A 3D-printed replica of Best Friends Forever, a sculpture by art collective Secret Handshake, made a brief appearance on the Downtown Mall March 18. Photo: Tristan Williams
Jeffrey Epstein arrived first.
On a bright morning, with temperatures just above freezing, the notorious late pedophile lay face down on the bricks paving Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, one knee bent to kick a foot jauntily into the air.
A few minutes later, the custom wooden podium that would support Epstein and his companion rolled into place next to the Free Speech Wall. Finally, the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, joined his longtime friend and alleged partner in equally alleged sex crimes.
For a fleeting hour on March 18, until a city employee insisted they take a hike, statues of Trump and Epstein held hands and capered together in front of City Hall. A sign between them, arrows pointing to each, echoed Trump’s 2017 remarks after the Unite the Right riots: “Good people on both sides.”
The statue—a recreation of Best Friends Forever, which art collective Secret Handshake displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., last fall—drew bemusement, bewilderment, and snapshots from onlookers. At least one city employee, beaming with apparent delight, walked quickly out of City Hall to photograph the statue during its brief public appearance.
Some passersby recognized Trump, but not Epstein. One asked in apparent earnest why Trump was holding hands with Epstein, since the latter was a bad guy. Another, fearing the satire would fly over most viewers’ heads, announced his intent to alert the city manager. Others puzzled over the bright orange letter “P” hung around each of the statues’ necks.
Reports indicate that Trump and Epstein were close friends for many years. In 2003, four years before Epstein’s initial sex crimes conviction, Trump contributed a signed birthday letter to a book for Epstein, saying the two had “certain things in common” and alluding to a “wonderful secret” within a crude drawing of a naked woman’s torso. Epstein died in jail in 2019, awaiting trial on federal charges of child sex trafficking. Files recently released by the Department of Justice include FBI interviews from 2019 with a witness deemed credible by the agency who alleged that Trump attempted to force her to commit a sex act on him when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
Members of the group that created and displayed the Trump-Epstein statue on the Downtown Mall agreed to interviews on condition of anonymity. After Secret Handshake released a public 3D scan of Best Friends Forever last September, two area residents began enlisting a team to make their own version.
The original file was too large and detailed for any 3D printer to reproduce. But one team member figured out how to slice the scan into 50 smaller chunks, each sized for a printer’s average output.
“It was a major production,” another team member said. Printing was crowdsourced, but each section required between 10 and 12 hours to print. The printing took place over three and a half months.
Once the pieces were stuck together with epoxy, another team member coated both statues with a thin layer of fiberglass. They then painted layers of brown and green with gold highlights to convincingly mimic bronze.
“Do you know the expression, ‘trompe l’oeil?’” the artist said, referencing the French term for art so realistic that it tricks the eye. “A friend of mine last night texted me, said, ‘Yeah, Trump l’oeil!’”
The team set up the statues without a city permit. “That wall says it’s the Free Speech Wall,” one member said, “and having to get a permit for free speech means it’s not free speech.” They intended to display it for perhaps two hours, but after less than one, Afton Schneider, Charlottesville’s director of communications, emerged from City Hall to announce that the statue needed to go.
“You can’t just drop things on the Mall whenever you want to,” Schneider said at the time. “You have to follow the proper procedures, or else anybody could drop anything out here that they want anytime.” But the process for public art permits seems so obscure—the city’s website appears to have no mention of it—that even Schneider initially, inadvertently got its details wrong.
Anyone seeking to exhibit public art needs to send a detailed request to the city manager, Schneider says. City Council makes the final determination on public art permits on a case-by-case basis.
Evicted, the statue’s creators took their show on the road, wheeling Trump, Epstein, and their roughly 150-pound base halfway down the Mall and back. Rapture owner Mike Rodi confirmed via email that he offered to temporarily display the statue on the restaurant’s patio, but the team declined, taking the statue back the way it came before dismantling it. The creators plan to display it again at the March 28 No Kings 3 protest.
The team behind the statue hope that its presence will inspire other communities to make and display their own. They’re working on uploading the smaller-chunk files they made to thesecrethandshake.com, the same site that hosts the original file, and they’d love to see the orange P’s they added to the original design—yes, for “pedophile”—become protest symbols themselves.
“Satire is—a friend of mine said it’s the weapon of the weak,” says one team member. “What this hopefully does is this gives a voice to the voiceless.”
“I’m not an artist, I’m a scientist,” another says. “I prefer facts to lies. I don’t think of this as a work of art. This is a way of standing up and shouting.”
