{Book 1} Proof of Devilry: The Crimes of Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein
The available evidence places Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell at the heart of a multistate and multinational child sex-, sex- and human-trafficking ring whose discovery could change the course of history.
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{Note: This 600-page, Summer 2025 book about the Trump-Epstein Scandal is the seventh book in the New York Times-bestselling Proof series. Previous books in the series include national bestsellers Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019); and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020), as well as the full-length ebooks Proof of Coup (Substack, 2022), Proof of Cruelty (Substack, 2024), and Proof of Destruction (Substack, 2025). The Proof Project also includes an international Top 10 pod that ran before the 2020 U.S. elections, Proof: A Pre-Election Special (Cineflix Media, 2020).}
Table of Contents
Introduction
Book One
Chapter 1: The Epstein-Wolff Tapes
Chapter 2: Why the Trump-Epstein Friendship Actually Ended
Chapter 3: Sex Game—Seducing Your Best Friend’s Wife
Chapter 4: Sex Game—Performative Sexual Assault
Chapter 5: Sex Game—The Meat Market
Chapter 6: Sex Game—Partner-Sharing
Chapter 7: Sex Game—Getting Underage Girls Into Illegal Situations
Chapter 8: Sex Game—Pimping
Chapter 9: Trump, Epstein, and the Presidency
Chapter 10: The Big Picture
Book Two
Chapter 11: Trump and Conspiracy Theories
Chapter 12: The Epstein Files
Chapter 13: Trump Changes His Story in Response to the Epstein Files
Chapter 14: The Evidence That Trump Went to Little St. James Is Growing
Chapter 15: The Big Secret About Little St. James Island
Chapter 16: Helicopter Redux
Sidebar: So What Happened During “Period 2”?
Chapter 17: The May 2025 Trump-Bondi-Blanche-Patel Summit
Chapter 18: Why the Epstein Files Endanger Trump
Chapter 19: The Virginia Giuffre Tragedy
Sidebar: The Katie Johnson Tragedy
Chapter 20: Melania, Paolo, and Jeffrey
Chapter 21: Was Epstein Ever Banned From Mar-a-Lago?
Chapter 22: On Stuart Pivar
Chapter 23: “The Pussy Committee”
Book Three
Chapter 24: The Recess
Sidebar: The Dershowitz Angle
Chapter 25: On Ghislaine Maxwell
Chapter 26: The Department of Justice Is Plunged Into Its Worst Scandal Ever
Chapter 27: The July 2025 Trump-Maxwell Summit
Chapter 28: The Kremlin Appears to Have Horrifying Kompromat on Trump
Chapter 29: The Alaska Summit
Chapter 30: What Comes Next Is Worse Than What Came Before
Chapter 31: The Coming Pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell
Chapter 32: The Coming Civil War
Chapter 33: The Evidence
Conclusion
Disclaimers
Introduction
In 2017, at a time when Donald Trump was the most powerful man on Earth, famous for seeking the destruction of anyone who disparaged him and capable of smiting any American he trained his legions of supporters on, a Florida billionaire living a life of luxury beyond measure—one he had every interest in maintaining—sat down with a New York Times bestselling author to tell the shocking truth about the then-president.
That Florida billionaire was Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, as he explained across 100+ hours of bracingly frank conversation with the New York Times bestselling author, Michael Wolff, had been Donald Trump’s “closest friend” for well over a decade—spanning the late 1980s, all of the 1990s, and almost half the 2000s—and he had evidence to prove it, in the form of not only anecdotes and easily corroborated secrets but photographs and hard data. While today, in 2025, the statement that President Trump was best friends with a convicted pedophile, serial sexual predator, and notorious child sex trafficker is uncontroversial, having been the subject of thousands of major-media news reports in the current decade, back in 2017 the assertion was fairly new outside the high society of southern Florida’s Palm Beach.
Epstein spoke to Wolff knowing that he would have to stand by everything he said— possibly in a court of law. The premise of a future lawsuit, or something even worse, was a considerable risk for Epstein, given that he’d previously served a jail sentence of over a year for his past misconduct—if, infamously, a cushier and shorter jail sentence than was appropriate. That sentence came courtesy of a prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who Donald Trump would later reward for his prosecutorial malfeasance with a promotion to United States Secretary of Labor (the federal department that, among much else, oversees some of the offenses Epstein was guilty of but deliberately never charged with).
Also top of mind for Epstein would have been the fact that the man he was speaking to Wolff about, Donald Trump, was and remains one of the most litigious persons in recorded human history, having been involved in a staggering 4,095 lawsuits prior to his ascension to the U.S. presidency in January 2017 and many more since then (the latest Lawfare Litigation Tracker displays almost 400 lawsuits, focusing exclusively on those of a more recent vintage). This despite the fact that Trump has made one of the cornerstones of his political persona a supposed aversion to “frivolous” lawsuits, and at least in his second presidential term has ignored judicial outcomes he dislikes about 33% of the time, according to a recent Washington Post analysis.
Epstein also would’ve been concerned that his former longtime friend would jail him.
More than any American president in the nation’s history, Donald Trump routinely makes credible threats to prosecute, imprison, and even execute his personal rivals.
His history of such unprecedented public threats currently sits in the triple digits, and includes some of the most harrowing statements ever made by a sitting president—including an expression of desire that his own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, be executed, and that former president Barack Obama be charged with Treason—a federal crime intended to be punished by state-sponsored homicide and, like President Trump’s threat to General Milley, “supported” by baseless claims.
In this context, how concerned should a mere private citizen have been in 2017 about angering the sitting President of the United States? Very concerned, it would seem.
So while no one would deem the now-deceased Epstein an honorable or honest man—he was, as noted, a historically rapacious pedophile and child sex trafficker for much of his adult life, and the entirety of his seventeen-year friendship with Donald Trump—he was a famously calculating man who put self-interest above all other considerations.
So if Epstein were going to speak to an author whose forthcoming book, Fire and Fury, all concerned knew was a likely future national bestseller, one to be placed on sale at every bookstore and even airport—whether the new book were to take the form of an exposé on Trump, as Wolff intended, or, as there’s evidence Epstein anticipated, be a biography of his life that would become a bestseller simply because so much of that life was entwined with the sitting president’s—he was going to have to make sure he told only the truth over his 100+ hours of revelations to Wolff.
So how did Epstein do? Well, as already observed, he did ultimately speak to Wolff for over 100 hours, on topics large and small. Donald Trump was just one of those topics, seemingly confirming that Epstein didn’t speak to Wolff simply to harass Trump and indeed believed he was telling his life story for national consumption—a story which, while it would have to include discussion of his own past misdeeds (as he had gone to jail for some of them), would more generally need to spare few details about his seedy life in order to justify any prospective reader’s purchase of it.
But what Epstein revealed about Donald Trump was, nevertheless, astonishing.
In fact, what he told Wolff about Trump would include some of the most damaging things ever said about the then-and-now sitting U.S. president outside a courtroom.
So did that sitting President of the United States, the most litigious American of his long lifetime, sue Jeffrey Epstein, following the publication of Fire and Fury, for what he’d said to Wolff?
No, he did not.
But surely, then, President Trump sued Wolff post-publication, for all that he wrote?
No, he did not.
He tried in vain to block publication of the book ex ante, but when that effort failed, took no further action against Wolff or any of his sources—as doing so would have forced him to sit for hours of depositions about the book’s horrifyingly seedy content.
After all, truth is an absolute defense to a Libel or Defamation claim, as Trump knows.
So what did Trump do about one of the biggest betrayals he had ever experienced— which betrayal became clear to the public in October 2024, when Wolff revealed that Epstein had been one of his sources (even as the source of the betrayal would have been clear to Trump years earlier, not long after the publication of Fire and Fury in January 2018, as Wolff could only have had certain information from certain people)?
That remains something of a mystery.
What we know is that Trump’s stated ambition, as president, is to jail his leading rivals—especially those he feels have betrayed him.
And we know that by July 2019, just 18 months after the publication of a damaging book about Trump that was significantly sourced from Jeffrey Epstein, employees of Donald Trump at the Department of Justice had arrested Epstein on several felony indictments for incidents that had occurred almost two decades earlier and had been known to the United States government for over a decade. The federal investigation that led to these tardy indictments would have begun just a matter of months after President Trump came to the realization that his former best friend had betrayed him.
Perhaps all this was mere coincidence.
Perhaps President Trump’s February 2017 nomination of Acosta, who had looked the other way on nearly all Epstein’s crimes in the first instance—a nomination that came two years into the 2015-launched Epstein-Wolff Dialogues—wasn’t some eldritch plot to slowly bring the Epstein Scandal back to public consciousness but was instead just what it looked like: an attempt by Trump to reward Acosta for effectively covering up a sprawling Child Sex Trafficking ring his longtime Florida pal had been at the head of.
Perhaps Donald Trump would later falsely imply that the investigation, prosecution, imprisonment and death of Jeffrey Epstein had happened in the Biden administration rather than his own not because he wanted Americans to forget he had been running the U.S. government when a man who hypothetically could destroy him was himself destroyed, but because he wanted to give his former Democratic Party rival credit for something he did not do… the first time in his life Trump would ever have done so.
What we do know is that when the Trump administration brought extremely tardy indictments against Trump’s former best friend for crimes a Trump administration official had previously helped cover up in the 2000s, those indictments focused only on the period from 2002 to 2005—a four-year timespan during which the Trump-Epstein friendship ended (and even when it was still active during that span, in 2002 and 2003, it was apparently waning due to the two friends’ divergent professional obligations).
What’s interesting about the 2019 indictments against Epstein—the ones that arrived the year after his major betrayal of Trump went public, and were the result of a Trump administration criminal investigation that began the same year his betrayal of Trump went public—is that by focusing on the span from 2002 to 2005, they avoided entirely the roughly decade-long period during which Trump and Epstein were confirmably best friends: from 1989 through 1999. It was during this latter period, the one that was studiously ignored by the Trump administration’s 2019 prosecution of Epstein, that the two men had regularly partied together per countless photographs, videos, contemporaneous accounts, and (most tellingly) their own statements from the time.
And as we’ll see in this report, the partying Trump and Epstein did during this period was consistently, unmistakably, and harrowingly problematic as a matter of U.S. law.
With this in mind, it no longer seems as coincidental that 1989 through 1999 was also the period during which the majority of the thirty-plus Sexual Assault and Rape (and in a few instances, Sexual Harassment) allegations against Donald Trump hailed from, and that the years 2002 and 2003 (the only years both in the window of the 2019 Epstein indictments and during the course of the 17-year Trump-Epstein friendship) saw just one of the dozens of serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump.
1989 to 1999
1989: Ivana Trump
Early 1990s: Kristin Anderson
1993: Stacey Williams
Mid-1990s: E. Jean Carroll
Mid-1990s: Lisa Boyne
1992: Faith Daniels
1992: Jill Harth
1992: Multiple NFL cheerleaders (link)
1994: Katie Johnson
1997: Five (5) former Miss Teen USA contestants
1997: Amy Dorris
1997: Cathy Heller
1997: Temple Taggart McDowell
1998: Karena Virginia
Other allegations hailing from both before and after the 1989 to 1999 time period discussed above include the following.
Before
1970s: Jessica Leeds
After
2000: Bridget Sullivan
Early 2000s: Karen Johnson
2001: Tasha Dixon
2003: Melinda McGillivray
2005: Jennifer Murphy
2005: Natasha Stoynoff
2006: Rachel Crooks
2006: Jessica Drake
2006: Ninni Laaksonen
2007: Summer Zervos
2011: Alexia Palmer
2013: Cassandra Searles
All of the above incidents, and many more, are discussed at length in the 2024 book Proof of Cruelty: Donald Trump’s Decades of Violence, in the New York Times bestselling Proof Series. That book can be found here. An excerpt from its 405-page text is below.
Of course, of far more importance to the 2019 indictment against Jeffrey Epstein than what Trump was doing before or after the time period it focused on was what Epstein was doing from 1989 onward. The available evidence suggests that Epstein’s massive, transnational Child Sex Trafficking operation saw its heyday during the period from 1989 to 1999 as well: that is, the very period the 2019 indictment opted not to focus on.
So it must be reiterated that when Donald Trump’s employees brought a criminal case against Epstein in 2019—at a time the sitting president needed to discredit and, if possible, silence his longtime friend—that case only involved events between 2002 and 2005, the period in the 17-year Trump-Epstein friendship when the two men had their least contact. (Indeed, one of the few instances of contact known and recorded from that 48-month window—a 2003 bawdy, creepy Birthday Note sent by Trump to Epstein—is now the subject of the sitting president’s extremely disconcerting public wrath as well as a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal).
Perhaps, as this is just the introduction to a damning report about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, none of this yet seems concerning. It may also not seem concerning to some readers that the federal criminal prosecution Trump’s employees launched the very next year after Epstein’s, against Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell—who no one has ever suggested was an eyewitness to sex crimes by President Trump—opined of the correct timespan for Epstein’s criminal conduct; its fact-pattern begins in 1994.
The most immediate result of all this is that the limited grand jury documents Trump now says he wants his personal lawyer (Pam Bondi) to secure from the courts (albeit only if they’re “pertinent,” which his personal lawyer will be the sole judge of) not only are almost certain to include nothing about him—as they’re documents his own administration determined the content of in the first instance—but involve a carefully selected timespan when the sitting president was mostly not in contact with Epstein at all. They are also the documents most likely to, to the extent they do or could reveal anything at all about any Epstein associates, harm well-known Democrats like Larry Summers (pictured below with Epstein in 2004), former president Bill Clinton (whose Clinton Foundation-related connection to Epstein in the “early 2000s” fits like a glove over the timespan Trump employees chose for their 2019 indictment of Epstein), late New Mexico governor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson (who was alleged to have abused the now-dead-by-suicide Virginia Giuffre sometime between 2000 and 2002), and former Maine Democratic senator George Mitchell (who faces the same allegations from the same timespan and now-deceased alleged victim).
{Note: The first grand jury transcript release request from Trump’s DOJ has just been denied.}
In short, Trump and his lawyers have most of America looking at Epstein’s conduct in the 2000s—not the 1990s or 1980s. And no one seems to have noticed how odd that is.
{Note: I studied Criminal Law under Professor Alan Dershowitz, pictured above, at Harvard Law School. I still recall Professor Dershowitz telling our class that it is the “absolute duty” of every attorney to “walk right up to the line of what’s considered unethical conduct, but never cross it.” In my opinion, my former professor has several times crossed that line in recent years in pursuing legal theories and courses of representation—including his work as a personal lawyer for Donald Trump—that were arguably unethical. So I am gravely concerned when Professor Dershowitz, who has been accused of heinous acts in Epstein-related litigation, blithely says that “[Ghislaine Maxwell] knows everything. She’s the Rosetta Stone. She knows everything. She arranged every single trip with everybody. She knows everything. And if she were just given ‘use immunity’ [a type of limited grant of immunity used in criminal prosecutions], she could be compelled to testify. I’m told that she actually would be willing to testify. And there’d be no reason for her to withhold any information.” I am concerned that the intent behind this seemingly helpful but also unlooked-for suggestion from an alleged Epstein client is to create a public spectacle with a predetermined outcome: Maxwell, urgently seeking a pardon from President Trump for a prosecution that his DOJ initiated against her, does the sitting president a solid by testifying before Congress that powerful Democrats did cavort with Epstein—which they should be punished for severely, if they did—but Trump himself did not.
The effect of this fraudulent exculpation, from a woman already twice charged with Perjury and who Trump’s own DOJ said cannot be trusted to tell the truth under oath in a courtroom or anywhere else, could also cover lawyers and agents of the president, to include Dershowitz, Acosta, Bondi—who was Florida Attorney General during the lifespan of Epstein’s Child Sex Trafficking and did nothing about it, making her the second such lawyer, after Acosta, to be rewarded for such inaction—and even perhaps Marc Kasowitz, who former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon once credited with silencing at least “a hundred” women Trump wronged or had adulterous relations with by paying them to keep quiet in the 2016 election campaign.
Dershowitz insisting, “I’m told that she actually would be willing to testify” raises the specter that he has been in contact with Ghislaine Maxwell’s camp for his own self-interested reasons—or perhaps even as a direct or indirect continuation of his past legal representation of Donald Trump—and that him going on to say “there’d be no reason for [Maxwell] to withhold any information” is a sign that he (a legal genius to be sure) is working avidly to hide from the American people the fact that a pardon from her twenty-year prison sentence almost certainly hangs on Ghislaine Maxwell never inculpating Donald Trump in any wrongdoing. She would be well aware of that, as would Professor Dershowitz, despite his self-serving obfuscation of it.
In any case, the upshot of President Trump’s prosecutions of his two troublesome ex-close friends has been that (1) Maxwell ended up with the aforementioned two-decade prison sentence and the bizarre, oft-repeated “well wishes” of Trump (who’s seemed oddly unthreatened by her arrest and incarceration, a mirror of how, as noted above, his lawyer Alan Dershowitz—who’s been accused of getting questionable massages from Epstein masseuses—is quite comfortable with her testifying before Congress about “everything she knows”); and (2) within a month of the Trump administration incarcerating him, Jeffrey Epstein looked like this:
In other words, dead.
{Note: Trump has explained away his repeated well-wishes to his longtime friend Ghislaine by saying that wishing her “good luck” was just his way of saying he hoped she wouldn’t die in jail like her ex-boyfriend did—a macabre and even ghoulish self-justification that at once implies Trump believes Epstein was murdered while in Trump administration custody and also now serves, in 2025, as an implicit warning to Maxwell that she would be wise to take any heavily conditioned sentence-reduction, commutation, or pardon deal Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche offers her, lest she suffer the same fate in Trump administration custody Epstein did.}
The implications of the above-referenced distinctions in charging documents, and the above-referenced distinctions in how President Trump and his lawyers have reacted to the two cases—Epstein’s and Maxwell’s—and the above-referenced distinctions in how Maxwell is doing (alive and pursuing promising appeals to President Trump and a U.S. Supreme Court remarkably deferential to the man who handpicked a third of it) versus how Epstein is doing (mysteriously dead from injuries he almost certainly was not in a position to cause himself) suggest that whatever the secrets are that Donald Trump has with respect to the pedophilic and Human Trafficking activities Epstein was involved in, the conduct he engaged in was more likely to have been undertaken in Epstein’s presence and/or with his ex ante or ex post knowledge and less likely to be anything he fears Ghislaine Maxwell would have firsthand knowledge of.
With that in mind, this Proof report explores the sadistic sex games that Trump and Epstein—but not Maxwell—were known to engage in between 1989 and 1999. It also discloses how the context in which these sex games occurred tells us about much more than just the antisocial sexual proclivities of two Florida men; more importantly, it explains how the life and times and even the death of the one of these two rich men who is deceased still threaten the one who is the sitting President of the United States.
So whereas Ghislaine Maxwell is treated as no threat by Trump and his associates; and the new document releases Trump says he supports were long ago curated to be the ones most likely to implicate—even if they’re not as militantly over-redacted as Trump and Bondi promise they’ll be—only Democrats; it remains the case that Mr. Epstein, Trump’s best friend in the late 1980s, for the entirety of the 1990s, and in a significant portion of the 2000s—a man investigated during Trump’s first presidency, charged during Trump’s first presidency, imprisoned during Trump’s first presidency, found dead in his cell during Trump’s first presidency, and questionably deemed a suicide by conflicted Trump officials in Trump’s first presidency—remains specifically a threat to Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party and the supposedly vociferously anti-pedophile MAGA “movement.”
While this report doesn’t dwell much on Epstein’s untimely death, this Introduction must note that, in addition to all the foregoing, it was while Epstein was in Donald Trump’s custody that a host of missteps appears to have attended that untimely death: cameras that were supposed to be operational but weren’t; guards who were supposed to be on duty but weren’t; logs that were supposed to be kept but weren’t; prisoner transfers that weren’t supposed to happen but did; in short, the core facts of Epstein’s death have not surprisingly birthed a whole generation of Donald Trump supporters who ardently believe that the man was murdered.
By Democrats.
This may be the most unusual and truly astonishing example of what contemporary psychologists call mass anger transference or mass negative transference this author—who worked with sex offenders as a public defender for many years—has ever seen.
In the end, Epstein’s Trump administration-declared suicide was investigated and “confirmed” by Trump’s handpicked Attorney General, Bill Barr, a man not just loyal to Trump but with his own ostensible reasons for wanting Epstein to go away: his dad, Donald Barr, had materially advanced Epstein’s inexplicable rise to power, giving him a key post at an elite institution that Epstein was in no way qualified for; this decision, whose basis remains shrouded in mystery, has led to great embarrassment for the Barr Family. While Barr almost certainly should have recused himself from being the final arbiter of whether Donald Trump’s most infamous betrayer actually killed himself just a matter of months after Trump discovered his betrayal, he infamously refused to do so… without explanation.
Certainly, Barr’s boss, Trump, would have been livid had Barr recused himself. Indeed, Barr was tapped to be Attorney General of the United States precisely because of the president’s volcanic anger at a prior Attorney General who did recuse himself in a case closely linked to Trump; that would be Jeff Sessions and the Trump-Russia Scandal.
Trump had spent 2018—the year he learned Epstein had betrayed him and the year he nominated Barr—publicly fuming about Sessions supposedly having betrayed him by following longstanding American Bar Association regulations on recusals. 2018 was for this reason one of the most consequential years of Donald Trump’s life: not only did Democrats shock the country by gaining 41 net seats in the midterm elections; not only did Trump launch his reelection campaign with a newly minted AG; but as already observed, Michael Wolff published Epstein’s account of Trump to amazing sales, Trump quickly determined that Epstein had betrayed him and was behind the material in the book no one but Epstein could have known, and Trump therefore had a problem he needed to solve. If, per his top political adviser Bannon, Epstein had been the greatest threat of any man living to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Trump could not allow that to be the case for a second time. It was in this context that by November 2018 his employees in New York, then still his home state, were looking afresh into charging Epstein.
In under a year Epstein would be dead, leaving perhaps his last words via a message to Michael Wolff that can be read as cruelly ironic or an indication that he had no plans to kill himself: “I’m still hanging around.”
{Post-Publication Update: MSNBC News is reporting that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Pam Bondi, currently the Attorney General of the United States, told her client that his name appears in The Epstein Files “multiple times,” and did so months ago—before she, the DOJ, and the FBI (headed by another Trump personal lawyer, Kash Patel) declared the Epstein case permanently closed several weeks ago. MSNBC also reports that President Trump engaged in clandestine attempts to hide this fact from Americans.}
Book One
Chapter 1: The Epstein-Wolff Tapes
Michael Wolff has at times been accused of sensationalism. But even his critics don’t see him as a political partisan; in fact, they accuse him of being the opposite: too cozy with members of Trump’s inner circle, most notably the aforementioned Bannon. He also wrote a popular biography of Rupert Murdoch, for which he reportedly received “unprecedented access” to the Murdoch Family. A partisan assassin he surely is not.
Others have found minor factual errors in Wolff’s books, usually ones that a longer editorial process would have caught, suggesting—not without reason—that Wolff’s books are likely rushed to the market by their publishers because they’re on timely topics and will reliably sell like hotcakes. Were these minor errors enough to draw a post-publication lawsuit from the most litigious man in America? No, they weren’t, and that tells us a great deal about how material or significant they were or were not.
As a fellow Trump biographer, I must admit that I don’t always appreciate the way Wolff carries himself—or his methods. Whereas Proof is an outlet focused exclusively on dry curatorial journalism, and only credits statements made by known liars when they’re what a former criminal defense attorney and federal criminal investigator like me would call a “statement against interest,” Wolff does seem to relish the seedy side of the topics he covers (even more than he does their moral, political, and geopolitical implications) and is willing to give the time of day, even all day, to sources who might be seen as… well, categorically unreliable and self-interested. But for all that, Wolff’s work has stood up to the many challenges against it that could ever have threatened its primary book-by-book precepts and narratives, and a fellow Trump biographer is in some ways exactly the wrong person to critique Wolff; accusations of professional jealousy at his market success—however misplaced they may be when it comes to this author in particular, whose well-documented history very much isn’t one of obsession with money—are nevertheless always ready to be hurled from all quarters. Besides, I know as well as anyone that being a Trump biographer is a pressure-filled position that naturally engenders controversy and powerful enemies, so it’s well possible Wolff deserves at least a little grace.
By way of example, those who criticize Wolff for not releasing every word of his 100+ hours of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein might consider that when Epstein died in August 2019—possibly by suicide; possibly, as Trump and Epstein friend Dershowitz claims, a form of deviously assisted suicide; or possibly by premeditated assassination—Wolff would have to have been thinking to himself, in that moment, that the leading source for a book he had published the year before had quite possibly been murdered.
Would he be next?
Moreover, Wolff knew that while many famous men had been connected to Epstein’s grotesque conduct—Bill Clinton was famously an Epstein friend, though apparently the primary basis of their relationship was Clinton seeking money for the Clinton Foundation from Epstein (who was trying, in the early 2000s, to reinvent himself as a philanthropist who could successfully woo such politically minded Big Tech giants as Bill Gates; Epstein’s turn toward philanthropy, particularly in very complex scientific fields, is likely one thing that made his relationship with the infamously intellectually incurious Trump less appealing to him in those years); Prince Andrew, another man infamously connected to Epstein, was under such international scrutiny from 2018 onwards that Wolff likely feared little reprisal from him—Donald Trump was in a “category of one,” for extremely compelling reasons:
Unlike Bill Clinton, he was still in political power, indeed was at the very height of his political power, as he was arguably the most powerful man alive;
his relationship with Epstein had been exponentially closer than any living man’s; and
unlike Clinton or Prince Andrew or even Bill Gates, Trump had made an entire career out of suing people and then, once he entered politics, an entire political career out of threatening to jail people.
In short, Michael Wolff, who by 2018 was under a standing litigation threat from the sitting president that never actually arrived—and who saw the violence Trump was capable of inciting throughout his 2016 campaign and first term, and then especially in January 2021, just 36 months after the publication of Fire and Fury—had reason to be cautious about how and when and where and why and in what company he shared anything truly distressing that Jeffrey Epstein had told him about Donald Trump.
We may still have reason to resent this, nevertheless, as a country. To resent Wolff, to maybe not like all the ways he goes about being a biographer, and to wish that what the report below contains had gone wide in America media much earlier. As to this last piece, we must blame corporate media as much as Wolff; everything in this report was available to someone at some point in recent months and years, and yet there was never an appetite among American major media to present the narrative readers find below as comprehensively and clearly as Proof does here.
With all that said, what we do not have is any reason to doubt that what Epstein told Wolff across 100+ hours of conversation is true.
There are five primary reasons for this (and others more esoteric not covered here):
Epstein and Trump were the two sole consistent eyewitnesses to the conduct this report is about to detail, and (a) Epstein swore his version was true, and (b) Trump, the most litigious American alive, never sued him in an attempt to show otherwise.
Dozens and dozens of incidents in which Trump and/or Epstein committed sex crimes or other forms of sexual misconduct have since those offenses were committed seen their only other eyewitnesses come forward to describe those crimes or misconduct in a fashion perfectly consistent with Epstein’s. This, then, leaves Trump as the only man alive who says he’s not capable of what is described below—a contention that candidly means very little given that Trump told 30,573 lies as POTUS and has been adjudicated by a federal judge as having committed Rape. Besides being a 34-times-over convicted felon, he’s a known serial sexual predator whose words on the subject of his past sexual malfeasance are so inconsistent with all known facts on that subject that there is no legitimate basis to believe them. (Again, to read up on all this, see the full 405-page text of Proof of Cruelty, the exhaustively sourced fifth book in the New York Times-bestselling Proof Series.)
The sort of conduct Donald Trump has already himself admitted—in the Access Hollywood Tape, he confessed unambiguously to being a serial sexual predator, and thereafter acknowledged that the voice on the tape was his—is consistent with what Epstein describes. Put differently, Epstein had no reason or need to lie about Trump because the truth was stunning enough, and Trump had no capacity to convince anyone educated, either in public or private, that Epstein was not in a position to know what he was talking about because by 2019 every American had seen the numberless photographs and videos of Trump hanging out with Epstein and Maxwell.
So to the extent there is any detectable problem with the content that follows in this report, it is not that anyone educated about Donald Trump’s personal life and long history of malfeasance seriously doubts its truth. The problem, rather, is that major media decided to stop reporting in detail on the sex life of Donald Trump nearly as soon as he announced his 2016 presidential run. Such reporting, while essential, was somehow nevertheless deemed unseemly (a few notable exceptions notwithstanding).
What was America’s media enterprise afraid of? Litigation? Possibly. But more likely is that one of the few ethoi corporate media steadfastly adheres to—besides the profit motive—is what cultural theorists often call respectability politics. What this means is that a journalist isn’t supposed to write or speak publicly on seedy or salacious topics because it might cause either colleagues or one’s consumer base to start thinking of one as either a gossip or a conspiracy theorist rather than a journalist. And if that happens, it affects your ability to work, to draw a salary, to build an audience, and as importantly as anything else, be heard. The risk is far too great for the seemingly thin reward of being a journalist known to be willing to speak plainly on any question for which there’s compelling evidence worthy of discussion. For U.S. corporate media in particular, any mass tuning out of a leading journalist—let alone an entire network—is ruinous, even as we’re seeing exactly that right now (with respect to U.S. corporate media) precisely because of its excessive caution on many newsworthy, serious topics.
For instance, when the so-called “Steele dossier” was published by BuzzFeed News in January 2017—too late by far to have had any impact on a 2016 presidential election that was already two months in the past, as Republicans oddly seem to forget—CNN said that it wouldn’t even mention on-air the most “salacious” raw and unprocessed intelligence from the dossier (namely, what came to be popularly known as the “pee tape”) because its subject was unacceptable for the virgin ears of America’s adults. It went on to almost exclusively report on that part of the dossier, albeit euphemistically, rather than considering more substantive elements of the dossier. In short, it wanted the eyeballs discussion of salacious topics brings (see profit motive) without opening itself up to discussing with specificity what the fuss was about (respectability politics).
The irony was that the so-called “pee tape” wasn’t salacious at all. It involved no sex whatsoever, just Trump and several Russian escorts being present in a hotel suite as a rather juvenile stunt played out (a woman urinated on a bed that Barack Obama had once slept in). Anyone who’s been in a fraternity or sorority, or who—like this author—has roomed with someone who was at the time in a college fraternity, and sometimes came home intoxicated, has seen everything the so-called pee tape contained in person.
The point is that if American corporate media spent years whispering Puritanically—and in so doing, inaccurately—about what amounted to a college prank, it certainly was not going report with specificity or accuracy on the sort of content Epstein revealed to Wolff in conversations held between 2015 and 2017 and that Wolff alluded to in parts of his 2018 book. Wolff and Epstein, men familiar with the mores of corporate media, would have known this in advance.
All this is the real reason the material below hasn’t yet been seen by most Americans.
It has nothing to do with the provenance of the material, and everything to do with American media culture, a widespread fear of Trump in our halls of political and corporate power, and the fact that a large number of famous, powerful, rich, smart, and/or influential Americans think Donald Trump is capable of ordering a murder.
As one of his several bestselling presidential historians, I happen to believe this also—not that he has done so or will do so, but that he is eminently capable of it. I believe not because Trump has, to great fanfare, ordered illegal assassinations in the past, or because his ex-wife Ivana Trump—an eyewitness to much of what went on between Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell, the last of whom was (see infra) long one of her closest friends—once accused Trump of Rape and then decades later died in a fall in 2022 (120 days before Trump announced his fourth presidential run, and at a time the Biden administration had custody of the very Epstein Files that Trump now refuses to release—a course of federal custody Trump has proven to the nation over the last few days to have long been obsessed with). Nor do I believe this because I first reported on Trump seeing personal profit in the horrifically violent death of a close friend almost a decade ago at HuffPost, or because Trump spent years creepily dancing on the grave of John McCain, or because he has openly advocated the murder of Muslim babies, or because he has bragged about getting away with murder, or because he has bragged about helping others get away with murder, or because he appears to have committed an Attempted Murder while he was in military school, or because he has pushed the execution of men he knows were wrongly accused, or even because we know he is capable of great sexual and physical violence even against members of his own family and has long publicly fantasized about having incestuous sex with his eldest daughter.
No—I say that Donald Trump is capable of acts even worse than all those described below because I’ve been researching his life, psyche, conduct, and predilections for a decade, and I believe to a certainty that he is among the most dangerous men alive.
Chapter 2: Why the Trump-Epstein Friendship Actually Ended
Donald Trump has lied about the reason for the end of his friendship with Epstein so many times—and major media has been so solicitous of his lies, publishing them far more frequently than the truth, though the truth is widely known—that Americans could be forgiving for believing the president’s concocted tale. That tale claims that after seventeen years of being Epstein’s wingman and co-conspirator (see infra) as the two engaged in sex games across the Eastern Seaboard, Trump suddenly banned his best friend from Mar-a-Lago and stopped speaking to him because Epstein—who had apparently been recruiting sex slaves directly from Mar-a-Lago for years—“acted inappropriately” toward the daughter of a fellow club member. This tale is nonsense.
First, despite being a “fixture” at Mar-a-Lago, there have been frequent claims—most notably by Team Trump—that Epstein wasn’t a “member” at Mar-a-Lago, making it impossible for Trump to revoke a membership that did not exist. In those accounts that make the contrary claim, namely that Epstein was indeed a Mar-a-Lago member, the key revelation is that the only known incident in which Epstein was accused by Trump of acting inappropriately occurred in 2007, after Trump and Epstein hadn’t been speaking for three years and more than two years after Epstein had come under investigation in Florida for sexual misconduct. That investigation was a situation that Trump would have been well aware of (including Epstein’s 2006 indictment) not just because they still ran in the same social circles, but more importantly because Trump, as an act of personal revenge related to a failed real estate deal, was likely the one who dimed out Epstein to launch that investigation in the first instance (see infra).
By the time Trump banned Epstein from his club, Epstein was known to be pleading guilty to state charges of Solicitation as part of a federal criminal case against him. So the banning by Trump was in every respect an act of callous, cynical, and candidly cowardly self-preservation: he didn’t want Epstein associated with Mar-a-Lago; he didn’t want Palm Beach Police looking into how many years Epstein had been acting sexually inappropriately toward (or even recruiting sex slaves from among) Trump’s club members, let alone inquiring about whether his long-time best friend Trump knew anything about all this; and he certainly didn’t want Epstein to have physical access to him as the newly convicted sex criminal tried to figure out for certain how the 2005 criminal investigation of him had initially begun. So Trump’s oft-repeated claim—we’ve heard it from his pugnacious, profane spokesman Steven Cheung just this week—“that Trump removed Epstein from a club of his ‘for being a creep’” has no basis in fact, and indeed appears solely intended to end future questions about what he knew of Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago-centered sexual predation and procurement of rape victims for the 20 years Epstein was a “fixture” at the club before being “banned.”
But there’s another angle to this story many are missing, and it’s one that delves into the question of whether Epstein ever had a formal membership at Mar-a-Lago. What if, instead, he was comped a membership by Trump, and that comped membership—worth many millions of dollars over two decades—is one of the things Trump and his team now aim to hide beneath a seemingly benign claim that he was “not a member”?
After all, if Epstein was a fixture at Mar-a-Lago for nearly two decades, and if during that time he would have owed Trump millions in dues, why would Trump, who once infamously chased 13 cents (not a typo) for months and months, let him off the hook for that money? None of the answers would seem to be helpful to Trump. Either he was so fond of—and so close to—Epstein that he comped him millions of dollars in services; or Epstein had information about Trump so damaging that he could simply refuse to pay dues and Trump would do nothing about it; or, and this is perhaps the most interesting possibility, what he told a Forbes journalist face-to-face in December 2017 at his home in Florida (see The Big Picture) is true, namely that he was the one who provided Trump with the money to transform his home into the Mar-a-Lago club in 1995, in which case his borrower Trump was in no contractual position to charge him dues. Or there’s a fourth possibility, which is consistent with all the data this Proof report has compiled and that Proof has compiled generally about Trump over the last four years: all three of the above-referenced explanations are accurate.
So a billionaire child sex trafficker who could have paid his Mar-a-Lago dues from his pocket at any time was charged nothing at all as he stalked Donald Trump’s property for nearly two decades searching for (and often finding) future rape victims, and when the heat from him having done so for that many years finally came to be too much for Trump to handle in 2007, three years after the end of his friendship with Epstein on money-related rather than moral grounds, he took a desperate action intended to save himself from future Epstein scrutiny and banned Epstein from his club. Candidly, by then Epstein had apparently stopped coming to it with any frequency, anyway. Thus Trump framed himself as the crusading, anti-pedophile hero of a narrative in which he was in fact the co-antagonist.
To firmly plant his false narrative in fertile soil, Trump thereafter, in 2009, made Brad Edwards, an attorney for Epstein victims, one of its very first confirmed recipients—doing so at a time that any association with the already incarcerated Epstein would have been poisonous to Trump, who was then planning an eventually aborted 2012 presidential run. In so cementing a lie whose underlying truths were odious to a degree that could scarcely be imagined, and specifically in cementing them with the attorney most likely to be believed if he said that Trump had been helpful to all Epstein’s victims, Trump scored a longstanding victory that only now is coming under significant threat. In all this, it seems significant that this author has come across no stories of Donald Trump ever comping Mar-a-Lago dues, only jacking them up to exorbitant levels. Just so, it seems significant that Trump’s long history is of instantly forgiving or even coming to the aid of any man alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct—not directing that man’s punishment. There’s no record of Trump ever getting upset at a man making a pass at a young woman, even his own daughter.
Indeed, as we will see infra, Trump is especially excited to both hear about and share with others stories of men making improbable sexual advances on women they’re not supposed to be bothering. In fact, one might even say Trump has famously bragged about doing this. It’s arguably the the most famous recording the man has ever made.
Here’s the relevant transcript of Trump’s comments, from this New York Times report:
We should be clear on exactly what we’re reading here: Donald Trump is bragging, to one acquaintance (Billy Bush) and several strangers, that he “tried to fuck [a married woman]” while she was married and while he was married. He brags about viewing her as merely “a bitch”—a female dog—and finds it necessary to underscore a second time to the assembled group of acquaintances and strangers that he was actively trying to break up a marriage.
These are not the words of a man who cared one way or another what Mar-a-Lago club member (or non-member) Jeffrey Epstein—his best friend from 1989 to 1999 and a very close friend from 1988 to 2004—was doing at the club during that period, as is partly evidenced by the fact that what Epstein was then very successfully doing at Trump’s club, under Trump’s witting or unwitting nose, was recruiting rape victims. (As court records indicate Mr. Epstein was using Mar-a-Lago as a recruiting ground).
But we needn’t go down this rabbit-hole of Trump deceit any farther, as in fact we do already know both why and how the 17-year Trump-Epstein friendship actually ended.
It ended—as phone records and so much else show—well before the largely academic banning of the then-about-to-be-jailed Epstein from Mar-a-Lago at some unknown date in 2007, and thus even longer before “late 2007” (which was the first time any media outlet, namely the conservative tabloid that Trump often leaked to, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, reported that Epstein had been banned from Mar-a-Lago; it is worth noting that when this information was leaked to Murdoch’s tabloid—information that Epstein denied was even true until his death—it was months after Trump’s longtime best friend had signed his state plea deal for Solicitation, meaning Trump waited until Epstein was ruined before heaping additional administrative calumny upon him).
What really finally ended the seemingly endless, notorious Trump-Epstein bromance is widely known—the calculated lies Trump has told on the matter notwithstanding—because the Washington Post and many other outlets have reported on it.
As these outlets have reported, and as Epstein himself explained to Wolff at length, and as covered by the Palm Beach Post in detail here, in 2004 Epstein put in a $36 million bid to buy the former home of a close business associate and personal friend of his, Leslie Wexner. Epstein and Wexner were so close that the latter was one of the only publicly acknowledged clients of Epstein’s boutique investment firm; in fact, for reasons still mysterious, Epstein even had power of attorney over Wexner’s financial affairs. It was a dispute between Epstein and Trump over the Wexner Estate that led to the sudden break-up of their lengthy bromance—and in this case Donald Trump was the sole antagonist, and it was Epstein (hard as it is to believe) who was the sole victim.
{Note: Few other Epstein investment clients’ names are known, though one is billionaire Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, who paid Epstein a staggering $158 million (not a typo) simply for—or so the reporting goes—“financial advice.” Readers of this publication will recognize the name “Leon Black” because Black is a friend of the Trump Family, especially Jared Kushner, and his company at one point loaned Kushner $184 million for a building project. It was deemed a suspicious transaction at the time to the extent that Kushner was then-President Trump’s top policy adviser, and the Black loan was “triple the size of the average property loan made by Apollo’s real estate lending arm.” It was for this reason that the New York Times reported, of Epstein client Black’s 2018 loan to a Trump family member, “There is little precedent for a top White House official meeting with executives of companies as they contemplate sizable loans to his business, say government ethics experts.” That such a loan could also, in theory, have been justified if Black had elements of his relationship with Epstein that he didn’t want the world to know about, and that would be kept secret if—as would happen just a few months after his loan to Kushner—Trump’s Department of Justice began investigating Epstein and eventually, 18 months after the loan, arrested and imprisoned him, wasn’t seen as worthy of further investigation by the Times. This remained the case even after Epstein mysteriously turned up dead while in the custody of the Trump administration.
Major media continued to see all the foregoing as copacetic even as subsequent developments caused Black to have to quit his job at Apollo. As Kushner biographer Vicky Ward reports, “On July 21, 2023, it emerged in the New York Times that back in January 2023 Black paid the U.S. Virgin Islands $62.5 million to avoid being civilly sued in Epstein-related [banking] charges.” Nor did major media change its view on all this being fine after, beginning in 2023, Black came under public investigation by the Democrats’ leading Epstein expert in the United States Congress, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, for possible violations and/or abuse of major federal statutes. In this vein, it may also be worth noting that this close Trump family friend and Kushner lender, Leon Black, has also now been accused of raping a teen when she was 16—a crime that allegedly occurred at Epstein’s home.}
Jeffrey Epstein put in the highest bid by far for the Wexner Estate, and was so certain he would land it that, as he would detail to Michael Wolff in the mid-2010s, he invited his best friend—Trump—to view the grounds with him and give him advice on where to locate a new pool.
Trump turned around and bid over $40 million for the property, which (a) he hadn’t even known about before his best friend told him he was buying it, and (b) was many millions more than Trump even had to spend, as Epstein had reason to know because he was Trump’s best friend and had just a few years earlier (see infra) had to help Mr. Trump come up with the money to convert Mar-a-Lago from a personal residence to a club (for more on Trump’s finances during the heyday of his friendship with Epstein, and his need to rely on Epstein and possibly even some dodgy Epstein associates to stay afloat, see this now-famous New York Times report).
Epstein of course knew instantly that Trump had put in his bid to hurt and embarrass him. Even many years later, that understanding of events appears to be true, as while Trump had no means to harm Epstein via sex, as we will see below the man got quite nearly sexually titillated by the prospect of betraying his closest friends—and bidding to undermine Epstein’s dream of owning the palatial Wexner Estate was exactly that.
{Note: This happens to be a common psychological feature of pathological liars like Trump. They are physically excited by seeing how big a lie they can get away with, and lying to and about their closest confidants adds to the experience. I say this after many years of working with extremely talented pathological liars as a criminal defense attorney. What made Trump’s deceit particularly cruel, however, was that whereas Trump only wanted to “flip” the Wexner Estate, the Washington Post reports that “Epstein seemed interested in living at the place.”
In other words, Trump didn’t just steal a house from under his best friend, but a home. And he was so adamant about doing so, the Post further reports, that his personal involvement and vociferousness in the courtroom proceedings aimed at taking the property away from Epstein’s final $38.6 million bid were deeming “shocking” by those in attendance. Trump seemed to be strangely giddy at the prospect of hurting a man who’d been special to him for so many years.
The Post notes that Trump left two messages for Epstein at his Florida home in the days after the courtroom battle. To this day, no one knows what those messages said. What is known is that “on November 28, 2004, less than two weeks after the mansion auction [at which Trump won the Wexner Estate], Palm Beach police fielded a tip that young women were seen coming and going from Epstein’s home, then-Police Chief Michael Reiter said in a deposition.” It is worth keeping in mind here that Trump has a long, documented history of snitching—diming people out to law enforcement for personal gain.}
The account Jeffrey Epstein shared with Michael Wolff gets even more interesting from here.
According to Wolff, Epstein wasn’t entirely surprised by Trump’s betrayal, as he knew Trump to be the sort of man who would betray anyone almost instantaneously if he saw a profit in it. In consequence, what the angered Epstein was most interested in, as a man of dark and often self-destructive action, was finding out who was fronting money for Trump.
As a billionaire who had fronted money for the habitually cash-poor Trump before, Epstein was certain, as he would later tell Wolff, that someone who wanted to hurt him—or simply someone who had a reason to provide an unexpected financial windfall to Trump—was fronting Trump’s money in the Wexner Estate auction. So he set about trying to figure out who that was, which amateur investigation involved “threatening” Trump (it’s implied, but not stated explicitly, with exposures about his personal life) in order to get Trump to back down from the estate deal and reveal his secret backer(s).
It’s worth noting here that all this happened in the mid-2000s, and that by the time of his death in the next decade, Epstein would be known to have hundreds of millions of dollars in several secret bank accounts in sanctioned, Kremlin-linked Russian banks.
He would also die widely suspected (see here, here, here, and here for more discussion of this) of being an Israeli (Mossad) or even American (CIA) intelligence asset (from the New York Times, by way of example: “There’s a famous secondhand quote from [former Trump Secretary of Labor and original Epstein prosecutor Alex] Acosta, where he was reportedly told—by someone else in the first Trump administration—to back off Epstein because Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’”).
As readers will learn more about infra (see The Big Picture), Epstein also claimed, in late 2017, to be a major investor of funds for one of the wealthiest men alive, that being Mohammed bin Salman—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and a man Donald Trump acted outrageously obsequiously with, for reasons no one ever determined, for the entirety of 2017, his first year as president). A fake Saudi passport would be found in Epstein’s vault after his home was raided by the FBI, suggesting that he believed he would be able to flee to the Kingdom for protection if the law came looking for him.
With all this in mind, and given the amount of money Trump had come up with to try to screw Epstein over—tens of millions of dollars, effectively appearing overnight—Epstein’s certainty that someone was fronting the money for Trump to either benefit Trump or hurt him might well have included a fear that a state actor was involved.
{Note: New York Times journalist Ross Douthat has said, “There’s two intelligence [related] stories you could tell [about Jeffrey Epstein]: one, Epstein was literally an ‘intelligence agency,’ trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the United States government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme [version of events]. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. [Ghislaine Maxwell’s father] Robert Maxwell…had connections to Israeli intelligence. So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a[n] [indirect] conduit of information [to Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service].”}
In any case, what we know is that Epstein was “threatening” Trump about the source of the money for the Wexner Estate, and Trump didn’t want to reveal the sourcing or remove his bid.
According to Epstein—and candidly, consistent with the timeline of events described above—Trump got the jump on those potentially ruinous threats from Epstein by contacting the Palm Beach Police and anonymously reporting that “young” females had been seen coming and going from Epstein’s home with suspicious regularity. (In addition to the above reminder about Trump’s history of diming people out, we must now add, given that the call to the PBP was made anonymously, that Trump also has a long, storied, and often unintentionally hilarious history of making calls in character; with this in mind, nothing about the PBP getting a sudden tip about Epstein’s home in the midst of an unprecedentedly brutal Trump-Epstein kerfuffle would have been at all unlike Trump’s established modus operandi).
It was at this moment, and for these reasons, that the Trump-Epstein bromance ended.
But that’s not nearly the end of the story of the Wexner Estate.
It turns out that Jeffrey Epstein had extremely good reasons to be suspicious of Trump’s sudden cash windfall—the one that allowed him to outbid Epstein, on a property once owned by a man who had a close relationship with Epstein, to a degree that almost beggars belief given Trump’s finances at the time—to the point that Trump’s brief ownership of the Wexner Estate is now considered one of the enduring real estate mysteries of the twentieth century. If Leslie Wexner is (and he is) often said to be the sole reason that suspected Israeli and/or American spy Jeffrey Epstein became rich and powerful, and thus well-positioned to blackmail powerful men across the world, so too must it be said that far and away the most shockingly lucrative real estate deal Donald Trump ever did was with a Russian oligarch under the thumb of Vladimir Putin. And that real estate deal was his eventual sale of the Wexner Estate in 2008.
Here Proof quotes from the New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion (Chapter 1):
In November 2004, Trump bought for $41 million a parcel of land in Florida [the Wexner Estate] that—despite the improvements he thereafter made to it—he couldn’t unload.
In 2006, it was on the market for $125 million, more than three times what Trump paid for it; by the time the Great Recession began in the latter half of 2007, Trump had had to drop the price by 20%, to around $100 million.
In the summer of 2008, a Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev offered nearly the full asking price for the property—$95 million—despite Trump having no competing offers.
Trump thereby made a $54 million net profit in forty-eight months.
Rybolovlev immediately destroyed the structures on the property that Trump had renovated and divided the land into three parcels. By 2018, he was still hoping to make a mere $18 million profit—one-third of Trump’s own profit—in over a decade of holding the land.
The Charlotte Observer will note in March 2017 that Rybolovlev’s plane was parked next to Trump’s in Charlotte, not briefly but for hours, five days before Election Day in 2016 [an election a bipartisan Senate committee found Russia had interfered with to aid Trump].
The two men, Trump and Rybolovlev [the latter a Russian oligarch who was then on the outs with the Kremlin, and thus had a grave need to get into Putin’s good graces] likewise had their planes “meet” at a Las Vegas airport four days prior to their second meeting in Charlotte, despite their current claim that they’ve never met each other.
A representative for Rybolovlev “declined to say whether the oligarch had been aboard the plane when it landed in Charlotte”, according to the Observer.
The representative also declined to say “whether anyone associated with Trump was a passenger [on Rybolovlev’s plane] or whether its arrival was in any way connected with Trump’s campaign.”
As the Observer concluded, “If Rybolovlev were somehow assisting the campaign, it would constitute an illegal foreign donation.”
….
The influence Putin wields over his billionaire [oligarchs] is such that if he wanted to turn off the spigot of their money as it flooded to Trump Organization properties in America, he could do so—and quickly. Says Thomas Graham, co-director of the Russian Studies program at Yale University, of the personal property holdings of Russian oligarchs [like Rybolovlev], “You can lose your property overnight if you run afoul of Vladimir Putin.”
Trump’s surprising determination to get hold of the Wexner Estate for a price well over what anyone else, including Epstein, was offering—almost as though Trump knew that he would make a killing on the property if he could just get his hands on it—is the reason for the end of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the apparent reason why Trump concocted and has spent many years sticking with an imaginary explanation for that event (the fact that doing so also leaves the impression on voters that he saw the evil in Epstein from early on is a pleasant soupçon; “It shows I have good taste,” he once smirkingly said to media).
In fact—and it’s admittedly astonishing to say this of a notorious child sex trafficker—it appears to have been Epstein who (1) was cruelly screwed over by Trump in a matter concerning tens of millions of dollars; (2) was screwed over in a way that would have hurt and enraged anyone; (3) correctly assessed that Trump had bent over backwards to screw him over in this way, namely by putting up money he didn’t have in the hope of a future windfall he somehow felt confident anticipating 48 months before it arrived; (4) understandably challenged his friend directly on this conduct, deducing accurately that there was something his best friend was hiding from him in the midst of a long-term relationship where it certainly seems neither kept many secrets from the other); and (5) thereafter nearly had his life destroyed by a well-warranted federal criminal prosecution which—nevertheless—appears to have been maliciously orchestrated in part by a best friend who had already betrayed him by stealing his home.
Why did Trump suddenly want to see Epstein imprisoned for life? We don’t know.
Perhaps it was merely anger over the Wexner Estate feud. Perhaps whoever (or what-ever) was fronting him the Wexner Estate money made ending the career of an alleged Israeli spy part of the bargain. Perhaps he was planning to jumpstart his political career shortly, and needed Epstein out of the way for that to safely happen. Perhaps he envied Epstein for actually being rich rather than, like him, merely pretending to be.
The possibilities appear to be endless—and as ever, it’s possible that more than one of them are simultaneously true.
{Note: This report does not accuse Wexner of any misconduct. His reason for giving over so much of his life and fortune to a suspected child-sex blackmailer certainly has raised questions over the last few decades, not without reason, but it’s a mystery that has never been resolved.
As the New York Times reports of Wexner, famous for owning Victoria’s Secret, “Through his proximity to Wexner, Epstein gained unique access to young women. In the summer of 1996, Maria Farmer was working on an art project for Epstein in Wexner’s Ohio mansion. While she was there, Epstein sexually assaulted her, according to an affidavit Farmer filed earlier this year [2019] in federal court in Manhattan. She said that she fled the room and called the police, but that Wexner’s security staff refused to let her leave for 12 hours. That was around the time that executives at [Wexner’s] L Brands learned that Epstein was trying to involve himself in the recruitment of lingerie models for the Victoria’s Secret catalog—a coveted assignment for young models and aspiring actresses. That was troubling: Victoria’s Secret sourced models from talent agencies, not individuals, according to the two former executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements after leaving the company….Nearly a decade later, in early 2006, Florida authorities charged Epstein with multiple counts of molestation and unlawful sexual activity with a minor. It wasn’t until 18 months later that Wexner cut ties with Epstein….Since Epstein’s arrest this month [July 2019], [Epstein victim] Alicia Arden [a woman Epstein sexually assaulted after representing himself as an agent for Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret] said she has wondered whether his connections to Wexner allowed him to get away with the crimes he is now charged with. ‘Why would someone that powerful and successful [Wexner] befriend someone like Jeffrey Epstein?’ Ms. Arden said. ‘I don’t get it.’”
Of all the men now living, the two who have taken the most extraordinary—and inexplicable—actions and risks on behalf of Epstein at various points in their lives are Wexner and Trump. It is worth noting as well that before Trump decided to make his false claim of ending his long friendship with Epstein over a vaguely circumscribed incident at Mar-a-Lago his go-to lie on the subject in the 2020s, he told the Washington Post in 2019, evasively, “The reason [for the ‘rupture’ in our relationship] doesn’t make any difference, frankly.” It appears that Trump was adamant that the Wexner Estate not become a topic of political conversation; after all, 2019 was the height of the Trump-Russia Scandal.
What’s clear is that, by 2009, Trump, who was by then already gearing up for his planned 2012 bid for the presidency—see discussion infra—was so determined to separate himself from his recently imprisoned former best friend that he rather extravagantly offered to aid his accusers in seeking to bankrupt Epstein and possibly seek additional incarceration. Such magnanimity, nowhere mirrored anywhere else in Trump’s life, looks to have been a political calculation so that lawyers involved in the Epstein civil litigation of the time, like the aforementioned Brad Edwards, would subsequently say Trump was helpful to them. Which they have dutifully done.
Finally, to return briefly to the subject of whether Trump would leak to the New York Post’s “Page Six” gossip column: per the Daily Beast, which cites 104 minutes of the Epstein-Wolff Tapes as one of its of sources, “Trump, Epstein said, was almost ‘functionally illiterate,’ but did read the ‘Page Six’ gossip column in the New York Post. [But] he was ‘incapable’ of reading a balance sheet, and any ‘act of kindness’ would have been an accident.”]
Interlude
“For the better part of two decades starting in the late 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump swam in the same social pool. They were neighbors in Florida. They jetted from LaGuardia to Palm Beach together. They partied at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and dined at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.
….
Photos and articles captured the men together over the years, the future president of the United States and the future convicted sex offender: Here they are, Epstein and longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump and his then-girlfriend, Melania Knauss, double dating at a celebrity tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago. Partying with Britain’s Prince Andrew. Hanging out with National Football League cheerleaders. Dancing, laughing, palling around at a party Trump threw to celebrate his ‘freedom’ after he divorced his second wife, Marla Maples.
‘Terrific guy,’ Trump said of Epstein in 2002. ‘He’s a lot of fun to be with.’
….
[Yet] in 2016, Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten told Fox News that Trump had ‘no relationship’ with Epstein: ‘They were not friends and they did not socialize together.’”
— The Washington Post (July 31, 2019)
“On the tape Jeffrey Epstein can be heard saying, ‘Trump is a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, his best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust…[he] uses it to do bad things to them.
On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a [married] woman to what he called ‘The Egyptian Room’ in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged that Trump ‘came out afterward and said, “It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is fuck the wives of my best friends. That’s just the best.”’”
— The Epstein-Wolff Tapes (The Daily Beast, Congressional Report)
Chapter 3: Sex Game—Seducing Your Best Friend’s Wife
According to Epstein—who was, in fact, contra the lies Trump had Garten, his family company’s lawyer, tell America through Fox News—Trump’s best friend for at least a decade, and a very close friend of the known sexual predator-cum-president for at least seventeen years, Trump didn’t have any other friends during that time period.
Instead, Trump spent all of his time in those years with Epstein, Maxwell, his own bodyguard (then Matthew Calamari Sr., a man paid to be nice to him), his secretary (then Rhona Graff, a woman paid to be nice to him), and his daughter Ivanka (who was financially dependent on him and arguably is still, given the inheritance that she stands to gain when her father passes away).
That Trump didn’t see many men or women as genuine friends in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s is confirmed, Epstein told Wolff, by the fact that Trump would say things like, “The only thing I really like to do is fuck the wives of my best friends. That’s just the best.” Those aren’t the words of a man who thinks he has, or even cares to have, mutually affectionate friendships.
Instead, as a man largely incapable of sustained joy or authentic connection to others, per the account offered by Epstein to Wolff during Trump’s first term, Trump had to gamify his life to try to feel alive or engaged with the world. One way to do that was by seeing if he could do something incredibly (a) sadistic, and (b) strategically difficult: have sex with the wives of his “friends.”
In The Epstein-Wolff Tapes, we hear Epstein describe a typical scam Trump would run when trying to do as described above (Epstein here uses Wolff’s name, Michael, and the name of Wolff’s wife, Victoria, to explain in detail Trump’s modus operandi):
“[Trump] would say, ‘Michael, let’s go to [my] office.’ And he’d say, ‘Michael, tell me what it’s like being married?’ Michael would say, ‘Ah, you know…’
[Trump would reply], ‘Do you like having sex with your wife? How often do you?’ [The friend would say], ‘It’s great.’
[Epstein, as Trump:] ‘Michael, Seriously, how often do you have sex with your wife? Don’t you want [unintelligible]. We can—you and I can go upstairs, or tomorrow you can come over, there’s this girl coming in from Los Angeles, part of the Hawaiian Tropic Contest. So come over at 3 o’clock. You can have a great time. I promise you, Michael—you know, it’s just you and me [here], you’re going to have a great time. Be here, 3 o’clock, we can go upstairs.’
[Epstein to Wolff:] The whole time, Victoria has been on the phone listening. [Trump] is setting it [all] up, because he wants to fuck Victoria.
…
[Epstein, as Trump:] ‘You must have had a better fuck than your wife, right?’ Michael answers, ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me about it,’ [Trump says]. And the wife’s on the speakerphone listening.”
There are of course too many components to this to summarize them adequately, but here would be at least a starter list of all the sexual misconduct red flags we see above:
Trump is engaging in a premeditated plot to cheat on his own wife;
Trump is engaging in a premeditated plot to end a friend’s marriage;
In the context of a conversation about “sex”—namely, Trump trying to convince a friend that he could be having better sex than he is currently having with his wife—Trump offers him a “girl” from a competition Trump is presumably a judge for, and who therefore needs to do as Trump tells her to stay on his good side (a phenomenon much reported on, and that Trump has always pushed on pageant coordinators; Trump has implied contestants slept with him as part of his vile pageant operations);
Trump tells his friend he will provide the location in which the illicit sex will occur (consistent with the activities of a high-end pimp who rents out rooms for his many escorts); and
the reason Trump’s friend doesn’t question that this offer is 100% real is because Trump is known to engage in behavior like this.
This last point is the most significant.
Epstein is describing a scam that Trump regularly ran on his friends who had wives he wanted to have sex with, but of course it’s only a successful scam if Trump is widely known by those who know him best to actually be able and willing to pimp out beauty pageant contestants and if he is known to provide safe locations for this adulterous, implicitly abusive sex to happen.
If you or I were ever made an offer of this sort by a “friend,” not only would we be disgusted by it and likely end the friendship, but our first reaction would be incredulity. What normal person even has one friend who could—let alone would—offer to act as a pimp for a married person? That Trump’s friends took his offers to pimp women they had never met before to them confirms that this was a practice Trump had engaged in a sufficient number of times in reality that he could then exploit his deserved ill repute by destroying his friend’s lives and having sex with their wives. Only upon a base of actual past pimping by Trump could the detailed scheme Epstein describes above work.
And as we will see in this report, that history is exactly the sort of history Trump has.
The New York City sex scene Trump spent decades not just inside but dominating is as depraved a subcommunity as most readers of this report will ever have encountered—and that includes in television and film. And as noted, Trump wasn’t merely one of many participants in a deranged orgy of sexual misconduct: he was its ringmaster. (Do understand that a detailed exploration of this scene isn’t the primary work of this Proof report, however; that was pursued by Proof and the Proof Project via Proof of Cruelty—so if you have a strong stomach for explicit tales of a sitting President of the United States committing countless Sexual Assaults and Rapes, it’s the primary text on that.)
Which brings us to the sixth point about the above-described scheme, and the reason it appears in this Proof report: if you were the sort of degenerate man who scammed and destroyed your friends like this, would you tell anyone—ever—that you’d done so?
Of course not.
Because whoever you told would never speak to you again, so disgusted would they be by your behavior and, for that matter, the evident pride you must have taken in it to be repeating it in company. But there’s a second reason you wouldn’t speak about it: the whole point of the scam was to have sex with a woman you found beautiful, and in so doing create a replicable plan of action for future sexual consequents. Telling anyone what you had done would put at risk possibly years of pursuing this vile enterprise. It is true that one wouldn’t worry much about the men you’d cuckolded telling anyone what you’d done—they’d be too embarrassed to admit they had been hoodwinked in this way—but you would have to be certain, if you spread the tale to anyone else, that they were sufficiently sociopathic to (a) remain friends with you after they’d told you what they did, and (b) keep your secrets despite being the sort of sociopath one would normally never trust to care about or keep secrets.
And yet, every time Trump pulled this stunt—cuckolding one his best friends—he told Jeffrey Epstein about it, meaning he knew exactly what sort of man Epstein was.
But it means something else as well: that part of the sexual titillation for Trump in having sex with another man’s wife, and in ruining another man’s life, and in cruelly ending a “friendship” in the most callous and borderline demonic way imaginable, and (in the bargain) presenting oneself to a rich, powerful “client”—the man you’re about to cuckold—as a talented pimp with a stable of beautiful models ready to have sex with anyone their master points at, was to at the end of all this disgusting and possibly even psychopathic malfeasance tell someone else what you’d done in great detail.
As a boast.
Trump chose one man to be the receptacle for these stories—stories that could ruin him among a sizeable chunk of his political base if they ever got out—and one man only: Jeffrey Epstein. In the best-case scenario, Trump merely chose Epstein because he knew Epstein was sexually deranged; in the worst-case scenario, Trump knew that Epstein would keep his secrets no matter what because the secrets Trump was hiding about Epstein were even worse. Perhaps even the sort of secrets Trump could share with the Palm Beach Police if he ever got really angry at his “friend.”
The one thing we can be certain of is that Trump didn’t place blind trust in the idea that Epstein would never betray him, because in ten years of researching and writing on Donald Trump I haven’t encountered him granting blind trust to any person even once. Donald Trump trusts no one except—possibly—Ivanka. Something conjoined Trump and Epstein that made secrets like this safe for the two men to share with one another, which suggests that Epstein shared his own secrets with Trump. And as we will see in this report, that’s exactly what he did.
But Trump didn’t limit his deranged sexual aggression to trying to ruin the marriages of friends. He was equally interested in trying to destroy the relationships of strangers, especially if he could do so on a whim and with virtually no forethought whatsoever. He liked the flippancy of it. As Epstein would explain to Michael Wolff in the Epstein-Wolff Tapes,
He [Epstein] and Trump would pick up women by combining [cooperating] to split them from their male companions.
“We always used to go to Atlantic City to try to find girls in the casino. And if there was a guy [with a woman Trump wanted], I would say, ‘I’m here to invite the guy to go out to dinner.’ And [meanwhile] Trump would say to the woman, ‘Let me show you the casino.’
And as Trump walked out [with the man’s girlfriend], he [would] put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, and [his] bodyguard would walk up and Donald [would] ‘Whoosh!’ take the girl away.”
The key words above are “always”—meaning that this was a scam Trump and Epstein regularly pulled on unsuspecting men—and “bodyguard,” as Epstein emphasizes that Trump liked to move quickly when he was stealing a man’s girlfriend, and would use the fact that he was rich enough to have a bodyguard to essentially “block” the man he was victimizing from fully realizing that a second man (Trump) was in on the scam.
(In case it’s not clear, the “casino scam” involved Epstein first—alone—making an entreaty to a man to dine with him, perhaps offering the sort of investment advice Epstein was known to offer many men he met, and then Trump coming in while the man was distracted and leaving with the man’s girlfriend. Trump would do this, it must be said in particularly cowardly fashion, behind the cover of his bodyguard.
It’s the sort of gambit one would normally assume wouldn’t work—but for the fact that a significant segment of America finds men like Trump and Epstein charming.
Interlude
“‘They were tight,’ said one person who observed them together and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution [from Trump]. ‘They were each other’s wingmen.’
….
‘Donald liked Epstein,’ said Steven Hoffenberg, a Trump acquaintance who was Epstein’s business partner at a New York private equity firm in the 1980s and 1990s, until Hoffenberg was convicted of running a massive Ponzi scheme. ‘But he was crazy about [Epstein’s now imprisoned child-sex procurer Ghislaine] Maxwell, a very charming lady.’”
— The Washington Post (July 31, 2019)
Chapter 4: Sex Game—Performative Sexual Assault
We think of Sexual Assault as something a man does with only one eyewitness: his victim. Perhaps that goes without saying, as this public perception is both sensible and warranted; Sexual Assault is a serious felony, so committing it in the presence of another person makes that person a potential future witness against you in a criminal prosecution.
As a former public defender who represented thousands of criminal defendants in multiple jurisdictions, including many men accused of the full panoply of sex crimes—from Indecent Exposure up to Rape—I can say from professional experience in the courtroom that a man only commits a sex crime in the presence of another man in one of several scenarios: that man is (a) a co-conspirator in the crime (which means that his witnessing it legally makes no difference, not as a matter of his potential future criminal liability); (b) someone who has in the past committed crimes with the sexual assailant (meaning that if either man goes down for anything in the future, it’s highly likely both men do); or (c) someone who has such an encyclopedic knowledge of the wrongs committed by the sexual assailant, and vice versa, that either man hiding from the other that he’s a sexual predator has long since become rather beside the point.
We already know that Epstein was a serial sexual predator.
And we already know Trump was—from the 1970s through 2013 (see Introduction) for many years, indeed as many if not more than Epstein, also a serial sexual predator.
We already know Epstein was a committed pedophile and child sex trafficker.
And we also know that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed, in public, pedophilia-adjacent (specifically, hebephilic) feelings—at a minimum—and has more friends and advisers and aides who are pedophiles or are accused of being sex traffickers, child sex traffickers, pimps, human traffickers, sexual miscreants, sexual harassers, serial sexual predators, spousal abusers, domestic abusers, or serial rapists than the average person in America will even be in the physical presence of in their entire lives. The list of Trump-world figures who are accused of criminal (and often sexual) misconduct is so lengthy that there’s a whole archive at Proof (not updated since September 2021, nevertheless astonishingly long) itemizing just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we know. As a Trump biographer I have in the past catalogued dozens of such persons in my other books and reports on Trump, but you can also find outside reports on the subject here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The short summary is that it’s nearly impossible to find Trump taking a woman’s side in any instance of alleged sexual misconduct, no matter how grotesque the fact-pattern or even how young the victim is.
In November 2024, Fortune even reported that fully 33% of Trump’s Cabinet picks had been accused of sexual misconduct. CNN reports that Trump “always” believes any man who’s been accused of sexual misconduct if he says he did nothing wrong… unless he’s a Democrat.
So when former Sports Illustrated supermodel Stacey Williams—Williams was famous enough in the 1990s that as a Sports Illustrated subscriber in that decade I recognized her name immediately on seeing it again in the 2020s—accused Trump of committing Sexual Assault against her while she was (a) dating Jeffrey Epstein, and (b) with Trump in Epstein’s presence, the news should have been much more of a surprise than it was.
By that time, America had read so many accounts of Trump being Epstein’s wingman at party after party after party that it had become difficult to imagine each not being aware of and comfortable with the other’s sexual peccadilloes-cum-sex-crimes. And as we’ve seen in this and other past Proof reports, Trump is very much an exhibitionist when it comes to his criminal sexual deviancy (we must recall here that he raped E. Jean Carroll in a large department store).
Here is Williams’ account, from a 2025 report in the New York Times:
Having worked Sexual Assault cases as a criminal justice professional, I can explain to Proof readers that each individual “sexual contact” with either Williams’ “breasts” or her “buttocks” was a discrete sex crime—specifically, Sexual Assault (albeit whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony sex crime would depend on the jurisdiction; it would in any jurisdiction require years, or even a lifetime, of registration as a sex offender).
Had Trump ever been forced to register as a sex offender, even for a single year, his overriding ambition in life—to one day become President of the United States, a plan he first began testing the waters for forty years ago, in the mid-1980s—would have instantly become an impossibility.
Meanwhile, each individual “unprivileged physical contact” with Williams’ “waist”— so, for instance, him surprising her by “pulling her towards him” in a way intended to surprise her—would be considered by law a violent crime known as Simple Assault.
With all this in mind, I’ll note that in writing Proof of Cruelty in 2024 I encountered two consistent subnarratives in the dozens of accounts of Trump’s sex-crime victims:
Trump gets special pleasure from beginning his Sexual Assaults with Simple Assaults. Many—many—women described Trump first grabbing them like they were a piece of meat he wanted to consume, violently dragging them toward him (reminiscent of the way a Roper draws victims to its maw in Dungeons & Dragons, the best analogy I can find for what these women described). This appears to be part of the sexual titillation for Trump; he doesn’t aim to surprise women with unwanted contact in what’s already an intimate moment, but to communicate to them that he can do as he pleases with them at any moment. Indeed, many Trump Sexual Assaults and Rapes involved him immobilizing his victims through brute force before sexually violating them, which again puts one in mind of a mythical monster popularized in the 1980s and 1990s (the period Trump and Epstein were most active in sexually assaulting women), that being the disgusting evil creature in Dungeons & Dragons known as a Beholder.
Trump tries to commit as many Sexual Assaults as he can in as short a time-period as possible. Like a child trying to stuff as many sweets in his mouth as he can before he’s caught out by a responsible adult, Trump—as many, many of his victims described him—is indeed Roper-like in his ability to touch a woman in as many places on her body that constitute Sexual Assault (or even Digital Rape, the aforementioned “grabbing by the pussy”) as he can in a matter of seconds, with more than one victim describing him as being like an “octopus” in this regard. This criminal modus operandi suggests a voracious, ultraviolent sexual appetite, but also something else: as an infamously physically weak (if physically imposing) physical coward who mostly preys on women by catching them by surprise at a time that they’re still mere acquaintances, Trump’s lightning-fast multi-assault approach (a) minimally taxes his physical strength, as he needn’t hold his victim for long (and by catching them by surprise, he forestalls their physical resistance by critical seconds), and (b) makes it possible for his victim to wonder what just happened when the criming stops. To explain this: because Trump committed many of his Sexual Assaults in public places, there was never any belief on his part that these sex crimes would result in forced sexual intercourse—which is physically taxing—or a surprising sudden reciprocation of his advances (as he was assaulting mostly strangers or acquaintances) or an opportunity to continue the assault for an extended period of time (as he was committing his crimes in the presence of third parties who might get impatient with that). So it was in his own best interest to commit as many crimes in as short a period as possible and then release his hold on his victim. Events would transpire so quickly, many of his victims later said, that they would became disoriented and in some cases couldn’t even fully appreciate that they’d been the victim of a sex crime until much later.
The Trump modus operandi described above is one he’s confessed to—and is proud of.
Each component of the GRAB (Assault)–TOUCH (Sexual Assault)–QUICK RELEASE (Disengagement) technique Trump’s victims report is bragged about by Trump above (emphasis supplied):
GRAB. From Trump’s confession of being serial sexual predator: “I just start kissing them….I don’t even wait…..[you can] grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
TOUCH. From Trump’s confession of being serial sexual predator: “I just start kissing them….[or you can] grab ‘em by the pussy.”
QUICK RELEASE. A reference to the fact that Trump’s victims generally don’t issue an immediate—in situ—exclamation to a third party about the sex crime they’ve just been the victim of, as they remain so surprised about what’s just happened, and how quickly it happened, that they’re breathless and disoriented. Trump maliciously interprets this as “they let you [sexually assault them]” and do so “[because] you’re a star.” This obscene self-justification, repeated thereafter in civil depositions Trump sat for and often lied in, also gives Trump a potential premeditated defense: that is, he’s already laid the groundwork for saying that he thought the women welcomed his contact, as they didn’t exhibit any upset over it after the fact, and thereafter were seen to deal with him warmly and with the admiration stars often experience. (Another element of Trump’s modus operandi following many of his Sexual Assaults was continuing to have contact with the woman he’d assaulted so that he could later, if need be, have his lawyers argue that he couldn’t have assaulted her because she continued agreeing to be in his presence thereafter—a grotesque “defense” that lawyers who represent victims of persistent spousal abuse would at once be horrified at and not at all surprised by).
So beyond the Williams Sexual Assaults, is there other evidence of Trump engaging in performative sexual conduct with Jeffrey Epstein present? According to Michael Wolff, the answer is “yes.”
In his recent interview with longtime Trump fixer, friend, attorney, and employee Michael Cohen, Wolff reveals that he personally saw three Polaroid photographs of Donald Trump that were in Epstein’s private collection of photographs, which photos depict Trump surrounded by topless teens. In one of the photos, Trump has a wet spot on his crotch that the girls are visibly laughing at pointing to.
If such photographs exist, they would (a) present an instance of Trump having some sort of sexual or sexualized encounter with teens in Epstein’s presence (as well as a willingness to allow Epstein to photograph parts of such an encounter), and (b) be in the custody of the Trump administration FBI right now—that’s right, the part of the Epstein Files that Trump is now refusing to release, contra his explicit campaign promises—because Wolff says that the photographs were kept in Epstein’s home safe, and the contents of that home safe were all taken by… Donald Trump’s first-term FBI.
Alternately, those photographs are not in the Epstein Files, in which case it would indicate that they were likely illicitly destroyed by… Donald Trump’s first-term FBI.
A third possibility, far worse than the others, is that the FBI doesn’t know where these photographs are—and neither does Trump—which means they could well have been maliciously removed from FBI custody by someone who either sold them or transferred them to a third party, to include, quite possibly, a state actor who now holds them as potential kompromat to be used against the President of the United States. If indeed Epstein was an Israeli intelligence agent, the likelihood these dangerous materials are now in the custody of a rogue nation Trump is appeasing in the midst of a genocide skyrockets, and the matter of the unreleased Epstein Files grows exponentially in its importance. One could argue that knowing what is or is not in the those Files is now a national security matter that can no longer be kept hidden from the American people.
We ought to consider, here, that the three nations Epstein is known to have had the most clandestine relationships with—Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—are precisely the three nations Donald Trump has been inexplicably solicitous with for the last decade, often to the demonstrable detriment of the United States. As the number of dead child sex traffickers who used to be best friends with Donald Trump and had most of their offshore dealings with those three countries in particular is only one, and will only ever be one, it certainly makes public concern about the Epstein Files not a matter of conspiracy theorizing but imminent, rational, explainable national concern.
{Note: Trump, perhaps fearing that the FBI-held photographs of him at a pool with Epstein and topless teenagers will someday leak to the press, has his own version of similar events that would be laugh-out-loud funny if it wasn’t likely a cover story for pedophilic or pedophile-adjacent misconduct. As the Washington Post reports, per Trump “The one time I visited [Epstein’s] Palm Beach home, the swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls. ‘How nice,’ I thought, ‘he let the neighborhood kids use his pool.’ ” This story about one of the—it seems likely—many times Trump visited his best friend at his just-down-the-street home across the seventeen years of their friendship (Trump being a notorious liar, according to Epstein’s brother Mark, on the specific subject of when and where he would meet with Jeffrey to hang out) is interesting because of how strategically it establishes a future defense for Trump if the photographs Wolff and Epstein have spoken of ever get out. To wit, Trump would in the event of such a public disclosure agree that the topless teens were underage and in fact go farther and suggest that he thought they were so young that they were mere “neighborhood kids” who went topless in the way very young kids sometimes do. In any case, it’s hard to accept that a man who routinely implies he’s one of the smartest men out there went to the home of his best friend—a man who he knew, by his own prior admission, was obsessed with females “on the younger side”—saw topless teens all over the friend’s pool area and thought only to himself that they were “neighborhood kids” using his friend’s massive mansion as a public playground.
According to the late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, she was present at least once at a social gathering that involved Epstein, Trump, and some number of Epstein’s underage victims. This is what she quotes Trump as saying about the situation: “Jeffrey, you’ve got the life.” One key indicator that Giuffre is telling the truth here is that in the same statement she observes that, at the event, Trump neither flirted with her nor tried to have sex with her—one of the very few exculpatory facts this journalist could find in any report involving Trump, Epstein, and teens.
Yet another indicator of the accuracy of this statement by Giuffre is how closely it mirrors the words Trump once said to Daily Beast reporter Michael Gross: “As a young man on the make in New York City, Trump had joined the private Le Club. ‘It was fuckin’ wild,’ he told me. ‘The most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life were at Le Club. I had seen some incredible women going into Le Club with rich guys. And I said, “Boy, that’s a cool life.’” That is actually how the man talks.}
Interlude
“Trump is an emotionally challenged nine-year-old….He screams and yells at [his longtime secretary] Rhona [Graff] more than anybody else. His screaming is how he treats people. He has a tantrum—not a temper. If you don’t understand him, [his temper] is frightening. Once you understand him, it’s sort of silly.
….
The moral compass [of Donald Trump] just does not exist.”
— Jeffrey Epstein in The Epstein-Wolff Tapes (The Daily Beast, Congressional Report)
Chapter 5: Sex Game—The Meat Market
Every sex crime ends with a sex crime, but fact-patterns that end with sex crimes don’t always start with sex crimes (in fact, they usually don’t; Trump’s lightning-fast sex crimes, which constitute both the beginning and the ending of a criminal fact-pattern, are the exception rather than the rule). Certainly, there are many sex games, including ones played by pedophiles and serial sexual predators and human and sex traffickers, that are as much about passive sexual titillation as violent confrontation.
In short, one reason both Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein got involved in the NYC modeling scene in the 1990s (Epstein sometimes informally, sometimes through yet another man in this story who mysteriously died by a “hanging suicide” in his prison cell, Jean-Luc Brunel); one reason both Trump and Epstein were infamous for making false promises (as to jobs, television exposure, films, even future educational degrees) to the women they were trying to seduce but had no intention of doing any good for; one reason both Trump and Epstein repeatedly put themselves in situations in which they were judging the physical appearance of women like pieces of meat arrayed before them, is because these two rich misogynists loved the anticipation of a future crime—perhaps even just as much as the lies they told to hasten the onset of that crime. (In the same Vox report in which we learned that Trump advises his male friends to be “rougher with their wives”—that is, criminally abusive—we also learned that his summary of making promises to attractive aspiring models is as creepy as one might expect: “I love creating stars. And to a certain extent, I’ve done that with [my wife] Ivana. To a certain extent, I’ve done that with [my wife] Marla. And I like that. Unfortunately, after they’re a star, the fun is over for me. It’s like a creation process. It’s almost like creating a building; it’s pretty sad.” Since it would require a team of psychologists to unpack everything wrong with that, Proof will leave it alone, here.)
What this does do, however, is provide an introduction to the third Trump-Epstein sex game discussed in this Proof report: the Meat Market.
On Sunday, July 20, 2025, the New York Times reported the victim-witness account of crime victim and former Jeffrey Epstein sex slave (alongside her little sister) Maria Farmer, who multiple times tried to get state and federal law enforcement to criminally investigate Donald Trump in the 1990s and 2000s—not just because he was a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, but because of a personal experience she had had with the two men that suggested to her a course of potential criminal conduct involving both.
Here’s what she says:
This incident is significant not because Trump “hover[ed] over” a young woman in her early to mid-20s who he had just met, and did so in a way that both “scared” her and was wildly antisocial (“Trump stared at her bare legs”)—though just these few details would be enough for most Americans to dismiss Trump as a genuine creep—but because of what came after, which requires breaking down utilizing the lens of a criminal justice professional.
EPSTEIN: “No, no. She’s not here for you.” It’s important to understand that there’s exactly one—and only one—plausible context in which this statement by Epstein to Trump in response to Trump sexually ogling Epstein’s female friend makes any sense: there had been prior instances in which Epstein had procured a woman for Trump, essentially acting as a pimp for his best friend in a sex game. (Note that this sort of sex game is quite unlike being a “wingman” at a bar trying to make a friend look good to a woman he’s begun speaking with, or trying to set a friend up on a date with another friend of yours because you think they might compatible for a relationship; what we’re speaking of here is Epstein bringing a girl or young woman to his lair with the express intent of his best friend taking custody of her and in short order having consequence-free casual sex with her.)
TRUMP: “[I thought she was] 16 years old?” There are far too many troubling components to this response by Trump to fully articulate them here. Suffice to say that only one—Trump seemingly wanting to be sure a teen he aimed to have sex with was 16—is remotely exculpatory. All the rest suggest a likely criminal intent.
Trump brushing off Epstein’s claim that he was in some kind of personal or professional relationship with the girl. Trump’s first response to being told to lay off Epstein’s female friend was to note her age, which appears to partly confirm what Epstein told Wolff in 2017, that Trump prefers to have sex with women who are already in relationships with his “close friends” so that he can make clear to those “friends” that he’s their superior. Epstein making clear to Trump in Farmer’s presence that he wasn’t to consider her any sort of sexual prospect should have been the end of that discussion; instead, Trump went in another room and clearly came back to the topic of Farmer with respect to the only thing that mattered to him: whether it would be legal to have sex with her.
It actually wouldn’t have been legal for Trump to have sex with her had she been sixteen. By 1920, the age of consent in New York had been raised to 18; it was down to 17 in 2007 and is 17 today. Far more importantly, it was 17 in 1996, when Trump told his sex-addict friend (as the context strongly suggests) that he couldn’t understand what the problem was in ogling and potentially sexually pursuing one of his friend’s female acquaintances-cum-employees (Farmer was seeking employment with Epstein) if she was “16.” The problem? Such sex would have been Statutory Rape under the New York Penal Code.
Trump appears to admit knowledge—in 1996—of his friend’s pedophilia or near pedophilia (specifically hebephilia, that being sexual interest in girls who are pubescent but still under the age of consent, usually ages 11 to 14 (though if the girl is a gamine, potentially 15 or even 16). Keep in mind that Farmer was then in her early to mid-twenties; that she looked (even Trump admitted it in situ) her age; and that Epstein had just said to him (emphasis supplied), “No, no. She’s not here for you.” So in Farmer’s presence, Epstein had stated some sort of proprietary interest in Farmer, as if to say, “She’s here for me—she’s not here for you.” Trump, in response, said, just seconds later, in a conversation held in the next room, “[I thought she was] 16 years old?” This certainly creates a reasonable suspicion that Trump was surprised to learn that Farmer was “there” for Epstein due to her age—which would indeed be well above the age of the girls we now know Epstein was raping in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Looked at another way, if Epstein didn’t raise the subject of Farmer’s age—and he didn’t—and if Farmer looked her twenty-something age (and she did)… why did Trump start talking about age of consent laws in private with his friend? What could they possibly have had to do with anything? The best-case scenario here, in the view of a criminal investigator, would be that Trump was only interested in girls who were of age, and knew his best friend to be interested in girls who weren’t of legal age, so by pointing out Farmer’s age to Epstein, Trump was essentially saying, “Why shouldn’t I make a pass at her?” But even then, the question would remain: why did Trump use sixteen as his chosen baseline, when the age of consent in New York, as in almost every other state, was at the time seventeen? Was that standard—the standard of a rapist in New York state—the standard he had been using in his own sexual escapades?
Other variations of the event are even worse. In this New York Times report, Farmer records Epstein’s words to Trump as “She’s not for you” (“When she was introduced to Trump, he eyed her, prompting Epstein to warn him, ‘She’s not for you’”). As opposed to the marginally more anodyne “She’s not here for you”—which in the most over-charitable reading one could imagine would simply signify Epstein saying to Trump that Farmer wasn’t in Epstein’s office to meet with Trump—the more direct, “She’s not for you” better reflects Epstein’s understanding of Trump’s expectations for their friendship: namely, that Trump had good reason to believe Epstein would procure women for him for sex. It may go without saying, but Proof reminds readers that for one of the chief allegations made against Epstein and Maxwell was that they had devised a transnational system of procuring and trafficking teenagers for sex, so for Trump to even indirectly exhibit an awareness of or appreciation for this skill-set on Epstein’s part would be profoundly inculpatory.
It’s with all this in mind that we can consider the most famous Meat Market Trump and Epstein were ever part of. Incredibly, it’s not this one:
Here are the NFL cheerleaders the men are ogling in all these photos, per NBC News:
That 1992 meat market, organized by Trump, which you can read about and see video of at NBC News here, isn’t the most infamous one he and Epstein held for the simple reason that other men were allowed to be present. The same may be said of any instance in which Trump invited Epstein to attend (as a VIP) a pageant that Trump operated, or for that matter an event connected to such a pageant.
But that wasn’t the case at a party held at Mar-a-Lago in the same year as the one we see above. Just a few months later, as the New York Times reports (emphasis supplied),
Trump hosted a [1992] party at Mar-a-Lago for young women in a so-called “calendar girl” competition.
Jeffrey Epstein was the only other guest, according to George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman who arranged the event.
Houraney recalled being surprised that Epstein was the only other person on the guest list. “I said, ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs. You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”
Houraney’s then-girlfriend and business partner, Jill Harth, later accused Trump of [having committed] sexual misconduct on the night of the party.
In a lawsuit, Harth said that Trump took her into a bedroom and forcibly kissed and fondled her, and restrained her from leaving.
She also said that a 22-year-old contestant told her that Trump later that night crawled into her bed uninvited.
So: one 1992 Trump-Epstein meat market; one Sexual Assault that very night, in that very same location; and another attempted sex crime on the same night, in the same location, with the perpetrator (Trump) at age 46 and the would-be victim at age 22.
Interlude
“[Jeffrey Epstein’s brother] Mark Epstein said Trump flew on [his brother’s] plane ‘numerous times’…
….
‘They were good friends,’ Mark Epstein said. ‘I know [Trump] is trying to distance himself, but they were.’ He added that Trump used to comp Epstein’s mother and aunt at one of Trump’s Atlantic City casino hotels.*
….
When Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book of phone numbers appeared in a court file a few years ago, it contained 14 numbers for Trump; his wife, Melania; and others in Trump’s inner circle.”
— The Washington Post (July 31, 2019)
*Proof notes that this is the only other example of Trump systematically comping consumers he has encountered in his research—and both of these two women are Epstein relatives.
Chapter 6: Sex Game—Partner-Sharing
How close were Trump and Epstein? How about this: they shared a sex life through a shared concurrent partner.
That’s right—we’re not speaking of two men dating the same women consecutively but at the same time.
According to Michael Wolff, Trump and Epstein “shared a girlfriend for…the better part of a year.” You can see the full video of this stunning discussion at the link below.
It’s important to understand that this revelation isn’t entirely surprising.
That Trump, Epstein, and Epstein’s longest-term girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell—to be clear, not the girlfriend Trump and Epstein shared—were in the same social circles from the 1980s on has been written about extensively, for instance by the Washington Post here.
That Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell was an Englishman who was also an Israeli spy for years is also largely uncontested. Whole books have been written about not only Maxwell’s spying but his extremely suspicious death (a highly coincidental one, too, given how his daughter’s beau Epstein died): a homicide most believe was made to look like a suicide by one set of intelligence services or another. Certainly, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and countless other outlets have reported that Ghislaine’s spy dad’s suspicious death “set his daughter on a path to Jeffrey Epstein.”
How so?
Well, after the elder Maxwell died, Epstein—like Maxwell, now widely rumored to be an Israeli spy—mysteriously stepped in to become the Maxwell Family’s unexpected benefactor. Almost the entirety of his own inexplicable wealth having mysteriously arrived under the auspices of ardent Zionist Leslie Wexner, Epstein took Ghislaine under his wing and set about making her the manager for his clandestine operations, the same ones New York Times journalist Ross Douthat noted above would have been perfectly well-suited for a first-order or second-order foreign intelligence operation: procuring kids for sex—several a week for years and years—and beyond abusing them oneself, lending them out to the rich and powerful in a fashion none involved could ever publicly admit to on penalty of a social death and state or federal prosecutions.
Of course, Maxwell’s procurement of sex slaves for her “boyfriend” Epstein also had the effect of clearing his schedule to focus on what was ostensibly his “job”: investing unthinkably large sums of money for the fabulously wealthy and well-connected and, it appears, at least a few state actors his long-time best friend Donald Trump would subsequently act like he owed something to once he entered national politics. Did the “job” Epstein held also involve gathering human intelligence (HUMINT) for Israel, Russia, and/or Saudi Arabia and its virtually-joined-at-the-hip neighbor, the United Arab Emirates (run by Trump ally and ardent illegal election-inferer Mohammed bin Zayed, or MBZ)? We don’t know. What we do know is that Jeffrey Epstein appeared to have relationships of some kind or another with all the entities that wanted his friend Trump to become President of the United States, as detailed exhaustively in the Proof Series.
Is it significant that Robert Maxwell, who the FBI also believed to be—at a minimum, whether or not he was an Israeli spy, too—a Russian spy, chose 1987 (per ABC), the very year the KGB began to turn its attention to recruiting Donald Trump as an asset, to “turn his attention to America”? Is it significant that the KGB brought Donald Trump to Moscow in 1987 to cultivate him as an asset (not an agent, there are critical differences) the same year he met Epstein, whose girlfriend’s then-still-living father was thought by the FBI to be a KGB asset (or even agent)? Who knows. Maybe? It’s beyond the scope of this Proof report to seek that answer, but not beyond its ambit to note that that’s an awful lot of coincidences going on here (and some of these are further explored in the upcoming, extremely lengthy chapter titled The Big Picture).
The salient point here, with respect to the partner-sharing that Trump and Epstein allegedly engaged in, is that it makes the most sense if in fact the two Maxwells and Epstein were indeed doing the work of Mossad in priming Donald Trump to one day become President of the United States. Plying him with women—which is exactly the role Ghislaine Maxwell served for Trump’s best friend Epstein—would have made sense in that context, just as, candidly, it would make sense for the daughter of an Israeli spy (again Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine) to be supplying a rumored Israeli spy (Epstein) with diversions from his much more important covert work.
So how close were Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell? Well, not so close that he seems to think she knows his secrets—see discussion supra—but close enough that the Washington Post could report, “For at least fifteen years after the [1989] yacht party [they met at], Ghislaine Maxwell and Trump continued to mingle in the same gilded circles, attending the same parties in Florida and New York, sharing meals and flying together at least once on Epstein’s private plane, according to documents, interviews and media accounts. They were captured together in photographs and videos several times in that period, and Maxwell got to know two of Trump’s wives.”
And if you’re wondering if Trump knew the alleged Russian and Israeli spy Robert Maxwell, here’s a photo of the two men from the night Trump met Ghislaine in 1989:
{Note: The Washington Post reports, of Trump’s 1989, post-KGB-recruitment interaction with a man the FBI then believed to be a Soviet spy, “Trump appeared fond of Robert Maxwell, said [head of public relations at Maxwell’s publishing house David] Adler, who watched the two men interact at the 1989 party. ‘It was very jovial,’ Adler said. ‘They were both hustling. They were both trying to get business from each other.’ At one point, Adler pitched Trump on a proposal for Robert Maxwell to publish a Trump-branded magazine. He said that Trump was intrigued by the idea…” Proffering Trump-branded projects to Donald Trump to gain his trust and loyalty is, Proof here notes, something the Kremlin has done in every single decade since the 1980s. It is, in fact, the actual scandal at the heart of the Trump-Russia scandal—a Bribery scheme—rather than what so many MAGAs and corporate journalists seem to think that scandal was about.}
Against this backdrop—that is, all the foregoing geopolitical melodrama, and Trump’s long obsession with sleeping with women his friends had slept with, and Trump’s known affinity for acting as Epstein’s wingman at parties (to the point that he would, as seen above, arrange meat markets only the two of them were permitted to attend), and the Maria Farmer Incident that saw Trump seemingly put out that he couldn’t sleep with an Epstein girl who Epstein had said was “not for him”—would it be any surprise if the two men shared women? Or would it simply be par for the course in a friendship Trump confessed, in his eerie 2003 Birthday Note, was full of “wonderful secrets”?
While it’s not the business of this report to spend much time on the story of Katie Johnson—a woman who twice sued Donald Trump civilly for allegedly raping her when she was just 13 (one time represented by Lisa Bloom, one of the most celebrated attorneys for Rape victims in America; Proof of Cruelty has already offered a detailed analysis of the many components of Johnson’s report that remain credible to this day)—it’s worth at least acknowledging Johnson’s allegation, as reported by Politico in the year Johnson withdrew her suit due to death threats, saw her swearing under penalty of Perjury in a federal civil affidavit that in 1994 “she attended a series of parties at the Manhattan home of prominent investor Jeffrey Epstein. She alleges that during those parties [Trump] tied her to a bed and raped her. She also claimed Epstein raped her during that series of gatherings.”
This allegation is worth mentioning because Trump’s habitual response to any Rape or Sexual Assault allegation is to go beyond the usual denials one might expect—a claim of alibi, for instance, or even a claim to not know the accuser whatsoever—to make creepy, seemingly non-sequitur denials about whether a woman is attractive enough to rape or whether the sexual proclivities a given allegation reveals are ones he’d be likely to be involved with (in fact, one of Trump’s closest associates, Michael Cohen, confirmed in his book Disloyal that Trump, contra his public protestations, is in fact intensely titillated by what’s known in sexual-kink circles as “water sports”).
So with Wolff’s allegation that Trump and Epstein shared a woman, we can imagine Trump saying—in shades of his more recent “I never wrote a picture in my life, I don’t draw pictures of women”—something like, “I’ve never shared a woman in my life. I don’t have to share women—I get them all to myself.” He might even offer the same excuse to the many claims from Epstein and Trump himself that one of his biggest kinks was actually sharing women with his closest friends against their will (see supra).
So in assessing the credibility of Katie Johnson’s two abortive civil lawsuits alleging that Trump committed Child Rape, an analysis Proof of Cruelty offers at much greater length, we can consider that Johnson saying that both Trump and Epstein wanted to violate her during the same set of gatherings is consistent with what we know of both men in terms of partner-sharing. It might also be worth noting that Katie Johnson was willing to go on camera and speak at length about her allegations (the blurring in the video below has been removed for some recordings, but I’m posting one in which it’s maintained due to the fact that Johnson was a minor at the time of the sex she details).
And here’s a longer, non-voice-modulated version for those willing to be exposed to a much longer version of a description of Child Rape (WARNING: it’s very disturbing).
Interlude
“Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump had much in common. Both were outer-borough New Yorkers who had succeeded in Manhattan. Both were energetic self-promoters. And both had reputations as showy men-about-town.
In 1992, an NBC News camera captured the pair at a Mar-a-Lago party that featured cheerleaders from the Buffalo Bills, who were in town that weekend for a game against the Miami Dolphins. At one point in the footage, Trump can be seen dancing amid a crowd of young women. Later, he appears to be pointing at other women while whispering something in Epstein’s ear, causing him to double over with laughter.
Months later, when Trump hosted a party at Mar-a-Lago for young women in a so-called ‘calendar girl’ competition, Epstein was the only other guest, according to George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman who arranged the event. Mr. Houraney recalled being surprised that Epstein was the only other person on the guest list.”
— The New York Times (July 19, 2025)
Chapter 7: Sex Game—Getting Underage Girls Into Illegal Situations
Those with the intestinal fortitude to listen to the entirety of Katie Johnson’s account will now find themselves wondering what evidence we have of Donald Trump being interested specifically, as Epstein was, in pubescent-but-under-the-age-of-consent teens. This report isn’t going to focus on that broader question, because it’s been dealt with here and here and in many other Proof reports; the question on the table in this report is not whether Trump is a hebephile (a subcategory adjacent to pedophilia per some psychologists, and a subcategory of it according to others) by sentiment—he most certainly is, by his own repeated admission, given the ways he’s spoken of the ages of teen girls he finds sexually attractive (the most exculpatory of which is this horrifying one, while the most inculpatory is this horrifying one)—but whether he exhibited such qualities specifically in Epstein’s presence (as opposed to Maxwell’s), as is alleged by Katie Johnson and several others (see infra).
We know that Trump met Ghislaine Maxwell in 1989, not long before his then-best-friend Epstein became her family’s protector, patron, and benefactor following the mysterious death of her suspected Russian and Israeli spy father, Robert Maxwell.
But the year before Trump met Ghislaine Maxwell for the first time, he was found cavorting one day in one of his New Jersey casinos in the company of Epstein and more than one underage girl.
This incident, now written about across dozens of major-media reports (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) is both more and less than meets the eye. It’s less because the three girls with Trump and Epstein, all under 21, were all, it’s believed, above the age of consent for sex. They were “underage” to the extent that, as Trump well knew as a casino owner, persons under 21 weren’t allowed to be on the floor of any casino in the New Jersey by state law. By him and Epstein bringing their “dates” onto the floor of Trump’s Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino (which Trump bought in 1987, the year he met Epstein and was recruited by the KGB), Trump was risking a massive civil fine and possibly worse penalties for a casino he would shutter in 2014 (following years and years of humiliating decline) after nearly bankrupting it in 1991.
That Trump would risk a profound hit to the casino’s fortunes in 1988, just under 24 months before Trump nearly buried the casino by opening the Trump Taj Mahal—a major competitor—only a mile away in 1990, underscores his habitual recklessness with respect to women and money (the only things he cares about, per Epstein, infra).
One of the three teens Trump was cavorting with illegally in 1988 alongside Epstein was said to be the “number-three tennis player in the world,” which Proof can at least say fits the description of Gabriela Sabatini, who was then 17 or 18 and would become the number-three tennis player in the world in 1988 or (at the latest) early 1989. More importantly, Sabatini is widely listed as having been a Trump “mistress” in early 1989, at which point she was definitely the world’s number-three tennis player (increasing the odds that the incident at the Plaza Hotel and Casino occurred in 1989, when she was 18).
The problem with all this—creepy as it already is, for a man Trump’s age—is that in 1989 he was married to Ivana Trump and cheating on Ivana Trump with Marla Maples, the reason his brief affair with Sabatini is described as an instance of Trump cheating on the mistress he was cheating on his wife with. Worse still, in early 1989 Sabatini was 18 and Trump was in his mid-forties, underscoring that Trump had, for much if not all of his life, certainly including well into his middle-age, been sexually attracted to teens. It’s only the smallest consolation to say that an 18-year-old Sabatini was above New Jersey’s age of consent (16) in 1989, even as she’d only just ceased to legally be a “minor” in the state (by law, 18 is the “age of majority” in New Jersey; if this “date” instead happened in 1988, as some reports suggest, Sabatini would still have been above the age of consent but might well have been 17 years old and thus still a minor).
{Note: Ms. Sabatini hasn’t formally confirmed or denied that she was the world-number-three tennis player her ex-boyfriend Trump was illegally with at the Plaza Hotel and Casino in the late 1980s, though Trump isn’t known to have dated other world-number-three tennis players.}
Whatever the precise details of the Plaza Hotel and Casino incident, what’s important is (i) Trump and Epstein together tried to bring teenagers they were sexually attracted to into a space they knew it was illegal under state law to bring them, and (ii) the other activities we know Trump was engaged in at the same time—in both 1988 and 1989, see infra—underscore that this behavior wasn’t at all new for Donald Trump (and it goes without saying that it wasn’t new for Jeffrey Epstein, either). We know this about Trump because of events that occurred, rather confusingly, at another Plaza Hotel—this one in New York City—owned by Trump during the same 1980s/1990s timespan.
Trump purchased New York City’s Plaza Hotel in 1988, the year after he met Epstein and just a matter of months before Epstein began the process of searching for a home near Trump in Palm Beach (as the Post reports, “During [the late 1980s and 1990s] Donald Trump socialized with Jeffrey Epstein, particularly after Epstein purchased a mansion in Palm Beach in 1990, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate”).
So what did Trump purchase the hotel for? Possibly many things, but one of the very first things he began using it for was as a den for criminal conduct committed by older men against underage girls—specifically, widespread Drug Use and Statutory Rape.
Here’s a summary of the full report by The Daily Beast whose headline you can see above: according to multiple eyewitnesses who spoke to The Daily Beast just a few months ago—in late 2024—including one named eyewitness, Andy Lucchesi, soon after Trump bought the Plaza Hotel he began throwing days-long sex-and-hard-drugs parties in Plaza Hotel corner suites that he attended himself. The purpose of these big parties was two-fold (and didn’t involve Trump personally doing hard drugs, as he’s always been a teetotaller in that regard): (1) Trump was pimping out attractive and often underage models to his rich business associates, presumably with an eye toward financial advantage for himself in future dealings with them (making the arrangement very much a conventional sex-for-money form of prostitution), and (2) Trump happily was sampling the merchandise on offer himself, as Lucchesi confirms he was having regular sex with the models at these Plaza Hotel parties.
While these parties began in the very late eighties, not long after Trump bought the Plaza Hotel, their heyday was the early 1990s, which at once underscores that Trump was working as an active pimp (see infra) for years but also that the heyday of him doing so was the very period of his closest companionship with Jeffrey Epstein: the nineties.
As The Daily Beast reports via reporter Michael Gross (emphasis supplied),
“After I wrote for The Daily Beast earlier this year about the parties [Trump] hosted [at the Plaza Hotel] in the 1990s, where ‘his wealthy friends, high-rollers from his Atlantic City casinos, and potential Trump condominium buyers could meet models’ from second-tier agencies, several men who attended those parties at the Plaza Hotel emerged to share scandalous specifics about Trump’s presence and behavior at events where illegal drugs and young women were passed around and used.”
So “several eyewitnesses” confirm that Trump used one of his major Trump Organization properties to facilitate “illegal drugs….[being] passed around and used.” And used by whom? His wealthy friends, of course, but also the models he plied those friends with for sex (Gross: “young women [supplied by Trump] were passed around and used”).
Were the models underage?
On this subject, Gross may be the best source imaginable, for as a journalist he’s been covering the seedy side of Donald Trump’s personal and professional life, often with active participation by Trump, for decades. Besides euphemistically calling Trump Model Management, founded in 1999, a “date farm, perhaps for his friends, perhaps for [Trump]”—Proof hopefully won’t offend anyone’s sensibilities here by noting that this “dating” anticipates frequent casual sex—Gross writes that (emphasis supplied),
“I spoke in recent days with two Trump pals, both reluctant to talk about the man they once partied hard with who’s now the Republican nominee to be president of the United States. In that capacity, Trump has vowed to sue people who have come forward in recent weeks with allegations about his bad behavior.
One of the two men I spoke with, a fashion photographer, requested anonymity because he has fathered several children since his Trump days and doesn’t want his past dredged up. ‘There’s no upside for me,’ he says.
The other man… well, you’ll read his words. Both confirmed that Trump, as I’ve reported, used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men.
….
Both men put Donald Trump in the room with cocaine, very young women and underage girls, and rich old men there to—pardon my language, but if the Times can say ‘pussy’ on its front page, I can say this—fuck them.
I’m sorry, Ivanka, I really am, because your mother raised you well and I can’t blame you for supporting your father (even if he did give—at the least—his blessing when you were 15 and signed on as a model yourself with Elite, the hard-partying high-end agency founded by notorious teen-fucker John Casablancas) but here’s the sad truth: Your dad’s not a dog. He’s a pig.”
And Gross’s reporting just gets worse and worse upsetting:
“The photographer says he attended Trump’s parties with one of the owners of the hair salon, Pierre Michel, that operated in both the Plaza and Trump Tower.
The salon owner, Pierre Ouaknine, says his memories of those Plaza parties vanished after a recent surgery.
But the photographer’s memories are crystal clear.
Trump would take over ‘suites on the corners’ of his hotel with views of Central Park and Grand Army Plaza, not to mention lots to look at inside, and wow his guests.
The attraction for the men ‘was young girls assuming they’d get somewhere’ [in their careers] by joining the party, the photographer says. ‘Of course, it [that promised career advancement] never happens.’
Young models were attracted to the fêtes with a simple, time-tested pitch: ‘You’ll meet rich guys who will help you,’ says the photographer. ‘It was networking, but on a weird, bizarre scale.’
The girls were as young as 15, he says, and ‘over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations. There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It’s based on power and dominating [these] girls who can’t push back and can be discarded. There’s always someone [another rich guy] to pick them back up. Nobody wants to call home and say, “Help me.”’
Trump would ‘go from room to room,’ said the photographer, who added that ‘I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor’ but no smoking. Trump didn’t approve of cigarettes.
Those men at these parties often knew each other. ‘It’s a small community,’ the photographer says. ‘They exchanged information, facilitated each other. Trump was in and out. He’d wander off with a couple girls. I saw him. He was getting laid like crazy. Trump was at the heart of it. He loved the attention and in private, he was a total fucking beast.’”
So multiple suites owned by “total fucking beast” Trump were opened up by him:
To “get laid” by “young girls” (including possibly minors, “girls as young as 15”);
to defraud these young girls, who were far from their parents, into thinking that by going to his parties they would “get somewhere [in their careers]” despite knowing that that wasn’t going to happen (because the wealthy men he invited to his parties only wanted to sleep with them, not assist with their professional lives);
to supply these young girls with a space where they could illegally drink alcohol and illegally do drugs in the presence of men who wanted them inebriated and/or high so they could (in some instances illegally, by statute) sexually molest them; and
to pimp out models by providing “rich” men with “sex, a lot of sex” with “younger girls.”
Do we have names for some of these attendees? Yes, The Daily Beast provides them, and you can go to the links above—and the links they take you to—to find them. But the key point here is that Trump didn’t just have “sex” with “younger girls” like a “total fucking beast” at these parties (which included girls clearly under the age of consent) across years and years, he bought an entire hotel so that he could take over multiple suites across several days at a time to provide a veritable fuck-palace for creepy old men who wanted to (variously) molest children (those under the age of consent), have sex with teens (the bulks of the girls, apparently, who were 16 to 19), and do drugs with these teenagers while also trying to have sex with them and plying them illegally with alcohol.
Moreover, Trump invited business associates he wanted to make money with and from to these years and years of hards-drugs-and-underage-sex-fueled parties by apparently promising these associates sex (a modus operandi for Trump, as we will see in the next section).
Gross continues:
“Andy Lucchesi, the second man I spoke to, was and remains a male model. He was identified to me by a modeling executive as a frequent visitor to the Trump model salons.
….
Lucchesi had been described to me by the modeling executive as an organizer of Trump’s parties, one of several who wrangled models to them. Asked about that description, Lucchesi says that ‘the parties weren’t like an organized once a week thing.’
But was he wrangling models for Donald Trump? ‘A lot of people would say that,’ Lucchesi allows, adding that he thought Trump’s motive was a desire to open a model agency of his own, which he eventually did.
Lucchesi’s recollection of the parties dovetails with the photographer’s account. ‘There was cocaine around [at Trump’s Plaza Hotel parties].’
….
Girls? ‘Well. Of course,’ Lucchesi says.
….
But did [Trump] have sex with his female party guests? ‘So, he’s a man with a woman…’ Lucchesi says vaguely.
How old were the [girls Trump had sex with]? ‘A lot of girls [who are] 14, look 24. That’s as juicy as I can get. I never asked how old they were; I just partook. I did partake in activities that would be controversial, too.’”
“Too”? That certainly seems to be a reference to the sitting President of the United States also having “controversial” sex at a party significantly populated by underage girls.
Keep in mind that the modeling agency Trump ultimately did found in 1999, Trump Model Management, is what Gross—as a student of Trump’s life and a journalist with regular access to him—calls a “date farm,” meaning its main purpose was to… well, do exactly what Trump’s Plaza Hotel parties were doing. So Andy Lucchesi’s half-hearted defense of Trump’s intention with these parties as potentially leading to a modeling agency is only another way of saying that the Plaza Hotel parties Trump threw on a regular basis between 1988 and at least 1994 were simply a disgusting, chaotic prelude to the formalization of of what could charitably be called institutionalized pimpery.
More on that in the next section of this report.
Since in this section we’re primarily focused on Trump cutting lucrative business deals in part by providing dens of illegal iniquity for would-be elderly rapists of underage girls and other teens, what’s most significant legally about the account above is that (1) Lucchesi was acting as Trump’s special agent (a legal term) in populating his parties with models; (2) Lucchesi admits that he “never asked how old” the models Trump directed him to procure were; (3) he now says that the females he procured as Trump’s agent—to come to a venue where men would try to ply them with alcohol and drugs until they had sex with them—were as young as “14”; (4) the venue for this hebephilic predation and Statutory Rape was provided by Trump personally (along with all its victims, through his designated agent Lucchesi); and (5) Trump’s agent now admits that the “activities” that went on at Trump’s parties were legally “controversial”—a clear reference, to the normative reader of his words, to Statutory Rape. Moreover, when asked directly whether Trump had sex with the teens his agent Lucchesi had procured for him when he (Trump) disappeared with those young females into yet another private, Trump-owned room, Lucchesi says, “So, he’s a man with a woman…”
Say no more, Mr. Lucchesi—though it does seem “woman” needs to be in quotes, here.
But Proof has much more to say on this. Two points in particular bear repeating:
(1) This sounds reminiscent of the activities that close Trump friend P. Diddy was arrested for. (Worth noting here is that Trump hasn’t ruled out pardoning a man who he has called “a good friend of mine and good guy,” words that certainly seem like additional evidence that Trump is personally sympathetic to the sort of conduct that we now know Diddy was involved in, not-so-privately, for years and years and years.)
Did Trump and Diddy cross paths during the period Donald Trump was throwing his disgusting parties at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and Diddy was (presumably) either doing or considering starting to do all that he ended up doing? You bet they did:
It’s enough to make an observer wonder, “Where do folks think Diddy learned it from?”
Trump has called Diddy “legendary” and, for his part, Diddy, in 2015—before he was in any legal trouble that he might have needed Trump’s help getting out of, and before Trump was even president—said “Donald Trump is a friend of mine.” Where did that friendship start? We only know it was at parties in New York City in the 1990s, a time and place in which we know exactly the sort of parties Trump himself was throwing.
(2) What place does Epstein have in all this? If we consider that these cocaine-and-underage-sex parties began to be thrown by Donald Trump at the Plaza Hotel after he first met Epstein; if we consider that the primary activity Trump and Epstein engaged in from 1988 through the end of the 1990s and beyond was partying with young women; if we consider that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were best friends for this entire period, making it unthinkable that Trump wouldn’t invite him to his famous parties at the Plaza Hotel (the hotel Donald Trump married Marla Maples in, with Epstein in attendance); if we consider that during this period Trump had a long and documented history of inviting Epstein to parties at Mar-a-Lago and that Epstein, like Trump, had a home in New York City he invited Trump to and spent much time in (thus making it unclear why Epstein wouldn’t go to a Trump-owned property in New York City just as he often did when he was in Florida); if we consider that Trump knew Epstein liked models, and particularly younger models, and was precisely the sort of well-connected rich man the models at his Plaza Hotel parties wanted to meet (due to both his wealth, his social circle, his influence, and even his interest in and knowledge of the massive New York City modeling scene); could any talented, insightful, and neutral criminal investigator come up with even a single reason Donald Trump wouldn’t have held open an invitation for Jeffrey Epstein to attend any and all of his Plaza Hotel parties—and why Epstein wouldn’t have on regular occasion taken him up on that offer?
This former federal criminal investigator and criminal defense attorney, who has had more access to how criminals think and how they reason through their actions than 99.9% of non-criminal-justice-system professionals, cannot think of even one reason.
Which leads us to an even more upsetting question.
From 1988 through the end of his friendship with Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein used Ghislaine Maxwell to procure hundreds of beautiful young women (and girls) for sex.
Not dozens. Not scores. Hundreds.
Ghislaine Maxwell was Epstein’s on-again, off-again girlfriend; she had no particular special access to young women and girls besides—as the charges against her confirm—going to schools looking for them (literally) and then begging them (literally) to go out and recruit other victims for her. Though it in no way mitigates her guilt as a child sex trafficker, any criminal justice professional would note that Maxwell (by training just a banker) had no especially impressive skills as a recruiter of children for Child Rape. It was her perseverance, and the Epstein money she was able to throw at victims to go find other victims, that made her so prolific at the task Trump’s best friend set for her.
But for much of this seventeen-year period that Trump was friends with Epstein and Epstein was using Maxwell in this way, Maxwell may have been Epstein’s “girlfriend” but it was Trump who was Epstein’s best friend—a considerably more significant title, given how little Epstein respected women, how much he exploited Maxwell for his own dark purposes, and the fact that Maxwell was essentially his ward (rather than his equal) after the death of her father. Trump, by contrast, was clearly Epstein’s equal in terms of fame, women, and influence, if not in terms of money (which is why Trump needed Epstein for money, also, as discussed in The Big Picture, see chapter infra).
Unlike Epstein’s “girlfriend,” his “best friend” had a well-oiled, highly professional, regularized, routinized, systematized, extremely high end system in place—yes, a system—for congregating beautiful teen girls (some underage girls) in a single place that was safe from the prying eyes of state law enforcement and then introducing them to rich, influential, intermittently charming older men (just like Epstein) to seduce them with alcohol, drugs, money, promises of professional advancement, and all the other things despicable lechers like Trump and Epstein offer freely to try to briefly appear humane.
So why on Earth would Epstein not have availed himself of Donald Trump’s more than a decade of regular Plaza Hotel parties to recruit all of the following: (i) girlfriends; (ii) masseuses; (iii) Rape victims; and (iv) the sort of “ornamental” women Michael Wolff told Michael Cohen in a recent interview Epstein filled his New York City apartment with, not necessarily for sex but to perform administrative functions for him and be something nice to look at when guests (perhaps even Trump) came over to socialize?
This author fails to arrive at even one justification for Epstein not exploiting Trump’s parties in this way—especially given that we know Epstein directly used Trump’s Mar-a-Lago as a recruiting ground, and indeed recruited his most famous victim by far (the tragically now deceased-from-suicide Virginia Giuffre) from under Trump’s witting or unwitting nose. So why would the Plaza Hotel, a space far less intimate to Donald Trump given that he didn’t live or even spend nights there, have been off limits to his best friend? It seems clear that it wouldn’t have been and wasn’t.
{Note: Curiously, Giuffre was recruited by Trump friend Maxwell to be raped by Trump friend Epstein only “a few weeks” after Trump had hired her to work near the Mar-a-Lago locker room his friend Ghislaine frequented. And yes, Trump at least appears to have been involved in Giuffre’s hire, directly or indirectly, as her father was a maintenance man for Trump who Trump must have known well; he personally wrote a letter of recommendation for him. This author is put in mind of Epstein saying to Wolff, of Trump, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to….anyone who he first tries to gain their trust…[he later] uses [that trust] to do bad things to them.”}
And given that this report and its hundreds of links establish, among so much else, that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein kept no secrets from one another when it came to sex, if Epstein were at any point—even once—successful at using a Trump party (not just the ones at the Plaza Hotel but the meat markets Trump arranged for him and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago, see supra) to bring women or girls into his life who he would in some way victimize in the future, we can be fairly certain he would have told Trump about it and then thanked him for it.
And Donald Trump would know, in 2025, that every one of those women could now be traced back to him, opening the largest can of worms imaginable about the past illegal conduct of a sitting President of the United States—a man whose core political base is composed primarily of Christian evangelicals who vehemently oppose premarital sex.
{Note: Giuffre was, again, recruited to be raped by Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell, who Trump associates say Trump was known to be “crazy about.” That it was Maxwell—who Trump was so fond of that his fondness for her exceeded even his fondness for Epstein—who was most aggressively using Mar-a-Lago to recruit new victims for Trump’s best friend certainly must be taken into account when considering (a) whether Trump was aware of these recruitments, and (b) whether Trump was aware he was lying when he thereafter implied to the national media, after his long association with Epstein had been revealed, that it was Epstein doing recruiting at Mar-a-Lago. One might also ask why Trump was employing attractive underage girls like Virginia Giuffre as “locker room attendants” at Mar-a-Lago in the first place, given that role’s necessary proximity to naked, middle-aged club members. That Trump may have had a hand in this decision to inappropriately staff his club is suggested by his coordination of the parties at the Plaza Hotel during this very same period that are described both supra and infra.
Politico reports, tellingly, that “Epstein invoked his [Fifth Amendment] right against self-incrimination when asked various questions in the Giuffre suit, including about whether Maxwell first encountered Giuffre at [Donald Trump’s] Mar-a-Lago. ‘Fifth,’ Epstein said.”}
Interlude
“There was substantial interaction between Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Ivana Trump.”
— Trump acquaintance and Epstein business partner Steve Hoffenberg (July 31, 2019)
“After Trump’s divorce from Ivana, he continued to socialize with Maxwell, particularly alongside Epstein, according to media coverage at the time.”
— The Washington Post (July 31, 2020)
“Ivana Trump was like [Ghislaine Maxwell’s] best friend. That was creepy….Donald Trump was always hanging out with Epstein, and Ivana was always hanging out with Ghislaine. And [Ghislaine] would say, ‘We’re going to go pick up Ivana!’ or ‘Ivana’s going to come [with us]!’ And we’d ride in [Ghislaine’s] car with [Ivana].
I remember one occasion where Ghislaine was like, ‘I have to get out [of the car] right now!’ And she went and got a [phone] number from a child….in a [school] uniform.
Everybody knew what they were doing. Everybody who surrounded them knew exactly what they were doing. Yes, [I often went on car rides with Ghislaine and Ivana]. And [while Ghislaine] wouldn’t bring [the kids she was procuring] in the car, she would get their phone numbers. She would drive by schools as they got out.
And Ivana [Trump] was just sitting in [Ghislaine’s] car [while it happened].”
— Epstein victim Marie Farmer (July 22, 2025)
Chapter 8: Sex Game—Pimping
There can be no doubt that Donald Trump stands accused of pimping teens—many of them young enough that they’d be deemed “girls” in common parlance—to extremely wealthy men in much the same way that Ghislaine Maxwell could be said to have pimped females for Jeffrey Epstein.
This may in part explain why Trump simply couldn’t stop publicly wishing Maxwell well in her felony criminal case for sex trafficking, despite his aides trying to get him to stop and it being among the most obscene things a President of the United States has done with respect to that horrific crime (though a close second, one imagines, would be Trump’s entire Human and Sex Trafficking agenda in his first and second terms: he has categorically withdrawn U.S. resources aimed at combating Human Trafficking, cut 69 programs aimed at ending Child Labor—which is closely linked to Child Sex Trafficking—gutted the primary government office policing Human Trafficking, made it harder for foreign Human Trafficking survivors to receive any aid, promoted an immigration policy that experts say increases the risk of Child Sex Trafficking, specifically targeted Child Sex Trafficking prevention programs for elimination, overseen a massive reduction in Child Sex Trafficking prosecutions, and with this and other actions legitimizing and facilitating offenses that he’s personally been accused of helped cause a predictable rise in Human Trafficking in America and worldwide).
Here, then, is where we must return to the Plaza Hotel. If any prospective prosecutor were to doubt that Trump is an enthusiastic pimp; if any prosecutor were to posit that Trump’s above-described premeditated double-adultery scam—being a married man trying to sleep with another married man’s wife—could work even if Trump had never developed any reputation for successfully pimping pageant contestants and other Trump Tower supplicants; we would still have to return to the confirmed pimping Trump did at the Plaza Hotel in the 1980s and 1990s.
There’s no need to rehash all that was revealed in the prior section of this Proof report. While Trump may not have been hanging out on a New York City street corner in a floppy felt hat and psychedelic leisure suit while wielding a gold-topped hickory cane in pimping out teenagers to old men who expected casual sex from them, there can be no doubt that he hired agents—much like Epstein did Maxwell—to procure young (often teen, sometimes underage) models for him who he could personally have sex with if he desired and who could have sex with his friends. And at no point in all this—his agent confirmed to The Daily Beast—was anyone even thinking about how old these girls were. Some of those procured for Trump’s parties, Trump’s agent confirms, were 14 or 15 (even as a 16-year-old would also be underage, in a state where the age of consent was 17).
Trump was a pimp. A classier-than-usual pimp, to be sure; a high-priced pimp, certainly; but there seems to be no ontological or semantic basis to say that, in colloquial terms, what Donald Trump was doing from 1988 through the end of the 1990s was anything but pure pimpery.
The girls were often teenagers. As young as fourteen. They were systematically lied to. Many were used for sex by both their pimp and by his johns. Trump provided the space not only for the sex but also for illegal drug use, illegal drinking, and—to the extent witnesses say that the men who attended Trump’s parties were throwing “money” at the teens they wanted so badly to sleep with—Prostitution. America may have a tendency to forgive what rich white men do in swank hotel rooms, despite it being exactly (under the law) the sort of activity that poor Black men go to prison for, but Proof does not suffer from the malady of racial hypocrisy. It certainly appears that Trump isn’t, in 2025, willing to bank his political future on that possibly, either. He is acting like a man extremely worried that he’ll be treated like everyone else for conduct that this country simply won’t condone.
But again we return to the question of whether Trump himself had sex in NYC in the 1980s or 1990s with any minor who was 14, 15, or 16 (in an age-of-consent-17 state). ‘
What evidence do we have on this? Well, we needn’t search very far for an answer.
In fact, it’s so easy to get a handle on the type of teen Donald Trump is willing to have sex with that The Daily Show—a comedy broadcast—needed no more than a several-second Google search to suss it out. These images tell the story:
So to follow up on the above, and tease out what we learn from Donald Trump here,
12 years old is too young for him (note that, like any hebephile, Trump picks out an age that’s pre-teen and pre-pubescent but leaves open a range of ages that includes many under the age of consent, such as 13, 14, 15, 16, and in some states 17);
14 years old is an appropriate age to make an overture, but not yet an advance (as Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart establishes in the full video the above stills are taken from, Trump told multiple 14 year-olds that he would be “dating” them (code for “sex” in Trump’s well-established vocabulary) in “two years,” in other words when they were 16 and still underage in Trump’s home state;
Teenagers 14 to 19 (the ages of Miss Teen USA contestants) are perfectly okay to barge in on when they’re naked, despite the fact that all the 14-, 15-, and 16-year old contestants Trump did this to were underage minors not accompanied by their parents (and Proof notes again that Trump holding a pageant for teens in this age range and using his ownership of the pageant to ogle them naked is hebephilia); and most importantly by far, to the extent that it even swallows whole all of the preceding,
all the foregoing is what Trump is willing to admit to in public, meaning that what he says in private in almost certainly considerably worse (as Stewart opines in the clip linked to above, “This is what he's admitting to when he knows he's being recorded! Literally, he’s sitting in a studio with a giant sign that says ‘ON AIR’ and he’s like, ‘Well, twelve would be too [young]…”).
Nor is this all the evidence America has on this question. There’s so much more that it could fill up a whole report on its own. Besides telling Howard Stern he has “no age limit” besides not being willing to have sex with a “12 year-old,” there is another equally galling Howard Stern clip, from a different episode of the program, in which Trump—speaking specifically on the subject of sex with models—says that he made a deal with his “17-year-old model daughter Ivanka” regarding sex with models: “She made me promise to her, swear to her, that I would never date a girl younger than her.”
To be clear, we don’t know when Ivanka said this. If she said it the same year Trump told the story, she was exhibiting to her father a grave concern that he would have sex with a model who was 16, 15, or 14 (as she was 17 at the time Trump told the story).
If, however, Ivanka said this to her father when she was 16 or 15 (after all, Trump is merely telling a story here, not recounting an event that just occurred between him and his daughter), she was expressing a grave concern that he would have sex with a model who was 15 or 14.
What child would feel the need to extract such a promise from her father, unless she believed him capable of having sex with a “girl” (Ivanka’s word and Trump’s word) who was underage? Even the most charitable reading of this story Trump decided to tell to the entirety of the United States—and there’s no evident reason to be charitable to Trump on this topic, given his many odious statements about it—would see Ivanka desperately extracting this promise from her parent because she had seen men exactly his age try to have (and actually have) sex with underage models.
And where would men Trump’s age be meeting and having sex with underage models?
At Trump’s parties.
That’s a fact it’s hard to imagine Ivanka not being aware of by the late 1990s, given that by then Trump had been hosting such cocaine-and-underage-sex-fueled romps for a full decade.
Nor—again, in a charitable reading—would Trump have been at all surprised by the fear Ivanka was expressing, nor incapable of connecting it to his own past conduct. As The Daily Beast reports, “Trump himself nodded to the life [of an underage model] when his own daughter [Ivanka] began modeling [at 15], saying, ‘I am only modestly in favor of this because I understand that that life is a very fast life—and at that age it is always a risky proposition.’”
The Daily Beast followed this quote from Trump with the obvious observation— “He would know about that life”—but even Trump’s own words convey that sentiment (“I understand that that life is a very fast life….[and] risky”).
And who was the man in New York City who more than any other had created a system to create those harrowing risks for underage models (like his then-15-year-old child)?
Donald Trump.
The same man now desperate to keep America from pursuing its national interest in the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein and his closest associates.
Chapter 9: Trump, Epstein, and the Presidency
The massive chapter that comes after this one is long, contains a lot of significant new information, and will shock many.
It also situates the seventeen-year Trump-Epstein friendship within Trump’s forty-year pursuit of presidential power.
Most readers will know that Trump first publicly toyed with running for POTUS in 1987 via expensive, full-page newspaper ads regarding his foreign policy preferences and by giving speeches in key states. The other two major events for Trump in that year were these two, per reports:
Beginning a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Getting recruited by the KGB (Russian intelligence) according to a former top Soviet intelligence official and thereafter acting like a Russian asset; we know for certain know that Trump took a trip in Moscow in that year that was arranged by the KGB.
Given Epstein’s own now-revealed ties to Kremlin-linked banks (see supra and here); and that the eventual buyer of the massively expensive ($41+ million) property Trump and Epstein had their falling out over was a Russian oligarch; and that we know the Kremlin put certain human assets (if not agents) in Trump’s way during its decades-long recruitment of him (including Felix Sater in the early 2000s; Sater’s specific task was to try to get Trump elected president in 2016), it’s not unreasonable to wonder if Epstein came into Trump’s life at the moment he did for a reason.
This is especially worth asking when we consider that, per Epstein himself (see infra), he’s one of the reasons Donald Trump survived the 1990s financially such that he was in a position to run a lucrative Florida country club and run for president in this century.
Most readers will also know that, after Epstein helped Trump navigate a period of time in which he lost a billion dollars net (1985 to 1994), Trump in 1999 announced a run for President of the United States in 2000 as a member of the upstart Reform Party, receiving 15,000 votes in the 2000 Reform Party Primary in California but ultimately embarrassing himself so resoundingly with his poor performance that he withdrew from the race altogether (trying, thereafter, the wipe the episode from his biography, with surprising success given how many corporate media outlets falsely aver that 2016 was Donald Trump’s first presidential run.)
We can understand why Trump didn’t run for POTUS in 2004—he would have been facing a Republican incumbent, and by then he had decided any future run would be from inside the GOP, which was then united behind George W. Bush—and many words have been spilled in major media on Trump’s last-minute decision to bow out of a planned run in 2012 (explanations include that Obama was popular and a loss to a Black man would have ended his chance of accruing a significant percentage of the white racist vote; he was making fabulous amounts of money in 2012 through his NBC reality-television show; he wanted his first all-in run to be a race without incumbents) but there’s no earthly explanation for why Trump didn’t even float a run in 2008.
After all, the White House was then vacant of any incumbent, his likely opponent would have been either a woman or a Black man—both possibilities very much in keeping with his plan to run as a thinly veiled bigoted misogynist—and he was both (a) past the financial troubles of the 1990s, and (b) not yet fully immersed enough in the financial successes of the 2010s to be worried about missing out on a big private payday. We might also note that from 1988 (another election year in which there was no incumbent in the White House) through 2008, Trump had every four years either done a great deal to advance a run for president (1988, 2000), avoided a run because he was in massive financial distress (1992 and 1996) or had ample reasons not to run (see above) including his launch of The Apprentice (applicable to 2004). And of course, as noted, Trump was extremely close to running in 2012, as has been written reported on extensively—he even had Michael Cohen create a Draft Trump website and seek out 2012 polling results to determine if he’d win in 2012 (it’s to the point that some even refer to 2012 as Trump’s second “aborted” presidential campaign).
But Trump not even making any noise about running for POTUS in 2008? It’s bizarre.
Unless one considers, as discussed infra, that a top Trump political adviser deemed Jeffrey Epstein to be the most dangerous man alive with respect to Trump’s political prospects—and indeed, this was stated unambiguously at an event that at least one journalist who’s since spoken about it on the record attended—and in 2007, when Trump would have had to announce his candidacy for POTUS, Epstein was in the midst of a wide-ranging criminal probe that began in 2005 (after that “anonymous caller” dimed out Epstein in the midst of his real estate dispute with Trump the year before). By 2007, that investigation was in full swing, with Epstein finally signing a plea deal that made him a registered sex offender in late September of that year.
In short, Trump’s long-time best friend—allegedly, according to Steve Bannon (infra), the man who threatened Trump’s political prospects more than any other—was on his way to a jail cell for a 13-month sentence at the very moment Trump would have had to announce his 2008 presidential candidacy. What’s more, this potential threat was mad at Trump.
With a flick of his wrist, Jeffrey Epstein could have ended a 2008 Trump presidential campaign, and Donald Trump knew it.
This may help explain why, beginning in 2011, Trump began running—four full years before he’d announce a 2016 run—what for all the world looked like an already-in-the-bottle presidential campaign against Barack Obama that Trump could have launched in 2008 had it not been for Epstein.
Trump seemed to have an entire political strategy for running against Barack Obama ready to go in a non-election year in 2011, and has since then (even into the 2020s) repeatedly replaced his actual opponent’s name with Obama’s, mistakenly expressed that he once did or was then running against Obama (something he’s of course never done), and generally acted as though it’s Barack Obama who’s his lifelong political opponent. Just this week, Trump posted on social media an AI video of Obama being arrested by federal agents in the Oval Office as Trump looked on with a grin on his face. He also, in the last week, repeatedly posted and reposted calls from his DNI Tulsi Gabbard to have Obama arrested for Treason, and has now, as of this writing, repeated those calls personally and more than once from the Oval Office.
Doesn’t all that seem strange?
It doesn’t if you understand that 2008 was the election year Trump most wanted to run in. He had to forego a race that would have pitted him against Barack Obama because of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal difficulties—which difficulties, in what has to be one of the most karma-laden incidents in American political history, Trump himself caused by (to hear Jeffrey Epstein tell it, in his 100+ hours of interviews with Michael Wolff) either personally or through an agent being the one who jump-started the 2005 case against Epstein with an anonymous tip to local law enforcement sometime in very late 2004.
So every time Trump faces, in the 2020s, criticism from the left, center, or even some on the right for being one of the oldest presidents in American history, does he now think to himself that, but for Epstein—actually, but for his own actions, but Trump is not a man who blames himself for anything—he would have become President of the United States on January 1, 2009, at the hale young age of 62?
It’s worth remembering, here, that in mid-2007 Trump was perfectly positioned to finally make the run for President of the United States he had dreamed of since the mid-1980s. He had just married a statuesque future First Lady, Melania Knauss (on January 22, 2005); just become the father to a baby boy whose existence underscored his continued virility (Barron Trump was born on March 20, 2006); just launched a hit reality TV show that was making him rich, yet not yet so rich he would profoundly miss that income (the first episode of The Apprentice aired on January 8, 2004); and was doing bonkers business in Russia, according to his son Don (who revealed this at a private event in September 2008, two months before the presidential election of that year), which business he could have furthered significantly as president—just as he’d later try to do, via multiple Trump Tower Moscow “Letters of Intent,” when he ran in 2016.
Of the two men who Trump would blame for his stymied never-was run in 2008, one is his lifelong mortal enemy—a man he now seeks to have arrested for a death penalty-eligible offense—Barack Obama. And the other died in his custody in August 2019.
{Note: It ought not be lost on anyone that, to the extent Donald Trump was going to have to get remarried in the mid-2000s order to run for President of the United States in 2008 or any other year—America doesn’t elect bachelors—it was Jeffrey Epstein, of all people, with his dubious connections to multiple governments that wanted Trump elected and would in 2016 illegally aid his efforts to get into the White House, who (a) introduced Melania Knauss to Donald Trump, which for reasons that now seem self-evident neither of the two has ever acknowledged in public; (b) provided the intimate setting for the consummation of Trump and Melania’s relationship (his plane “The Lolita Express,” which is where Trump and Melania reportedly first had sex), and (c) was famously pictured partying with Trump and Melania—in perhaps the most famous picture of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein ever taken, one that is now ubiquitous in American culture. Other viral photos show Trump and Melania alone with Epstein’s girlfriend, the now-imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell. So if indeed Epstein introduced Trump to his wife, helped him financially navigate the 1990s—see infra—and helped connect him with very powerful foreign nationals while also keeping his many dark secrets as close to the vest as possible, we can understand why Trump’s betrayal of Epstein in 2004 and 2005 was a genuine blindsiding for Epstein and requires some sort of new, game-changing explanation.}
Obama and Epstein—connected in no other way, to be clear, than in Trump’s soiled imagination—do have something else accidentally in common. Whereas Trump has himself (via his Birthday Note) and through Steve Bannon (see infra) effectively now acknowledged that Epstein knows the sort of secrets about him that could ruin him, he’s also, inexplicably, centered his attacks on Obama upon the notion that Obama is obsessed with accessing secrets about him (which in fact Obama has never exhibited any interest in).
Trump has falsely accused Obama of committing Treason (a death-penalty offense) by spying on his 2016 presidential campaign using the FBI; he’s falsely accused Obama of committing Treason by making up a hacking-conspiracy connection between him and the Kremlin (something Obama never did, as Trump is here deliberately conflating two entirely different 2010s federal investigations), and he’s even falsely accused the former president of bugging Trump Tower (a related but slightly different allegation as the one about surveillance of his NatSec advisers Carter Page and Michael Flynn).
So what do all these allegations have in common? They all appear to be pretextual allegations whose real aim is twofold: (i) create an excuse to jail one of the two men he deems to be his foremost political threat (notably, the only one who is still alive), and (ii) create a situation in which, if any dirt about his clandestine dealings with foreign nationals or domestic sex crimes comes out, he can say that it was a hoax devised by Obama after years and years of secretly spying on his personal and political activities.
How do we know this is so? Well, because all of Trump’s allegations have been fact-checked and found false; Trump is now publicly promoting the idea of arresting Obama for Treason; and his sole defense to the allegations he faces in the Epstein Scandal is that Obama and his associates (including Joe Biden, James Comey, John Brennan, and Jim Clapper) “made [the entirety of the Epstein Files up.”
This astonishingly desperate, downright bizarre claim—after all, his own personal lawyers are in possession of The Epstein Files and, for all that they won’t release them, have never said they’re a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party—makes sense almost exclusively if you think of Barack Obama and Jeffrey Epstein in two ways:
They’re the two men Trump blames for his not becoming POTUS in 2008, the year he really wanted to (and thought he would) become president; and
they’re the two men who Trump believes could destroy him politically: Epstein because he had evidence of Trump’s most deviant adulterous and non-adulterous sexual misconduct, including criminal conduct (see supra and infra) and Obama because Trump’s paranoia and consciousness of guilt has convinced him that the former president has proof of Trump’s clandestine dealings with foreign nations over the last forty years (after all, President Obama had eight years of control over Trump’s pre-2016 FBI file); proof of Trump’s clandestine dealings with Russians, Saudis, Emiratis, and Israelis in 2015 and 2016 (hence Trump’s claims that Obama bugged Trump Tower, where Trump and his family held all their illicit meetings with agents of those nations and where Trump’s political operations were then headquartered, as detailed throughout the Proof Series); and even proof of private sexual misconduct, or at least the capacity to represent that he has such proof (as by attributing The Epstein Files to Obama, Trump was seeking to pin on Obama any future revelation of what he and Epstein were up to during their friendship).
As already observed, the three countries whose oligarchs or leaders and banking or royal investment funds Jeffrey Epstein has been connected to are Russia, Israel, and the Saudi/Emirati alliance. And which countries do we know from major-media reports has Trump colluded with illegally during the course of his political career? Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. (We can’t add China to this list because Trump’s collusion with the Chinese, according to his former National Security Advisor John Bolton and public records, was attempted rather than actual).
In this light, do Trump’s political life and political secrets start to make more sense?
And do Trump’s personal life and personal secrets start to make more sense?
Do the apparent connections between Trump’s personal and political lives and secrets start to make more sense?
Perhaps they do. Certainly, with all this in mind we can look afresh at the fact that, of the two men Trump most associates with this terrifying nexus of the personal and the political, one (Jeffrey Epstein) is mysteriously dead and the other (Barack Obama) is a man he’s now trying to incarcerate and execute in a way that will only be possible if he ends our democracy and declares martial law first.
How many people have to die, and how much must America suffer, simply to hide the secrets of what Donald Trump did with Jeffrey Epstein (and possibly those nations Epstein was investing in or on behalf of, and/or working for the intelligence services of) before America accepts that we actually do know the worst secrets at the heart of the story of Donald Trump?
Chapter 10: The Big Picture
From 2015 to 2017—thus, for the entirety of the 2016 presidential campaign, including that portion of it during which Steve Bannon was inexplicably made “campaign CEO” by Trump despite neither man much liking the other—Jeffrey Epstein and Bannon were in contact.
This is one of many things we learn from Michael Wolff from his recent interview with long-time Trump friend, fixer, attorney, and Trump Organization employee Michael Cohen.
Wolff would have cause to know what Bannon and Epstein were up to from 2015 to 2017 because that was the period during which he was writing his 2018 New York Times bestseller Fire and Fury. As it turns out, Bannon and Epstein were two of the primary sources for that book, and Wolff spent an inordinate amount of time with each man primarily discussing—what else—Donald Trump. But the two man also discussed with Wolff their relationship with one another, and that revelation, which came late in 2024, changes everything.
Why?
Because as Wolff explains at the link above, Mssrs. Bannon and Epstein weren’t just in contact during the two-year period that launched Donald Trump from being merely (by the numbers) the worst businessman in American history to being the worst U.S. president ever according to nonpartisan historians, they were “as close as you could possibly be for two years…phone calls every day, getting together constantly….and talking endlessly about Donald Trump.”
And Trump’s top political adviser and former best friend—the man most important to his political life and the man most important to his personal life, each of whom, Wolff reveals, had little respect for Trump privately, despite their public statements over the years—were specifically focused on Epstein having spend years and years “hunting women, pursuing women, with Trump” (emphasis supplied). That’s a topic that takes on an entirely different cast when we consider that Epstein wasn’t really interested in women because he was a pedophile. So the “women” Trump and Epstein would have pursued together (as we saw in their 1988 illegal casino romp) would have had to have fit into one of three categories: (i) underage girls; (ii) teens just barely legal as a matter of their capacity to consent to sex; and (iii) twenty-something “gamines” (early to mid-twenty-something young women whose “boyishness” makes them look much younger, indeed age-appropriate to classic hebephiles like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein).
So the general tenor of such a topic of discussion—as between Bannon and Epstein—would be summed up nicely by Wolff in this remark to Cohen on the subject: “Epstein regarded Donald Trump’s relationship with women as far worse than his own.”
Keep in mind that this was notorious sexual predator, serial child rapist, and transnational child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein saying “Donald Trump’s relationship with women was far worse than his own.” How many sex crimes would Donald Trump have to have committed for that to be true? Certainly, Jeffrey Epstein fervently believed that it was.
This also explains the most infamous statement Epstein’s 2015-to-2017 best friend, Bannon, ever made about Trump and women—and specifically what was going on behind the scenes (ironically, with the involvement of the aforementioned Michael Cohen) from 2015 to 2017, as Trump’s 2016 political campaign took off meteorically:
We already know, of course, about some of the women Michael Cohen helped silence in the 2016 presidential campaign. After all, that conduct led to felony convictions for both Cohen and Trump. But interestingly, Bannon wasn’t speaking of Cohen here; as the Business Insider report above explains, Bannon was speaking of another member of Trump’s veritable army of personal attorneys—specifically an even older presence in Trump’s life, Marc Kasowitz.
As Bannon would tell Wolff for Fire and Fury, “Look, Kasowitz has known [Trump] for twenty-five years [since the late 1980s or early 1990s]. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women [Trump needed to keep quiet]? Kasowitz took care of all of them.”
Of course, it wasn’t all of them. At least 28 women have accused Trump of either Rape or Sexual Assault, and Kasowitz managed to shut up precisely none of them.
This begs the question, however: of the 100 problematic Trump sexual encounters that Marc Kasowitz did have to pay to erase, how many were “mere” adulteries that Trump needed to cover up to maintain his pretense of believing in God and being a Christian—in truth, Trump is an atheist who doesn’t attend church and has privately expressed contempt for those of his voters who do—and how many were young women or girls who Trump knew were of the belief that he’d criminally assaulted them, by which self-awareness alone the man was implicitly acknowledging that these females had enough of a valid claim that he needed his most loyal personal fixer(s) to pay them all off?
We can’t know the percentages here, but we can say this much:
Most of Trump’s adulteries seem to be already known, as they involve on-again, off-again relationships that lasted for some time. For instance, Karen McDougal and her tragic story of unrequited love, Stormy Daniels and her creepy story of gross manipulation, Marla Maples and her mistress-to-cheated-on-wife story, and five other well-known and much-written about mistresses, including tennis player Gabriela Sabatini in 1989, 1988 Miss Maryland Rowanne Brewer Lane in 1993, Sports Illustrated model Kylie Bax in 1995, model Allison Giannini in 1997, and Victoria’s Secret and Playboy model Kara Young in 1998. Keep in mind here that Trump wasn’t married in 1991, 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, or 2004, so of the 38 years between Trump’s marriage to Ivana Trump and the launch of his political career, he couldn’t haven’t committed adultery (here combining half years to get full ones) for nine of those 38 years. He had a known mistress for eight others, leaving about twenty years for possible adulteries that would need to be covered up (in a way mere girlfriends wouldn’t need to be) in order to retain the far-right component of his religious base. The “problem,” of course, is that Trump appears to have actually been smitten with each of his three wives very early on in each marriage—before he got bored and trashed his wedding vows—so we can’t simply presume that Trump engaged in twenty full years of infidelity. Even in the years out of those twenty in which infidelities might have occurred, we still know the names connected to some of them that haven’t already been mentioned above: former French First Lady Carla Bruni while Trump was married to Marla Maples (an affair Bruni denies); socialite Jackie Siegel in 1998; and perhaps oddest of all, Jill Harth, the business associate he sexually assaulted before endinf up, later, in a consensual relationship with her. So where in all this is room for a hundred more adulteries that, unlike these many relationships, had to be quietly covered up?
The total number of Trump Sexual Assaults and Rapes appears to be much greater than his number of adulteries for a simple reason this report already broached: whereas his adulteries took time for him to arrange and develop, his sex crimes were often lightning fast. How many active adulteries can a highly public figure arrange in a given year? Who knows. But what’s clear was that Trump’s rapacious appetite for sexually assaulting women who might later want to go very public with their accounts made it possible for him to do so at volume. Witness, for instance, Harth’s claim that he both assaulted her and tried to assault a 22-year-old model on the same night. Or consider former Miss Hungary Kata Sarka’s pre-Trump-Russia Scandal claim that Trump tried to get her to commit adultery with him in Moscow on the very same night he’s widely alleged, by multiple witnesses, to have been cavorting with Russian prostitutes at the Ritz Moscow in November 2013. In other words, when Trump wants to move fast, he certainly can. So when Bannon says that Marc Kasowitz had to pay off a “hundred” women to keep Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign from falling apart over the grotesque and even sociopathic habits of the candidate, we must conclude that many of those silenced were in fact victims of Sexual Assault or Rape—and that the 28 (and counting) Trump victims who have come forward to allege such conduct by Trump are the remainder of a much larger set of women Donald Trump has wronged over the last half-century.
One additional fact seems to confirm this last observation.
After the 2016 presidential campaign was over, Bannon, Epstein, and Wolff met as a group to discuss it. Bannon’s first words to Epstein—having often emailed with him (emails Wolff saw, in many instances) but only on more infrequent occasions having met with him—“You were the only person I was afraid of during the [2016] campaign.”
For the head of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign to tell a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker that he and no one else was the biggest threat to that campaign is astonishing. More importantly, it underscores that adulteries were not what the campaign was most concerned about, as not only were many of Trump’s adulteries publicly known during the campaign—after all, Trump married a one-time mistress—but that fact alone decreased significantly the potential political damage any one former mistress could have caused the campaign by revealing herself publicly.
There’s also no particular reason for Epstein specifically to have information on Trump adulteries that no one else would. While Epstein was much closer to Trump from 1987 through just before Trump’s marriage to Melania in 2005, we have enough knowledge of how Trump conducted his adulteries—many were semipublic—that candidly any Trump acquaintance could have offered reporters some names had they wished to.
As someone Trump mainly partied with rather than attending organized events with, Epstein may have had more insight into Trump’s adulterous lechery than others, but he did not have exclusive access. Far from it.
What Epstein did have exclusive access to—attendees at Trump’s infamous cocaine-fueled Plaza Hotel parties with underage girls notwithstanding—was Trump’s secret sex life, specifically the series of secrets that Trump appears to refer to in his Birthday Note to Epstein on the occasion of the latter’s fiftieth birthday. How do we know that Epstein had the sort of exclusive access Bannon was worried about in the 2016 election cycle with respect to certain transgressive components of Trump’s sex life? Because that’s what Trump himself makes extremely clear in his note to Epstein. Moreover, we know, from Wolff, that Bannon and Epstein were speaking regularly for two years, and that the primary subject of their discourse was Trump’s sex life and the role Epstein played in it, so how else should we take Bannon—at the end of two years of emails and meetings—telling Epstein he was afraid of him besides a stunning acknowledgment that Epstein had the sort of knowledge of Trump Kasowitz couldn’t erase with cash?
In other words, something beyond “mere” adultery?
We must therefore see Steve Bannon’s statement to Mr. Epstein, witnessed by Wolff, as corroborating not just Epstein’s knowledge that Trump was engaged in much more than adultery—which adulteries we know Trump didn’t see as a major secret, anyway (witness his words on the Access Hollywood Tape)—but even the authenticity of the Birthday Note that the Wall Street Journal just published.
None of what Bannon and Epstein talked about or what Bannon said to Epstein after the 2016 election makes any sense if what that 2003 Note was referring to were “mere” adulteries, or if what Bannon was afraid Epstein would do to destroy Trump’s 2016 campaign involved “mere” tales of extramarital sex of the sort Trump proudly boasted of under his own steam.
No, Bannon was clearly referring to sex crimes—including those that Trump engaged in during the various sex games he played alongside Jeffrey Epstein during a creepy, seventeen-year “bromance” (one that even included, lest we forget, partner-sharing).
The only question remaining is whether any of those crimes involved underage girls.
Or perhaps we might see another question in all this: why didn’t Jeffrey Epstein destroy Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election?
Because he certainly didn’t, at least prior to the 2016 presidential election, and he certainly could have, as Bannon confirms. We have three likely explanations for this:
Epstein believed Trump would have him killed. Remember that a book filled with damaging information about Trump that had been provided to its author by Epstein came out in 2018, the same year the 2020 candidates—including eventual 2020 U.S. presidential election winner Joe Biden—began announcing their candidacies. Indeed, the investigation of Epstein that began in November 2018 and ended with his suicide or murder just nine months later began only a few weeks before Biden (who Trump feared more than any other potential competitor, as 2020’s national bestseller Proof of Corruption confirms via multiple sources) told the nation he would indeed challenge Trump. So if Epstein scheduled his work with Wolff, as he appears to have done, to be sure it wouldn’t see the light of day prior to Trump’s 2016 bid for the presidency, one reason could be that he thought any alternative would lead to his death. And given that he ended up mysteriously dead while in Donald Trump’s custody, that fear may have ended up a warranted one.
Epstein believed Wolff would never reveal that he had been a source for Fire and Fury. This belief of Jeffrey Epstein’s, if indeed he held it, likewise turned out to be accurate—at least in the ways that count. Michael Wolff didn’t reveal Epstein’s involvement in Fire and Fury until after Epstein was dead. While one could argue that Wolff may have been bound by agreements he made to Epstein even after the man’s demise, because we can’t know what arrangements the two had, we simply can’t say that for sure.
Epstein wanted Trump to win the presidency. This, too, appears to be true, and it adds enormous credibility to Epstein’s statements to Wolff between 2015 and 2017. Apart from Epstein’s many statements to Wolff about his own intention of being transparent—as Wolff tells Cohen in their recent interview, Epstein said to him right off the bat, “Ask me anything and I will be transparent with you, I will demonstrate my transparency to you”; for his part, Wolff says “I found [Epstein] to be incredibly open” —Epstein also told Wolff in early 2015 that “if Trump runs for president in 2016, he will win.” While not itself an endorsement, this remark was followed by Epstein doing nothing to prevent that outcome, even though it was in his power to do so. That certainly is as much of an “endorsement” as Trump could ever have wanted from Epstein. Certainly, Wolff relays that no statement was made by Epstein to the effect that he aimed to or sought to keep Trump from the presidency—so whatever the terms of their falling out in 2004 (see supra), they didn’t extend to Epstein trying to keep Trump from gaining presidential powers. Even if we argue that Epstein did, by speaking to Wolff, present a potential harm to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020, the fact that he didn’t, as Steve Bannon confirms, ever try to stand in the way of Trump becoming President of the United States in the first instance means that was an outcome he (or at a bare minimum, entities that he was financially or otherwise beholden to) were willing to live with.
Epstein, for all his anger at Trump, still felt close to him after their breakup. As with the items above, this also seems to have been true. As Wolff tells Cohen, the Trump-Epstein friendship not only lasted 17 years but stood as “the central and most important relationship in the lives of both men” because of its duration relative to their respective romantic relationships and because they shared an abiding obsession, Wolff says, with just two things: “women and money” (note that neither God, family, America, public service, nor foreign or domestic policy appear on that list). Remember Stacey Williams’ testimony to the effect that Epstein mentioned Trump “every time” she was with him? Recall the positively gushing language in Trump’s birthday card to his “wonderful pal”? Recall how many pictures of Trump and Epstein are in the public domain, as compared to only a handful with every mistress Trump has ever had in total? Remember the 14 numbers Epstein had for Trump in his infamous “little black book,” or the fact that Epstein was able to show Wolff (as Wolff details for Cohen) Polaroid photos of Trump at a pool with Epstein surrounded by a gaggle of topless teens? All this underscores that Trump and Epstein shared a comfort and an intimacy with one another that was, in every sense, a bromance—the sort of relationship in which one of the two (Trump) would set up a party at his home (Mar-a-Lago) in which the only guests were him, his bestie, and countless models. From Epstein attending Trump’s wedding to Trump routinely showing up at Epstein’s office (as Epstein’s brother recounts), the Trump-Epstein bromance has all the hallmarks of a lengthy relationship that meant so much to both men that even after it ended Epstein was titillated by the idea of his longtime pal becoming President of the United States.
Then there’s a fifth, darker possibility we must discuss—one comes from the late 2017 interview Epstein gave to a Forbes journalist at his Florida home, and which only Proof has written about because only Proof (and celebrated CNN journo Natasha Bertrand, who has, interestingly, lately become a target of Trump’s special ire) knows the name of the journalist.
So what did Epstein tell this Forbes journalist during an hours-long sit-down at his home arranged by a Russian-born special assistant of his? As Proof has previously noted on Twitter to an audience of nearly a million readers, he said all the following (with far and away the most significant revelation saved for last in the list below):
He helped Trump purchase Mar-a-Lago. That event happened in 1985, so either Trump and Epstein were business associates (at a minimum) two years earlier than we believed—which is possible—or what Epstein is referring to is Trump’s mid-1990s conversion of his Florida mansion into a country club, an extremely controversial and costly endeavor for Trump, as it involved not only battles with local government but also massive lawsuits, that it seems inconceivable he would have had the money for given that from exactly the year he bought Mar-a-Lago to exactly the year he broke ground on his new club (1994) we know, from a New York Times report that covers that very time period, Trump’s income was… minus $1 billion. That’s not a typo. So at a time Trump allegedly had hundreds of millions of dollars available to him to transform Mar-a-Lago into a lucrative country club that’s now one of his main sources of income—annual dues are now $1 million per member—and tens of millions of dollars available to him for the $50 million lawsuit that made this fateful transformation possible in the first instance, Trump’s net income was a loss of a billion dollars. So either Epstein’s claim that he helped Trump create Mar-a-Lago as a country club is true or the claims from his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. that much of the Trump Family’s money came from Kremlin-controlled banks explains this vast mathematical disparity. In either case, this would help explain why Trump certainly did not revoke Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago membership over Epstein engaging in his usual dodgy behavior at the club, and may have given Epstein good reason (see supra) to believe Russians were fronting the money for Trump to buy the Wexner Estate from under Epstein.
He and Trump were “best friends” for at least a decade of their seventeen-year friendship. That Epstein repeated this claim to Forbes at the same time he was divulging it to Wolff not only underscores his consistency on the matter but, far more importantly, the fact that this claim would surprise no one who was in good standing in Palm Beach high society at the time. Even Trump, for all that he has disingenuously disavowed Epstein at various points in his political career, hasn’t tried to claim he wasn’t close to Epstein for some years because (a) he’s admitted as much in past interviews he can’t undo, and (b) no one would believe him if he lied about this because hundreds or even thousands of wealthy Floridians know first-hand the truth of the matter.
Epstein was investing billions of dollars for one of the richest men on Earth, Mohammad bin Salman—the murderous Saudi autocrat who would become Trump’s closest foreign ally (ahead of even Vladimir Putin) after his election to the U.S. presidency in 2016. This revelation is so critical that it could probably be a report—even a full-length book—on its own. Could this explain why Epstein wanted Trump to become president? Because it would benefit a client? Could this explain why MBS sent agents to Trump Tower in August 2016 to offer illegal election assistance to Don Jr. (which assistance was both accepted and given, as detailed exhaustively in the Macmillan-published 2019 national bestseller Proof of Conspiracy)? Does a long-term MBS-Epstein financial relationship make more likely Epstein’s rumored association with Israeli intelligence, given that MBS and the Israelis—much like MBS’s ally, Emirati crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed, and the Israelis—have been secretly playing footsies, unbeknownst to their most ardent antisemitic supporters, for many years? Given that we just learned that Epstein had untold wealth stashed in multiple U.S.-sanctioned, Kremlin-linked banks, is Epstein’s claim that he was an investor for MBS an indication he was also an investor for other murderous autocrats Trump is close with, like Putin? Does this explain why the fake passport the FBI found in Epstein’s safe said he lived in Saudi Arabia? Because MBS wanted Trump to know that (a) Epstein knew his secrets, and (b) could flee to Saudi Arabia at any moment he chose, meaning (c) Trump had to do anything MBS demanded of him, including cover up a murder?
Epstein said that he and Trump were still in contact—and that Trump had come to his home to visit him while he was president, in December of 2017. I have written about this possibility on Twitter many times—from calling on major media to look into it to linking these events to the Wexner Estate to a 200-plus-tweet thread breaking down the logistics of such a visit based on Trump’s daily schedule (he was indeed in Florida at the time) and the distance from Mar-a-Lago to Epstein’s home (mere minutes)—but in the context of this Proof report, the significance of Epstein’s claim is magnified exponentially. Why? Because it would explain why Epstein never betrayed Trump during the 2016 presidential election: because Trump had secretly kept him close throughout the campaign (perhaps even by having his campaign CEO, Bannon, stay in touch with him), and because Epstein client MBS was secretly aiding the Trump campaign at a time Epstein was in regular contact with Trump and/or his political team, making Epstein a useful local, Palm Beach conduit for communications between Trump and his secret political ally from the Kingdom. It would also confirm that every statement Trump has made about his falling out with Epstein was indeed a lie—but one not so much intended to cover up the fact that there never was a falling out but as part of a concord between Epstein and Trump (or Trump and Epstein’s backers) aimed at avoiding having anyone look at the Kremlin-connected real estate deal the two men had argued over in 2004, or what MBS was doing during the 2016 campaign, or what the Israeli government was doing during that same campaign, and so on.
{Note: Lying about recent contacts is a common feature of those involved in the Epstein scandal. As the Washington Post reported in 2020, not long after Trump friend Ghislaine Maxwell represented to a court, through her attorney, that she hadn’t sent or received any message from her ex-boyfriend Epstein since the 2000s, it was revealed that Epstein had sent her an email in 2015 that told her she’d done nothing wrong (in Epstein’s view) and should now simply “go outside, head high, not as an escaping convict. Go to parties. Deal with it.”}
This chapter must now put together all of the foregoing in the context of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein having had a seventeen-year friendship in which each was apparently a firsthand witness to sex crimes committed by the other, meaning that either could crush the other’s professional or political career instantly if they chose.
And we must put all this in the context of the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein while he was in Trump’s federal custody, and put all this in the context of Trump’s profoundly corrupt relationship with MBS in both of his two presidential terms.
We must put all this in the context of the Birthday Note Trump sent Epstein in 2003, with all its coy mentions of “secrets” and “enigmas” and the unspoken ways for men who already have everything one can legally acquire to somehow get… more than that.
And finally, we must put it in the context of Trump positioning two of his personal lawyers as the heads of the FBI and DOJ, by coincidence the two agencies that took custody of the Epstein Files on January 20, 2025—after years of at least one of these two people (Kash Patel) assuring Trump voters that he would release every last page of the Files, only to have the Trump personal lawyer at DOJ (Pam Bondi) declare that the Files will never be released. Part of this context, too, of course, is the President of the United States thereafter losing his marbles online and calling his supporters “cowards” and “weaklings” and “stupid” for wanting to see the Files he’d long promised to show them, excommunicating all such Trumpists from MAGA (even calling them “PAST supporters” whose continued “support” he “didn’t want”) and ranting in private that MAGAs needed to “shut the fuck up” about Epstein (items discussed by Proof here).
This latter conduct is conduct the likes of which we have never seen from a sitting president—but we’ve certainly seen it from serial sexual predators once they know that they have finally been caught out by law enforcement. Trump is exhibitly that degree of manic consciousness of guilt.
We’re now even starting to learn some secrets about this conduct that weren’t in the public record until just a matter of days ago.
In a just-released report, Allison Gill, a journalist who’s the former Outpatient Clinic Operations Chief of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and regularly receives confidential tips from persons still working in the government, confirmed the recent revelation by Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-IL), previously covered by Proof here, that Trump personal lawyer Pam Bondi secretly tasked a large number of FBI agents with “flagging” all mentions of “Donald Trump” in The Epstein Files. Gill writes as follows of tips she received from active federal law enforcement agents (emphasis added):
“Approximately a thousand personnel in the [FBI’s] Information Management Division and the FBI’s New York Field Office were assigned to this task [of flagging mentions of Trump in the Epstein Files], confirming the whistleblower account made to Senator Durbin’s office. I can also confirm that a log exists tracking the mentions of Donald Trump in the files.
There were approximately 100,000 files containing roughly 300,000 pages [in The Epstein Files now in the possession of the FBI and DOJ, both headed by Trump’s personal lawyers].
Individual analysts were told to flag mentions of Trump by document and page number by logging them in an Excel spreadsheet, then they would hand in their spreadsheet at the end of their sometimes 24- or even 48-hour shift.
But it’s important to note that the agents were not told to flag Trump until later in a process that began mid-March.
The process of reviewing the Epstein and Maxwell files was chaotic, and the orders were constantly changing—sometimes daily.
Gill goes on to detail what her FBI and other government sources told her about the training for this review process:
“Video exists of [DOJ] trainers explaining the process of flagging instances of Donald Trump appearing in the files, and those videos went out on unclassified networks within the bureau.
….
Analysts were told that what would be released [from the Files] would be solely up to [Trump’s personal lawyer] Bondi. Many feared that victims’ information would be released or used for nefarious purposes. Eventually, lawyers from the Department of Justice were assigned to the project to oversee what was being flagged for redaction.
Analysts were next told to mark the victim’s names for redaction. Then soon after that, they were told to mark all other Personal Identifiable Information (PII) such as social security numbers and addresses.
Then they were told to mark all descriptions of illicit acts for redaction.
Then, finally, they were instructed to keep a spreadsheet of instances when Trump was mentioned. After the spreadsheets of mentions of Trump were handed in, they were stitched together in one master list.”
As Gill’s report concludes, “There is a log of instances [in which] Donald Trump is mentioned in the files; there are video and PDF trainings instructing analysts to flag Trump; and there were multiple instances of Trump appearing in the files.”
With all this in mind, the question of “What did Trump do to underage girls between 1987 and 2004, when he was best friends with a pedophilic child sex trafficker?” becomes something considerably more than an academic exercise.
For instance, whatever Trump did with underage girls is enough for him to have literally forced the United States Congress to shut down (as the New York Times reports):
And whatever Trump did with underage girls is enough for him to try to distract from it by repeatedly promoting on social media platforms plans by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to recommend the near-term arrest and seek the execution of a former President of the United States and his top officials on an imaginary charge of Treason. Thus this Politico headline and a thousand others like it, a number of them pushed by Donald Trump on his Truth Social site:
Trump is in fact so spooked by what’s happening right now that he’s gone five days without being willing to answer even one question about Epstein—and Trump loves the spotlight, no matter the topic—such that on July 22, per a New York Times report,
“President Trump, under fire over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files, escalated his distract-and-deflect strategy on Tuesday, accusing former President Barack Obama of Treason and declaring, ‘It’s time to go after people.’
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump condemned questions about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as…. ‘a witch hunt” and then launched into a rant against a now-familiar string of rivals and the media. ‘The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama. Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton.’
In his remarks, Trump claimed that he could have sent Clinton, the former Secretary of State and another of his political rivals, to prison but chose not to.
He said he would show no such leniency to Obama.
‘I let her off the hook, and I’m very happy I did, but it’s time to start [sending people to federal prison] after what they did to me,’ Trump said. ‘Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly.’
….
‘[The first prosecution] would be President Obama,’ Trump said. ‘He started [the coup], and Biden was there with him, and [former FBI Director James] Comey was there, and [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, the whole group was there.’
‘He’s guilty,’ he said of Obama. ‘This was Treason. This was every word you can think of.’”
Only fringe-right conspiracy theorists can even begin to imagine what Trump thinks he’s referring to here. His own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio (R-FL), ran the Senate committee that came to all the same conclusions about the 2016 presidential election that Obama, Comey, Biden, and Clapper did.
Trump at least knows what he’s avoiding here: a growing public concern that he may have regularly slept with teenagers as a grown man, and perhaps even underage girls.
Whatever Trump did with underage girls is enough for him to have had his very first public response to Epstein’s death be, per the New York Times, “sharing a social media post that attempted to link the death to Bill Clinton. Days later, when pressed about his unfounded claims of Clinton’s involvement, Trump did not let up, calling for a full investigation, even though he offered no facts to support his allegations.”
So in addition to trying to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein case by floating the state-sponsored execution of one former President of the United States—Barack Obama—Trump effectively also tried to distract from the Epstein case by floating the state-sponsored execution (following a conviction for Conspiracy to Commit First-Degree Murder) of a second former President of the United States, Bill Clinton.
How bad does a secret involving a dead pedophile you were best friends with for over a decade have to be for you to try to kill not just one but two U.S. presidents over it?
Whatever Trump did with underage girls is enough for him to, for the first time in his political career, attack his own political base and demand that they stop supporting him, as he did in screeching across several social media posts that any Republican who wanted the information about Epstein that he promised them in order to become president a second time was in fact “stupid,” a “coward,” a “weakling,” and (he added, per media reports, in private rants inside the White House) should “shut the fuck up.”
Whatever Trump did with underage girls is enough for him to lie viciously and again and again about—Proof writes this advisedly—every aspect of his lengthy relationship with Epstein, all the way down to saying, absurdly, of his close friend for 17 years and his best friend for over a decade, “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.” Does this mean “everybody” in Palm Beach flew on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” at least seven times, at Trump did? Did “everybody” appear in Epstein’s “little black book” fourteen times, as Trump did? Did “everybody” in Palm Beach go to Trump’s second wedding, as Epstein did? Whatever sexual misconduct Trump got up to with Epstein was so bad it appears to have diffused his normally capable ability to lie.
And whatever Trump did with underage girls is enough for him to send his personal lawyer Todd Blanche—now masquerading as a bona fide public servant, just like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Emil Bove, Alina Habba and all the other Trump personal lawyers given government jobs on the apparent promise they would continue being Trump’s personal lawyers also—to seemingly dangle a pardon in front of Ghislaine Maxwell (who wasn’t willing to cut a deal when a mere reduction in sentence was in the offing under a Democratic president with no ties to Epstein) in exchange for her now saying Trump never did anything to anybody. Meanwhile, Trump himself sits in the Oval Office and pretends he knows nothing about what his lawyers are doing on his behalf.
{Note: Or was doing so, until this major news broke—karmically, in the pages of the under-suit Wall Street Journal—on the evening of July 24, 2025.}
The transparent hamminess of all this, the cloyingly arrogant charade of it, is getting increasingly hard to take. Everyone who knows the history here believes that this is a cover-up of something incredibly nasty—and that what Donald Trump and his agents are trying to determine is simply what red meat (e.g., the hide of a major Democrat) would be enough for the MAGA base to leave them alone about Epstein forever. If that day should come, they would never mention his name again, no matter how much Democrats and independents daily point out that protecting U.S. children from serial sexual predators is a moral imperative.
Is there a possibility that none of these secrets and lies relates to hebephilia at all?
Yes, it’s possible. For instance, in The Epstein-Wolff Tapes, the deceased billionaire makes “an allegation….that Trump had an affair with a politician while in the White House.” Is that true? We don’t know. But it at once gives another window into the sort of misconduct Trump might be trying to hide and offers some additional evidence that Epstein in fact continued to be in contact with Trump after 2004—as it’s hard to see how he could claim intimate knowledge of the Trump White House (which he does, at length, in The Epstein-Wolff Tapes), let alone about Trump’s sexual conduct inside the Presidential Residence, unless his decades of close friendship with Trump, and them telling one another their sexual secrets, continued long past the time that either was able to publicly admit it.
The Epstein-Wolff Tapes include other allegations too, including a few—none of the ones discussed above in this report, to be clear—that Epstein would thereafter recant (or seem to) in civil depositions. We can’t know, however, whether his claims to have been in various ways involved with many of Trump’s closest friends, family members, and even some administration officials (he speaks to Michael Wolff of Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, very close Trump friend Carl Icahn, very close Trump friend Thomas Barrack, and first Trump Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis) have substance or not. And now that Jeffrey Epstein is dead, we’ll never know—even as it remains unclear what evidence he may have left behind.
All in all, almost every piece of evidence known to exist in The Epstein Files, in the Epstein-Wolff Tapes, in The Epstein Grand Jury Transcripts, and in every piece of civil litigation connected to Epstein points to every dark secret connected to the dead man involving one thing above all others: Child Rape. Not Blackmail, or Extortion, or Conspiracy—crimes that are oddly absent from nearly the entire Epstein record—but simply Epstein’s testimonial knowledge (and possibly unused and forever unmentioned videos) of rich and powerful men from multiple countries raping underage girls.
{Note: As Florida reporter Julia K. Brown, the foremost journalist covering Epstein in this century, has said, “I don’t think Epstein blackmailed people directly…I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down. I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with. It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying, ‘If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so.’ I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this [having sex with underage girls]….[you think], ‘Jeffrey Epstein knows this about me, maybe I better do this [thing that Epstein now wants me to do for him].”}
We must remember that, for all that corporate media now treats Jeffrey Epstein’s life as one shrouded in shadows and secrecy, in fact the somewhat reclusive pedophile did make time to regularly hold social gatherings at his home in which his predilections were clear. As Brown has said in a New York Times interview, “I had some of [Epstein’s underage] victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over [Epstein]. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see” (Emphasis supplied).
But these were rich and powerful people—and accountability is hard to orchestrate for such types in contemporary U.S. culture. Or perhaps at any time in U.S. history.
Brown reminds us, too, that what was apparently the largest and most enduring known pedophilia ring in American history didn’t happen through the actions of just two people, one of whom is now dead and one of whom is angling—quite promisingly—for a pardon from Donald Trump. “Epstein didn’t do this all by himself. He barely tied his shoes by himself. He had butlers and assistants doing everything for him—including the compiling of his contact lists, his musical playlists. He had people doing that for him. His computers—he had lots of people helping him [with all that]. So he did not do this alone. There were other people helping him. And there were other men who [were] sent some of these women, too.”
It’s enough to make one feel as though the question at this point isn’t whether Trump raped children but how many he raped. It’s inconceivable that he could be involved in the truly deranged public gymnastics he’s now performing before the entire world if the only inculpatory component of the Epstein saga is that Trump used to have very, very bad taste in friends. No—it seems clear that Trump now considers himself to be personally implicated in the criminal activities of (this bears repeating over and over) a mysteriously dead serial sexual predator who was not only a notoriously, historically prolific pedophile rapist but also the biggest child sex trafficker in U.S. history. And did I mention that this man was Donald Trump’s best friend for seventeen years, and that their entire relationship boiled down to—according to literally everyone who has ever written about it—only two things: sex and money?
Thanks for your tireless research. Seth, you are a force of nature, shining light into the darkness so that goodness can prevail. I stand with the victims of these horrific, sickening crimes. Release the complete Epstein/Maxwell files!
I don’t understand why this isn’t everywhere. Thanks for what you do. Looking forward to the next pieces.