Here are some important dates with respect to Jeffrey Epstein. The Palm Beach police department first received a tip that minor girls were coming in and out of his home in November 2004. In March 2005, the police were contacted by a mother who said her underage daughter had stripped naked during a $300 massage of Epstein. On July 27, 2006, he was arrested by the Palm Beach Police Department on state felony charges of procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute.
Now, I don’t know how exclusive clubs like Mar-a-Lago generally deal with paying members who demonstrate extreme moral turpitude. Do country clubs kick out members who are arrested for paying to have sex with underage girls? It would seem like a prudent thing to do, if only to protect the children of other members. But it’s defensible to first see if someone is actually convicted, since we’re all innocent until proven guilty. Mar-a-Lago took no action at that time.
In August 2006, Epstein pleaded not guilty to the charges. However, Epstein’s problems were not over because the FBI had begun looking into his activities, and in June 2007 the Department of Justice handed down a 53-page indictment. At this point, Epstein entered into plea negotiations.
Things heated up in October 2007, when U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta, met with “Epstein lawyer Jay Lefkowitz at the West Palm Beach Marriott on Okeechobee Boulevard to discuss finalizing a deal. Among the terms agreed upon: that the victims would not be notified, that the deal would be kept under seal and all grand jury subpoenas would be canceled.”
It was at this point that his membership with Mar-a-Lago was cancelled. I don’t know for sure whether it was the club or Epstein that initiated the cancellation but I can’t actually complain too much about the timing. It came more than half a year before Epstein’s June 30, 2008, conviction on a state charge of procuring prostitution from a girl below age 18, for which he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. It could be that the club caught wind of the fact that Epstein was going to plead guilty and took preemptive action at that point.
Perhaps you consider this a tardy decision, and perhaps it wasn’t the club’s decision at all but a cost-saving measure from Epstein who knew he would be going to prison and unable to enjoy Mar-a-Lago’s many pleasures.
There’s also reporting that the cancellation was completely unrelated to Epstein’s legal case but arose after Epstein “behaved inappropriately toward a club member’s teenage daughter.”
A Mar-a-Lago member told the journalists that Trump had “kicked Epstein out after Epstein harassed the daughter of a member,” Sarah Blaskey of the Miami Herald reported. “The way this person described it, such an act could irreparably harm the Trump brand, leaving Donald no choice but to remove Epstein.”
This fits the initial explanation Trump made that Epstein was expelled for “being a creep.” In any case, October 2007 was when the membership came to an end, and that’s a pretty firm date for the end of any close association between Epstein and Donald Trump.
But it’s inconsistent with Trump’s latest explanation that he kicked Epstein out of his club for “stealing” girls who worked in his spa. One of those girls was Virginia Giuffre who was 16 in the summer of 2000 when she was recruited away from Mar-a-Lago by Ghislaine Maxwell to become a masseuse for Epstein.
“I think (Giuffre) worked at the spa,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. “He stole her.”
In Trump’s telling, he first issued a warning to Epstein to stop taking his employees and later banished him for a repeated offense.
“He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata,” Trump said.
That explanation just doesn’t fit the timeline unless there were seven years between offenses.
Whatever the truth about the reason and timing for the lapse of Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago membership, it’s pretty well established that their friendship was ruptured in some way in November 2004 when they competed to buy a mansion owned by a Russian oligarch. Trump outbid Epstein and there’s no record of them interacting after that point, even if Epstein remained a member of the club for almost three more years.
It seems strange that Epstein would continue to show up at the club during that time without interacting with Trump, but that’s the record we have.
What helps Trump here is that his friendship ended right at the point that the Palm Beach police first started receiving concerning reports about minor girls visiting Epstein’s house. What hurts him is that his explanations are all over the place and very inconsistent.
All this lying indicates some awareness of guilt. And it’s really not the main point when Epstein’s membership was cancelled or why, because the concern is really about what Trump did with Epstein when they were close friends.
A good example of that involves British model Anouska De Georgiou who has said that Epstein “slowly groomed” her “until she was completely vulnerable and defenceless.”
“For me, I was involved in that kind of lifestyle growing up and so I thought I could cope. And I thought I could handle it,” she said, only to add: “By the time I was being raped, it was too late.”
In 1999. De Georgiou, was introduced to Trump by Maxwell. He was in-between wives at the time. He flew them both to Florida and later put De Georgiou up in one of his Manhattan properties as a kind of kept woman.
This was the kind of service Maxwell provided for Trump. It was a year later that she “stole” Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago. But in 1999, she handed over a young girl to him that had already been prepared by Epstein.
A British actress has told of how paedophile Jeffrey Epstein would “physically shake” with excitement before raping her.
Anouska De Georgiou, 42, who went to the same school as Kate Middleton, says she was groomed by Epstein after meeting him through well-connected friends in London in the 90s.
…She said: “When Jeffrey would see me he would physically shake because he wanted to get at me and that was very unnerving.”
There’s no allegation that Trump similarly raped De Georgiou and she was not a minor at the time. But this is just one example that we know about, and it is about as unseemly as it can get. There’s plenty of smoke that indicates that Trump and Epstein shared women on a more regular basis, including Trump’s creepy 2003 sexually themed birthday card he wrote for Epstein where he discussed their shared secret with a reference to the last time they got together.
We know there are many references to Trump in the FBI files on Epstein and that those references have been carefully redacted. We know that Trump is thinking about pardoning Maxwell if she testifies to his innocence. He has already moved her to a minimum security prison as an incentive to do his bidding.
So, as people debate the timeline of Epstein’s membership at Mar-a-Lago, they should be careful not to let it be a distraction from what really matters here. People want to know which powerful people raped Epstein’s girls and whether the president was one of them. And they want to know if some of these powerful people arranged to have Epstein murdered in prison to ensure his silence. When Epstein died, Trump was the president.
Everything Trump is doing now appears to be in service of a coverup of his own culpability, and that’s especially true of his handling of “Madam Maxwell.”
