Trump, Epstein, and the Ladies

Trump’s angle towards ladies was by no means unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was at all times keen to explain his conquests, actual and imagined, for the good thing about gossip columnists and talk-show hosts. Since he turned a politician, the image has solely sharpened. Round twenty ladies have publicly accused the President of assorted types of sexual misconduct. (He has at all times denied the accusations.) In 2023, a New York jury awarded the author E. Jean Carroll a five-million-dollar civil judgment towards him for defamation and sexual abuse. She accused Trump of assaulting her within the mid-nineties in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman division retailer, in New York. (Trump has denied Carroll’s account and has known as on the Supreme Courtroom to overturn the ruling.)

On Tuesday, because the Justice Division continued to launch the avalanche of paperwork and pictures identified collectively because the Epstein recordsdata, some, however hardly all, main information retailers reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the previous U.S.A. Gymnastics crew physician who abused tons of of feminine athletes and pleaded responsible in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree legal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten textual content displays contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his previous. Whereas all three males shared a “love of younger, nubile ladies,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “beloved to ‘seize snatch,’ ” solely Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub within the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”

The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Related Press. However is it actual? There isn’t a purpose to consider that it’s. Julie Okay. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for a few years, wrote on X, “That is suspect to me, largely as a result of Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know methods to spell. It doesn’t appear to suit with the best way he wrote, both. Plus it actually appears to be like like a girl’s handwriting.” The Justice Division later introduced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”

The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires placing a doubtful letter into proof. As we proceed to sift day by day by means of the detritus of Trump’s accumulating report and biography, we preserve residing with the notion that in some way, someplace, there’ll seem a doc or a element so grotesque, so damning, that the nation will lastly rise as one to declare this Presidency at an finish. Only one extra occasion of sexual assault; of merciless and unlawful deportations; of monetary self-dealing. Only one extra indulgence of racism and antisemitism within the MAGA camp; yet one more outrageous insult hurled towards a international chief or a feminine reporter; yet one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.

There has already been a mountain of correct reporting on Trump’s angle towards ladies and the shut relationship between the President and Epstein. Among the many greatest and most complete accounts was printed final week within the Occasions. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate explored numerous paperwork and interviewed greater than thirty of Epstein’s former workers, in addition to victims. They described the connection as certainly one of frequent carnal curiosity.

“Neither man drank or did medication. They pursued ladies in a recreation of ego and dominance. Feminine our bodies have been foreign money,” Confessore and Tate wrote. “Over almost 20 years, as Mr. Trump reduce a swath by means of the social gathering circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was maybe his most dependable wingman. In the course of the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Lodge, at the very least certainly one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic Metropolis casinos and each their Palm Seaside properties. They visited one another’s places of work and spoke usually by telephone, in line with different former Epstein workers and girls who hung out in his properties. With different males, Mr. Epstein would possibly focus on tax shelters, worldwide affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about intercourse.”

That passage is the “billboard” of the piece, the thesis, and it’s amply supported by a number of sources who describe the small print of their relationship, how Trump regaled Epstein over the phone “with tales of his sexual exploits” and the way Epstein delighted in making his discomfited assistants hear on speaker. Confessore and Tate reported the recollections of a former Epstein assistant, who recounted “one name within the mid-Nineteen Nineties on which the 2 males mentioned how a lot pubic hair a specific lady had, and whether or not there was sufficient for Mr. Epstein to floss his enamel with. On one other, Mr. Trump informed Mr. Epstein about having intercourse with one other lady on a pool desk.”