General Discussion

In 1991, there were 10 judges in total, eight of them men, including Trump, Casablancas, the celebrity magician David Copperfield, and the president of Elite’s European division, Gérald Marie.

George Houraney, a businessman whose American Dream Calendar Girls beauty contest had been running in Las Vegas casinos since 1978, recalls encountering Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in January 1993. Houraney says that Trump asked him to organise a party that month with some of his pageant’s finalists, promising to invite heads of modelling agencies and prospective sponsors for his competition. “He had me fly in all these girls, and gave me a $30,000 budget for airfares and limos to pick them up at the airport,” he says. “The girls were all decked out, expecting to meet all these VIPs.” But after an hour at the party, Houraney says, there seemed to be only one other guest: Epstein. “I was like, ‘Donald, where are the guys? What’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘Well, this is it.’” Houraney says he realised “this is a Jeff Epstein party, basically”.

While suspicious of Epstein, Houraney was keen to have Trump as a business partner. A month earlier, in December 1992, Trump had met with Houraney and Jill Harth, who ran the pageant together. They were looking for a new sponsor for their contest, which each year saw models aged 16 to 22 compete to appear in wall calendars wearing bikinis and swimsuits while posing with classic cars. At dinner in the Plaza’s Oak Room, Harth, Houraney and Trump discussed moving the American Dream competition from Las Vegas to one of Trump’s casinos. “He wanted to build this into the biggest, the best thing that he could do. He was talking about television and pulling out all the contacts,” Harth later said. Eventually, the pageant was held at Trump Castle in Atlantic City in November 1993, but for one year only.

The partnership soured and ended in two lawsuits, but for Trump it was a prelude to a series of more lucrative ventures in the beauty business. In 1996, he secured what the New York Daily News described as “his most beautiful deal yet”. After months of negotiations, Trump acquired the Miss Universe Organization in a reported $10m deal that handed him control of three large, well-established pageants: Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA. Three years later, he founded Trump Model Management, poaching many staff from Elite.