President Donald Trump has made a deliberate effort to distance himself from the disgraced pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, even before his death, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with Epstein’s alleged accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who he expressed positive feelings for during a press conference this week.
While answering questions for reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said that he knew Maxwell because they both spent a lot of time in Palm Beach, Florida.
“I don’t know. 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. I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well. Whatever it is. I don’t know the situation with Prince Andrew. Just don’t know. Not aware of it,” Trump said.
Virginia Roberts, one of the women who was trafficked by Epstein while she was underage, says that she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell while working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Roberts says that she was approached by Maxwell about working as a massage therapist for a very rich man. Maxwell then recruited Roberts into Epstein’s trafficking ring, where she was forced to become a sex slave for Epstein and his wealthy friends, including Prince Andrew.
Trump has appeared in numerous photos with both Maxwell and Epstein, but outlets like Fox News have been caught attempting to crop Trump out of some of these photos in negative stories about Maxwell.
“On Sunday, July 5, a report on Ghislaine Maxwell during Fox News Channel’s America’s News HQ mistakenly eliminated President Donald Trump from a photo alongside then Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein, and Maxwell. We regret the error,” the network’s statement read, according to CNN’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy.
After the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell this week, Eric Trump tweeted out a photo showing Ghislaine Maxwell at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, with a caption that read “birds of a feather,” but was quickly forced to delete the post after the comments were flooded with photos of his father, US President Donald Trump, hanging out with both Maxwell and Epstein.
A former Trump associate told the NY Times that Trump and Epstein had a “VIP Party” at the Mar-a-Lago resort where they and about two dozen women were the only attendees, although it is not clear if any underage girls were in attendance.
Many of Trump’s diehard supporters point to a falling-out that the president had with Epstein a few years before his initial arrest as evidence that he was not involved in the trafficking network.
They often attempt to create the narrative that Trump was disgusted by Epstein’s activities once he learned of them, and banned him from his Mar-a-Lago resort after learning about what he was up to, despite there being no evidence of any of this.
In fact, it has since been revealed that Trump’s friendship with Epstein was ruined over a bad real-estate deal, not any kind of moral objection over his lifestyle.