Donald Trump might have thrown himself into hot water by admitting that he knew Virginia Giuffre.
Speaking with reporters on Air Force One Tuesday, Trump said that he had confronted Jeffrey Epstein in the early 2000s about abducting underage girls who were on his payroll at Mar-a-Lago, including one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers.
Trump: People were taken out of the spa, hired by Epstein… I told him we don’t want you taking our people, whether it’s spa or not spa. He did it again, I said out of here.
Reporter: Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?
Trump: I think so. He stole her. pic.twitter.com/70gE7V2fbP
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 29, 2025
The anecdote partially corroborated Giuffre’s account of being abducted in 2000 by Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago, where she worked at the time as a pool attendant. But admitting to knowing the characters of the chilling story could backfire on Trump in a court of law, according to New York University law professor Ryan Goodman.
“It’s that much of a significant statement,” Goodman told CNN host Erin Burnett Tuesday night. “If he had said he was aware of it from the court documents, then he’s OK in that regard. But I think that’s a very potentially bad situation for him to be in.”
Rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by Trump’s base, the administration has decided to go in a different direction and accrue a new list of Epstein’s clients from Maxwell. Maxwell, in turn, has directly appealed to the president and the Supreme Court in pursuit of a pardon.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department notified Trump in May that his name appeared several times throughout the “truckload” of documents that are the Epstein files.
Trump has previously claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was indicted in 2006 for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But if Trump is taken at his new word, then that means that Trump continued to maintain ties with the pedophilic sex trafficker years after he was aware of Epstein’s criminal activities. Several reporters at The Miami Herald found that Epstein was still on Mar-a-Lago’s membership logs until October 2007, when his account was labeled “closed,” as chronicled in their 2020 book The Grifters Club.
Earlier this month, the former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Jack O’Donnell, revealed that he had caught Trump and Epstein in the late 1980s shepherding underage girls into the establishment.
“They were pretty good buddies,” O’Donnell told CNN, recalling that he warned Trump against spending more time with Epstein.