In audio clip from 2017, Jeffrey Epstein said he was once Trump’s ‘closest friend’
New excerpt from interview conducted by author Michael Wolff reveals disgraced financier’s knowledge of president’s personal life and the inner workings of his presidency
The late disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein once considered former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump one of his closest friends, according to previously unheard recordings released last week by author and journalist Michael Wolff.
The audio recordings were an excerpt from a 2017 conversation between Wolff and Epstein while the former was conducting research for his book “Fire and Fury.”
The Daily Beast published the excerpts in partnership with Wolff, who said he decided to release them after realizing there was “a hunger to know about a story, the Trump-Epstein relationship, that has seemed for so long to hide in plain sight.”
In the audio clips, Epstein divulges information on Trump’s personal life and his relationships.
“Tell me about his intelligence,” Wolff can be heard saying to Epstein in one of the clips, to which Epstein replies that while Trump is “brilliant” when it comes to real estate, “he knows nothing” of anything else.
Later in the clip, Epstein tells Wolff that Trump is “delightful.”
“He is charming, he is able to convince people,” Epstein says, comparing him to another former US president, Bill Clinton.
“Both Bill and Donald have the ability to go over to a fat, ugly woman, say ‘you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen…’ He tells everybody what they want to hear. And that is charming.”
He then adds of Trump, however, that he is “a horrible human being” who “does nasty things to his best friends, his best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”
He also reveals, with seeming glee, that Trump had “a scalp reduction” to deal with the fact that he was balding. “It’s hysterical,” Epstein says.
Pressed by Wolff on how he knows so much about Trump, Epstein replies: “I was Donald’s closest friend for ten years.”
Trump, who once called Epstein a “terrific guy,” has long insisted that they had a falling out some 15 years prior to Epstein’s death by suicide in 2019, while he awaited trial on charges of sex trafficking minors.
Despite Trump’s insistence that he had no connection to Epstein for well over a decade, Wolff’s audio recordings suggest that the disgraced sex offender had intimate knowledge of the goings-on in the White House during the first year of Trump’s presidency.
“His people fight each other, and then… he sort of poisons the well outside,” says Epstein in the recording.
“He will tell ten people [former White House strategist Steve] Bannon is a scumbag, and [former White House chief of staff Reince] Priebus is not doing a good job, and [former senior counselor to the president] Kellyanne [Conway] has a big mouth,” Epstein is heard telling Wolff, demonstrating Trump’s alleged penchant for spreading gossip about his employees.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there were well-documented instances of Trump’s friendship with Epstein, and in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
The former president also alleged that he had never flown on Epstein’s private jet, but flight logs released in 2021 indicated that he had done so seven separate times.
Epstein, who died before he could stand trial, had previously been convicted in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. After his death, his partner Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex trafficking and other offenses in connection to Epstein.
Wolff told the Daily Beast that he was prompted to publish the audio recordings after former model Stacy Williams said last month that she had been groped by Trump in 1992 after the two were introduced by Epstein.
Williams, now 56, said that Trump put his hands “all over” her breasts, waist and buttocks, causing her to freeze on the spot, and she noticed that the two men appeared to be smiling at each other.
“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams was quoted as saying.
Put yourself or your children in Stacey Williams' place- instead of the perpetrator's. Please.pic.twitter.com/eZPPYLor4z
— Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) October 24, 2024
In response to the audio clips, Trump’s campaign dismissed Wolff as “a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics.”
The campaign further lambasted Wolff for waiting “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.”
AFP contributed to this report.
