A former beauty queen who alleges Donald Trump sexually assaulted her has claimed in an interview with PunchUp that vulnerable young women at his 1990s pageants were funneled toward Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network.
Beatrice Keul, 55, a former Miss Switzerland and Miss Europe contestant, has spoken out in an exclusive tell-all with the Daily Beast’s new investigative Substack publication.
Keul claims she watched fellow contestants at the 1993 Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant get picked out, pressured, and moved on to private gatherings with men they barely knew by Epstein and another “predator” working in the modeling industry.
She described the pageant to PunchUp as “a playground.” Of Epstein and the other men involved, she said: “They knew exactly what they wanted. I was fresh meat.”
Keul, who was a 23-year-old banking executive at the time and a former runner-up in the 1992 Miss Switzerland competition, says the contest felt nothing like the pageant world she knew.
Instead of the usual routines and clear rules, she describes a murky environment in which powerful men hovered around contestants, sizing them up in hotel lobbies and private suites.
Epstein, Keul told PunchUp, tried to recruit young women by promising to arrange flights and hotel accommodations for parties at Mar-a-Lago, telling her she had “the caliber for this league.”
There is no evidence that Trump knew Epstein or anyone else was using the pageants to target young women, and he has not been accused of facilitating it. He has consistently denied all sexual assault allegations made by 28 women, several of whom, including Keul, spoke out in a December 2025 New York Times investigation.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told PunchUp that Trump has been “totally exonerated on anything related to Epstein,” adding that by releasing documents and signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, “President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
During the years Donald Trump owned the Miss Universe franchise—which included Miss USA and Miss Teen USA—from 1996 to 2015, multiple former contestants have alleged he walked into backstage dressing rooms while women and teenage girls were changing and in various stages of undress.
In a 2005 interview with Howard Stern, Trump boasted that he could go backstage when “no men are anywhere,” said he was “inspecting” contestants who were “standing there with no clothes,” and remarked that he “sort of get[s] away with things like that.”
Trump and his campaign have rejected these accounts, with a spokeswoman saying the accusations have “no merit” and are politically motivated.
The Daily Beast has contacted Donald Trump’s representatives for comment.
Subscribe to PunchUp for the third and final part of Tom Latchem’s exclusive interview with Keul, in which she identifies another figure very close to Trump who she believes helped enable the Epstein sex trafficking network. And to start reading more scoops, claim a two-week free trial.
