Hundreds of pages of transcripts from Ghislaine Maxwell’s interviews with the US Justice Department have been released.
The Trump administration published the logs amid a fierce backlash over a previous refusal to disclose records from the Jeffrey Epstein case.
In them, convicted sex trafficker Maxwell spoke glowingly of the president, calling him a ‘gentleman’ but acknowledging he was ‘friendly’ with the paedophile financier.
She also detailed what she knew of Epstein’s interactions with other high-profile men, including former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, saying she never observed untoward behaviour.
What’s in the Maxwell transcripts?
The transcripts are from interviews Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche conducted with Maxwell last month.
The sit-down came as the Trump administration scrambled to present itself as transparent amid backlash among even some of Trump’s most loyal supporters over a perceived broken promise to release more information on the Epstein case.
Trump has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the sex-trafficking case.
The ire peaked when Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that Epstein did not leave behind a ‘client list’, after earlier suggesting it was on her desk, and said no other evidence would be released.
Blanche later interviewed the imprisoned Maxwell at a Florida courthouse.
What did Maxwell say about Trump?
Maxwell was questioned on Epstein’s relationship with Trump, and said she ‘never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way’ and that he was ‘never inappropriate with anybody’.
She recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990 when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News.
‘I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,’ Maxwell said, according to the transcript, adding that her late father had been fond of Trump’s then-wife Ivana ‘because she was also from Czechoslovakia where my dad was from.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me,’ Maxwell said.
‘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.’
Maxwell told Blanche she didn’t know how Epstein and Trump met nor how they became friends.
‘I certainly saw them together and I remember the few times I observed them together, but they were friendly,’ she said. ‘I mean, they seemed friendly.’
Maxwell said she recalled only seeing Epstein and Trump in social settings, not private settings. Asked by Blanche if she ever observed Trump receiving a massage, she answered: ‘Never.’
‘I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,’ Maxwell said.
‘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 estimated that she hadn’t seen Trump since the mid-2000s, again in a social setting.
Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump ‘had done anything inappropriate with masseuses’ or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied: ‘Absolutely never, in any context.’
Maxwell said she and Epstein would go to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, often separately, though she didn’t say specifically when that was.
She said she ‘loved going there’ and that Epstein would ‘maybe go himself to the spa. I certainly did.’
What did Maxwell say about Epstein and Prince Andrew?
Maxwell said Epstein first met Andrew at a vineyard in Nantucket, an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the early 2000s.
She added that Sarah, Duchess of York, Andrew’s now ex-wife, was the one who had ‘pushed’ the pair’s friendship.
The 63-year-old former girlfriend of Epstein said she was ‘sure’ Andrew himself had suggested he meet Epstein through her.
Of the paedophile financier, Maxwell said: ‘First of all, let’s just state, I did not introduce him to Prince Andrew.
‘I did not introduce him to Prince Andrew or to Sarah Ferguson. That is a flat untruth. I’ll start with that.’
She continued: ‘I would never have introduced them. It would never have occurred to me to introduce them.
‘I couldn’t imagine them being friends. Two chalk and cheeses would never… for real, there’s nothing there to connect them.
‘So he met Prince Andrew and then he had a really good relationship. I don’t like that word. It sounds clunky.’
She added: ‘I think Sarah is the one that pushed that. And they met and hung out, I want to say two or three times that had nothing to do with me.
‘I wasn’t communicating with Andrew, I wasn’t in touch with him.
‘And I know this because I was annoyed and I felt left out, and I felt disrespected and I was like, this is weird. I couldn’t even imagine Epstein and Andrew together.
‘And I thought that Sarah was trying to put the moves on Jeffrey, if I’m being honest, and I thought the whole thing was annoying and I was pissed off.’
Later in the transcripts, Maxwell said allegations that Andrew and Ms Giuffre had sex in her London home were untrue because at the time of the alleged incident she was at her mother’s 80th birthday celebrations in the countryside outside the city.
She added: ‘The second reason why… probably maybe even the more important reason than my mum’s birthday, that I think it’s absolute rubbish, is that Prince Andrew – the idea of him doing anything of that nature in my house, that’s the size of this room, is so mind-blowingly not conceivable to me, as the man or what… I just can’t… I can’t even… I… no.’
She said Ms Giuffre’s allegation that she and Andrew had sexual contact in the bathroom of Maxwell’s London flat were not true as the room was not big enough.
She added: ‘So her description of whatever the two people were doing in the tub, that wouldn’t work. The bathroom itself is so small, you can’t lie flat on the floor.
‘So it couldn’t happen on the floor, because you physically, physically can’t. This bathroom is too small to even be on the floor.’
Asked by Mr Blanche whether the alleged incident in the bathroom was ‘logistically and physically not something that could have happened’, Maxwell said: ‘Well, there’s that.
‘And there’s just… Andrew would… he’s so English. He’s so… he had a tie on.’
Asked if there was ‘any way it could have happened’, Maxwell replied ‘no’, according to the transcripts.
She added that a well-known image of her standing alongside Andrew with his arm around Ms Giuffre’s waist was ‘literally a fake photo’.
The Duke of York has strenuously denied any wrongdoing.
The ‘client list’ and Epstein’s links to other high-profile men
Asked about a rumoured ‘black book’ or ‘client list’ Epstein reportedly kept of famous people he knew, the former British socialite said ‘there is no list’, adding ‘there is nothing like that’.
On trips she was said to have gone on with high-profile men, Maxwell said it was difficult to remember details, as they became a ‘blur’.
‘And after a while, you know, in the incredible job that you have, all of you, that when you’re so high pressured and you’re spending so much time with extraordinary people like you do with President Trump, it — it can blur,’ she said. ‘It just does.’
Blanche pressed Maxwell on whether she knew certain high-profile names, such as Elon Musk and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Maxwell said she met Musk around 2010 or 2011 during an event for the co-founder of Google that Epstein did not attend and then saw Musk again later at the Oscars.
She told Blanche she was friends with Cuomo’s ex-wife, Kerry, but had only met him a few times and she didn’t think Cuomo knew Epstein.
Maxwell said she had no recollection of either man flying on Epstein’s plane or ever visiting his homes.
The interview wasn’t only helpful to Trump, but also another one-time White House occupant with Epstein ties: former President Bill Clinton.
Maxwell told Blanche that Clinton was initially her friend, not Epstein’s, and that she never saw him receive a massage — nor did she believe he ever did.
The only times they were together, she said, were the two dozen or so times they traveled on Epstein’s plane.
‘That would’ve been the only time that I think that President Clinton could have even received a massage,’ Maxwell said. ‘And he didn’t, because I was there.’
Epstein’s death was ‘no suicide’
Maxwell said she does not believe Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019.
‘I do not believe he died by suicide, no,’ she said.
She said she did not know who was behind his death but that it was not a difficult thing to arrange.
‘In prison, where I am, they will kill you or they will pay – somebody can pay a prisoner to kill you for $25 worth of commissary,’ she said.
‘That’s about the going rate for a hit with a lock today.’
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