Portrait of American financier Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump as they pose together at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1997.
Davidoff Studios Photography | Archive Photos | Getty Images
A “bawdy” letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing President Donald Trump’s signature was included in an album of letters Epstein received for his 50th birthday in 2003, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday evening, citing documents reviewed by the newspaper.
The letter, which the Journal said Trump sent at the request of Epstein’s friend Ghislaine Maxwell, would have been written 16 years before the Justice Department charged the now-dead Epstein with child sex trafficking in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office.
The missive, which Trump denied having written, came to light as the president angrily tries to tamp down growing criticism of the decision by Attorney General Pam Bondi not to release more evidence the Justice Department obtained during its investigation of Epstein.
It was unclear whether the birthday album was among the Epstein documents recently reviewed by the Justice Department. CNBC has requested comment from the Justice Department and the White House about the album and the letter.
According to the Journal, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.”
“A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair,” the Journal’s Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo reported.
“The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,'” they wrote.
The Journal said that it was not clear “how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared.”
“Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person,” the paper reported.
A leather-bound album book containing Trump’s birthday letter, as well as letters to Epstein from the lawyer Alan Dershowitz and billionaire Les Wexner, was among the documents “examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago,” the newspaper reported, citing people who have reviewed the pages.
Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the photo during an interview on Tuesday, according to the newspaper.
“This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” he said. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
The paper said that Trump told the Journal that if it published an article about the letter, “I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.”
After the Journal’s story was published, Trump said he would file a lawsuit against the newspaper, its parent company NewsCorp and against Rupert Murdoch, whose family holds a controlling stake in NewsCorp.
Trump wrote that Murdoch had been “warned directly” by Trump that he would be sued if the Journal printed the story.
“Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so,” Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social.
Shortly after he wrote that post, however, Trump announced that he had asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek “any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval,” on the Epstein case.
Legal experts quickly noted that the secrecy of grand jury testimony is strictly protected, raising questions of whether Bondi’s request would be made with any serious expectation of success.
The Journal’s article was published a day after the Justice Department fired Maurene Comey, a top prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, who had been part of the teams that prosecuted Epstein and Maxwell. Comey is the daughter of Trump’s long-time nemesis James Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in 2017.
Trump has said that he ended his friendship with Epstein before the money manager pleaded guilty to a sex crime involving a minor in Florida state court in 2008.
Epstein, then 66, died in August 2019 in a Manhattan federal jail, a month after his arrest on child sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.
Maxwell was convicted at trial in Manhattan federal court of multiple crimes related to procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. In 2022, she received a 20-year prison sentence.
