Transcription
Late last week, the Department of Justice released three previously missing FBI memos. Memos that we knew the Department of Justice had, but did not put up on their website when they released the files that summarized the bureau's 2019 interviews with a woman who said that Jeffrey Epstein groomed, trafficked, and sexually abused her when she was a minor.
And in those interviews, the woman also said that when she was between 13 and 15 years old, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, sexually abused and beat her. The FBI seemed to take these accusations seriously enough that they interviewed the same woman four times.
Producing these FBI memos, which contain a bunch of details that are, let's say, they're verifiable but were not verified, meaning it's possible to use available public records to just start to cross-reference some of the factual assertions she makes when describing her abuse and the situation. And that is exactly the kind of investigation that South Carolina newspaper, The Post and Courier, undertook with this enterprise reporting. They were able to verify a number of the woman's claims about her background and her family using things like court records, police reports, old print reporting, and property records.
Epstein consistently denied wrongdoing, any wrongdoing when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. And The Post and Courier, I should be clear here, does not substantiate the woman's allegations about Trump. In fact, the paper reports, quote, "Of the details the Post and Courier have found, supported by public records, none related directly to the alleged victim's claims about Trump."
But this new reporting shows that this woman's story is, let's just say, not a completely fictitious or fabricated account, right? It's not disproven. It's not dispositively ruled out based on facts here. The paper reached out to the woman and her lawyer. They did not respond.
Joining me now is Marilyn Thompson, veteran investigator reporter at The Post and Courier who dug into public records to publish that story with her colleague, Mitchell Black. Marilyn, I just want to start by praising the work that your colleague, Mitchell Black, who I know was running around doing sort of shoe leather reporting on this, and you have done on this, because my first thought when I read through these documents, I read them a number of times, is, okay, there's some basic assertions here that should be in the public record that we can sort of start to sift through. So tell me what documents.
The first document came out a little earlier, and it had a pretty substantial story of her abuse while she was living on Hilton Head Island. A lot of details that basically Mitch and I put our heads together and said, you know, these are either true or not true. And we came at this from the assumption that good reporting is looking back at the record to try to verify facts as they exist. In this case, we were able to verify any number of claims that she made in her initial report. What she did in the second FBI interview, the first one had ended rather abruptly and she started mentioning Trump and then she shut down. The FBI came back and got a more detailed account. We, Mitch, who's a fearless, less young reporter, got on a plane and went to the West Coast. He went to the West Coast and was able to look in the public records in kind of a breakneck pace and find verification of a number of the claims. It was really interesting to watch it.
Can you walk us through those? Let's start with that first interview and just like the basic claims, Hilton Head Island. She says she was there at the time. She answered this advertisement, I think for babysitting, is how she describes it. Like, what were you able to sort of pin down?
Yeah. I mean, there was a story behind it, that her mother was a realtor on the island, that her mother had loaned her out for babysitting services to clients of her rental real estate company, and that she had gone to a house, thinking she was babysitting, and this attack began. She did have a number of other encounters with the person that that she later identified as Jeffrey Epstein. So we were able to take that story, the mother. We didn't know who she was, but we found her. You know, we found the mother. We found the mother's cases. We found property records. We did old-fashioned shoe leather type stuff that I haven't seen done in many a year.
And what that just means is that, again, you can imagine someone calls an FBI tip line and says something and it's just totally fabricated. I was in a plane with so-and-so and we flew to Dubai and they did something. And then it's like, you were never on that plane. In this case, just the ground fact of she was in Hilton Head Island. Again, we don't want to give any details that revealed her identity, but she's around the age that this would be the case, that her mother was a realtor there, that she did live there, that these are all things that you can kind of nail down as true.
Correct. Yeah. The friend, the friend in the FBI's kind of bungled handling of an internal memo, they put some identifying details about this friend that were quite, quite interesting and verifiable. So we were able through this mosaic to kind of create a picture of what this woman's life had been like, and then tell the story. And I thought it was a very compelling story. We have a lot of respect for victims and don't believe that you can just dismiss their claims out of hand.
Yeah, and I suspect this is there's more.