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On July 6, 2019, financier Jeffrey Epstein -- who in 2008 had plead guilty to felony sex-related charges in Florida and was required to register as a sex offender as a result -- was again arrested on felony sex trafficking charges. Although Epstein committed suicide in his jail cell several weeks later, rumors and accusations continue to fly about which high-profile persons who were friendly with Epstein may have known about, or even participated in, illegal sexual activities with minors taking place at Epstein's so-called Pedophile Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands (and elsewhere). One prominent celebrity who often socialized with Epstein beginning in the latter part of the 1980s was Donald Trump, who by the time of Epstein's 2019 arrest had become President of the United States. Although Trump and Epstein apparently had long since ceased to remain on speaking terms by 2019, Trump's name continued to be connected with Epstein's illegal activities throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, due in large part to a lawsuit initially filed against Trump and Epstein in April 2016 by a woman who claimed that Trump had repeatedly raped her at several Upper East Side parties hosted by Epstein in 1994, when she was just 13 years old. (The first filing of the lawsuit was dismissed by the court; the second was voluntarily withdrawn by the plaintiff because, she claimed, her life had been threatened.) In mid-2020, a meme circulated via social media sought to defend Trump against such accusations by offering positive information about him, including claims that Trump had booted Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club for inappropriate behavior towards a teenager, had outed Epstein as a pedophile early on, and had voluntarily provided information to help Epstein's victims build a case against the financier: This meme offers a mixed bag of factual and inaccurate or misleading information, as detailed below: The first part of the text, about Trump's defying a Palm Beach ordinance and refusing to exclude Black people and Jews from his club Mar-a-Lago, has a kernel of truth to it, but the wording used is a bit misleading. It wasn't the case, as the meme implies, that a local law required Trump to exclude Blacks and Jews from his club, but he refused to follow that law and sued to have it abolished. Rather (as we detailed in an earlier article), when Trump sought to convert Mar-a-Lago (which he had purchased in 1985) from a private estate to a club in the 1990s, he was disgruntled that the town council imposed a series of operational restrictions upon his plans that were more stringent than the restrictions placed on upon existing (segregated) clubs and vehemently criticized local officials over the matter. Trump was eventually successful in getting most of those restrictions overturned: In 2002, Trump described Epstein as a terrific guy and said he had known Epstein for 15 years, which would date their friendship as beginning around 1987. In 2019, after Epstein's arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, Trump declared that he was not a fan of Epstein and asserted, I had a falling out with him a long time ago, I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years, which would date their friendship as ending around 2004. Trump didn't publicly state what prompted his falling-out with Epstein, but the 2020 book The Grifter's Club attributed it (via a second-hand source) to Trump's kicking Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club after Epstein allegedly harassed another club member's teenage daughter: A July 2019 New York Times article provided a slightly different story, however, quoting a former Trump campaign aide as saying that Trump had banned Epstein from his club because Epstein had tried to recruit a woman who worked there: We found nothing suggesting that Trump had outed Epstein as a pedophile in 2002, however. Their friendship apparently didn't end until after that, and an October 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein quoted Trump as still speaking quite positively of the financier at that time: The reference to Trump's being the only one of Epstein's contacts who was not subpoenaed in 2005 because he came forward voluntarily appears to be a garbled version of an occurrence from 2009, when Trump was in fact served with a subpoena but rendered it unnecessary by proactively coming forward to volunteer information: The July 2020 arrest and indictment of long-time Epstein associate and girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell on charges of enticement of minors and sex trafficking of children has kept Epstein's illicit sexual activities in the forefront of the news even beyond his death.
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