Of all the controversies that have threatened to topple Donald Trump, none seem to have come closer than his friendship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Let’s not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” the president posted on his social media platform Truth Social earlier this month, weeks after his former tweeter-in-chief Elon Musk claimed he was featured in the Epstein files, days after the US government said it found “no evidence” Epstein kept a secret client list — and just days before what was to be perhaps the most damning revelation of the Trump-Epstein scandal yet.
How wrong he was, to claim that nobody would care. Days later, on Thursday, an article in The Wall Street Journal claimed that Trump was among the influential friends who contributed to a “birthday book” compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday by his then-socialite girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003. “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” the message — written inside a drawing of a naked woman — is reported to read, following a comment about the two men having “certain things in common”.
Trump was quick to deny the message was written by him, calling it fake. He claimed he’d “never [written] a picture in [his] life” (cue a barrage of his past doodles being shared across the internet) and filed a $10bn (£7.5bn) lawsuit against the WSJ and its owner — a backlash that was hardly surprising, given the damning nature of the claims in the report. Not only does the alleged message reflect terribly on the president, with its references to secrets and “enigmas” that “never age”. Not only does the article reignite the scandal he can’t seem to snub out, and challenge the denials he’s recently made about his friendship with Epstein. But it also comes as a particular blow when you look at who controls the WSJ: Trump’s most powerful media ally and the rightwing owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch himself.
Murdoch’s team’s decision to publish the article certainly can be viewed as a high-profile symbol of Trump’s declining fanbase as his support among the Maga contingent appears slowly to be crumbling. Even those who stayed loyal throughout a turbulent few years of scandals from the Capitol Riots to the Stormy Daniels hush money case are drifting, say commentators. Many are nervous to call this Trump’s final straw after years of predicted final straws, but they are certainly on tenterhooks as the next chapter of the Trump-Epstein story unfolds. Just how close were the two men, exactly? Could this birthday book claim be the final push that gets the Epstein files released? And if so, could the Epstein scandal really — just maybe — be Trump’s eventual downfall?
A friendship founded money and women
Private jet trips. Glamorous dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. Raucous parties at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
This was the elite, sun-tanned, jet-set world in which Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein — then a businessman and a financier — seemed to operate in during their reported 15-year friendship. How the two men met exactly is not clear, but what is clear is that Trump quickly fell into Epstein’s orbit and remained there for quite some time.
The pair, aged in their forties and fifties at the time, moved in monied circles in the 1980s and 1990s and appeared to bond over a mutual love of women, parties and lavish lifestyles. Both had homes in Palm Beach in Florida. Both mixed with a high society New York set. Both hosted or attended parties alongside models, cheerleaders and beauty pageant contestants. They were reportedly pictured together at a Victoria’s Secret Angels event in New York, and at a separate event alongside their partners Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump has insisted he never went on Epstein’s plane or to his private island, Little St James, which later became synonymous with his crimes. But flight logs show Trump did indeed fly on the plane seven times in the four years between 1993 and 1997, once accompanied by his former wife Marla Maples and their daughter Tiffany, another time with his son Eric (other notable passengers include President Bill Clinton, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Prince Andrew and actor Kevin Spacey). According to the New York Times, Trump and Epstein were the only guests present at a “calendar girl” competition at Mar-a-Lago the year before their jet-set chapter started, in 1992 — the same year a clip from the NBC archives shows the two men pointing out women on a dance floor. A photo taken in Palm Beach in 1997 shows the two men smiling, Trump resting his hand on Epstein’s shoulder.
“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,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002, five years later. Epstein, who was known for being a talented social climber, called the future president “charming” and said he believed himself to be Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years”.
“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”
Much of what is now reported about that 15-year friendship comes from hours of tape-recorded interviews between Epstein and bestselling political author Michael Wolff, in 2017, released last year. That Epstein and Trump frequently picked up women together in casinos, that Trump liked to seduce his best friends’ wives, and that the first time Trump “slept with” Melania was on Epstein’s plane are among the claims the late financier made at the time. Trump’s team has since called them “false smears”.
Wolff has since spoken on his podcast about a time Epstein supposedly produced a pile of photos of Trump at his Palm Beach mansion, from a safe in his New York home. “They were kind of spread out like playing cards,” Wolff said. “And it was Trump – with girls of uncertain age. In two of them, topless girls are sitting on Trump’s lap. In another, he has a visible stain on his pants while several girls are laughing and pointing at it... I think it’s certainly not unlikely that they were in the safe when the FBI came in after his arrest and took everything.”
Trump’s team hit back at Wolff’s allegations. “Michael Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics,” a campaign spokesperson told reporters last year. “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.”
Lawsuits and claims of sexual misconduct
There were also more serious claims from that party period, some of which surfaced at the time, some of which have surfaced since. In 1997 — around the peak of the pair’s friendship — both men were accused of sexual misconduct: Epstein in a civil lawsuit brought by a former model; Trump in three public allegations of groping, non-consensual kissing and sexual propositioning amid the #MeToo movement. Trump denied the allegations; Epstein’s case was settled quietly the following year.
Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers who died by suicide in April this year, alleged that three years after this, in the year 2000, she was 16-years-old and working as a pool attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club when Epstein’s girlfriend and so-called “fixer” Ghislaine Maxwell offered her a gig as Epstein’s masseuse. She claimed that Epstein and Maxwell groomed her to have sex with rich, high-profile men, including Prince Andrew, over the following two years. Prince Andrew vehemently denies the allegations. Maxwell was later accused of conspiring with Epstein to lure young girls into sexual relationships over the decade from 1994 to 2004. She was found guilty of sex trafficking in 2022, and sentenced to 20 years in jail, with Trump’s name featuring during her 2021 trial when a woman claimed Epstein took her to meet Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort when she was 14. The woman did not accuse Trump of any improper behaviour.
Other claims have surfaced over the years since, too. In 2016, an anonymous plaintiff claimed Trump and Epstein had raped her, but the circumstances were deemed sketchy and the lawsuit was dropped. Another victim, Danielle Bensky, came forward in 2021, claiming Epstein sexually abused her at the age of 18 when she was an aspiring ballerina.
Last year, former glamour model Stacey Williams told The Guardian that Epstein, who she was dating at the time, had taken her to Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse in 1993, encouraging the future president to grope her in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men. “It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” she said last year. Trump denied the allegations, his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt calling it “a fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”
This week, another Epstein accuser, Maria Farmer, told the New York Times she urged the FBI to investigate Trump all the way back in 1996, when she reported Epstein and Maxwell of sexual crimes and identified others in their orbit who might be worth looking into. She claims she repeated this suggestion during a follow-up FBI interview in 2006, raising Trump’s name specifically after a late-night encounter with him in Epstein’s luxury Manhattan offices in 1995. The White House challenged Farmer’s account, telling the Times that Trump ended his friendship with Epstein many years ago.
A bitter bust-up over property
2004. This was the year the Trump-Epstein era came to an abrupt and bitter end, according to reporters who have spent years digging into what may have caused the end of one of the world’s most high-profile friendships. It just so happens to be the year before the FBI began investigating Epstein for sex trafficking after the parents of a 14-year-old girl in Palm Beach, Florida, alleged he had molested their daughter.
The reason for the fallout? A real-estate bust-up over the Maison de L’Amitié estate in Palm Beach, apparently. According to a report in the Washington Post in 2019, the same year Epstein was arrested, both men were vying for a Florida mansion that was being sold after the owners filed for bankruptcy. The property’s trustee Joseph Luzinski described the bidding war as “two very large Palm Beach egos going at it”, having supposedly been contacted by both men in the run-up. “It was something like, Donald saying, ‘You don’t want to do a deal with him, he doesn’t have the money,’” Luzinski told the Post. “While Epstein was saying: ‘Donald is all talk. He doesn’t have the money’.”
Trump won the bid in the end, and sold the mansion to Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million four years later. He said nothing of the fallout in public until 2019 — 15 years after the supposed property war, 11 years after Epstein was found guilty of sexually abusing girls, and four years after Trump’s name appeared circled in pen in Epstein’s “little black book” of 1,571 personal contacts.
“I had a falling out with him a long time ago”
2019, when Trump first spoke of the fallout, was also the same year Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors. “I was not a fan,” he told reporters of Epstein following the arrest. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago”. He referred to the financier as a “creep” and attempted to downplay their friendship, saying: “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him... I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years.”
Over the six years since then, Trump has continued to downplay his closeness with Epstein, referring to him as an acquaintance rather than a friend and calling others out for the very same thing. Former president Bill Clinton was one particular individual he went onto criticise, with Trump even sharing a conspiracy theory that Clinton was involved with Epstein’s death. “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,” he told reporters days after Epstein’s death. “So you have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.” Clinton denied visiting the island.
Maxwell was arrested the following year, in 2020, and Trump spoke more fondly of her. “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly,” he told reporters at the time. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is”.
Fury over the Epstein files, and fresh scrutiny on the friendship — will Trump survive?
Threats to block a deal to build a new football stadium unless the Commanders change their name back to the Redskins. The sharing of a fake AI-generated video of former President Barack Obama being arrested by the FBI. More sharing, this time of AI-generated mugshots of Democratic officials who’ve served as Republican bogeymen.
These are just some of the distraction techniques Trump has turned to over the last 24 hours in a desperate bid to divert attention from the Epstein ghost that seems hellbent on haunting him. "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?" he shot back at a reporter Trump after the deadly Texas floods. "This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking. We have Texas, we have this. We have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable."
Like it or not, the president had better believe it — and fast. The deceased financier’s name has quickly returned to the top of the agenda in recent weeks after Elon Musk’s explosive claim that Trump was “in the Epstein files”, shortly followed by attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel backtracking on earlier pledges to release the files.
Also read: Are Elon Musk and Donald Trump friends again? A timeline of their bitter feud and fallout
The hefty set of files may include names and details of evidence and testimonies that were gathered during the investigation into the disgraced financier, but may have not been backed up with evidence or relied upon in the prosecutions of him and Maxwell. Trump initially said he would have “no problem” releasing the files before he was re-elected last year. He has always denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein and law enforcement agencies have never accused him of such. In late 2023 and early 2024 he said he was “not concerned” about the content of the files, but in June 2024 he expressed reservations, citing concerns about potential “phony stuff” in the files.
The subject returned to the front of the political agenda earlier this year. Bondi said in February that she had the Epstein client list "sitting on [her] desk right now to review", but then claimed earlier this month that no client list existed — a U-turn that caused fury and division among the president’s usually-loyal Maga supporters, many of whom are angry at a perceived lack of transparency. After all, transparency around issues like sex trafficking in particular are a key element of the Maga philosophy, and Trump’s angry diversion tactics aren’t helping. Yes, fury and frequent outbursts can be seen as Trump being Trump. But they also only add fuel to the theory he has something to hide.
Bondi has since confirmed she was not talking about a specific client list, but rather documents relating to the Epstein case and suicide in general, and Trump then called for grand jury testimony in the prosecution of Epstein to be publicly released, insisting that he had nothing to hide. But the backtracking has done little to defuse the backlash among Maga fans, and puts Trump’s friendship with Epstein under fresh scrutiny once more.
“I have had more success in six months than perhaps any president in our country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the fake news and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein hoax,” he posted on Truth Social last week, claiming: “I don’t want their support anymore!”
Whether that claim holds true will become clear in the coming weeks and months, as the first proper cracks in his Maga base begin to widen and the court battle between him and media titan Rupert Murdoch adds even greater spotlight to the saga. The president who survived impeachment and more scandals than any other seems to be facing his greatest challenge yet — the question now is whether his career will out-survive the ghost of his “terrific” former friend.
