Washington DC [US], July 30 : US President Donald Trump has said that he ended his relationship with disgraced financier and convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein because he "stole" young female workers from Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, Al Jazeera reported.
Speaking to reporters on his way home from a trip to Scotland on Tuesday (local time), Trump alleged that one such worker was the late Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's highest-profile accusers.
"People were taken out of the [Mar-a-Lago] spa, hired by him. In other words, gone," Trump said. "When I heard about it, I told him, I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people.' And then, not too long after that, he did it again. And I said, 'Out of here,'" Al Jazeera quoted.
The US president, who had a close relationship with Epstein for years, has become increasingly defensive as he faces growing scrutiny over his administration's refusal to release government records with information about Epstein's abuses.
Officials including Attorney General Pam Bondi have said that releasing further documents would risk disseminating victim information and child pornography collected as evidence.
But Bondi's comments have helped fuel the controversy. In a February interview with Fox News, Bondi said that Epstein's supposed client list was "sitting on my desk right now," as per Al Jazeera.
And the White House last week had said Trump barred Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club "for being a creep," as per CNN (Trump on Tuesday said the two reasons were "sort of a little bit of the same thing.")
But back in 2019, reporting traced their fallout to another factor entirely: the two powerful real estate men competing for the same Palm Beach property, as per CNN.
It's clear that this is something of a sensitive subject. After Epstein's arrest in 2019, Trump declined to go into detail about their falling out, telling reporters, "The reason doesn't make any difference, frankly," CNN reported.
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