overdoses (e.g., Virginia Giuffre in 2025, Carolyn Andriano in 2023, Leigh Skye Patrick in 2017), all of these publicly described as “suicides.” One of the men who was Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel’s version of Trump’s Andy Lucchesi—a “party promoter,” as it’s euphemistically put—also died mysteriously of a suspected “drug overdose” in 2012. Mark Middleton, the former Bill Clinton aide with alleged “links to Jeffrey Epstein,” allegedly committed “suicide” in 2022—though a shotgun was found at the scene after local police had initially said there was no weapon present. Epstein “mentor” Steve Hoffenberg, referenced in this book supra as a key source on the matter of Epstein’s place in Trump’s social life, was found dead under mysterious circumstances in 2022. Epstein lawyer Roy Black died just a few days ago. Other key witnesses are either imprisoned and, because they’re in Donald Trump’s custody, beholden to him (e.g., Ghislaine Maxwell) or else are in the custody of his reputed co-conspirator in all this and much else, Vladimir Putin, and therefore beholden to him (e.g., Michael Dougan). And most of the people supposedly looking into all this are Trump’s personal lawyers, such as the aforementioned Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Jeanine Pirro, Alina Habba, D. John Sauer, and Kash Patel.
Maybe none of the above deaths or circumstances are suspicious. We don’t know. The point is that there’s no trusted, neutral body that will ever look into any of this. Even if Democrats were somehow able to regain the House in November 2026—despite a publicly stated plan by Donald Trump and his agents to rig the midterms through unprecedented and dubiously legal nonstandard gerrymandering schemes in Texas, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, and other red states that Trump claims will net Republicans double-digit seats—Trump’s critics still wouldn’t gain subpoena power in the United States House of Representatives until early January 2027. Right now it’s August 2025.
For now, the most that can be done is to tell the stories of some of these victims when and as possible, with Virginia Giuffre’s undoubtedly being one of the most tragic. She experienced abuse in her home life early on, ran away and ended up in the hands of a Miami sex trafficker, and then, when he was arrested, ended up in the clutches of yet another serial sexual predator, Donald Trump, and just a matter of days later the sex-slave procurer for Trump’s best friend Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell. From there she’d end up getting victimized countless times by Epstein himself, and then, after her death, get blamed for all this—under the sponsorship of a DOJ-provided transcript overseen by Trump lawyer Todd Blanche—by convicted child sex-trafficker Maxwell.
But for all this suffering, Giuffre was never before thought to figure prominently in Trump’s role in Epstein’s many sex crimes, and certainly never featured in Trump’s pathologically deceitful recollections of his seventeen-year friendship with Epstein.
Which is why it seemed so odd that suddenly—once he came into possession of The Epstein Files—Trump seemed dead set on them never being seen by researchers in the United States or around the world. After all, wasn’t much of the Epstein case file just a discussion of known Epstein victims like Virginia Giuffre? How could that ever threaten Trump? And what did Giuffre’s story, or those of Epstein victims like her, have to do with (and/or in some way imperil) the story of Jeffrey Epstein that Trump has sworn for decades now is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Apparently everything.
Indeed, as he now faces the daily risk that the Virginia Giuffre-focused Epstein Files will leak to the press and thereafter the American public, here’s the new version of events Donald Trump has just debuted for America and the world (a roll-out that began on July 29 2025):
QUESTIONER: Mr. President, Jeffrey Epstein has a certain reputation, obviously. Just curious, were some of the workers that were taken from you [at Mar-a-Lago], were some of them young women?
TRUMP: Well, I don’t want to say, but everyone knows the people that were taken. And the concept of taking people that work for me is bad, but that story’s been pretty well out there. And the answer is yes, they were [young women who were taken from Mar-a-Lago].
Q: Yes, they were young women?
TRUMP: Yeah.Q: What did they [the young women] do [at Mar-a-Lago]?
TRUMP: In the spa.
Q: What were their jobs? The spa?
TRUMP: Yeah. People that work in the spa.
{NB: Proof is here cutting out here a Trump digression that is exclusively on the subject of how great the Mar-a-Lago spa is.}
TRUMP: People were taken out of the spa. Hired, by [Jeffrey Epstein]. In other words, gone. And other people would come [to me] and complain, ‘This guy is taking people from the spa.’ I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it I told [Jeffrey], ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people. Whether it [is] spa or not spa, I don’t want [you] taking our people.’ And he was fine [with that]. And then not too long after that he did it again and I said, ‘[You’re] outta here.’
QUESTIONER (second questioner): Mr. President, did one of those stolen persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?
TRUMP: Uh, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yep. He stole her.
There are almost too many elements to unpack in this astonishing exchange.
Trump is falsely claiming—out of nowhere—that everyone knows his best friend was using his property as a recruitment ground for rape victims. Yet here this author is, an Epstein researcher, and he only knew of one such person: Virginia Giuffre. Certainly, there may be those researchers who have dedicated more years to this subject who can name more such victim, but here we see Donald Trump (a) admitting for the first time that there are any, but also in the same breath trying to (b) create an entirely new reality in which everyone already knows that there are many such Mar-a-Lago rape victims. It’s jaw-dropping. It beggars understanding.
If in fact Trump was aware that there were multiple rape victims recruited from Mar-a-Lago, why didn’t he stop it immediately and inform the police? This can’t be emphasized enough: Trump is confessing here that his property was used as a primary recruitment locus for a child sex trafficking ring in the 1990s, and we not only have no documented history of Trump reporting that to law enforcement, but we have Trump confusingly saying both that he put a stop to it immediately and admitting that he was made aware of rape-victim recruitments happening on more than one occasion, which means of course that he didn’t put a stop to it when he could have and—far from that—actually continued offering up his property as a recruiting ground for his two close friends at the time, Epstein and Maxwell, despite knowing what they were doing because he’d been directly told by his own staff and club members.
So Trump knew what Epstein and Maxwell were doing, and was involved in it either directly or—via action and inaction—indirectly aiding and abetting it. Trump above says that he knew that multiple “people” were taken from Mar-a-Lago by Epstein and Maxwell, which means that when he says “people would come to me and complain” he’s referring to several separate reporting dates. He also reveals that he must have ignored at least some of these complaints, because it was only after some number of them (a number he won’t reveal) that he finally (or so he says) confronted Epstein. He also grudgingly admits that Ms. Giuffre was one of the people Epstein took, with even this grudging concession being incriminating because he begins his acknowledgment by saying “everyone knows the people that were taken….that story’s been pretty well out there” (which could only be referring to Giuffre) but then says it was “not too long after” such an incident that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. In fact, Epstein, as Book One details wasn’t banned from Mar-a-Lago until 2007, so by Trump’s own accounting of time he allowed Epstein to continue being a “fixture” at Mar-a-Lago for a full decade after he was informed of what happened to Giuffre in 1998. The only way Trump’s version of events makes sense is if, between the opening of Mar-a-Lago as a club in 1995 and approximately 2006, Trump was repeatedly informed that Epstein was recruiting “young women” from the “spa” area of Mar-a-Lago and did nothing about it, deciding to act only in 2006 as the investigation of Epstein for sex crimes was well underway. (Nor could this alleged, decade-tardy 2006 action against Mr. Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago status have actually, as Trump claims, been in response to a new violation by Epstein, as by 2007 Epstein knew he was under active state and federal investigation for soliciting underage girls—so he wouldn’t have still been engaging in that activity at Mar-a-Lago). Even in a best-case scenario, Trump’s best friend used Mar-a-Lago to recruit sex slaves for a decade and Trump knew nothing about it despite claiming (in fact as the cornerstone of his whole business empire and political career) that he’s one of the shrewdest and most perceptive men alive.
But it’s impossible that Trump knew nothing about it. Why? Because of what this book has already discussed, supra: the fact that Trump now says he rejected an invitation to go to Little St. James Island sometime between its purchase by Epstein in 1998 and the end of their friendship in 2004, and that he declined the invitation because he was “in one of his very good moments.” As discussed, this means that Trump knew, when his invitation to Little St. James Island arrived, what Epstein was up to in the Caribbean. But if true that would indicate, in turn, that he let Epstein recruit girls from the spa at Mar-a-Lago for a decade—from 1998 to 2007 at a bare minimum (if we assume, as we need not, that Giuffre was Epstein’s first recruitment)—but then sometime between 1998 and 2004 refused to go to St. James Island as an act of conscience. What conscience could that possibly be referring to, if the entire time he’d been letting Epstein recruit sex slaves for Little St. James Island under his nose? Trump’s statements can only be made to make sense if he knew what Epstein was doing with the girls he was recruiting from Mar-a-Lago all along and simply wanted to protect himself from criminal liability for it by transporting himself to the location where the crimes themselves were occurring. Yet even then, we can hardly see Trump as cautious on this score; it was in 2002, after all, that he told New York Magazine that Epstein liked women “on the younger side” and nevertheless called him a “terrific” guy with a vibrant “social life.”
We return, now, to what was understood by top Epstein researchers, up until a few weeks ago at least, as the real reason Trump and Epstein fell out: the 2004 real estate deal discussed in detail in Book One. Jeffrey Epstein said in no uncertain terms to bestselling Trump biographer Michael Wolff—a man to whom Trump himself has often given personal access—that it was in the midst of this dispute that Trump called the Palm Beach Police Department to try to compel them to investigate Epstein for having inappropriately young girls going in and out of his Palm Beach home. Epstein had no doubt that Trump was diming him out to law enforcement, something that, as Proof has detailed, Trump has a history of doing to anyone he wants to get rid of (a very old way to “weaponize the criminal justice system,” Trump’s supposed pet peeve).
Previously, Proof and others had assumed Trump apparently snitching on Epstein on November 28, 2004 was either revenge for their feud or an attempt to sully Epstein so that he couldn’t get the upper hand in their real estate dispute. The latter explanation was always a disfavored one, however, as the Palm Beach Police Department received their tip about Epstein after the real estate feud between Trump and Epstein had been definitively concluded, meaning that Trump would achieve no real estate feud-related benefit from harming Epstein in this way. (And frankly that fact also burdened the first possibility, too—that Trump was seeking revenge on Epstein—because (a) he started the feud and won the feud and was unequivocally in the wrong during the feud, giving him little basis to seek revenge, and (b) if Trump had wanted revenge against Epstein so badly in 2004, why did he wait until 2007 to ban him from Mar-a-Lago?)
We now have new answers to these questions, based on Trump’s own new statements.
Trump didn’t call the police on Epstein out of revenge. He called the police on Epstein because, as Epstein admitted to Wolff, Epstein was extremely angry at Trump after he had been screwed over by Trump—and he really was, quite badly; see Book One—and began to “threaten” Trump on a subject that, even in the 2015 to 2017 period Epstein was regularly meeting with Wolff, he wouldn’t fully reveal.
But it’s now clear what that topic was: Trump’s own involvement in Epstein’s crimes.
Epstein was in a position to use the knowledge he had about Trump in myriad ways, and all of them threatened to destroy Trump—who in 2005, when the Palm Beach Police Department first received a tip about Epstein, would have been looking ahead to a possible presidential run in 2008. If Steve Bannon now confirms that Epstein was the biggest threat to Trump’s candidacy in 2016, that was even more the case in 2005 with respect to a prospective Trump candidacy in 2008 (for the simple reason that Mr. Epstein generated no new dirt on Trump between 2005 and 2016, as they weren’t still friends; Epstein’s fresher dirt during the 2008 election cycle would therefore have been much more damaging to Trump than his by-then-far-older dirt was in 2016).
So when Epstein began threatening Trump in early 2005, Trump would have been—and rightly so—in a panic. The best option he had available to him was to try to get Epstein arrested on such a sprawling sex trafficking case that no one would believe anything Epstein told the police thereafter about various rich johns, as Epstein’s own credibility with law enforcement would by then be sitting at the sub-basement level.
It’s in this context that we must consider that, after Epstein threatened (per Bannon) Trump’s candidacy in 2016, Trump and his team clearly didn’t want the same thing to happen again during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. And it didn’t. Why? Because Trump employees arrested Epstein on old crimes that largely stemmed from when he and Trump weren’t speaking and Epstein almost immediately thereafter died in Trump’s custody.
After Epstein’s death, the top two remaining eyewitnesses in a position to bring down a presidential administration with numerous state-actor supporters—Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel—were Ivana Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell went under investigation by Trump’s employees the same year her ex-boyfriend died, and was indicted by Trump’s employees in July 2020, putting her in exactly the same situation Trump had contrived for her dead ex-boyfriend in late 2005, as he quickly reminded her via an Axios interview, explaining that repeatedly and ostentatiously “wishing [Ghislaine] well” in public was indeed intended to be a reference to her dead ex-boyfriend, with Trump agreeing with the notion that what he was doing was publicly telling his old friend that he hoped she didn’t get murdered in prison. (Trump was, at the time, inexplicably blaming Maxwell’s death on Bill Clinton, often echoed on social media by Donald Trump Jr., with neither man ever explaining why Clinton had even a hundredth of the motive to harm Jeffrey Epstein that the Trump Family did.)
Whether Trump had anything at all to do with Epstein’s death or not, he certainly wanted to create the appearance, in the most mafia-boss-like way possible, that he had been involved with it so that Maxwell wouldn’t rat him out before the 2024 election in the same way he’d feared Epstein would before the 2008, 2016 and 2020 election cycles.
Sidebar: The Katie Johnson Tragedy
The video of Katie Johnson’s testimony appears in this book supra. But it’s worth us returning to it here, for several reasons: (1) it’s just received its first-ever transcription, here; (2) contrary to corporate media’s self-exculpations for refusing to cover this key testimony, Johnson’s account has now been double-corroborated (first by the identity-protected Tiffany Doe, a former Epstein recruiter, who filed her own sworn testimony alongside Johnson’s, and then by a friend of Ms. Johnson who issued sworn testimony declaring that she heard the same account from Johnson many, many years ago that Johnson first made public in the mid-2010s); and (3) both versions of the civil lawsuit Johnson filed were withdrawn for reasons having nothing to do with their substance, as one had simply been filed in the wrong jurisdiction and the other—attached to and signed onto Attorney Lisa Bloom, one of the most experienced and respected rape-victim attorneys in America, and a lawyer trained to spot deceit from such witnesses and not stake her hard-won reputation on improbable claims—was only withdraw because Katie Johnson was receiving death threats and decided to put her life above a lawsuit.
Indeed, the only strike that still supposedly stands against Johnson, at least that U.S. corporate media has ever identified, isn’t one against her at all. Rather, it’s that early on, before Attorney Bloom arrived on-scene, a man with a questionable reputation—a former successful television producer—tried to help Johnson get her story to media.
That man, who Johnson didn’t know previously and who she today has no affiliation with, has said that he believes Johnson and that he helped her for this reason alone.
Nevertheless, in a cruel irony—given the allegations Katie Johnson has made against Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump—corporate media has decided that the reputation of an unrelated man should stand in as a proxy for Katie Johnson’s own reputation, so this producer’s indiscretions are now, inexplicably, used to deface Johnson’s report.
To term this a “re-victimization” of Johnson would be too kind by half to U.S. media.
With all this in mind, here’s the full, transcribed account of Trump’s conduct as told by Johnson, with an analysis thereafter of how this account comports with the other discoveries and revelations detailed in this book.
KATIE JOHNSON: I came to this interview of my free will.
No, there was nothing promised to me for doing this interview.
Yes, everything that I say in this interview will be the truth.
I met Donald Trump at some parties that I was working for Mr. Jeffrey Epstein. There were about three or four times that I had encounters with Donald Trump.
I was 13.
The first time that I met Donald Trump was at a party at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion. There was an orgy going on and he was kind of watching off in the distance. He basically asked if I could come over and give him a hand job.
At first I wasn’t very comfortable with it. This was my first party, and I didn’t think that that was my responsibility. But my recruiter told me that I needed to do it. So I agreed to it and then he, you know, I began to—sorry, this is a little difficult. But before I gave him a hand job, he kind of slapped my hand away and said, “You need to use a glove.” The recruiter ran over and handed me a glove and said, “No one touches Mr. Trump’s penis without a glove.” So I needed to use a glove. I gave him a hand job and then immediately after he had an orgasm he left, and I didn’t see him again at that party.
I originally came to New York trying to be a model, and in my travels I met a girl named Tiffany there who was very interested in me and said that that’s what she did is that she helped girls, you know, get what they wanted. She could help me get into modeling. [She said] that she knew a lot of people that were higher-ups and that it would be no problem.
And so that’s why, you know, [I thought] I would just basically have to come model at a couple of events and meet some people, there would be no sweat. So of course I went, you know, that sounded like no big deal. And she was recruiting the girls to come to these parties and they all looked, I mean—most of them were my age. There were maybe a couple girls that were maybe 14 or 15, but it seemed to me like we were all very young.
Jeffrey Epstein knew that I was 13 years old. When he interviewed me, he asked me to get down to my bra and just my panties and I thought that was weird but, I mean, modeling. Maybe it was something about my figure.
He asked me to give him a massage. He asked me my age, I told him that I was 13, I told him why I was there, and he basically said, “Well, you’ll do, you know, I’m sure that you’ll fit pretty nicely here.”
And then he tried to basically slip himself inside of me.
And I pushed him away and I said, you know, I’m—because at that point in time, I still believed that there were “models” and then there was the girls that did that. Like I thought there was a separation. So I told him that I wasn’t interested in that, but he said that I would do.
And as far as Donald Trump, he knew that I was 13, and I believe that Tiffany told him.
He seemed to take a liking to me because I was so young, and I was also a virgin. So, I don’t know, he seemed like he wasn’t really into having girls that were liked by the other guys. The whole glove thing—he kind of liked things to be his first, you know, for lack of a better term. He was the one who wanted to get to a girl before everyone else did.
Donald Trump knew that I was 13 because the first night that I was there, Tiffany actually suggested that—she had a whole bunch of different wigs, and I expressed interest in them and I always told her that I would love to walk around with blue hair. And so I tried some on and there was a blonde wig that she said that looked great on me.
So, I wore that wig, and Donald Trump had specifically asked about me because I remind him of his daughter and she said, “Well, she’s 13 as well.” So, he knew the first time that he saw me. He took a liking to me because I looked like his daughter.
The reason I’m coming out now is, when it happened originally, I just wanted to forget about the whole incident. And when I saw that he was running for president, I felt that it was my responsibility to come out and tell our country what kind of man this person is. I don’t think that he should even be the dog catcher, let alone running the greatest country in the world…
The first time that I met Jeffrey Epstein, he did try to force himself inside of me without getting the go-ahead or anything. And then it was probably about the third or fourth party is when he basically forced—it was another massage, and it was basically like, it wasn’t sex, but it was, there was penetration. And I told him that I didn’t want that, but he kind of got a little irritated. So, I don’t know, there was something about him that, I guess I kind of held a lot of resentment towards him. By the time that that happened, I already started catching on that maybe I wasn’t there for modeling and maybe I was just getting used for things and I kind of held him responsible.
I did receive money to go to these parties. After every party, I was paid by Mr. Epstein. There wasn’t, out of all the girls that were there with me, most of them were 13, 14. I think the oldest one might have been 16, but just turned 16 and she’d been there for a while…
Second time that I saw Mr. Trump was, same scenario, he was an onlooker at an orgy and Tiffany came over to me and said that Donald Trump had requested that I perform oral sex on him. And never, I’d never done something like that with anybody, so I was a little nervous.
So, I walked up to him and he was sitting there very proud-like, and I just kind of moved in that direction and he kind of slapped me away and said, “What are you doing? You need to put a condom on.” Like I was some dirty filth or something. Tiffany ran over and handed me a condom and apologized profusely and said that would never happen again. And she looked at me and scolded me basically like a child and said that, “That’s not how [you do it]—Donald Trump always, anytime anyone touches his penis, it needs to have a condom on or a glove. Especially when it comes to performing oral sex.”
So I apologized, and then I performed oral sex on him. And once again, once he was done, he hopped up and that’s the last I saw of him at that party. It’s like once he’s done, he’s out.
Some of the things that I noticed that were weird with him: sometimes before the parties he would come over and Jeffrey Epstein and himself would kind of banter back and forth and he was very, Donald Trump was very racist. He said a lot of racist things. There was a lot of comments towards Mr. Epstein about being Jewish and he called him “a Jew bastard,” said that he was “cheap” and there were some words I didn’t even understand. Something about his, you know, the shape of his penis being directly related to his mole or, I mean, I’m not too familiar with the Jewish tradition—but I’m pretty sure that whatever he was saying wasn’t very nice.
He also referred to, you know, people of Hispanic origin, he called them “spicks.” That was around the first time that the World Trade Center had gotten bombed in the 90s. And he was talking about the “towel heads” and how we would just be better off if we didn’t let them in and basically got rid of everyone, every single one that was already here. And it made me really uncomfortable, really, really uncomfortable.
He also loved to call Black people “niggers” and Arabic people he called “sand niggers.”
The only time that he tried to give me some money was our last encounter together, where he acted out a rape fantasy. I was forced to give that money back, because Jeffrey Epstein paid us after the party. I don’t even know why he gave it to me, maybe to make me feel more cheap. It was a rape fantasy to him, but I wasn’t playing.
The next thing that Tiffany approached me with was that [Mr. Trump] had a fantasy where he walked in on his maids—maids basically making out. And it was some type of fantasy for him. At that point, I was like, “I don’t want to be involved with anything that has to do with him.” But she’s like, “You are just basically the other [maid]. So, there’s nothing that you will have to do. Just—he’s requesting you to be involved.”
So, I reluctantly—I mean, I felt like I didn’t have a choice there, but it was basically, he’s walking in on his two maids, I was one of the maids, I was the white maid. And there was a Spanish girl, Maria, who was the Hispanic maid. And we were making out and he walks in and he gets really angry and threatens to call immigration on Maria if she doesn’t come over and make things right and give him a blowjob.
So, while she is over there giving him a blowjob, I’m supposed to look scared like, “Oh, oh no,” cleaning up things and pretending like I’m trying to go back to my job as a maid. And then he’s being so rude to Maria.
I felt so bad for [Maria]. It just didn’t seem like a fantasy. It’s the weirdest fantasy as far as that goes. He was threatening, he was threatening to call “immigration” on her. She wasn’t even near going down to give him, perform oral sex on him, before he slapped her away and said, “What are you doing? You know you need to put a condom on.” And she’s trying to say “I’m so sorry.” And he’s like, “You can’t even—I can’t even understand what you’re saying. Just speak English!” He called her derogatory comments. And then he’s like, “You know what, you don’t know what you’re doing. Have her [Katie] come over and show you how it’s done.” And so I, again, I said that I didn’t—I had to go over there or else he was going to call “immigration” on Maria. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but he said that if I didn’t show her how to perform oral sex on him, then he was going to call “immigration” on her and then “get rid of us both.”
Anything that was in relation to him getting off or being satisfied or happy had to do with him being in power—extreme power. And it was always intimidating when he was like that. You didn’t really know if it was true. If you refused to play along, would he really call immigration on Maria? Would he really “get rid of” us both? And I didn’t even want to know what that meant. It wasn’t a game.
The one night that I had the blonde wig on, [Mr. Trump] mentioned that I reminded him of his daughter. And actually the maid’s fantasy, I didn’t have a blonde wig on. I was trying to stay away from blonde wigs at the time. But he actually requested, [he] told Tiffany that that’s what he wanted me to wear. Like he wanted it, and anytime I put it on, anytime I had it on and he’d see me, he would say, “Oh man, you look—” and it wasn’t like a[n], “Oh, you remind me of my daughter.” It was this sick, evil “You remind me of my daughter.”
It was just this weird pleasure, sick smile. Like I don’t even want to know what he was thinking about. [But] I could imagine what he was thinking about.
After the parties would end, we were to report to Mr. Epstein and basically tell him everything that happened, with who, what they liked, what they disliked, if there was any requests, if there was any talk about anything.
That’s what we told Mr. Epstein—everything. And then he paid us, and then we got to go home.
The fact that Trump has a chance to be the next president makes me feel disgusting inside. I’ve always been proud to be an American. I think we live in a beautiful country. But I just see him ruining everything. He’s horrible, what he portrays on the outside isn’t even that great, but people don’t even know the half of how evil, how sick and twisted that man is. I have a friend that’s been my friend ever since the school year that I stopped going, the eighth grade. I confided in her, and she knows all about it. She knows everything…
I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to save the country that I believe that we have. I know what he does behind closed doors. I’m willing to sacrifice my life to put our country back in the right—like, going maybe in some type of positive direction. Not even, there’s no right or wrong, but a positive direction. This guy’s not going to take us anywhere positive.
You know, as far as my life changing by coming out with this information, I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not I should. And I’ve gone back and forth. But I think that the American people need to know what kind of man this person is. And if my life changes because of that, then so be it. But the American people need to know what they’re dealing with.
If I had the chance to talk to Donald Trump, I would run the other way. I’m scared of him like I’ve never been scared of anything else in my entire life. I can’t explain it to you, but the fear of him even being in a next room, I have a panic attack.
The last encounter that I had with Donald Trump, Tiffany approached me about a rape scene that was supposed to be played out. And I didn’t like the sound of that at all. But Tiffany promised, assured me that it wasn’t going to be—if it was anything I wasn’t comfortable with, we could stop. That she would be right there and that it wouldn’t get out of hand. And that it was just a fantasy, like it wasn’t really going to happen. And so I told her that I would. I mean Tiffany was always nice to me. I trusted her, or else I wouldn’t have always done what she asked me to.
But she was there and he came in and I was basically tied to a bed with pantyhose. And they were so tight it hurt to even lay there. And I tried to say something and he was just “Shut up! Shut up, bitch!” He was being really, really rough.
It just didn’t seem like a fantasy. And I started to get scared and he was basically like ripping my clothes off. And I got freaked out. I told him that I didn’t want to do this. I screamed over for Tiffany and she was like, “Mr. Trump, she’s only, she’s not—this is scaring her.” And he’s like, “Oh you shut up, too.”
He just turned into this animal. It was like a completely different, completely different person. It was like everyone in the room was scared of him. And I couldn’t do anything about it.
He ripped off all my clothes and he started to basically have sex with me and I was screaming. I’d never had sex before, it was my first time, and Tiffany was yelling at him too. She was saying I was a virgin, and he told us to just shut the fuck up and just basically took my virginity while I was crying and telling him to stop and basically begging for him to just stop. And Tiffany didn’t know what else to do either. No one was there to help us, or me. And so, after the fact, he basically finishes. It didn’t take that long at all. But it felt like it was like five and a half hours. It felt like it was an eternity.
I was crying and Tiffany was consoling me and she was apologizing. She told me that she would never put me in that situation again. But he comes over mad because I was crying and he said that I should be thankful that someone like Donald Trump took my virginity. Well, he didn’t say “took my virginity.” He said, I should be glad that someone like Donald Trump popped my cherry and not some pimply little 14 year-old.
And I just was like, “What if I get pregnant?” Not even talking to him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I was talking to Tiffany and he said, “Well, you’ll get an abortion then, bitch.” And then just walked away. And I told Tiffany I needed to go home.
I never went back again.
I guess it’s for you to decide. I don’t have any kids myself, because I’m afraid to have kids because who knows what kind of damage they can get into, but if you have a 13-year-old daughter, would you be okay with the person who’s running our country doing that to your little girl? And I just, I don’t know. I just want people to know. I think that I have a faith in our society that we’ll make the right choice. He seemed to be taking great pleasure in dominance and control and the more I screamed, the more I got scared, the more he was enraged with power and it was like he was just charged with it. It was scary.
A federal criminal investigator would go through this testimony with a fine-toothed comb, asking at every turn not only which narrative beats are consistent with what’s known about the people and places involved—or, as applicable, inconsistent—but also asking which of these facts were or weren’t widely known in 2016, when Johnson’s narrative came to light.
With this in mind, it’s worth recalling that most of what we know about Mr. Epstein’s activities came out well after Katie Johnson’s testimony. In 2016, public awareness of Epstein’s past was virtually nil, as even the Alex Acosta imbroglio of 2017 was still yet to unfold. Knowledge of Epstein was largely limited to a small subset of people living in a part of southern Florida in the 2000s—people who were, perhaps, vaguely aware that one of their neighbors had gotten himself pinched for (essentially) being a john, and not, it must be underscored, running some sort of sex trafficking or rape scheme.
So for instance, besides the core facts of the Johnson Allegation that lend it legitimacy—two witness corroborations; the involvement of Attorney Bloom; the willingness of a crime victim to say the things Johnson did when, in 2016’s political environment, it really could mean getting killed by a fanatical MAGA voter; the fact that 67 women (at a bare minimum) have experienced sexual misconduct at the hands of Donald Trump and 27 have gone public, meaning this sort of behavior is very much on-brand for Mr. Trump, up to and including Rape—there are also the following yes-or-no checks that investigators can now run on what Katie Johnson has alleged about Donald Trump.
Did Jeffrey Epstein throw parties that included orgies? Yes.
Did Donald Trump go to Epstein’s home for social events? Yes.
Is Donald Trump a known germaphobe? Yes.
Does Donald Trump often compare women he’s attracted to to his daughter? Yes.
Has Trump expressed a potential for sexual attraction to 13 year-olds? Yes.
Did Epstein use young female “recruiters” to manage his girls? Yes.
Did Epstein pay girls to act as hostesses and sexual playthings? Yes.
Is Donald Trump know to use the “n-word” freely? Yes.
Is Donald Trump known to employ antisemitic stereotypes in conversation? Yes.
Does Trump see many or most Brown people as potential illegal immigrants? Yes.
As an adjudicated rapist, is Trump categorically to be deemed capable of Rape? Yes.
Is Trump known to speak misogynistically to females? Yes.
Is Donald Trump “pro-choice” if the alternative is siring an unwanted child? Yes.
Is Trump known to turn into “a completely different person” when aroused? Yes.
Is Trump (in view of the revelations in Michael Cohen’s Disloyal) voyeuristic? Yes.
Was Trump known to attend parties in the 1990s where public sex occurred? Yes.
Were Trump and Epstein close enough to regularly “banter” at parties? Yes.
Is Trump known to not take the rape of teenagers seriously? Yes.
Do Trump’s statements about his own sexual predilections suggest a tendency toward “rape fantasies”? Yes.
Does Trump sometimes try to leave money for women he has had sex with, if he somehow considers them to be beneath him? Yes.
Is Trump Islamophobic—particularly with regard to Islamic terrorist attacks on New York City (his home in the 1990s)? Yes.
Were the girls recruited by Epstein generally 13, 14, 15, or 16? Yes.
Is it true that Epstein was generally disinterested in girls 17 or older? Yes.
Did Epstein seek intelligence on his associates from the girls he ensnared? Yes.
Is Trump known to speak in vulgar terms about sex in private social situations, such that a phrase like “pop your cherry” would be on-brand for him? Yes.
Is the arrogance, sense of superiority, and flippant minor violence (e.g., hand-slaps) described in the testimony above on-brand for Donald Trump? Yes.
Is Trump known to ejaculate quickly, and to seek to do so during sex? Yes.
Was Epstein’s “interview” process for female hires known to be as described? Yes.
Is one of Trump’s fantasies walking in on females when they don’t expect it? Yes.
And of course there are secondary and tertiary analyses—further basic investigative techniques of the sort that help develop a useful theory of the case—to be done here.
For instance, as we learn here, despite the fact that Trump has known Paris Hilton “since she was a child” and is close with her entire family, he was willing to admit to Howard Stern on-air—before an audience of millions and millions—that when he saw Hilton for the first time, when “she was 12,” he was so instantly attracted to her that he asked someone nearby, “Who the hell is that?” While he claimed to Stern that he felt the 12-year-old Paris was “beautiful” but “wasn’t interested [in having sex with her]” at that age, we must recall that all of this is simply what Trump said and did in public.
In public, Trump was willing to not only silently gauge the physical attractiveness of a pre-teen child but comment on it aloud to others.
In public, Trump was willing to voluntarily, unilaterally, and without invitation tell stories about finding kids attractive from many years in the past—shamelessly bringing to the forefront and the present details about himself he should’ve been ashamed of.
So was Trump’s public claim that he wasn’t interested in having sex with a 12-year-old when he saw Paris Hilton for the first time just for public consumption or actually true?
And if was true—that is, if Trump really did find the idea of having sex with a 12 year-old unthinkable—how would we explain this, below?
It’s hard, in light of the above, not to see Trump’s “Who the hell is that?” comment about the 12 year-old Paris Hilton as anything but an expression of a taboo (and illicit) sexual predilection: pedophilic sexual attraction.
So in addition to the 29 points of testimonial support itemized above, does it seem consistent with what we know about Trump, and about sex criminals in general, that a man willing to repeatedly speak in public about being sexually attracted to 12- and 13-year-old children—two ages that place Trump squarely in the camp of being a pedophile—would in private, in a party setting where every friend’s sexual pleasure were being serviced by Jeffrey Epstein without judgment or recrimination, Trump would seek to in actual fact have sex with a kid of an age he’s sexually attracted to by self-admission?
Yes, that presents a thirtieth point of reasonable correspondence with known facts.
All thirty of these points cast a well-justified shame on corporate media for refusing to report on Katie Johnson’s testimony simply because one of her early backers was a man she didn’t know who it turned out had a bad reputation. (Keeping in mind that this man’s past involvement—at a very high level—with TV and media would have given the comparatively unsophisticated Johnson every reason to think he really could help her get her story out.)
But federal criminal investigators must of course look also for genuine red flags. Are there elements of the Johnson testimony that don’t jibe with known, confirmed facts?
And the answer, candidly, is no.
While there are components of the Johnson Testimony that aren’t yet reflected in the existing record as this author knows is—for instance, did Maxwell sometimes have Epstein’s girls use wigs? It’s quite possible she did, as she herself was known to use wigs, but this author doesn’t yet know if that was the practice in Epstein’s homes—but none of these abscesses of knowledge contradict Johnson’s words. They merely offer additional opportunities for federal criminal investigation and, quite possibly, corroboration of the Johnson Testimony. And even more than this, they clarify for us yet another reason for Donald Trump to be scared of what The Epstein Files reveal about him—as it’s hard to imagine the Johnson Testimony not earning a key place in those files.
Chapter 20: Melania, Paolo, and Jeffrey
As discussed on the twelfth page of this deposition, when Jeffrey Epstein was in 2002 or 2003 considering working with Jean-Luc Brunel—another Epstein Scandal figure who, like Epstein, committed “suicide” by “hanging” while in his cell awaiting trial—he told one of his financial assistants that he wanted his new agency to have the same “benefits” for “scouters” of talent that his then-best friend Donald Trump was using for the 1999-founded Trump Model Management.
This is just one of many confirmations that Epstein was a keen student of the sort of work Andy Lucchesi and others had been doing for Trump in New York throughout the 1990s—in particular with respect to the illicit Plaza Hotel parties that formed (as Mr. Lucchesi has already told us) the groundwork for Trump Model Management.
As The Good Age writes, “Forget Jeffrey Epstein. Forget even Ghislaine Maxwell. If you want to understand how elite sex trafficking truly operated—not as a scandal but as a system—you start with the modeling agencies. In [1972], [Donald Trump friend] John Casablancas, founder of Elite Model Management, built the original model: turn teenage girls into glamorized assets. [In 2004], [Jeffrey Epstein business partner] Jean-Luc Brunel took it international, founding MC2 and receiving at least $1 million from Jeffrey Epstein to expand operations. [Former Melania Trump agent and now Trump government official] Paolo Zampolli cornered the visa angle, using U.S. immigration loopholes to bring in young foreign models—often from Eastern Europe and South America—under false pretenses.”
This accounting of events does much to contextualize the current Epstein Scandal, underscoring that it was in the late sixties that America first saw the rise of the “waif model”—the term for a skinny and even childlike feminine appearance being deemed aesthetically pleasing in the modeling industry. It was Casablancas, who passed away in 2013, who realized the easiest way to acquire “waifs” at scale for modeling purposes was to simply do the unthinkable: not often look for particularly skinny and childlike twenty-somethings, but simply recruit ever younger and younger girls.
Casablancas’ own attraction to younger models is well-documented, as is the fact that this particular interest—and his ability to surround himself with such females—came to attract the attention of wealthy ephebophiles (and hebephiles) like Donald Trump.
As one runway model told Cosmopolitan about how Trump conducted himself around models in the early to mid-1980s, when Casablancas was a regular companion of his—and this was pre-Epstein, as those two didn’t meet until 1987—“He was gropey...he had his hands in the most inappropriate places [on women’s bodies], always. When he went in to kiss someone, [his] hand always went to either the hip or the butt. He was also really good when he did pictures, or when he’d ‘side-hug’ someone. He’d always get his hand on the boob. Every time.” {Note: U.S. criminal statutes designate unprivileged physical contact with the breasts or rear end of another for prurient purposes as a sex crime.}
Cosmopolitan continues by observing that, in the 1980s, “Stories about Trump and his hands circulated within the modeling community. At one modeling event, Trump allegedly went down a line of women feeling their bodies to guess their dress size. Backstage at a lingerie show, he is said to have moved his hands all over a model’s breasts under the guise of inspecting the bra’s fabric….I saw this several times, [said one interviewee]: When [Trump] met a girl, he’d immediately move in to kiss her, not shake her hand or say ‘Hello, how are you?’ He’d immediately put his mouth on her. I saw him many times go straight to the mouth, to kiss them on the mouth, and they would turn their cheek. But a lot of them didn’t, because they knew [Trump] was the moneyman and it [letting him kiss them] was a way up [in the modeling industry].”
The 1990s saw a Sixties Revival across various categories of art production and U.S. culture generally, from a rash of sixties-LP reissues in CD format to “twee” music—think Belle & Sebastian—in the United Kingdom. The Waif Era in U.S. modeling was part of that. And so it was that when Trump began throwing tawdry parties in the Plaza Hotel in the 1990s, it would have been well understood by his procurers (such as Andy Lucchesi) that the women the old rich white men at these wild parties would be most interested in were waifs. It was females who looked like children, or who actually were children, that these rich men wanted to ply with alcohol and drugs in an effort to sleep with them.
Trump’s taste in women, honed in the 1980s, had by the Waif Era come to be well-aligned with what his clientele wanted. As model Nakina Carr told Cosmopolitan, “Among modeling insiders, Trump had a reputation at the time for preferring the younger girls. ‘If you’re over 21 you don’t have to worry [about him touching you inappropriately],’ Carr said she was told.”
It’s worth observing, in this context, that by 1983 Trump’s friend Casablancas had launched Elite Model Management’s “Look of the Year” Competition, which Trump would frequently act as a judge for—including, now infamously, in 1991, long after he and Jeffrey Epstein had become close friends. Judging a competition known for glamorizing underage girls and holding its events (once Trump had bought it) at the very same Plaza Hotel where Trump pimped teen models to his rich businessmen friends was yet another way for Trump to indulge his taste for extremely young flesh. (Others, of course, included owning and judging the Miss Teen USA pageant during the 1990s, as Trump has admitted to conspiring to see an untold number of underage girls naked.)
If Trump’s “maximum” age in the 1980s and 1990s for a female he planned to sexually assault or try to sleep with was 21, his “floor” was apparently 13. Having told his then-friend Howard Stern that “12” was too young for him, he did tell a friend (see supra) that he was more sexually attracted to then 13-year-old Ivanka than to his own wife.
Between the “Look of the Year” Competition, the Miss Teen USA pageant, and his Plaza Hotel parties, Trump was able to lure to his sphere almost as many 13-to-21 year-olds as he liked.
But what it appears Trump realized as the 1990s wore on is that he could commodify and weaponize females 13-to-21, rather than merely sexually assault and/or sleep with them. {Note: His sleeping with girls under the age of consent would not be Sexual Assault but Statutory Rape.} What if he had a veritable factory that imported girls from around the world, not for modeling purposes but to act as “dates” for rich businessmen? Behind the legal veneer of a legit modeling agency, and perhaps inspired by what he saw his friend Casablancas doing, Trump could run the equivalent of a high-end escort service that, in the bargain, would give him access to the sexual peccadilloes and potentially lucrative secrets of rich men from around the world. From all over the globe, men who wanted to sleep with very young girls—or perhaps even minors—would come to New York for business, and they would there learn that the best place to find such women in the company of booze and hard drugs was Trump’s Plaza Hotel (and specifically the parties Trump threw there).
But as Trump began his planning for his first presidential run in 2000—under the banner of the Reform Party, as neither the Democratic nor Republican Party was open to a persona like his at the time—he surely realized that (a) being a bachelor was going to make it impossible for him to be elected president, and (b) he needed to somehow “legitimize” his Plaza Hotel parties if he was going to continue making money off trafficking in the prospect of sex with very, very young women at scale.
Here’s where The Good Age again picks up the story: “In 1999, Trump launched Trump Model Management. His agency followed the exact same pattern [as the one his friend Casablancas had used]: bring girls in on tourist or ‘extraordinary talent’ visas, overcrowd them in overpriced apartments, charge them for every service, and send them to work illegally while racking up debt they could never repay. Former models from his agency say they were instructed to lie to customs and start working immediately upon arrival.”
Yet as established in Proof of Cruelty (2024), somehow Trump never provided enough work for these models—with the average Trump model living in poverty (indeed, at wages comparable to a prison inmate doing state labor) and receiving a modeling gig only once every month and a half. And Trump took much of the money from those shoots for room and board and various, carefully unspecified fees. The result? To be a Trump model in the late 1990s and early 2000s was to know that in order to survive you would have to attend Trump’s parties if asked, meet Trump’s rich businessmen friends if asked—whether they were from the United States or abroad—and, candidly, maybe even go on “dates” with them to seek their aid in advancing your career (in the context of such “dates” potentially leading to sex). Trump had thus found a legitimate way to illegally ferry attractive but impoverished teens from far overseas to a wealthy clientele who would in turn owe him favors—and possibly be scared that he might one day reveal their secrets. It was an excellent foundation, to a man of Donald Trump’s broken moral compass, upon which to build a political career. It also places a very different lens atop the roster of very young women who Donald Trump has dated, assaulted, or even married, as well as some of the very young women who became part of Epstein’s creepy coterie at homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, France, and the Caribbean.
It must also be reiterated here that for the entirety of the 1980s and 1990s Trump was very close with John Casablancas—the modeling mogul who had launched the often abusive international model-trafficking scheme (and at times apparent Immigration Fraud scheme) Trump would later adopt, well aware of what that scheme led to, how it treated the women who came to be engaged by it, and how a man could cruelly profit from it. Notably, Trump’s friendship with Epstein (1987 to 2004) also covered almost the entirety of this period. But there were other men involved, too, directly or tangentially, in this misogynistic, pseudo-pimping lifestyle. One was Paolo Zampolli.
Zampolli has long been one of the Trumps’ closest friends, and has for decades now been known for throwing model-filled parties just like Trump and Epstein used to do.
He was also a good friend of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and, apropos of the fact that in 1998 Trump needed a long-term girlfriend he could later marry as part of his planned 2000 foray into politics, it was Zampolli who (he insists) introduced Trump and Melania (see, e.g., here, here, and here). For years, Trump himself said that Zampolli introduced him and Melania, until The Epstein Scandal suddenly led to him refusing to name who introduced him to Melania but stressing that it wasn’t Epstein’s good friend Zampolli. As for Melania, her first-person account of meeting Donald Trump appears to be rather nakedly untrue:
“Hi, I’m Donald Trump.”
On a Friday night in September 1988 [sic], as I settled into the comfort of my New York City apartment after a whirlwind trip to Paris, my phone rang. It was a friend of mine.
“My boyfriend is throwing a party at the Kit Kat Klub tomorrow night,” she said. “Please come. We haven’t seen each other in so long.”
“I just got back from Paris,” I said.
“Please, it will be fun. A lot of people will be there. We’ll pick you up.”
While I was tired and jetlagged, I loved the idea that my weekend was about to be filled with the company of friends.
I have always been selective in how I choose to spend my time and where I put my energy. A late-night party at the club was not my top choice for a Saturday evening. I much preferred staying in, watching a film, or going to dinner with close friends. Though I didn’t shy away from social gatherings, clubs were simply not my cup of tea.
I accepted the invitation anyway; after all, it was Fashion Week—a time of glamour and sophistication. I was actually looking forward to mingling with industry insiders and trendsetters.
When I stepped into the sleek black limo my friend arrived in, I felt like a celebrity en route to a gala. As we arrived at the Kit Kat Klub, the energy of the crowd and the dazzling lights greeted us. Inside, the dark, crowded space buzzed with models, photographers, editors, and designers mingling in this Fashion Week Saturday night. I settled in upstairs at our table in the VIP section, where the atmosphere was one of sophistication and camaraderie. Some guests danced, while others engaged in lively conversation, and we were all enjoying ourselves.
I saw my friend wave at someone behind me. When I turned around, I noticed a man and an attractive blonde woman approaching us.
“Hi, I’m Donald Trump,” the man said when he reached my table. “Nice to meet you.”
I recognized the name, and I knew he was a businessman or celebrity, but not much else. He put his hand out to shake mine.
“Hello,” I replied. “I’m Melania.”
His eyes filled with curiosity and interest, and, seizing the opportunity, he took the seat next to mine and started a conversation. He asked me about my time in New York, my Slovenian home, and my world travels. It was a moment of connection, a brief encounter that left a lasting impression. It was nice to make a new acquaintance.
He was accompanied by a beautiful date, so I initially dismissed our conversation as mere pleasantries exchanged at an industry event. The music was loud, and the crowd boisterous, making it difficult to truly connect with someone.
From the moment our conversation began, I was captivated by his charm and easygoing nature. There was so much bustling activity around us, but his intent focus on our interaction made me feel like the center of his world. It was a refreshing departure from the usual superficial small talk, and I found myself drawn to his magnetic energy.
The party described above was thrown by the then-Melania Knauss’ then-employer, agent, and friend Paolo Zampolli. It seems preposterous to suggest that an unnamed female “friend” called her and referred to Zampolli as merely “my [the unnamed Melania friend’s] boyfriend”—not only due to the fact that an invitation to the party surely would already have come to Melania from Zampolli himself, but because even if it hadn’t Melania’s friend would have said that Zampolli was throwing the party. It’s a key fact Melania appears keen to leave out of her narrative.
Just so, the idea that Melania Knauss, then on a dodgy “Einstein” visa and in a state of desperation to move up in the world of fashion—and very much under the thumb of her manager and (as it were) angel investor Zampolli—had to be dragged to one of the hottest parties of 1998 in American fashion is… well, silly, honestly. There’s a reason she was picked up in a “sleek black limo”; this party was a very big deal, and she knew it. This wasn’t just a group of friends hanging out, with one of them suddenly (or so Melania claims) casually waving over Donald Trump himself to their table. That Melania appears not to want to even name this friend who played such a central role in her life should tell you how little any of the scene she depicts above can be trusted.
In addition to eliding Zampolli from her story—arguably, twice—with respect to how she found out about his party in the first place, Melania now elides his name a third time by making no mention of the fact that, as her agent and employer, Zampolli had almost certainly made it clear that this party was a professional responsibility not to be missed, which is yet another reason why there was both a limo and VIP seating section waiting for Melania the Kit Kat Club rather than, as would have been the case if she were merely attending a party with friends on a last-minute basis, perhaps a Toyota Camry and a “General Admission” ticket. Melania also describes meeting Trump as merely a fortuitous event, but that doesn’t quite ring true, either. Why? Because she here elides Zampolli a fourth time by (according to his own account) removing him from the story at its critical moment, as Zampolli has now insisted for decades that it was he who led Trump over to meet Melania.
Meanwhile, in Melania’s telling Trump is on a date in a room where no one can hear anyone else but he magically appears at her table to introduce himself and try to start up an intimate conversation. Narratively, none of this makes any sense whatsoever.
This is why other tellings of the meeting are so fascinating to recount. Put aside, for instance, Melania’s claim that Trump introduced himself to her—and that she was quickly smitten by him—and look at what she told a close friend at the time, Edit Molnar, whose account is relayed here by the New York Post, which spoke to her (emphasis supplied):
It wasn’t love at first sight. In fact, it wasn’t even like.
When Melania Knauss was introduced to Donald Trump at a fashion party at the Kit Kat Club in 1998, she told best friend Edit Molnar that the bombastic billionaire was “absolutely out of the question.”
The Slovenian stunner was “turned off” by The Donald asking for her phone number because he’d arrived with another woman, Norwegian shipping heiress Celina Mildefar.
“Melania said, ‘He’s here with a woman. I am absolutely not giving him my number,’” recalled Molnar, a fellow model who befriended Knauss in 1996 when they were neighbors in the Zeckendorf Towers in Union Square. “She [Melania] wouldn’t even consider it.”
Here Melania acknowledges that a third party introduced her to Trump; it wasn’t, as she’s seemed to imply, perhaps as a way of advertising Trump’s self-confidence, a self-introduction. Moreover, Melania acknowledges that she wasn’t at all intrigued by the Trump persona, but in fact repulsed by it. So who exactly orchestrated Trump meeting Melania at a time Trump was trying to impress her by being on a date with another beautiful woman? (Trump and Melania both make clear that he essentially stiffed his date after seeing Melania, which lends credence to the idea that the date and the event were a pretext for a third party to introduce the two.)
For that matter, if Melania so disliked Trump and refused to give him her number—though he’d given her his—who was it in her life that convinced her that Trump was a person (perhaps even, as models were often told at the time, see supra, a “money guy”) she needed to develop a connection with?
In short, why did this Soviet Bloc-born, impoverished twenty-something model with a suspect immigration status and few immediate prospects—both imported to America and then represented by one of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein’s best friends—ever reach out again to Trump at all?
For that matter, why was Trump so certain that she would, when everything about his approach to her had been so contemptible? Who was in Trump’s ear telling him such maneuvers would actually work out fine for him in this instance? And more to the point, who was it in Trump and/or Melania’s life that was able to predict all this so—as it turned out—accurately?
But this story gets stranger still—and further suggests that Melania’s first meeting with Trump wasn’t merely fortuitous event she and he pretend. As the Post continues,
Five years ago, the 33-year-old downtown girl [Melania]—whom Molnar describes as “strawberry ice cream, sweet and smells nice”—couldn’t envision an uptown life. She favored cashmere sweaters and Joseph pants to gala gowns, and liked to spend time alone reading and watching movie classics.
“She’s changed her style. She was more laid-back,” Molnar said. “Now she shops at the best stores in the world. And she’s always got her Manolos on.”
The pals used to spend their days working out in the gym, swimming and using the sauna. Besides errands, Melania rarely went out. “She was reserved; the first party she ever came to with me was the one she met Donald at,” laughed Molnar.
Melania spent a lot of time designing and sewing clothes for herself and friends. She even made Molnar a camel-hair coat.
The man who discovered Melania and brought her to New York in 1996 also recalls her as a homebody. “It was unusual for her to go out; she never went to clubs or bars,” said Paolo Zampolli, president of ID Models. “She never dated anyone in New York before Donald. She only went to movies by herself and to the gym. This is a woman who modeled for Camel cigarettes on a huge billboard in Times Square but stayed home all the time. She was not a party girl.”
This underscores that Melania going to the Kit Kat Club that night in 1998 was a big deal. It was not consistent with her modus operandi, making it all the more intriguing from an investigative standpoint that she now appears to be so dedicated to not just eliminating Epstein from the story of how she met Donald Trump but also Zampolli.
The problem for Melania’s revisionist history is that if she was “introduced” to Trump at an “industry event” she was pressed to attend, it wouldn’t have been by Edit Molnar, apparently, but someone who knew Trump and wanted him to meet Melania—which suggests further that this person may also have known Melania and wanted her to meet Trump. The universe of people who fit that description is quite small, given that Melania had been in the United States only about 24 months when she met Trump and Trump knew many, many people but was close to quite few (and even fewer who would try to get involved in his love life). It’s therefore worth noting that the universe of people who knew both Trump and his now-wife well enough to want to orchestrate their meeting in 1998 includes Jeffrey Epstein, Paolo Zampolli, and… well, possibly others, but if so, we don’t know who they are or how they would have come to know both a man about to launch a modeling agency and a recently arrived foreign model.
Epstein and Zampolli were connected to the U.S. modeling industry—specifically, through Trump. This further underscores the seeming near-certainty that someone had pushed Melania to go to the Kit Kat Club that night in part due to the fact that Donald Trump was someone it was professionally important for her to meet. After all, Trump was about to launch a new modeling agency whose preferred models would all be from Melania’s general demographic, if not yet as semi-established as she then was.
{Note: While Melania met Trump when she was in her twenties, she had been modeling since the age of five, and was throughout her teens exactly the sort of model that men like Trump, Epstein and Zampolli were interested in recruiting from abroad and working with in America.}
As if all the foregoing weren’t internally contradictory enough, we then have versions of the Trump-Knauss Kit Kat Club meeting that appear to be an amalgam of different versions—including Melania’s—such as the one below from Vanity Fair.
Melania captured the attention of Donald Trump at a party, thrown by Zampolli, at the Times Square nightclub the Kit Kat Club, during Fashion Week in September 1998.
Trump had come with a date, Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart, but when she went off to use the bathroom, Trump approached Melania and asked for her number.
She took his number instead—a story she tells proudly.
Here we see a confusing return to the notion that Donald Trump introduced himself to Melania, but also a new detail: that he knew what he was planning to do was classless, so he waited until his date went to the bathroom to begin hitting on (and seeking the number of) another woman sitting nearby. This attempt to manage whether Trump is seen as a cad in what is supposed some sort of “meet-cute” story does carry a scent of desperation; as the Charlotte Observer has written, “In some retellings [of the Trump-Knauss meeting], Trump arrived with a date; in others, he arrived alone.”
The Observer notes too that while Melania had a limited social life in 1998, she was then 28, and likely aware that 28 “can be a difficult age in an industry where youth is nearly everything”—the implication being that it was the moment in her career when meeting the right man could be critical for her future. As a “money guy” about to start up a modeling agency, Donald Trump was in many respects the “right man.”
And what the above-linked Vanity Fair report does do clearly is establish that from the start Trump saw Melania as someone who he could launch a political career with:
The union made perfect sense for Donald. After demanding Ivana and needy Marla, Melania would be the perfect mate, one who would be an advertisement for his virility while giving him his “space.”
Federico Pignatelli, a longtime Trump friend and business associate, who founded the fashion studio Pier 59, says, “Ivana was an intelligent, entrepreneurial woman. Also a very strong-minded person and very feisty. While instead, Melania….really no fights.”
For her part, Melania would get a luxurious home where she could indulge her hobbies—Pilates and reading fashion magazines, according to People—in peace, and a promise that she would never have to return to drab Eastern-European prospects.
The euphemistic term “space” here suggests what ultimately came to pass: the idea that Trump could and would cheat on Melania repeatedly but that unlike the clingy Marla or cantankerous Ivana, Melania would be grateful for her life of luxury because it was better than living abroad in poverty.
This last point is crucial because, just as the Epstein-Maxwell Child Rape and Sex Trafficking ring recruited poor girls internationally and, both in the United States and abroad, looked especially for desperate, drug-addicted, or abused teens, the modeling operations run by Casablancas and eventually run by Trump, Zampolli, and Brunel (with Epstein as a partner to Brunel) all saw value in recruiting overseas from among those who were financially disadvantaged. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, how sex traffickers and child sex traffickers and human traffickers have thought for literal millennia.
Such recruits are less likely to complain about mistreatment, and more likely to feel gratitude. They are more likely to be impressed by rich businessmen who have long traveled the world and therefore, one assumes, are more likely to participate avidly in what going on “dates” with such men might require (a loss of dignity, if not more).
So for Vanity Fair to acknowledge that in the ramp-up to Trump’s first presidential run he wanted a twenty-something by his side who would let him do whatever he wanted and simply be grateful that she would “never have to return to [her] drab Eastern-European prospects” is telling. It’s perhaps even more telling that Donald Trump then married Melania in the run-up to the presidential election cycle that seemed perfectly suited to be the first election Trump ever won—2008, when Trump would have run an openly racist campaign against Barack Obama or an openly misogynistic one against Hillary Clinton—but which Trump abandoned before it even began in part, perhaps, because of the first Epstein Scandal in southern Florida in the 2000s.
At the time, Trump was in a feud with Epstein, and Epstein was spending nights in jail. He could have ruined Trump at any moment, and had every reason to want to do so. In other words, if Epstein was as much of a threat to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign as Bannon has said, he would have been doubly or triply dangerous to a 2008 Trump presidential campaign. By the time Trump ran in 2016, it appears (from his own admission, see supra) he had once again gotten on Epstein’s good side and wasn’t any longer in a running feud with him.
This is not to say that Melania had the same view of being a political spouse as Trump might have had. She did not. While admitting in 2016 that her husband had by then been talking about entering politics “for years”—which would seemingly include a potential 2008 run that never happened—it has also been widely reported, for instance by Vanity Fair, that Melania didn’t want Trump to run for president ever because “she was terrified that he might win” and didn’t want to be the spouse of a politician. It may be noteworthy, in this context, to add that, according to the Observer, Trump and Melania “broke up briefly in 2000, when Donald Trump was toying with running for president on the Reform Party ticket” (a run he did make, briefly and unsuccessfully).
So the idea here isn’t that Melania Trump sought to be a political spouse, as she did not; or even that she might have been aware of any Zampolli, Epstein, Trump, and/or Maxwell plot to put the two together to give Trump the sort of relationship within which he could continue to do anything he liked and enter politics as he planned to; rather, it’s the opposite: that Melania now appears to be so wildly uncomfortable with the true circumstances of her meeting her current husband that she has developed an internally and externally contradictory narrative she’s making wild lawsuit threats to protect. This doesn’t mean she has done or did anything wrong, only that a robust and honest narrative about her first meeting with Trump—which would surely center on Zampolli, and in that way quickly bring into the picture claims made by Epstein about his involvement in the Trump-Knauss courtship—is one she really doesn’t want to see in public discourse.
Zampolli is entwined with the Trumps in a way perhaps no one but Epstein is. It was Zampolli who, as noted, arranged Melania Trump’s preposterous “Einstein” visa to come to the United States as a model, a visa whose legality (including her compliance with it early on) has been challenged for many years. He not only owned the modeling agency Melania worked for on arrival in the United States but acted as her agent. He was extremely close with Epstein and Maxwell throughout this period, and after he founded ID Models in the mid-1990s—one of his first “discoveries” being Melania Knauss in 1996—he worked for Trump at the Trump Organization in the 2000s, with his job being, he once said, to on Trump’s behalf “take care of the big, big money people that want to buy the expensive $9 million to $30 million penthouse that we have at Trump Park Avenue.” (A 2005 example of this sort of work, per the New York Observer, was aiding “some prospective Middle Eastern buyers who sought not one but two penthouses, with hopes of combining them into what [Zampolli said] ‘looked like a royal palace on Park Avenue.’”)
Indeed, the Observer reports that Zampolli was so set on being recognized at Trump’s legal agent that he even wore Trump-branded cufflinks. No wonder Trump made him part of the first Trump administration as a member of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, and then also part of the second Trump administration as a Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. (He’s now also Trump’s Special Envoy to Italy.) Trump has shown a special interest in keeping Zampolli close to him by doing what he always does with people he needs to keep within his circle of trust: giving them government positions that they’re in no way qualified for. All this leads to the following question: if Andy Lucchesi was, as he says, trawling “second- and third-tier” New York modeling agencies to populate the disgusting Plaza Hotel parties Trump threw throughout in the 1990s, was Zampolli’s second- or third-tier ID Models one of those agencies? And is this why neither Trump nor Melania now seem to want to talk about Zampolli at all—because (a) he further links them to Zampolli’s (and Trump’s) good friend Jeffrey Epstein, (b) the Zampolli-Epstein friendship—and the modeling-agency ambitions Epstein had in the 1990s— could create the impression, accurate or otherwise, that Epstein was also involved in helping populate Trump’s seedy Plaza Hotel parties via his own international model recruitments (which mirrored Zampolli’s), or (c) Zampolli’s long-term closeness to Trump might make it seem that the Trump-Knauss courtship was tainted from the start, or in some way connected to Trump’s Plaza Hotel operation, or even that Trump had helped his friend Zampolli decide which women to import from abroad, which is why he was already so keen on getting to know Melania the moment he met first saw her in the flesh in New York City? Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that Trump and Melania, for reasons clearly other than personal privacy, have a great deal that they feel they must hide about how they met one another.
Even more troublingly, Paolo—who tried to buy his longtime friend John Casablancas’ Elite Model Management in 2004, but lost at auction—was, if he was one of the small number of modeling agents who helped supply dubiously aged models for his friend Trump’s 1990s Plaza Hotel fêtes, doing so in part as a sort of interview for eventually becoming Trump’s agent in the following decade. We must remember, here, that from the very moment Zampolli began working for Trump his specific area of focus was on (and readers are sure to read between the lines here) providing Trump’s many foreign tenants and clients with anything they could possibly want when they came to New York.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s in this context that Zampolli has—yes—faced allegations that in the 1990s and after he ran a high-priced escort business on the side of his modeling operation.
Politico reports that when Zampolli moved to D.C. after Trump’s first election, he was preceded by a personal item, the first to arrive at his new home: a giant oil painting of Donald Trump. Zampolli, who seems almost to worship a man who often refers to himself in the third person (including as “the Trumpster”) brought his creepy, skeezy conduct from New York City to Washington during the first Trump administration, according to Politico: “He became known [in D.C.] for his garish tastes and his affinity for entertaining ‘questionable folks,’ as one attendee [of one of his model-filled parties] described them—[including] lobbyists for disreputable industries and diplomats for countries with lackluster human rights records.”
Per the same attendee, Zampolli’s wild parties during Trump’s first term notoriously “skewed heavily toward older men and younger women.” Which sounds… familiar.
It sounds, in fact, exactly like what Trump spent the 1990s doing at the Plaza Hotel with the cooperation of unnamed second- and third-tier modeling agency heads, a category of New Yorker Zampolli was one of the foremost specimens of at the time.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Zampolli has, like so many Trump friends, been dogged by sex scandals. Politico reports that after Trump lost the 2020 election, Zampolli soon began “packing up his house [in D.C. to] head back to New York. The move came after he ended a relationship in D.C. that threatened to ruin his family still living in New York. Zampolli is not married but has a partner of seventeen years and a son. In a series of text messages sent in July to a dozen lobbyists, business owners and other power players in Washington, he forwarded a screengrab of exchanges between himself and a woman, in which he described his sexual encounters with her in graphic detail. Zampolli went so far as to describe her as a ‘working girl’ {NB: a prostitute}—a claim for which he offered no factual support and which several sources said was false. Zampolli himself now says he did not pay the woman for sex. ‘Please stay away from my family, you are a pro, all [D.C.] knows you are a working girl, since day one you said I had to pay you,’ Zampolli said in one message to the woman….‘[Zampolli] was the continuation of Trump’s [1990s] Sodom and Gomorrah [life of sinful depravity],’ said one of Zampolli’s friends who was on the text chain. ‘I told Paolo many times to cool off, this [D.C.] is not New York.’”
It’s with all this in mind—Epstein, Zampolli, Casablancas, and Trump all being pals in the 1990s and focused on building model agencies that would double as “date farms” for rich men, particularly shadowy foreign businessmen and diplomats; Trump at the time being on the prowl for a wife, because he planned to launch a political career with the new century arriving in 2000—that this author can now also report some breaking news that may help put a lot of what’s happened with Trump this century into context.
In the hardcover edition of a just-released book by the British author and historian Andrew Lownie—a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, President of the global Biographers’ Club, and one of the most successful literary agents worldwide—a 2007 claim by Jeffrey Epstein is recounted: that he slept with the then-Melania Knauss in 1997, at least a year before Trump met her. According to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, this claim has apparently been taken out of the audiobook and e-book versions of the text following a lawsuit threat from the First Lady. This rumored lawsuit threat follows on the heels of the known and acknowledged one by the First Lady against the son of former President of the United States Joe Biden; Melania apparently believes that Hunter Biden repeating her husband’s late best friend’s claim that he (Epstein) introduced her and Trump now entitles her to $1 billion in civil damages.
This is, to understate the case, perplexing.
How could Melania Trump believe herself to have suffered one billion in damages simply from having someone repeat Trump’s late best friend’s claim that he was the one who introduced Trump to his wife? Why, in fact, would such a claim be damaging at all, let alone to the tune of a billion dollars? It’s all enough to make a former federal investigator feel like the First Lady is protesting too much; specifically what danger or harm does she apprehend to herself—acknowledging, as she surely does, that her manager in the 1990s, Paolo Zampolli, was friends with both Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, and that Trump was friends with Maxwell and Epstein, and that all of these people were regularly photographed at social events with one another, making it unsurprising to think Epstein at least could have introduced Melania and Donald—if anyone living today even hears the dead Epstein’s matchmaking claim? That answer, of course, could be a simple enough one, and it’s certainly one that Melania’s lawsuit threat acknowledges: the danger of false association.
Except that that’s not quite right, is it? The First Lady doesn’t dispute her links to Paolo Zampolli. She doesn’t dispute that she’s been regularly photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. She doesn’t dispute that all the foregoing people, each with a beyond dubious reputation, were in her now-husband’s social circle in the 1990s and 2000s. So what conversation, exactly, is Melania trying to shut down here in publicly threatening Hunter Biden on such thin evidence?
The details of Lownie’s revelation may be the shibboleth that opens that door.
Melania Trump has been dogged by allegations of illegal entry into the United States and illegal work in the United States; she has been dogged by allegations against her former manager and longtime friend Zampolli that Zampolli was a high-end pimp, which allegations sully the First Lady by suggesting she might at one point have been an employee of both ends of Zampolli’s business, the public-facing and illicit (which would, if it were true, position her as a former prostitute); if, therefore, she slept with Zampolli’s good friend Epstein while she was desperately trying to keep her status in the United States in 1997, it could leave the impression that Zampolli pimped her out to Trump’s friend in the same way that Trump was, throughout the nineties, pimping out young women (keeping in mind that Melania was then in her mid-twenties) and in the same way, for that matter, that Trump and Epstein friends Casablancas and Zampolli stood accused of doing during the same period.
But the danger posed to Melania Trump by the unconfirmed claims of the late Epstein may go still deeper than this. While we cannot know if Epstein’s claims are true—even as they’re consistent with many facts now known about the milieu he was in at the time, and his own predilections, and his self-avowed status as a man who could ruin Donald Trump if he wished—we can project out the threat they would pose to both Melania Trump and Donald Trump if true. Keeping in that mind that in 1998 Trump was planning to run for president in 2000 but knew he couldn’t do so without some sort of longtime consort (as at the time and still, American politics is hostile to any bachelor who isn’t a widower) if it were the case that a conspiracy between Trump’s pals Epstein (an alleged Russian and Israeli spy with financial ties to the Saudis) and Zampolli (a man accused of running a high-end brothel for the ultra-rich worldwide) put Melania Knauss in Donald Trump’s path in 1998, leading to a six-year relationship and now an apparently loveless two-decade marriage of convenience, it would surely raise questions about whether even Trump’s marriage was arranged for him by the very same shadowy foreign interests he now seeks to avoid association with by:
Refusing to release The Epstein Files into the eager hands of thousands of amateur OSINT researchers, as those files could link pimping, sexual blackmail, geopolitics, sex trafficking, human trafficking, and transnational intelligence operations;
falsely calling the Trump-Russia Scandal a “hoax” when he well knows it’s not; and
threatening to have former president Barack Obama arrested for Treason as part of a bid to make it seem the Kremlin played no role whatsoever in a presidential election he won.
All this might help explain why, per news reports, Trump supports Melania’s threat against Hunter Biden even though it violates the Barbara Streisand Principle (by way of keeping a story in the news—the Epstein case—that neither Trump nor his wife should want lodged there).
So is it true that Zampolli—a man with shadowy foreign contacts all over the world, whose specialty is delivering to rich people their dreams, who has worked for both the Trump Organization and the Trump administration in exactly that shadowy capacity—orchestrated Trump’s longest term romantic relationship for him at a time that he (Zampolli) was close with Jeffrey Epstein? Yes, it appears to be. But of course if what Epstein says about sleeping with Melania in 1997 is true, which Melania disputes, it raises the possibility that Melania was indeed imported to the United States by Mr. Zampolli at least in part as a component of his “date farm” operation (something less covert and illicit than an escort service but less legitimate than a modeling agency).
It would also, far more importantly, put renewed focus on whether Zampolli (or even Epstein) was engaged in such an operation at various points in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and for that matter whether all of Donald Trump, John Casablancas, and Jean Luc Brunel were as well. What if Epstein was procuring women for more than just his own personal pleasure—and Ghislaine Maxwell was helping other men receive such lurid “imports” as she was arranging for her boyfriend-cum-employer, Epstein?
All this could even, at the outside, place all these people and all these operations and all of these legitimate-modeling-agency-adjacent schemes into a narrative centering on “second- and third-their” modeling agencies, Trump’s Plaza Hotel, and the U.S. and international trafficking and immigration violations that made a certain 1990s scene in New York City possible.
There could be no worse time, surely, for Trump to be revealed as not just a pimp and a human trafficker but one of the most dedicated importers of illegal immigrants and abusers of America’s immigration system in recent American history—especially as up until a few months ago he was virtually co-POTUS with another man, Elon Musk, who’s faced some similar allegations even as he too decries our immigration system.
While Melania arrived in America when she was 25 or 26, she was “discovered” by Mr. Zampolli when she was even younger, and began her modeling career—before moving to France in her early 20s—under rather desperate circumstances in Eastern Europe.
So while we do not know for certain if Epstein slept with Melania in 1997, we know he was close to the man who brought Melania to America by dubious means in the mid-1990s, and that her financial situation was archetypally bad when she arrived. We know Epstein also claimed that Melania and Trump first had sex on his jet—a claim that, notably, hasn’t been the subject of legal threats or hopping-mad media denials from the Trumps—and that because Epstein’s then-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was at the time telling her close confidants that the jet in question, later known as the “Lolita Express,” was wired for sound and possibly video (see supra) it’s possible that Epstein had videotape of Trump having sex. If he did, that tape would be one of those that would later ended up in the hands of the Kremlin as kompromat (see Chapter 28).
It’s even possible—given how close Trump was with Epstein in both 1998 and 1999 and how comparatively powerless and anonymous Melania Knauss was at the time—that Trump knew his sex with Melania was being recorded (audio and/or video), but she didn’t. That too would certainly be consistent with the sort of sex games we now know Epstein and Trump liked to play, as described in Book One of Proof of Devilry.
More troubling, of course, is the lingering association of Jeffrey Epstein with Russian banks, Israeli intelligence, and the Saudi Royal Family—which in practical terms is to say that Epstein may have been in a highly leveraged position with respect to the governments and intelligence services of Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, autocratic governments (albeit only recently so with respect to Israel) that have long had an interest in developing compromising material on powerful American businessmen.
Is there reason to fear that Jeffrey Epstein would have been willing to feed his tapes to foreign interests? Of course. Is there reason to think that Trump—who once offered to dime out people to the American intelligence community—would be aware of and concerned about such a possibility? Certainly. While Donald Trump might not be readily blackmailed by information suggesting he’s taken bribes, given that he has repeatedly pushed for the dissolution of Bribery laws and has only contempt for them, does he really want the whole world to see a sex tape of him having awkward fifty-something-year-old sex in a cramped luxury-jet cabin? That seems extremely unlikely.
In any case, readers will agree that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly have been more accommodating to the governments of Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia over the last decade—often to the clear detriment of the United States—so he can be said to be acting as a man who’s compromised (or as a man who simply fears such compromise) when he is or not. We must understand that intelligence agencies can benefit as readily from what people think they’re in possession of as what they actually possess.
The fact Donald Trump was all but bankrupt in the 1990s; initially repulsed Melania; had political hopes that in the 1990s were beyond improbable—as evidenced by his tragic showing in the 2020 presidential primaries as a Reform Party candidate—yet had men like Zampolli and Epstein with shadowy foreign connections trying to hook him up with beautiful women, lucrative business deals, and top-shelf connections in various industries around the world (including the modeling industry), underscores that foreign governments and their intelligence agencies work on a timeline of many decades, not mere months or years.
There’s no contestation of the fact that the KGB sponsored Trump’s trip to Moscow in 1987, and that Trump began gesturing at political ambitions immediately upon his return from that KGB-overseen tour of the business opportunities and high-level government connections that had apparently been made available to him in Moscow.
Even if those efforts only bore fruit for any foreign intelligence agencies thirty years later, when Trump did in fact run for President of the United States—successfully and with ardent Kremlin support—it would still mean any 1990s intel operation focused on the development of Trump as a foreign asset (not agent) would have been a success.
It’s in this context that greater scrutiny of Melania is warranted. It’s not because she is alleged to have done anything wrong, and not because she was or is a political player. Rather, it’s because the means that foreign governments and foreign intelligence services have used to try to control Trump invariably have focused on his two main interests (as detailed by every one of his biographers): sex and money. Trump’s social life, full of liaisons and illicit acts capable of being used against him as blackmail material, is conducive to conventional intelligence use of sexual misconduct and the many foreign business deals offered to him by those who want him to direct U.S. policy in their favor. But Trump, more than almost any man alive, has also evinced a George Costanza-like fascination with indulging all his pleasure-points at once. This explains why so many of his business ventures are money-making schemes aimed at simultaneously giving him:
Readily abused power over beautiful women (e.g., the Miss Universe pageant, the Miss USA pageant, the Miss Teen USA pageant, the Mar-a-Lago spa, Trump Modeling Management, and even The Apprentice, appearances on which TV show he dangled to mistresses like Stormy Daniels even as other mistresses, such as Karen McDougal, were promised benefits by Trump’s good friend David Pecker at the National Enquirer, one of many examples of Trump using friends’ properties and holdings—or properties he only interacted with intermittently, such as the Hawaiian Tropic Swimsuit Competition—to get himself payday and liaisons); and
Money without effort, for instance the sort of money that flows from tax evasion, crypto scams, Bank Fraud, Wire Fraud, reneging on contracts with independent contractors and then daring them to sue you, licensing one’s name to buildings one doesn’t own, having foreign oligarchs inexplicably overpay you for properties, being “gifted” Qatari luxury jets, convincing foreign dignitaries that you’ll listen to their geopolitical requests more ardently if they stay at your various hotels and frequent your various golf courses, bilking American taxpayers for government services provided by Trump properties, and so on—many of these being scams, hoaxes, or cons being ones that foreign nation-states and their intel agencies can be helpful with in ways both obvious and clandestine.
The upshot: whenever any woman was put in Donald Trump’s way in the 1990s or 2000s by persons with foreign connections, it would and still does raises legitimate questions not be in play with almost anyone else—as few men are as venal, easily bribed, unscrupulous, and open to juxtaposing sex and commerce as Donald Trump.
This book can’t adequately answer all existing questions about how Melania Trump fits into the Epstein Scandal, beyond her for years socializing with both Epstein and Maxwell at a time her boyfriend was well aware of what the two sexual deviants were up to. Perhaps the evidence doesn’t yet exist in the public sphere to even begin a real investigation into questions about what exactly Melania knew and when she knew it.
But all of the foregoing, in part because of how much of it features obvious lies and scurrilous lawsuit threats by the First Lady, does underscore the stakes of the Epstein Scandal. And it may help explain the highly unusual circumstance of the first lady of the United States threatening to sue the son of a former president for a billion dollars simply for repeating a seemingly anodyne claim by the deceased best friend of her husband.
The general sense a normatively cautious researcher or investigator would have here, in view of all these contradictions, is that someone somewhere is hiding something.
And that something—or even those many things—involve various people central to the Epstein Scandal, specifically how they came to know one another. (For instance, America just learned that, according to Ghislaine Maxwell, her father Robert Maxwell never met Jeffrey Epstein and didn’t know who he was. But as Proof of Devilry will establish, the two men were actually involved in intelligence operations together in the 1980s. Yes—you read that correctly. So Maxwell must be very certain Trump is on-board with her lying, and fairly confident her lies won’t be caught, to tell such whoppers in a depo.)
What researchers and investigators must incorporate into a new theory of the case, therefore, is the possibility—or even likelihood—of exactly the sort of intelligence operation that none other than Trump’s most important historic domestic policy adviser after Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, is now obsessed with: a transnational network that put an alleged Russian and Israeli spy (Robert Maxwell) in the way of Donald Trump at the same time it put another Russian and Israeli spy (Jeffrey Epstein, who was working with Maxwell at the time) in the way of Donald Trump, with both Epstein and Maxwell’s heir (Ghislaine Maxwell) thereafter building with Trump a new international system to supply rich American businessmen with foreign models, many of them exceedingly young, with the aim of these sexual favors being to at once (a) put such men at the mercy of Epstein, Maxwell, and Trump and (b) put Epstein, Maxwell, and Trump themselves into such potential legal jeopardy that it could make them easier to control by foreign intelligence agencies such as those of Russia and Israel.
Whether or not Melania was ever part of such an operation, she certainly wouldn’t want it to be understood or thought in any quarter that she was.
Nor would Trump be at all open to the general sense impression among the American public being that his current marriage was arranged rather than a felicitous meet-cute.
And that Trump wouldn’t want to be associated with a sprawling and transnational Human Trafficking network goes without saying.
Here then we come to the broadest conceivable metanarrative in the ongoing Epstein Scandal, finding to our surprise that it is also the broadest conceivable metanarrative in the Trump-Russia Scandal, and also the broadest conceivable metanarrative in the Trump-Ukraine Scandal, and candidly also the broadest conceivable metanarrative in every political and personal Scandal Donald Trump has ever been associated with, in or out of politics: the idea that far-flung events that have appeared to be narratively disconnected are in fact connected through a sturdy connective tissue that involves sex, money, and geopolitics. To date, the number of far-flung events claimed to be just fortuitous and unrelated in the scandals itemized above number in the hundreds or perhaps even (by now) the thousands, to the point that it beggars the imagination to think there’s not some overarching structure to the circles within which Trump and his top allies have long moved. And those circles include far too many people who, like Epstein and Jean Luc Brunel and Robert Maxwell, are now mysteriously dead and presumed by many to have been murdered by intelligence services, organized crime, or political enemies. Even Trump says now, when asked, of Jeffrey Epstein’s “suicide,” “A lot of people wanted him dead.”
This is the ultimate irony of Trump successfully casting all his critics as conspiracy theorists: that it’s actually significantly more far-fetched to think all the events that correspond to the scandals mentioned above are unrelated than to believe, under the principle of Occam’s Razor, that they could rather simply be explained by Donald Trump being an asset positioned and prepped for the American presidency long ago by interests hostile to the United States.
The story of the potential recruitment, situation, and development of a venal U.S. businessman with no abiding principles is actually a reasonably simple one, even as the allegedly chaotic and wholly aleatory existence Trump has claimed for himself is almost incomprehensible even to the wisest historians, academics, and journalists.
One could well argue, therefore, that it takes a conspiracy theorist to believe Trump’s self-exculpations—and merely a reasonably intelligent, educated adult to disbelieve them and see instead a surprisingly conventional sex-and-money-oriented foreign intelligence operation, one that involves precisely the foreign powers we would expect based on their intelligence capacities and what they want from America politics: Russia, Israel, and the Saudi-Emirati alliance. Perhaps Donald Trump has tried to artificially make his life story incomprehensible precisely because it’s actually, at its heart, a shocking banal tale of simple greed and treachery. Remember what Trump once admitted is his overarching philosophy: “Whatever complicates the world more, I do. It’s always good to do things nice and complicated so nobody can figure it out.”
Chapter 21: Was Epstein Ever Banned From Mar-a-Lago?
Those familiar with the pathological nature of Trump’s deceitfulness and the equally pathological nature of corporate media’s inherent (small-c) “conservatism” won’t be surprised to learn that Trump’s most noteworthy claims about his friendship with Epstein—its brief duration and lukewarm tenor—have now come in for significant recalculation in independent media, even as corporate media continues to be moving in Trump’s direction and shortening the time-frame of this friendship (with the New York Times recently erroneously reporting that the friendship began in 1990 and may have ended sometime in 2003, reducing its seventeen-plus years by four full years).
As for one of the data-points most often used to mark the terminus of that friendship—the alleged “banning” of Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago by Donald Trump—it’s rather more likely Trump and Epstein were friendly and at least in contact with one another for the entirety of the period they knew one another: 1987 to 2019, or 32 years.
Were there likely periods when the relationship was quiescent because Trump was focused on politics and Epstein on his “scientific philanthropy”? Yes. Smaller periods when they were feuding, as even friends sometimes do? Sure. Time spans when it was safer for one or the other if they spoke through intermediaries like Bannon—or even (though we at present have no evidence of this) shared lawyers like Alan Dershowitz? Why not.
We know the two men feuded at least briefly in 2004; that much is true. We know also that nothing that happened in that year, the next year, or even the year after that led to Epstein disappearing from documents relating to Mar-a-Lago’s membership roster.
We know Epstein was (sort of) in jail for 18 months in the latter part of the 2000s, and probably wasn’t much interested in speaking to Trump at that point given how he ended up there.
We know that Trump must have rekindled his friendship with Epstein at some point in the 2010s (see supra for a longer discussion of the difference between “for years” and “forever”) and that by 2017 Epstein and an executive assistant of his were saying to a journalist that Trump had recently visited Epstein’s home.
We know that Trump may be the most shameless liar in American political history, so his self-serving claims to have ended his friendship with Epstein long ago—almost all of them now formally debunked—not only have no value whatsoever, but if anything should help convince us that this infamous friendship between serial sexual predators never stopped.
And now a new discovery by independent journalist Marcy Wheeler—as well as a recent statement by Trump himself—is playing havoc with our already muddled (deliberately so) understanding of the duration of the Trump-Epstein relationship.
Wheeler has discovered a 2007 report, published in the wake of Epstein’s arrest that year in the pages of the then-New-York-dwelling Trump’s favorite newspaper feature—the New York Post’s “Page Six”—that details a news item Mr. Trump wouldn’t have missed because it pertained to his foremost property and sometime home, Mar-a-Lago.
Per the report, on October 14, 2007, “the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach…confirmed a website report that Epstein has been banned there. ‘He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about eighteen years old, he tried to get her to do things,’ a source told us. ‘Her father found out about it and went absolutely apeshit. Epstein’s not allowed back.’ Epstein denies he is banned from Mar-a-Lago and says, in fact, he was recently invited to an event there.”
Every part of this statement is absolutely stunning.
First, it seems to establish that the banning was only from the Mar-a-Lago spa, not (as Donald Trump has insisted for many years) all of Mar-a-Lago, as the club’s complaint only refers to Epstein’s conduct in the spa, and Epstein contemporaneously denies the report by referencing being invited to an event elsewhere on the club’s grounds. (And we already know, see Book One, that even ten years later, while speaking with Michael Wolff, Epstein was adamant that he was never banned from the club proper.)
This is significant for several reasons.
First, if the ban only covered the spa, it did nothing to protect Mar-a-Lago patrons from Epstein and Maxwell’s sex-slave recruitment operation. Given that Maxwell was the one doing the sex-slave recruitment, it’s not even clear, in the first instance, why Trump would ever have believed banning Epstein would have put a stop to the sex-slave recruitments. Indeed, Trump has now said that he was aware of Giuffre case at the time it happened in 1998, which, if true, means he knows it was his friend Ghislaine Maxwell who recruited Giuffre from the Mar-a-Lago spa, not Epstein. So not only did Trump not take any action to protect club patrons from this sex-slave recruitment operation for a full decade, but even when he did take action (if he did) it was in a way that protected precisely no one—as the sex-slave recruiter he had known about for a decade wasn’t even banned from the spa area she recruited from, let alone the whole club.
Why? Well, uf the quotes we saw in Book One of Proof of Devilry about Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell are any indication, it’s because he liked her. That’s it. Trump’s personal fondness for Maxwell was by itself enough, apparently, for him to allow her to recruit teen rape victims on his property in perpetuity.
Second, the Mar-a-Lago statement above appears to be—in its entirety—a lie.
As Epstein’s victims have consistently told law enforcement, their lawyers, and judges and juries, in Epstein’s view an 18-year-old masseuse had “aged out” from his service and was immediately dismissed from it. So the club’s oddly specific claim, in the wake of pedophilia allegations against Epstein, that the only known instance of Epstein clearly acting inappropriately involved an “18-year-old” young woman is highly improbable.
Rather, this seems to be an attempt to convince the news-reading public that Mar-a-Lago never had—by 2007—any indication that Epstein was a pedophile who was, via Maxwell, recruiting underage girls at Mar-a-Lago. (A situation that, had it been known at the time, might well have destroyed the club; who wants to belong to a country club where serial sexual predators are knowing to be stalking your kids or grandchildren?)
Here again it is the Virginia Giuffre case that is specifically a problem for Trump, the very case that Trump is now trying to keep America from delving more deeply into by hiding the Epstein Files. Trump was aware Epstein had recruited a 14-year-old Mar-a-Lago masseuse in 1998, and indeed that he was the one who put her into her job just a matter of days before she was recruited—which means he should have been through the roof angry at Epstein for recruiting away from him someone just hired by him, if indeed Trump was surprised by any of this, rather than its co-architect—so the spa copping in 2007 to an 18-year-old supposedly being recruited by Jeffrey Epstein (and note the lack of any mention of Ghislaine Maxwell) is catastrophic chutzpah to say the least. The club certainly appears to be backdating (or rather up-dating) its knowledge of a sex trafficking ring by a decade, which is only innocuous if in fact Donald Trump had been keeping news of that ring a secret from his own club staff for all that time.
Third, there seems to be another reason Mar-a-Lago pegged the victim’s age here at “eighteen”: because the club is saying that the victim was victimized at the club itself.
Otherwise, how would Mar-a-Lago’s management have any idea what happened to this girl?
The only two possibilities appear to be these:
The 18-year-old was sexually assaulted by Epstein at the Mar-a-Lago club. In this instance, the club is likely making up the girl’s age, at Trump’s direct or indirect instruction, in order to evade any bad press connected to pedophilia. However, the fact that Epstein wasn’t much attracted to 18-year-olds makes this story implausible. What it does mean, however, is that Mar-a-Lago knew about a Sexual Assault that occurred on its premises and did nothing about it, as the only response recorded here is a “father” going “apeshit” and Epstein getting banned from the spa area; there’s no mention of law enforcement getting involved. Which of course raises a necessary question: why did Mar-a-Lago refuse to contact law enforcement, especially if Epstein wasn’t even a club member and therefore wasn’t someone the club should have felt it needed to protect? One promising answer is that Trump and Epstein were friends again by 2007, and Trump didn’t want to get Epstein in more trouble with the police than he already was. Another promising answer is that Trump didn’t want police attention on Mar-a-Lago because his own role in Epstein’s operations would have been revealed. Yet another promising answer is that this supposed incident with an 18-year-old either never happened at all, or happened many years before the club said it did, or both happened to a much younger girl and many years earlier, in which case the entire Mar-a-Lago statement above is crafted to exculpate the club and falsely make it look heroic.
The 18-year-old in question was victimized at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion. Though unlikely—given that Epstein infamously didn’t employ 18-year-old masseuses at his home—this possibility is nevertheless the creepier of the two because it means that the parent of a former Mar-a-Lago employee had to do his own investigation to find out his daughter was recruited by a child sex trafficker from Mar-a-Lago, and it was only when he complained to the club (to be clear, about a practice Trump now admits the club had known about for at least a decade) that the club took any action against Epstein (but not against the proximate party in the sex-slave-recruiting equation, Ghislaine Maxwell). All of which any lawyer will tell you almost certainly means that Epstein was banned from the club, if he was actually ever banned at all, because this young woman’s father threatened to sue Mar-a-Lago over its liability for being a sex-slave recruitment center for years and years. This would mean that not only was there nothing heroic about the club banning Epstein, but in fact it only did so when, after a decade or more of letting Epstein recruit sex slaves from it, it finally faced legal liability for this. This would also confirm, once and for all, that Epstein’s 2000s state and federal sex-crime investigations had nothing to do with Mar-a-Lago altering his membership status.
The likelihood that this second possibility is what occurred is raised slightly by the unusually specific lie Trump told about his separation from Epstein for years: that Epstein had made a pass at the daughter of a club member in 2004.
This Trump lie, which has now fallen out of his Rolodex of lies altogether, was in view of the foregoing likely aimed at (a) bringing Epstein’s crimes out of the spa area, (b) removing from the story any reference to the young lady’s age, and (c) giving Trump a plausible reason for acting against Epstein: because he had offended the dignity of a family paying dues to Mar-a-Lago. (But of course the truth is that, as the New Yorker has reported, “Only Trump and certain of his minions know who among Mar-a-Lago’s more than three hundred listed members has actually forked over initiation fees and who’s paid how much for the privilege.” The magazine goes on to add that Trump uses membership status for clout more so than income, which may be the best explanation of Epstein’s relationship to Mar-a-Lago as a “member” ever provided.)
But if, in fact, the complaint to Mar-a-Lago came from the father of an employee at Mar-a-Lago—a man who wasn’t himself a club member—is raises the likelihood that the victimization of this employee came out during the criminal and civil probes into Epstein’s conduct. As the New York Post writes, in the context of Epstein’s supposed ban from Mar-a-Lago, “Lawyers for Manhattan billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein—who’s agreed to plead guilty to soliciting underage hooker—are bracing for a slew of lawsuits from as many as forty young women who came to his Palm Beach mansion for massage sessions.”)
In other words, it’s quite possible that Epstein was only ever banned from Mar-a-Lago in response to a lawsuit threat, and that even then the banning was a fake one—“real” only in that it showed up in a Mar-a-Lago press release—because by then Trump was so compromised by Epstein that he couldn’t actually ban him from Mar-a-Lago, he could only create that appearance to keep his club clear of Epstein’s civil and criminal cases. And why would Trump have needed to do that? To keep his club from being sued, certainly, but also to prevent himself from being civilly deposed about the unusual activities of Epstein (and perhaps Maxwell) at the Mar-a-Lago club (spa and all) from 1988 onward. Trump had years and years of conduct by his best friend that he knew he would have to answer for, including the key question that here in 2025 Trump wants no one to be asking: why didn’t he ban Epstein in 1998, when—by his own admission—he learned in that year that Epstein was recruiting underage girls from Mar-a-Lago to give him massages in his home?
The obvious answer would be that Trump didn’t do this because he knew it was happening—knew everything that was happening—and not only didn’t oppose it but was a facilitator of it as a man who himself was engaging in precisely this sort of vile and criminal recruitment practices in two states at the time: New York and Florida.
(It’s worth adding here that the New Yorker saw firsthand, as part of a 1997 interview with Trump, that he was fond of telling the richest and most powerful figures who came to Mar-a-Lago in that decade that “they were all welcome to drop by the spa the next day for a freebie.” That part of the club seemed to be one that Trump took special interest in as having a salutary effect on his biggest business relationships. “Evidently, Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young female spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions.” How involved was Trump in spa hiring decisions? Very. Per a New Yorker journalist in 1997, “Trump introduced me to ‘our resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lea Southall’—a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. “Baywatch {NB: referencing this TV show} Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, “Did we hire her because she’d trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?” The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.’”)
All of which brings us to Trump’s now-famous claim, in 2019, the year of Epstein’s death, that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in “15 years”—the exact time between this claim being made by Trump in 2019 and the 2004 real estate feud over the Wexner Estate discussed exhaustively in Book One. Trump setting the date of his last time speaking to Epstein as 2004 appears partly prompted by real events—he was in fact quite angry at Epstein that year, and vice versa (though Epstein had much, much more reason to be angry at Trump than the reverse)—and partly prompted by self-interest.
If Trump stopped speaking to Epstein in 2004, it meant the two weren’t friends when Epstein came under investigation in 2005 for sex crimes. It’s this latter circumstance, noted publicly by Trump as often as he could in the late 2010s, that made possible his contemporaneous lie that Epstein had been banned from Mar-a-Lago back in 2004 for being a “creep.” The premise thereby established by this sequence of Trump lies was the classic hero narrative he prefers: Trump seeing the truth of a situation (Epstein’s vile conduct) far before even the “experts” (law enforcement) did, and taking decisive action in response to the situation when no one else could or would.
That this is the rhetorical “sale” Trump wanted to make to the public is clear. Indeed, he once appended to a late-2010s telling of this story that it proves he has “good taste.”
{Note: That Trump calibrated his story to make himself a hero, and spread it in the mid-2010s to lock in that narrative as he prepared for his 2016 presidential run, appears to be confirmed by this Yahoo News report: “Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide, told The Washington Post in 2019, after Epstein had been arrested on federal charges, that he had quizzed the president about his relationship with Epstein back in 2014, when Trump was considering a White House bid. ‘Trump told Nunberg that Epstein had recruited a young woman who worked at Mar-a-Lago to give him massages,’ the Post reported. ‘Nunberg said Trump told him he issued the edict against Epstein years before the police investigation became public.’” All of that is untrue, of course, but the last thirteen words of this excerpt are the most telling in that regard.
According to this CNN report, Epstein remained on the Mar-a-Lago membership logs in 2007.
And in 2019, the Washington Post reported, contra Trump’s claims to Sam Nunberg, “Trump prohibited Epstein from visiting the club around that time [2007], as a reaction to criminal charges that had been filed against Epstein.” In other words, Trump banned Epstein—at least temporarily—only to protect himself. It had nothing at all to do with any Epstein predation.}
As ever, it’s useful to simply take the opposite of what Trump says as the most likely scenario. The Epstein saga reveals, of course, that Trump has no standards or moral compass at all—and indeed that he socialized with Epstein because Epstein is the sort of creep Trump likes and because, to put a finer point on it, Trump is a creep himself. But if that’s true, wouldn’t Trump have secretly remained friends with Epstein? Why end a long-term friendship over conduct you don’t actually have a problem with and in fact often emulate and sort of admire? That is: “No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life!”
This analysis of the duration of the Trump-Epstein friendship and the question of whether Epstein was ever banned from Mar-a-Lago seems to be the one most clearly headed in the right direction. Trump’s own recent statements suggest his friendship with Epstein never ended in the way he told America it had back in 2019 (a time when he was in the midst of a re-election campaign). As CNBC reports, in a media presser just a few weeks ago Trump made a stunning statement (emphasis supplied): “For years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk because he did something that was inappropriate.”
Recall here that Trump’s claim after Epstein’s 2019 death was that he hadn’t spoken to him since 2004—meaning that 2004 was the last time the two men ever spoke, full stop.
Now Trump says that he merely stopped talking to Epstein “for years”—meaning the two did talk at some point between 2004 and Epstein’s mysterious death (in Trump’s custody) in 2019.
One possible date for the reinstitution of their friendship is 2013, the year Trump chose to run for president and made a trip to Moscow. Consider this Politico report (emphasis supplied):
A 2013 news release on the website for [Ghislaine Maxwell’s oceans-oriented charity] TerraMar—which announced it was shuttering in the days after Epstein’s arrest [in 2019]—describes the alliance [the Sustainable Oceans Alliance] as a four-way partnership between [Maxwell’s] TerraMar; another nonprofit called the Global Partnerships Forum; the late Stuart Beck, who served as “ambassador on oceans and seas” from the Pacific island nation of Palau; and a Trump friend, Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-born businessman who has served in diplomatic posts for Caribbean nations.
Before his diplomatic career, Zampolli co-founded a model management company and served as the Trump Organization’s director of international development. He has long been credited with introducing Trump to his third wife, Melania, though The New York Times reported this month that Epstein has also claimed credit for the introduction.
Zampolli is so close to the Trumps and their operations that the notion that he would partner with Epstein’s ex-girlfriend at a time Trump deemed Epstein persona non grata is dubious to say the least. That Zampolli was recently given a job in the second Trump administration that he’s manifestly unqualified for would seem to confirm that he’s either rarely displeased Trump or else that Trump needs to keep him very close.
All this—especially Trump’s telling “for years” remark—is consistent with a pre-2025 exclusive Proof report, one that was republished in Book One, revealing that in the final days of 2017 Jeffrey Epstein told a Forbes journalist that the then-president had visited Epstein at his Palm Beach home (just minutes from Trump’s own) that month.
Epstein implied it was a secret visit, but not a wholly unexpected one—meaning that contact between the two, direct or indirect, was likely ongoing at that point.
So why would this matter, apart from the fact that it reveals yet another colossal lie by Trump about Jeffrey Epstein, and therefore the consciousness of guilt all lies reveal?
Because, as Proof and many major media outlets have reported—and as the Senate Finance Committee is in the midst of investigating right now—Jeffrey Epstein had suspicious financial and intelligence ties to the three nation-state entities Trump seemed to be inexplicably beholden to during his first presidency: as already noted, Russia, the Saudi-Emirati alliance, and Israel, all three of which are confirmed to have illegally aided the 2016 Trump presidential campaign (see the first three books of the Proof Series).
If Epstein remained in contact with Trump at a time he was, per Bannon, the biggest threat to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign on Earth; if Bannon was in regular contact with Epstein partly due to that fact; and if Trump later pardoned Bannon, as he did, over unrelated criminal conduct Bannon wasn’t eligible for a pardon for as he had never taken responsibility for it; all of that certainly does suggest that Trump sees Bannon as a man he must elevate above the law because Bannon knows what and who Epstein was to Trump during his first sustained presidential campaign—a successful one that received an enormous amount of illegal foreign aid. We know from the Trump-Russia investigation that not only Trump’s agents but Trump himself had significant contact with Kremlin agents during the 2016 presidential campaign, up to and including having his top Russia adviser (Dimitri Simes) be a Kremlin agent; what if Trump was also, at the same time, in regular contact with Epstein either directly or indirectly? Would it be so surprising if Trump and his team kept regular tabs on both the biggest threat to Trump (Epstein) and his biggest potential windfall source (Putin)?
In other words, the attempt by major media and independent investigative journalists to figure out what Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel have on Trump—such that these nations will do anything to keep him in power and maintain whatever hidden leverage they perceive they have with him—may well trace back to activities Trump was involved in with Epstein in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.
Put even more bluntly, it seems the “pee tape” of the Steele dossier was the yellow tip of an iceberg whose size we never could have imagined. Trump isn’t compromised because he watched some Russian prostitutes urinate on a bed in Moscow in 2013—though as the New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion (2018) robustly establishes, he definitely did—but because foreign countries have evidence that Donald Trump co-ran some sort of trafficking ring alongside one of their assets, Jeffrey Epstein. The same Epstein who became the benefactor of the Maxwell Family after its patriarch, an Israeli and Russian spy, died mysteriously. And the same Epstein who had a Saudi passport in his vault when he died.
Chapter 22: On Stuart Pivar
One of the difficulties in all this is that we know Trump and Epstein were extremely close for 17+ years, and best friends for over a decade, but unless and until we hear from another person who was close to Epstein during that same time-period, it’s hard for us to objectively gauge—particularly from such a remove of time—what Trump would have known about Epstein’s activities if he weren’t involved in them in any way but was still close friends with him.
Enter Stuart Pivar, a decades-long Epstein friend who Mother Jones contacted after Epstein’s death in August 2019 because Pivar’s name appeared in Epstein’s “little black book” of contacts.
Pivar’s stories about Jeffrey Epstein confirm that he was, in fact, extremely close to him.
So what would an Epstein friend in the 1990s have known about Epstein’s sex crimes?
One of Epstein’s rape victims, Maria Farmer, says that everyone around him knew “everything,” which of course would mean that Donald Trump and Ivana Trump did also (as the two were married for the first two to three years of the Trump-Epstein friendship, and remained in close contact after their divorce). Does Pivar agree with this assessment?
Here’s what he told Mother Jones when asked how he felt about the sex-crime allegations against his old friend (emphasis supplied):
Let’s put it this way. What’s the difference between the punishment which befalls a murderer and a serial murderer? It’s the same. If Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of fooling around with one 16-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention. The trouble is, what he did was quantitative and not qualitative.
What Jeffrey did is nothing in comparison to the rapes and the forceful things, which people did. Jeffrey[’s arrest] had to do with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again.
And if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed—except he made an industry out of it.
And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man.
For some reason that doesn’t get understood. Did you ever hear of nymphomania? Do you know what that is?
….
Everybody knows what a nymphomaniac is. It’s a girl who is insatiable in her sexual appetite, right? Yeah. There are men who are like that, and it’s a disease. It’s called satyriasis, and Jeffrey was afflicted with that.
He couldn’t help himself. I know that [for a fact]. [I observed it] at close range.
….
I know what he did except I know the cause of it and other people simply can’t conceive of the idea that what Jeffrey did—that he was beset with a pathology, like a disease. I watched it happen.
So if we consider, now, Donald Trump—like Pivar, a close Epstein friend in the 1990s—suddenly getting multiple reports of his best friend recruiting multiple young women from the Mar-a-Lago spa, there would have been no doubt in Trump’s mind why that was happening. And in view of that, Trump knowing that at least one of the those girls (the one he got a job for, Virginia Giuffre) was just a teenager would have been enough to cause any man to put everything aside and work to stop Jeffrey Epstein.
Which Donald Trump did.
Sort of.
Ten years later.
By working briefly with victims’ attorneys at a time doing so burnished his political brand, removed suspicion from him, and helped inure him against mentions of his own name in what would eventually become The Epstein Files. It also would have greatly satisfied him, personally speaking, at a time he was still feuding with Epstein.
And as Trump has just now started to allow he knew at the time, Epstein wasn’t just picking off girls one at a time from Mar-a-Lago over a very, very long time period.
Here’s how Epstein friend Pivar describes it:
Anyone who did one thing, let us say, to some 16-year-old trollop who would come to his house time after time after time and then afterwards bitch about it—why, no one would pay attention. Except Jeffrey made an industry out of it.
Apparently he went beyond. This got out of hand. What’s the name of that girl? I forget. Time after time after time after time she [NB: Mother Jones indicates that Pivar seems to be referring to Giuffre] comes there for I don’t know what length of time, and then after it’s all done, she has things to say—why did you stay there?
In other words, what I’m saying is, what Jeffrey did in comparison with other people is only different in the fact that he made an industry out of it.
Industry!
He did stuff with underage girls who knew what the hell they were doing. By the hundreds.
If he only did one, no one would pay attention. Nor, on the other hand, did he actually rape any of them or anything like that, which happens, you know.
If you want to make a list of, let us say, in the past several years, of the kind of stuff going on of sexual abuse of children and what the hell not—you want to compare that with what Jeffrey did? What Jeffrey did in comparison with the kind of stuff which gets exposed every day of people who are abusing children left and right and all kinds of institutions? Jeffrey never did anything like that. Everything he had to do with these girls was complicit. And it was just interesting to the rest of the world who doesn’t understand that Jeffrey was a very sick man. He had a case of what is called satyriasis.
While Pivar claims that Epstein kept his sex life out of his friendship with him (Pivar) because he (Pivar) was just a scientist, as we now know that couldn’t have been further from the truth with respect to Trump. As Michael Wolff has reported, the very bases for the seventeen-year relationship between Trump and Epstein were money and sex.
So what Pivar’s perspective adds, rather, is a notion of what a friend of Epstein would have come to understand about Epstein once the dam of any separation in their friendship between Epstein’s proclivities and that friendship had finally broken—in other words, once a longtime Epstein friend learned the “truth” about Epstein. What Pivar emphasizes is that as soon as that dam broke it immediately became clear that Jeffrey Epstein was running an “industry” of “regular sex” with “underage girls.”
Donald Trump would have seen the same thing, surely—indeed likely in even higher relief, given the ways in which he related to Epstein that Pivar could not and did not.
And the more Pivar speaks of Epstein, the more it’s clear that even before he heard the story of Maria Farmer (see below)—Farmer being an acquaintance of his—he did in fact witness Epstein acting in ways that underscored that he was a sick individual.
What he did to Maria was inexcusable, of course. He locked her up, and she couldn’t get away, and her father had to come and rescue her. That’s a story she told. And, of course, that’s the least of what she told me. Forget that, her little [then-fifteen year-old] sister, for Christ’s sake, the guy actually brought her to his place and did those kind of things, which, of course, is inexcusable and that’s the kind of thing which satyriasists do because they can’t help themselves.
….
It annoys me that that the whole thing is dealt with so superficially. Why doesn’t somebody talk to a psychologist?
For example, I was a sort of an art consultant, furnishing his numerous houses, and at one point I took him to a very prominent art dealer to buy furniture and what have you. I brought along an assistant I had who was a very attractive young girl, and there we were in those precincts of art and Renaissance furniture and what have you. He grabbed her up from behind and lifted her up and squeezed the hell out of her and she screamed. I said, “Jeffrey put her down! What are you doing?”
And the three or four of us who were watching were horrified, and he put her down. He was out of control. Have you ever seen anyone do a thing like that?
It was at the gallery of Ruth Blumka. Ruth is dead now. But the point is, I saw Jeffrey do a thing I’d never seen in my life anyone do. And when I saw him do that, I said, oh my god. This is a screw loose. To do an uncontrollable thing like that.
Pivar also indicated that he heard Little St. James Island called “The Isle of Babes.”
“I’ve heard it called that,” he tells Mother Jones, and clearly had heard that phrasing enough to internalize it, as in his interview with Mother Jones he never once mentions Little St. James Island as anything but “The Isle of Babes.” He calls it that six times.
The final fifth of the conversation between Pivar and Mother Jones has to be read to be believed. Pivar goes on a long monologue about how much trouble he’s going to be in, with so many people, for what he’s just told a journalist about Epstein—to the point that he briefly tries to bribe Mother Jones to forget he said anything about Epstein, and at another point threatens to sue Mother Jones, and at another point seems—though it’s not entirely clear—to be threatening to kill the Mother Jones journalist he’s speaking with. Here’s a part of that portion of the conversation:
“You know, I just realized something. Why the hell am I talking to you and getting involved with Jeffrey Epstein when I shouldn’t? I regret everything I just told you, by the way. Oh god, when journalists talk you’re supposed to not talk to them. Now, I’ve told you those interesting things, and they are interesting things….why am I telling you this stuff for? Leave me alone. Go away. I know it’s very interesting, but I’m just realizing something. I have just gotten myself into terrible trouble and everyone who knows is going to be mad at me—why the hell did I pick up the phone?….[Y]ou are about to get me into big-time trouble!….I am suddenly—I am mad at myself for even talking to you….What have I done? I have just shot myself in the foot. I am mad at myself! What have I—oh, dammit. I have now put myself into terrible trouble….Why did I talk to you! I’m a dead fish, and you’re going to ruin me.”
{Note: Proof has elided, in the excerpts above, the questions asked by Mother Jones—as they’re not material to Pivar’s monologue. They’re clearly just a way to keep him talking. All of them can be found at the link above, however. Pivar makes very clear that he was unaware of what Epstein was doing until a certain point in their friendship, and that when he found out what Epstein was up to he immediately ended the friendship, which—if true—distinguishes him from Donald Trump. He is not accused of any wrongdoing by either this book or anyone else.}
Chapter 23: “The Pussy Committee”
If this report is going to have a chapter on a friend of Epstein who Donald Trump didn’t know, with an eye toward better understanding what Trump would have known as a friend of Epstein in the 1990s—namely, that he was dangerously sex-crazed and had a clearly antisocial sexual appetite—it’s worthwhile to also devote a chapter to certain friends of Donald Trump not known to be close to Jeffrey Epstein: for instance someone like Tevfik Arif.
Arif, whose story can be found here and here, offers to us an opportunity to determine whether Donald Trump being friends with the most notorious child sex trafficker in American history was merely a one-off. If it was, it makes it slightly less likely Donald Trump was involved in child sex trafficking himself, for all that his ownership of Trump Model Management and Miss Teen USA and the Plaza Hotel and (for that matter) Mar-a-Lago for all the years there enterprises and locales were useful for potential child sex traffickers and sex traffickers makes this question a fraught one.
Proof has previously written about the shocking number of Trump associates accused of sexual misconduct of some kind: John Casablancas, Roy Cohn, Matt Gaetz, George Nader, Diddy Combs, Melania Trump (accused of running an escort service in the 1990s alongside her agent and now Trump Family friend Paolo Zampolli, but as noted above never proven to have actually done what she has been accused of), Jean-Luc Brunel, Joel Greenberg, Anand Jon, Thomas Kramer, Tony Lazzaro, Robert Morris, George Nader, Timothy Nolan, Ralph Shortey, Roy Moore, Andrew Tate, Harvey Weinstein, Steve Wynn, Cindy Yang, Rob Porter, Andrew Pudzer—in fact, the list just goes on and on and on.
And of course, there’s the recent book that exhaustively details 67 instances of Trump being accused of sexual misconduct, even as it confirms that the list isn’t exhaustive—besides the “100” women Steve Bannon says Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz paid off prior to the 2016 presidential campaign, who knows how many past Trump victims remain to be undiscovered. Trump’s victim list is now widely believed to be in the hundreds—which, as it happens, is also the case with Jeffrey Epstein’s own victim list.
Simply put, Donald Trump has spent decades in very close proximity to powerful, influential, rich, unscrupulous, right-wing white men who either (1) want to have sex with relative children they consider beautiful (whether young boys, as in Nader’s case, or older teens, as in many others’), or (2) want to set themselves up as the brokers of getting such young people to the men willing to do anything to get with them.
As this book has already detailed, Trump had an entire operation—property, staff, budget, well-established and years-long modus operandi—dedicated to the second of these activities at the Plaza Hotel throughout the 1990s. He was also able to use the Mar-a-Lago spa, during the same period, to entice wealthy male businessmen, many of whom it appears wanted to be surrounded by the sort of attractive mere teenager Virginia Giuffre was when Trump hired her to work around naked old men in 1998.
But as Trump biographer Michael Wolff has just revealed, not every Trump pimp-job could be handled at Mar-a-Lago or the Plaza Hotel; or at one of Trump’s casinos; or via the swimsuit competitions he was known to promise friends girls from (especially if he was in the midst of trying to sleep with their wives); or even the beauty pageants—including teen ones—he used as his personal onanistic and casual-sex enterprise.
There were people who were business associates of Trump, or men who he wanted as business associates, some of them foreign nationals and some of them tied to foreign intelligence services, who needed Trump’s personal touch. For such jobs, a Trump agent like Andy Lucchesi was insufficient. As Michael Wolff explains (video at link):
One of the many things Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump had in common was their obsession with the [British] Royal Family.
At one point in the mid-1990s, after Charles and Diana’s marriage started to fall apart, Trump and Epstein had a bet with each other about who could sleep with Diana first.
….
What they understood—and many, many people have understood this before them—is that the Royal Family was one of the great social climbing vectors in the world. If you were involved with the Royal Family, engaged with the Royal Family, familiar to the Royal Family, able to bring members of the Royal Family with you [to social events], all doors opened. You could have access to anyone you wanted to have access to. This raised both your stature and the possibilities in your life. So here were these two guys—parvenues [and] vulgarians—who by this, in part because of their connection to the Royal Family, suddenly had access to all of the status and all of the financial circles of the world.
….
The agent of their Royal Family plan was Ghislaine Maxwell, with her deep connections throughout British society.
The plan, for both Epstein was Trump—this was their mutual plan—was to focus on Prince Andrew, and ply him with girls, for which he had an insatiable appetite, and money, which he was always short of and in desperate need for.
Now this is a key issue right now in the way the White House is looking at The Epstein Scandal. The[ir] fear is that Ghislaine Maxwell can tie Donald Trump to the details of what Trump and Epstein called The Pussy Committee.
The Pussy Committee consisted of Trump and Epstein in their efforts to get girls for Prince Andrew.
Journalist Ben Meiselas adds significantly to this account by quoting from a 1997 report (video at link, see 3:15) noting that in that critical year—see supra for how much was going on with respect to Trump and Epstein in 1997 and 1998—it was already the case that “Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine ha[d] introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer [Donald Trump].”
The key point here is that as Ghislaine Maxwell was flying on Trump’s jet; as Maxwell was recruiting attractive girls from Mar-a-Lago posts Trump had personally hired them to, with the intentional of turning these girls into sex slaves of Jeffrey Epstein; as Trump’s best friend, Epstein, was opening up his child-rape emporium at Little St. James Island; as Trump was simultaneously disappearing from Epstein flight logs but also (as he’s now admitted) aware that things were happening on Epstein’s island that (a) he normally would be interested in, but (b) knew were immoral and/or criminal; as Maxwell was ramping up to getting her pilot’s license so that rich men like Trump who had yachts and private jets could get to Little St. James Island without ever going on “The Lolita Express,” which aircraft was privately confessing to friends was wired for sound; Trump was in an unofficial state of systematic transaction with Maxwell in which Maxwell procured attractive women for him and he in turn—with Epstein— worked as part of “The Pussy Committee” to get girls for a Royal the British socialite Maxwell desperately wanted to impress, Prince Andrew.
Trump also, as the full video above reveals, believed that helping Maxwell in this way would give him a chance to sleep with Princess Diana.
So as Ghislaine Maxwell was running the largest sex trafficking ring in American history, Trump was effectively in the midst of an ongoing exchange with her in which the sole currency was…
…females.
Females intended for sex on Trump’s end, and females intended for sex on Maxwell’s end, apparently. Trump would help find females for Andrew, even as Maxwell was finding females for Epstein and (effectively) for Trump, who saw Maxwell as a well-connected point of entry to the British Royal Family and the widely desired Diana.
In other words, Trump would have believed at the time that part of the recompense for letting Maxwell recruit sex slaves at Mar-a-Lago could be—so he thought—sex with a literal princess.
The aforementioned British historian and author whose research focus is the House of York, Andrew Lownie, recently told The Daily Beast that not only were Trump and Prince Andrew close because of three shared interests—“money, sex, and golf —but at one point the former advanced his “buddy-buddy” friendship with the British royal by “swapping a list of masseurs with Andrew that [Andrew] could use when he came to New York.”
Given that Trump’s best friend Epstein—who was also very close with Andrew—was at the time using “massages” as a euphemism for sexual misconduct, and given that Trump was personally selecting the massage-giving women at the Mar-a-Lago spa on the basis of their attractiveness, Lownie’s revelation moves the needle notably on the idea that the “Pussy Committee” was in fact not just about enjoying sex but recruiting young women to give older and almost unimaginably powerful men “massages” that turned out to be sex crimes.
As Lownie says, “They’re all distancing themselves [from Epstein now’, but they were all [Trump, Epstein, and Andrew] part of the same little group.…so I don’t think anyone can deny these people were extremely close in a particular period at the beginning of the century.”
Could “The Pussy Committee” hold a significant clue as to the sort of international sex trafficking network Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein shared a dream of creating?
Wow, Seth, I don't know how you do it. Amazing research; "meticulous" is the understatement of the year. What jumped out for me was your mention of Epstein and Maxwell's connections to Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia and how Trump has been particularly solicitous and accomodating to these countries. Little by little, in no small part to you, I'm getting a clearer view of this very complicated and corrupt era and regime. More than ever, I will call my elected officials and demand, "End the cover-up! Release the full Epstein/Maxwell files! Listen to the victims, not the criminals!"
No wonder you needed breaks from writing all of this, Seth. I've only skimmed Book 2 and I know I'm going to struggle with it. I'll do the same as you and have plenty of happy things to do in between the chapters. Thank you for putting this together. Everyone who voted for him - and still idolises that massive POS - should be made to listen to every word of all three books. "Devilry" is such an accurate title. Take care and enjoy some precious Seth-time! 🫡