Poor Donny Jr. can’t escape the reek of Epstein, no matter where he goes. It follows him and his siblings from bedroom to boardroom, from New York to Palm Beach to Indian Creek Island, the Bahamas and beyond. Like a leaky propane tank.
Everyone in Manhattan knows Junior’s daddy was Epstein’s closest buddy in the city for more than a decade. Undeniable.
But eau d’Epstein permeates Florida too, including Junior’s fairytale marriage to “classy” Palm Beach blueblood Bettina Anderson. Junior’s father-in-law, Harry Loy Anderson, was not unlike so many powerful men who did business with Epstein and gave him special treatment.
Anderson, according to communications and other records we have discovered in the DOJ’s Epstein files, was listed as the primary officer on Epstein’s personal accounts in Anderson’s bank. He personally intervened to give Epstein special consideration in the early 2000s, while Epstein was using these accounts to pay for his “massages” and the “young females” who visited him.
As owner and president of Palm Beach National Bank & Trust Co. in the early 2000s, Anderson repeatedly instructed bank employees to bypass normal requirements to issue credit cards or raise credit limits for Epstein, his employees, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s personal assistants in New York. In one instance, Anderson phoned in special instructions regarding the Epstein accounts – from Utah.
When Palm Beach National Bank was sold to a holding company in May 2002, Anderson remained president of the branch. The most damning evidence about the cash withdrawals and payments involving Epstein comes under the name of that holding company, Colonial Bank. Under Anderson’s ownership, not a single Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) was filed with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network regarding Epstein’s activity.
Within six months of Colonial’s purchase, however, their corporate HQ began filing a series of SARs about what it described as a pattern of structured cash withdrawals from Epstein’s accounts at the Palm Beach branch headed by Anderson.
The amounts were not insignificant. In December 2002, JPMorgan filed a SAR, flagged for suspected money laundering, over about $1.9 million in cash withdrawals from an Epstein account that was being funded through his Colonial account in Palm Beach. JPMorgan had filed a SAR about similar activity earlier in 2002, before Anderson sold the bank, concerning suspicious cash withdrawals funded from Epstein’s account at Palm Beach National Bank.
And yet, as late as 2005 – the year police learned Epstein was receiving sexual massages from teens at Royal Palm Beach High School – his employees were still routinely able to withdraw cash in $1,500 increments, often multiple times a week, from the “household” account at Anderson’s bank. Anderson’s daughter Bettina graduated from the elite St. Andrew’s school that same year.
Epstein and the Andersons are also connected through Epstein’s assistant and paralegal Story Cowles, who visited him in prison around 130 times per CNBC (“no one visited Epstein more”). Cowles dated Epstein’s assistant and self-described victim Sarah Kellen and claimed on his resume that, during the same period he was working for Epstein, he was president of a charitable fund founded by Bettina and her brother, Loy Anderson, called The Paradise Fund (The fund itself doesn’t list Cowles as president in its tax filings, but he is listed as a member of the “Host Committee” on an archived website and was photographed with Bettina and her brother at Paradise Fund events; in a 2012 email, after Cowles asks a redacted person if they plan to attend a Paradise Fund event, the person responds: “Are you involved with the charity again?”).
The late Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett, and later the New York Times, reported that Anderson once wrote a letter supporting Epstein’s application for tax breaks in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the letter, he described Epstein as “a gentleman of the highest integrity” who “enjoys an excellent reputation in our community.”
The connection between Harry Loy Anderson, the Anderson family and Epstein is not really shocking. Florida is rife with slimeballs, and banks do business with them. In one 1997 newspaper item, Anderson is even quoted giving a character reference for one Paul Prosperi – a sometime Epstein business associate who was on trial for tax fraud and money laundering – describing him as “a very honest, forthright individual.” The item also says the banker was “taken aback” when prosecutors reminded him that Prosperi had given his daughter a car. (The daughter could not have been Bettina, who was 11 at the time.)
Bettina Anderson is about the same age as the girls Epstein abused in Palm Beach. She is their generational peer – but born on the right side of the tracks. Bettina is the kind of insider who might have been found sitting across from Jeff at a dinner party, not unlike Kathy Ruemmler – except not a buddy, just a social acquaintance – clinking champagne flutes over candlelight. She is definitely not the girl living a mile away across the causeway bridges giving naked happy ending massages to the old man in the creepy house of horrors run by G. Max. Maybe Jeff Bezos can fork over some money to help Bettina, who played lacrosse and attended parties at the Polo Club, produce or even star in a series: a tale of two cities, a Rich Girl Poor Girl about the interconnected flipsides of the Palm Beach in which she grew up.
Her mother, Inger, was a Swedish model. Coincidentally, Epstein had a thing for Swedes. His longest-running girlfriend was Eva Andersson, a Miss Sweden who remained a close confidante until his death, and whose Swedish nannies have talked. More on that here in Jeff and the Blondes.
Of course Bettina – now Bettina Trump – would have a fairytale wedding to her beloved on a private island in the Bahamas. Little Pipe Cay: 38 acres, five plantation estates, infinity pools, tropical sunsets. The set and setting, owned by longtime friends of the Anderson family, was everything a girl could dream of. (It turns out the files also contain evidence that the owners of Little Pipe Cay were also very tight with Epstein.)
Big Daddy Trump, notably, chose to miss number one son’s second wedding. It’s not entirely clear why he felt compelled to give a speech at Rockland Community College in New York while the blessed event was taking place thousands of miles south. Trump watcher Rob Shuter claims the President and Barron boycotted the wedding because Melania refused to go. It is well known that there’s no love lost between the First Lady and Ivanka – who did attend.
The wedding pictures are all high production value, involving drones, HMU, multiple cameras, videos and stills, all edited and released on social media to incite envy in wannabe billionaire wives and longing in online MAGA fans whose own future wedding dresses will come off the rack from TJ Maxx. Maybe a little overpriced – thanks to Dum-ocrats and Biden!
The pictures are mesmerisingly disgusting: a glimpse into a dime-store tropical version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. In the middle of the US-Israel war on Iran, a month after The Boss promised “a whole civilization will die tonight,” there’s Bettina walking on the sand in a sheer dress, Junior in his white linen. The drone shots of the couple entering the little chapel look like a spectacle produced to mimic the JFK Jr.-Carolyn Bessett secret wedding off the coast of Georgia.
But even Bettina’s Palm Beach pedigree can’t quite deliver the thing the Trumps are always trying to buy: class. The Trump family has raked in hundreds of millions from World Liberty Financial crypto, an intake valve open for influence and bribes. Even the crooks are shocked; read the interview with their ex-partner Justin Sun in New York magazine. The Trumps are richer than ever, but will never be more than the degraded version of the Kennedys as America’s “First Family” presiding over the sunset of an empire.
There is no greater evidence of that than Bettina and Junior accepting a six-figure, two-day wedding party from a Putin pal. According to the investigation by Pro Publica:
Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin … footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
Junior has seen his wealth increase by hundreds of millions, not just through WLF but through taxpayer-financed mining deals and Pentagon contracts. Conservative estimates say the Trumps have been enriched by at least $2 billion during the second term alone.
The boys learned from their dad: If the government or taxpayers or fleeced investors or Trump U suckers or one or Putin’s tools will pay up, be my guest.
Responding to the story, Bettina posted more wedding party pictures on Instagram and declared that “our dear friend Umar” did not finance their very private family-only wedding, but only threw them a big two-day party later. Kremlev is a former member of the fascistic Russian Night Wolves biker gang who went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children, according to journalist and author Anne Applebaum, who writes frequently about Russia.
But hey. What are dear friends for?
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
