What the Jeffrey Epstein Documents Reveal About Donald Trump
For weeks, speculation has been building about which famous and powerful figures would be tarnished by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal when court documents from a years-old case related to the disgraced financier were made public. And while Epstein’s black book contained a staggering number of A-listers and high-society pals, perhaps the biggest question surrounding the court documents’ unsealing is what they reveal about Donald Trump.
They hype escalated on the afternoon of January 3, when Mark Epstein said that three years before his brother died in jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, he told him he knew secrets that could blow up the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
“Here’s a direct quote: ‘If I said what I know about both candidates, they’d have to cancel the election.’ That’s what Jeffrey told me in 2016,” Mark Epstein told the New York Post.
Wild stuff! But of course, Mark Epstein said he doesn’t know what information his brother was referring to. And while Trump and Bill Clinton (who have both denied any Epstein-related wrongdoing) are both mentioned in the court documents that were made public hours later, there was nothing that could have upended a previous presidential race or Trump’s current reelection bid.
But questions about Trump’s ties to Epstein persist, as the convicted sex offender is now a conspiracy theory fixture, and more court records are set to be released in the coming days and weeks. Here’s a running list of revelations from the newly unsealed documents, and what we’ve already learned about Trump’s friendship with Epstein.
Why are more Epstein documents being released now?
The newly unsealed documents are from Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s settled 2015 defamation lawsuit against Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislane Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison term for trafficking women and girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. Giuffre is one of dozens of women, some as young as 14, whom Epstein allegedly abused.
Some documents were blacked out or sealed when the suit was settled in 2017 over privacy concerns. But in December 2023, federal Judge Loretta Preska ruled that most of the records would be made public, as most of the names were already public. The first 40 exhibits, totaling 943 pages, were released on January 3, 2024. (Read about the other figures listed in the new Epstein documents here.)
What does the January 3 batch say about Trump?
In short: not much. His name is mentioned only four times, in a May 2016 deposition of Johanna Sjoberg, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, who said she was around him from 2001 to 2006.
Sjoberg said that while flying on one of Epstein’s planes, they made an unplanned stop in Atlantic City and went to “one of Trump’s casinos.” She recalled that when she relayed the pilot’s message that they’d need to land in New Jersey, “Jeffrey said, Great, we’ll call up Trump and we’ll go to — I don’t recall the name of the casino, but — we’ll go to the casino.”
Later, Sjoberg said she never gave Trump a massage.
What we know about Trump’s friendship with Epstein.
Trump began palling around with Epstein in the late ’80s but the depth of their friendship is a subject of debate.
Footage unearthed by NBC News in 2019 shows the two men joking around and ogling women during a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 1992.
Trump and Epstein were also photographed together in 1992 and 1997. The now famous image below shows Trump and then-girlfriend Melania Knauss partying with Epstein and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago on February 12, 2000.
In 2002, the mogul told New York, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
When did Trump cut ties with Epstein?
Trump has claimed that he and Epstein had a “falling out” years before the financier was first arrested in Palm Beach in 2005, after he was accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex. (Though dozens of other underage girls accused Epstein of sexual abuse at the time, through a 2008 plea deal he served only 13 months in jail in a work-release program).
There are reports that a battle over a choice Palm Beach property ended the friendship, but it’s unclear what exactly came between the two men. Days after Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Trump downplayed their relationship while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. He said he merely “knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” adding, “I had a falling out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”
What did Trump say about Epstein’s death?
During an August 2023 interview Tucker Carlson asked Trump if he believes that Epstein killed himself in jail. “I don’t know,” said Trump, who seemed more interested in bashing his former attorney general Bill Barr. After more prodding from Carlson, Trump said he thinks it’s “possible” that Epstein was killed, but “I think he probably committed suicide.”
“Life with beautiful homes, beautiful everything, and all of a sudden he’s incarcerated and not doing well,” Trump said. “A lot of people think he was killed. He knew a lot on a lot of people.” Carlson confirmed he’s among those who believe Epstein “was killed,” and Trump replied that “a case could be made either way.”