Trump claims Epstein 'stole' Prince Andrew accuser Virginia Giuffre from his Mar-a-Lago resort
Ms Giuffre became a household name after she sued Prince Andrew for sexual abuse in August 2021 - saying he had sex with her when she was 17 and had been trafficked by his friend Epstein.
Prince Andrew reached an out-of-court settlement with Ms Giuffre but has repeatedly denied the claims and has not been charged with any criminal offences.
Mr Trump made his remarks about Ms Giuffre as his administration has faced growing pressure in recent weeks, including from within his "MAGA" base, to release files related to Epstein after he promised to do so during his 2024 presidential campaign.
The US president was speaking to reporters on Tuesday when he was asked about comments he made over the weekend about a falling-out with Epstein over employees taken from his business.
"He took people that worked for me. And I told him, 'Don't do it anymore.' And he did it," Mr Trump told reporters while on board Air Force One as he returned to the US from Scotland.
"I said, 'Stay the hell out of here'," the US president added.
Pressed about whether any of the employees he referred to were young women, Mr Trump said many of them worked in the spa at Mar-a-Lago.
"The answer is yes, they were in the spa," he said. "I told him, I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.' ... And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again."
Asked if Ms Giuffre was one of the employees poached by Epstein, the US president replied: "I think she worked at the spa... I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her, and by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know, none whatsoever."
1:09
The White House said in a statement last week that Mr Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because he was acting like a "creep".
Epstein took his own life in a Manhattan prison cell in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
On Tuesday, lawyer's for his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for recruiting young girls for the financier, said that they are open to her answering more questions from US Congress if she is granted immunity from future prosecution.
However a spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee, which requested the interview with Maxwell, said the panel would not consider granting the immunity she requested.
The former British socialite was interviewed inside a Florida courthouse by US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last week.
Officials have not publicly disclosed what she said.
Mr Blanche had earlier said that Maxwell would be interviewed because of Mr Trump's directive to gather and release any credible evidence about others who may have committed crimes in relation to the Epstein case.
Separately, Maxwell's lawyers have urged the Supreme Court to review her conviction, saying she did not receive a fair trial.
They also say that one way she would testify "openly and honestly, in public", is in the event of a pardon by Mr Trump, who has told reporters that such a move is within his rights but that he has not been not asked to make it.
What had Ms Giuffre said about Mar-a-Lago?
Ms Giuffre, who took her own life in April, claimed Maxwell spotted her while she was working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was a teenager in 2000.
She added that Maxwell hired her as Epstein's masseuse, which led to sexual abuse.
She accused Epstein of pressuring her into having sex with powerful men.
Why is the Epstein case such a problem for Trump?
Rumours have circulated since Epstein's death about who he may have supplied underage girls to and who visited his private island.
Some of those rumours quickly spiralled into conspiracy theories, which Mr Trump fanned the flames of during his campaign for a second term.
Mr Trump promised to release more Epstein files to the public if he was elected president for a second time - but is now facing a backlash from his voter base after carrying out a complete U-turn on the move.
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Daily Mail
7 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Sick sci-fi sex fantasy written by Epstein's first benefactor people say inspired his twisted island... before author's SON ended up arresting him
An obscure 1970s sci-fi novel — packed with graphic depictions of teenage sex slaves, breeding clinics, and aristocratic rapists — is suddenly one of the most talked-about books on the internet. Conspiracy theorists have drawn eerie parallels between its disturbing plot and Jeffrey Epstein 's real-world sex trafficking ring. The book in question, Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale, published in 1973 by Donald Barr — a former headmaster of a New York City prep school and father of Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr — has found itself at the heart of a tangled web of online controversy. Fueling the speculation is the fact that Donald Barr, a former CIA officer, once served as headmaster at the prestigious Dalton School on the Upper East Side, where Jeffrey Epstein taught in the mid-1970s, despite lacking a college degree. Though Donald Barr had stepped down by the time Epstein was hired, conspiracy theorists have seized on the timing, the lurid novel, and his son Bill Barr's role in Epstein's 2019 death in custody — as proof of a sinister connection. 'The Internet is abuzz with many bizarre theories,' reviewer Justin Tate posted on Goodreads about the 250-page book, which is now being sold online for as much as $4,000 a copy. 'Some read Space Relations like it's the Da Vinci Code, with hidden clues that might even reveal who killed Epstein. Others marvel over loose connections between Barr's plot and Epstein's crimes.' What has most stunned readers is how eerily similar the fictional universe is to the real-life sex trafficking empire run by Epstein, who abused scores of underage girls in New York, Palm Beach and his now-infamous private island. The plot of Space Relations follows John Craig, an Earth diplomat captured and enslaved on a distant planet called Kossar, where the ruling aristocracy maintains a brutal regime of sexual domination and forced breeding. Craig ultimately becomes a servant to Lady Morgan Sidney, a sadistic elite described as having 'high breasts and long thighs', and is compelled to rape a teenage slave girl as part of an intergalactic breeding clinic. Critics have called the book 'cheesy', 'bad writing' and 'incredibly creepy' — but that hasn't stopped a cult following from forming among collectors, conspiracy theorists, and critics of America's ruling class, who say the novel reads more like a disturbing prophecy than fiction. Just one year after Space Relations hit shelves, Donald Barr was headmaster at Dalton. In 1974, Epstein, then a college dropout in his early 20s with no teaching qualifications, landed a job there teaching math and physics. His brief stint at the school is widely seen as the springboard for his later social climbing — and grooming. It's never been definitively confirmed that Donald Barr personally hired Epstein. But it's that foggy link — between the bizarre content of the novel, Epstein's inexplicable employment, and Bill Barr's involvement decades later — that has sent the internet into a frenzy. Following Epstein's death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York in August 2019, then-Attorney General Bill Barr promised a full investigation, calling the circumstances a 'perfect storm of screw-ups' — including non-functioning security cameras and asleep guards. He ultimately accepted the ruling of suicide, despite widespread doubts and calls for deeper scrutiny. Recently, conservative YouTube host Tucker Carlson featured a segment exploring the connections, interviewing controversial history podcaster Darryl Cooper, who called the coincidences 'very strange and unacceptable'. Cooper questioned Bill Barr's motives for dismissing Epstein's death as a 'suicide before they'd finished the investigation.' Donald Barr's son, Bill, came under fire for his handling of the Epstein suicide investigation when he was President Donald Trump's Attorney General in 2019 'It could all be a coincidence, but the odds are against that,' said Cooper. The claims have been debunked by fact-checkers, including Snopes, which labeled the theories 'mostly false.' There is no proof Donald Barr, who died in 2004, played a role in Epstein's hiring, nor are there strong similarities between the fictional interplanetary sex ring in Space Relations and Epstein's real-life criminal enterprise. Still, for a novel that once gathered dust on the back shelves of second-hand bookstores, Space Relations has found a strange second life — not as science fiction, but as the focus of one of the strangest conspiracies of the post-Epstein era. 1999 - Virginia Roberts Giuffre is allegedly recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to became Epstein's 'sex slave,' at 17. She also claimed that he forced her to have sex with his friend Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth. 2002 - Trump tells New York Magazine that his friend Epstein 'likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' 2005 - A 14-year-old girl tells police that Epstein molested her at his Palm Beach mansion. May 2006 - Epstein and two of his associates are charged with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. State attorney of the time Barry Krischer, referred the case to a grand jury who heard from just two of the 12 girls law enforcement had gathered as potential witnesses. They returned just one single count of soliciting prostitution. July 2006 - The case is referred to the FBI by the Florida Palm Beach police who were unhappy with how the case was handled. 2007 - Epstein's lawyers meet with Miami's top federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, who would later become the Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration. They secretly negotiate the 'deal of a lifetime'. June 2008 - After pleading guilty to two prostitution charges, the millionaire was sentenced to 18 months in a low-security prison in exchange for prosecutors ending their investigation into his sex acts with minors and give him immunity from future prosecution related to those charges. In reality, Epstein was able to work from his office six days a week while supposedly incarcerated at the jail. July 2008 - Accusers learned of the deal for the first time. July 2009 - Epstein is released from jail five months early. July 2018 - The Miami Herald publishes investigative journalist Julie K. Brown's exposé on Epstein's long history of alleged sexual abuse and news of the 'deal of a lifetime' after Acosta was made Labor Secretary. February 2019 - The justice department opens an internal review into Epstein's plea deal. July 7, 2019 - Epstein is arrested after his private jet lands at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport from Paris. At the same time, federal agents break into his Manhattan townhouse where they uncovered hundreds of photographs of naked minors. July 8, 2019 - Epstein is charged with sex trafficking charges which detail how he created a network of underage girls in Florida and New York, paying girls as young as 14 to provide 'massages and sex acts.' The charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years in prison. July 11, 2019 - More than a dozen women, not previously known to law enforcement, came forward to accuse him of sex abuse. July 24 - Epstein was found unconscious in his cell after an apparent suicide attempt. He was moved to suicide watch at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. August 9, 2019 - More than 2,000 documents are unsealed which reveal the lurid allegations against Epstein in detail.
The Independent
37 minutes ago
- The Independent
ICE turned Louisiana into America's deportation capital. The inspiration was Amazon and FedEx ‘with human beings'
After he was arrested outside his Virginia apartment in March, Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri was briefly detained in the state before being put on a plane bound for an immigration detention center more than 1,000 miles away. Suri — who was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his Palestinian activism and his family ties to Gaza — arrived at the only ICE facility that doubles as an airport, without his attorneys having any idea where he was. Officers told Suri that he had entered the nation's ' super deportation center, ' according to his attorneys. The college professor was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed then marched into a 70,000 square foot 'staging facility' in Alexandria, Louisiana, which has emerged as the nexus point for President Donald Trump's mass deportation machine. Suri is far from alone. Since Trump returned to the White House, more than 20,000 people en route to other detention centers have passed through the Louisiana facility — which ICE officials have long aspired to operate like corporate giants FedEx and Amazon. ICE's acting director Todd Lyons has bluntly compared the movement of people to packages. 'We need to get better at treating this like a business, where this mass deportation operation is something like you would see and say, like, Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours,' Lyons told a law enforcement conference in Phoenix earlier this year. 'So, trying to figure out how to do that with human beings,' he said. The idea of 'running the government like a business' has taken root inside ICE over the last decade with lucrative public-private partnerships between the federal government and for-profit contractors, which operate roughly 90 percent of all ICE detention centers. Since before the Trump administration, the ICE field office in New Orleans — which is responsible for removal operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — was modeling operations after shipping giant FedEx and its 'spoke-hub' model. Detainees are temporarily held in detention 'hubs' before they're sent to a network of detention center 'spokes' where they wait to be deported. In Suri's case, he arrived at the Alexandria 'hub' before he was moved to a regional 'spoke' in Texas. The idea for a staging facility in Louisiana ' started on a cocktail napkin ' at Ruth's Chris steakhouse, according to Philip Miller, a former ICE official in New Orleans who went on to work for an IT firm that contracts with federal law enforcement. Miller sought 'a more effective and efficient way of moving the growing number of foreign detainees,' according to 2015 newsletter from GEO Group, the private prison contractor that operates the Alexandria facility. Trump's border czar Tom Homan tapped former GEO Group executive David Venturella to support the administration's deportation agenda, and he is now serving in a top role at ICE managing contracts for immigrant detention centers, according to The Washington Post. Meanwhile, Daniel Bible, who worked at ICE for 15 years, including a year as the executive associate director of removal operations, left the agency in November 2024 to join GEO Group as its executive vice president. Lyons, who has helmed ICE since March, addressed his now-viral remarks about treating immigrants like packages in an interview the following month. 'The key part that got left out of that statement was, I said, they deal with boxes, we deal with human beings, which is totally different,' he told Boston 25 News. ICE 'should be run like a corporation', he told the outlet. 'We need to be better about removing those individuals who have been lawfully ordered out of the country in a safe, efficient manner,' Lyons continued. 'We can't trade innovation and efficiency for how we treat the people in our custody.' The Independent has requested comment from ICE on its removal operations at the Alexandria facility. Fourteen of the 20 largest ICE detention centers in the U.S. are in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a network that immigrant advocates have labelled 'deportation alley.' The jails — most of which are operated by private prison companies — hold thousands of people each year. More than 7,000 people are currently jailed in Louisiana's immigration detention centers while Texas facilities are holding more than 12,000. More than 56,000 people are in ICE detention across the country. But Louisiana is home to the nation's only ICE detention center with a tarmac. The facility in Alexandria has become the nation's busiest deportation airport with 1,200 flights to other U.S. detention centers and more than 200 planes leaving the country since Trump took office. ICE has operated at least 209 deportation flights in June, the highest level since 2020. During the first six months of Trump's second presidency, ICE removed nearly 150,000 people from the U.S. Alexandria, a city of roughly 44,000 people, is the ninth largest in the state but surrounded by forest and swampland, with summer temperatures regularly climbing into triple digits with humidity levels exceeding 70 percent. Detainees at the facility in Alexandria cannot be held for more than 72 hours, and the facility does not permit access to visitors or even legal counsel, according to attorneys. Suri was held there for three days before being transferred to a Texas detention center where he was housed in the 'TV room,' according to his attorneys. He was given only a thin plastic mattress. Suri was released after spending eight weeks in detention amid an ongoing legal battle. Louisiana locks up more people per capita than any other U.S. state, in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet. Most incarcerated people in Louisiana are in local jails, and the state pays sheriffs a daily rate per inmate, creating what civil rights groups fear is a cruel pay-to-play system that incentivizes locking people up. In 2017, the state's Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards advanced legislation to reduce the state's prison population, which ultimately fell by more than 8,000 over the next five years. But at the same time, the first Trump administration was ramping up immigration arrests and expanding capacity to hold immigrants in detention. Following Trump's 2016 victory, ICE expanded the nation's immigration detention system by more than 50 percent, with contracts for private companies to operate at least 40 new detention facilities. Companies including GEO Group, CoreCivic and LaSalle Corrections own or operate facilities that jail the majority of immigrants. All but one of Louisiana's nine facilities are run by private prison firms. The 400-bed detention center in Alexandria is run by GEO Group, whose stock is valued at roughly $4 billion. Inside, dorm-style units hold up to 80 people each, and each includes an expansive 'processing area' with rows of benches and walls lined with hundreds of shackles. People who are processed at the facility from arriving flights are placed in five-point restraints and forced to sit on the benches, according to immigration attorneys. Before it opened in 2014, ICE transported people by bus from different jails to a local commercial airport or Alexandria International Airport, a converted military base that has emerged as what human rights groups called a 'national nerve center' for ICE Air, the group of charter airlines contracted with the agency to operate deportation flights. 'Alexandria allows the concentrated detention and staging of hundreds of people at a time, optimizing efficiency of ICE's deportation machine,' according to a 2024 report from a coalition of human rights groups. In August 2017, the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties found that the Alexandria facility 'is not properly screening for and identifying detainees at risk for suicide' and 'does not provide mental health treatment and programming,' the report found. That civil rights office was among bureaus within Homeland Security that have been abruptly shuttered under Trump's second administration. Alexandria is a two-hour drive from Baton Rouge and more than three hours away from New Orleans, where most of the state's immigration attorneys live and practice. That distance has made access to legal counsel for the nearly 8,000 people in Louisiana's detention facilities enormously difficult. There is little if any access to the internet or law libraries and few chances to privately speak with family or attorneys. To visit detainees at another facility, the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, roughly 200 miles from New Orleans, Tulane University law professor Mary Yanik and students with the Immigrants' Rights Law Clinic said they leave by 5:30 a.m. and return as late as 10 p.m., in order to speak with as many people as possible. 'That is a grueling schedule, if you think about the number of hours for a single visit with a client for a single court hearing,' she told The Independent earlier this year. 'They feel forgotten. They feel like they're screaming into a void.' The most common question among them is 'why am I here?' 'They're so disoriented by what was happening to them, and so confused. At least one person thought they were in Texas,' she said. ''What is going on? Can't I just go home?''
BreakingNews.ie
37 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
'It is a terrible deal': UCD economist says EU was 'robbed' in US negotiations
The EU-US deal confirmed earlier this week was "terrible" and the trading bloc was "robbed" during negotiations, according to a professor of economics at University College Dublin (UCD). On Sunday, t he United States and the European Union agreed to a trade deal setting a 15 per cent tariff on most goods, staving off higher import taxes on both sides that might have sent shockwaves through economies around the world. Advertisement While the overall reaction to the deal has been positive — with the Taoiseach saying it " avoided a damaging trade war " — others have been more critical of the agreement. Speaking to UCD professor of economics, Ronald Davies said the EU gave in too easy to Donald Trump. "Essentially, Trump said: 'Give me your wallet and your car'. We gave him the car. 'So, yeah, we got to keep the wallet, but we still got robbed." Advertisement Prof Davies said people can paint it as it could have been worse, "but this was in no way a deal: we got mugged." He claims Ursula von der Leyen should have initiated a trade war with Trump as "he is somebody that only respects force, to the extent he respects anything." "People can have differing opinions on what the better approach is. I think Europe needs to cut the US out entirely," he said. Prof Davis thinks the EU should reorganise their supply chains and bypass the US entirely. Advertisement "What I'm saying is, if progress is going to be made on a global scale, it is got to be Europe, working with China or working with Latin America." While that may seem extreme, I asked him whether he thinks it is worth renegotiating with a possibly less unpredictable Democrat administration in four years. His outlook was quite bleak: "The reason why it does not matter is that the US is fundamentally broken. "You can tell by the accent where I grew up, right? I've been in Ireland for nearly 20 years now. I think it's just going to be this pendulum swinging back and forth. Advertisement "In terms of its own domestic, internal policies, the US will make no progress. Every incoming administration is just going to try to undo what the last one did, and whatever they achieve is going to be undone by the next." In terms of how the deal will impact the European single market, being part of a globalised world complicates things. "This deal is going to have an impact on European consumers," he said, noting half of what the US imports are intermediate inputs from other countries, including Europe. "60 per cent of what Europe imports are intermediate inputs, including what we get from the US. The idea that we are not adding the tariff and therefore not going to have higher prices, while being part of global supply chains, does not work." Advertisement In 2024, Irish exports to the United States totalled $78.61 billion (€67.45 billion), with pharmaceutical products accounting for $33 billion or 42 per cent of all exports. How the deal will impact Irish businesses overall depends on the sector in question. Elastic products Photo:"So, the question is, okay, if prices go up by 15 per cent, how much are (US) consumers going to buy for something like alcohol? He described it as an elastic product, so if Irish whiskey is more expensive, consumers might switch to scotch or Kentucky bourbon because there is only a 10 per cent tariff on it. 'That is something where people actually have the ability to move to a different product easily or cut back. 'Something like dairy or butter, that is also one that I think is probably fairly elastic too." He has concerns about the Irish agri-food sector and how there could be a drop in demand for Irish produce as a result. Meanwhile, for pharmaceuticals, it is a different story. "If you cannot get your usual drug. What's the next best option? A lot of the time, there is not one. "Ireland is the leading producer of Viagra, you know, if you cannot get your magic blue pill, what's the next best option?" The long-term outlook makes for grim reading, with tariffs likely to add to the already skyrocketing cost of living. "This is not going to be good. We will sort of bump along for a while until things even out. But, you know, it is a trade war and make no mistake, we are in a trade war. 'We just kind of surrendered. There is also the Russian-Ukraine war, there is an impending AI war. It is going to be a turbulent decade," he said. Ultimately, the deal for the EU is about bringing some semblance of certainty to things, even if that means taking a substantial hit in the short term. "They are saying, 'Okay, this is a crap deal, but it's 15 per cent; we know what's going on. Now let's get on with things'." World US-EU deal sets 15% tariff on most goods and avert... Read More In terms of how quickly we can expect to see the impact of the deal on prices, there will be some lag. "It will take a while. Even in the US, where they have had the tariffs, at some level, they have not seen prices go up as fast as one might expect. "That is because there is a lot of drawing down of stockpiles in place before tariffs kicked in. Come autumn, those stockpiles are going to be largely evaporated. That is when the US will start to see prices rise," he said. For Europe, Davis reckons it will be hard to pinpoint when exactly we could see the impact, but as winter comes along and rising energy costs ensue, we will likely see the real impact of this deal.
