Ghislaine Maxwell — the convicted co-conspirator of sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein — told a top official of the U.S. Justice Department that President Donald Trump was “a gentleman in all respects” and that she never saw him do anything inappropriate with anyone associated with Epstein.
“Absolutely never, in any context,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche during a highly unusual two-day interview session last month that during her time with Epstein — which spanned from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s — she never saw nor heard of any improper or illicit activity by Trump nor any of the well-known men who associated with Epstein, according to a transcript of the conversation made public on Friday.
“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 said.
Maxwell’s comments came as the Trump administration remains mired in controversy over its decision not to release to the public its investigative files on Epstein.
Published reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal last month indicated that the decision not to release the files came after President Trump was informed that his name was among those that appeared multiple times in the documents. The president has denied that he was told his name appeared in the files. The appearance of a name in the Epstein files is not evidence of illicit activity.
The transcript released Friday indicates that Maxwell’s lawyers initiated the request for the meeting with Blanche, but her representatives have insisted that no promises were made by the administration in connection with the interview.
Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump attend the 50th anniversary for both the Ford Modeling Agency and Pantene hair care products in New York, Oct. 30, 1997.
Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
“We haven’t spoken to the president or anyone about a pardon just yet,” Maxwell’s attorney David Markus said outside the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tallahassee, where the interview took place last month.
“Of course, everybody knows Ms. Maxwell would welcome any relief,” he added.
Trump, Maxwell told Blanche, was “always very cordial and very kind to me” in her interactions with him.
“And I just want to say that I find — I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him,” she said, according to the transcript.
Before any allegations of sexual misconduct against Epstein surfaced in 2005, Trump spoke glowingly of Epstein, and court records have included documents and testimony indicating Trump was a passenger on one of Epstein’s jets at least eight times between 1993 and 1997. The two native New Yorkers appeared in photographs together at Mar-A-Lago, the president’s private Palm Beach club, and at various public events in Manhattan.
Trump told New York magazine in 2002 he’d known Epstein for 15 years and described him as a “Terrific guy.”
“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life,” he told the magazine.After Epstein’s arrest in 2019 on conspiracy and child sex-trafficking charges. Trump, then in his first presidential term, said he’d ended his relationship with Epstein 15 years earlier.
“I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in July 2019. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan. I was not, yeah, a long time ago, I’d say maybe 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you. I was not a fan of his,” Trump said.
More recently, the president has claimed he split with Epstein after discovering Epstein was allegedly poaching employees from the spa at Mar-A-Lago, the president’s private club in Palm Beach.After Maxwell’s arrest in 2020 for aiding in Epstein’s sex-trafficking, Trump was noticeably more sympathetic.
“I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is,” the president said.
Maxwell said that she first knew of Trump through her late father, the late British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, who purchased the NY Daily News in 1991.
“I may have met Donald Trump at that time because my father was very friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said. “And I think, [it] should be said that he also very much liked [Trump’s first wife] Ivana because she was also from Czechoslovakia where my dad was from.”
Maxwell said she only saw Trump and Epstein together in social settings and that she did not introduce the two men.
“I don’t know how they met, and I don’t know how they became friends. I certainly saw them together and I remember the few times I observed them together. But they were friendly. I mean, they seemed friendly,” Maxwell said.
The 63-year-old Maxwell — a former girlfriend and longtime companion of Epstein — was granted limited immunity for her discussions with Blanche. She was convicted in 2021 of sex-trafficking and other offenses connected to her facilitation and participation in Epstein’s sexual exploitation of minor girls.
Maxwell did not testify in her own defense, but her attorneys insisted on her innocence throughout the trial. They contended the government was prosecuting Maxwell as a “substitute” for Epstein, after the accused child sex-trafficker died in federal custody in 2019.
In the interview with Blanche, Maxwell continued to insist she was not involved in the sexual exploitation of minors.
“I’m not saying that Mr. Epstein did not do those things,” Maxwell told Blanche. “I’m not here to defend him. But what I can say is I did not participate in that activity.”
At her sentencing hearing in 2022, a federal prosecutor said that Maxwell had shown “absolutely no remorse” and had “made misrepresentations when it suits her.” A federal judge imposed a 20 year prison sentence.
Maxwell has appealed her conviction but has thus far been unsuccessful. She currently has a petition pending before the US Supreme Court for a review of her case. The justice department has opposed her petition, and the high court has not yet indicated whether it will hear her appeal.
At the conclusion of the interview session last month, Blanche told Maxwell that he had no plan for what might come next, but that he would continue communicating with her attorneys.
“So I will talk to Mr. Markus about what we’re going to do next, if anything,” Blanche said.
“I’m not being coy. I just — I don’t know yet. I don’t know,” he said.
