A survivor of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein who voted for President Donald Trump has blasted him for reducing the scandal to a “hoax.”
Jena-Lisa Jones was introduced to the late pedophile when she was just 14 years old and was one of the women who shared her harrowing ordeal at Wednesday’s press conference on Capitol Hill. Survivors joined Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to back a discharge petition that would force the Trump administration to release all of the Epstein files.
Trump repeated his claim Wednesday that the Epstein case is “a Democrat hoax that never ends,” which has infuriated survivors.
“I voted for Trump,” Jones told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word, as her voice noticeably cracked with emotion. “And for him to say what he’s saying is beyond me, because I put my hope in him and he’s supposed to protect us.”
“For him to say that this is a joke…” Jones added. “There is no one that is accusing him of any wrongdoing, so the fact that he’s saying it’s a hoax, who are you hiding for then?”
When The Independent asked Trump whether he was protecting powerful friends and Republican campaign donors by not releasing the entirety of the documents in the Epstein case, the president complained again of the so-called “hoax.”
“From what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given. But it's really a Democrat hoax, because they're trying to get people to talk about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've had as a nation since I've been president,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
Jones called out the president for failing to back Epstein’s survivors.
“You should be supporting us, you should be backing us. We spoke our truth and you are telling us pretty much that we’re lying,” Jones said. “I put my hope in you when I voted for you and you can’t even back us when we need you the most?”
Transparency around the Epstein case was a pledge that Trump campaigned on in 2024 but when his Justice Department and the FBI released a joint memo on July 6 stating that no further documents in the case warranted release, and there was no evidence the convicted sex offender kept a “client list,” fury erupted.
MAGA’s Marjorie Taylor Greene broke ranks with Trump by speaking at the event with Epstein’s victims and backed the discharge petition put forward by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie to release more about the federal investigation.
The Georgia representative said that she received “phone call after phone call” from the White House Tuesday evening in a bid to dissuade her from signing the petition.
“They didn’t want me to sign the discharge petition,” Greene told Eric Bolling of Real America's Voice. “They want to focus on the oversight investigation.”
Greene vowed to reveal “every damn name” of the purported high-powered clients of the late financier’s underage sex trafficking operation at the press conference.
“If they want to give me a list, I will walk in that Capitol on the House floor and I’ll say every damn name that abused these women. I can do that for them and I’d be proud to do it.”
The Trump administration continues to be dogged by the Epstein files saga nearly two months on from when the bombshell FBI and Justice Department memo dropped.
Epstein died by suicide behind bars in 2019, the FBI determined. His sudden death has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories, fueling the demands for heightened transparency around the case.
