July 18, 2025
[There is a lot about sexual assault in tonight’s letter.]
Now we know why President Donald J. Trump earlier this week began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
The journalists say the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
The lines of text represent an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein:
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.
“Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
“Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
“Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
“Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
“Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
“Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
“Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Florida police began investigating Epstein in 2005 after allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. They identified five victims and 17 witnesses, but ultimately the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, negotiated a plea deal with Epstein in 2008, by which Epstein pleaded guilty only to state charges, including soliciting a minor, and avoided federal charges. Trump appointed Acosta to be the secretary of labor in his first administration; Acosta resigned in 2019 after new reporting by the Miami Herald accused Epstein of abusing about 80 girls and women and showed how Acosta had shut down an FBI investigation into Epstein’s actions.
In July 2019, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman charged Epstein with sex trafficking of minors as young as 14. The indictment charged Epstein with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of underage girls who engaged in sex acts for money at Epstein’s properties in New York and Florida. Arrested in New Jersey in July, Epstein died in his Manhattan prison cell in August.
In 2020, Epstein’s associate Maxwell was indicted on charges of assisting, facilitating, and contributing to Epstein’s abuse of minor girls, not only in New York and Florida, but also at his residences in New Mexico and London, “helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to Maxwell and Epstein to be under the age of 18.” Epstein also owned a private 72-acre island off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, rumored to be another site of sex trafficking. In 2021 a jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor and transporting a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
When the FBI raided Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan in 2019, they seized piles of evidence, including stacks of compact disks bearing the labels “Young [Name] + [Name],” suggesting he had kept video evidence of men sexually assaulting underage girls.
Within hours of the discovery of Epstein’s body in his prison cell in 2019, Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory alleging that former president Bill Clinton was involved in his death. Trump and his loyalists pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood actors, an accusation that dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was secretly leading the fight against such a cabal. Trump fed the idea that if reelected, he would release the information he claimed was being withheld as part of a coverup.
In fact, the politician most closely associated with Epstein was Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
And yet Trump supporters overlooked Trump’s long friendship with Epstein until billionaire Elon Musk resurrected the story that Trump might be implicated in the records of the Epstein investigation. On June 5, in the midst of a fight with Trump, Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
On July 7, the Department of Justice announced that Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” that he died by suicide, and that it would not be releasing any more information about the investigation into his activities, although it released a video from outside Epstein’s prison cell the night he died to show that no one had entered the cell, claiming it was “raw” footage. MAGA exploded, and Trump’s attempt to downplay the Epstein files made things worse. Then he turned on his supporters, calling them “stupid” and “foolish” and saying he didn’t want their support while also insisting that Democrats had written the files.
And then Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired reported that two minutes and fifty-three seconds were missing from the “raw” video.
On Wednesday night, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes responded to Trump: “F*ck you. You suck. You are fat, you are a joke, you are stupid, you are not funny, you are not as smart as you think you are.” “[W]e are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history,” he added. “And the liberals were right. The MAGA supporters were had. They were.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has been working for the past three years to trace Epstein’s finances, and yesterday, Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times reported his staff’s discovery that four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in financial transactions, but only after Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Wyden renewed the demand for more financial information about Epstein he had called upon the administration to release in March.
Yesterday, Trump announced on social media: “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
But the grand jury testimony was a small part of the information from the investigation, and as legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, this demand was “a meaningless trick” anyway, because courts prohibit public disclosure of such information. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance clarifies in Civil Discourse that while it is possible in rare circumstances to publish grand jury testimony, the process will be slow and difficult.
Bondi promptly assured Trump she was ready to do as he asked, but Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that the actual document asked the court to unseal the transcripts “subject to appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information,” a provision that has the potential to protect Trump if his name was discussed.
The story of the birthday message has thrown gasoline on this fire. The Wall Street Journal reporters said that when they contacted Trump about the story, he denied writing the letter or drawing the picture and threatened to sue them. Then, hours later, Trump told reporters that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had made up the story, although neither was in office when the FBI investigated Epstein. Trump was. Oliver Darcy of Status News reported that Trump personally called the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal to try to stop her from publishing the story.
After the story dropped, Trump posted that the letter was “FAKE.” “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”
Reporters had a field day today rebutting his claim with accounts of all the times Trump auctioned off his doodles for charities, with photos of the sketches. “The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature,” wrote Tyler Pager of the New York Times, “are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.”
In a letter to FBI director Kash Patel today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that his office had received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured the FBI to put 1,000 personnel to work in 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein records. Durbin said his office had received information that the personnel were instructed “to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
Patel pushed the idea that the Epstein files were being covered up during the Biden administration, only to change his tune once he took charge of the FBI. Durbin asked him to answer a series of questions about the information the FBI holds and how the administration is handling that information, like, for example, how the “raw” footage was modified.
This afternoon, with a complaint that misrepresents the Wall Street Journal story and reads like a Trump press release, Trump sued for defamation Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., its parent company News Corp, owner Rupert Murdoch, chief executive Robert Thomson, and the two reporters who broke the story, asking for $10 billion in damages. A Dow Jones spokesperson responded: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
The Epstein story is about more than the sex trafficking of girls. It is also about rich and privileged people evading accountability for breaking the law. MAGA likely jumped on the story for both of these reasons when they thought a coverup was protecting Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites.
But the story is also about a group of elite people who think they are better than the rest of us and have the right to dominate anyone that is not part of their group, particularly people of color, Black Americans, and women, no matter what the law says.
Journalist Fareed Zakaria called out that worldview today in a Washington Post story noting that for all their performative cruelty, Trump’s ICE raids have led to far fewer deportations than took place under Obama, and barely more than under Biden. ICE does not coordinate with local law enforcement, follow rules, or work with legal processing—all of which are necessary for an efficient process. The plan appears to be simply to create a spectacle that demonstrates power and dominance.
The latest step from the Justice Department in the case of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, woman killed during a botched police raid in 2020, reinforces that message. In 2024 a federal jury convicted former police officer Brett Hankison of depriving Taylor of her civil rights when he fired several shots into her home through a covered window and glass door. While his bullets were not the ones that killed Taylor, a jury decided that his blind firing constituted excessive force.
On Wednesday, assistant attorney general for the civil rights unit in the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, asked a federal judge to sentence Hankison to a single day in jail, time he has already served.
Civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Sherrilyn Ifill wrote: “They mean to be as insulting to Black people, as dismissive of our lives, as [resistant] to our status as full citizens in this country as they can be.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/12/politics/alex-acosta-donald-trump-labor-secretary
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/29/us/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-wednesday
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/us/politics/timeline-trump-epstein.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-island-little-st-james-what-allegedly-happened-there/
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5407135-trump-epstein-files-conspiracy/
https://www.newsweek.com/right-wing-influencer-denounces-trump-epstein-liberals-were-right-2100489
https://www.wired.com/story/the-fbis-jeffrey-epstein-prison-video-had-nearly-3-minutes-cut-out/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, July 17, 2025, 9:57 PM.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/us/politics/trump-drawings-epstein.html
https://pbump.net/timeline.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/business/epstein-banks-wyden-trump.html
https://www.courthousenews.com/trump-sues-wsj-over-epstein-birthday-letter/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/18/trump-deportations-obama-cruel/
https://www.status.news/p/wall-street-journal-trump-epstein-emma-tucker
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lu72axxegs2h
barbarasobel.bsky.social/post/3lu6ppa4or22a
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lu7dnxjf5c2j
sifill.bsky.social/post/3lu6w4ocmlc2s
It seems that the overlords want to retire DT. I wonder about the timing. Sadly, Vance is as bad or worse.
This is difficult to read. Thank you, Heather, for the warning. However it’s so important to spell out the details and make the connections within this tangled web.
Your interview with Jim Acosta ( link below) helps to define it further and I truly appreciate hearing your personal perspective of this topic. “…either you think that everyone should be treated fairly and be treated equally before the law, or you believe that some people are better than others and they get to rule…”. This is the crux of this moment!
https://open.substack.com/pub/jimacosta/p/historian-heather-cox-richardson?r=9vmv5&utm_medium=ios