Two of television’s biggest names broke through days of silence from their networks about the bombshell tapes revealed by the Daily Beast in which Jeffrey Epstein speaks about his relationship with Donald Trump.
Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC both spoke of their shock at the tapes, with the late-night host complaining that they had not been widely covered by other outlets.
A tiny snippet of the tapes were first disclosed last Thursday by the author Michael Wolff, and on Saturday the Daily Beast published recordings in which Epstein made extraordinary claims about his friend of a decade.
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The convicted pedophile suggested intimate knowledge of the West Wing. He alleged that Trump liked to cuckold his best friends, that Trump first made love with Melania Trump on Epstein’s “Lolita Express plane,” called Trump a serial cheat who boasted about “f---ing Black girls,” and claimed without evidence that Trump had had an affair while in the White House. The tapes were made two years before Epstein’s death in a federal jail cell, when he spoke to Wolff as a source for his bombshell international bestseller, Fire and Fury. Wolff said Epstein showed him a cache of pictures of Trump with topless young women in his lap.
Such dramatic claims about the character of a presidential candidate on the eve of a campaign would normally be expected to be taken up immediately by major television networks, particularly given the light they cast on Trump’s largely unexplored relationship with one of America’s most notorious sex offenders.
But instead they were greeted by silence, despite being highlighted by leading Democrats, including Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC who posted on X, “Trump is all over the Epstein files.”
The wall of silence lasted until the very eve of the election, when first MSNBC‘s Maddow and then ABC’s Kimmel spoke about them on air Monday night.
On MSNBC, Maddow listed what she termed “October surprises,” comparing the tape to the revelation that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said Trump is a textbook fascist, and to the Iowa poll that put Harris three points ahead in the deep-red state. Both have received blanket coverage on liberal-leaning MSNBC and other networks.
The Beast can disclose that Maddow spoke out despite an NBC News “standards” ruling not to report on the tapes. The network’s “standards” unit had warned its staff that the tapes were “DNU,” meaning “Do Not Use,” and said they could not be mentioned until there was “an attempt to listen to the entire, unedited, version of the recording to note what was omitted.” Wolff has said he has 100 hours of recordings.
Notably, MSNBC has not posted the segment in which Maddow talks about the tapes on X so far Tuesday.
On ABC, Kimmel, who is not bound by news standards, spoke freely about his shock at the recording and hinted at the silence that surrounded the Beast’s bombshell.
“We heard a bombshell audio tape in which Jeffrey Epstein says he was Trump’s ‘closest friend’ and shares a bunch of crazy stories. This barely moves the needle,” Kimmel said. “Remember when Mitt Romney went down because he put a dog carrier on the roof of his car? We just got 100 hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying he and Trump were BFFs; I didn’t even get an alert about it on my phone.”
Wolff disclosed in a post on X that the tapes had previously been offered to “most major broadcast outlets,” adding, “That includes networks, streaming platforms, cable channels. I say ‘most’ rather than ‘all’ because after a while, working down the obvious candidates, the effort seemed clearly unproductive and not likely to yield a different response anywhere else.”
While television has ignored the tapes, the most subscribed-to commentator on Substack, the historian Heather Cox Richardson, highlighted them to her 1.6 million subscribers and to 2 million Facebook followers. Google interest in Epstein, and particularly in the term “Epstein-Trump,” has also increased significantly since the Daily Beast first reported on the tapes’ existence on Nov. 1.
The Daily Beast has reached out to NBC News for comment.
