At a Christmas party in 1992, former model Stacey Williams recently said Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump. The late financier had been interested in her, she told The Guardian, and they casually dated for a few months.
“It became very clear then,” Williams told the paper, “that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together.” At the time, Epstein was a New York social fixture but not yet a figure of international notoriety; Trump was a real estate developer and tabloid mainstay. Williams was in her mid-20s.
A few months later, Williams said, she and Epstein were on a walk, and he suggested that they visit Trump Tower. Moments after arriving, she claimed, she experienced what she took to be a “twisted game” between the two men.
According to Williams, Trump began groping her just after greeting her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and butt. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused,” but that she believed she saw Epstein and Trump smiling at each other.
“These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false,” Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign, told The Guardian. “It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”
Williams had previously recounted details of the allegation on social media and during a Zoom call on Monday organized by a group called Survivors for Kamala. After the alleged incident, she said on the call, “Jeffrey and I left and he didn’t look at me or speak to me and I felt this seething rage around me, and when we got down to the sidewalk, he looked at me and just berated me, and said: ‘Why did you let him do that?’”
The allegation comes just weeks before the presidential election, and a few years after Epstein’s death in a federal prison while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Trump was then approaching the end of his presidential term, and the outcry over Epstein’s crimes—as well as those of his associate Ghislaine Maxwell—prompted a fresh round of inquiry into the long-running ties between the two men. In one of his most infamous remarks, Trump told New York in 2002 that he had known Epstein, a “terrific guy,” for 15 years.
“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
The relationship traces back, as with so many of Epstein’s connections, to Maxwell. Her father, the British media mogul Robert Maxwell, hosted Trump on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, when he was attempting to buy the New York Post in 1989 and make the corresponding social inroads. Ghislaine became friendly with Trump’s first wife, Ivana, according to former Epstein business associate Steven Hoffenberg. (Rumors of Trump’s affair with Marla Maples began circulating in 1990, and he and Ivana divorced in 1992.) Maxwell and Epstein began dating in the ‘90s, and Hoffenberg said Trump was especially fond of her.
By 1992, Trump and Epstein were inviting one another to parties in New York and Palm Beach. That year, 28 young women flew to Mar-a-Lago for a calendar-girl contest organized by a Florida businessman named George Houraney. Trump and Epstein were the only two men on the guest list, Houraney said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times.
“Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well,” Houraney recalled himself telling Trump in the interview with the Times. “I can’t have him going after younger girls.” He said Trump brushed him off.
The two men fell out at some point in the aughts, for reasons that remain to some degree unclear. They had a dispute over a Palm Beach mansion in 2004, a few years before Epstein signed a non-prosecution agreement related to soliciting a child for sex. In 2015, Trump called Epstein’s private island an “absolute cesspool” and encouraged reporters to ask Prince Andrew about it.
After Epstein was arrested in 2019, Trump sat in the Oval Office as he told reporters that he “knew him, like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.”
“I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” Trump said. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” He declined to expand on the reason for their relationship ending, saying it didn’t “make any difference.”
Epstein-Trump scrutiny has largely subsided in recent years amid the overall deluge of Trump scandal and following the criminal conviction of Maxwell, Epstein’s best-known associate. But the two men left a long trail behind them and one that, with Williams’s allegation surfacing ahead of a potential second presidential term for Trump, is perhaps still unfolding. “In those days, if you didn’t know Trump and you didn’t know Epstein,” former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who has represented both men, told the Times in 2019, “you were a nobody.”
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