A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 , 2019
‘He’s a real creep’
It is unclear when Trump
learned of allegations that Ep-
stein was preying on teenage
girls. In a 2002 interview, he gave
no indication of concern, telling
New York magazine that Epstein
“enjoys his social life.”
“It is even said that he likes
beautiful women as much as I do,
and many of them are on the
younger side,” Trump said.
On Nov. 28, 2004 — less than
two weeks after the mansion auc-
tion — Palm Beach police fielded
a tip that young women were seen
coming and going from Epstein’s
home, then-Police Chief Michael
Reiter said in a deposition. Reiter
declined to comment.
Four months later, in March
2005, police received a complaint
from a woman who alleged that
her 15-year-old stepdaughter had
been paid $300 by Epstein to
massage the financier while par-
tially undressed, according to the
police report. The Palm Beach
police investigation identified
more than a dozen possible vic-
tims, the report shows.
In 2006, a Palm Beach grand
jury returned an indictment
against Epstein of a single count
of soliciting a prostitute. Epstein
pleaded not guilty. That July,
news organizations first reported
that Palm Beach police had inves-
tigated Epstein for unlawful sex
with minors and wanted the FBI
to take up the case.
After a lengthy FBI investiga-
tion, federal prosecutors agreed
not to prosecute Epstein under
federal law, allowing him instead
to plead guilty in state court in
2008 to two felony counts, includ-
ing soliciting a minor.
Epstein is now facing federal
charges in New York of sexually
abusing dozens of girls. He has
pleaded not guilty.
In late 2007, the New York Post
reported that Epstein had been
barred from visiting Mar-a-Lago,
which Epstein at the time denied.
Earlier this month, Garten, the
Trump Organization lawyer, said
that Trump “banned him from
stepping foot on the property.”
Nunberg said that when he
quizzed Trump about his rela-
tionship with Epstein, Trump
told him, “He’s a real creep, I
banned him.” Trump told Nun-
berg that Epstein had recruited a
young woman who worked at
Mar-a-Lago to give him massages.
Nunberg said Trump told him he
issued the edict against Epstein
years before the police investiga-
tion became public.
Epstein has also been accused
of preying on a girl he met at
Mar-a-Lago.
One of his alleged victims, Vir-
ginia Giuffre, has alleged in court
documents that when she was a
16-year-old towel girl in Mar-a-
Lago’s locker room in 2000, Max-
well “recruited” her to come to
Epstein’s Palm Beach place to
make money by giving massages.
Giuffre said in a lawsuit
against Maxwell that Epstein
sexually abused her at his man-
sions in both Palm Beach and
Manhattan. That case was later
settled out of court. Epstein and
Maxwell have both denied taking
part in any sex trafficking.
Trump also appears to have
been helpful to Epstein’s accus-
ers.
Brad Edwards, an attorney for
some of the alleged victims, said
in an interview last year that
when he was seeking information
from Epstein’s acquaintances in
2009, Trump was “the only per-
son who picked up the phone and
said: ‘Let’s just talk. I’ll give you as
much time as you want. I’ll tell
you what you need to know.’ ”
Edwards declined to say what
Trump told him but said he was
“very helpful in the information
that he gave.”
When Nunberg looked into
Trump’s ties with Epstein, he said
that Trump’s longtime secretary,
Rhona Graff, and others in the
Trump Organization all agreed
that Trump had made a clear
break with Epstein.
“That’s all I needed to know,”
Nunberg concluded. “He’d never
let somebody else get leverage
over him.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Manuel Roig-Franzia and Alice Crites
contributed to this report.Trump and Epstein began talking
each other down to the trustee,
Luzinski said.
On Nov. 15, 2004, the bidders,
their representatives, and a small
cavalry of lawyers representing
the creditors and the Gosman
family gathered in a courtroom at
the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in
West Palm Beach. Trump was
connected by phone.
The auction began with an
attempt by one of Epstein’s three
attorneys to knock Trump out of
the bidding. Attorney Andrew
Kamensky argued that Trump
was not qualified because he de-
manded that the property have
title insurance or he would not
close on the sale. “What I’m tell-
ing you is that Mr. Epstein will —
he will close,” Kamensky said,
according a transcript obtained
by The Post.
Trump wasn’t in Palm Beach —
his own attorney, Raymond
Royce, was in the courtroom. But
Trump was on the phone, and
now he chimed in to defend him-
self.
Riedel’s first notice that Trump
might personally take part in the
proceedings came when his voice
boomed from the speakerphone.
“I was sort of shocked,” the lawyer
said.
Judge Steven Friedman reject-
ed Epstein’s objection. The bid-
ding began with Epstein’s offer of
$37.25 million, but he dropped
out after his bid of $38.6 million
was topped.
Trump “had made up his mind
to get it no matter the price,” said
Charles Tatelbaum, a lawyer for
one of Gosman’s creditors, JP-
Morgan Chase Bank.
A third bidder jumped in late,
prompting Trump to pipe up
again. “This is Mr. Trump,” he said
over the speakerphone. “It
seemed to be very clear that they
dropped out also.”
The judge allowed the other
bidder, Mark Pulte, to proceed,
but Trump outbid him, too, with
an offer of $41.35 million.
“I will therefore determine by
the bang of the gavel that Mr.
Trump is the higher bidder,”
Friedman said.
In an interview, Luzinski de-
scribed the showdown as “two
very large Palm Beach egos going
at it.”
It is unclear whether Trump
and Epstein were in contact after
the house sale. That month,
Trump left two messages for Ep-
stein at his home in Palm Beach,
according to records obtained by
Vice News — the last known inter-
action between the two men.
Four years after he bought the
Gosman mansion, Trump sold it
to Russian businessman Dmitry
Rybolovlev for $95 million, more
than doubling his investment.But according to Stone, Trump
turned down numerous invita-
tions to Epstein’s private island
and his Palm Beach home. In a
2016 book, Stone quoted Trump
as saying that “The one time I
visited [Epstein’s] Palm Beach
home, the swimming pool was
full of beautiful young girls. ‘How
nice,’ I thought, ‘he let the neigh-
borhood kids use his pool.’ ”‘Palm Beach egos going at it’
It was another prime property
on Palm Beach island that pitted
the two men against each other —
a six-acre oceanfront estate with a
180-degree view of the Atlantic.
In November 2004, Trump,
who was starring in NBC’s “The
Apprentice” at the time, declared
himself intent on winning “the
finest piece of land in Florida and
probably the U.S.,” an estate that
had been seized as part of the
bankruptcy of nursing home
magnate Abe Gosman.
Trump said he planned to cre-
ate “the second greatest house in
America, Mar-a-Lago being the
first” and then resell it.
Epstein was also enraptured by
the property, which Gosman had
purchased in 1988 for about
$12 million from Leslie Wexner,
the Ohio-based retail executive
who was a friend and patron of
Epstein’s. In contrast to Trump,
Epstein seemed interested in liv-
ing at the place. Harley Riedel, an
attorney for Gosman, said the
previous owner had filled the
mansion with pricey art and “re-
ally did have in his heart that it
would be nice if someone moved
in and lived there.”
At first, Epstein pressed to gain
the upper hand in the competi-
tion for the estate, according to
Luzinski, the bankruptcy trustee.
Epstein agreed on a price and
terms that were viewed as favor-
able for Gosman’s creditors if a
higher bid didn’t emerge, he said.
As the competition heated up,and whispers in the financier’s
ear, leading Epstein to double
over in laughter.
Photographs and videos show
Epstein and Trump posing to-
gether at the mansion in 1992,
1997 and 2000. The two were also
pictured together, with model In-
grid Seynhaeve, in 1997 at a Victo-
ria’s Secret party in New York City.
Around that time, Trump flew
at least once, in the late 1990s or
2000, on Epstein’s private plane
from Florida to New York, accord-
ing to Epstein’s brother, Mark,
who described the flight in a 2009
deposition.
In an interview last week with
The Post, Mark Epstein said
Trump flew on the plane “numer-
ous times” but said he was only
present for one flight.
“They were good friends,”
Mark Epstein said. “I know
[Trump] is trying to distance
himself, but they were.” He added
that Trump used to comp Ep-
stein’s mother and aunt at one of
Trump’s Atlantic City casino ho-
tels. When a Post reporter sought
further details, Mark Epstein
hung up.
When Jeffrey Epstein’s little
black book of phone numbers
appeared in a court file a few years
ago, it contained 14 numbers for
Trump; his wife, Melania; and
others in Trump’s inner circle.
Trump and Epstein’s appear-
ances often made the news: In
February 2000, Epstein and Max-
well attended a celebrity tennis
tournament at Mar-a-Lago. Ep-
stein brought along Prince An-
drew, who was photographed
with Trump and his then-girl-
friend Melania Knauss.
Trump also dined at Epstein’s
Upper East Side Manhattan man-
sion in 2003, according to New
York magazine. “The dialogues
are so engaging,” Epstein told the
magazine, “that serving even the
most extraordinary food some-
times seems inappropriate.”Trump, recently divorced from
his first wife, Ivana, was in an
on-and-off relationship with the
woman he would soon marry,
Marla Maples.
During that period, the New
York developer, casting himself as
a carefree playboy billionaire,
hosted and attended parties at
Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, some-
times featuring models, cheer-
leaders and beauty pageant con-
testants. Trump had a business
connection to all three industries:
For a time, he ran a modeling
agency. He owned a team in the
United States Football League, a
short-lived competitor to the
NFL. And he controlled the Miss
Universe pageant.
Since the start of his career,
Trump had made his love life a
central part of his public image.
The idea was to build his brand as
an avatar of fabulousness and to
extend that brand by attaching
beautiful women to his name, he
has said.
“I create stars,” he said on
ABC’s “Primetime Live” in 1994,
adding: “I’ve really gotten a lot of
women great opportunity. Unfor-
tunately, after they’re a star, the
fun is over for me. It’s like a
creating process. It’s almost like
creating a building. It’s pretty
sad.”
Trump’s parties at Mar-a-Lago
often featured models from Mi-
ami who floated around the patio
and pool, with many more wom-
en than men, friends have re-
counted.
“That’s true,” Trump said in an
interview in 2015, stressing he
was single at the time. “The point
was to have fun. It was wild.”
“There’s 100 beautiful women
and 10 guys,” Roger Stone, his
longtime adviser, told The Post in- “ ‘Look, how cool are we?’
... I mean, it was great.”
Epstein, who in 1990 bought
his own place in Palm Beach, two
miles north of Trump’s, never
became a member of Mar-a-Lago
but visited the club for social
events, Garten has said. On some
of those occasions, Epstein was
accompanied by Maxwell.
“Donald liked Epstein,” said
Steven Hoffenberg, a Trump ac-
quaintance who was Epstein’s
business partner at a New York
private equity firm in the 1980s
and ’90s, until Hoffenberg was
convicted of running a massive
Ponzi scheme. “But he was crazy
about Maxwell, a very charming
lady.”
Epstein made several appear-
ances at Mar-a-Lago. He attended
a party there with NFL cheerlead-
ers in 1992, where he was video-
taped by an NBC news crew gath-
ering footage for a segment on
Trump. The network recently re-
leased the footage, in which
Trump greets Epstein warmly
both really wanted it.”
Only one man would win.
In the wake of Epstein’s arrest
last month on sex trafficking
charges, many who socialized
with him — including Trump —
are eager to have it known that
they never much liked the man, or
weren’t really friends, or barely
even knew him.
“I was not a fan of his, that I can
tell you,” the president said in the
Oval Office the day after New York
authorities took Epstein into cus-
tody.
But friends and associates said
the two wealthy New York-to-
Palm Beach commuters had so-
cialized for years, drawn together
by a mix of money, women and
power.
“They knew each other a long
time,” said Sam Nunberg, a for-
mer Trump aide who said he
pressed the candidate about his
ties to Epstein in late 2014 as the
real estate mogul considered a
White House run. “Bottom line,
Donald would hang out with Ep-
stein because he was rich.”
Their falling out, Trump said,
happened about 15 years ago —
several years before Epstein’s
conviction on a prostitution solic-
itation charge.
Trump has not said why their
relationship ruptured. “The rea-
son doesn’t make any difference,
frankly,” the president said.
Fifteen years ago, the two men
squared off over the Palm Beach
mansion. Just a few months later,
local police began investigating
allegations that Epstein was sexu-
ally abusing minors. Trump has
also said — without providing
details — that he at some point
banned Epstein from Mar-a-La-
go.
The White House declined to
comment. Epstein’s lawyer did
not respond to requests for com-
ment.
It had been a typical Trump
relationship: heavily chronicled
in the news media, with an uncer-
tain core beneath the surface.
Photos and articles captured
the men together over the years,
the future president of the United
States and the future convicted
sex offender: Here they are, Ep-
stein and longtime girlfriend
Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump and
his then-girlfriend, Melania
Knauss, double dating at a celeb-
rity tennis tournament at Mar-a-
Lago. Partying with Britain’s
Prince Andrew. Hanging out with
National Football League cheer-
leaders. Dancing, laughing, pall-
ing around at a party Trump
threw to celebrate his “freedom”
after he divorced his second wife,
Marla Maples.
“Terrific guy,” Trump said of
Epstein in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun
to be with.”
Within two years, public sight-
ings of the two had ended.
‘They were good friends’
Trump and Epstein were more
than just neighbors who hap-
pened to end up at the same
parties. They were two outer-bor-
ough New York guys, both with a
knack for building their images
and making a buck. Both attract-
ed a ton of attention, though
Trump worked hard to win notice
and Epstein sometimes sought to
deflect it. Both won reputations
as men who were seen around
many beautiful women.
In 2016, Trump Organization
attorney Alan Garten told Fox
News that Trump had “no rela-
tionship” with Epstein: “They
were not friends and they did not
socialize together.” Garten de-
clined to comment for this article.
But Epstein, asked in a 2010
deposition if he had ever social-
ized with Trump, responded:
“Yes, sir.”
The Epstein-Trump relation-
ship didn’t exist in isolation but
as part of a larger Palm Beach
social swirl. In the early years
after Trump bought the private
Mar-a-Lago estate in 1985, Ep-
stein and Trump were spotted
together at Palm Beach events,
including a pre-pageant dinner at
Mar-a-Lago in 1992, according to
people in attendance.
“They were tight,” said one
person who observed them to-
gether and spoke on the condi-
tion of anonymity to avoid retri-
bution. “They were each other’s
wingmen.”
EPSTEIN FROM A
BY RENAE MERLE
AND MATT ZAPOTOSKYnew york — Registered sex
offender and multimillionaire
Jeffrey Epstein is expected to face
a four- to six-week trial on charg-
es that he sexually abused dozens
of young girls, his defense attor-
ney said in court Wednesday, add-
ing that his legal team anticipates
prosecutors will turn over 1 mil-
lion pages of material on the case.
When the trial will begin re-
mains unsettled. Prosecutors
want a date in June 2020, while
Epstein’s defense is arguing for a
date after Labor Day of that year.
“We need time to receive 1 mil-
lion pages of discovery and de-
fend a four- to six-week trial,” said
Martin Weinberg, Epstein’s de-
fense attorney.
Epstein, 66, was arrested July 6after landing at New Jersey’s
Teterboro Airport and hit with
sex trafficking charges that pros-
ecutors say involve dozens of girls
from 2002 to 2005. His case is
especially notable because the
jet-setting financier had pleaded
guilty to state charges in Florida
in 2008 to resolve similar allega-
tions as part of an agreement with
prosecutors that has been widely
criticized as overly lenient.The deal allowed Epstein to
avoid being accused of federal
crimes, and he ultimately spent 13
months in jail with work release
privileges. It was approved by
Alex Acosta, who was then the
U.S. attorney in Miami. Acosta
served as President Trump’s labor
secretary, though he resigned
that post July 12 after Epstein’s
arrest raised new questions about
Acosta’s handling of the previouscase.
Epstein is being held at the
federal detention center in Man-
hattan after a judge rejected his
request to be released on home
confinement. His lawyers are ap-
pealing that decision.
Epstein was recently found in
his cell with marks on his neck,
and authorities are trying to de-
termine if he was attacked or may
have attempted suicide, accord-ing to two people familiar with
the matter, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. In court
Wednesday, he appeared in a blue
jail uniform and showed no ap-
parent signs of distress. His attor-
ney did not address questions
about the matter after the hear-
ing, and it did not come up in
court.
[email protected]
[email protected]Epstein’s sex trafficking trial could last a month or more, attorney says
15 years ago, Trump and Epstein became real estate rivals
ROBERT STEVENS/ROBERTSTEVENS.COM
In 2004, the Maison de l’Amitie oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., was being sold out of bankruptcy. Donald Trump and Jeffrey
Epstein, New York-to-Florida commuters and friends, each tried to buy the property. Their friendship ruptured around the same time.NBC
Trump and Epstein speak at a party at Mar-a-Lago in November- Epstein made several appearances at Trump’s Florida estate.