The new Jeffrey Epstein tapes and his friendship with Trump, explained

In media and politics, timing is everything — which leaves many people wondering why journalist and author Michael Wolff waited until mere days before the presidential election to drop a bombshell: what he says are recordings of Jeffrey Epstein discussing his intimate friendship with Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, a bestselling 2018 book about the Trump White House, dropped a brief clip from the tapes last week on his Fire and Fury podcast, on which he and co-host James Truman gab about the news and political insider gossip. In the clip, Epstein chit-chats about how Trump played mind games with his staff. After it made headlines over the weekend,  Wolff shared a wider selection of the “hundred hours” of his Epstein recordings with the Daily Beast, which published excerpts Monday. 

On the tapes — which, it must be noted, feature only Epstein’s version of events — Epstein proclaims he was Trump’s “closest friend.” He depicts the pair as bros who partied together for over a decade, and Trump as a dedicated womanizer and adulterer. 

“The only thing I really like to do is fuck the wives of my best friends,” Trump allegedly told Epstein after a tryst. “That is just the best.’”

The Trump campaign has responded to the tapes by accusing Wolff of outright lying and “blatant election interference on behalf of [Trump’s opponent] Kamala Harris.”

What’s striking about the allegations Epstein makes in the tapes is that they aren’t anything we haven’t heard before, about Trump’s friendship with Epstein or Trump himself. 

The pair’s “bromance” has been a matter of public record since the ’90s, with plenty of accompanying salacious gossip. No fewer than 28 women have come forward to publicly accuse Trump of sexual misconduct against them over the decades. The two most recent allegations were made within days of each other, with the 27th accuser, Stacey Williams, claiming that Epstein had introduced Trump to her and that the two men seemed to be treating her like the object of a “twisted” game.  

Wolff said on the podcast that he was motivated to release the Epstein-Trump clip after the 28th accuser, former Swiss pageant queen Beatrice Keul, also made a recent allegation of sexual assault against the former president. 

Wolff claimed to the Daily Beast that he’d attempted unsuccessfully to interest various media outlets in the tapes at various points in the past. Those editors likely passed on the clips due to the difficulty of fact-checking them or verifying any of the claims made by Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking. 

Vox likewise makes no claims to the veracity of Epstein’s statements, but even if the claims Epstein makes about Trump can’t be verified, the recordings serve as a visceral reminder that the Epstein-Trump connection was real and well-documented. 

It may even serve as a much-needed reminder about the many, many accusations of sexual misconduct that Trump himself has yet to really confront.

Who was Jeffrey Epstein?

Jeffrey Epstein was, ostensibly, a money manager, though whose money he managed was always somewhat unclear. You can learn more about him here or here, but at a basic level, it’s important to know that by the 1990s, he was wealthy enough to buy a private island in the US Virgin Islands and that he moved in circles with some of the richest and most powerful men in the world.

During that time, dozens of women say that he sexually abused them, often while they were underage, then offered them money to find him more girls or young women to abuse. “He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them,’’ one woman told Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown, saying she recruited 70 or 80 girls for Epstein. A detective in Palm Beach, where much of the alleged abuse took place, called it a “sexual pyramid scheme.” 

But Epstein avoided any legal consequences until 2008, when he pleaded guilty to charges of solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution, and served a shockingly light sentence: just 13 months in a private wing of a Palm Beach county jail.

In July 2019, however, thanks in part to Brown’s reporting at the Herald, Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking, accused of recruiting young girls for abuse in both Palm Beach and New York. A month later, before he could be tried, he was found dead in jail; the New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
Epstein has since become a kind of symbol for the most depraved sort of sexual abuser, a man who, according to the women who came forward, knowingly and repeatedly targeted children, manipulating them and forcing them to become his accomplices in harming others. Other men accused of serial sexual misconduct, like Sean Combs, are often compared to Epstein. Investigations and reports have continued since the money manager’s death — in a 2020 lawsuit, for example, the attorney general of the Virgin Islands said that Epstein had run a sex trafficking operation from his private island there, bringing girls as young as 11 to be abused.

Trump and Epstein were more than acquaintances — they were self-professed close friends who partied together for over a decade

On episode 22 of the Fire and Fury podcast, released October 31, Wolff discusses the “longstanding deep relationship” between Epstein and Trump. 

“Epstein knew him, really, I think, better than most,” Wolff said. “I mean, this was a true BFF situation: two playboys very much styling themselves as playboys in that Hefner sense, who palled around for the better part of 15 years.”

Trump’s own previous statements bear out this assessment. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002, in a profile that now reads like an indictment of the many powerful people in Epstein’s orbit. Archival photos abound of the pair hanging out at events, partying at Mar-a-Lago, double-dating with Melania and Epstein’s girlfriend-turned-business partner Ghislaine Maxwell. In one video recorded at Mar-a-Lago in 1992 and released in 2019, Trump appears to point out women to Epstein and then to whisper something in his ear, making the money manager laugh. The earliest photos hail from the early ’90s; Trump was a frequent dinner guest of Epstein’s until at least 2003. 

Trump told New York that “Jeffrey enjoys his social life” and that “he’s a lot of fun to be with.” He also told the magazine, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” A source once told Page Six that Epstein had formerly “use[d] the spa” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club “to try to procure girls.” (The club claimed it had since banned Epstein, a claim Epstein disputed to Page Six.) Photos of Trump and Maxwell — now serving her conviction on sex trafficking charges for having procured underage victims for Epstein — also abound. 

In addition to Epstein frequently attending Trump parties at Mar-a-Lago, Trump allegedly also frequently partied at Epstein’s former New York townhouse. This included allegedly having sex with at least one of Epstein’s victims “on regular occasions,” according to an Epstein survivor who later testified in court to witnessing the meetings. Another Epstein accuser testified in court that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was just 14.  (Trump has denied the accusations.)

Epstein and Trump eventually had a falling out in 2004 after they reportedly feuded over the since-destroyed Maison de l’Amitie estate in Palm Beach. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to drastically reduced charges of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute — crimes for which he served 13 months of an 18-month sentence. Trump has since distanced himself publicly from Epstein, claiming he was “not a fan” of the money manager and had “no idea” of Epstein’s crimes.

The Wolff tapes, if true, add some new dimension to the dissolution of their friendship and Epstein’s downfall. According to Wolff, Epstein first told Trump that he was planning to buy the Palm Beach estate, only for Trump, as court records recently revealed, to come in guns blazing and outbid him. Following this dispute, according to Wolff, Epstein came to suspect that Trump was the person who initiated the subsequent criminal investigation into Epstein’s now-infamous parties. 

For Epstein’s part, based on his comments to Wolff, it seemed he remained interested in Trump’s trajectory and had trouble even grasping that Trump, who he described as “functionally illiterate,” could have made it into the White House. 

In the tapes, Epstein emphatically showed his distaste for his former friend, calling him “a horrible human being.”

Why all this matters

It’s an open question whether Wolff’s revelations about Epstein and Trump will play any role in the 2024 election. The tapes have had little time to percolate through the media landscape or to be investigated and fact-checked. There’s also a widespread belief that no accusation against Trump, no matter how damning, can truly damage his standing with his supporters: He was caught on tape bragging about his ability to grab women “by the pussy,” for example, and still won in 2016.

Nonetheless, the Wolff tape underscores what many Americans already knew: that Trump and Epstein spent time together socially, chatting at parties and praising one another in the press, for many years. What’s new on these tapes is largely Epstein’s perspective on their friendship. According to Epstein in his conversations with Wolff, that party life included sexual exploits — a suggestion that Trump himself teased in that same New York piece. Williams’ recent allegation against Trump further bolsters the theme of Trump and Epstein competing over women; in her recounting of the incident, Trump groped her aggressively while he and Epstein allegedly smiled at each other, after which Epstein grew angry with Williams.  

“Of course, we see now Epstein as the sexual monster,” Wolff said on the podcast episode, “but certainly, at least in Epstein’s telling, he and Trump were pretty much, in this regard, brothers in arms.”

Besides the fact that Trump himself has been accused of sexual assault or other misconduct by more than 20 women, he has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation of journalist E. Jean Carroll in 2023. When Carroll first came forward in 2019 to say that Trump had assaulted her in a dressing room in the mid-90s, Trump responded that she was “not my type.”

American voters may never know how deep Trump’s association with Epstein went. But we are familiar with the fact that for Trump, abuse of women is a punchline, “locker room talk,” a little joke to share among friends. Trump has never made a secret of what he thinks about women and their bodies. 

Ultimately, the Wolff tape may be less of a revelation than a reminder of what’s always been out in the open, if voters choose to see it.