The Incident That Prompted Trump to Ban Epstein From Mar-a-Lago’s Spa

Mar-a-Lago sent an 18-year-old spa worker on a house call to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. She complained to her bosses that Epstein pressured her for sex.

Employees at the Mar-a-Lago club warned each other that Epstein sometimes exposed himself during in-home spa appointments.

The house calls went on for years, even as spa employees warned each other about Epstein, who was known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments, according to the former Mar-a-Lago employees.

The spa occasionally provided house calls for members. Epstein wasn’t a dues-paying member of the club, but Trump told staff to treat him like one, the employees said. Epstein had an account at the spa where his companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, booked appointments on his behalf.

They came to a halt in 2003, after an 18-year-old beautician returned to the club from a house call to Epstein and reported to managers that he had pressured her for sex, former employees said.

A manager sent Trump a fax relaying the employee’s allegations and urged him to ban Epstein, some of the former employees said. Trump told the manager it was a good letter and said to kick him out.

The beautician disclosed the house call to the club’s human resources team, one of the former employees said. The incident wasn’t reported to Palm Beach police, according to the former employees and police.

The department didn’t begin investigating Epstein until two years later, when a parent told them Epstein molested a 14-year-old girl from a local high school. Epstein was arrested in 2006 after several underage teens told police he paid them for sex.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the Journal was “writing up fallacies and innuendo in order to smear President Trump.”

“No matter how many times this story is told and retold, the truth remains: President Trump did nothing wrong and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar a Lago for being a creep,” Leavitt said in a text message.

Representatives for the Trump Organization didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The beautician’s allegations, and the Mar-a-Lago spa’s practice of dispatching workers to Epstein’s home, have not been previously reported. Employees sent on house calls, like the 18-year-old beautician, were typically licensed by the state boards of cosmetology or massage therapy.

The allegations came three years after Maxwell recruited another employee, Virginia Giuffre, who said she was 16 years old when she left the spa to work for Epstein. Giuffre died by suicide this year.

The Wall Street Journal identified four other Mar-a-Lago employees who were listed in Epstein’s address book, which was obtained by the FBI in 2009.

By the time Epstein was banned from the spa in 2003, disquiet over his presence at the club had been bubbling for years—including from Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, who in the mid-1990s warned her husband and others there was something “off” about Epstein, according to former employees.

The relationship between Epstein and Trump, spanning from the 1980s to the early 2000s, has been the focus of intense scrutiny this year. The Justice Department, in response to a law passed by Congress in November, has recently begun releasing thousands of documents from its files on Epstein, some of which reference Trump. Being mentioned in the files isn’t an indicator of wrongdoing. Trump has said he cut ties with Epstein years before Epstein’s 2006 arrest.

Trump and Epstein continued to cross paths after the spa banned Epstein and Maxwell in 2003. They were in fierce competition for a Palm Beach property up for grabs in bankruptcy in late 2004, and Epstein’s message book showed two calls from Trump the month of the auction, which Trump won.

In 2008, Epstein reached a controversial deal with federal prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and procuring a minor to engage in prostitution. He was arrested a second time on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019 and died in jail awaiting trial. A medical examiner ruled it suicide.

Trump has given a variety of answers about when and why he cut Epstein off from Mar-a-Lago and then ended their friendship altogether. “I had a falling-out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” Trump said after Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

When asked this summer why he stopped socializing with Epstein, Trump said it was because Epstein had lured away some of his staff. “Because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata.”

Trump, in a social-media post on Christmas Day, said he was the “only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so.”

The White House, meanwhile, has said that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for “being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre.”

Into the early 2000s, Trump continued to associate with Epstein, saying in a New York magazine profile in 2002 that he was “a lot of fun” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” A letter bearing Trump’s signature and a drawing of a naked woman was part of a book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday in January 2003.

Trump sued The Wall Street Journal in July over its article about the letter, calling it “nonexistent” and alleging defamation. Congress has since obtained the letter from Epstein’s estate and publicly released it. The Journal has moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

Maxwell regularly visited the Mar-a-Lago spa, where she booked Epstein’s in-home appointments and charged services for herself to the account in Epstein’s name. The spa made house calls for some members but preferred that they come in for services, former employees said.

Maxwell also used the spa to recruit young spa workers for side jobs, which weren’t authorized by the club. She said they could make some extra cash by giving massages to her friend, former employees said.

Maxwell went to other spas in the Palm Beach area in search of massage therapists for Epstein, according to a 2009 deposition by Epstein’s house manager, who said he drove her as she made her rounds. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 for her role in Epstein’s sex-trafficking and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Representatives for Maxwell declined to comment.

Maples, who married Trump in 1993, widely shared concerns with Mar-a-Lago staff about Epstein soon after the club opened in 1995, according to former employees.

She was vague about her reasons for disliking Epstein. She told employees that something about Epstein was “wrong” and “off,” and that she worried about his influence on Trump. The comments were out of character for Maples, who rarely spoke ill of anyone to staff, the former employees said.

Marla Maples with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 1993.

Maples told Trump that she was uneasy about Epstein’s presence and that she didn’t want to spend time with him—and didn’t want Trump to either, according to former employees and people close to Maples.

But Epstein continued to attend parties and events at Mar-a-Lago.

Representatives for Maples didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Trump and Epstein had known each other since the 1980s and once made a bet over whether Maples was pregnant, according to a story Epstein retold in emails sent in 2015 and 2016 that were recently made public by Congress.

As payment for losing—Maples gave birth to a daughter, Tiffany, in October 1993—Epstein wrote that he sent Trump a truckload of baby food worth $10,000.

Trump’s friendship with Epstein outlived his second marriage. He and Maples announced their separation in 1997 and finalized their divorce in 1999.

By then, Epstein had developed a reputation among spa staff for being inappropriate on house calls, former employees said.

A massage therapist who worked at Mar-a-Lago in the late 1990s and early 2000s recalled asking managers why Epstein couldn’t come to the spa, as they talked about sending someone 2 miles away to his house.

The bosses told her that Epstein preferred spa services in the privacy of his own home, and warned the employee that Epstein sometimes exposed himself during massages.

In 2000, Maxwell offered Giuffre, then an attendant in the spa, work as a massage therapist for Epstein. On her first visit to the mansion, Giuffre said that Maxwell brought her into a room where Maxwell took off the teen’s clothes, including a Mar-a-Lago polo shirt, and Epstein sexually assaulted her, according to her posthumous memoir, published this year.

Over the next two years, Giuffre alleged, Epstein sexually abused her and trafficked her to other powerful men. Giuffre said in a 2016 deposition that she never observed Trump participating in any abuse of women or girls and wrote in her memoir that “Trump couldn’t have been friendlier” when she met him.

Trump was asked by a reporter this year whether Giuffre was one of the employees that Epstein had poached. “I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her,” Trump said in July.

Maxwell continued to scout for women in the spa in the early 2000s, handing out a phone number to young staff, former employees said. She told them to call if they or their friends wanted to make extra money.

Write to Joe Palazzolo at Joe.Palazzolo@wsj.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com and Khadeeja Safdar at khadeeja.safdar@wsj.com