Epstein wrote that Trump knew about the sexual assault but did not participate

New documents released by the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Wednesday (11/12) indicate that Donald Trump was aware of the sexual abuse scheme against minors led by Jeffrey Epstein, but the current US president did not participate in the abuse.

The House committee released more than 20,000 pages of documents on Wednesday. One file contains an email sent by Epstein on February 1, 2019, about six months before his suicide.

“Trump learned of this (abuse) and came to my home several times during this period,” Epstein wrote in an email to himself. In the same letter, the businessman said that Trump did not participate in the crimes. “He never got a massage,” he wrote.

Jeffrey Epstein case

Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sexually assaulting underage girls between the 1990s and 2000s through a sex trafficking ring he coordinated.
Investigations against the former financier began in mid-2005. He was arrested in 2008, after pleading guilty to some charges, which secured him a lighter sentence. Epstein was released in July 2009.
Epstein returned to the spotlight in 2019, when federal investigations culminated in a new arrest.
In August of that year, less than three weeks after his second arrest, Epstein was found dead in a detention center located in Manhattan. Investigations indicate that the billionaire committed suicide.

The “massage” mentioned by Epstein was used to commit sex crimes. According to documents from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Epstein’s trafficking scheme involved recruiting young girls, often promising to pay them $200 in exchange for a “rich billionaire’s massage.”

The young woman was then taken to Epstein’s room, where he sat on a massage table. There he sexually assaulted the victim. “This same pattern has been repeated countless times with many children,” an excerpt from the lawsuit says.

Trump ‘knew about the girls’

Other documents released by the House committee reinforce that Trump was aware of the violations. In one of them, sent in 2019 to author Michael Wolff, Epstein stated that the current US president “knew about the girls.”

“Trump said he asked me to resign, but I was never a member (of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club). Of course he knew about the girls, and he told Ghislaine (his former partner) to stop,” Epstein wrote to Wolff.

In a 2011 email exchange with Ghislaine Maxwell, his then-partner who was later convicted of facilitating his crimes, Epstein claimed Trump “spent hours” with one of the victims at his home.

The link between Trump and Epstein

Although the case was never formally investigated, relations between Trump and Epstein became a flashpoint in the Republican Party’s second term.

Between the 1990s and 2000s, the two maintained a close friendship, and were spotted at many parties involving high circles in the USA.

But the US President denies knowledge of the crimes committed by Epstein. In last year’s election race, Trump promised to release new documents about the scandal, including a list of people allegedly linked to the sexual exploitation scheme.

Some of them were published last February, but without carrying any important news about the case.

4 photosConditional closure.1 of 4

Photo taken in 1997. Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump attend an event held at the Mar-a-Lago Club Resort

Davidoff Studios/Getty Images 2 of 4

“You’re the greatest,” Trump praises Epstein in his book’s dedication

Reproduction / The New York Times 3 of 4Mark Cresson / Photos via Getty Images4 of 4Probal Rasheed/LightRocket via Getty Images

Trump attacks Democrats

After the emails were published, Donald Trump accused Democrats of using the issue to “distract attention” from the lockdown facing the United States.

“The Democrats are trying to revive the Jeffrey Epstein hoax because they will do anything to distract from what a disaster they were with the government shutdown and so many other issues,” the US President wrote.