Mary Trump recounted how “alarming” it was to see Jeffrey Epstein in attendance at one of her uncle Donald Trump’s three weddings.
Mary, the daughter of Donald’s older brother Fred Trump Jr., discussed her brush with the late sex offender when she was 28 years old on The Daily Beast Podcast on Sunday.
“I have had the great misfortune of being in the same room with Jeffrey Epstein, which is alarming,” Mary, 60, told The Daily Beast’s Chief Creative and Content Officer Joanna Coles.
The disgraced sex offender was seen in photos published from Trump’s wedding to second wife, Marla Maples, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1993.
The Epstein scandal made a loud return to the spotlight on Wednesday after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails subpoenaed from his estate, focusing on three emails that Epstein wrote about Donald Trump, including one in which Epstein wrote that Donald “knew about the girls.”
Mary said that while she and Epstein were in the same space, she was never formally introduced to the disgraced financier, for which she considers herself fortunate.
“I wouldn’t have been considered worthy of meeting him,” said Mary with a laugh.
“Meaning what?” replied Coles. “Meaning you were too old?”
“Oh jeez, no, although that’s a horrifying thought. I probably would have been at that point,” answered Mary. “No, I wasn’t somebody that Donald never would have gone out of his way to introduce to his close friends and inner circle.”
The conversation moved on to Mary’s childhood around Donald, and Mary, a clinical psychologist, did not have a positive impression of the future president.
“Donald was sexist, for sure,” said Mary. “Everybody in my family, including the women, were misogynists. He and my uncle Robert treated my grandmother in a very infantilizing, disrespectful way. And it was very obvious, that they didn’t respect women and didn’t think women should have any power.”
“A common dinner table conversation would be talking about all of the ugly fat women or talking about the beautiful women and how they were classed by the men in my family,” she added.
Throughout her childhood, Mary says she “believed the myth” started by Frederick Trump Sr. that Donald was successful, though she added, “I never bought into the idea that he was smart because he was so demonstrably not.”
It took until her 16th birthday to get an inkling that Donald wasn’t the man she was told he was for her entire life to that point.
When she was 16, her father threw her a birthday party at a Hyatt hotel owned by Donald. Her uncle appeared at the party, and as Mary puts it, the event went from her birthday party to a party celebrating Donald.
“That was the first inkling that as long as Donald has an audience that’s giving him attention, he doesn’t really care about who is in the audience,” she said. “Because what he was doing was trying, like, going out of his way to impress a bunch of teenagers who couldn’t have cared less about the fact that he was there.”
Mary’s first book about her family was 2020’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. When asked by Coles if Mary still considered Donald “The World’s Most Dangerous Man,” she did not mince words in clarifying her statement.
“I honestly find it unfathomable that anybody would ever be scared of Donald,” she said. “He’s the weakest, most pathetic person I’ve ever known. And, there is nothing about him that’s threatening. So I think it’s important to step back and put that designation in context. He was and remains the world’s most dangerous man because of power that was given to him by other people.”
To Mary, that danger extends to the people around him.
“Whether he thinks he’s going to be going down because of the Epstein issue or because if he starts to think that his health is failing, he will not go alone,” she said. “He will take as many people down with him as he can.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast, “Democrats and the mainstream media knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”
“But Democrats and the media are desperately trying to use this as a hoax and as a distraction to talk about anything other than President Trump’s many wins, including the Democrats getting utterly defeated by President Trump in the shutdown fight,” she continued. “We won’t be distracted, and the entire Administration will continue fulfilling the promises the President was elected on, including cutting the Biden-era price hikes.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung took a shot at the president’s niece: “Mary Trump is a stone-cold loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.”
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