We all remember the Access Hollywood bus tape, which was a major political scandal that broke in October 2016, just weeks before the presidential election. In 2005, Trump was riding on an Access Hollywood bus with host Billy Bush, heading to tape a segment for the show. They were wearing microphones and having what they thought was a private conversation, but it was being recorded. Trump made crude comments about women, including boasting about being able to grope women because of his celebrity status. The most infamous quote included him saying he could “grab them by the pussy” and that women would let him “do anything” because he was famous. The Washington Post obtained and published the tape on October 7, 2016, about a month before the election. The timing was significant because it came just days after the first presidential debate and during a crucial period in the campaign. The fallout was significant, but only to a point. Many Republican politicians condemned the comments and some withdrew their endorsements. He issued a rare public apology, calling the comments “wrong”. Trump initially dismissed it all as just “locker room talk”. Despite the controversy, Trump won the election about a month later. The tape became a defining moment of the 2016 campaign and continues to be referenced in discussions about Trump’s history and character.
The U.S. electorate and the world knew then and there the womanizing and misogynistic nature of Trump’s character. Since then there have been the E. Jean Carroll lawsuits. The lawsuits against Donald Trump involve two related civil cases that resulted in significant financial judgments against Trump. The background is that in June 2019, E. Jean Carroll published an article in New York magazine accusing Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in late 1995 or early 1996 in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City . Trump denied the allegations, which led to two separate lawsuits. Carroll filed her first defamation lawsuit in November 2019 after Trump denied her allegations. In November 2022, Carroll filed her second suit against Trump, renewing her claim of defamation and adding a claim of battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations. The jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll and defamed her in his 2022 statements. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Importantly, the jury delivered a verdict that first stated that Carroll had not proven that Trump raped her, and next stated that Carroll did proved that Trump was responsible for a lesser degree of sexual abuse. Based on Trump’s inability to accept the verdict, he went public again with further recriminations, which led to another lawsuit against him by Carroll. A New York jury then ordered Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for ruining her credibility as an advice columnist when he called her a liar after she accused him of sexual assault. The appeals court has already overturned Trump’s appeal of the original verdict. The $83.3 million judgment is also under appeal, with Trump’s attorney arguing that presidential immunity protects Trump from liability for public statements made as president . However, Carroll’s attorney argued that statements Trump made about Carroll as president would clearly fall outside of his official responsibilities. Anyone claiming that Trump is not an abuser of women now have this adjudication to prove otherwise.
And now there is the Epstein situation. Jeffrey Epstein was a complex figure whose life ended in scandal and controversy. Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born in 1953, in Brooklyn in a relatively humble Jewish home. He was a talented student who excelled in mathematics and was also a skilled pianist. He studied at NYU for three years but did not graduate. In 1974, despite not having received a degree, Epstein began teaching physics and mathematics at the private Dalton School in Manhattan, many of whose students belonged to some of the wealthiest families in the country. Kim and I have met with Dalton and have a questionable opinion of the place. Epstein so impressed one student’s father with his intelligence that the parent referred him to Alan (“Ace”) Greenberg, then the CEO of the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns and also a Dalton parent. Having worked at Bear for four years, I knew Ace very well and this bootstrapping approach to people is very recognizable. After a short stint working at Bear Stearns, Epstein started his own firm with billionaire Leslie H. Wexner as his anchor client. Wexner was the founder of Victoria’s Secret. From that connection and others, Epstein grew immensely wealthy. He operated out of the Virgin Islands, where he had bought his own private island, Little Saint James. Epstein owned a private Boeing 727 jet nicknamed the Lolita Express by the locals in the Virgin Islands, because of its frequent arrivals at Little Saint James with apparently underage girls and friends and clients of all sorts. Epstein cultivated an elite social circle and began associating with socially prominent people, including former president Bill Clinton, and then real estate mogul Donald Trump. He was accused of cultivating that elite social circle by procuring many women and children whom he and his associates then sexually abused .
In 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein. Federal officials identified 36 girls, some as young as 14 years old, whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused. Then, in 2008, US Attorney Alex Acosta (later to become President Donald Trump’s labor secretary) agreed a secret plea deal with Epstein, who pleaded guilty to two felony prostitution charges. Of his 18-month prison sentence, he served 13 months. Epstein had a decades-long association with the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell (someone I have mentioned I knew from my relationship with her father, Robert Maxwell in the pre-Epstein days), who recruited young girls for him, leading to her 2021 conviction on US federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy for helping him procure girls. Finally, in July 2019, Epstein was arrested on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors. Soon thereafter, Epstein was found unresponsive in his jail cell, having supposedly hung himself. The New York City medical examiner and the Justice Department Inspector General ruled that Epstein’s death was a suicide by hanging, which brought a convenient end to the speculation about who of his elite circle of friends would be implicated during the pending trial.
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein described each other as being friends from about the late 1980s to the early 2000s . Trump and Epstein met sometime around 1990 when Epstein bought a mansion two miles north of Mar-a-Lago which Trump had purchased five years earlier in 1985. In a 2019 interview, Epstein referred to Trump as his “closest friend for 10 years,” a claim echoed by three others who knew the men. Trump flew in Epstein’s private plane seven times between 1993 to 1997, according to flight logs. In 1992, Trump invited NBC to film a party he threw for himself and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago, where they joined various NFL cheerleaders. Photos from 1993 confirm that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. I was at Mar-a-Lago about two years later for one evening and saw Trump dancing at 2am with his infant daughter Tiffany, with Epstein at his side. In 2002, Trump was quoted in a New York Magazine profile of Epstein, saying, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery” and describing him as “a terrific guy,” saying he’d known Epstein for 15 years. Their relationship seems to have ended around that time due to some combination of real estate deal wrangling and accusations (made recently by Trump) that Epstein had poached young female spa workers from Mar-a-Lago. An important aspect of the Trump/Epstein relationship involves Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims. Giuffre was a locker room spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in summer 2000, two years before Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy.” Virginia Giuffre, one of the women who accused Epstein of sexual abuse, told the court that she was working at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited by Maxwell to become Epstein’s masseuse at the age of 16.
This Epstein connection continues to haunt Trump. Most recently, the 2003 50th Birthday Book put together by Maxwell for Epstein includes both a lewd and suggestive Trump note and drawing that places Trump’s misogynistic and perverse tendencies once again at center stage. Trump is doing what he always does, denying the letter and suing the Wall Street Journal for $20 billion for libel in telling the world about the Birthday Book entry.
The locker room is filled with rich and famous lotharios and none more prominent than Donald Trump. Many of the others have fallen from grace, while Donald and others keep pretending that what happened and was bragged about in the locker room never happened. At age 12, I worked cleaning a men’s locker room and have rarely seen a nastier place.