Trump and Epstein

Trump and Epstein moved in the same Palm Beach and Manhattan circles from the late 1980s. In 2002 Trump called him a “terrific guy” who liked beautiful women “on the younger side.” A prosecutor’s 2020 email says flight records list Trump on at least eight Epstein flights in the 1990s, and the pilot testified Trump flew with them. Trump is in the address book and the 2003 birthday album, where a letter bearing his name appears; he denies writing it. [1][2][3]

Trump says he ended the friendship in the mid-2000s, and in 2025 said it was because Epstein “stole” young women who worked at Mar-a-Lago, including Virginia Giuffre, who was recruited there in 2000. Accounts of when and why differ. No known record places Trump on the island. [4]

In 2016 a woman using the name Katie Johnson filed suits alleging that Trump and Epstein raped her in 1994 when she was 13. A California case was dismissed on legal grounds and a New York case was withdrawn days before the election, after a planned press conference was cancelled. Trump denied the claims, and they were never tested. In March 2026 the Justice Department released FBI summaries of a different woman’s allegation that Trump and Epstein abused her as a minor in the 1980s; the department called the claims false and they have not been corroborated. [1][2]

Giuffre, the best-known accuser, said repeatedly that she never saw Trump take part in abuse. Epstein’s own claim that Trump “knew about the girls” is the word of a convicted manipulator writing to a journalist. [3][4]

The strongest documented criticism of Trump in this story concerns not 1990s Palm Beach but his administration. His attorney general promised a client list, then said there was none; he called the issue a “hoax” before reversing and signing the transparency law; his former defense lawyer interviewed Maxwell, who then cleared him and was moved to a camp; and his Justice Department conceded in court that it violated the law’s requirements. Supporters say he released more than any president before him. Both are true. Full detail is in The Trump Files. [1][2][3][4][5]