Trump ‘was never inappropriate’, says Maxwell

Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend repeatedly denied witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions by Donald Trump, according to records released on Friday.

Ghislaine Maxwell also defended Prince Andrew, and denied claims that he had sex with one of Epstein’s alleged victims at Maxwell’s house.

The Trump administration issued hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche conducted with Maxwell last month, amid a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to disclose a trove of records from the sex trafficking case.

The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behaviour.

“I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Maxwell also said that she was unaware of any so-called “client list”, saying that she never personally witnessed any sexual abuse by Epstein.

“There is no list that I am aware of,” Maxwell said.

The transcripts represent the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations around the Epstein case, much of it created through conspiracy theories spread by officials, including Trump himself.

After her interview with Blanche, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas to continue serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on allegations that she lured teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.

Her trial featured sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein’s homes.

Maxwell recalled meeting Trump for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News. She said she often had been to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, sometimes alone, but hadn’t seen Trump since the mid-2000s.

Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”

The case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer’s social connections over the years to prominent figures, including Prince Andrew and former US president Bill Clinton.

Trump has said he had a falling-out with Epstein years ago and well before Epstein came under investigation.

Maxwell told Blanche that Clinton was initially her friend, not Epstein’s, and that she never saw him receive a massage.

She also spoke glowingly of Prince Andrew, and dismissed as “rubbish” the late Virginia Giuffre’s claim that she was paid to have a relationship with Andrew and that he had sex with her at Maxwell’s London home.

Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein’s conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made during her trial about her role.

Though she acknowledged that at one point Epstein began preferring younger women, she insisted she never understood that to “encompass children.”

“I did see from when I met him, he was involved or – involved or friends with or whatever, however you want to characterise it, with women who were in their 20s,” she told Blanche.

“And then the slide to, you know, or younger looking women. But I never considered that this would encompass criminal behavior.”

Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, and was found dead a month later in a New York jail cell in what investigators described as a suicide.

The saga has consumed the Trump administration following a two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Department last month that Epstein had killed himself, that a “client list” did not actually exist, and that no additional documents from the investigation were suitable to be released.

The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a government coverup.

That expectation was driven in part by comments from officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who on podcasts before taking their current positions had repeatedly promoted the idea that damaging details about prominent people were being withheld.

Trump later shut down questions about Epstein at a White House Cabinet meeting and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he said were falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

With additional reporting from AP and Reuters