Beauty Queen Alleges Epstein Used Trump Pageants to Recruit Women

Source: Daily Beast

Published Jul. 1 2026 12:58PM EDT


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.”

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/beauty-queen-alleges-epstein-used-trump-pageants-to-recruit-women/