Portrait of financier Jeffrey Epstein (left) and real estate developer Donald Trump as they pose together at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, 1997.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has taken to boasting that he severed ties with Jeffrey Epstein after learning that the child sex trafficker had “stolen” staff from his country club — but has failed to mention that it took him seven years to do so.

“He did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump told reporters in Scotland on July 28. “He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata.”

“I said, ‘If he’s taking anybody from Mar-a-Lago, he’s hiring or whatever he’s doing, I didn’t like it.’ And we threw him out. We said we don’t want him, you know, at the place,” Trump said at the White House three days later.

But while Trump implies that his response was rapid if not immediate, previous reporting lays out a timeline that says otherwise.

A 2021 book by journalists then with the Miami Herald, who were shown logs of Mar-a-Lago membership rolls, found that Epstein remained a member there until October 2007 – a full year after Epstein was indicted on a state prostitution charge and just after he had agreed to plead guilty in return for a shorter prison sentence and avoiding more severe federal charges entirely.

“Most closed accounts are labeled ‘Resigned’ and then the date that the membership ended. Epstein’s account says, ‘Account closed 10/07,’” co-author Nicholas Nehamas, now with the New York Times, told the Herald in 2021.

An October 15, 2007,

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