Trump cheered Kraft’s team to Super Bowl victory with founder of spa where he was busted
BY SARAH BLASKEY,
NICHOLAS NEHAMAS, AND
CAITLIN OSTROFF
MARCH 08, 2019 07:38 AM,
[ President Sleaze: Prostitution was grandpa's business too, the foundation the Trump fortune was built on. ]
Who is Li Yang, the Asian spa founder who joined Trump’s MAGA movement?
Li Yang, 45, posed with Donald Trump during the Super Bowl while rooting for the Patriots. Two weeks later, authorities would charge the team owner, Robert Kraft, with soliciting prostitution at a spa in Jupiter that Yang had founded.
By Marta Oliver Craviotto
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.
The Kraft bust brought global attention to the proliferation of Asian day spas across the country, some of which are thinly disguised houses of prostitution — and experts say could be engaged in human trafficking to fill demand.
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Patriots owner Robert Kraft charged with soliciting prostitution
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution at a spa in Jupiter, Fla.
By Eric Garland
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.
“If you’re just wanting to get a ‘rub and tug,’ this might be one of the best places in West Palm Beach,” one Internet commenter wrote about a Tokyo Day Spas’ parlor. A massage therapist at a different location informed police in late 2016 that some employees at the parlor were selling sex and said management encouraged the behavior.
Cindy Yang poses with President Donald Trump at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago on March 2, 2018. She received a signed photograph. A flyer for the event advertised a “reception, photo and two seats for a dinner with President Trump” for a donation of $50,000.
In a brief phone interview, Yang said she and her family have never broken the law, but did not answer questions about whether she knew of the allegations that therapists in her spas were offering sex. She added that she was out of the business, would soon be moving to Washington, D.C., and didn’t want any negative press.
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.
Future Florida governor Ron DeSantis (center) attended a pro-Israel gala at Mar-a-Lago on Feb. 25, 2018. The event was also attended by Cindy Yang (far left). Tickets cost $1,000 per person, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
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.
The White House, the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
HANGERS-ON As some established political elites have distanced themselves from the president, a new group of people is filling open seats at political events.
Some are businessmen like Kraft who have always been influential because of their wealth but under Trump have gained added political status. (Months before the bust, Trump thankedKraft for his role in a major international success: Clinching the 2026 World Cup for North America.)
Others in the Trump orbit are political novices like Yang, who came to the United States roughly 20 years ago.
In 2007, Yang started what would become a large chain of Tokyo Day Spas.
Cindy Yang and her family members operate the Tokyo Day Spa & Massages parlor, as well as a nail salon, at a strip mall in Palm Beach Gardens. It is part of a chain of spas the family controls.
Sarah Blaskey sblaskey@MiamiHerald.com
The first to open was her flagship, which is still in business and run by her husband, Zubin Gong, in Palm Beach Gardens.
The next was a Tokyo Day Spa in Jupiter that would later become Orchids of Asia after Yang sold it to another businesswoman, Hua Zhang, around 2013. Zhang, who was charged in February with racketeering and running a house of prostitution and has pleaded not guilty, declined to comment when contacted at her Martin County home.
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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