One of the 17 exhibits unsealed on January 8 references Trump — but he is only named in emails an Epstein victim sent to a journalist, which she provided no evidence to support and later recanted.
In emails exchanged with then–New York Post journalist Maureen Callahan in October 2016, Sarah Ransome made a number of explosive allegations against famous men, saying her friend had had sex with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson on multiple occasions. Ransome also said she had videos of the encounters but could not share them without her friend’s permission.
All of the famous men named by Ransome denied her claims. A Virgin Group spokesperson said, “We categorically reject all allegations made by Sarah Ransome. In 2023 she admitted to The New Yorker that the ‘tapes’ had been ‘invented.’ Any suggestion that Sir Richard Branson was involved in a ‘sex tape’ is entirely false. The allegations are baseless and unfounded.”
In one of the now-recanted emails, summarized below by attorneys representing Alan Dershowitz, Ransome said her friend was one of “many girls” Trump had had sex with, claimed the friend regularly had sex with Trump at Epstein’s mansion, and shared other NSFW details about Trump’s sexual proclivities:
Ransome’s email that includes the claims about Trump appears later in the document and is partially cut off:
In the document, Dershowitz’s attorneys used the emails to portray Ransome as a liar, noting that she had made many outlandish claims to journalist Maureen Callahan, such as saying she’d reached out to the Russians for help and was “approached, by Special Agents Forces Men sent directly by Hilary [sic] Clinton herself, in order to protect her presidential campaign.” For example:
In her final email to Callahan, Ransome says she wants to “retract everything I have said to you and walk away from this.” Callahan never published a story related to her allegations.
Ransome then told The New Yorker in 2023 that she never had any videos. In her 2023 memoir, Silenced No More, Ransome explained why:
I also told her I had video evidence of public figures participating in Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s pedophile ring. I didn’t. I said I did because I was absolutely terrified that, once I went public with my story, Jeffrey and Ghislaine would find and kill me. I wanted to send them a message via the press: If you wage war on me, I will return fire by releasing my evidence. That would be my leverage, my way of protecting myself.
As ABC News noted, while Ransome was involved in various lawsuits against Epstein, no evidence supporting these claims appears in publicly available court records:
Ransome was deposed in 2017 as a witness in the Giuffre versus Maxwell litigation. No evidence supporting the allegations Ransome shared with the reporter was entered in the record of this case.
The lawsuit Ransome filed in 2017 under the pseudonym “Jane Doe 43” against Epstein, Maxwell and other alleged co-conspirators was settled the following year.
Neither Clinton, nor Trump, nor Branson was accused by Giuffre, or anyone else besides Ransome, of any wrongdoing in the course of Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against Maxwell.
Ransome gave a victim-impact statement in federal court at Maxwell’s sentencing that did not specifically mention Trump or anyone but Epstein and Maxwell.