According to former Mar-a-Lago employees, the house calls continued for years, even as spa employees warned each other about Epstein, who was known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during appointments.
The spa sometimes offered house calls for members. The staffers said Epstein was not a dues-paying member of the club, but Trump told staffers to treat him that way. Epstein had an account at the spa where his partner Ghislaine Maxwell booked appointments on his behalf.
Former employees said they came to a halt in 2003, when an 18-year-old beautician returned to the club after calling from Epstein’s home and telling managers that he had pressured her for sex.
Some former employees said a manager sent Trump a fax about the employee’s allegations and urged him to sanction Epstein. Trump told the manager that it was a good letter and to send it out.
The beautician disclosed the house calls to the club’s human resources team, one of the former employees said. According to former employees and police, the incident was not reported to Palm Beach police.
The department did not begin investigating Epstein until two years later, when a parent told them that Epstein molested a 14-year-old girl at a local high school. Epstein was arrested in 2006 after several underage teenagers told police that he had paid them for sex.
White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt said Tuesday that the Journal was “writing fallacies and insinuations to discredit President Trump.”
“No matter how many times this story is told and retold, the truth remains this: President Trump did nothing wrong and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar a Lago because he was cheap,” Levitt said in a text message.
Representatives for the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
The beautician’s allegations, and the Mar-a-Lago spa’s practice of sending staff to Epstein’s home, were not previously reported. House call workers, such as 18-year-old beauticians, were generally licensed by state boards of cosmetology or massage therapy.
The allegations come three years after Maxwell hired another employee, Virginia Giuffre, who said she was 16 when she left the spa to work for Epstein. Giuffre died by suicide this year.
The Wall Street Journal identified four other Mar-a-Lago employees who were listed in Epstein’s address book, which was obtained by the FBI in 2009.
By the time Epstein was banned from the spa in 2003, there had been unease about his presence at the club for years — including from Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, who warned her husband and others in the mid-1990s that there was something “disgusting” about Epstein, according to former employees.
The relationship between Epstein and Trump, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, has been the focus of intense scrutiny this year. The Justice Department recently began releasing in response to a law passed by Congress in November thousands of documents From its files on Epstein, some of which reference Trump. Mention in files is not an indicator of wrongdoing. Trump has said that he ended relations with Epstein several years before his 2006 arrest.
Trump and Epstein continued to cross paths after Spa banned Epstein and Maxwell in 2003. They were in fierce competition for the Palm Beach estate that went into bankruptcy in late 2004, and Epstein’s message book shows two calls from Trump in the month of the auction, which Trump won.
In 2008, Epstein reached a controversial agreement with federal prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution and procuring a minor to engage in prostitution. He was arrested for a second time on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019 and died in prison awaiting trial. a medical examiner Government This is suicide.
Trump has given a variety of answers about when and why he separated Epstein from Mar-a-Lago and then ended their friendship altogether. After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Trump said, “I had a falling out with him. I haven’t talked to him in 15 years.”
When asked this summer why he stopped meeting with Epstein, Trump said it was because Epstein had lured some of his employees. “Because he did something that was inappropriate. He took help,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again and I threw him out of there, person undesirable.”
Trump said in a social-media post on Christmas Day that he was “the only person who dropped Epstein, and that was long before it became fashionable to do so.”
Meanwhile, the White House has said Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because he was “misbehaving with his female staffers, including Giuffre.”
In the early 2000s, Trump continued to associate with Epstein, saying in a New York Magazine profile Said in 2002 that he was “a lot of fun” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are of a young age.” A letter signed by trump And a portrait of a naked woman was part of a book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday in January 2003.
Trump sued the Wall Street Journal in July On his article about the letter, he called it “non-existent” and accused him of defamation. Congress has since obtained the letter from Epstein’s estate and made public released itThe Journal has moved to dismiss the lawsuit,
Maxwell regularly visited the Mar-a-Lago spa, where she would book in-home appointments for Epstein and charge the services for herself in an account in Epstein’s name. Former employees said the spa invited some members to their homes but they preferred to come for services.
Maxwell also used the spa to recruit young spa workers for side jobs that were not authorized by the club. Former employees said she said they could make some extra cash by massaging her friend.
According to a 2009 statement from Epstein’s house manager, Maxwell went to other spas in the Palm Beach area looking for a massage therapist for Epstein, who she said drove her away during Epstein’s rounds. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 for her role in Epstein’s sex-trafficking serving a 20 year prison sentence,
Representatives for Maxwell declined to comment.
According to former employees, Maples, who married Trump in 1993, widely shared concerns with Mar-a-Lago employees about Epstein soon after the club opened in 1995.
She was vague about her reasons for disliking Epstein. She told staffers that there was something “wrong” and “disgusting” about Epstein and that she was worried about his influence on Trump. Former employees said these comments were out of character for Maples, who rarely spoke ill of anyone on the staff.
According to former employees and people close to Maples, Maples told Trump that she was uncomfortable with Epstein’s presence and that she did not want to spend time with him — and she didn’t want Trump either.
But Epstein continued to attend parties and events at Mar-a-Lago.
Representatives for Maples did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump and Epstein knew each other since the 1980s and once bet on whether Maples was pregnant, according to a story Epstein recounted in emails he sent in 2015 and 2016 that recently surfaced made public by Congress,
As payment for losing – Maples gave birth to a daughter, Tiffany, in October 1993 – Epstein wrote that he sent Trump a truckload of baby food worth $10,000.
Trump’s friendship with Epstein continued after his second marriage. He and Maples announced their separation in 1997 and finalized their divorce in 1999.
By then, Epstein had developed a reputation among spa staff for being inappropriate on house calls, former employees said.
A massage therapist who worked at Mar-a-Lago in the late 1990s and early 2000s recalled asking managers why Epstein couldn’t come to the spa, since they had talked about sending someone to his home 2 miles away.
The owners told her that Epstein preferred spa services in the privacy of his own home, and warned the employee that Epstein sometimes exposed himself during massages.
In 2000, Maxwell offered Giuffre, who was then an attendant at the spa, a job as a massage therapist for Epstein. According to her posthumous memoir published this year, on her first visit to the mansion, Giuffre said Maxwell brought her to a room where Maxwell removed the teenager’s clothes, including a Mar-a-Lago polo shirt, and Epstein sexually assaulted her.
Giuffre alleged that over the next two years, Epstein sexually abused her and referred her to other powerful men. Giuffre said in a 2016 statement that she never saw Trump participate in the abuse of women or girls and wrote in her memoir that “Trump could not have been friendlier” when she met him.
This year, a reporter asked Trump whether Giuffre was one of the employees who was poached by Epstein. Trump said in July, “I think yes, he was one of those guys. He stole it.”
Former employees said Maxwell continued to pursue women at the spa in the early 2000s and gave a phone number to young employees. He told them to call if they or their friends wanted to earn extra money.
Write to Joe Palazzolo joe.palazzolo@wsj.comon Rebecca Ballhaus rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com And on Khadija Safdar khideeja.safdar@wsj.com
