“I think they were friendly like people are in social settings,” said Ghislaine Maxwell of President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, per transcripts released this week by the U.S. Department of Justice. “I don’t – I don’t think they were close friends.”
However, she said that current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once joined Epstein for a trip to hunt for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas in the early 1990s. Maxwell said that she knew his ex-wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, “pretty well,” and was also along on the trip.
“I never saw anything inappropriate with Mr. Kennedy,” Maxwell added. Kennedy is known for adventurous exploits, including transporting the cut-off head of a dead whale on the top of his family vehicle and leaving a dead bear in Central Park.
Those quotes from Maxwell are just some tidbits from the pages of transcripts released by the DOJ. Before we dive deeper, let’s check in on how Maxwell ended up in the interview in the first place.
Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of the late publisher Robert Maxwell, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Epstein, a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, to abuse minors. She was recently moved from moved from a prison in Florida to a lower-security federal prison camp in Texas, around the time that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that he would interview her.
Even before Epstein died in his prison cell in 2019, the case attracted public attention due to his connections with high profile people, from Prince Andrew to models and U.S. politicians. This year, the Epstein scandal has again been in the headlines, particularly headlines focused on Epstein and Trump.
Notably, Trump administration officials Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Dan Bongino, deputy director, previously speculated about a “client list” of Epstein’s high-profile contacts, as the BBC mentioned in this report. However, FBI and DOJ issued a joint letter this summer that refused the existence of a list and said that Epstein died by suicide, a finding that has been met with public scrutiny since 2019.
That letter was met with backlash from both Democrats and some Republicans, leading Trump to lash out about it on social media. There have also been the aforementioned headlines with claims about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and photos of the president and the disgraced financier – some of them including Maxwell and First Lady Melania Trump – have been circulating online.
While the DOJ and FBI said they will not release more files from the Epstein case, Blanche announced that he would interview Maxwell and address some lingering questions about Epstein. During their talks, Maxwell said that her father – a Czechoslovakian immigrant to the U.K. – was a big fan of Trump and his former wife, Ivana, who was also from Czechoslovakia. She said she met the president some time before she met Epstein in 1991.
“As far as I'm concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me,” she said. Later on, Maxwell added that she never witnessed Trump in a “massage setting” or any “inappropriate setting.”
She also told Blanche that she did not know how Trump and Epstein met.
“I don’t know how they met, and I don’t know how they became friends,” she said. “I certainly saw them together and I remember the few times I observed them together, but they were friendly. I mean, they seemed friendly.”
Maxwell said that she only observed the two men in “social” settings and that she did not recall any “private” settings. She confirmed that she had visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in West Palm Beach, Fla., and indicated that Epstein also visited the club.
“I – I believe he did, but again, we really were – he – he didn't take me with him all the time. So he would go and -- oh, right,” she said. “He never – I never – well, he did from time to time, but he would go alone. I think he would maybe go himself to the spa. I certainly did.”
Trump has said that he was friendly with Epstein but that he had not spoken him since the early 2000s due to a dispute over real estate in Florida. Maxwell told Blanche that she has not seen Trump since the mid-2000s.
She also refuted the existence of an Epstein client list, suggested that that Epstein did not die by suicide and denied that former President Bill Clinton engaged in sexual misconduct or other inappropriate behavior to her knowledge. According to Maxwell, neither Clinton nor Trump ever visited any of Epstein’s private islands. The New York Times noted that she also defended Epstein at times and denied allegations of sex trafficking.
“Mr. Epstein’s victims and their families had objected to the interview, and Ms. Maxwell’s subsequent transfer to a cushier prison, accusing Mr. Trump of offering a sweetheart deal to someone prosecutors say has a history of self-serving falsehoods,” said the outlet in a Friday report.