Trump’s Friendship With Jeffrey Epstein: Everything We Know

Sort of? Last week, Pam Bondi, Trump’s new attorney general, said the Justice Department would soon release files related to the Epstein investigation. Bondi — who is facing pressure from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers to make Epstein’s “client list” public — told Fox News on February 21 that she was reviewing the files.

“It’s sitting on my desk right now to review,” Bondi said. “That’s been a directive by President Trump.”

Days later, Bondi teased in another Fox interview that the documents could start be released as soon as Thursday, February 27. She said the documents include, “A lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information.”

But rather than simply making the Epstein files public, on Thursday afternoon Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel released binders of documents to a handful of far-right influencers, including Mike Cernovich, Rogan O’Handley (aka @DC_Draino) and Chaya Raichik (aka @libsoftiktok), according to Politico. They were later seen brandishing the binders:

Then Bondi blamed the FBI for withholding additional Epstein documents. She released a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel in which she criticized the agency, claimed she had been misled, and demanded that all Epstein documents be turned over by Friday at 8 a.m. Patel then blamed FBI agents in New York for failing to hand over the files. However, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown reported:

… a source close to the FBI told the Herald that nothing had been held back — and the dispute was part of a larger plan to clean house in the agency’s New York office, which has long been in Trump’s cross hairs.

The release consisted of “less than 200 pages of previously released flight logs, an evidence log and a heavily redacted list of contacts,” as Julie K. Brown put it. You can read the documents released (or re-released) by Bondi here.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Trump ally who leads the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, isn’t thrilled about how the release was handled:

It’s almost like this isn’t “The Most Transparent Administration in History,” despite what it says on the cover of the “Phase 1” binder.

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 Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago on February 12, 2000.

Photo: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images

In 2002, the mogul told New York, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 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.”

Yes. In recent years a 1993 photo of Trump and his children standing next to Epstein has been circulating online.

Snopes.com confirmed that the image is real with the photographer, Dafydd Jones:

The 1993 photo was captioned: “Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harley Davidson Cafe opening. Manhattan. 1993.”

“I can of course confirm that those people were all at the Harley Davidson Cafe and I did do a picture in black and white on film,” Jones wrote to us via email in early 2024.

This should not be confused with the bogus image that shows Donald kissing a young Ivanka on the head, with Epstein in the foreground. That photo was edited to add Epstein, according to FactCheck.org.

There is no evidence that Trump ever visited Little St. James, Epstein’s residence located in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Epstein allegedly trafficked and sexually abused women and girls there, which is why it was nicknamed “Orgy Island,” “Pedophile Island,” and “Island of Sin.”

Trump has denied that he ever visited Epstein’s island. But he’s been happy to fan similar unfounded conspiracy theories about about his political rivals. When asked in 2019 if he believes the Clintons were involved in Epstein’s death, Trump answered:

I have no idea. I know he was on his plane 27 times, and he said he was on the plane four times. But when they checked the plane logs, Bill Clinton, who was a very good friend of Epstein, he was on the plane about 27 or 28 times, so why did he say four times?

And then the question you have to ask is ‘Did Bill Clinton go to the island?’ because Epstein had an island that was not a good place as I understand it, and I was never there. So you have to ask, ‘Did Bill Clinton go to the island?’ If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.

Like Trump, Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane. But none of the Epstein flight logs list either former president as passengers on Virgin Islands-bound flights. A Clinton spokesman said the former president “has never been to Little St. James” and his office has repeatedly said he “knows nothing” about Epstein’s “terrible crimes.”

Yes. Flight logs show Trump was on Epstein’s plane multiple times, though he has denied it.

Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least seven times between 1993 and 1997, according to flight logs made public during various court proceedings. As the Miami Herald reported in 2021, Trump was accompanied by his then-wife Marla Maples and two of his young children on some of these flights:

The flights were all between Palm Beach and New York City airports, with the June 1994 flight stopping at Ronald Reagan Washington Washington National Airport between Palm Beach and New York.

A woman named Marla, apparently Trump’s then-wife Marla Maples, is listed as joining him on the June 1994 flight, along with a Tiffany, apparently their then-infant daughter, and a nanny. Trump’s son Eric is listed as joining him on an August 1995 flight between Palm Beach and New York.

Nevertheless, in a January 2024 Truth Social post, Trump claimed “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.”

Bizarrely, it seems Trump unwittingly used Epstein’s plane during the 2024 campaign. The Miami Herald reported that the Trump campaign used a blue Gulfstream jet formerly owned by Epstein to travel to several campaign fundraisers after Trump’s private jet experienced mechanical problems on Friday, August 9, 2024.

Epstein’s old plane is now owned by Threshold Aviation Group, an Ontario, California-based company that offers private charter service. The Herald noted that the plane used by the Trump campaign was not the infamous “Lolita Express”; Epstein replaced that plane around 2017 and it “has since been destroyed.”

A Trump campaign official told the New York Times that it has used the private jet vendor for years, and will try to avoid using Epstein’s old plane in the future.

In 2016 a woman who went by the pseudonyms Katie Johnson and Jane Doe in legal filings accused Trump of raping her in 1994, when she was 13, during an orgy held at Epstein’s home in Manhattan. She accused Epstein of raping her as well.

Three suits were filed over the same allegations; the first was dismissed for failure to properly state a claim, and the other two were voluntarily dismissed. The third case was withdrawn just days before the 2016 election, and the accuser canceled a press conference at the last minute. Her attorney, Lisa Bloom, said the woman had received death threats and, “She has decided she is too afraid to show her face … She is in terrible fear.”

The circumstances around the case were bizarre, as Vox summarized at the time:

It was the end of an incredibly strange case that featured an anonymous plaintiff who had refused almost all requests for interviews, two anonymous corroborating witnesses whom no one in the press had spoken to, and a couple of seriously shady characters — with an anti-Trump agenda and a penchant for drama — who had aggressively shopped the story around to media outlets for over a year.

Those shady characters — a former reality-TV producer who calls himself Al Taylor and a Never Trump conservative activist named Steve Baer — had been mostly unsuccessful in getting the media to bite. There are a few very good reasons for that, which the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim succinctly summed up: Taylor and Baer have been really sketchy about the whole thing, and since the accuser is anonymous, journalists can’t do anything to verify her claims. The only journalist who has actually interviewed Johnson, Emily Shugerman at Revelist, came away confused and even doubting whether Johnson really exists.

Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 other women over the years. None of the women were underage, except for several Miss Teen USA contestants who said Trump walked in on them while they were changing. Only one of the president’s accusers, Stacey Williams, said Epstein was involved in Trump’s alleged abuse. In May 2023, a federal jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her when he denied her rape allegation in 2022. He was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in damages and is currently appealing the verdict.

Less than two weeks before the 2024 election, former model Stacey Williams accused Trump of groping her in 1993 as Epstein looked on.

Williams had previously alluded to this on social media, but she publicly described the incident in detail for the first time during a Zoom call on October 21, 2024 organized Survivors4Harris, a group of sexual-abuse survivors supporting Kamala Harris.

Williams said that during a 1993 walk with Epstein, who she was dating, he suggested they stop into Trump Tower to visit Donald. She said on the call:

Moments later, Trump was greeting us. And he pulled me into him, and started groping me. He put his hands all over my breasts, my waist, my butt. And I froze. And I froze because I was so deeply confused about what was happening because the hands were moving all over me yet these two men were like smiling at one another and continuing on in their conversation. 

She said Epstein berated her afterward, and she came to feel that the groping was part of a “twisted game” between the two men. A short time later, Trump sent Williams a postcard from Mar-a-Lago via her agent. The Guardian published a photo of it on October 23.

Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the story, telling The Guardian: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”

Author Michael Wolff made several salacious claims about Epstein and Trump on the October 31, 2024 episode of his podcast Fire and Fury, which he co-hosts with former Condé Nast editor James Truman. On November 2, 2024 The Daily Beast published another Wolff tape in which Epstein claimed, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

On his podcast, Wolff, who wrote four books about the Trump administration, said Epstein had showed him about half a dozen photos of Trump with “topless young women” sitting in his lap, which were taken in the late ‘90s at Epstein’s Palm Beach home. The Daily Beast reported:

Wolff said of the photos, “They were with Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach house sitting around the pool with these young girls, and the young girls are topless.

“And in some of the pictures, they’re sitting in his lap. I mean, and, and then there’s one I especially remember where there’s a stain, a telltale stain and on the front of Trump’s pants, and the girls are pointing at him and laughing.” Trump separated from his second wife Marla Maples in 1997 and began dating his third wife, Melania, in 1998.

Wolff said Epstein kept the photos in his safe, which was seized by the FBI when they raided his homes in July 2019. The author said that during the Trump administration, the convicted sex offender was “utterly preoccupied with Trump, and I think, frankly, afraid of him.”

In the same episode, Wolff claimed that in the ‘90s Trump and Epstein were “very competitive” especially when it came to women, and “shared a girlfriend” at one point, per Newsweek. Wolff also said that at one point they “had a competition about who would be the first one who would sleep with Princess Diana,” though he added, “Now, I don’t think that ever happened.”

Wolff also played a purported recording of Epstein talking with him about Trump’s White House team, which he said was made in a New York restaurant in 2017. Wolff claimed he his recordings of Epstein discussing Trump total around 100 hours.

In the tape published on November 2, which Wolff said was recorded in August 2017, Epstein says Trump is “charming,” but “He’s 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 uses it to do bad things to them.”

Epstein also claims Trump liked to “fuck the wives of his best friends,” and describes his elaborate schemes for seducing his friends’ partners. Wolff says Epstein also bragged about his closeness to Donald and Melania by saying, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” the so-called “Lolita Express.” Flight logs show Trump flew on Epstein’s plane multiple times, though there is obviously no way to verify this specific claim.

Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for Trump’s 2024 election campaign, responded by pointing out that Wolff’s reporting has been questioned in the past. She told the Daily Beast:

Michael Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics. He waited until days before the election to make outlandish false smears all in an effort to engage in blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris. He’s a failed journalist that is resorting to lying for attention.

Trump has claimed that he and Epstein had a “falling out” years before the financier was first arrested in Palm Beach in 2005 after being accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex. (Though dozens of other underage girls accused Epstein of sexual abuse at the time, because of 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 Trump-Epstein friendship, but it’s unclear what exactly came between the two. 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.”

The newly unsealed documents were 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 over privacy concerns when the suit was settled in 2017. But in December 2023, federal judge Loretta Preska ruled that most of the records would be released since most of the names were already public. The first 40 exhibits, totaling 943 pages, were released on January 3, 2024. Another 17 documents were unsealed on January 8. Seven more documents were released on January 9.

On January 3, 2024, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung offered a terse statement on the newly released documents, telling Newsweek that any claims about Trump’s relationship with Epstein had already been “thoroughly debunked.”

In short: not much. His name was mentioned 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 would 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.

One of the 17 exhibits unsealed on January 8 references Trump — but he is only named in emails an Epstein victim sent to a journalist, which she provided no evidence to support and later recanted.

In emails exchanged with then–New York Post journalist Maureen Callahan in October 2016, Sarah Ransome made a number of explosive allegations against famous men, saying her friend had had sex with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson on multiple occasions. Ransome also said she had videos of the encounters but could not share them without her friend’s permission.

All of the famous men named by Ransome denied her claims. A Virgin Group spokesperson said, “We categorically reject all allegations made by Sarah Ransome. In 2019 she admitted to The New Yorker that the ‘tapes’ had been ‘invented.’ Any suggestion that Sir Richard Branson was involved in a ‘sex tape’ is entirely false. The allegations are baseless and unfounded.”

In one of the now-recanted emails, summarized below by attorneys representing Alan Dershowitz, Ransome said her friend was one of “many girls” Trump had had sex with, claimed the friend regularly had sex with Trump at Epstein’s mansion, and shared other NSFW details about Trump’s sexual proclivities:

Ransome’s email that includes the claims about Trump appears later in the document and is partially cut off:

In the document, Dershowitz’s attorneys used the emails to portray Ransome as a liar, noting that she had made many outlandish claims to journalist Maureen Callahan, such as saying she’d reached out to the Russians for help and was “approached, by Special Agents Forces Men sent directly by Hilary [sic] Clinton herself, in order to protect her presidential campaign.” For example:

In her final email to Callahan, Ransome says she wants to “retract everything I have said to you and walk away from this.” Callahan never published a story related to her allegations.

Ransome then told The New Yorker in 2019 that she never had any videos. In her 2021 memoir, Silenced No More, Ransome explained why:

I also told her I had video evidence of public figures participating in Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s pedophile ring. I didn’t. I said I did because I was absolutely terrified that, once I went public with my story, Jeffrey and Ghislaine would find and kill me. I wanted to send them a message via the press: If you wage war on me, I will return fire by releasing my evidence. That would be my leverage, my way of protecting myself.

As ABC News noted, while Ransome was involved in various lawsuits against Epstein, no evidence supporting these claims appears in publicly available court records:

Ransome was deposed in 2017 as a witness in the Giuffre versus Maxwell litigation. No evidence supporting the allegations Ransome shared with the reporter was entered in the record of this case.

The lawsuit Ransome filed in 2017 under the pseudonym “Jane Doe 43” against Epstein, Maxwell and other alleged co-conspirators was settled the following year.

Neither Clinton, nor Trump, nor Branson was accused by Giuffre, or anyone else besides Ransome, of any wrongdoing in the course of Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against Maxwell. 

Ransome gave a victim-impact statement in federal court at Maxwell’s sentencing that did not specifically mention Trump or anyone but Epstein and Maxwell.

Trump’s name appeared four times in a deposition of Giuffre taken on January 16, 2016. She said that while she’d heard Trump had been in Epstein’s home, she never saw him there herself, adding, “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything.”

Trump’s name was also mentioned in passing later in the deposition when he was described as one of Epstein’s famous friends.

Giuffre testified that she had been recruited into Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring by Maxwell, who approached her in 2000 when Giuffre was a 17-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s Florida resort comes up more than a dozen times in the newly released depositions, as Epstein and Maxwell are questioned about how they met Giuffre. But Giuffre has said she had no relationship with Trump beyond his being her employer.

No. On February 29, 2024, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation that paved the way for the release of grand-jury evidence and testimony from a 2006 Florida investigation into Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. The law says grand-jury records, which are usually secret, can be made public under limited circumstances.

The state’s initial investigation into Epstein’s sex ring has long been controversial, as New York’s Matt Stieb explained:

The state’s response to the initial investigation of Epstein’s sex ring in Florida has long been controversial. After police produced substantial evidence that Epstein was procuring and abusing girls, the state attorney’s office for Palm Beach County kicked the responsibility to a grand jury rather than charging Epstein directly. The grand jury ultimately led to one felony count against Epstein for soliciting prostitution — with no mention that the alleged victims were teenagers. Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter published a letter he sent to five alleged victims stating that he did not believe “justice has been sufficiently served.” Reiter then brought the case to the FBI — which ultimately led to federal charges against Epstein and more controversy: Somehow, the financier scored a sweetheart deal signed by federal prosecutor Alex Acosta, which allowed him to leave jail six days a week for 12 hours at a time. (In 2019, Acosta resigned from his position as secretary of Labor after facing criticism for his role in the deal.)

Judge Luis Delgado ordered the records released on July 1, 2024, the day the new law went into effect. The 176-page transcript does not mention Trump or Mar-a-Lago. As the Washington Post reported, the “long sought-after records that show how prosecutors attempted to paint two young women who testified as criminals rather than victims of sexual abuse.”

In a June 2, 2024, Fox & Friends interview, Trump was asked if he would declassify various federal files if reelected. He quickly answered “yes” when asked about documents on 9/11, the JFK assassination, and Epstein — but then backtracked on the sex trafficker.

“I guess I would,” Trump said. “I think [Epstein] less so because you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”

Interviewer Rachel Campos-Duffy tried to get Trump back on topic, but he continued musing about the Epstein files.

“Yeah, I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died,” Trump replied. “It’d be interesting to find out what happened there because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”

In an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman released September 3, 2024 Trump lightly praised Epstein when asked why he had so many powerful associates.

“He was a good salesman; he was, you know, a hailing, hearty type of guy,” Trump said. “He had some nice assets that he’d throw around, like islands.”

Trump did not commit to releasing more files on Epstein and his associates if reelected, but he said he’d “certainly take a look at it.”

“I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it,” Trump added.

On January 23, 2025, Trump signed an executive order calling for the release of the remaining classified documents on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. — but not Epstein.

Days later, several Republican senators told The Bulwark that the think the Epstein files should be released too, even if they name Trump.

“I’d like to see them,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). When I asked Kennedy why he thinks Trump didn’t include Epstein, he said, “I don’t know. If I talk to him, I’ll ask him, but I’d like to see them. I’ll be the first in line.”

“I don’t care if he’s named in them,” Kennedy added of the possibility of a Trump cameo in the files. “The American people are entitled to know the truth. The man’s dead as Jimmy Hoffa—he’s gone—and his sidekick’s in jail. We’re entitled to know what he did, who he did it with, and whether he broke any laws.”

During an August 2023 interview, Tucker Carlson asked Trump if he believed 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 that he thought it was “possible” Epstein had been killed but that “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 that he was among those who believe Epstein “was killed,” and Trump replied that “a case could be made either way.”