A lot has emerged this week about U.S. President Donald Trump’s relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. U.S. Congressional Democrats initially released three emails where Epstein mentioned Trump. Republicans followed that up by releasing more than 20,000 pages of documents, all from Epstein’s estate.
Epstein served about a year in jail after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18. He killed himself in jail in 2019, a month after his arrest on sex trafficking charges.
Trump says he broke off ties with Epstein sometime around 2004, following a dispute over a piece of property. Some of the emails suggest the two did have further contact after that, but it’s not clear. Questions over what Trump knew and when he knew it have persisted.
None of the released emails were written by Trump himself, and many of the statements and comments in them are open to interpretation. Trump has repeatedly refused to fully explain his involvement with Epstein, calling the story a “hoax” orchestrated by Democrats.
Here’s some of what was discovered in that trove of documents, and how that compares to what we already know.
Epstein and Wolff
Journalists sometimes contacted Epstein, including Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump. In a 2019 email to Wolff, Epstein mentioned that one of his best-known accusers, Virginia Giuffre, had worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.
Giuffre had said that Epstein’s longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her from Mar-a-Lago to give sexualized massages to Epstein.
Trump said this summer that he banned Epstein from his club in 2007 because Maxwell was “taking people who worked for me.” But it’s not clear from that statement whether Trump knew what the women were being recruited for, or if he was merely angry that he was losing staff from his operation.
“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein said in an email to Wolff. Again, it’s not clear from this what exactly Trump knew about the “girls.”
WATCH | White House aggressively defends Trump after documents release:
Trump ‘knew about the girls,’ Epstein wrote in newly released email
The White House aggressively defended U.S. President Donald Trump after 23,000 pages of documents from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate were handed over to Congress, including an email that said Trump ‘knew about the girls.’
Giuffre
If Trump were to be implicated in wrongdoing, many believed Giuffre would be the one to do it. The most prominent Epstein victim, she died by suicide earlier this year. But in numerous statements during her life, she said she never saw Trump do anything wrong.
In a court deposition, she said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s misconduct with underage girls. And in her recently released memoir, she described meeting Trump only once, when she worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, and did not accuse him of wrongdoing.
Giuffre wrote that she was introduced to Trump by her father, who also worked at the club. She described Trump as friendly and said he offered to help her get babysitting jobs with parents at the club.
Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier,” Giuffre wrote.
Giuffre refrains from naming many of the people she says were in Epstein’s circle, either because she didn’t know who they were or because she feared retribution.
A glaring exception is the former Prince Andrew (now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). She said he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was a teenager. They were also seen in a photo together that was allegedly taken by Epstein.
In Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, published in October, she includes a photo of her, Ghislaine Maxwell and then-Prince Andrew. She says the photo was taken by Jeffrey Epstein in 2001. (Niklas Halle’n/AFP/Getty Images)
In one of the emails released this week, Epstein appears to confirm the photo’s authenticity. He calls Giuffre a liar but also says, “yes she had her picture taken with Andrew.”
Mountbatten-Windsor has long said the photo may be a fake, claiming he doesn’t remember it being taken. He denies having sex with Giuffre, and even claims he never met her. Despite this, he settled a lawsuit she filed against him, reportedly paying her millions of pounds.
Maxwell
Ghislaine Maxwell was Epstein’s partner and is currently serving a 20-year sentence in the U.S. for sex trafficking, specifically for recruiting girls and young women on behalf of Epstein.
When Maxwell was interviewed in prison by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July this year, she said she never saw Trump engage in wrongdoing.
“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to a transcript of the interview. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell also commented on Trump’s relationship with Epstein. “I don’t think they were close friends, or I certainly never witnessed the President in any of — I don’t recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance.”
But the documents released this week call that into question. In April 2011, Epstein sent an email to Maxwell (the spelling and grammar are as Epstein wrote it): “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. Virginia spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”
Maxwell’s response to that email — “I have been thinking about that” — seems to acknowledge that she knew Trump had been in Epstein’s house.
It’s been pointed out that Maxwell has reasons to lie, or at least to say what she thinks the Trump administration wants to hear. After she was interviewed by Blanche, Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison, an unusual move for a sex trafficker. Also, around that time Trump refused to rule out pardoning her for her crimes.
