Megyn Reveals She Has Listened to Never-Before-Heard Tapes of Jeffrey Epstein Amid the Latest File Release

We begin today with Jeffrey Epstein – convicted felon, pervert, abuser of women, and, yes, at one point a long time ago, friend of Donald Trump. Epstein also met with Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, reportedly the Dalai Lama, and many, many others who are not guilty of crimes just because they spent time with the criminal Epstein.

Epstein’s back in the news this week, six years after he died in prison awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking minors. In the never-ending quest to finally know everything there is to know about Jeffrey Epstein and his dastardly deeds, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Epstein’s estate for his emails and related documents and – lo and behold – they got them.

Now, every media outlet known to man is reporting on every word he penned related to Donald Trump in a mad search to tie the president to the disgraced financier’s sexual crimes. So far, it hasn’t worked. It is also pathetic and blatant proof these people don’t care at all about trafficking victims. The media cares about one thing and one thing only: Getting Donald Trump. 

Michael Wolff’s Claims

We have been covering the Epstein case for years here at The Megyn Kelly Show – long before it was a Trump witch hunt – and many of the names surfacing in these reports are familiar to us. 

Given that Epstein is back in the news, we thought now would be the time to bring you an update on a story we first told you about nearly two years ago. You may remember way back in January 2024 I told you something that went viral. I said I believed we would be hearing directly from Jeffrey Epstein sometime soon.

I later clarified that I was not implying Epstein was still alive, just that I knew there were tapes of the man and I had reason to believe they would be made public soon. I knew that because I’ve heard some of them. 

You see, author Michael Wolff has tapes of Jeffrey Epstein. Hours and hours and hours of them. Tapes he was shopping around and it was clear to me then and now: It was only a matter of time before they were published.

Eleven months after my prediction that we would hear tapes of Jeffrey Eptstein, we did. Michael Wolff himself played, and allowed to be played, a small portion of one tape.  

Thing is, this was October 31, 2024, six days before the presidential election. News was at a fever pitch, and Wolff’s planned “October surprise” landed with a thud. Even he admitted that. 

That week, Wolff released one short excerpt of the tapes and also gave left-wing media outlet The Daily Beast access to nearly two hours of the footage. He also confirmed publicly that he has up to 100 hours of tape of Jeffrey Epstein. 

Here is a clip here from Wolff’s podcast, Fire and Fury, on October 31, 2024:

WOLFF: I had many secret sources… It was Trump’s old friend Jeffrey Epstein. That Jeffrey Epstein. I think we have a snippet from one of the conversations that I recorded with Epstein, and I think this was in a restaurant in 2017. 

EPSTEIN: His people fight each other. And then have outsiders, he sort of poisons the well outside. He will tell 10 people, ‘[Steve Bannon] is a scumbag, and [Reince Priebus] is not doing a good job, and [Kellyanne Conway] has a big mouth. What do you think?’ ‘Jamie Dimon says that you’re a problem, and I shouldn’t keep you.’ ‘And I spoke to Carl Icahn, and Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson. So, Kelly, even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband, Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard to me.’ And then he tells Bannon, you know, ‘I really want to keep you, but Kellyanne hates you.’

WOLFF: I have more than dozens. I probably have 100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his longstanding, deep relationship with Donald Trump.

An unflattering excerpt about Donald Trump, but not a huge surprise given Wolff is clearly not a fan of Trump about whom he wrote a scathing biography in 2018 called Fire and Fury. While Trump cooperated with the book, he attacked it as soon as it hit, criticizing its author and alleging it was full of lies.

The podcast Wolff released on Halloween 2024 seemed a clear effort to hurt Trump before the vote. The Trump campaign called the move “election interference.” Wolff said on that show that he, Wolff, had become an “outlet” for Epstein “to express his incredulity about someone whose sins he knew so well [meaning Trump], and then this person actually being elected president.” 

Wolff described Epstein as “utterly preoccupied with Trump.” Epstein was, according to the author, “I think, frankly, afraid of him.”

The Daily Beast Reporting

As mentioned, Wolff shared more of his tapes at this same time with The Daily Beast. One hour and 44 minutes, in fact. The Beast reported on November 2, 2024, three days before the election, that it had listened to this tape and provided many details from it, including two excerpts.

Its piece began, “Epstein painted a complicated portrait of Trump. He called him ‘charming’ and ‘always fun,’ capable of extraordinary salesmanship… But he alleged Trump was a serial cheat in his marriages and loved to quote ‘F the wives of his best friends.’”

Epstein, The Beast claimed, could be heard alleging that while Trump had friends, he was, at heart, “a friendless man incapable of kindness.” Asked by Wolff how Epstein knew all of this, Epstein responded, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

Epstein says on the tape, per The Beast, that Trump had an elaborate scheme to procure sex with his friends’ wives and goes into detail about how Mr. Trump allegedly did this – supposedly by getting the husband to agree on the phone to cheat on his wife with a young woman Trump would procure, while the wife was secretly listening. Then, Epstein claims that Trump would say to the wife, ‘See, he’s a bad guy. Why not consider sex with me?’ This is a story Wolff had already told in his 2018 book Fire and Fury and which The Beast effectively verified was sourced to Epstein.

On the tape, Epstein also can be heard attacking Trump’s intelligence and his character. Here is the second excerpt published by the Beast last November:

WOLFF: So, just tell me about his intelligence.

EPSTEIN: [long pause] With respect to real estate deals, he’s brilliant. He’s a salesman, he knows real estate really well. Anything else but that? He knows nothing. No history. No strategy. And then I start to say by executive function… and it’s strange because construction, by definition, is just that. First, you have the foundation, you have the steel going up. What stage? But in terms of his, anything but real estate, he can’t figure out if I fire Bannon what happens in New York.

WOLFF: So cause and effect, that has no relationship in analytic intelligence?

EPSTEIN: No.

WOLFF: Now, what’s this thing about that functionally he can’t read, or he doesn’t read–

EPSTEIN: He doesn’t really. He certainly, he certainly can’t read a balance sheet, which is funny. He has no idea. He doesn’t read the newspapers. But he’s not functionally illiterate. But his reading comprehension is overly complicated.

WOLFF: Now, other than he has a… sense of humor. He can be funny–

EPSTEIN: He’s delightful, Donald.

WOLFF: What else recommends him?

EPSTEIN: His ability to sell. He is charming. He is able to convince people. It’s very much like Clinton. Both Bill and Donald have the ability to go over to a fat, ugly woman, say, ‘You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ So he tells everybody what they want to hear, and that is charming. And I’m telling you that I know four or five people who have recently seen him be a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and then uses it to do bad things. That’s how it goes.

Keep in mind, Epstein is a man who was reportedly thrown out of Mar-a-Lago by Donald Trump after pursuing young women there and whose friendship with Trump was ended… by Trump. Wolff claimed on his Halloween 2024 podcast that Epstein actually blamed Trump for Epstein’s legal troubles.

It started when the two men both attempted to purchase a Florida mansion. Trump had the higher bid and got the property. Here’s how Wolff described it:

WOLFF: So, Epstein was pissed, of course. And he began to threaten lawsuits, and he began to threaten press exposure. I mean, he was really, really, really pissed. When those guys lose a dream house. And that was the point at which Epstein’s own legal problems, the problems with the girls, began. And certainly, in Epstein’s telling, this all happened because it was Trump who first dropped a dime on him… And Trump would have known about the girls because he was in and out of Epstein’s house when Epstein and I were talking about this and Trump was now the president of the United States.

The version of Epstein talking to Michael Wolff appears to be a jilted friend who blames his legal troubles on Trump, and who has watched his hated ex-friend become president.

The 2024 Trump campaign denied all of these allegations, attacking Wolff as “a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics.” When Fire and Fury the book came out six years earlier, the White House called it “trashy tabloid fiction” saying it was filled with “false and misleading accounts.”

The Remaining Tapes

Which brings us to today. Where are the remaining 98 hours of Epstein tapes? Wolff says he has one hundred. One hour and 44 minutes were provided to The Daily Beast. A few minutes was played on Wolff’s podcast and by The Daily Beast. So, what gives?

Well, we at The Megyn Kelly Show can confirm that more tapes do indeed exist. We know because my team and I have heard some of them. The tapes have not been made public because, we have been told, they are part of an unknown, unreleased project. We do not have a copy of them nor do we know the plans for them. But we do recall some of what we heard on them.

We heard a conversation from April 2019, which is five months after Julie K. Brown’s explosive reporting on Epstein and young women in The Miami Herald that led to renewed national scrutiny on Jeffrey Epstein, and it was three months before Epstein was arrested.

On the tape we heard, four power brokers were in a room brainstorming public relation strategies. The goal? To try and rehabilitate Epstein’s image. Along with Epstein, Steve Bannon was there. Wolff was also there, but he was not just a journalistic observer. He was an active participant, providing Epstein with his own PR advice.

This tracks with an extraordinary email exchange released yesterday between Wolff and Epstein from three years earlier. It’s dated December 15 and December 16, 2015. In the exchange, Wolff sounds more like a crisis management PR rep than an independent journalist, which he purports to be. 

On December 15, 2015, Wolff told Epstein, “I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you – either on air or in scrum afterwards.” Epstein responded that same day, “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”

Wolff responded on December 16: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” 

CNN did not ask Trump about Epstein that night.

And in another stunning email, Wolff in October 2016 wrote to Epstein: “There’s an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him. Interested?”

Wolff posted a video on social media yesterday, responding to the disclosures. But he didn’t address any of the ethical issues about his relationship with Epstein. Rather, he went after Trump. Watch:

The Strategy Session

Back to the room with Epstein, Wolff, Bannon, and one other. We can, at this time, exclusively reveal that the fourth party in that room – never before publicly identified – was former Obama White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. Ruemmler is all over the emails just released which show a very friendly relationship with Epstein. She reportedly even showed up to Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking arraignment.

In Wolff’s 2021 book Too Famous, he revealed parts of this conversation, but he does not reveal the attorney’s identity. In the audio we heard, she is referred to as “White House Counsel” and “Kathy.” We reached out to Ruemmler on our reporting that she was in this meeting with Epstein; she declined to comment.

The tenor of the conversation is friendly and upbeat. It sounded like friends having a good time, laughing and joking as they tried to come up with ways to spin a known sex abuser back into the good graces of the public. This was all happening just months before Epstein would wind up dead in a New York City jail.

The discussion in the audio began with a bizarre and flippant conversation about prostitution and whether the average prostitute is underage or not. Reminder: Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to solicitation of an underage prostitute, which, by the way, is not a thing. Minors cannot prostitute themselves. That’s called statutory rape.

Bannon then quickly tried to change the topic, expressing his opinion that the core accusations against Epstein – that he’s a rapist and a pedophile who is trafficking underage girls to his rich friends – are not true.

Bannon said Epstein does not have a legal strategy problem; but that his PR problems are metastasizing. He suggested a year of media training so Epstein could do an interview on a program like 60 Minutes, and both Bannon and Ruemmler expressed regret that Charlie Rose, who was brought down by a sexual harassment scandal in 2017, was no longer available to do an interview on his show.

Wolff brought up Gayle King as a possible interviewer. Bannon noted R. Kelly’s disastrous interview with her went south because, in his view, R. Kelly didn’t prepare. Wolff documented some of this conversation – though, notably, not all – in Too Famous, revealing that Ruemmler (who, again, is not named in the book) chimed in that she did not want Epstein videotaped in preparation for an interview because it could be subject to a subpoena.

Notably excluded from Wolff’s book is Wolff’s own role in this exchange. He was openly advising Epstein in this conversation on how to minimize his alleged crimes. Epstein, meanwhile, didn’t appear to be taking it seriously at all, asking at one point, “Who’s going to play me on Saturday Night Live?”

In Too Famous, Wolff depicted a conversation he said he had with Steve Bannon comparing the media training to professional athletes studying game tape. Ruemmler ultimately relented and allowed Epstein to sit for a practice interview so long as they didn’t talk about his legal issues. 

On the tape we heard but not in Wolff’s book, Epstein bizarrely suggests that he should talk about women and science in the practice interview. An incredulous Ruemmler accused Epstein of having said there has never been a great female scientist and that women become morons as soon as they get their first period. An undeterred Epstein said women are the future of science because they will focus on things that can’t be measured, like love and intuition.

We can also reveal for the first time that before the practice interview, the group also discussed possibly suing The Miami Herald over its award-winning reporting about Epstein, but Ruemmler expressed concern that Epstein’s reputation was already so low that he wouldn’t be able to recover many damages and that he would still have to plead the Fifth Amendment in depositions.

Ruemmler then left the group to take a call on behalf of another client, and Epstein was heard on the tape telling Ruemmler “cute dress.” Bannon joked, “Let me introduce you to Jeffrey Biden” – an obvious reference to Joe Biden’s inappropriate public behavior toward young women. 

In the practice session, Bannon played the role of a 60 Minutes interviewer and Epstein tried to say he doesn’t like to party but admitted to he is a playboy and that he likes women.

No wonder this interview never happened…

On the tape, we heard Epstein say he has a photographic memory with numbers, studied at the Lawrence Livermore National laboratory in high school, and received a perfect score on the math section on his SAT. Despite not having a college degree, he said he got a job as a math teacher at the prestigious private Dalton school in New York City by cold calling and then acing the interview. 

In the practice interview with Bannon, Epstein said he taught 17 and 18 year olds, and that he would pay extra attention to the girls. Epstein’s comments about black students also weren’t exactly media-friendly.

The group then took a break to give Epstein feedback, where Wolff and Bannon complimented him on his charisma and screen presence but made the observation that his commentary needs some work. 

“Seriously,” Bannon said, according to Too Famous, “you’re engaging, you’re not threatening, you’re natural, you’re friendly, you don’t look at all creepy, you’re a sympathetic figure, and this is what seventy-five percent of the battle is, I’m totally impressed. We just have to cut the content down.”

On the audio we heard – but not in the book – Wolff entered the conversation again, reminding Epstein that 60 Minutes is going to shoot two hours of tape and cut it down to about six minutes and saying Epstein was giving them opportunities to capture moments when he sounds terrible. Also not in the book is Bannon reminding Epstein that the interview is quote “not a search for truth.” 

While Epstein was in another room, Wolff expressed on the tape how “fishy” it is that Epstein got a job at Dalton without a college degree. “I’ve been going after this for years,” Wolff was heard saying. “I’m still not buying it,” a laughing Bannon said.

Lingering Questions

And the American people aren’t buying the story around Epstein either. Legitimate questions persist about the extent of Epstein’s crimes and who, if anyone, is being protected. 

President Trump seems uninterested in further Epstein disclosures. Just this week he reportedly met with Rep. Lauren Boebert, one of the Republicans pushing a so-called “discharge” petition that, if signed by 218 House members (which has now happened), will get a vote on the House floor seeking more disclosure from the Department of Justice. The vote will be largely symbolic however, as it would likely be DOA in the Senate and, presumably, on the president’s desk.

Still, what we heard and what Wolff’s earlier reporting reveals is a deep animus by Epstein toward Trump, a bitterness and resentment, at least by the date of those tape excerpts we played – August 2017. 

By 2019, after the media storm hit, Epstein was focused on image rehab. Within months he would be charged with two serious felonies and would die, allegedly by suicide, in a New York prison.

So many questions remain:

• Did the seemingly jocular man we heard on those tapes in 2019 take his own life months later, after his legal troubles mounted?
• Why was a so-called “journalist,” Michael Wolff, advising Epstein like a  hired PR guru, and why wasn’t his full role disclosed in his earlier books?
• Why was our friend Steve Bannon there, and what does he know of the Wolff tapes? More importantly, what about Bannon’s own tapes?

Bannon has publicly revealed that he, at one point, was making a documentary about Epstein. It’s been reported he has 15 hours of his own tapes of Epstein, but they’ve never been released. Bannon once explained he was hoping to show that Epstein’s “perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence.”

The film was never released. We reached out to Steve – who we love! – for comment on our reporting and will let you know if he responds. 

You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,193 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.

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