Trump cheered Kraft’s team to Super Bowl victory with founder of spa where he was busted

Source: Miami Herald | March 8, 2019 | Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, and Caitlin Ostroff

Seated at a round table littered with party favors and the paper-cutout footballs that have become tradition at his annual Super Bowl Watch Party, President Donald Trump cheered the New England Patriots and his longtime friend, team owner Robert Kraft, to victory over the Los Angeles Rams on Feb. 3.

Sometime during the party at Trump’s West Palm Beach country club, the president turned in his chair to look over his right shoulder, smiling for a photo with two women at a table behind him.

The woman who snapped the blurry Super Bowl selfie with the president was Li Yang, 45, a self-made entrepreneur from China who started a chain of Asian day spas in South Florida. Over the years, these establishments — many of which operate under the name Tokyo Day Spas — have gained a reputation for offering sexual services.

Nineteen days after Trump and Yang posed together while rooting for the Patriots, authorities would charge Kraft with soliciting prostitution at a spa in Jupiter that Yang had founded more than a decade earlier.

Yang says she had long since sold Orchids of Asia Day Spa, the massage parlor where authorities say they caught Kraft on camera paying for oral sex the morning of the Jan. 20 AFC Championship game — his second visit in 24 hours. (Kraft has denied breaking the law.) Yang, who goes by Cindy, was not charged in the multi-agency anti-human trafficking operation last month that shut down 10 Asian day spas in Florida, none of which are registered to her or her family.

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Yang’s family still owns several South Florida spas. The family’s Tokyo Day Spa branches have attracted the attention of at least two local police agencies over allegations of prostitution, and are discussed online as places where men can pay for sexual extras.

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Before the 2016 general election, Yang offered no evidence of political engagement. She hadn’t voted in 10 years, records showed. But she has now become a fixture at Republican political events up and down the East Coast. Her Facebook is covered in photos of herself standing with President Trump, his two sons, Eric and Donald Jr., Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott, Sarah Palin, the president’s campaign manager and an assortment of other high-level Republican operators she has met at charity events, political fundraisers and galas, many of which require hefty donations to attend. She sometimes carries a rhinestone encrusted MAGA clutch purse.

Yang has shown considerable political largesse. Since 2017, she and her close relatives have contributed more than $42,000 to Trump Victory, a political action committee, and more than $16,000 to the president’s campaign.

In February 2018, Yang was invited by the White House to participate in an event hosted by the Asian American and Pacific Islander Initiative, an advisory commission Trump established by executive order the year before. Later in the year, she attended at least two more AAPI events in Washington D.C., according to her Facebook page.

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Online reviews from prior to 2013 suggest sex was for sale at the Tokyo Day Spa Jupiter location even before it became Orchids of Asia. Although the name and ownership of the location have changed, the decor has not. A photo from a Tokyo Day Spa Yelp review shows the same couch, the same wall hanging and the same faux plant as now.

“Used to be known as Tokyo Day Spa and Massage — most of the same girls still work there,” a Yelp reviewer wrote of Orchids of Asia in 2013.

Over the past decade, Yang and her family members have opened at least six locations across Palm Beach and Broward counties, including a massage school established in 2011 and several nail salons. In at least three cases, online classifieds written in Chinese indicate Yang opened the spas and then flipped them, advertising sale prices ranging from $55,000 to $88,000.

Organized networks of massage parlors offering sex are common, according to Bradley Myles, CEO of Polaris Project, a nonprofit dedicated to ending human trafficking in the sex work industry. The parlors have licenses, allowing them operate the illicit part of their businesses behind a smokescreen of legitimacy.

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