The family of one of the women who accused New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and his friends of sexually abusing her is questioning President Donald Trump’s knowledge of the exploitation.
Before she died by suicide earlier this year, Virginia Giuffre filed a lawsuit in 2015 alleging that she was recruited by Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, to work for the financier as a “masseuse” when she was a sixteen-year-old working as a spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort in 2000. While still a minor, Epstein and Maxwell then groomed her to have sex with a slew of influential figures, Giuffre alleged.
Trump appeared to confirm her story earlier this week when he stated that Epstein poached several workers from his Palm Beach Club, including those employed at the Mar-a-Lago spa. When pressed on whether he believed “young women” were among those recruited by Epstein, Trump answered in the affirmative. When further pressed on whether Giuffre was one of the workers, the president said, “Yeah, he stole her,” before adding, “she had no complaints about us [Mar-a-Lago].”
Giuffre’s family speculated if Trump’s statement meant that he knew more about Epstein’s proclivities for sex trafficking minors than he has claimed during an interview with the Atlantic responding to his comments.
“It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side … no doubt about it,’” Giuffre’s two brothers and her sisters-in-law said. “We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”
They also denounced Maxwell’s recent offer to testify before Congress on the Epstein case in exchange for immunity during the interview, in which the family backed up claims that Giuffre worked at Mar-a-Lago as a “fun summertime job” before being recruited for sex work by Maxwell and Epstein. Trump’s White House has appeared to view Maxwell as the potential link to deciphering Epstein, whom observers have for decades said was shrouded in mystery, and the Justice Department has granted her limited immunity to discuss Epstein with the government
“If our sister could speak today, she would be most angered by the fact that the government is listening to a known perjurer, a woman who repeatedly lied under oath and will continue to do so as long as it benefits her position,” Giuffre’s family said. “The government and the President should never consider giving Ghislaine Maxwell any leniency. Maxwell destroyed many young lives, and she was convicted for only a fraction of the crimes she actually committed.”
Trump has long confirmed that he and Esptein were friends for years before splitting up around 2004 while competing over a real estate deal.
He reflected on their relationship in a statement to New York Magazine in 2002 for the outlet’s profile on Epstein, which also scrutinized the New York financier’s deep friendship with former President Bill Clinton, who called him “a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science.”
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told the magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
In depositions related to her 2015 lawsuit against Maxwell, Giuffre testified that she had no sexual contact with Trump and wasn’t aware of him ever having relations with the other girls in Epstein’s orbit.
She named a slew of other men as sexual abusers in the lawsuit against Maxwell that claimed she was lured away from a job as a spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club the summer she turned 2017 to become a “masseuse” for Epstein and provide sexual favors for his connections.
“There’s a whole bunch of them — it’s just hard for me to remember,” said Giuffre, according to the court filings. “My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy. Their whole lives revolved around sex.”
High-powered men Maxwell and Epstein allegedly directed Giuffre to have sex with included French modeling agent Jean Luc Brunel, billionaire money manager Glenn Dubin, an individual who was introduced to her as a prince to whom she was allegedly trafficked in the south of France, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Marvin Minsky — a computer scientist known for his pioneering contributions to artificial intelligence, a “foreign president,” and “a well-known prime minister. People she named in depositions have denounced her allegations as lies.
Epstein told Giuffre that he slept with “over a thousand women that Brunel brought in,” she claimed during a 2019 interview. Brunel was found dead in a French prison cell in 2022 as he was investigated for rape and sex trafficking of minors for Epstein.
Giuffre accused Epstein of directing her to provide sexual favors to several other influential figures, including Great Britian’s Prince Andrew, and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchel, who served in the Clinton administration from 1995 to 2001 as the U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, and was recognized as the architect of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to a decades-long conflict known as The Troubles.
Giuffre also accused Epstein of pawning her off to Lex Wexner, the founder of a global retail empire that included Victoria’s Secret, whose decades-long friendship with the New York financier was analyzed in a 2003 Vanity Fair report.
“I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” Wexner, who has staunchly rebuffed Giuffre’s allegations, said at the time. “But Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are not in investment strategy, and, as everyone who knows Jeffrey knows, his are not in fashion and design. We frequently discuss world trends as each of us sees them.”
Speculation has long fomented about who Epstein was, with some spectators, from right-wing Trump ally Steve Bannon, to Harvard affiliate Eric Weinstein, a mathematician who has conducted scientific research into the theory of gravity, suggesting that the New York financier held ties to the intelligence community. Epstein’s illicit sex and pedophilic acts played a side-character role in his overarching purpose of monitoring and influencing global dynamics by building relationships with leading figures in every realm of society, including the scientific, political, academic, and celebrity worlds, Weinstein suggested during a recent interview on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.
In the early 2000s, a time period when Epstein was viewed as being at the peak of his career, several outlets did profiles on him, probing the source of his financial wealth and meteoric rise to wining and dining with the world’s most influential figures as someone who never earned a bachelor’s degree. Those accounts paint a picture of a man who had a fetish for privacy and a deep fascination with science, particularly physics.
“He’s very enigmatic,” Rosa Monckton, who was described as a close friend to Epstein and former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K., said during her 2003interview with Vanity Fair. “You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there’s something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand…. He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get.”
Before her death in April, Giuffre also speculated on the idea that the financier image Esptein crafted was a front hiding his connections to the intelligence community, whether the United States’ CIA or Israel’s Mossad.
“Does anyone else here also believe Epstein in all likelihood was a Mossad/CIA linked Intelligence agent that was responsible for helping run a Blackmail/Honey pot ring to entrap elite oligarchs?” Giuffre questioned in a 2023 statement to X linking to a Reddit post “I think a strong argument can be made Epstein was indeed an Intelligence agent who helped run a blackmail/honey pot operation (that is most likely still running to this day). What better way to control the elites than to catch them doing something heinous and then hold it against them for life.”