US President Donald Trump has denied drawing any picture in a book made for Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, The Washington Post
United States President Donald Trump has emphatically denied contributing a drawing and note to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book.
On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee released the three-volume leather-bound book, hundreds of pages long and organised into sections including “friends”, “girlfriends”, and “business”.
The documents released by the committee include a drawing of the contours of a woman’s body and a suggestive note purportedly signed by “Donald”. Trump and Epstein were friends at the time.
“May every day be another wonderful secret,” the note says. White House officials have denied that Trump drew the sketch or signed the note.
As Congress gets thousands of documents from the Justice Department and Epstein’s estate, the book is one of the clearest looks yet at which rich and famous men socialised with Epstein.
It is also loaded with sexually explicit language and images, some of them depicting young girls in various states of undress and others alluding to violence.
Epstein’s then-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in connection with Epstein’s abuse of girls, signed an introduction to the book, saying: “The idea behind the book was simply to gather stories and old photographs to jog your memory about places and people and different events.”
The book includes submissions from Wall Street billionaires, a past president, women Epstein socialised with and some people who simply signed their first names, all recounting different aspects of Epstein’s life.
The tone is sometimes light and reminiscing, but at other times aggressive and even dark.
While many questions remain about the book and its submissions, here’s what we know now that Congress is starting to get never-before-public information about the Epstein case.
When the Wall Street Journal first reported this summer that such a book existed and that Trump had submitted a drawing and note for it, Trump flatly denied it: “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story.”
He sued Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and the two Journal reporters who wrote the article for defamation. The suit is ongoing.
Trump denied ever making any drawings at any point in his life: “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he told the Journal. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
A spokesman for him earlier said of Trump: “He doesn’t draw things like the outlet described”.
But Trump regularly drew pictures that he auctioned off for charity. And as the Journal and others have detailed, Trump’s signature in the picture very closely resembles other signatures of his from that time.
Trump and Epstein were friends around the time the book was put together before a falling out in the early 2000s.
A number of other contributors make suggestive comments about Epstein’s sexual relations with young girls. Some are violent.
“We picked up girls on beach,” one submission says. “I tell them with knife in my hand to take suits off.”
“You began to realise that you could get away with sh*t!” another submission reads, “that chicks and people in general were schmucks!”
“To some it may have seemed a get-rich scheme, but to me it was pure genius,” another reads, with a photo of Epstein and another person wearing black masks over their faces. “Rob and Kill was the name of the plan. The first victim, [redacted] to be attacked and brutally plundered … The thieves were never caught.”
And a poem reads: “Blonde, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically/ With this net of fish, Jeff’s now ‘The Old Man and The Sea.’”
Another is a drawing, labelled “1983”, of a man giving balloons to three girls in skirts and pigtails, then in the next image, labelled “2003”, the man is drawn receiving massages from topless blond women.
There is nothing in the book to suggest Trump had any involvement in these other submissions.
One partially redacted submission by an unidentified contributor includes a photo of Epstein holding an oversize novelty cheque signed by “DJTRUMP.” A handwritten message below that image reads: “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500.”
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has said that the signature in the photo was “absolutely not” Trump’s.
In another submission, an assistant of Epstein’s thanks him for the opportunity to travel the world to meet powerful people, including Trump.
Trump was told by his attorney-general that he is one of many people named in the Epstein files in the Justice Department, the Journal recently reported.
It’s unclear if the names of people who associated with Epstein would have come out during his trial, said Evan Gotlob, a lawyer who prosecuted similar crimes as a federal prosecutor in New York during the first Trump Administration and is now with the DarrowEverett law firm.
“You don’t have to keep them secret if they are part of what I would call a criminal enterprise, aiding and abetting trafficking because they are the ones paying for the services,” he said.
The criminal investigations into Epstein and Maxwell are over now, but there is plenty of political pressure for the Trump Administration to share what information it has.
Since Epstein died in 2019 in jail, figures on the right have spun unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about how he died and who was connected to him, weaving them into an overarching narrative that the country is run by an evil cabal that revels in abusing children.
“There is a sense Epstein had so much influence over these elites,” said Cynthia Wang, who studies conspiracy theories and heads a conflict-management centre at Northwestern University.
Trump and his allies got into office promising to release the information in the files, only for his attorney-general to suddenly announce that they wouldn’t.
Attorney-General Pam Bondi put out a memo in July confirming that Epstein died by suicide and that there is no “client list” naming powerful men who may have abused underage girls, despite what she previously stated.
Since then, the story has metastasised into one Trump has struggled to control.
Last week outside the Capitol there was one of the largest gatherings of Epstein’s accusers since his 2019 death.
One accuser said she and other women would compile their own list of abusers: “We know the names,” Lisa Phillips said. “Many of us were abused by them.”
A bipartisan group of lawmakers could force a vote soon to release the files, which would be a sharp rebuke to Trump, who has urged lawmakers to drop the matter.
A Republican-led House committee recently subpoenaed the Justice Department to hand over its Epstein files. It also subpoenaed Epstein’s estate, which is where this birthday book came from.
Lawmakers are trying to track down Epstein’s finances, too.
Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat-Oregon) is seeking to obtain federal records tracking large, potentially suspicious payments among Epstein and his associates, which he says total about US$1 billion.
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