Mar-a-Lago

Mar-a-Lago is an estate of about seventeen acres at 1100 South Ocean Boulevard in the town of Palm Beach, Florida, running from the Atlantic to Lake Worth. It was built in the 1920s for the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, deeded by her to the United States in 1972 as a residence for visiting heads of state and executive officials, returned to her foundation by act of Congress in 1980, and bought by Donald Trump in 1985. Trump opened it as a private club in 1995. Virginia Giuffre was a teenage locker-room attendant at its spa in 2000 when, by her account, Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her for Jeffrey Epstein; Trump said in 2025 that Epstein had "stole" her and other spa workers. In August 2022 the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the estate for classified documents under a warrant signed by Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who in 2011 had sought to intervene against Epstein's victims in their suit over his non-prosecution agreement.¹²³⁴⁵

The Post Estate

The house is an adaptation of the Hispano-Moresque style, crescent-shaped around a patio facing Lake Worth, with a seventy-five-foot tower. Its exterior walls were built of Doria stone brought in three boatloads from Genoa, its roof tiles came from old Cuban houses, and its sculpted ornament was designed by Joseph Urban. A tunnel under South Ocean Boulevard leads to the beach, where the private cabana and pool adjoin the Bath and Tennis Club. The boulevard in front was depressed so that passing traffic would not obscure the view. The National Park Service's landmark nomination described the estate as "representative of the affluent society's way of life in the 1920's," exemplifying "the baronial way of life adopted by the affluent society of the 1920's during the land boom that opened Florida to winter resort development."¹

The Secretary of the Interior designated the Mar-A-Lago National Historic Site on January 16, 1969. An act of October 21, 1972 authorized the Secretary to accept and administer it "as a temporary residence for visiting foreign dignitaries or heads of state or members of the executive branch of the United States Government," and Post conveyed the property to the United States by deed of December 18, 1972. Public Law 96-586, of December 23, 1980, repealed the designation, designated the property the Mar-A-Lago National Historic Landmark, and directed the Secretary, consistent with the terms of Post's deed, to transfer it to the Marjorie Merriweather Post Foundation of the District of Columbia within 120 days.³

Trump's Club

Trump bought the 128-room estate and its furnishings in 1985 for 9 million dollars and used it as a private residence until 1995, when he opened it as a club with a 100,000 dollar initiation fee. He had first sought to subdivide the land for mansions; after a year of hearings the Palm Beach Town Council voted the plan down, Trump sued the town for 50 million dollars, and the town approved a club with restrictions on traffic and noise. At the time only one Palm Beach club was open to Jews, and Mar-a-Lago was the first to accept African Americans and openly gay couples; the author Laurence Leamer credited Trump's lawyer Paul Rampell with persuading him of the business value of a wider membership. In December 1996, after the council refused to lift its restrictions, Trump sued again, alleging that the town discriminated against Mar-a-Lago in part because it was open to Jews and African Americans; the town denied the allegation and said it was deciding a zoning matter.⁴

Epstein and Giuffre

Trump and Epstein socialized in Palm Beach and New York from the late 1980s, and archival NBC footage from 1992 shows the two together at Mar-a-Lago watching dancers. In 2002 Trump told New York Magazine he had known Epstein for fifteen years and called him a "terrific guy." Social Security records filed in Giuffre's defamation suit against Maxwell show that she was a locker-room spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2000. In 2009, as "Jane Doe 102," she said that Maxwell recruited her there while she was a minor to be Epstein's masseuse. Maxwell disputed Giuffre's account, and Giuffre sued her for defamation.²⁶⁷

On July 28, 2025, at his course in Turnberry, Scotland, Trump said that he had broken with Epstein because "He stole people that worked for me. I said, 'Don't ever do that again.' He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata." The next day, aboard Air Force One, he said of Giuffre, "I think (Giuffre) worked at the spa. He stole her." The White House communications director, Steven Cheung, had said on July 23 that Trump expelled Epstein for "being a creep," and told PolitiFact that "taking employees is most definitely creepy." Reporters for the Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal, citing a club member, wrote that Trump barred Epstein after he harassed the teenage daughter of a member, around October 2007, when the club's registry listed Epstein's account as "closed"; the lawyer Bradley Edwards said Trump told him that account in 2009. The two men had also bid against each other in 2004 for the Palm Beach mansion Maison de l'Amitie, which Trump bought for 41.35 million dollars.²⁸

On March 4, 2018 Jonathan Farkas wrote to Epstein that he had gone to "the trump mar a lago speech trump gave Saturday," then described an evening at the house of a businessman and closed, "I am going to get to know him better"; Epstein replied, "i like him i know him," without identifying whom he meant. On July 17, 2019, as prosecutors in the Southern District of New York opposed Epstein's bail, the office's press staff circulated a New York magazine story on archival footage of Epstein and Trump at Mar-a-Lago.⁹¹⁰

The 2022 Search

On August 5, 2022 Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida signed a warrant to search "1100 S Ocean Blvd, Palm Beach, FL 33480," described as "a resort, club, and residence" with "approximately 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, on a 17-acre estate," including the "45 Office" and all storage rooms used or available to "FPOTUS and his staff," for documents with classification markings and presidential records created between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021, as evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. sections 793, 2071 and 1519. Agents executed it on August 8, 2022 and listed numbered boxes in their receipts for property. Reinhart ordered the government to respond to motions to unseal from news organizations, including The Palm Beach Post, and the warrant and receipts were unsealed on August 12, 2022.⁵

Reinhart had been a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. On May 3, 2011 he moved to intervene in Doe v. United States, the suit of Epstein's victims under the Crime Victims' Rights Act, to seek sanctions over their allegations that he had violated Florida Bar rules and Justice Department regulations "by representing employees of Jeffrey Epstein ('Epstein') in civil litigation after the undersigned retired from the United States Attorney's Office," and had engaged "while still employed by the Office" in "improper conduct relating to Epstein." He called the allegations false and "irrelevant, slanderous accusations against a non-party."¹¹