Allegations Against Donald Trump and Katie Johnson: Everything We Know

A viral social media post is circulating a court document containing allegations of sexual assault against former President Donald Trump made in a legal case that was dismissed nearly a decade ago.

The post accuses Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, of “coercing” young girls to “perform lesbian sex acts.” It has been viewed more than 17 million times on X, formerly Twitter, since Monday, and shared more than 34,000 times.

Some X users appear to believe the document is a recent case file. The post was shared after about 150 pages of transcripts related to a 2006 grand jury investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s rape and sex trafficking of teenage girls were made public Monday.

However, the document included in Post X is not related to these documents, but actually comes from a lawsuit filed in the months leading up to the 2016 election by an anonymous plaintiff using the name “Katie Johnson.”

The complaint, filed in federal court in Riverside, California, in April 2016, named Trump and Epstein, the recently convicted sex offender, as defendants. It alleged that the men held Johnson as a “sex slave” in 1994, when she was 13, and forced her to perform sexual acts.

A judge dismissed the case in May of that year, finding that the complaint did not raise valid claims under federal law, Politico reported at the time.

Another version of the complaint was filed in June, but it was reportedly withdrawn a few months later. A third version of the complaint, in which the plaintiff called herself “Jane Doe,” was filed in September 2016, accusing Trump of rape. That complaint was also dropped a few months later.

Trump’s accuser was scheduled to appear at a press conference in early November 2016, but her lawyer, Lis Bloom, said she had received threats and was too afraid to show up. Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Meagher, then filed a motion to dismiss the case, without providing an explanation. The woman has not been heard from since.

Alan Garten, Trump’s lawyer at the time, dismissed the woman’s allegations as “categorically false” at the time. “It’s completely frivolous. It’s baseless. It’s irresponsible,” Garten told Politico. “I’m not even going to discuss the merits of these allegations because that gives them a credibility they don’t deserve.”

A Trump spokesperson was reached by email for comment.

Allegations contained in the now-dismissed lawsuits appear to be resurfacing on social media as documents related to Epstein are unsealed.

A similar social media post circulated in January after previously sealed court documents from a now-settled lawsuit filed against Ghislaine Maxwell by one of Epstein's victims were made public.

Epstein was charged by federal prosecutors with sex trafficking in 2019. He was found dead in his jail cell while awaiting trial.

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.