Trump Flies Epstein Air, aka the Lolita Express

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Woman says Trump had sex with women in Jeffrey Epstein's N.Y. mansion, then retracts [for family's safety]
by Hannah Phillips
Palm Beach Post
Published: 1:47 p.m. ET Jan 8, 2024 Updated 2:24 p.m. ET Jan. 9, 2024

In the latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein documents, a woman claims that Donald Trump had sex with "many women" in Epstein's New York mansion. It's one of several bombshell allegations made by Epstein victim Sarah — some of which she later retracted out of concern for her family's wellbeing.

The allegations appear in a trove of documents a federal judge has steadily released since Jan. 3, which detail the breadth and depth of a the sex trafficking ring Epstein operated from his Palm Beach mansion and beyond.

The latest batch of documents includes a sampling of emails Ransome sent to a New York Post reporter in 2016 linking former presidents Trump and Bill Clinton to Epstein's "seedy inner circle." Ransome claimed that Epstein recorded sex tapes of Clinton, Prince Andrew and other prominent men to keep as blackmail, though no such footage has ever been publicly uncovered.

Ransome also said that an unnamed friend who allegedly had sex on separate occasions with Clinton and the Duke of York "was made to feel like a dirty whore and a liar" when she reported it to police in 2008.

According to Ransome, her friend was approached months later "by Special Agents Forces Men sent directly by Hilary (sic) Clinton herself, in order to protect her presidential campaign in 2008."

As Clinton had hinted in his 1987 withdrawal, he and Hillary had already begun to formulate the tactics they would adopt to deal with the all too real potential for a sex scandal's erupting during a presidential campaign. He had thought it a "weakness" in Hart, aides remembered, that the senator seemed to equivocate over issues like a definition of adultery and appeared unprepared to lash back to discredit the attacks. Hart, who had formally and openly separated from his wife in 1979 and again in 1981, would admit to having seen women during the separations but otherwise refused to answer questions about infidelity. At the same time, no woman had come forward to accuse him, including Donna Rice.

With Hart's precedent and four years to prepare, Clinton's response would be more concerted and sophisticated, at least as staff and advisers saw it evolve between 1987 and the 1992 race. He might acknowledge having had "difficulties" in his marriage -- "nodding humbly at the weakness of the flesh," as a Hot Springs friend put it caustically, "like a good Southern Baptist is supposed to do" -- but dismiss them as all in the past. Unlike what they saw as a passive Lee Hart, Hillary would stand behind him with characteristic firmness. "She was never to play the poor little wife," said one adviser. They would also be prepared to strike back at any women accusers -- "taking on the bitches," as one former staff member put it -- including with private campaigns of "spin" to discredit them with the media and even pressures to silence them. Above all, however, Clinton would simply deny everything. Barring the most direct evidence -- which advisers and others say he always assumed would never be available -- he was sure the story could go no further. The governor, they remembered, had an almost mystical faith in the absence of photographs. "He felt it was probably those pictures that killed Hart, that and being sort of mealy-mouthed about the whole thing," one friend remembered. "If you could deny it over and over, the reporters would get tired sooner or later and go away to something else." As Clinton himself would tell one of the women, Gennifer Flowers, late in 1991, "If they ever hit you with it, just say no and go on. There's nothing they can do .... If everybody kinda hangs tough, they're just not going to do anything. They can't ... if they don't have pictures."

Even given all the familiar reasons for discretion and concealment by the women themselves, there was no small potential for revelation. There had been far too many cases. As they eventually told their stories after he was elected president, the Arkansas trooper bodyguards and others would testify to Bill Clinton's extramarital relations with literally hundreds of women, "There would hardly be an opportunity he would let slip to have sex," a state police security guard told the London Sunday Times in 1994. Insistent denials by both Clinton and the woman in question would not always be a guarantee of erasing suspicion, even without photos. While one woman employee of an Arkansas utility continued to deny any relationship with the governor, for example, the Los Angeles Times unearthed partial phone records between 1989 and 1991 that showed Clinton telephoning her fifty-nine times at her home and office, placing eleven cellular calls to her residence on July 16, 1989, and, two months later, while on an official trip, making a ninety-four-minute call at 1:23 a.m. and another for eighteen minutes the next morning at 7:45. Clinton had been wrong when he talked about telephone evidence in a tape-recorded conversation with Gennifer Flowers in December 1991. Did she have phone records? he had asked her after she told him someone had broken into her apartment. "Unh unh. I mean why would I? You ... you usually call me, for that matter. And besides, who would know?" Flowers had answered. And Clinton, speaking from the mansion, had seemed to reassure himself: "Isn't that amazing? Well . . . I wouldn't care if they ... you know, I, I ... They may have my phone records on this computer here, but I don't think it.... That doesn't prove anything."

Though most of the eyewitness accounts would appear only after the 1992 election, the list of the future president's illicit affairs would be remarkably detailed, including more than twenty women who stepped forward or were otherwise publicly identified by the spring of 1994. Troopers would describe the wife of a prominent local judge, a Little Rock reporter, a former state employee, a cosmetics clerk at a Little Rock department store, and several others, including Flowers, whom Clinton had seen at intervals of two to three times a week in the course of relationships lasting anywhere from weeks to months to years. According to the British press, there had been a black woman who claimed, after more than a dozen visits by the future president, that Clinton was the father of her child. In the testimony, too, were the settings and circumstances -- the flaunting of girlfriends in public, Clinton's slipping troopers cash to pay for gifts at Victoria's Secret in Little Rock's University Mall, the constant and often vain efforts to conceal movements from Hillary and the periodic scenes between Clinton and her, the numberless one-night stands with strangers in the state and beyond, oral sex in the dark parking lot of Chelsea's elementary school. "Later he told me that he had researched the subject in the Bible," trooper Larry Patterson told the American Spectator, "and oral sex isn't considered adultery." Some thought it all undeniably pathological. "What has emerged," Geordie Greig of the London Sunday Times wrote, "is a man with what would appear to be an almost psychotic inability to control his zipper."

From the first alarm and strategizing after the Hart episode in 1987, the response of the Clinton entourage had been to view the womanizing in an almost prudish way, fearing outright public rejection. "We were thinking how it was going to play in Jonesboro or Paragould," said one aide, "and of course we were thinking of Gary Hart." But the national public response in 1992 would prove apparently more lenient and worldly. When audiences in New Hampshire, New York, or California seemed ready to accept that a presidential candidate's private life -- whatever his extramarital sexual habits and whether they credited his denials or not -- had no bearing on his integrity as a leader, Clinton's aides regarded their strategy of simply stonewalling as vindicated. Neither then nor later did many of those around Clinton reflect on the deeper meaning of the womanizing and what it said about other aspects of the man and leader.

At almost every turn in the history was an abuse of power and trust: the routine employment of the troopers to facilitate, stand guard, and cover up; the use of state cars and time and the sheer good name and prestige of the governor's office.

It was not that Clinton had governed and then made his sexual forays as part of some scrupulously separate private life. In part because of the furtive shadow play with Hillary, in part the product of his own insouciance and sense of entitlement, much of the philandering took place during the workday, on official trips, or around ceremonial or political functions. He had indulged a good deal of his relentless promiscuity as the government. Propositioning young women at county fairs or enticing state employees at conferences, he enjoyed much of his predatory privilege because he was the government.

There was also the issue of how much the illicit practices opened the governor and future president to blackmail or how much the gifts and other expenses, which could not be taken from any legitimate income that Hillary might notice, made him all the more dependent on his own "walking around" cash from backers. Equally telling was what it all revealed about his genuine attitude toward women. The repeated testimony of the troopers would show the undisguised Clinton rating women as objects, "ripe peaches," as he called them, "purely to be graded, purely to be chased, dominated, conquered," according to L.D. Brown. The governor had been predatory even toward one of the trooper's wives and toward another's mother-in-law.

There was a sharp demarcation between his two worlds, the public champion of equal rights naming women to high office and the seducer who preferred his partners without too much rival seriousness, rewarding substance only as part of the seduction. A young staff analyst for the National Governors' Association would remember Clinton's courting her not only by personal charm and flirtation but also by ardent support of her policy proposals. When she firmly rebuffed his advances one night at an NGA dance, however, he instantly lost interest in her ideas -- "cut me and the policies dead the next day," she remembered. When a former Miss Arkansas, Sally Perdue, told of a four-month affair with Clinton that began not long after he returned to power in 1983, reports fixed on her colorful details of the governor parading around her apartment in one of her black nightgowns playing his saxophone, using cocaine. More significant were the circumstances of their breakup. When she told him she was thinking of running for mayor of Pine Bluff, Clinton bristled. "You'd -- you'd better not run for mayor," he warned her, and the relationship ended in an angry argument. He was clearly upset that she had crossed a line, Perdue remembered. A "good ole boy," as she recalled him, he had wanted a "good little girl" as an intimate. "I don't think he really wanted me to be an independent thinker at that point," Perdue would say.

Fear of exposure notwithstanding, the behavior would continue through the election and transition. Among the troopers' stories would be a scene at the Little Rock airport as the president-elect and his wife left for Virginia and their inaugural procession into Washington. Hillary noticed a security guard escorting one of the women to the farewell ceremony and turned on him angrily. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" she asked Larry Patterson, according to his account in the American Spectator. "I know who that whore is. I know what she's doing here. Get her out of here." In a reaction familiar to many aides, Clinton simply shrugged and the trooper took the woman back to the city. At the same juncture, having witnessed during the later days of the campaign and during the transition what some in Arkansas had seen for years, even the legendarily discreet Secret Service was shocked by the new occupants of the White House. According to reliable sources, some of the agents who had been in Little Rock filed an extraordinary warning with headquarters referring in old-fashioned terms to issues of "moral turpitude" involving the president-elect.

Even after the troopers' initial revelations in the Los Angeles Times and the American Spectator late in 1993, however, the issue would be all but marginalized by the mainstream media. ''I'm not interested in Bill Clinton's sex life as governor of Arkansas," New York Times Washington bureau chief R.W. Apple told a British reporter. At the same time, longtime Washington Post journalist Mike Isikoff would find himself in a shouting match with editors who were refusing to publish even a portion of his meticulously researched investigative report on Paula Jones, who would later bring a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president. Jones's much-substantiated story of being propositioned by Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock on May 8, 1991, when she was a twenty-four-year-old Arkansas state employee, was typical of the situation in which many young women of her time and class found themselves during the Clinton era. Yet few episodes so starkly expressed the inherent sexism, class discrimination, and willful myopia of the Washington establishment as the Jones case. The media, national women's organizations, leaders throughout the Congress, and organized labor and other ostensibly progressive institutions alternately ignored, dismissed, or even belittled Jones and witnesses like her. The studied hypocrisy and insensitivity to the underlying issues of abuse of power and exploitation of women would be one more vivid example of the capital's culture of complicity.....

Much of the rest of the campaign would be directed not at making a point of his power and willingness to use it but at hiding its embarrassments. The Clintons summoned Betsey Wright to brief reporters on local Arkansas critics and seemingly trivial local issues and incidents. "I'll swear to God there were dossiers kept on anybody who said anything crossways of Clinton, and I don't know who did it, but a lot of folks got smeared real good with the reporters," said one Little Rock activist. "You'd talk to a reporter and they'd be ready to jump on a story and look into everything," remembered another, "and then they'd go down to [Clinton campaign] headquarters and come out thinking you ought to be in a straitjacket or jail or you were just dumb or vengeful. When they got through attacking people personally down there, it wasn't just the people who suffered, but real issues like Whitewater or funny money didn't have any credibility either." "Where's the info on Gennifer?" Hillary Clinton had asked Little Rock from a pay phone on the campaign trail when the story broke. The tactics of suppression were not limited to Arkansas, however, and were not always so genteel as providing discrediting information or spin for visiting reporters. The campaign soon hired a private detective to work on the "bimbo problem." Then, too, Sally Perdue would later tell of being approached by a Democratic functionary in Illinois and none too subtly warned that she might have her knees broken or worse if she continued to speak publicly about her relationship with Clinton. For their part, the professionals of the campaign would deny any knowledge of such practices, though Betsey Wright, gone to a lobbying job in Washington, would be enlisted again in 1994 and afterward to "explain" the instability or seamy motives of those, like the state troopers, who told their stories. It would be a mark of the Clinton White House to attack in open and secret the people who exposed its inhabitants and thus to evade, often successfully, the substance and truth of the charges, the issues themselves.

-- Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America, by Roger Morris

President Bill Clinton assaulted me in the Oval Office.

I went through intensive FBI interrogations, gave depositions, and testified before the grand jury. In the process, I hurt Clinton. His machine came after me and defamed me in the media. They coerced others to lie about me. They violated my right to privacy. I suffered a public ordeal of humiliation and frustration. That was the fight that the American public saw.

But there was another side of my ordeal. It was the private side -- my private terror.

They threatened my children. They threatened my friend's children. They took one of my cats and killed another. They left a skull on my porch. They told me I was in danger. They followed me. They vandalized my car. They tried to retrieve my dogs from a kennel. They hid under my deck in the middle of the night. They subjected me to a campaign of fear and intimidation, trying to silence me. It didn't work.

When Bill Clinton assaulted me, he betrayed my trust and our friendship. This was a personal betrayal. But that which followed was not. That which followed was a betrayal of the public trust, of political power, and of the Democratic ideology that the Clintons and I once held dear. Subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of Bill Clinton, I was then subjected to abuse of power at the hands of the Clinton administration. More than any other's, these were Hillary Clinton's hands.

When the White House released letters in which I asked President Clinton to help me find a government job, they broke the law and violated my right to privacy. That was Hillary's call. When my corroborating witness recanted her story, a very powerful Washington lawyer whom she could ill afford stepped in to represent her. That was Hillary's good friend. When a White House aide predicted my reputation would sink just days after my first public appearance, he told a friend he could go to jail for what he was doing. That was Hillary's aide. When White House lawyers hired private investigators, those thugs terrorized me. They were Hillary's investigators.

-- Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Kathleen Willey

-- Passion and Betrayal, by Gennifer Flowers with Jacquelyn Dapper
-- Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Kathleen Willey
-- Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America, by Roger Morris
-- The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
-- Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA: How the Presidency was Co-opted by the CIA, by Terry Reed & John Cummings

Sarah Ransome

Victim retracts claims, cites concerns for family

The same batch of documents contains another email in which Ransome retracted her claims, telling the reporter she feared for her family's safety and wanted "to walk away from this." She told Bazaar in 2021 that Epstein threatened to murder her family if she spoke publicly.

"It's not worth coming forward," she wrote. "I will never be heard anyhow."

In a 2019 New Yorker article, Ransome added that she "had invented the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior, and to make him believe that she had ‘evidence that would come out if he harmed me.’”

Ransome said she met Epstein in 2006 and was raped and starved in the year she spent in his circle of women and underage girls. In a deposition, Ransome said she wanted to expose Epstein to stop him from hurting others.

"Seeing as I’m going to be a parent myself, I can’t really live with myself knowing that there’s a pedophile with my kids on the planet," she said. "So as a responsible human being, I thought that I would come forward."

Attorneys representing Alan Dershowitz — who Ransome has also accused of sexual abuse — submitted her emails to the court in an attempt to undermine her credibility.

Monday's documents are among the last expected to be unsealed in victim Virginia Giuffre's defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre, who in 2001 worked as a teenaged spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, said Epstein forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew and other prominent men after Maxwell lured her into his circle.

Maxwell called the accusations lies, prompting Giuffre to sue in 2015. Though the case was settled and sealed two years later, the Miami Herald successfully fought to have the names and documents associated with it made public.

Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence at a Tallahassee prison — where she teaches etiquette to fellow inmates — for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls. Epstein pleaded guilty to two state prostitution-related charges in 2008 and served 13 months in a work-release program at the Palm Beach County Jail.

Federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking in July 2019. He was found hanged in his jail cell less than a month after his arrest.

Hannah Phillips covers criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at [email protected]. Help support our journalism and subscribe today.

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It sure looks like Donald Trump was disguised as 'Doe 174' in the newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein documents
by Jacob Shamsian
Business Insider
Jan 8, 2024, 8:24 PM MST
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald- ... led-2024-1


Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Davidoff Studios/Getty Images

** A federal judge unsealed the names of nearly 200 "Does" affiliated with Jeffrey Epstein.
** Based on an analysis of court records, Donald Trump is Doe 174.
** Trump may have fought to keep his name redacted in the documents before the judge unsealed it.

Over the past week, thousands of pages of court documents in a Jeffrey Epstein-linked lawsuit have been unsealed.

The documents identify about 170 people whose names have come up in a legal battle between Virginia Giuffre, one of his accusers, and Ghislaine Maxwell, his former girlfriend who in 2021 was convicted of trafficking girls to him for sex.

Those roughly 170 Epstein associates had names under seal for different reasons — some were his wealthy friends, some were his victims, and some were people whose names were merely mentioned in passing. They were identified as a "J. Doe" in arguments over whether their names should be made public or remain redacted.

Donald Trump is one of them. But until now, it wasn't clear which of the nearly 200 Does — as enumerated by US District Judge Loretta Preska in a 50-page list — he actually was.

An exhaustive review of the documents by Business Insider points to one no-longer-anonymous Doe who checks all the boxes: Doe 174.

In deciding whether to make the names on the list public, Preska weighed any privacy rights the Does might have against the public's right to access judicial documents. The newly unsealed documents include new excerpts of deposition transcripts and other legal filings where Trump's name is now revealed.

Preska's list identifies Doe 174 as a person whose "association with Epstein and Maxwell has been widely reported in the media already, and his or her name came up during Maxwell's public criminal trial."

The former president Trump fits that bill as someone who had a long history with the now dead pedophile and who said "I wish her well" when Maxwell was indicted on sex-trafficking charges.

Trump also came up several times during Maxwell's trial. One of his Mar-a-Lago employees testified about an Epstein victim working at Mar-a-Lago. Flight records made public on the trial showed Trump flew on Epstein's plane with his son Eric. And one victim at the trial said Epstein name-dropped Trump, apparently to demonstrate that he was connected to powerful people.

The newly unsealed filings have shed more light on Epstein's connections to some of the most powerful people in the world. They detail some of his connections to former President Bill Clinton and sexual misconduct accusations against Prince Andrew, which the British royal has denied.

But in her ruling, Preska said Doe 174's name came up in nine different documents that were previously under seal or had their name redacted.

As of publication time Monday night, three of those documents had not yet been completely unredacted. But Trump does fit into the context of those documents.

The other six documents that had been unsealed all include Trump's name, too, and no other Doe is listed as being named in all those same docket entries.

It's unclear whether Trump fought to keep his identity under seal in the documents.

In her December order to unseal the names, Preska said some Does didn't argue to keep their identities secret. For Doe 36, who's Bill Clinton, for example, Preska wrote that he didn't object to having his name unsealed.

"This individual did not raise any objection to unsealing, and thus did not meet his or her burden of identifying interests that outweigh the presumption of access with specificity," Preska wrote of Doe 36.

Preska used the same language in her rulings for more than one-third of the Does on the list to describe their lack of objection.

But she did not include that note in her ruling for Doe 174, instead writing that "no interests that outweigh the presumption of access have been identified with specificity."

"This material should be unsealed in full," Preska ruled.

An attorney for Trump did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Victims talked about Trump as one of Epstein's friends

The unsealed documents are not all damning for Trump.

Two of the unsealed documents the judge said named Doe 174 are from a deposition of Johanna Sjoberg, who has accused Epstein of rape and Prince Andrew of groping her (the British royal has denied the claims).

In the deposition, Sjoberg denied massaging Trump at any of Epstein's properties. She also described flying to Atlantic City in Epstein's private jet, where they visited one of Trump's casinos.

"Jeffrey said, Great, we'll call up Trump, and we'll go to — I don't recall the name of the casino, but — we'll go to the casino," Sjoberg recalled in the deposition.

Another document, which was fully unsealed in 2022, is an already-public 2016 New York Post article about the allegations against Epstein. It mentions that Trump and Epstein were friends and spent time at parties together in Palm Beach.

The three other unsealed documents are motions and letters from lawyers representing Epstein and Alan Dershowitz, where Trump is mentioned in passing.

"Mr. Epstein's name has been widely linked in the press with prominent individuals such as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew," his attorneys wrote in a motion arguing that he should not be forced to testify in front of a jury, later adding: "His personal appearance at the trial of this case would predictably be the focus of massive media attention, of both the mainstream and gutter variety."


Alan Dershowitz. Mario Tama/Getty Images

One unsealed document from a lawyer representing Dershowitz seeks to discredit one of his accusers, Sarah Ransome, by saying she has made unproven claims about possessing video footage of powerful people having sex with girls in Epstein's homes. Ransome had said that she had a friend who was "one of the many girls that had sexual relations with Donald Trump" and that the friend said she had sex with Trump in Epstein's Manhattan mansion.

"She told me how he kept going on about how he liked her 'pert nipples,'" Ransome said, purporting to cite a friend. "Donald Trump liked flicking and sucking her nipples until they were raw."

Ransome later recanted her claims about having the video footage. In her book "Silenced No More: Surviving My Journey to Hell and Back," she said she told the false story as a sort of insurance policy, though she maintained that "Jeffrey kept a trove of surveillance on every person who had ever visited his properties."

"I was absolutely terrified that, once I went public with my story, Jeffrey and Ghislaine would find and kill me," Ransome wrote in her book. "I wanted to send them a message via the press: if you wage war on me, I will return fire by releasing my evidence. That would be my leverage, my way of protecting myself."

While three of the nine documents naming Doe 174 have not yet been fully unsealed, the public docket includes versions with some redactions.

It's easy to see where Trump fits into them. They are all transcripts of depositions from Ransome, Giuffre, and Epstein's Palm Beach housekeeper Juan Alessi, all of whom were asked about Epstein's relationships with celebrities and other powerful people.

"I saw guests at the house that were celebrities," Alessi told the attorney deposing him.

"Who did you see at the house?" the attorney asked.

Alessi's answer, as of Monday evening, remained redacted.

January 9, 2024: This story has been updated to include more detail about Judge Preska's unsealing process.

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How suite! Trump's Brit of all right.
Sunday Mirror
November 23, 1997



Just weeks after ditching his second wife, America's best-known billionaire Donald Trump has fallen under the spell of a 20-year-old English girl.

Trump, 50, who has failed in his bid to secure the services of Princess Diana's butler Paul Burrell, was in search of another British trophy when he met London model Anouska De Georgiou at a party in Manhattan.

Several American millionaires already had their eyes on Anouska. But she was there with Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer.

And none of his would-be rivals owned a vast mansion in Florida like Donald does: Mar-a-Lago (where I have dined with him and his outgoing wife Marla) is enough to make any young girl go weak at the knees.

After their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the sunshine state, where all three enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, Anouska was installed in one of Donald's many apartments there.

Ms De Georgiou likes older men - she went out once or twice with Joanna Lumley's ex-husband Jeremy Lloyd, who is 45 years her senior.

Doubtless it is the start of a long (by Trump standards it already is) friendship.

COPYRIGHT 1997 MGN LTD

Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery
by Landon Thomas Jr.
New York Magazine
October 28, 2002

He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world. Ever since the Post’s “Page Six” ran an item about the president’s late-September visit to Africa with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker – on his new benefactor’s customized Boeing 727 – the question of the day has been: Who in the world is Jeffrey Epstein?

It’s a life full of question marks. Epstein is said to run $15 billion for wealthy clients, yet aside from Limited founder Leslie Wexner, his client list is a closely held secret. A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists yet possesses no bachelor’s degree. For more than ten years, he’s been linked to Manhattan-London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert Maxwell, yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes as he scours the world for investment opportunities. He owns what is said to be Manhattan’s largest private house yet runs his business from a 100-acre private island in St. Thomas.

Power on Wall Street has generally accrued to those who have made their open bids for it. Soros. Wasserstein. Kravis. Weill. The Sturm und Drang of their successes and failures has been played out in public. Epstein breaks the mold. Most everyone on the Street has heard of him, but nobody seems to know what the hell he is up to. Which is just the way he likes it.

“My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money-management firm, though you won’t get a straight answer from him,” says one well-known investor. “He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I’ve also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It’s like looking at the Wizard of Oz – there may be less there than meets the eye.”

Says another prominent Wall Streeter: “He is this mysterious, Gatsbyesque figure. He likes people to think that he is very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness. The whole thing is weird.”

The wizard that meets the eye is spare and fit; with a long jaw and a carefully coiffed head of silver hair, he looks like a taller, younger Ralph Lauren. A raspy Brooklyn accent betrays his Coney Island origins. He spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day doing advanced yoga with his personal instructor, who travels with him wherever he goes. He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

He dresses casually — jeans, open-necked shirts, and sneakers — and is rarely seen in a tie. Indeed, those close to him say the reason he quit his board seat at the Rockefeller Institute was that he hated wearing a suit. “It feels like a dress,” he told one friend.

Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, AND and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Other footage showed Trump discussing the Access Hollywood, hot-mic footage which surfaced in 2016, briefly threatening to derail Trump’s election campaign.

In that tape, Trump said: “I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet, just kiss, I don’t even wait and when you’re a star they just let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In his deposition, he said: “Well historically, that’s true with stars.”

He was asked: “It’s true you can grab them by the pussy?”

He said: “Well, if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”

“You consider yourself a star?”

“I think you can say that, yeah.”

-- Video of Trump confusing E Jean Carroll with ex-wife in deposition is released, BY Martin Pengelly, The Guardian

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president. In his eyes, Clinton as a species represents the highest evolutionary form of the political animal. To be up close to him, as he was during the African journey, is akin to seeing the rarest of beasts on a safari. As he put it to a friend upon his return from Africa, “If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician.”

“Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science,” Clinton says through a spokesman. “I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.”

Before Clinton, Epstein’s rare appearances in the gossip columns tended to be speculation as to the true nature of his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. While they are still friends, the English tabloids have postulated that Maxwell has longed for a more permanent pairing and that for undetermined reasons Epstein has not reciprocated in kind. “It’s a mysterious relationship that they have,” says society journalist David Patrick Columbia. “In one way, they are soul mates, yet they are hardly companions anymore. It’s a nice conventional relationship, where they serve each other’s purposes.”

Friends of the two say that Maxwell, whose social life has always been higher-octane than Epstein’s, lent a little pizzazz to the lower-profile Epstein. Indeed, at a party at Maxwell’s house, her friends say, one is just as apt to see Russian ladies of the night as one is to see Prince Andrew. The Oxford-educated Maxwell, described by many as a man-eater (she flies her own helicopter and was recently seen dining with Clinton at Nello’s on Madison Avenue), lives in her own townhouse a few blocks away. Epstein is frequently seen around town with a bevy of comely young women but there has been no boldfaced name to replace Maxwell. “You may read about Jeffrey in the social columns, but there is much more to him than that,” says Jeffrey T. Leeds of the private equity firm Leeds Weld & Co. “He’s a talented money manager and an extremely hardworking person with broad interests. Most unusual, though, is that in this media-obsessed age he is not in any sense a self-promoter.”

Born in 1953 and raised in Coney Island, Epstein went to Lafayette High School. According to his bio, he took some classes in physics at Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971. He left Cooper Union in 1971 and attended NYU’s Courant Institute, where he took courses in mathematical physiology of the heart, leaving that school, too, without a degree. Between 1973 and 1975, Epstein taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School.

By most accounts, he was something of a Robin Williams–in–Dead Poets Society type of figure, wowing his high-school classes with passionate mathematical riffs. So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point-blank: “What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street — why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call.”

Epstein was in many respects the perfect candidate for Greenberg’s consideration. Greenberg, a senior partner at Bear Stearns at the time and a legendary trader in his own right, has long made it clear that it’s the hungry, brilliant guys lacking the fancy degrees that he favors at Bear. They even have an acronym: PSDs — poor, smart, and a deep desire to be rich. It was a description that fit Epstein to a T. He was a Brooklyn guy with a motor for a brain, and while he did love teaching, this close-up view of the rarefied Upper East Side life of his students’ gave him a taste for the big time.

So in 1976, he dropped everything and reported to work at Bear Stearns, where he started off as a junior assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. His ascent was rapid.

At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off. To trade options, one had to value them, and to value them, one needed to be able to master such abstruse mathematical confections as the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. For Epstein, breaking down such models was pure sport, and within just a few years he had his own stable of clients. “He was not your conventional broker saying ‘Buy IBM’ or ‘Sell Xerox,’ ” says Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. “Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special-products division, where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions. He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well.”

In 1980, Epstein made partner, but he had left the firm by 1981. Working in a bureaucracy was not for him; what’s more, in rubbing up against ever greater sums of money during his time at Bear, he began to feel the need to grab his own piece of the action.

In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos – just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.

His firm would be different, too. He was not here just to offer investment advice; he saw himself as the financial architect of every aspect of his client’s wealth — from investments to philanthropy to tax planning to security to assuaging the guilt and burdens that large sums of inherited wealth can bring on. “I want people to understand the power, the responsibility, and the burden of their money,” he said to a colleague at the time.

As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge; at Bear, he had come to the realization that, counterintuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious you became. For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn’t make sense.

From the get-go, his business was successful. But the conditions for investing with Epstein were steep: He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client’s financial cause. And he remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.

It’s nice work if you can get it. Epstein runs a lean operation, and those close to him say that his actual staff — based here in Manhattan at the Villard House (home to Le Cirque); New Albany, Ohio; and St. Thomas, where he reincorporated his company seven years ago (now called Financial Trust Co.) — numbers around 150 and is purely administrative. When it comes to putting these billions to work in the markets, it is Epstein himself making all the investment calls — there are no analysts or portfolio managers, just twenty accountants to keep the wheels greased and a bevy of assistants — many of them conspicuously attractive young women — to organize his hectic life. So assuming, conservatively, a fee of .5 percent (he takes no commissions or percentages) on $15 billion, that makes for a management fee of $75 million a year straight into Jeff Epstein’s pocket. Nice work indeed.

It has been rumored that Linda Wachner and David Rockefeller have been clients, too, but both parties deny any such relationship. What’s more, who ever heard of a financial adviser turning down $500 million accounts? All the speculation and mystery has proved fertile ground for some alternative Jeffrey Epstein stories – the most bizarre of which has him playing the piano (he is classically trained) for high rollers in a Manhattan piano bar in the mid-eighties.

Another focus of curiosity is the relationship that Epstein has with his patron and mentor Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of the Columbus, Ohio–based Limited chain of women’s-clothing stores. Wexner, who is said to be worth more than $2.5 billion by Forbes, became an Epstein client in 1987. “It’s a weird relationship,” says another Wall Streeter who knows Epstein. “It’s just not typical for someone of such enormous wealth to all of a sudden give his money to some guy most people have never heard of.” The Wexner-Epstein relationship is indeed a multifaceted one.

Given the secrecy that envelops Epstein’s client list, some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein’s lavish life — but friends leap to his defense. “Let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients,” says noted m&a lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. “I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn’t take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that’s Jeffrey.”

Epstein’ s current residence in Manhattan — a 45,000-square-foot eight-story mansion on East 71st Street — was originally bought by Wexner for $13 million in 1989. Wexner poured many millions into a full gut renovation, then turned it over to Epstein in 1995 after he got married. One story has Epstein paying only a dollar for it, though others say he paid full market price, which would have been in the neighborhood of $20 million. Epstein then undertook his own $10 million gut renovation (special features: closed-circuit TV and a heated sidewalk in front of the house for melting snow), saying to friends: “I don’t want to live in another person’s house.”

There are other houses as well, including a sweeping villa in Palm Beach and a custom-built 51,000-square-foot castle in Santa Fe. Said to be the largest house in the state, the latter sits atop a hill on a 45,000-acre ranch. He had it built because of the month or so he found himself spending there, talking elementary particle physics with his friend Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and co-chair of the science board at the Santa Fe Institute.

Epstein also owned a grand house (he has since sold it) near Wexner’s opulent manse at the center of the Limited magnate’s high-end housing development in New Albany, Ohio. New Albany was a lush sprawl of farmland on the outskirts of Columbus that Wexner, starting in 1988, turned into a rich village of multimillion-dollar Georgian homes surrounding a Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course. It was a massive development project, financed largely by Wexner himself. Epstein was a general partner in the real-estate holding company, called New Albany Property, despite putting only a few million dollars of capital into the project.

“Before Epstein came along in 1988, the financial preparations and groundwork for the New Albany development were a total mess,” says Bob Fitrakis, a Columbus-based investigative journalist who has written extensively on Wexner and his finances. “Epstein cleaned everything up, as well as serving Wexner in other capacities — such as facilitating visits to Wexner’s home of the crew from Cats and organizing a Tony Randall song-and-dance show put on in Columbus.” Wexner declines to talk about his relationship with Epstein, but it is clearly one that continues to this day. Not that it helped Epstein in any way to land Clinton. Wexner is a staunch Republican donor, and Epstein, aside from a small contribution to the president’s legal-defense fund, has given more to the likes of former senator Al D’Amato.

What attracted Clinton to Epstein was quite simple: He had a plane (he has a couple, in fact — the Boeing 727, in which he took Clinton to Africa, and, for shorter jaunts, a black Gulfstream, a Cessna 421, and a helicopter to ferry him from his island to St. Thomas). Clinton had organized a weeklong tour of South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Mozambique to do what Clinton does. So when the president’s advance man Doug Band pitched the idea to Epstein, he said sure. As an added bonus, Kevin Spacey, a close friend of Clinton’s, and actor Chris Tucker came along for the ride.

While Epstein got an intellectual kick out of engaging African finance ministers in theoretical chitchat about economic development, the real payoff for him was observing Clinton in his métier: talking HIV/aids policy with African leaders and soaking up the love from Cape Town to Lagos.

Epstein brings a trophy-hunter’s zeal to his collection of scientists and politicians. But the real charge for him is in seeing these guys work it. Like former Democratic Senate leader George Mitchell, for example. In Epstein’s mind, Mitchell is the world’s greatest negotiator, based on his work in Ireland and the Middle East. So he wrote the senator a bunch of checks. Says Mitchell: “He has supported some philanthropic projects of mine and organized a fund-raiser for me once. I would certainly call him a friend and a supporter.”

But it is his covey of scientists that inspires Epstein’s true rapture. Epstein spends $20 million a year on them — encouraging them to engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy. They are, of course, quite lavish in their praise in return. Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. “Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations,” says Edelman. “He came to see us recently. He is concerned with this basic question: Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.”

Then there is Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard. Epstein flew up to Kosslyn’s laboratory in Cambridge this year to witness an experiment that Kosslyn was conducting and Epstein was funding. Namely: Is it true that certain Tibetan monks are capable of holding a distinct mental image in their minds for twenty minutes straight? “We disproved the thesis,” says Kosslyn. “Jeff was on his cell phone most of the time — he actually wanted to short the Tibetan market, because he thought the monk was so stupid. He is amazing. Like a honeybee — he talks to all these different people and cross-pollinates. Just two months ago, I was talking to him about a new alternative to evolutionary psychology. He got excited and sent me a check.”

Epstein has a particularly close relationship with Martin Nowak, an Austrian biology and mathematics professor who heads the theoretical-biology program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Nowak is examining how game theory can be used to answer some of the basic evolutionary questions — e.g., why, in our Darwinian society, does altruistic behavior exist? Epstein talks to Nowak about once a week and flies him around the country to his various homes to deliver impromptu lectures. Over the past three years, he has written $500,000 worth of checks to fund Nowak’s research. This past February, Epstein had Nowak over for dinner at the 71st Street townhouse. It was just the two of them (not including the wait staff), and Nowak, making use of a blackboard in the formal dining room, delivered a two-hour highly mathematical description of how language works.

After dinner, Epstein asked if Nowak wanted to meet up with his new friend President Clinton, and off they went to a nearby deli, where Clinton regaled the starstruck former Oxford professor with tales from his own Oxford days. “Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist. It’s like talking to a colleague in your field,” says Nowak. “Sometimes he applies what we talk about to his investments. Sometimes it’s for his own curiosity. He has changed my life. Because of his support, I feel I can do anything I want.”

Danny Hillis, an MIT-educated computer scientist whose company, Thinking Machines, was at the forefront of the supercomputing world in the eighties, and who used to run R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, thinks Epstein is actually using scientific knowledge to beat the markets. “We talk about currency trading — the euro, the real, the yen,” he says. “He has something a physicist would call physical intuition. He knows when to use the math and when to throw it away. If I had acted upon all the investment advice he has been giving me over the years, I’d be calling you from my Gulfstream right now.”

On the 727 these days, he has been reading a book by E. O. Wilson, the eminent scientist and originator of the field of sociobiology, called Consilience, which makes the case that the boundaries between scientific disciplines are in the process of breaking down. It’s a view Epstein himself holds. He wrote recently to a scientist friend of his: “The behavior of termites, together with ants and bees, is a precursor to trust because they have an extraordinary ability to form relationships and sophisticated social structures based on mutual altruism even though individually they are fundamentally dumb. Money itself is a derivative of trust. If we can figure out how termites come together, then we may be able to better understand the underlying principles of market behavior — and make big money.”

So how do termite grouping patterns fare as an investment strategy? Again, facts are hard to come by. A working day for Epstein starts at 5 a.m., when he gets up and scours the world markets on his Bloomberg screen — each of his houses, in New York, St. Thomas, Palm Beach, and New Mexico, as well as the 727, is equipped with the necessary hardware for him to wake up, roll out of bed, and start trading. He will put some calls in to his private banker at JPMorgan to get a reading as to how wealthy investors — the best gauge of market sentiment, he believes — are reacting to the market’s movements. Then he will call currency traders in Europe. On a given day, he will spend ten hours or so on the phone — after all, he is running $15 billion essentially by himself.

Strangely enough, given his scientific obsessions, he is a computer-phobe and does not use e-mail. “I like to hear voices and see faces when I interact,” he has said. Given the huge sums he has to invest, he focuses on assets with extremely high liquidity, like currencies — though he dabbles in commodities and real estate as well. Those who know him say he is an impulsive, quick-to-change-his-mind trader, still governed by Ace Greenberg’s trader’s maxim: If the stock is down 10 percent, sell it. He has been on the short side of the Brazilian real, and those close to him say bets there have paid off in spades. He recently took a long position on the euro before its rebound on the basis that Europeans were too proud to see their currency sink any lower against the dollar. His next targets: an across-the-board short of the German stock exchange and a possible attack on the Hong Kong dollar peg in light of the recent disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

None of this is investment rocket science, but getting the direction and the timing right, no matter how conventional the investment idea, can spin large money for an investor. Before taking a big position, Epstein will usually fly to the country in question. He recently spent a week in Germany meeting with various government officials and financial types, and he has a trip to Brazil coming up in the next few weeks. On all of these trips, he flies alone in his commercial-jet-size 727.

Friends of Epstein say he is horrified at the recent swell of media attention around him (Vanity Fair is preparing a megaprofile, and the Villard House office has had a barrage of calls from other media outlets). He has never granted a formal interview, and did not offer one to this magazine, nor has his picture appeared in any publication. Yet for one so obsessive about his privacy, one wonders — didn’t he realize that flying Clinton and Spacey around Africa was going to blow his cover? As he said to a friend: “If my ultimate goal was to stay private, traveling with Clinton was a bad move on the chessboard. I recognize that now. But you know what? Even Kasparov makes them. You move on.”

Donald Trump boasted about meeting semi-naked teenagers in beauty pageants: Mr Trump said on Howard Stern’s radio show in 2005 that he could ‘get away’ with walking into the dressing room to ‘inspect’ beautiful women
by Rachael Revesz
Independent.co.uk
Wednesday 12 October 2016 15:02 BST

Donald Trump used to “stroll right in” to the dressing room of beauty pageants while the contestants - some of whom were teenagers - were naked or half-dressed, a former model has claimed.

Tasha Dixon was 18 when she competed in the Miss USA pageant, winning the state crown.

“Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis,” Ms Dixon told CBS.

“He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.”

She added that people who worked for Mr Trump “pressured” the women to “fawn over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention” while still not fully dressed.

Ms Dixon added the situation made them feel awkward and physically vulnerable.

Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant also said the Republican used to walk in. Some of the girls were as young as 15.

Former Miss Vermont Teen USA, Mariah Billado, told Buzzfeed: "I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, 'Oh my god, there's a man in here."

Three other girls chose to remain anonymous, but told the publication it was "creepy" and "shocking".

Mr Trump said on the Howard Stern radio show in 2005 that he was “allowed”, as the owner of the pageant, to go backstage while the contestants were getting dressed.

“You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”

Ms Dixon told CBS she believed that Mr Trump owned the pageant for 19 years because he could “utilise his power around beautiful women” and there was no one above him to complain to.

When Ms Dixon competed in 2001, the theme was empowering women.

She said she had not listened to the radio show and her accusations were not politically motivated.

The revelations come as a leaked video from 2005 show the presidential nominee bragging about sexually assaulting women. He released an apology within hours but defended the remarks as “locker room talk”.

The remarks come in contrast to a statement from former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who competed in the beauty pageant the same year as Ms Dixon.

“To paint Mr Trump as someone who would purposely walk into a women’s dressing room and ask women to come impress him is the most disgusting accusation so far,” she said.

Mr Trump used to own the Miss Universe, the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants until last year.

[admin]

Epstein Rape Victim Was Passed on to Donald Trump by Ghislaine Maxwell
by Graha Lester
dailykos
Wednesday, June 09, 2021 at 8:07:57a MDT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/6 ... ne-Maxwell



A woman who says that she was groomed and raped by Jeffrey Epstein as a teen-ager was passed on to Donald Trump by Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump then installed her in one of his apartments.

The woman’s name is Anouska De Georgiou. Her relationships with Epstein and Trump are both well known, but that it was Ghislaine Maxwell who transferred her from the former to the latter has been overlooked, despite the fact that the details were reported at the time in London’s Sunday Mirror (November 23, 1997, page 14).

According to an interview with De Georgiou that aired on Dateline NBC on September 20, 2019, she was groomed as a child by Epstein:

Ms De Georgiou grew up in an affluent family and attended school with Kate Middleton at the illustrious Marlborough College.

But telling of how billionaire Epstein bent her to his warped will, she told Dateline: "By the time I was being raped, it was too late."

She added that the sick financier's cronies and enablers would turn a blind eye to his brazen abuse of vulnerable young girls.

De Georgiou was twenty-years-old by the time she was subsequently introduced to Donald Trump by Ghislaine Maxwell. According to the aforementioned Sunday Mirror article, entitled “How suite! Trump’s Brit of all right”:

(Trump) met London model Anouska De Georgiou at a party in Manhattan. Several American millionaires already had their eyes on Anouska. But she was there with Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer. (Italics from the original).

Later in the article, the Sunday Mirror informs us that:

Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the sunshine state where all three enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, Anouska was installed in one of Donald’s many apartments there.

This all happened back when Trump was a Democrat, so clearly the article was not politically motivated. Note that De Georgiou was only one of several young women that Ghislaine introduced to Trump.

Epstein & Midelfart At Mar-a-Lago. Portrait of American socialite Jeffrey Epstein (1953 - 2019) and Norwegian college student (and future businesswoman) Celina Midelfart as they pose together during a reception (in honor of Tony Bennett) at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, March 19, 1995. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)


Midelfart & Epstein At Mar-a-Lago. Portrait of Norwegian college student (and future businesswoman) Celina Midelfart and American socialite Jeffrey Epstein (1953 - 2019) as they pose together during a reception (related to a charity ProAm tennis tournament) at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, February 22, 1997. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)


Donald Trump At The Beauty Ball. Property developer Donald Trump and Norwegian buisnesswoman Celina Midelfart attend the 23d annual Million-Dollar Beauty Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on April 6, 1998 in New York City, New York . (Photo by Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)


Valentine's Day Birthday Party for Ivana Trump. NEW YORK CITY - FEBRUARY 12: (L-R) Celina Midelfart, Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump attend Valentine's Day Birthday Party for Ivana Trump on February 12, 1998 at Chaos in New York City. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)


Blaine Trump Receives Marietta Tree Award for Public Service. (L-R) Celina Midelfart, Donald J. Trump, and guest attend a Citizens Committee of New York event, honoring Blaine Trump with the Marietta Tree Award for Public Service, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on February 13, 1998. (Photo by John Calabrese/Penske Media via Getty Images)

Celina Midelfart is another woman who was associated first with Epstein and later with Trump. She was Trump’s date on the night he met Melania.

[admin]

How a British teen model was lured into Jeffrey Epstein's web: Anouska De Georgiou, who grew up in an affluent family, says she fell into Epstein's circle of abuse through well-connected friends.
by Sarah Fitzpatrick, Anna Schecter, Chelsea Damberg and Rich Schapiro
NBC News
Sept. 20, 2019, 3:29 PM MDT

Anouska De Georgiou was living a charmed life in the mid-1990s. A teenage model from an affluent family in London, she had a future as bright as her mega-watt smile.

But then De Georgiou got sucked into Jeffrey Epstein's orbit through well-connected friends. They met for the first time in London. In time she was being flown to Epstein's properties around the world, including his private island in the Caribbean, on flights he paid for.

The grooming, De Georgiou said, was subtle but persistent ⁠— and pervasive.

"By the time I was being raped, it was too late," De Georgiou, recounting the details of her experience for the first time, told NBC News as part of a months-long "Dateline" investigation.


Anouska De Georgiou says she was abused by Jeffrey Epstein at his homes all around the world. Courtesy Anouska De Georgiou

The abuse, De Georgiou said, spanned several years and locales. In addition to the estate on his private island, De Georgiou said Epstein preyed on her at his homes in New York and Paris.

"And in every location there was this microcosm of acceptance, of yes people, who acted like this was normal," De Georgiou said.

"If you're a young person walking into a mansion or someone's island and all the people who are present are acting as though this is OK and you're the only one who thinks it's weird, it's hard to say something," De Georgiou told Savannah Guthrie.

Epstein’s web of enablers are now at the center off a high-profile federal sex trafficking investigation.

Epstein, 66, was accused of sexually abusing and trafficking dozens [actually, many, many hundreds. See Netflix's "Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich."] of girls in New York and Florida in the early 2000s.

The focus of the probe shifted to his recruiters and other associates after he hanged himself in a federal jail cell in Manhattan last month.

Among those believed to be in the investigators' crosshairs is Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime companion.


Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Cipriani Wall Street on March 15, 2005 in New York City. Joe Schildhorn / Patrick McMullan via Getty Image

Maxwell’s association with Epstein has been chronicled for years. But new interviews with nearly two dozen Epstein accusers and multiple Maxwell acquaintances shed fresh light on the extent to which she and others allegedly abetted his sexual abuse of young women and girls.

Taken together, the accounts paint a portrait of a woman [Ghislane Maxwell] whose life appeared to revolve around finding a way to satisfy Epstein’s every whim, no matter how deviant.

“Jeffrey has the sickness but they worked together as a unit,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who says she was abused by Epstein and Maxwell for several years starting in the late 1990s, told "Dateline." “I was brought in by Ghislaine, and at that time, she was the main procurer for Jeffrey.”

Maxwell’s lawyers didn’t return requests for comment. In a 2016 court deposition, the British-born socialite denied knowing about or playing any role in Epstein’s alleged abuse.

Maxwell, 57, has vanished from public life. It’s unclear where she lives, what she does, or with whom she associates.

Her ultra-private existence marks a stark departure from her previous life as a high-flying socialite known for her vibrant personality and extraordinary connections.

The daughter of Robert Maxwell, a wealthy newspaper baron who died under a cloud of scandal, Ghislaine Maxwell was a fixture on the upper-crust social circuits in New York and London.

“She was friends with politicians and royals and because she was such a popular person and easy to get on with, people wanted to be in her presence,” said Lady Victoria Hervey, a British model and socialite who befriended Maxwell around 2000.

Maxwell and Epstein were already an item by then, Hervey said.

“When I met them, I met them as a couple, and they were the hot ‘it couple’ of New York. And I sort of always thought that they would end up together and be married,” Hervey told "Dateline." “People wanted to be invited to their events and dinners in their houses. They were like the most connected couple at the time in every city.”

But it was also around this time that Epstein was allegedly preying on young women and teenage girls — with Maxwell, several accusers say, acting as his chief recruiter.

Chauntae Davies says she was a 22-year-old aspiring masseuse when she was introduced to Maxwell by one of her massage teachers near the end of 2001.

“She and Jeffrey were already clients of his,” Davies said. “He reassured me that it was fine to take on this job.”


Chauntae Davies. NBC News

Davies said she was hired on the spot after a face-to-face meeting with Maxwell, and flown to Palm Beach that night.

Along the way, Maxwell made comments that Davies now recognizes as portending the sinister world she was about to enter.

Davies said Maxwell described her partner as a Ralph Lauren-type and asked if she had the same taste in men.

Davies said she wasn’t sure how to respond.

“I thought it was like a weird question but for me in my young naive brain, I thought she’s just wanting some reassurance that her boyfriend is hot,” Davies said. “I didn’t think he was hot but I just kind of laughed it off. I may have been over 18, but I was also very still young in my mind and very naive in a lot of ways and genuinely just wanted to see the good in people.”

Davies knew that she would be providing massages but felt insecure given her lack of experience.

Maxwell, Davies said, was quick to allay her concerns, saying all she had to do was follow Epstein's instructions.

Davies said Epstein raped her at his private island a few months later after a handful of massage sessions. He raped her two or three times more, she said. Over the next few years, Davies said, she continued to perform massages that resulted in her engaging in what she called nonconsensual sex with Epstein.

“I stopped fighting back,” Davies said. “I realized very early on he was going to do what he was going to do.”

Davies said she was receiving money from Epstein but she viewed it at the time as compensation for her massage services.

Davies said she would sometimes resist the invitations to visit Epstein but “Ghislaine would get on the phone or someone in their office and aggressively persuade me to go and give reasons why I should.”

“I wasn’t much of a fighter so I gave in very easily,” Davies said.

Giuffre’s entry into Epstein’s web follows the pattern of Davies and Benavidez.

A high-school aged spa attendant at Mar-A-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Florida, Giuffre was reading a book about massage therapy when she was approached by a woman on a quiet day in the summer of 2000.

“This beautiful, well spoken, well mannered woman with an English accent, prim and proper,” Giuffre told NBC News.


Virginia Roberts Giuffre. NBC News

The woman, Giuffre would soon learn, was Ghislaine Maxwell. She immediately referenced Giuffre’s book.

“It's so funny that you're reading a book on that because I know this older gentleman who's looking for a traveling masseuse,” Maxwell said, according to Giuffre. “He's super rich. He flies around everywhere. If you want, you can come by for an interview.”

Giuffre was thrilled about the offer but wasn’t sure she was up to the job due to her lack of training.

“Don’t worry about it,” Maxwell said, Giuffre told NBC News. “He’s got amazing abilities to help people out. That’s what he likes to do.”

Giuffre has described what happened next in lawsuits and to a British paper several years ago. But speaking in her first TV interview, she provided an extensive account of her first encounter with Epstein.

After entering his Palm Beach mansion, Maxwell led her up a staircase and into a sparsely-furnished room.

“There’s this man laying naked on a green massage table in the middle of the room,” Giuffre said.

Epstein looked up at Maxwell and flashed a smile signaling that Giuffre described as a “cheshire cat grin.”

“He smiled and nodded as in, like, approval,” Giuffre said.

Maxwell grabbed a bottle of lotion and instructed the young masseuse to “grab one side of Jeffrey” and “just follow what I do,” Giuffre said.

They worked over Epstein’s legs, his back, his neck. Then Epstein unexpectedly turned over, Giuffre said.

“That’s when they told me to take my clothes off. That’s when Ghislaine started to take her clothes off,” Giuffre said. “In an instant, I knew what was happening. This wasn’t the first time I’d been abused.”

Giuffre had come from a troubled home and said she had suffered sexual abuse in the past.

Giuffre said she stripped down to her panties but was ordered to remove those as well. “But before they did that, they both looked at my undies and snickered and they said, “Oh, you’ve still got little girl undies,” she said.

With the teenage girl fully nude, Epstein and Maxwell started giving her commands, Giuffre said.

“They asked me to lick his nipples and give him oral sex,” Giuffre said. “Ghislaine was, I like to say, roving around in between, doing the same things that she asked me to do for him while touching me in my private areas as well.”

“And then at the very end,” Giuffre said, “they instructed me to get on top of Epstein and that’s how the night ended.

Giuffre, now a 36-year-old mother of three, said she still grapples with the question of why she allowed the abuse to go on for so long.

“Jeffrey and Ghislaine's way of keeping us under his thumb, under his rule, under their control, were invisible chains,” Giuffre said. “And it was that constant - ‘We own the police. You can't run. You can't tell anybody. We'll never be held accountable for this.’"

The pair also leveled threats, Giuffre said.

“Jeffrey was a mastermind at manipulation and so was Ghislaine,” Giuffre said. “They didn't just put a gun to your head and tell you, "If you don't do this you're gonna die." No. They used very quaint threats. One of the scariest threats that I ever had was that they told me they know where my little brother goes to school, and if I don't do what they say I know the outcome.”

Florida police caught on to Epstein’s behavior in the mid-2000s. But he ultimately struck a lenient 2008 deal with federal prosecutors that spared him the prospect of a long prison sentence.

Instead, he pleaded guilty to two state prostitution counts and served 13 months in a Palm Beach county jail in an arrangement that allowed him to leave for 12 hours a day, six days a week, on work release.

Despite her name appearing in news accounts tied to Epstein’s case, Maxwell glided past the scandal.

She remained a fixture on the New York social circuit, friends say, hosting parties that attracted a wide array of well-heeled guests

Maxwell transformed herself into a crusading environmentalist focused on protecting the ocean. She spoke before the United Nations and in a 2014 TED talk.

Pamela Ryckman, an author who befriended Maxwell in 2013 over what she says she believed was a shared passion for the environment and women’s empowerment, said there appeared to be two sides to her personality.

“On one hand, there was the very professional, earnest persona,” Ryckman said. “And yet at the same time, you'd find her in social situations and she was always pushing boundaries. She was always sort of saying something a little coy or a little bit sexual or touching people.”

“If you can have someone who behaves so differently from one environment to another, it makes it seem more likely that she actually had this double life, that she was able to manipulate and fool people into believing that she was who she seemed to be at any given moment,” Ryckman said. “She was a chameleon.”

But Maxwell would soon drop out of the public eye. Lady Victoria Hervey, Maxwell’s one-time friend, said she last saw her a year ago at a baby shower.

“She seemed totally normal, like the same as ever,” Hervey told NBC News. “She’s always so well put together and never seems affected by anything.”

Epstein was arrested in July. His suicide weeks later robbed his victims of the chance to see him held accountable for his alleged crimes.

But in late August, his victims were given the chance to tell their stories in open court.

Not long after, six women sat down together for an interview with NBC News, sharing their stories of abuse by Epstein and imploring investigators to pursue criminal charges against his enablers.

“There should be still some accountability for a lot of the people that were enabling Epstein,” Jennifer Aroaz, who says Epstein raped her when she was 15, told NBC News. “There are still people out there.”

Jennifer Araoz, 32, has alleged that the billionaire financier forcibly raped her when she was 15. Rolling Stone.

Giuffre said she was plunged into mourning following Epstein’s death.

“Not because the world lost a monster. I wasn’t mourning the death of this man,” Giuffre said.

“I was mourning the death of my ability to hold this man accountable.”

Speaking out for the first time, Rachel Benavidez said she was fresh out of massage school when she was recruited by Maxwell to put her training to work at a ranch in the New Mexico desert owned by Epstein.

The job got off to a smooth start, with Benavidez working on Maxwell. Known as the Zorro Ranch, the property was extraordinary, featuring a main house painted pink with elevator banks in the hallways and Italian frescoes in the pool area.


Rachel Benavidez. NBC News

Soon Benavidez was directed to massage Epstein. In time what had started as a dream opportunity massaging a pleasant and pretty woman turned into two years of abuse at the hands of Epstein, Benavidez said.

“I kind of liken it to the toad that’s thrown in the boiling water and jumps out immediately,” Benavidez said. "But I was more like the toad that was put in lukewarm water. And then all of a sudden it started boiling. And then you’re done.”

Epstein, Benavidez said, took advantage of her youth and her struggling financial state.

“Jeffrey was very manipulative,” Benavidez said. “He provided me with promises of continuing education and a clientele that's a world-class clientele. And that's kind of how he lured his tentacles into me.”

Her visits to the Zorro Ranch came to an end, she said, after she refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Benavidez said she confided in her sister Brandy many years ago. The sister, who was living with Benavidez at the time, confirmed to NBC News that she was told about the abuse by Epstein.


Zorro Ranch, one of the properties of financier Jeffrey Epstein, is seen in an aerial view near Stanley, N.M., on July 15, 2019.Drone Base / Reuters file

“She was inexperienced,” the sister said. “I don’t think she was sure how to set boundaries. She wanted opportunities and was trying to please clients.”

De Georgiou, the former British model, spoke out in court last month. But surrounded by her fellow survivors, she offered details of her experience with Epstein for the first time.

Her story is, in one way, strikingly different than that of many of Epstein's other accusers. She came from a life of privilege, growing up affluent in London.

Still, De Georgiou said, Epstein was able to identify and exploit her vulnerabilities as he treated her to his rarefied world.

“For me, I was involved in that kind of lifestyle growing up," De Georgiou said. "And so I thought I could cope. And I thought I could handle it."

De Georgiou said her grooming was carefully calculated. "It wasn't zero to 100 in one day. It was introduced piecemeal, along with constant emotional, financial reinforcement that this was the path, the only path,” she told NBC News.


Anouska De Georgiou. NBC News

She described a sick man who was equal parts captivating and frightening. “When Jeffrey would see me he would physically shake because he wanted to get at me," De Georgiou said. "And that was very unnerving."

She said she has largely moved past the pain and torment that plagued her for years, but one experience still haunts her.

While on Epstein's private island in the Caribbean, De Georgiou said, she saw a blonde girl that appeared even a few years younger than her teenage self.

"I wanted to say something," De Georgiou told NBC News. "I was in the ocean and she was on a paddleboard or something...and I wanted to say, 'You have to leave.' But I didn't."

She now runs a group home, called The Kintsugi Foundation, for women battling substance abuse and recovering from trauma.

From Social Butterfly to Saving Women’s Lives: Anouska de Georgiou & The Kintsugi Foundation
by John Lavitt
West Hollywood, CA (The Hollywood Times)
09/28/2019
https://thehollywoodtimes.today/from-so ... oundation/


Anouska de Georgiou and John Taylor Celebrating-Recovery. The Kintsugi Foundation’s launch party celebrates recovery with board members John Taylor of Duran Duran and composer Jonathan Elias

On September 28, 2019, as evening fell and Saturday night approached, the Kintsugi Foundation launch party was fully underway. From fancy mocktails and fine hors d’oeuvres to silent auctions and Tarot card readings, Anouska de Georgiou put to work the skills and talents she learned as an international socialite. However, today, the point is not the party itself, but the use of such a party to celebrate recovery.

The Kintsugi Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to helping women recover from trauma and substance abuse. As the founder of the Kintsugi Foundation, Anouska truly has put her money and time where her heart resides. Focused on giving back and saving lives, Anouska’s a prime example of recovery at work.

At the launch party, Anouska was joined and supported by fellow board members of the Kintsugi Foundation. The dedicated board members of the foundation are musician John Taylor of Duran Duran, music composer Jonathan Elias, artist Sarah Stitt, and recovery advocate Lindsey Glass. Together with Anouska, they celebrate the miracle of recovery. Indeed, the greater recovery community came out in force to learn about the Kintsugi Foundation and lend a helping hand.

The Kintsugi Foundation is today on a sober living house for women in West Hollywood founded by Anouska de Georgiou. The house offers residents extensive programming, including trauma groups, art therapy, music therapy, and guided meditation. The meaning of the word Kintsugi in Japanese is the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer with the understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

The goal of the Kintsugi Foundation is to help women who feel broken to find their authentic path, recovering from substance use disorder and the underlying trauma behind the addictions. As Dr. Gabor Maté explains, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.” If you don’t treat the underlying trauma behind addiction, you are not treating the bleeding heart of the problem

At the launch party, many well-known sobriety luminaries mingled, including Leonard Buschel of the Reel Recovery Film Festival, actor Ed Begley, Jr., Director Alison Anders, and author Jay Westbrook. A raffle was held to help support the Kintsugi Foundation. The impressive raffle prize was a guitar played by Niles Rogers, then signed by Rogers and the legend herself, Cher. The raffle tickets were sold to help support the foundation’s work. Whoever ended up winning, went home with quite a prize!

In a bit of a family twist, the father-daughter creative team of John Taylor and Atlanta Taylor traded off DJ’ing duties, delivering the funk with big smiles and lots of love. Also, inside the house, Grace McGrade gave Tarot card readings to the excited guests. Doesn’t everyone like learning about their future?

In an inspiring moment, author Amy Dresner spoke in the garden about living in the house for many years and how important it was to her recovery. She told of being embraced and accepted by Anouska in a difficult period of her life. After Anouska gave birth to her daughter, Amy Dresner helped to take care of the infant for the first year. Laughing, Amy shook her head and said, “And I don’t even like kids.”

As the guests were leaving, everyone was surprised to receive a lovely gift basket with t-shirts and a Pam & Gela clutch. Indeed, the gesture proved to be one more example of the grace of Anouska de Georgiou and the spirit of the Kintsugi Foundation. After all, a social butterfly battling to save lives knows how to throw a party and treat her guests with a touch of class and style. In the end, such efforts are memorable, hopefully making the continuing success of the Kintsugi Foundation a priority moving forward.

"My healing came through that, that I could walk alongside these women and girls and be a witness to their suffering," De Georgiou said.

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the other women, De Georgiou said she and her fellow survivors have developed a tight bond that has strengthened their resolve.

“No one else understands like somebody who’s experienced it,” De Georgiou said

“Jeffrey thought that we were disposable, and he threw us all away. And look who’s standing.”

Sarah Fitzpatrick

[admin]

Trump’s Warm Words for Ghislaine Maxwell: ‘I Just Wish Her Well’: The president’s comments about Ms. Maxwell, who is charged with luring girls into Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit, drew new attention to Mr. Trump’s friendship with Mr. Epstein.
by Ed Shanahan
New York Times
Published July 21, 2020
Updated Oct. 22, 2020


From left, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 2000.Credit...Davidoff Studios, via Getty Images

President Trump’s return to the White House podium on Tuesday to discuss the coronavirus pandemic took an unusual detour when he offered warm words for Ghislaine Maxwell, who is facing federal charges of helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom and sexually abuse girls.

Mr. Trump’s comment about Ms. Maxwell, who was arrested in New Hampshire this month and is being held without bail in a federal jail in Brooklyn, came in response to a reporter’s question about whether he expected her to go public with the names of powerful men who have been accused in lawsuits of taking part in the sex-trafficking ring that Mr. Epstein allegedly ran.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said. “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.”

“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach,” the president continued, referring to the Florida town where his Mar-a-Lago resort is and where Mr. Epstein had a home. “But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

Ms. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The remarks renewed attention on Mr. Trump’s ties to Mr. Epstein, who was arrested almost exactly a year before Ms. Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion. Mr. Epstein was charged in a federal indictment with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of girls and women at his mansion in Manhattan and elsewhere, including at his Palm Beach estate.

A month after his arrest, Mr. Epstein, 66, hanged himself in his cell at the federal jail in Manhattan where he was awaiting trial. Federal prosecutors said after his death that they would continue to investigate his associates.

After Mr. Epstein’s arrest, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from the disgraced financier, who had avoided federal sex-crime charges under a widely criticized plea deal in 2008 that allowed him to plead guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting prostitution. (A furor over the plea deal ultimately caused Mr. Trump’s labor secretary, who negotiated it, to resign.)

Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House last July, said he knew Mr. Epstein “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.”

But, the president added: “I had a falling-out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” The circumstances of the rupture in their relationship have never been made clear.

Mr. Trump’s comments last year were a reversal from the opinion he expressed in 2002, when he told New York magazine that Mr. Epstein was a “terrific guy” whom he had known for 15 years.

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Mr. Epstein was never a dues-paying Mar-a-Lago member, but Mr. Trump treated him like a close friend and the two men were photographed together at the club in the 1990s and early 2000s — Mr. Trump always wearing a tie, Mr. Epstein never wearing one. They also attended many of the same dinner parties in Manhattan.

George Houraney, a Florida businessman, described one episode in the two men’s years-long relationship to The New York Times last year.

It was 1992, and Mr. Houraney had flown two dozen or so women in for what was supposed to be a “calendar girl” competition at Mar-a-Lago. The only guests, it turned out, were Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein.

Mr. Houraney, who at the time had just teamed up with Mr. Trump to host events at his casinos, was taken aback.

“I said, ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with V.I.P.s,’” he recalled. “‘You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”

Last year, about a week after Mr. Trump sought to disavow his ties to Mr. Epstein, a video surfaced that captured the men enjoying themselves together at Mar-a-Lago in the company of dozens of N.F.L. cheerleaders.

At the event shown in the footage, which also happened in 1992, Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein can be seen watching and commenting to each other about women.

Mr. Trump, who was 46 at the time and dressed in a suit and a pink tie, appears to be in jovial spirits, laughing and warmly welcoming guests, including Mr. Epstein.

Mr. Trump seems to be in his element. He moves from the dance floor to the sidelines and back. At one point, he points out a woman to Mr. Epstein and leans in to tell him, “She’s hot.”

At another point, Mr. Epstein doubles over laughing at something Mr. Trump whispers in his ear.

[admin]

Trump's Labor Secretary Acosta resigns amid Epstein case
by Nandita Bose
Reuters
July 12, 2019 10:50 AM MDTUpdated 4 years ago
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1U71UI/

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta resigned on Friday amid fresh scrutiny of his handling of the sex abuse case against financier Jeffrey Epstein, becoming President Donald Trump's latest adviser to leave the administration in controversy.

Acosta, joining Trump at the White House before the president left for a trip to Wisconsin, said he did not want to be a distraction to the administration's work because of his leadership of the Epstein case more than a decade ago.

"As I look forward, I do not think it is right and fair for this administration's Labor Department to have Epstein as a focus rather than the incredible economy we have today," Acosta said.

Trump, who has fired numerous cabinet and other administration officials during his 2 1/2 years in the White House, said it was Acosta's idea to step down.

"Alex called me this morning and wanted to see me," Trump told reporters. "I just want to let you know this is him, not me."

Acosta's resignation is effective in seven days. Trump named Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella as the acting secretary of Labor.

Acosta has served in Trump's cabinet since April 2017 and from 2005 through 2009 was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. It was there that he handled Epstein's first case involving sex with girls, which resulted in a punishment that critics say was far too lenient.

"Mr. Acosta now joins the sprawling parade of President Trump’s chosen advisors who have left the administration under clouds of scandal and corruption, leaving rudderless and discouraged agencies in their wake. Taxpayers deserve better,” Democratic U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in a statement.

Epstein, a billionaire hedge fund manager, pleaded not guilty to new federal charges in New York this week. Epstein had a social circle that over the years has included Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Britain's Prince Andrew.

Melania Trump, Prince Andrew, Gwendolyn Beck and Jeffrey Epstein at a party at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000. DAVIDOFF STUDIOS/GETTY

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had called on Tuesday for Acosta to resign.


U.S. President Donald Trump announces the resignation of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta (R) before departing for travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S., July 12, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque Acquire Licensing Rights

DEFENDING HIS CASE

Acosta responded to the criticism on Tuesday with tweets saying Epstein's crimes were "horrific" and that he was glad prosecutors were moving forward based on new evidence and testimony that could "more fully bring him to justice."

On Wednesday Acosta held a news conference to defend his handling of the deal, which allowed Epstein to plead guilty to a state charge and not face federal prosecution. Acosta said Epstein would have had an even lighter sentence if not for the deal.

Acosta would not say if he would make the same decision regarding Epstein now, considering the power of the #MeToo movement that led to the downfall of several powerful men publicly accused of sex crimes by women.

U.S. prosecutors in New York on Monday accused Epstein, 66, of sex trafficking, luring dozens of girls, some as young as 14, to his luxury homes and coercing them into sex acts.

Democratic U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee who has called on Acosta to testify on the Epstein matter, said in a statement: "Secretary Acosta’s role in approving the extremely favorable deal for Jeffrey Epstein raises significant concerns about his failure to respect the rights of the victims, many of whom were children when they were assaulted."

The federal prosecutors in New York said they were not bound by the deal arranged by Acosta, which allowed Epstein to plead to a lesser offense and serve 13 months in jail with leave during the day while registering as a sex offender.

In February, a federal judge in West Palm Beach, Florida, ruled that the 2007 agreement violated the victims' rights. Epstein's case and Acosta's role in the plea deal had come under scrutiny earlier this year after an investigation by the Miami Herald.

The Epstein case came up during Acosta's Senate confirmation hearing but the Republican-majority Senate approved him in a 60-38 vote.

He is the latest top Trump administration official to depart under a cloud. The heads of the Interior, Justice, State and Health departments have also either been fired or resigned, among other top staff during Trump tenure so far.

Acosta, the son of Cuban refugees and the first Hispanic member of Trump's Cabinet, previously served on the National Labor Relations Board and in the U.S. Department of Justice under Republican President George W. Bush.

Reporting by Nandiat Bose; additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Writing by David Alexander and Jeff Mason; Editing by Bill Trott

[admin]

Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year: In the early 90s, Donald Trump judged the world’s biggest modelling competition - since hit by allegations of abuse. This is how the people who were there remember it
by Lucy Osborne, Harry Davies and Stephanie Kirchgaessner. A special investigation
The Guardian
Sat 14 Mar 2020 02.00 EDT


Donald Trump, then 45, with contestants in the 1991 Look of the Year competition, the year he was a judge

On 1 September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty. It was a clear, breezy evening, and from the upper deck of the Spirit of New York, a golden sunset could be seen glinting off the Manhattan skyline. Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them.

As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: “Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?”

The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour. At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas.

Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges.

In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalls. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing in front of those two has anything to do with me becoming a model. And she said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.”


Contestants wait to board the Spirit of New York yacht, September 1991. Photograph: Nina Berman/NOOR

Another contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition. “I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.”

While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19. Some had come to New York with parents or chaperones in tow; others were alone. Many were away from their families for the first time. For them, the stakes were high, and the pressure to impress the judges great. As Casablancas had warned them at the outset of the competition, in a scene recorded by TV cameras: “You are going to be judged, constantly judged.” (In 1991 and 1992, the Elite contest was filmed for a 60-minute glossy television special, featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, and later screened on Fox – an early foray into reality TV.) Casablancas was a powerful figure in the industry, and to many of the new crop of would-be supermodels, this seemed an opportunity too good to miss.

Three decades on, a very different picture of the competition is beginning to emerge. Over the last six months, the Guardian has spoken to several dozen former Look of the Year contestants, as well as industry insiders, and obtained 12 hours of previously unseen, behind-the-scenes footage. The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.


Naomi Campbell and John Casablancas


Trump with John Casablancas, who ran the competition, at the 1991 Look of the Year awards, at Trump’s Plaza Hotel in New York


Casablancas speaking at a Look of the Year reception in 1991 at the Plaza Hotel, alongside Trump
Top left: John Casablancas with Naomi Campbell, who co-presented the 1991 Look of the Year finale. Photograph: Bettina Cirone/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

No such allegations have been levelled against Trump, who at the time was dating Marla Maples, the woman who in 1993 became his second wife. But his close involvement in the contest raises questions for the president. Did he know that Casablancas and others were sleeping with contestants? Why would a man in his 40s, whose main business was real-estate development, want to host a beauty contest for teenage girls?

Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “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.”

-- Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery, by Landon Thomas Jr., New York Magazine

Journalists have scoured almost every corner of the 45th president’s life, but his friendship with Casablancas, and his involvement in Look of the Year in 1991 and 1992, have been largely overlooked. Yet the competition is more than a footnote in the Donald Trump story. In time, it would prove to be the foundation of his pivot into reality TV. He even married a former Look of the Year contestant: the current first lady, Melania Trump, narrowly missed out on a trip to New York in 1992, after coming second in the Slovenian heat.

When John Casablancas arrived in New York in 1977, aged 35, he quickly caused a stir. Branded “the snatcher” for poaching models from rivals for his Elite Model Management agency, he gained a reputation as a ruthless operator. Handsome and charismatic, the son of a former Balenciaga model and a wealthy Spanish banker, he formed the agency that became Elite in Paris in his late 20s. Within years of setting up shop in New York, Casablancas was generating millions of dollars in revenue each year, and ushering in the era of the supermodel. Glamorous friends flocked to Elite parties in fashionable clubs like Studio 54.

It’s not clear how Casablancas first met Trump but, according to several former models who encountered him during the 1980s, the businessman became a regular at his parties. With the opening of Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1983, and the acquisition of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 1985, Trump had gained the reputation of a high-flying playboy in his own right. In 1987 he published The Art Of The Deal, and a flurry of publicity followed. “He sits atop a $3 billion empire,” proclaimed the Washington Post, “and seems to have a Midas touch.”

It was perhaps unsurprising that Trump, a New York celebrity who liked to date beautiful women, should come to know the city’s best-known model agent. “Trump was good with PR and that was something John liked,” says Jeremie Roux, who now runs System, a modelling agency he cofounded with Casablancas in 2009. “Good or negative press was all good to Trump.”

Patty Owen, an Elle and Cosmopolitan cover star, recalls seeing Trump at Elite parties as far back as 1982. “He would always be at the bar. That’s where he would stay and that’s where all the new models would hang out,” she says. “Whenever I saw him, I was always like: why does John have to invite him?” Barbara Pilling, also then an Elite model, told us Trump asked her out for dinner in the summer of 1989 at an industry soiree. She recalls Trump asking how old she was. “I said 17 and he said, ‘That’s just great – you’re not too old, not too young.’”


Stacy Wilkes on the Spirit of New York in 1991, with that year’s winner, Ingrid Seynhaeve. Photograph: Nina Berman/NOOR


Shawna Lee (second from right) with other contestants at the 1992 Look of the Year competition

Speaking to the Guardian, four former Elite models say that in the late 80s or early 90s, when they were teenagers, the agency required them to attend private dinners with Trump, Casablancas and sometimes other men. One was Shayna Love, an Australian model who was 16 when she came to New York for the first time in the summer of 1991. Recalling a dinner she attended, she says now: “It was presented as our duty as models at the agency. It wasn’t an invitation. It was like, you have to go and do this.” She says the dinner she attended, at which 10 or 15 models were present, was served at a long table in a private area of an upmarket restaurant. “I was at one end with John, and Trump was up the other end… surrounded by the other girls.”

In the spring of 1991, Trump and Casablancas struck a business deal. Trump would sponsor Look of the Year’s final and host contestants at the Plaza, which would double as the headquarters. At the time, Trump faced significant financial pressures and was close to filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but it didn’t seem to deter him. In the newly unearthed, behind-the-scenes footage of Look of the Year 1991, Trump makes a series of appearances alongside Casablancas, whom he describes as “my friend John”. At one point, Casablancas reveals how he and Trump struck their business partnership. “I had prepared for a long meeting with Donald Trump to explain to him why this was going to be a great success,” Casablancas tells the crowd. “In fact, I hadn’t finished my third sentence and he said: ‘I love the idea. Let’s do it.’”

Trump now disputes being friends with Casablancas. The president’s representatives told the Guardian that he denies it “in the strongest possible terms”. Trump, they said, “hardly knew him, spent very little time with him, and knew very little about him”.

Stacy Wilkes had never been anywhere like the New York Plaza when she arrived at Trump’s hotel with another contestant in September 1991. Then 16, she was living in Louisville, Kentucky, with her mother, who was struggling to make ends meet. The teenager would hold yard sales and mow lawns to make extra cash. “I was just so excited to be in a hotel,” she says. “To go from a poor part of Kentucky to a place like this – I felt like the little kid in Home Alone.” She recalls feeling out of place in a hotel where “everything was gold”.

The teenager had been selected as part of a sprawling international search, overseen by Casablancas, for “new faces”. Many contestants had come through feeder competitions after winning regional heats, or being spotted in malls and hotel lobbies or, in one case, on the beach. Casablancas had visited Wilkes’ local mall to host an Elite scouting event a year earlier, when she was 15. Her local agent had sent her to meet him, telling her what to wear and how to act. She says: “I was told to put my hair down in front of my face and then, like, whoop it around and look up at him.”

One year later, Wilkes was among those met at the airport by a scrum of photographers, and whisked into limousines – a supermodel welcome. “That was kind of neat,” she recalls. The contestants assembled beneath crystal chandeliers at the Plaza to meet Casablancas. He told them they would be judged over several days ahead of a gala evening, when the winner would be crowned. The girls would undergo makeovers and attend photocalls, donning spandex for an exercise routine in front of the Plaza. The behind-the-scenes footage shows Casablancas informing the would-be models that attention would be paid not just to appearance, but to “the way you are, your attitude, your personality, your sense of cooperation”.


John Casablancas, photographer Patrick Demarchelier and Gérald Marie, head of Elite’s Paris office and a 1991 Look of the Year judge.

First there was Harvey Weinstein, and then Jeffrey Epstein, two men so corrupted by their own power and money they thought it entitled them to sexually abuse any woman or teenager they lusted after. Now one of the icons of the world of modelling stands similarly accused of being a sex fiend. His name might not be familiar to those outside the beauty industry, but for decades Frenchman Gérald Marie, now aged 70, was the super-agent who decided, or torpedoed, the careers of supermodels. He even married one of the most famous of them all, Linda Evangelista. But a 60 MINUTES global investigation has uncovered more than a dozen former models with shocking accusations about him. They say he’s a predator who ritually abused and raped young women – including minors. As Tara Brown reports, the women are now demanding that Gérald Marie be held accountable for his depravity, and it seems prosecutors in France are finally taking notice.



-- Gérald Marie: Former models expose the ugly truth of the beauty industry, by 60 Minutes Australia

Donald Trump with contestants in the 1991 Look of the Year competition, the year he was a judge

At 16, Wilkes was one of the older contestants in Look of the Year. The 1992 Fox documentary reported that the average age was 15, and the film’s interviews make the youth of many contestants plain. Standing before the judges for the key swimwear round, the aspiring models are asked to tell the panel about themselves. “I sing and love animals,” says one girl, nervously. Another tells the judges: “I like big dogs and chocolate.” Later, during a photoshoot, a photographer instructs a 15-year-old to show more of her cleavage by pulling her bra lower. “More,” he tells her. “More. More.”

In 1991, there were 10 judges in total, eight of them men, including Trump, Casablancas, the celebrity magician David Copperfield, and the president of Elite’s European division, Gérald Marie. For the swimwear round, judges including Trump and Casablancas sat at a table in one of the Plaza’s palatial rooms, rating the teenage models. “I felt so uncomfortable, standing there in my bathing suit,” recalls Wilkes. She says that at one stage of the contest the judges said she should lose weight: “It felt like they were ganging up on me.”

The contestant who came third in 1991 was Kate Dillon, then 17[/size][/u][/b]. Dillon, who went on to become a successful plus-sized model, says that many of her fellow competitors were “from places that were very poor. I came from a family that had means, so it was something fun to do for a week to get out of school – but a lot of these girls were desperate.” She recalls various “after-hours” events over the course of the five-day competition. “It was very clear that there were opportunities to go out and party with Donald,” she says. The contestants were led to believe “that if you were nice to certain people, good things will happen to you, and I think that’s why girls were going out”.

Every time we changed, Trump would find a reason to come backstage

The behind-the-scenes footage seen by the Guardian shows brief snippets of the future president mingling with the Look of the Year models. At an evening reception, he seems to play the role of host, moving regally around the Plaza’s ornate rooms in a suit and tie, talking to VIP guests and contestants. “How’s the Canadian contestants?” he asks, before moving over to a handful of Canadian would-be models and introducing himself. At another point, he circulates on the top deck of the Spirit of New York as the boat prepares to depart. Wearing a billowing cream blazer, pink open-neck shirt and oversized baseball cap, Trump grins while posing for photographs and chatting to several girls. One tells him she is just finishing school.

Some former contestants recall him being there as they got dressed for events. “Every time we changed, it was like Trump would find a reason to come backstage,” Wilkes says. A Canadian contestant from 1992 recalls similar incidents. “He’d come by and say, ‘Hey girls, are we ready?’” she says. “I remember thinking, what have I got myself into?” Trump denies, “in the strongest possible terms”, behaving inappropriately with any Look of the Year contestants. His representatives say he was not aware of any predatory environment at the time.

Others, however, observed a disturbing side to the contest. Ohad Oman, a young reporter for a magazine in Tel Aviv, was sent to cover it in 1991 and 1992. He attended a number of the after-parties, and remembers seeing girls drinking alcohol. He recalls one particularly debauched party, telling the Guardian: “I saw girls sitting on guys’ laps, and I remember one guy putting his hand down a girl’s top. I remember thinking they were younger than me, and I was 17 going on 18.” (The legal drinking age is 21 in the US.)

Others who were present recall underage models being served alcohol at the contest. Trump’s representatives say he did not provide alcohol to contestants, or encourage any models, whether below the drinking age or not, to drink alcohol, stressing he “does not drink alcohol and does not encourage others to do so”.


A still from previously unseen footage of the 1991 Look of the Year finale

The finale of the 1991 competition was a glittering black-tie gala in the Plaza’s ballroom. Casablancas and supermodel Naomi Campbell presented, as 10 finalists went through a series of costume changes, walking across a stage decorated with columns of sunflowers. Trump sat on the front row alongside a roster of celebrities, his nine-year-old daughter Ivanka perched on his knee.

Ingrid Seynhaeve, an 18-year-old from Belgium, was crowned the winner. As the evening drew to a close, Seynhaeve was surrounded by photographers. Guests filtered out of the ballroom as a party got going in another of the Plaza’s grand rooms. In the newly uncovered footage, a man can be heard off-camera, saying: “Come on, babes. Let’s get some liquor in you.”

In the months before and after the contests, Elite sent several of its teenage models to Milan, New York or Paris on assignments, usually by themselves. Shawna Lee, the 14-year-old from Canada who felt pressured to perform on the Spirit of New York in 1992, had spent the previous summer in Paris, working for Elite. She recalls days at castings, and nights out partying, including at the legendary Les Bains Douches nightclub.

After one drunken night at the club, one of the first times she had drunk alcohol, she says a senior executive at Elite offered her a ride home on his motorbike. Gérald Marie, then in his early 40s, was head of Elite’s Paris office, a powerful figure in the fashion industry and a 1991 Look of the Year judge. Lee accepted the offer. “I was like, OK, sure, because I was always relying on whoever to get me home,” she says. But she alleges that, rather than taking her home, Marie brought her to his apartment and told her to come to his bedroom. Lee says she initially refused, asking about his wife. She says Marie responded: “Oh no, just come and sleep in the bed with me, don’t worry,” and she relented. “So I don’t know, I just went.”

Lee says the #MeToo movement has emboldened her to talk about what happened next. It was her first sexual experience. “I just froze,” she says. “I really didn’t know what to do.” Looking back 30 years later, she feels she was taken advantage of. “I just felt really pressured,” she says. “I was really young and I was manipulated.” She told a friend what had happened, and this soon got back to Elite’s agents. “They all knew something went down, but they downplayed it,” says Lee, who is now 42 and works as a makeup artist in Toronto. “It was just understood that it was in my best interest to walk away from it and brush it under the rug.”

Questions about Marie’s alleged mistreatment of teenage models are not new. In 2000, New York magazine reported that two of Elite’s senior women executives had pleaded with both Casablancas and Marie to stop sleeping with underage models, but had been ignored. (“We are men,” Marie reportedly said. “We have our needs.”) In 2011, the Elite supermodel and actor Carré Otis alleged that Marie had repeatedly raped her when she was a 17-year-old model in Paris in the 1980s. Two years ago, another Elite model, Ebba Karlsson, accused Marie of raping her when she was 21.

Marie did not respond to a formal letter from the Guardian, but in a brief phone call insisted he had never sexually assaulted any models, and denied the specific allegations levelled against him by Lee. “It’s absurd, I don’t know this person,” he said. “Allegations like this are becoming too easy to make. Frankly, it hurts.”


Trump with his nine-year-old daughter Ivanka at the 1991 Look of the Year final. Photograph: Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Other men closely involved in Look of the Year during this period have been accused of sexual misconduct by former contestants. Some allegations are contained in legal proceedings filed decades ago; others have been shared for the first time with the Guardian. The newspaper has decided not to publish some of these allegations, at the request of the women involved.

One allegation already made public concerns David Copperfield, an associate of both Casablancas and Trump, who judged Look of the Year in 1988 and 1991, and once dated another Elite supermodel, Claudia Schiffer. Two years ago, as the #MeToo movement reverberated through the entertainment industry, he was the subject of allegations by Brittney Lewis, a 17-year-old contestant in the 1988 Look of the Year, held in Japan. According to her account, published on the entertainment news website The Wrap, Copperfield invited her to a show in California after she had returned home to Utah. Lewis alleged that she saw Copperfield pour something into her glass and then blanked out, but says she retained hazy recollections of him sexually assaulting her in his hotel room. Copperfield stated on Twitter at the time that he had been “falsely accused” in the past, and was now having to “weather another storm”. He added: “Please for everyone’s sake, don’t rush to judgment.” In response to the Guardian’s questions about the alleged assault, his representatives said that the claims were false and seriously defamatory.

Several of the 1991 contestants recall Copperfield behaving in a way that now strikes them as inappropriate. Stacy Wilkes says Copperfield called the hotel room she was sharing with another 15-year-old contestant, inviting the other girl to his room. Another remembers translating a phone call from Copperfield into Spanish so he could invite a teenage contestant to his hotel room. Aimee Bendio, who was a 14-year-old Look of the Year contestant in 1991, says Copperfield and his assistant contacted her at her family home several times after she took part in the contest, “checking in to see how my career was going”. She says the magician invited her to his shows, offering to send a limousine, but she declined.

A 14-year-old contestant says Copperfield contacted her family home several times afterwards

Magician David Copperfield on the Spirit of New York, 1991, the year he was a judge
Copperfield with former girlfriend Claudia Schiffer


Copperfield with former girlfriend Claudia Schiffer. Photograph: Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Maya Rubin, a 16-year-old contestant in 1991, says Copperfield approached her on the Spirit of New York. “I told him I’m from Israel,” she recalls. “He said to me that his mum always wanted him to marry a Jewish girl.” Months later, she says, the magician sent her a Christmas card. Copperfield categorically denies behaving inappropriately with any contestants at any time.

In the early 90s, Look of the Year contestants who secured modelling contracts with Elite were introduced to a fledgling financial advisory firm, Star Capital Management. It was run by an associate of Casablancas, David Weil. Housed at Elite’s Manhattan offices, and an official sponsor of Look of the Year, Weil’s company advertised its services in the 1991 competition programme with a photograph of a small girl dressed in adult clothing and jewellery, alongside the marketing line: “Just like you, we’re not just another pretty face.”

By the following year, Star Capital Management was handling millions of dollars earned by Elite’s models. The business soon caught the attention of federal authorities, who later accused Weil and his business partner of stealing at least $1.2m from their clients. In 1998, Weil pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges. He also pleaded guilty to the statutory rape of a 15-year-old model he had met at Look of the Year in 1992.

Weil was sentenced to serve weekends in prison for three months, and required to register as a sex offender for 10 years. Mark Lawless, a New York lawyer who brought a civil fraud case against Star Capital Management on behalf of the 1991 Look of the Year winner Ingrid Seynhaeve and others, says that when he inspected its office, he found an adjoining bedroom. One of the desk’s drawers, he recalls, contained “bullets and condoms”. Weil declined to comment when contacted by the Guardian.

Four years after Weil’s conviction, in 2002, Casablancas faced his own set of accusations in the civil courts. A former Look of the Year contestant, known only as Jane Doe 44, filed a lawsuit accusing him of repeatedly sexually abusing her, beginning when she was 15. The abuse began, according to the lawsuit, at Look of the Year 1988 in Japan, where Casablancas told Doe he was “falling in love” with her. At the end of the competition, the lawsuit states, “contestants drank and partied late into the evening” and Casablancas told the teenager to come to his hotel room. There, Casablancas sexually abused the girl “several times over the evening”. The abuse allegedly continued the following year; when the girl became pregnant, Casablancas told her “she would be having an abortion”. The abortion was allegedly “arranged and paid for” by Elite. Casablancas was 46 at the time.


John Casablancas with his third wife, Aline Wermelinger, in 1995; they met when she was a 1992 Look of the Year contestant. Photograph: The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

The lawsuit also alleged that Casablancas “engaged in a pattern of seducing, sexually exploiting and/or abusing minor girls, including girls as young as 14 or 15 years old”. But in 2003, the Los Angeles superior court dismissed the claims against him because he did not live in California, where it had been filed. At the time, a lawyer for Casablancas said the allegations were without merit.

Trump’s representatives have told the Guardian he denies in the strongest possible terms having any knowledge at the time that Casablancas allegedly engaged in sexual relationships with Look of the Year contestants, including those who were under the age of consent, or that Casablancas allegedly enabled others to exploit or abuse teenage models.

But Casablancas’ sexual interest in teenage girls predated this period. His marriage to his second wife, Danish model Jeanette Christiansen, ended in 1983 when it emerged that he was having an affair with a 15-year-old model, Stephanie Seymour. Casablancas, who was in his early 40s at the time, later described Seymour as a “woman-child”. He met his third wife, Brazilian model Aline Wermelinger, in 1992, when she was a Look of the Year contestant staying at Trump’s Plaza. They married the following year; Casablancas was 51 and she was 17.

By his own account, Donald Trump got to know financier Jeffrey Epstein in the late 1980s. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump famously told New York magazine in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” After Epstein was charged with the sex trafficking of underage girls last year, the president distanced himself, telling reporters he knew the financier “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him”, but hadn’t spoken to him in 15 years. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” he said. Trump’s representatives told the Guardian that he had “kicked Mr Epstein out” of Mar-a-Lago for acting inappropriately towards staff.

Photographs of Trump with Epstein, who owned a house near Mar-a-Lago, were widely circulated in the wake of the financier’s arrest last year. Renewed attention was also given to a deposition by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who said she was first approached by Epstein’s friend, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, while working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 1999.

Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein & John Casablancas, who ran a ‘modeling agency’ that Ivanka Trump signed up to aged 13, together in New York. 1989.

It also appears that Epstein had a Casablancas connection during the 1990s. According to a lawsuit filed in the US three months ago, in 1990 Casablancas sent a teenage model for her first “casting call” at a residential address on New York’s Upper East Side, to meet a “photographer” who, it turned out, was Epstein. The lawsuit states that Epstein ordered the 15-year-old girl to undress before taking photographs of her, pushing her against a wall and sexually assaulting her.

George Houraney, a businessman whose American Dream Calendar Girls beauty contest had been running in Las Vegas casinos since 1978, recalls encountering Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in January 1993. Houraney says that Trump asked him to organise a party that month with some of his pageant’s finalists, promising to invite heads of modelling agencies and prospective sponsors for his competition. “He had me fly in all these girls, and gave me a $30,000 budget for airfares and limos to pick them up at the airport,” he says. “The girls were all decked out, expecting to meet all these VIPs.” But after an hour at the party, Houraney says, there seemed to be only one other guest: Epstein. “I was like, ‘Donald, where are the guys? What’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘Well, this is it.’” Houraney says he realised “this is a Jeff Epstein party, basically”.

While suspicious of Epstein, Houraney was keen to have Trump as a business partner. A month earlier, in December 1992, Trump had met with Houraney and Jill Harth, who ran the pageant together. They were looking for a new sponsor for their contest, which each year saw models aged 16 to 22 compete to appear in wall calendars wearing bikinis and swimsuits while posing with classic cars. At dinner in the Plaza’s Oak Room, Harth, Houraney and Trump discussed moving the American Dream competition from Las Vegas to one of Trump’s casinos. “He wanted to build this into the biggest, the best thing that he could do. He was talking about television and pulling out all the contacts,” Harth later said. Eventually, the pageant was held at Trump Castle in Atlantic City in November 1993, but for one year only.

The partnership soured and ended in two lawsuits, but for Trump it was a prelude to a series of more lucrative ventures in the beauty business. In 1996, he secured what the New York Daily News described as “his most beautiful deal yet”. After months of negotiations, Trump acquired the Miss Universe Organization in a reported $10m deal that handed him control of three large, well-established pageants: Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA. Three years later, he founded Trump Model Management, poaching many staff from Elite.

For Wolfgang Schwarz, a veteran model agent in Austria who worked closely with Casablancas, and met Trump at the Plaza in the early 90s, Trump’s decision to establish his own agency was about him wanting his own private source for models. “If you have your own agency and you’re the owner, you can tell your bookers to make a party,” Schwarz says. “It’s easier than calling 15 agencies in New York.” Trump’s representatives say he entered the modelling industry because it was a “very profitable” business opportunity.


Kate Dillon, in behind-the-scenes footage from the 1991 contest


Casablancas with 1992 Look of the Year winner Mariann Molski, then 14. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

The Miss Universe deal allowed Trump to realise his ambition of turning a pageant into an international televised event. In 1997, he sold a 50% stake in the business to CBS. Five years later, amid a slump in the Miss Universe ratings, Trump brokered a deal with NBC that led to the launch of The Apprentice in 2004.

The move into reality TV positioned Trump as a heavyweight tycoon with a significant media profile. In many ways, it was a natural progression from his involvement in beauty contests and pageants. Where once he had judged young models, whose hopes, rivalries and insecurities became TV storylines in Fox’s Look of the Year documentary, now he was ruthlessly separating aspiring business people into winners and losers.

Three decades on from the contests at Trump’s Plaza, it is striking to reflect on the diverging fortunes of those who attended. Many of the powerful men Casablancas brought on board to help judge the girls thrived in the years that followed. Gérald Marie is now the chairman of a prestigious model agency in Paris, Oui Management. Although Marie told the Guardian he had retired, his LinkedIn page lists his responsibilities at the “thriving newcomer” agency as scouting for and managing talent. Oui Management did not respond to our request for comment. David Copperfield remains a prominent entertainer, with a current residency at the MGM Grand resort in Las Vegas.

The fortunes of the teenagers who took part have been mixed. Some became successful models, Hollywood actors and TV hosts, while many more lived quieter lives. Ingrid Seynhaeve, the 1991 winner, became a face of Ralph Lauren and Dior, hosted Belgium’s Topmodel TV show, and continues to front high-profile campaigns. Other contestants we spoke to include a beautician, a stay–at–home mother, a makeup artist, a yoga teacher and a bus driver.

Ingrid Seynhaeve, 1991 "Look of the Year" winner; Mariann Molski, the 1992 grand prize winner; and Renee Jeffus, a 1989 finalist. LOOK OF THE YEAR, a new documentary which takes a behind-the-scenes look at the Elite modeling competition of the same name, will air on FOX, Tuesday, July 13 from 9:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT.

In 1992, the crown went to one of Look of the Year’s youngest contenders: 14-year-old Mariann Molski. Months after her victory, a profile in the Chicago Tribune reported that the sporty high school student was “on the brink of a career of a kind that most young women only dream about”. While she had some success as a model, it is not clear what happened to her in the years that followed; US public records indicate multiple arrests for probation violations, alcohol offences and prostitution, though there is nothing to say she was ever charged. Molski’s current whereabouts are unknown, but she is believed to have been homeless in Arizona.

After years of financial mismanagement, Elite was forced into bankruptcy in 2004. The Elite brand continues to be used by two separate agencies, owned by different corporate entities. One is Creative World Management, which bought the New York division in 2004. It strongly distances itself from the Casablancas-owned firm and era, saying it “utterly” condemns the kinds of “deplorable behaviour” alleged to have taken place in the past.

The other inheritor of the brand is Elite World Group, which operates the successor to Look of the Year, a similar global contest for the next top young model, called Elite Model Look. It, too, distances itself from the Casablancas era. “We would have no tolerance for the conduct you’ve described,” the company told the Guardian. “Empowering our models and protecting their safety is our foremost priority.”


Donald Trump, then 45, with contestants in the 1991 Elite Look of the Year contest, the year he was a judge.


Donald Trump with contestants in 1991’s Elite Look of the Year

John Casablancas retired in Brazil in the early 2000s. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, aged 70, long before the #MeToo movement heralded a new standard of accountability for powerful men accused of exploiting women and girls. He never got to see his old associate Donald Trump ascend to the White House, despite a cascade of allegations about Trump’s own treatment of women. There are now at least 25 sexual misconduct allegations against the president [Donald Trump], ranging from unwanted advances and harassment to serious sexual assaults. More than half relate to models or pageant contestants. Trump denies that he has ever behaved in a predatory or inappropriate fashion with any women or girls.

Speaking to the Guardian 30 years on, several former Look of the Year contestants feel that a #MeToo moment for the modelling world is long overdue. “The girls are young and they look at these agents like parental figures, and they’re not,” says Shawna Lee. “Anything they say goes, whether it’s ‘Go cut your hair’, ‘Go wear this dress’. It’s too bad that there were not more consequences for these men.”

After Look of the Year 1991, Stacy Wilkes returned to Louisville and quit school, despite having told the judges she would finish. “I thought that was the reason I lost,” she says, “so I might as well leave if I want to make it as a model. We were really broke, so I thought I’d try and make money for my mom, but it didn’t work out.” She is content with the path her life took, living in Louisville with her partner and three cats, but adds that women were raising concerns at the time and were ignored: “I think models from the 90s tried so hard, over and over, and nobody believed what we had to say.”

Kate Dillon, now a businesswoman living in Seattle, remembers the contest as one that “exploited women’s assets, women’s bodies. A lot of these girls were desperate. They thought modelling was about attracting men, which it isn’t.” There was a climate of opportunism, she says. “There’s no doubt that the men were like, ‘Yes, Look of the Year week, let’s make sure my schedule is clear to have chicks over to my apartment.’

“What’s great is that we now have a language, and a precedent of young people saying: ‘No, I’m not going to let this continue’,” Dillon adds. “They would never accept being treated the way I was.”

[admin]

A Timeline of Donald Trump’s Creepiness While He Owned Miss Universe: From walking into a teen dressing room to joking about his obligation to sleep with contestants, Trump's a storied pageant creep
by Tessa Stuart
Rolling Stone
October 12, 2016
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... se-191860/


Donald Trump with 51 Miss USA contestants and 20 former Miss Universes in 2006. CURTIS/STARPIX/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Donald Trump was forced to sell the Miss Universe Organization – which also includes sister scholarship programs Miss USA and Miss Teen USA – in 2015 after his incendiary comments about Mexicans drove away broadcasters NBC and Univision. But Trump owned the pageant for nearly two decades, during which time he would have had the opportunity to come into contact with nearly 4,000 beauty queens.

On the heels of the damaging videotape on which Trump and former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush salivated over Days of Our Live actress Arianne Zucker, and joked about sexually assaulting women, came allegations that Trump entered the Miss Teen USA changing room where girls as young as 15 were in various states of undress.

Mariah Billado, Miss Teen Vermont 1997 told BuzzFeed, “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here.'” Three other teenage contestants from the same year confirmed the story. The former pageant contestants discussed their memories of the incident after former Miss Arizona Tasha Dixon told Los Angeles’ CBS affiliate that Trump entered the Miss USA dressing room in 2001 when she was a contestant.

“He just came strolling right in,” Dixon said. “There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked. Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half-naked changing into our bikinis.”

Dixon went on to say that employees of the Miss Universe Organization encouraged the contestants to lavish Trump with attention when he came in. “To have the owner come waltzing in, when we’re naked, or half-naked, in a very physically vulnerable position and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention…”

The Trump campaign did not offer a response to either story, but in a 2005 appearance on Howard Stern’s show, Trump bragged about doing exactly what the women describe. “I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,” he said.

His position as the pageant’s owner entitled him to that kind of access, Trump explained, seemingly aware that what he was doing made the women uncomfortable. “You know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore I’m inspecting it… Is everyone OK? You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that,” he said.

(Billado told BuzzFeed she mentioned the incident to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who shrugged it off, saying, “Yeah, he does that.”)

Here are other “highlights” from Trump’s storied history as a pageant creep.


Miss Venezuela, Alicia Machado (L), 19, from the hometown of Maracay, won the 1996 Miss Universe Crown late 17 May in Las Vegas, Nevada.

1996
When he bought the Miss Universe pageant family, Trump told Stern in 2005, the pageant was “a sick puppy.” The relative hotness of contestants had seriously deteriorated in the preceding years, he explained to Stern, because the judges had begun placing a greater emphasis on brains over beauty. “They had a person that was extremely proud that a number of the women had become doctors,” Trump said. “And I wasn’t interested.”

The first Miss Universe crowned on Trump’s watch was Miss Venezuela, Alicia Machado. Hillary Clinton famously invoked Trump’s treatment of Machado during the first presidential debate. Machado remembers him calling her “Miss Piggy” because she gained weight and “Miss Housekeeping” because she’s Latina. Trump invited reporters to observe Machado exercising, against her protests. She told The New York Times earlier this year, “I was about to cry in that moment with all the cameras there. I said, ‘I don’t want to do this, Mr. Trump.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.'”

1997
The same year former contestants say Trump unexpectedly entered the Miss Teen USA dressing room, the reigning Miss Universe, Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, recalls Trump asking her about the looks of his daughter Ivanka, who was co-hosting the pageant. “‘Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?'” Mahealani Lee recalls Trump saying.

Also that year, Miss Utah, Temple Taggart, recalls Trump kissed her against her wishes. “He kissed me directly on the lips. I thought, ‘Oh my God, gross.’ He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s inappropriate,'” Taggart told The New York Times. She says he did the same thing a few months later at Trump Tower, where he had invited her to discuss her career. To succeed in the entertainment industry, Trump advised 21-year-old Taggart to lie about her age. “We’re going to have to tell them you’re 17,” she remembers Trump saying.

2005
The same year Trump bragged to Howard Stern about barging into the dressing room while the women were changing, he declined to say whether he’d ever slept with a contestant. “It could be a conflict of interest. … But, you know, it’s the kind of thing you worry about later, you tend to think about the conflict a little bit later on,” Trump joked. A few beats later, he rethought his stance, joking that, as the pageant’s owner, it might be his “obligation” to sleep with the contestants.


Donald Trump places a ribbon on Miss California USA Carrie Prejean during a press conference at Trump Tower May 12, 2009 in New York.

2009
Miss California, Carrie Prejean, recalled in her memoir the way Trump would pit the women against each other, asking them to rate each other’s looks on the spot.

Donald Trump walked out with his entourage and inspected us closer than any general ever inspected a platoon. He would stop in front of a girl, look her up and down, and say, “Hmmm.” Then he would go on and do the same thing to the next girl. He took notes on a little pad as he went along. After he did this, Trump said: “O.K. I want all the girls to come forward.” …

Donald Trump looked at Miss Alabama.

“Come here,” he said.

She took one more step forward.

“Tell me, who’s the most beautiful woman here?”

Miss Alabama’s eyes swam around.

“Besides me?” she said. “Uh, I like Arkansas. She’s sweet.”

“I don’t care if she’s sweet,” Donald Trump said. “Is she hot?” …

It became clear that the point of the whole exercise was for him to divide the room between girls he personally found attractive and those he did not. Many of the girls found the exercise humiliating. Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after he left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began to impress “The Donald.”

Her recollection was boosted by an audio recording from the same year, obtained by TMZ, on which Trump can be heard asking the contestants for help picking out some of the best-looking women before the contest itself took place. “We get to choose a certain number [of contestants who will be guaranteed to make it through the first round]. You know why we do that? Because years ago when I first bought it, we chose ten people, I chose none and I get here and the most beautiful people were not chosen. And I went nuts. So we call it the Trump Rule.”

Later in the same tape, Trump can be heard talking up his son, Eric – who also served as the contest’s judge – to the assembled beauty queens: “I have a son, he’s very handsome; he’s 6-foot-6, and he was number one in his class in school.”

2010
Trump boasted to David Letterman that when he bought Miss USA, “I made the heels higher and the bathing suits smaller.”

2013
Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, recalls that when she was a contestant, the businessman demanded the women redo their introductions when they failed to look Trump in the eye. In a Facebook post this year, Searles called Trump a “misogynist” who “treated us like cattle” and “lined up so he could get a closer look at his property.” Other contestants from the same year, like Paromita Mitra of Mississippi, bolstered Searles recollection. Mitra commented, “I literally have nightmares about that process.

Miss Washington 2013 claims Donald Trump groped her, invited her to hotel room
by Brian Murphy
Miami Herald
October 15, 2016 Updated October 15, 2016 9:41 a.m.

Jessica Leeds, a businesswoman at a paper company, was sitting next to Donald J. Trump on a flight to New York in the early 1980s. She told The Times that he lifted the armrest and began to grope her. By McClatchy

A contestant in the 2013 Miss USA pageant alleges that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump groped her and invited her back to his hotel room.

Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, wrote a Facebook post in June outlining a series of complaints about Trump’s behavior. In the post, she included a picture of Trump standing in the middle of all the pageant contestants and tagged many of her fellow competitors in the post.

“Miss USA Class of 2013: Do y’all remember that one time we had to do our on stage introductions, but this one guy treated us like cattle and made us do it again because we didn’t look him in the eyes? Do you also remember when he then proceeded to have us lined up so he could get a closer look at his property? Oh I forgot to mention that guy will be in the running to become the next President of the United States. I love the idea of having a misogynist as the President. ... #HeWillProbablySueMe #iHaveWorseStoriesSoComeAtMeBro #Drumpf”

Yahoo! reported in June that other contestants complaints about Trump in the comments.

In an article about Trump’s history with the pageant, Rolling Stone reported that Searles added a comment to her original post.

“He probably doesn’t want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.”

Trump owned the Miss USA pageant from 2002 to 2015, when he sold to WME amid controversy over his statements about Mexicans.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that two women claim Trump touched them inappropriately. In that story, a former Miss Utah claims that Trump kissed her on the month more than once when she was a contestant.

Trump denied the accusations to the Times.

The news comes less than a week after The Washington Post posted a video of Trump bragging about touching and kissing women without consent. Trump apologized for the comments, but has called it “locker room talk” in recent days and said he did not do any of the actions he was caught discussing.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016, 9:50 PM.

Searles added in a comment on her initial post’s thread, “He probably doesn’t want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.”

2015
The 2015 Miss USA pageant was set to take place the first week of July – three weeks after Trump characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals during his campaign kick-off event. One by one, the pageant’s hosts, judges, sponsors, and broadcasters dropped out. Trump was forced to sell the pageants to WME in September 2015.

Update, October 13th, 10:30 a.m. ET: The Trump campaign issued a statement to Rolling Stone categorically denying these allegations and questioning the political motivation behind reporting on them, adding, “Mr. Trump has a fantastic record of empowering women throughout his career, and a more accurate story would be to show how he’s been a positive influence in the lives of so many.”

[admin]

Woman suing Trump over alleged teen rape drops suit, again
by Josh Gerstein
Politico
11/04/2016 07:03 PM EDT. Updated: 11/04/2016 10:04 PM EDT

A woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her two decades ago when she was a 13-year-old aspiring teen model has again dropped a federal lawsuit over the alleged assaults.

The accuser, identified in the lawsuit by the pseudonym “Jane Doe,” was expected to appear at a news conference in Los Angeles Wednesday, but that appearance was abruptly canceled.

The lawyer who organized the event, Lisa Bloom, said Trump’s accuser had received threats and was too frightened to show up.

In the most recent suit, Trump’s accuser asserted that while she was exploring a modeling career in 1994, she attended a series of parties at the Manhattan home of prominent investor Jeffrey Epstein. She alleges that during those parties the real estate mogul tied her to a bed and raped her. She also claimed Epstein raped her during that series of gatherings.

The accuser’s lead attorney, Thomas Meagher of New Jersey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. He filed a one-page notice dismissing the case Friday evening in federal court in Manhattan. No explanation was given for the action.

Bloom did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.

Through his attorney, Trump had flatly denied the woman’s allegations.

“It is categorically untrue. It is completely frivolous. It is baseless. It is irresponsible,” Trump attorney Alan Garten told POLITICO in September. “I won’t even discuss the merits because it gives it credibility that it doesn’t deserve.”

“I don’t think I ever had a case where I even suspected a woman was making a false accusation,” said former Suffolk County sheriff and prosecutor Andrea Cabral.

According to Suffolk County District Attorney John P. Pappas, the problem with sexual assaults is underreporting, “because victims fear they won’t be believed. The overwhelming majority of such allegations are grounded in truth.”

Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan said, “There may be a variety of legal reasons our office cannot proceed with prosecution; that does not mean the allegation is false.”

False accusations do in fact happen, but again, rarely. Various studies estimate between 2 percent and 10 percent nationwide.

But since only rapes reported to police can be deemed false, some analysts put the number much lower and say that a “false” accusation may actually be a true one recanted because a survivor doesn’t want a trial.

-- The myth of ‘false accusations’ of sexual assault, by Margery Eagan, Boston Globe

Doe named Trump and Epstein as defendants in the suits and says they knew she was well under 17 — the age of consent. “I understood that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein knew that I was 13 years old,” she wrote.

Two earlier suits were filed over the same alleged events.

The first suit over the alleged rapes was filed in federal court in Riverside, California, in April by someone acting without an attorney and using the name “Katie Johnson.” That suit named both Trump and Epstein as defendants, alleging that the two men held Johnson as a “sex slave” and repeatedly forced her to engage in sexual acts against her will.

Subsequent news reports raised doubts about who filed the suit. Johnson claimed she had just $300 in assets and that she was living at a home in Twentynine Palms, California, but Radar Online reported neighbors said the home had been foreclosed upon and vacant since its owner died last year.

U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee dismissed that case in May, ruling that Johnson’s complaint didn’t raise valid claims under federal law. Gee, an appointee of President Barack Obama, noted that the suit cited a criminal statute that doesn’t give rise to civil damages and that the civil statute Johnson cited only applies to actions based on “race-based or class-based animus.”

Another version of the suit was filed in federal court in June, but withdrawn in September after apparently never being served on the defendants.

The case was refiled later that month.

The second and third iterations of the complaint accused Trump of only a single act of rape, but said he had “sexual contact” with the accuser on three other occasions. A declaration from an anonymous witness attached to the later suits continued to accuse Trump of four acts of rape or sexual assault.

A lawyer for Epstein declined to the comment on the lawsuits.

About a decade ago, Epstein came under investigation by local and federal authorities near his Palm Beach, Florida, home over allegations that he solicited underage girls to have sex with him at that residence and another on an island he owned in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Epstein pleaded guilty in June 2008 to two state felony charges relating to prostitution and was sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served only 13 months before being released but was required to register as a sex offender.