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Documents in a case linked to Jeffrey Epstein were unsealed for the public, and former President Donald Trump’s name is among those mentioned.
On Wednesday (Jan. 3), court documents related to a case involving the disgraced hedge fund billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking were unsealed and released to the public. Many were eagerly anticipating the release to find out if there were other notable figures mentioned. Former President Donald Trump was confirmed to be among those names.
Trump’s name first appears on a document where Epstein is quoted as saying that he intended to meet up with him during a weather-related stop en route from Palm Beach to Atlantic City (at that time, Trump was still involved in real estate) in a conversation with former accuser Johanna Sjoberg. She mentioned going to one of his casinos, to which Epstein agreed: “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 was quoted as saying. The other instance where Trump is mentioned in the documents is when a witness states that she was never asked by Epstein to enter into sexual relations with Trump.
Trump was friendly with the 66-year-old for quite some time in the early 1990s, with the two often hanging out at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach by the accounts of witnesses in the documents. In a 2002 interview for New York Magazine, Trump referred to Epstein as a “terrific guy.” Epstein’s pilot also recalled Trump being present on the financier’s jet for several flights from Palm Beach to New York City. In 2009 though, Trump stated that the two had a falling out, saying: “I had a falling out with him a long time ago; I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan.”
The twice-impeached former president has been quiet since the unsealing of the documents. Right-wing supporters of Trump have been steadily hurling accusations of wrongdoing at former President Bill Clinton, who has also been mentioned often in documents related to Epstein to smear Democrats. Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend and associate of the late Epstein (who died by suicide in 2019), states that a former accuser, Virginia Guiffre, lied about seeing Clinton at Epstein’s private island in a now-settled 2015 lawsuit. That dispute lies behind Clinton’s repeated mentions.
