When an allegation recently surfaced in the Epstein files that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl decades ago, most of us did not react with disbelief. We reacted with a grim, exhausted: of course this is plausible.
News just broke that the FBI interviewed a woman who once accused Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was barely a teenage girl. Internal documents referencing the allegation exist but the Trump Justice Department has withheld portions of that material, likely in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Justice Department insists that it has withheld only information designed to spare the survivor embarrassment. Right.
Here are the facts as we know them (and thanks to the Justice Department’s decision to withhold information, there is a lot this administration does not want us to know): a survivor alleged that sometime in the mid-1980s, when she was between thirteen- and fifteen-years-old, “Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”
The FBI interviewed this witness four times — all during the first Trump administration while Christopher Wray was director of the bureau and Bill Barr was attorney general. (Another survivor accused Barr of having witnessed the abuse at Epstein’s house.) Needless to say, all of it was swept up under the rug. The only notation that is publicly available, sent from one FBI agent to another in the Southern District of New York on July 22, 2025, says that “one identified victim claimed abuse by Trump but ultimately refused to cooperate.”
Maybe. Or maybe no one tried very hard to ask for her cooperation. More likely, this was a fishing expedition to find out what she had to say, rather than a search for the truth that would hold a powerful pedophile accountable.
The timing of this particular accusation is notable. The first interview that the FBI conducted with this survivor was on July 24, 2019, less than three weeks after Epstein’s arrest, and was entered into the FBI’s case files on August 9, the day before Epstein’s death. It does not mention Trump.
A second survivor alleged that when she was fourteen-years-old, “Epstein introduced her to Trump saying ‘This is a good one, huh’ and Trump responded ‘Yes.’” In a lawsuit against Epstein's estate and Ghislaine Maxwell, she claimed that Epstein and Trump chuckled. She added that she "felt uncomfortable, but, at the time, was too young to understand why.”
In 2016, a third woman, using the pseudonym “Katie Johnson,” alleged that Trump raped her when she was thirteen-years-old in 1994 and that he and Epstein treated her as a “sex slave,” while repeatedly sexually assaulting her when she was barely in her teens. Like the girl who allegedly bit Trump’s penis, “Johnson” also failed to come forward publicly, with her lawyers claiming that she had “received numerous threats.” The attorney added, “She has decided she is too afraid to show her face. ... She is in terrible fear.”
Remember that the next time Trump, the most powerful man on earth, claims he has been exonerated because no one has publicly accused him of participating in Epstein’s crimes. Remember, too, that the Department of Justice, which is supposed to protect survivors, is acting like Trump’s personal defense counsel (which Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche actually was) by withholding information that might shed more light on his activities around underage girls.
With the Epstein files, like so much of Trump’s presidency, we tend not to see the forest for the trees. There are so many outrages on a daily basis that our brains are exhausted into submission. So let’s take a deep breath and a step back. Once we do, everything comes into focus: