Jeffrey Epstein spent his last years “afraid” of his former friend Donald Trump, the author Michael Wolff, who spent hours interviewing the pedophile financier, has said.
The multimillionaire sex offender died in a federal jail cell in August 2019, weeks after he was arrested by the FBI on child sex-trafficking charges.
Wolff has broken years of silence just days before the 2024 presidential election to reveal that Epstein was a source for his best-selling book Fire and Fury, and released a tiny portion of one of their interviews. Wolff also alleged that Epstein showed him photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap.
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The author’s allegations have been aggressively rejected by the Trump campaign, which accused him of being a “disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics.” A spokesperson for Trump said, “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.”
Wolff’s decision to speak about Epstein as his source is likely to raise eyebrows among the author’s critics. Only one other journalist has acknowledged using Epstein as a source, The New York Times’ James Stewart, who wrote about it immediately after the pervert’s death.
Wolff had previously acknowledged Epstein as a source without offering details, but in the latest episode of his podcast, Fire and Fury, he speaks expansively about what Epstein told him in the course of what Wolff estimates to be 100 hours of taped interviews—including about the sex offender’s long relationship with Trump.
Wolff told his co-host, James Truman, “When I was writing Fire and Fury, I became an outlet for Epstein to express his incredulity about someone whose sins he knew so well, and then this person actually being elected president. Epstein was utterly preoccupied with Trump, and I think, frankly, afraid of him.”
Wolff said Epstein’s relationship with Trump had gone back to the late 1980s, and that he had seen them bonding and competing over money and women. “I think Epstein saw Trump as essentially Bush League,” Wolff said.
“Epstein knew him, really, I think, better than most. I mean, this was a true BFF situation: two playboys very much styling themselves as playboys in that Hefner sense, who palled around for the better part of 15 years.”
Among the exploits Wolff said Epstein told him about were that at one point the two of the men “shared” the same girlfriend. “They were both openly, possibly proudly, going out with the same girl at the same time,” he said, adding that he knew her identity but was not revealing it.
“In a moment in time, there was a particular kind of sexual excess and license and cruelty, masculine cruelty, rich guy masculine cruelty, that was not just allowed, but celebrated and I think that Epstein and Trump really were two of its exaggerated exponents,” he said.
“Of course, we see now Epstein as the sexual monster, but certainly, at least in Epstein’s telling, he and Trump were pretty much, in this regard, brothers in arms.”
But, Wolff alleged, Epstein came to believe that it was Trump who had first caused him to be investigated by law enforcement in Florida in 2005. Asked by Truman if Trump knew Epstein was “hanging out with underage girls,” Wolff said, “Trump was certainly kind of in and out of Epstein’s house and world, so I think knew something about that.”
The two men fell out in 2004 when Epstein bid for the Maison de L’Amitié, an estate neighboring Mar-a-Lago. Wolff said that in Epstein’s version of events, he asked Trump for advice on moving the swimming pool, but “Trump went around Epstein’s back and bid $40 million for the house.” Calling it a “classic rich guy breakdown,” Wolff said Epstein had told him he was “really, really, really p---ed.”
“He began to threaten lawsuits and he began to threaten press exposure,” Wolff said. “And that was the point at which Epstein’s own legal problems, the problems with the girls, began and Epstein always, certainly in Epstein’s telling, this all happened because it was Trump who first dropped the dime on him.”
Sources in the Trump camp suggested a different version of events to the Daily Beast, saying it was “well known” that Trump had thrown Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago when he learned about the sex-trafficking allegations. In 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trump and the pedophile were in a bitter bidding war late in 2004, during a hearing with a bankruptcy judge who was overseeing the sale of the estate.
Wolff said that when he interviewed Epstein in 2017, he was frightened of Trump. “When Epstein and I were talking about this, Trump was now the president of the United States, and I think frightening. Because the most inappropriate person to be the president of the United States was probably Donald Trump.
“But I couldn’t help but feeling that there was a level of personal fear there.”
Wolff said other people had verified Epstein’s fear.
“I was always startled how afraid he seemed about Trump,” he told his co-host, Truman. “And I’ve spoken to several other people who knew Epstein well. 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.
“I urged Epstein to go public with everything I’ve told you here, but Epstein’s attitude was that I was clearly unaware of how the real world operated. So, in the end, Epstein died in prison and we’ll probably never hear that story.”
Wolff said he found the description of how Epstein died by suicide “implausible” but also said that for Epstein to have been murdered would imply that a huge number of people would have to “keep their mouths shut.”
