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JAMES PATTERSON

“Whether they love me or not, everyone agrees the greatest and most important place in Palm Beach is Mar-a-Lago,” Trump told the Washington Post after winning his battle. “I took this ultimate place and made it incredible and opened it, essentially, to the people of Palm Beach. The fact that I owned it made it a lot easier to get along with the Palm Beach establishment.”

The Breakers hotel, Trump explained, “gets the [island’s] leftovers.”

It cost $100,000 to join the club. Members paid $14,000 yearly in dues. And although Epstein had never properly joined the club, Trump’s friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell gave Epstein unlimited use of the facilities.

This arrangement ended when a member’s young daughter complained to her wealthy father: while relaxing at Mar-a-Lago, she’d been approached and invited out to Epstein’s house.

The girl said that she had gone and that Epstein had tried to get her to undress.

The girl’s father had gone directly to Trump, who—in no uncertain terms—told Epstein that he was barred from Mar-a-Lago.

Because no complaint was filed, the police had taken no action. But years later, a woman named Virginia Roberts would say that, as a young girl, she’d had an identical encounter at Mar-a-Lago.

According to a court document Virginia filed in her civil lawsuit against Epstein, she was a changing-room assistant at Mar-a-Lago, earning about nine dollars an hour, when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her. Maxwell asked Virginia if she was interested in learning to be a massage therapist—which, it turned out, she was. Like the other girl, Virginia told her father,

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