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Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell told the Department of Justice earlier in 2025 that she never saw President Donald Trump act inappropriately, according to DOJ documents released Friday of her interview.
“I think they were friendly, like people are in social settings. I don’t — I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the President in any of — I don’t recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance.” she told the DOJ. “I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting. 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.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed Epstein associate Maxwell at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida, in July, where she has been serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.
The interview was held across a two-day period, with the administration weighing in August whether to release the audio file and transcript of the interview, senior administration officials previously told Fox Digital.
Maxwell explained in her interviews that she first met Trump in the 1990s through her father, saying Trump was “always very cordial and very kind to me.”
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“Well, I just want to say for my relationship with President Trump — relationship’s a big word — but I just want to say that I met him or I believe I may have, because of my father in the ’90s,” she said.
“Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me,” she continued. “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. So that is the sum and substance of my entire relationship with him.”
As for Epstein’s relationship with Trump, Maxwell said she only ever witnessed the pair interacting in social settings and that she was unsure how they struck up a friendly association.
“I don’t know how they met, and I don’t know how they became friends,” she told Blanche. “I certainly saw them together and I remember the few times I observed them together, but they were friendly. I mean, they seemed friendly.”
“I believe I only ever saw them in social settings,” she continued. “I don’t recall any private settings.”
Epstein was a notorious predator who pleaded guilty to procuring underage girls for prostitution in 2008, before he was arrested in 2019 on new federal charges of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors. The predatory billionaire, who had rubbed elbows with the world’s elites stretching from Bill Gates to being photographed with Trump long before his presidency, was found dead in his New York City jail cell in August 2019 by apparent suicide.
Maxwell continued in her DOJ interviews that she last saw Trump in the mid-2000s in a social setting. When pressed if Maxwell had ever heard rumors or witnessed Trump do anything inappropriate with “masseuses or with anybody in your world,” she gave a firm denial.
“Absolutely never, in any context,” she responded.
Toward the end of her interview, Maxwell asked Blanche to add to the records that she believes Trump was “swept into” the controversy surrounding Epstein.
“I just would like to put out there that I also focused on how I think the president got swept into some of this unnecessarily, by the way,” she said. “And I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I certainly don’t subscribe to all the — all of everything that I see. But I do believe that there is animus in some areas that may have contributed to how the use of the president to harm him, that I find deeply offensive.”
“And whilst I can’t obviously say definitively that that is what it is, I would like to show you what I see so that you can evaluate it and do with that as you see fit if it needs to be addressed. I’ve seen it, it struck me, and I would like to give it to you,” she continued, before Blanche agreed to her request and the interview wrapped for the day.
Maxwell weighed in on Epstein’s 50th-birthday “book,” which included people sending him cards in 2003, but said she did not recall Trump sending Epstein a card and reported she had no evidence of such a card in her discovery of legal proceedings.
The DOJ and FBI said in a joint memo in July that the two agencies had no further information to share with the public about Epstein’s case and death, determining that he died by suicide, and that there was no list of clients whom Epstein may have procured for exploitation by third parties.
The memo set off condemnation from some MAGA supporters, who said the reports would not make the Epstein scandal disappear and continued calling for documents to be released. Such supporters claim that Epstein did not hang himself, and that the death was allegedly part of a bigger cover-up protecting elites allegedly involved in his sexual abuse of minors.
Trump repeatedly has slammed the Epstein case as a hoax promoted by the Democrats, including chastising reporters who asked him about the matter when the FBI and DOJ first reported evidence showing Epstein committed suicide.
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“For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again,” Trump said in a July Truth Social post. “Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden administration.”
“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands,” Trump wrote. “Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?”
Amid mounting calls from voters that the government release more details on Epstein, Trump instructed the Justice Department in July to release “all credible” evidence in the files.
“We’d like to release everything, but we don’t want people to get hurt that shouldn’t be hurt, and I would assume that was why he was there,” he told Newsmax in July.
The White House referred Fox News Digital to Trump’s public comments earlier Friday when asked about the Maxwell interview drop.
“Innocent people shouldn’t be burt, but I’m in support of keeping it totally open,” Trump told the media Friday of keeping the Epstein case open. “I couldn’t care less. You got a lot of people that it could be mentioned in those files that don’t deserve to be, people, because he knew everybody in Palm Beach.”
“This is a Democratic hoax to try and get the significance of what we’ve done over the past seven months,” he added. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. They say it’s number one in history. What we’ve done, including stopping seven wars, I mean.”
Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman, Breanne Deppisch and Ashley Oliver contributed to this report.
