Jeffrey Epstein mugshot
Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire who was recently arrested on charges of child sex trafficking, had close ties with President Donald Trump, drawing increased attention to his past sexual misconduct.
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Epstein and Trump are longtime friends, with the two having known each other since at least 1987. In 2002 Trump remarked that he has “known Jeffrey for fifteen years,” and that “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.” The president and Epstein often went to parties together, flying on the billionaire’s private jet.
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Some suspect that Trump may have known about Epstein’s molestation of underage girls. One victim of Epstein, Virginia Giuffre, stated that at age 15 she was recruited to give him “massages” while working as a towel girl at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. During the president’s 2016 campaign a woman who went by Katie Johnson accused him of raping her during a party at Epstein’s New York mansion in 1993 when she was 13 years old. Johnson dropped the suit after a Trump lawyer denied the claim, too scared to go through with the case.
Relations between Trump and Epstein reportedly soured when rumors began to emerge that the billionaire was involved in the sexual assault of underage girls. A lawyer representing three of Epstein’s victims during a 2009 suit stated that Trump was very helpful in building his case, and that the future president “was very helpful, in the information that he gave, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was involved in anything untoward whatsoever, but had good information. That checked out and that helped us and we didn’t have to take a deposition of him in 2009.” According to court documents filed by the lawyer, Trump had banned Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago resort after catching him having sex with an underage girl, although the lawyer admitted that he was unable to confirm the claim.
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