Donald Trump’s official explanation for his falling out with Jeffrey Epstein is that he dropped the late financier and sex offender after years of close friendship because Epstein hired Mar-a-Lago staff from under his nose. During his trip to Scotland, Trump told reporters: “He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again’. He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata.” Later, Trump declared that those “stolen” included Virginia Giuffre, the ill-fated Epstein accuser who helped put Ghislaine Maxwell in jail and received a large payoff over her claims about sex with Prince Andrew.
But as ever with Trump, the truth appears to be more complex and more transactional. Indeed, Epstein may even have broken with the future president rather than being snubbed by him; their split happening when Trump outbid him for Maison de l’Amitie (House of Friendship), a French Regency-style estate in Palm Beach, Florida, that Epstein planned to buy at auction. Epstein went up to $38.6m but Trump outbid him, buying the 62,000-square-foot mansion for $41.35m before selling it four years later to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95m – making it at the time the most expensive property ever sold in the USA.
Any strong objections that Epstein may have had to being gazumped by his friend were forgotten when, less than two weeks after the auction, Palm Beach police were tipped off about young women seen coming and going from Epstein’s home, leading to his subsequent downfall.
