Here’s what some of the key players have said in the Epstein-Trump controversy

A lot has emerged this week about U.S. President Donald Trump’s relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. U.S. Congressional Democrats initially released three emails where Epstein mentioned Trump. Republicans followed that up by releasing more than 20,000 pages of documents, all from Epstein’s estate.

Epstein served about a year in jail after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18. He killed himself in jail in 2019, a month after his arrest on sex trafficking charges.

Trump says he broke off ties with Epstein sometime around 2004, following a dispute over a piece of property. Some of the emails suggest the two did have further contact after that, but it’s not clear. Questions over what Trump knew and when he knew it have persisted.

None of the released emails were written by Trump himself, and many of the statements and comments in them are open to interpretation. Trump has repeatedly refused to fully explain his involvement with Epstein, calling the story a “hoax” orchestrated by Democrats.

Here’s some of what was discovered in that trove of documents, and how that compares to what we already know.

Journalists sometimes contacted Epstein, including Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump. In a 2019 email to Wolff, Epstein mentioned that one of his best-known accusers, Virginia Giuffre, had worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Giuffre had said that Epstein’s longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her from Mar-a-Lago to give sexualized massages to Epstein.

Trump said this summer that he banned Epstein from his club in 2007 because Maxwell was “taking people who worked for me.” But it’s not clear from that statement whether Trump knew what the women were being recruited for, or if he was merely angry that he was losing staff from his operation.

“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein said in an email to Wolff. Again, it’s not clear from this what exactly Trump knew about the “girls.”

If Trump were to be implicated in wrongdoing, many believed Giuffre would be the one to do it. The most prominent Epstein victim, she died by suicide earlier this year. But in numerous statements during her life, she said she never saw Trump do anything wrong. 

In a court deposition, she said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s misconduct with underage girls. And in her recently released memoir, she described meeting Trump only once, when she worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, and did not accuse him of wrongdoing.

Giuffre wrote that she was introduced to Trump by her father, who also worked at the club. She described Trump as friendly and said he offered to help her get babysitting jobs with parents at the club.

Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier,” Giuffre wrote.

Giuffre refrains from naming many of the people she says were in Epstein’s circle, either because she didn’t know who they were or because she feared retribution.