Trump confirms Epstein ‘stole’ women from Mar-a-Lago spa

WASHINGTON — President Trump shed additional light Tuesday on his falling out with late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, telling reporters the soon-to-be convicted sex offender used Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club spa as a hunting ground for young women.

“Everyone knows the people that were taken, and it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad,” Trump, now 79, said as he flew back to Washington after spending five days in Scotland. “But that story has been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes, they were.”

The US president said Monday that he booted Epstein — who died in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting federal trial on sex trafficking charges — from Mar-a-Lago because the financier “stole people that worked for me.”

“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 aboard Air Force One. “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.’”

Among the victims Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell met at Mar-a-Lago was Virginia Giuffre, who made global headlines when she claimed she had sex with the UK’s Prince Andrew at the age of 17.

“I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he stole her,” Trump said of Giuffre, who took her own life this past April. “And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.

Giuffre, who went public with her accusations against Epstein in 2011, had worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, where her father was a maintenance manager.

At some point in 2000, Giuffre, then 16, met Maxwell, who offered her a job working for Epstein as a traveling masseuse.

Giuffre later won a defamation claim against Maxwell in 2017 for an undisclosed sum.

Documents in that case were later ordered unsealed, with the first tranche coming to light Aug. 9, 2019, the day before Epstein was discovered dead.

Some observers have pointed out inconsistencies in Giuffre’s statements about her time with Epstein and Maxwell. In 2022, she settled a defamation lawsuit filed by former Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz, publicly saying she “may have made a mistake in identifying” him as one of her abusers.

Trump has faced a three-week firestorm over Epstein following the release of a July 6 memo from the Justice Department and FBI, which concluded that the sex predator most likely killed himself and did not have an “incriminating client list” of powerful acquaintances who engaged in sex with girls as young as 14.

Last week, US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell for two days of questioning about the case, with her attorney publicly angling for a pardon or sentence commutation from the president.

“Nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it,” Trump told reporters Monday when asked about the topic.

During the same press availability, the president acknowledged that “for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, for years, because he did something that was inappropriate.”

“By the way, I never went to the island,” Trump elaborated, referencing Epstein’s Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands, where much of the lurid abuse is alleged to have taken place.

“I never had the privilege of going to his island — and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island,” he said. “In one of my very good moments, I turned it down, I didn’t want to go to his island.”