Trump’s attitude toward women was never unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was always eager to describe his conquests, real and imagined, for the benefit of gossip columnists and talk-show hosts. Since he became a politician, the picture has only sharpened. Around twenty women have publicly accused the President of various forms of sexual misconduct. (He has always denied the accusations.) In 2023, a New York jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll a five-million-dollar civil judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse. She accused Trump of assaulting her in the mid-nineties in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in New York. (Trump has denied Carroll’s account and has called on the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.)
On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”
The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”
The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence. As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.
There has already been a mountain of accurate reporting on Trump’s attitude toward women and the close relationship between the President and Epstein. Among the best and most comprehensive accounts was published last week in the Times. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate explored countless documents and interviewed more than thirty of Epstein’s former employees, as well as victims. They described the relationship as one of common carnal interest.
“Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency,” Confessore and Tate wrote. “Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes. With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.”
That passage is the “billboard” of the piece, the thesis, and it is amply supported by multiple sources who describe the details of their relationship, how Trump regaled Epstein over the telephone “with tales of his sexual exploits” and how Epstein delighted in making his discomfited assistants listen on speaker. Confessore and Tate reported the recollections of a former Epstein assistant, who recounted “one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table.”
