President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were seen bringing underage girls onto a Trump Hotel casino floor in the early 1990s, one former Trump Hotel president said in a story published Tuesday in Slate.
“Early one Sunday when I was the president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Donald Trump and his friend Jeffrey Epstein arrived to the casino unannounced,” wrote Jack O’Donnell. “But there was a problem: they had brought guests too young to be there.”
O’Donnell’s story is not new, and was recounted in his 1991 book “Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump – His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall.”
Only now, however, has interest in his encounter drawn significant attention amid the growing scrutiny on Trump for his past ties with Epstein, who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and was alleged to have maintained a “client list” of powerful figures for blackmail purposes.
O’Donnell wrote that Trump and Epstein had brought three young girls with them to the casino floor, and that the following Monday, the independent chief gaming inspector had informed him that “Trump had brought an underaged woman onto the casino floor.”
While Trump and Epstein’s alleged female guests did not have their age verified, the gaming inspector, according to O’Donnell, recognized one of them as 19-year-old Gabriela Sabatini, a top tennis player, and that the other girls “appeared significantly younger.” O’Donnell said that the inspector told him he would “overlook” Trump’s infraction should he be given a warning, which O’Donnell ultimately followed up on.
Trump’s response, O’Donnell wrote, was one of concern.
“Oh s—,” Trump said, according to O’Donnell. “I never even thought about it. I did not realize. I never would have done that. Am I in trouble?”
After being told he would be “getting a break this time,” Trump went on to make “extended crude comments about the body of Sabatini,” O’Donnell said, before moving to Epstein, where Trump reportedly said “Jeffrey likes them young – too young for me.”
Trump’s alleged comments referencing Epstein’s preference for “young” girls would not be his first, with the president telling New York Magazine in 2002 that Epstein preferred women “on the younger side.”
“Trump, who is reportedly mentioned several times in the Epstein files, may not have fully known about Epstein’s activities, though each day a new report seems to shed deeper and more damning light on the relationship,” O’Donnell wrote. “But I can again tell you what I saw: a man utterly unbothered by his friend’s behavior, even when it raised legal eyebrows on the floor of his own casino.”