Jeffrey Epstein showed off photos of Donald Trump with “topless young women” sitting in his lap, the controversial author Michael Wolff has alleged.
The pedophile financier had about half a dozen pictures which showed Trump by the pool with multiple young women, Wolff claimed on his podcast, Fire & Fury, Thursday. They were taken in the “late ’90s” at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, where he victimized dozens of underage girls along with his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, Wolff said.
Wolff alleged that they were in Epstein’s safe, which the FBI seized when they raided his homes in New York and Palm Beach in July 2019. The massive haul of evidence taken by the feds has never been made public—and while prosecutors disclosed after the raid that they had “hundreds of photos of girls and young women,” they have never offered any more details of them.
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Wolff said of the photos, “They were with Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach house sitting around the pool with these young girls, and the young girls are topless.
“And in some of the pictures, they’re sitting in his lap. I mean, and, and then there’s one I especially remember where there’s a stain, a telltale stain and on the front of Trump’s pants, and the girls are pointing at him and laughing.” Trump separated from his second wife Marla Maples in 1997 and began dating his third wife, Melania, in 1998.
The Trump campaign hit back at Wolff for the claims, calling him “disgraced.” A campaign spokesperson said in a statement to the Beast, “Michael Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics.
“He waited until days before the election to make outlandish false smears all in an effort to engage in blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris. He’s a failed journalist that is resorting to lying for attention.”
Sources in the Trump camp claimed that he had severed his relationship with Epstein when he learned of allegations that he was a sex trafficker and pointed to his quote: “I was not a fan of Jeffrey Epstein. And you watched people yesterday saying that I threw him out of a club. I didn’t want anything to do with him. That was many, many years ago.”
Wolff described the photos as he revealed details of how Epstein was a key source for him while writing his best-selling book Fire & Fury, which rocked the Trump White House when it was published in 2018. Wolff said he had as much as 100 hours of tapes of Epstein talking about Trump and played a short snippet of one of the tapes in the podcast. He also said he was prompted to speak after allegations this week by a former Miss Switzerland that Trump groped her, “grabbing and touching my body everywhere he could.”
Asked by the co-host of the podcast, journalist James Truman, “Where are these pictures?” Wolff suggested they may be among the items taken by the FBI, which worked for Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, at the time.
“You know, he would go and he would take them out of the safe. And then he would return them to the safe and I would say it’s likely that they would have been there when the FBI, Trump’s FBI at that point, not to put too fine a point on it, raided Epstein’s house and took the contents of the safe in 2019.”
In 2017, when Wolff was speaking to Epstein, the pedophile was living as a free man and socializing openly in New York and Florida. The tape appears to have been made in a restaurant.
But, said Wolff, he felt that Epstein was at the time living in fear of Trump, whose victory the pedophile had predicted the previous year.
“I couldn’t help but feeling that there was a level of personal fear there. So he’s having this conversation with me. And as I say, I’m writing Fire and Fury," Wolff said.
"I‘m trying to figure out Donald Trump, but it‘s as confounding to me, of course, as it was to everybody. ’What? Who is this guy? How did this happen?’“
Wolff said Epstein’s level of fear “startled” him, and said, “I’ve spoken to several other people who knew Epstein well and yeah, you know, they make the same point. And I know that Epstein would emphasize how he believed Trump was capable of doing anything. He had no scruples.“
Claims that Epstein had compromising material on the rich and powerful with whom he associated have long swirled, especially since his death in a federal jail cell in August 2019, weeks after his arrest.
Wolff also expressed some skepticism that Epstein’s death was by suicide–something which Trump suggested himself in August 2020–but also warned that the alternative, a cover-up on an extraordinary scale, is itself implausible.
“The descriptions of how he died seem completely implausible, to have to break your own neck,” Wolff said. “But the idea of him being murdered seems to also imply that you would have all of these assistant US attorneys and FBI agents who had to keep their mouths shut.”
Wolff, a veteran magazine journalist and author who was also the biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has long been a divisive figure with some questioning the accuracy of what he says and writes. When Fire & Fury was published in January 2018 it attracted praise and bromides in equal measure and threats to sue by Trump, which never materialized. Wolff did not disclose that Epstein, who was then alive and free, was a source and only hinted at it long after Epstein’s death.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which was prosecuting Epstein when he died, for comment.
