Epstein’s former girlfriend: Did not see Trump act in inappropriate way
FILE – Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, during a news conference in New York on July 2, 2020. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend repeatedly denied to the Justice Department witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with President Trump, according to records released Friday.
The Trump administration issued hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell last month.
The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Blanche that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behavior.
The president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.
“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News.
She estimated that she hadn’t seen Trump since the mid-2000s, again in a social setting. Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”
Maxwell, a onetime socialite who was convicted in 2021 of helping lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, was interviewed over the course of two days last month by Blanche at a Florida courthouse.
Blanche prefaced the interview by saying Maxwell had been given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said. The only exceptions, he said, were if she lied or gave statements inconsistent with what she’d previously said.
After her interview, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida where she had been serving a 20-year sentence to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. Neither her lawyer nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have explained the reason for the move.
The Epstein case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer’s social connections over the years to prominent figures, including Prince Andrew, former President Bill Clinton and Trump, who has said his relationship with Epstein ended years before.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, and was found dead a month later in a New York jail cell in what investigators described as a suicide.
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