What Jeffrey Epstein's files reveal about Donald Trump

One of the 17 exhibits unsealed on Jan. 8 contained references to Trump, but they came from emails that an Epstein victim sent to a reporter and later recanted.

In emails exchanged with New York at the time Job Journalist Maureen Callahan in October 2016, Sarah Ransome made a number of explosive allegations against famous men, claiming her friend had sex with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Richard Branson on multiple occasions. She also said she had videos of the encounters but couldn't share them without her friend's permission.

In one of the emails, summarized below by lawyers representing Alan Dershowitz, Ransome said her friend was one of “many girls” Trump had sex with, claimed the friend regularly had sex with Trump at Epstein's mansion and shared other NSFW details about Trump. sexual tendencies:

Ransome's email containing the claims about Trump appears later in the document and is partially truncated:

In the document, Dershowitz's lawyers used the emails to portray Ransome as a liar, noting that she made numerous outlandish claims to the reporter, such as saying she had asked the Russians for help and that she had was “approached by special forces agents”. Men sent directly from Hilary [sic] Clinton herself, in order to protect her presidential campaign.” For example:

In her final email to Callahan, Ransome says she wants to “take back everything I've told you and move away from it.” Callahan has never published an article related to his allegations.

Ransome also said The New Yorker in 2019, she never had any videos. In his 2021 memoir, Never again silencedRansome explained why:

I also told him that I had video evidence of public figures participating in Jeffrey and Ghislaine's pedophile ring. I did not do it. I said I did it because I was absolutely terrified that, once I went public with my story, Jeffrey and Ghislaine would find me and kill me. I wanted to send them a message through the press: if you make war on me, I will retaliate by making my evidence public. It would be my leverage, my way of protecting myself.

As ABC News noted, although Ransome has been involved in various lawsuits against Epstein, no evidence to support these claims appears in publicly available court records:

Ransome was deposed in 2017 as a witness in the Giuffre v. Maxwell litigation. No evidence supporting the allegations Ransome shared with the journalist has been placed on the record in this case.

The lawsuit Ransome filed in 2017 under the pseudonym “Jane Doe 43” against Epstein, Maxwell and other alleged co-conspirators was settled the following year.

Neither Clinton, Trump, nor Branson were accused by Giuffre, or anyone other than Ransome, of wrongdoing during Giuffre's defamation lawsuit against Maxwell.

Ransome gave a victim impact statement in federal court during Maxwell's sentencing that did not specifically mention Trump or anyone except Epstein and Maxwell.