As the scandal over his administration’s botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files exploded in July, Donald Trump claimed he doesn’t understand why anyone is still interested in the late sex offender, as “He was never a big factor in terms of life.” That’s debatable. (“Who among us is?”) But Epstein has definitely become a big factor in terms of problems for his old pal.
For years, Trump stoked conspiracy theories about Epstein and his many powerful friends and associates, but questions about his own relationship with the disgraced financier persisted. We know Trump and Epstein were friends from the late 1980s to the early aughts. The future president was photographed with Epstein many times, flew on his plane, and discussed their relationship in the media. Trump’s name comes up repeatedly in both old court documents and the batches released in 2024, years after Epstein died in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
So is Trump in the federal government’s unreleased Epstein files? And is that “the real reason they have not been made public,” as Elon Musk claimed? On July 23, 2025, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported that, indeed, Trump’s name appears multiple times in the files, and Attorney General Pam Bondi informed Trump in May — weeks before the DOJ and FBI tried to shutdown the Epstein conspiracy theories and said there will be no further disclosures.
Trump has repeatedly denied any Epstein-related wrongdoing, and his name appearing in the unreleased files does not necessarily contradict that. There has never been a smoking gun proving that the president was on Epstein’s so-called “client list.” But Trump has made contradictory claims about exactly how close he was to the disgraced financier. And Trump could be covering up embarrassing information about his old friendship, even if he truly had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. Here’s a guide, which we’ll keep updated, to everything we know about Trump’s relationship with Epstein.
What’s the timeline of Trump and Epstein’s relationship?
Here’s a brief overview of their friendship and falling out, and how Trump’s political career intersected with Epstein’s prosectuion.
1980s to early 2000s: Trump and Epstein are friends. They are spotted partying together on multiple occasions, Trump flies on Epstein’s private jets at least seven times, and his name and number appear in Epstein’s “little black book” (along with several Trump family members and many other famous and powerful figures).
2004: Trump and Epstein have a “falling out,” as the president put it years later. The cause may have been a real estate battle, but Trump has not confirmed this.
2006: After Florida police investigate multiple claims of Epstein sexually abusing underage girls, Epstein is indicted on just a single count of soliciting prostitution. Florida officials are accused of giving Epstein special treatment, and the FBI launches an investigation.
2008: Epstein pleads guilty to two state charges after striking a plea deal with the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, to avoid federal prosecution (Acosta then served as Trump’s Labor secretary in his first term). Epstein is sentenced to 18 months in jail, but serves most of his sentence in a work-release program that lets him leave jail during the day.
July 6, 2019: Epstein is arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in New York. Acosta resigns from the Trump administration days later amid public outcry over his decision not to prosecute Epstein years earlier.
August 10, 2019: Epstein is found dead in his Manhattan jail cell. His death is ruled a suicide.
2024: Thousands of pages of court documents from an Epstein civil suit are unsealed, reviving interest in the case. Trump is mentioned multiple times, but the documents don’t reveal any incriminating information about him. During the 2024 campaign, Trump suggests he’ll declassify the federal government’s Epstein files if reelected.
February 2025: Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly teases the release of more Epstein files, suggesting in a Fox News interview that the “client list” is “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Days later, right-wing influencers are given binders of Epstein materials at the White house, which turn out to be previously released documents.
July 7, 2025: In an unsigned memo, the FBI and DOJ say that following an “exhaustive review” they have determined that there is no “client list,” and nothing in the Epstein files warrants further investigation. The memo presents a previously released jail surveillance video as proof that Epstein killed himself — but it’s missing a minute of footage. The memo says there will be no further Epstein document releases.
When exactly did Trump and Epstein become friends?
Trump began palling around with Epstein in the late ’80s, but we don’t know exactly how or when they met.
In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine, “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.”
Are there photos and a video of Trump with Epstein?
Yes. You can’t always trust what you see on social media as a lot of bogus photos of Trump and Epstein have been circulating in recent years. But there are quite a few verified images of the two men partying in the 1990s and early aughts.
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.
There are also photos that show Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. CNN published the newly discovered images on July 22, 2025, along with new footage of Trump, Epstein, and Melania at a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York.
This 1993 photo of Donald Trump and his children Eric and Ivanka standing next to Epstein, which CNN presented as new, has actually been circulating for years. British photographer Dafydd Jones told Snopes last year, “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.”
The New York Times published this picture of Trump and Epstein with the singer James Brown on July 24, 2025. It’s unclear when or where the photo was taken.
On January 1, 1997, Trump and Epstein were photographed together at Mar-a-Lago.
They also attended a Victoria’s Secret “Angels” party together in New York on April 9, 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.
What did Trump write in Epstein’s birthday card?
On July 17, 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump contributed a message and a bawdy sketch to an album Maxwell put together for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. Trump is listed in the table of contents under “friends” (along with Bill Clinton). The leather-bound album was reportedly among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago.
The letter from Trump “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair,” according to the Journal.
The text inside contains an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein:
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.” He has also threatened to sue the Journal.
The New York Times reported that the birthday letter isn’t the only complimentary note from Trump to Epstein:
“To Jeff — You are the greatest!” reads an inscription in a copy of Mr. Trump’s book “Trump: The Art of the Comeback” that belonged to Mr. Epstein.
The message, reviewed by The Times, is signed “Donald” and dated “Oct ’97,” the month the book came out.
Did Trump go to the island Epstein owned?
There is no evidence that Trump ever visited Little St. James, Epstein’s residence 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 ever visiting Epstein’s island. But he has been happy to fan similar unfounded conspiracy theories about about his political rivals. When asked in 2019 if he believed 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 lists either former president as a passenger 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.”
Did Trump ever fly on Epstein’s plane?
Yes. Flight logs show Trump was on Epstein’s private jet multiple times, though he has denied it.
Trump flew on Epstein’s plane 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 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, Trump unwittingly used Epstein’s plane to fly to several 2024 fundraisers. The Miami Herald reported the campaign rented a jet that was formerly owned by Epstein from a private charter service after Trump’s own private jet experienced mechanical problems on August 9, 2024. (This was not the infamous “Lolita Express,” which Epstein replaced in 2017 and has since been destroyed).
What happened to Trump accuser Katie Johnson?
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 Manhattan home. 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 cases 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. 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. A federal appeals court affirmed the jury verdict in July 2025. Trump now has 90 days to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the verdict.
None of the women who accused Trump of misconduct was 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 sexual misconduct.
Did anyone else accuse Trump of abusing women with Epstein?
Aside from the strange Katie Johnson cases, no one has specifically accused Trump of participating in Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. However, former model Stacey Williams claimed Trump had groped 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 by Survivors4Harris, a group of sexual-abuse survivors supporting presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Williams said that during a 1993 walk with Epstein, whom she was dating, he suggested they stop at 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 the groping had been 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.”
What did Michael Wolff say about tapes and photos of Trump and Epstein?
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 ten 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 it 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 podcast 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 Wolff said was made in a New York restaurant in 2017. He claimed 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.
Leavitt 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.
When did Trump cut ties with Epstein?
Trump has claimed 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. There are reports that a battle over a choice Palm Beach property was what 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.”
What do the 2024 Epstein court documents say about Trump?
In 2017, Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s settled her defamation lawsuit against Ghislane Maxwell. Many documents in the case were initially sealed, but in 2023 federal judge Loretta Preska decided to release most of them. About 1,400 pages of records were released in five batches in January 2024.
Giuffre testified that Maxwell recruited her into Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring in 2000, when Giuffre was a 17-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s Florida resort is mentioned more than a dozen times in the court documents. However, Giuffre (who passed away in 2025) has said she had no relationship with Trump beyond being his employee. In a January 2016 deposition, Guiffre said she had heard about Trump visiting Epstein’s home but never saw him there herself. “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she added.
Another alleged Epstein victim mentioned Trump in passing, but did not accuse him of doing anything inappropriate. In a May 2016 deposition Johanna Sjoberg said that while flying with Epstein on his plane they made an unscheduled stop at a Trump casino in Atlantic City. “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,’” Sjoberg said. When asked if she ever gave Trump a massage Sjoberg said no.
The 2024 release also included emails Epstein victim Sarah Ransome sent to New York Post journalist Maureen Callahan in which she made explosive allegations against Trump and other famous men, including Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. However, Ransome provided no proof and later recanted. No evidence supporting her claims about Trump appears in publicly available court records.
In a now-recanted October 2016 email, Ransome told Callahan that her friend was one of “many girls” Trump had sex with, claimed the friend regularly had sex with Trump at Epstein’s mansion, and shared other NSFW details:
Ransome said she had incriminating videos of Epstein’s associates, and made outlandish claims, like saying she’d reached out to the Russians for help and had been “approached, by Special Agents Forces Men sent directly by Hilary [sic] Clinton herself.”
In her final email to Callahan, Ransome said she wanted to “retract everything I have said to you and walk away from this.” Ransome told The New Yorker in 2019 that she’d never had any videos. In her 2021 memoir, Silenced No More, Ransome said she lied because she was scared that Epstein and Maxwell would kill her:
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.
What did Elon Musk say about Trump and Epstein?
Amid his messy public breakup with the president, the former DOGE chief dropped these tweets:
Musk then replied with a raised-eyebrow emoji to other X users who pointed out some facts about the Trump-Epstein friendship:
To be clear, no publicly released evidence backs up Musk’s suggestion that the Epstein files contain incriminating information about Trump.
What did Trump say about releasing the Epstein files when he was out of office?
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.
Did Trump order the release of the Epstein files?
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.
Shortly after she was sworn in as attorney general, Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would soon release files related to the Epstein investigation. Bondi — who was 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,” she said. “That’s been a directive by President Trump.”
On February 27, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel released binders of documents labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a handful of far-right influencers. Following bipartisan complaints that the binder simply repackaged already-released Epstein materials, Bondi cast blame on the FBI and promised to release more documents.
When asked about the Bondi “Phase 1” debacle in a March 2025 Full Measure interview, Trump told host Sharyl Attkisson that his attorney general was doing a “phenomenal job.” Then he pivoted to the JFK files, saying, “It’s moving along, and it’s moving along pretty rapidly.”
What has Trump said about Epstein’s death?
In an August 2023 interview, Tucker Carlson asked Trump if he believed 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 thought it was “possible” Epstein had been 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 was among those who believe Epstein “was killed,” and Trump replied that “a case could be made either way.”
As Trump was pleading with his supporters to move on from the Epstein scandal in early July 2025, he repeatedly called the story “boring” and a “hoax” and said he couldn’t understand why anyone still cares.
In a July 12, 2025, Truth Social post, he mused, “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’”
“I don’t understand it, why they would be so interested,” Trump wrote. “He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand what the interest or the fascination is I really don’t. And the credible information has been given.”
This post has been updated throughout.
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