House Democrats on Monday released an image of a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that appears to bear the signature of Donald Trump, the very same note the president had denied writing after reports of its existence were published earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.
The letter, which was turned over by lawyers for disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in response to a subpoena from the House oversight committee, was included in a set of notes sent to the convicted sex offender for his 50th birthday.
The image showed a letter that in effect comported with a description in the Journal’s report from July. Inside the sketch of a woman’s torso, the note depicts an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein, with what appeared to be Trump’s signature below.
“The oversight committee has secured the infamous ‘Birthday Book’ that contains a note from President Trump that he has said does not exist,” Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the panel, said in a statement. “It’s time for the president to tell us the truth about what he knew and release all the Epstein files.”
The White House did not immediately comment on the letter, but officials sought to discredit the note. Deputy chief of staff for communications, Taylor Budowich, suggested in an X post carrying a different version of Trump’s signature that the letter or the signature had been falsified.
“Time for news corp to open that check book, it’s not his signature. DEFAMATION!” Budowich wrote, referencing the defamation suit that Trump filed against News Corp, the parent company of the Journal, over its original story.
But even though Trump more recently has signed both his first and last name together, for years, he used only his first name in signatures, stylized with a line extending from the last letter – and Trump’s signature on a letter from 1995 closely resembled the one found on the note to Epstein.
Trump has separately denied drawing the figure or writing the note to Epstein. “The supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE,” he said in July.
The letter from the so-called birthday book was turned over to the House oversight committee in response to a subpoena issued by its Republican chairperson James Comer, and a 25 July letter from Democrats Sylvia Garcia and Ro Khanna urging Epstein’s estate to produce the materials.
The committee later also released the entirety of the birthday book, which scanned pages showed was titled “The First Fifty Years” and was split into 10 sections including a prologue written by Epstein’s associate Ghislane Maxwell.
The leather-bound volume contained dozens of letters and images that were of a sexually explicit nature, ranging from drawings by “girlfriends” of Epstein receiving massages next to a pool, to photos of lions and zebras engaged in sex.
Other contributors included Bill Clinton, the billionaire Leon Black, Harvard law school professor and onetime Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the now British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson and Les Wexner, among others.
Trump vehemently denied having written or illustrated the note, dismissing it as “a fake thing” and insisting “these are not my words, not the way I talk”.
He later filed the defamation suit against the Journal’s reporters, publisher Dow Jones and News Corp. In response, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.” The lawsuit sought $10bn in damages and specifically named media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has spent months shifting its position on whether Epstein-related files would be released or even if they existed at all, with Trump at one point calling them a “Democrat hoax”.
The House oversight committee, with participation from Democrats and Republicans, continues to review Epstein-related records. Epstein, a wealthy financier with numerous powerful connections, died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
