The NYT has now provided backstory to a part of the Epstein birthday book even more obscene than Trump’s own letter: the picture, submitted by Joel Pashcow, of Epstein holding a check doctored after the fact to look like it was signed by Trump.
The photo is captioned,
Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! sells “fully depreciated” [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500. Showed early “people skills” too. Even though I handled the deal, I didn’t get any of the money or the girl!
The photo is actually the third page of Pashcow’s submission. After a page full of images of girls in suggestive positions, Pashcow included a clear allusion to Epstein’s predation, a progression from offering balloons to prepubescent girls in 1983 to him receiving massages from topless young women in 2003, the year of the birthday book. (It’s unclear whether the 2003 image is meant to be Mar-a-Lago or Epstein’s private island.)
The NYT offers this explanation for the photo:
It shows a photograph of Mr. Pashcow at the resort with Mr. Epstein, another man and a woman whose face is redacted. Mr. Pashcow is holding an oversize check that appears to have been doctored, with a seemingly phony “DJ TRUMP” signature.
A handwritten note under the photo, which was taken in the 1990s, joked that Mr. Epstein showed “early talents with money + women,” and had sold a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump for $22,500.
The woman, whose name is also redacted in the files released by the House Oversight Committee, was a European socialite then in her 20s, according to two people familiar with the original photo. She had briefly dated both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump around that time, according to court transcripts and a person close to Mr. Epstein. The birthday book entry appears to be a reference to the competition between the two men for the woman’s affections.
The nature of the woman’s relationship with Mr. Epstein is murky. The New York Times is not naming her because she may have been one of his victims.
A lawyer for the woman said she knew Mr. Epstein in “a professional capacity” when she was a student but severed ties with him in 1997. She did not know anything about the letter or its “derogatory content,” the lawyer added.
Between the comment from the woman’s lawyer — who said she severed ties with Epstein in 1997 — and NYT’s photo analysis, they date the photo to a narrow period of time in 1996 to 1997.
A visual analysis by The Times found that the photo was taken at Mar-a-Lago after the resort opened as a club in 1996 and was landscaped with palm trees and other features. In the background of the photo, a thatched hut is visible in front of a line of palm trees. The area is bordered by a white picket fence and what appears to be the white band of a tennis net is visible in front of the hut. The features match what was captured at the club by the renowned tennis photographer Art Seitz in February 1997.
That’s the news report.
The trick is that many of these submissions are full of inside jokes, peddling the kind of masculine bravado often divorced from facts. Why did Pashcow show a progression from 1983 to 2003 in the earlier drawing depicting grooming, for example, when the earlier date shown, 1983, postdated his time — from 1974 to 1976 — at Dalton School, the most obvious explanation for depicting Epstein with younger girls?
More interestingly, why did Pashcow include a seven year-old picture from Mar-a-Lago in a 2003 birthday book? Perhaps that was just the most expressive picture Pashcow had in his possession with Epstein. Or perhaps he was trying to make a more subtle double entendre, one that like everything else could just be masculine bravado.
Per the NYT, the woman “was a European socialite then in her 20s” when the picture was taken in 1996 or 1997. Per her lawyer, the association with Epstein was professional, not romantic. But there is a reference in testimony from Epstein’s assistant at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial to Epstein sending a woman flowers — a woman known to have been on at least one date with Trump. According to Epstein’s assistant, she “felt like they” — Epstein and this particular woman mentioned at trial, who may or may not be the woman in the photo — “were a couple.” (The testimony was presented to show that by the time of the trafficking for which Maxwell was tried, Maxwell and Epstein were no longer themselves a couple.)
The reason Trump is believed to have dated this woman at least once is because she reportedly was the woman whom Trump was with on the night in 1998 — per the official story — that Trump first met Melania. Melania’s book described,
I noticed a man and an attractive blonde approaching us.
[snip]
He was accompanied by a beautiful date, so I initially dismissed our conversation as mere pleasantries exchanged at an industry event.
The picture was taken in 1996 or 1997. At the time Pashcow included this photo in Epstein’s book, Melania had moved in with Trump, but he had not yet proposed.
Since DOJ assigned 1,000 FBI agents in March to review all the Epstein files, since July 7, when DOJ announced it would not release any more files, Melania has aggressively tried to tamp down Michael Wolff’s claims that Epstein had a larger role in her introduction to Trump than the official story claims. She posted the excerpt of their meeting on July 18. She got Daily Beast to issue a retraction on July 31. She got James Carville to issue a retraction about a week later. She attempted — but thus far has failed — to get Hunter Biden to retract a reference to Michael Wolff’s public claims another week later.
A week after that, she got Harper Collins to remove a reference to a Michael Wolff claim in digital copies of a new book on Prince Andrew.
In recent days, such claims have all been sourced to Wolff, but as Hunter said to Channel 5, in an article responding to Epstein’s arrest in 2019 the NYT sourced the very same claim to Epstein himself.
But while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting. Mrs. Trump has said that her future husband simply asked for her phone number at a party at the Kit Kat Club during Fashion Week in 1998.
Whatever the truth of the story, Epstein certainly boasted when he was alive there was more to it.
Which is the kind of thing that depraved men might make jokes about when they believed no one was watching.