Trump-Epstein ties covered up, House Democrats allege; want special counsel
Published in News & Features
Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued a 53-page report Monday alleging that five women have accused President Donald Trump of rape or sexual assault while in the company of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, or shortly after meeting the men together, decades before his presidency.
The Committee presented at least one new allegation against Trump: a former Miss Switzerland who says she was raped by him at the Plaza Hotel in New York during a beauty pageant in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.
Issued just nine days before the midterm elections, the report details inconsistent – and in some cases, inaccurate – public statements the president has made about his relationship with Epstein, such as a claim that he never flew on Epstein’s plane, when flight logs show he did. The two men were friends from the late 1980s until the early 2000s.
In the report, the representatives call for a criminal investigation into the president. The Miami Herald contacted the White House, and has not received a response.
Epstein, 66, died in jail awaiting trial in August 2019 on sex trafficking charges brought by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
After his death, Epstein’s victims mobilized to call for an investigation into who else was involved in his sex trafficking network. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump supporters and conservative media influencers also demanded transparency – and the release of the Department of Justice’s files on the Epstein case.
Ultimately, Trump – after saying he was open to releasing the files – tried to block their release by pressuring several members of Congress to vote against making them public. But the unrelenting efforts of survivors led Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act in late 2025, which Trump signed into law, leading to the release of millions of FBI and Department of Justice files on the case earlier this year.
Much of the Democratic Judiciary report comes from information from those files. Among other things, it reveals that other men connected to Epstein were accused of sexual assault and rape, including Trump.
Trump has denied he was involved in any criminal activity connected to Epstein, and has called the scandal a “hoax.” In January, the Department of Justice issued a statement denying accusations in the documents.
“Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” read the statement. “To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
The report mentions 11 women, five of whom said in interviews with newspapers, a lawsuit, or directly to the Committee that Trump either raped or sexually assaulted them. Three additional women told the FBI of interactions with Trump in Epstein’s presence, which the Committee says indicates a pattern of Epstein introducing Trump to young women. Another three women have not come forward with accusations; instead the Committee points to public files tying them to Trump and Epstein.
Two women have claimed they were 13 or 14 when Trump assaulted them; they met him through Epstein, they say in the report. One said the assault took place around the 1980s; the other said, 1994. One, known by the pseudonym Katie Johnson, filed a lawsuit against Trump and Epstein in 2016 detailing the alleged rape in 1994. She later withdrew the suit.
A second woman, Jane Doe, told the FBI in an interview that Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s – and that Trump forced her head “down to his penis” and she bit him. She lived in South Carolina at the time. Neither of the women’s stories have been corroborated.
But questions were raised about why the DOJ initially withheld some of Jane Doe’s FBI interviews. Trump denied he had any sexual relations with the two women.
Former models describe alleged assaults by Trump
The Democrats on the Committee are calling for an independent special counsel to investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and Congressional action to “end DOJ’s cover-up.”
The report was compiled from interviews conducted by the Committee staff, survivor accounts, FBI records and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It documents “striking similarities in the stories of women abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump,” the Committee said.
Donald Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s,” according to the report, which calls for a formal investigation into the Trump administration’s cover-up of Epstein’s crimes. Other men are named in the report as “likely” co-conspirators, including Paolo Zampolli, who knew Trump through his previous work as a modeling agent in New York. The report also describes ties to the late John Casablancas, a modeling agent who was accused by multiple women of sexually abusing them, many as minors.
Reached Monday, Zampolli, who stepped down from his post as a special envoy to the president last week, denied he was involved with Epstein or Epstein’s recruitment of models.
“Jeffrey Epstein was my competitor and rival. We never had a relationship. I never had any business dealings with Jeffrey Epstein,” he said.
Most of the alleged assaults involving Trump happened between 1992 and 1997 in New York and Palm Beach, according to the report. It is not clear how many of the women the Committee interviewed.
“The actual evidence we have seen — as shared in the accounts and stories of 11 women ... indicate that Trump abused, assaulted and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most famous sex trafficker in history,” the report said in its executive summary.
A number of women in the modeling industry have accused Trump of assault, misconduct or rape. Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams and Jill Harth have previously told reporters that they were raped or assaulted by Trump; their allegations are described in the report.
Alleged Plaza Hotel incident
There is one new account, however.
Keul, a former beauty pageant contestant from Switzerland who said Trump had groped her, told the Committee that the encounter was more violent that she previously stated. According to the report, she said Trump raped her in a Plaza Hotel suite during his November 1993 American Dream Pageant, where she also met Epstein.
“I’m Jeffrey, Don’s best friend,” Epstein told her at the pageant, according to the report.
Keul told the Committee that a representative for Trump invited her upstairs, where Trump grabbed her from behind and raped her, she said, tearing her dress and leaving her bleeding and bruised. She was 24 and described the rape as “brutal,” according to the report.
She also told the Committee that Trump offered for Zampolli to arrange her visa to the United States in 1993, and Casablancas also interviewed her at the pageant.
Stacey Williams – another young model at the time, working for Sports Illustrated – said in 2025 interviews with CNN and the New York Times that she dated Epstein and was later sexually assaulted by Trump in 1993, who groped her while Epstein and Trump talked. Her allegations are detailed in the report.
In 1997, a makeup artist named Jill Harth filed a lawsuit against Trump, stating that in 1993 he forced her into a bedroom, fondled and restrained her. The Committee report cites a New York Times interview with her ex-husband, where he said Epstein was Trump’s guest at a Mar-a-Lago event attended by the couple. The report said it was the same event where she was assaulted.
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