Palm Beach in the nineties was a glass of warm gin left too long on a marble bar: rich, slightly sour, and best swallowed in one gulp before you started asking what was floating in it. Mar-a-Lago was its crown jewel: a palace with gold-leaf ceilings and a velvet rope spun from money, power, and the quiet understanding that nothing inside would ever make the papers.
Donald Trump likes to tell a story about how, one day, as the decade waned, Jeffrey Epstein crossed a line and got shown the door. The way he tells it, it was a clean break, the kind you could hang your reputation on when reporters started digging.
But in the real world, clean breaks are for fairy tales. In this one, the club ledgers — those dull, patient witnesses, say Epstein kept paying his dues for years after the supposed exile. And the paper doesn’t care about politics.
The Public Story
On July 9, 2019, in the Oval Office, and a month before Epstein killed himself, Trump leaned into the cameras and gave the official line: “I was not a fan… I haven’t spoken to him in maybe 15 years. I was not a fan.”
That math put the split around 2004, neatly before Epstein’s July 2006 indictment on sex-crime charges in Florida. It also placed Trump’s supposed break in the shadow of a well-publicised 2004 real-estate dust-up, when the two men bid on the same bankrupt Palm Beach mansion. Trump won, paying $41 million for “Maison de l’Amitié”.
Trump has also changed his story recently, to make himself seem more virtuous, but the paper trail merely confirms his dishonesty.
The “Stolen” Spa Worker
In July 2025, Trump told reporters Epstein had “stolen people who worked for me” and singled out Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most well-known accusers, who has said she was recruited at Mar-a-Lago in 2000. Court documents establish she was a minor at the time she worked for Trump, not illegal, but not a good look.
Her own account backed by years of legal filings and interviews is that Ghislaine Maxwell approached her while she was on the job and drew her into Epstein’s orbit.
Trump’s framing, that she was “stolen” from him, recasts the episode as an act of theft, not exploitation. And here’s the first detail that should have made headlines but didn’t: no journalist in the room asked why an underage girl was working at Trump's spa in the first place.
There's another problem with Trump's latest version. Those same court documents also confirm her employment was terminated in 2000, two years before Trump's infamous "he likes them young" observation about Epstein, in comments to New York agazine profile that published on October 28, 2002.
Trump also described Epstein in that profile as a 'Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with" confirming that the pair where still close friends two years after Giuffrie was recruited by Maxwell for Epstein.
The Paper Trail
The public record isn’t a polite dinner companion. It interrupts, points, and contradicts.
Irrespective of whether it was a property deal gone wrong in 2004, or a falling out poaching under age staff in 2000, here’s the kicker: The Grifter’s Club, a book by Miami Herald reporters, says Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago account wasn’t closed until October 2007.
That’s three years after the date implied in Trump’s 2019 Oval Office statement, although sources like The New York Times and PBS note "little public record" of interactions after 2004, with the 2007 ban as the final tie.
The question lingers. If the ban happened in 2004, why did Epstein remain a paying member until 2007? If Epstein was persona non grata, why did that status take three years to show up in the club’s books?
These aren’t abstract questions. In politics, controlling the timeline is controlling the narrative. And in this case, the narrative is running on two tracks, one for the public, one for the records.
The Club as a Character
Mar-a-Lago isn’t just backdrop. It’s a character in this story, the kind that wears diamonds in the daylight and knows where all the bodies are buried. Membership is about more than pool privileges; it’s about belonging to the kind of closed world where scandal can be managed in-house.
Inside those walls, the “velvet rope” is just a metaphor. The real barrier is made of connections and unspoken agreements. For a man like Epstein, whose Rolodex could open almost any door, that barrier was porous — until it wasn’t.
Power’s Selective Memory
History written in speeches is a malleable thing. History written in membership ledgers and flight logs is stubborn.
As early as March of ’93 Trump and Epstein's close connection was marked in the ink. Twice—on the 23rd and the 26th—Trump’s name riding shotgun with Jeffrey Epstein’s on flights between Teterboro and Palm Beach.
Two years later, August 13, ’95, the script flipped—Trump brought his son Eric along for the ride north from Palm Beach.
By January 5, ’97, the company had changed but the pattern hadn’t. Epstein, Maxwell, Trump—same sky, different airport, this time Newark.
In the business of secrets, planes are just rooms without corners, and these flights had plenty of shadows.
Trump’s public line about the “fifteen-year” split gives him daylight from their long shared history, and from Epstein’s subsequent legal troubles. The membership documents pull him closer, at least until late 2007.
In politics, the truth is often less about what happened than about what you can convince people to remember. That’s the selective memory of power: not an outright erasure, but a rewrite in just enough detail to survive the daily news cycle.
The Ledger Never Blinks
The books at Mar-a-Lago don’t know how to lie. The court documents containing Virginia Giuffre's testimony don’t smirk for the cameras or spin a sob story for the evening news. They just sit there, yellowing quietly, waiting for someone to notice them. And somewhere in those silent columns, the fairy tales about a young Virginia Giuffre being shuffled from one sleazy rich man's palace to another, or the bedtime story about a busted property deal in ‘04, don’t explain a thing. They don’t explain why Jeffrey Epstein’s name keeps showing up in the ledger until 2007, twelve months after the first charges hit him like a hammer in the dark. Or why Trump was effusive in his praise of a sexual predator named Jeffrey Epstein - "Terrific guy" - two years after he claimed he banned him from Mar-a-Lago.
My sources are your sources (except for the secret ones): WPBF, Fox News, Miami Herald, Newsweek, Guardian, PBS, 7 Eye Witness News, Wikipedia, Polifact, NBC, Getty, NYMag, Daily Beast.
The image is a digital illustration.