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A news publication has verified some of the details included in a woman’s testimony to the FBI in 2019, in which she accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor.
The publication in question — Charleston, South Carolina-based The Post and Courier — was not able to verify the woman’s allegations against Trump. However, it was able to confirm details about her family history, her personal legal history, and other historical facts relating to her claims about Jeffrey Epstein.
Those details were provided to the FBI in a series of interviews she gave to the agency in 2019. The unnamed woman alleges that Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, around the time she was 13 to 15 years old. During that meeting, the woman says, Trump attempted to force her to perform oral sex, after which she bit him, resulting in Trump hitting her.
The Post and Courier’s report, published on Sunday, does not confirm those details. However, elements of her interview with the FBI have been confirmed.
For example, the woman claimed Epstein had taken her to a Rick James concert in Georgia around the time she was 15. The publication confirmed that concerts featuring that performer did indeed occur at the time the woman said they had.
The woman also claimed Epstein had blackmailed her over nude pictures he had of her, and that her mother had to embezzle money from her employer to help pay for the blackmail. Court records confirm embezzlement charges were filed against the woman’s mother.
The publication also confirmed where the woman and her mother lived later on, as they had told the FBI they had moved to California.
Trump administration officials deny that Trump engaged in any of the activities the woman described.
In her final interview with the FBI, agents asked the woman if she would be willing to talk more about the alleged assault committed by Trump. The woman responded by questioning “what the point would be” of elaborating on her claims, as there was “a strong possibility nothing could be done about it.”
Trump was president at the time the interviews occurred.
The reporting from The Post and Courier comes just days after the Department of Justice (DOJ) uploaded memos detailing the woman’s accusations to the public database of Epstein files. Previously, those memos were not included in the database, violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required all files to be made public, regardless of any reputational harm they might result in for the accused. The DOJ claimed they had accidentally excluded the files because they wrongly believed they were duplicates.
There is deep skepticism among the American public over how the Trump administration has handled the release of the Epstein files. An Economist/YouGov poll published earlier this month found that two-thirds of Americans (66 percent) believe the government has not included all Epstein documents on the database. And a Data for Progress poll published last month found that 55 percent of Americans believe Trump has been dishonest in his remarks about his prior relationship with Epstein.
In February, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton sat separately for depositions with Congress regarding the latter’s friendship with Epstein. That same standard hasn’t applied to Trump, who had a strong friendship with Epstein from the 1980s through the early 2000s.
Some Democrats are calling for Trump to sit before the House Oversight Committee, too.
“Let’s get President Trump in front of our committee to answer the questions that are being asked across this country from survivors,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), the ranking member of the committee, said late last month.
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