Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein acknowledged in a bitter email months before his death that Donald Trump told Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to stop recruiting young girls from the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to groom and abuse.
In the email, written by Epstein to author Michael Wolff on Jan. 31, 2019 and released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, the disgraced financier responded to Trump’s claim to have booted Epstein from the club.
“[T]rump said he asked me to resign,” Epstein told Wolff. “[I was] never a member ever.”
“[O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked [G]hislaine to stop.”
The release is likely to increase pressure on the Justice Department to make public all its files in connection with the notorious case.
Trump has insisted that renewed interest in the Epstein case is a “hoax” driven by Democrats to harm him politically after the Justice Department and FBI concluded over the summer that the 66-year-old committed suicide and did not keep a “client list” of wealthy and powerful allies to whom he trafficked girls as young as 14 — contrary to widespread public speculation.
On July 29, Trump told reporters that Epstein “stole people that worked for me” in a rare public disclosure of how the former Wall Street titan became persona non grata at Mar-a-Lago.
“Everyone knows the people that were taken, and it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad,” Trump said at the time. “But that story has been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes, they were.”
“I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world, at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa, hired by him,” Trump recounted. “When I heard about it, I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people,’ whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said, ‘Out of here.’”
Nearly eight years before his email to Wolff, on April 2, 2011, Epstein had described Trump in an email to Maxwell as “that dog that hasn’t barked,” adding that an unnamed victim “spent hours at my house with him [and] he has never once been mentioned.”
“I have been thinking about that …” responded Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, conspiracy and other charges.
Epstein, who was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, and Trump, now 79, enjoyed a warm friendship in the 1990s and early 2000s, but reportedly fell out in the middle of the latter decade amid a bidding war over a since-demolished Palm Beach, Fla., mansion.
