Court documents unsealed on Friday shed new light on Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s claim that when she was underage, she was forced to have sex with Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, and “many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” as it states in a formerly sealed 2017 opinion by late U.S. district judge Robert Sweet.
The thousands of pages of documents unsealed in New York today are from Giuffre’s federal defamation case against Epstein’s alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, which was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2017. So far, the documents’ revelations about the current U.S. president are not damning — nor do they “totally exonerate” Trump, as some of his supporters are claiming on Twitter. Here’s the new information we’ve learned about Trump and his ties to Epstein, who is awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
Giuffre Said Trump Did Not Abuse Her or Other Underage Girls, to Her Knowledge
One of the unsealed documents is a deposition of Giuffre in which she says Maxwell directed her to have sex with Britain’s Prince Andrew and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, among other prominent men. (Buckingham Palace has put out a statement denying this. Richardson’s spokesperson also denied this in a statement to CNBC, saying, “These allegations and inferences are completely false.”)
In a partial transcript of her deposition on November 14, 2016, Giuffre is asked to identify errors in statements attributed to her by reporter Sharon Churcher. Giuffre put check marks next to a handful of claims on a list, indicating that she took issue with them. She put a check next to this statement: “Donald Trump was also a good friend of Jeffrey’s. He didn’t partake in any sex with any of us but he flirted with me. He’d laugh and tell Jeffrey, ‘you’ve got the life.’”
Giuffre was asked to explain what was wrong with the statement.
A: “Donald Trump was also a good friend of Jeffrey’s.” That part is true. “He didn’t partake in any” of — “any sex with any of us but he flirted with me.” It’s true that he didn’t partake in any sex with us, but it’s not true that he flirted with me. Donald Trump never flirted with me.
Then the next sentence is, “he’d laugh and tell Jeffrey, ‘you’ve got the life.’” I never said that to her.”
Q: When you say “he didn’t partake in any sex with any of us,” who is “us”?
A: Girls. Just —
Q: How do you know who Donald Trump — Trump had sex with?
A: Oh, I didn’t physically see him have sex with any of the girls, so I can’t say who he had sex with in his whole life or not, but I just know it wasn’t with me when I was with other girls.”
She added that she knew Trump through her work at Mar-a-Lago, and her father would chat with him when they saw each other. But she said she could not recall ever being with Trump and Epstein at the same time, or seeing Trump at any of Epstein’s properties. She only knew about their relationship because “Jeffrey told me that Donald Trump is a good friend of his.”
Giuffre has said that she was recruited by Maxwell when she was working as a towel girl at Mar-a-Lago when she was 16. While much has been written about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and their subsequent falling out, he has faced no new allegations stemming from the latest charges against Epstein. (An anonymous woman claimed in a 2016 lawsuit that Trump and Epstein raped her at the latter’s mansion in 1994, when she was 13, but the suit was dropped shortly before the election and journalists who looked into the claim were confused or skeptical.)
Flight Logs Show Trump Was on the “Lolita Express”
Newly unsealed flight logs show Trump flew on Epstein’s private plane at least once, in 1997. (And we know Epstein flew on Trump’s plane.) According to the Insider, handwritten logs show Trump flew from Palm Beach International Airport to the Newark Liberty International Airport with Maxwell; Epstein; Epstein’s brother, Mark; billionaire couple Glenn and Eva Dubin; and someone identified as “Didler” or “Didier” on January 5, 1997.
This corroborates Mark Epstein’s claim in a 2009 deposition that Trump flew on Epstein’s plane. Mark said Trump was on the plane “numerous times,” but that he was only present for one flight with Trump in the late ’90s.
“They were good friends,” Mark Epstein told the Post recently. “I know [Trump] is trying to distance himself, but they were.”
This post will be updated as more information becomes available.
