Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, developed a social and professional relationship with financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that began in the late 1980s and continued into the early 2000s.
During Trump's prior careers as a businessman and media personality before entering politics in 2015, he and Epstein visited each other's real estate properties regularly. Trump and Epstein socialized frequently throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including attending parties at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and Epstein's residence. Flight logs released during an associate's trial confirm that Trump flew on Epstein's private jet multiple times in the 1990s, and according to Epstein, Trump first had sex with his future wife Melania Knauss in his private jet. Trump had a falling out with Epstein around 2004 and ceased contact. After Epstein was said to have sexually harassed a teenage daughter of another Mar-a-Lago member in 2007, Trump banned him from the club. Epstein said, in a 2019 email attributed by NBC News and Axios to the event, that he had never been a member of the club.
Epstein was convicted of procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution in 2008. Since Epstein's 2019 arrest for sex trafficking of minors and his death in prison shortly thereafter, their former relationship has come under further scrutiny, particularly during and after Trump's re-election as president in 2024. Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein's criminal activities and distanced himself from the deceased financier in the years before Epstein's arrest and death. Trump promoted unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the circumstances and suggested Epstein was murdered. Media attention and public pressure has mounted in 2025, as Trump's administration has not released files relating to Epstein, despite Trump promising to do so during his 2024 presidential campaign.
On November 12, 2025, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released thousands of emails authored by Epstein and his associates. Epstein had suggested in a number of private email exchanges that he had damaging information on Trump. In a 2011 email to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein said that Trump had spent hours at his house with Virginia Giuffre and that Trump was "the dog that didn't bark".[5][6][7] Although Giuffre revealed that Epstein and Maxwell had recruited her from Mar-a-Lago into a sex trafficking ring.
