Trump's friendship with Epstein: Everything we know after Elon Musk's bombshell – The Mirror
Donald Trump’s decades-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is today under a blazing spotlight after Elon Musk publicly claimed the president’s name appears in the paedophile’s government files.
Musk’s statement on X, where he commands an audience of over 185 million, was as brief as it was damning. "Time to drop the really big bomb,” the billionaire wrote, “Trump's in the Epstein files”, and “that is the real reason they have not been made public.” He signed off: “Have a nice day, DJT!”
With his single post, the Tesla billionaire reignited scrutiny over Trump’s intimate association with a man who allegedly trafficked and raped underage girls – and did so with impunity for years, while socialising with the world’s elite. How Trump is allegedly mentioned in the files he vowed to release, only few know.
The fallout between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has left Washington reeling(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
But what is documented and undeniable is the US leader’s closeness to Prince Andrew’s paedophile pal for years. The Epstein flight logs, released by Trump's own attorney general in February, include his name seven times. The documents, reviewed by The Mirror, show him flying alongside Epstein as early as October 1993, with Ghislaine Maxwell – now a convicted sex trafficker herself – also listed aboard.
Despite years of denials and deliberate distancing, the paper trail is growing, and with it, the pressure to answer one increasingly urgent question: What exactly did Donald Trump, if anything, know about Jeffrey Epstein? It is compounded by how the property mogul said six years before the sex offender was convicted in 200 for soliciting a minor for prostitution, how his pal liked women, “ many of them are on the younger side.
To understand how deeply intertwined Trump and Epstein were, one only needs to look at the 1992 video footage from Mar-A-Lago. There, the two men, surrounded by young women, some reportedly NFL cheerleaders, can be seen laughing, pointing, whispering, and dancing.
And not just any dance. The stiff, robotic shimmy Trump wheels out at campaign rallies – dubbed by his MAGA supporters the “Trump Dance” – was on full display three decades ago while he partied with Epstein. “It was only during last year’s election campaign that the world saw Donald dance, but those at the club have seen it for years,” a Mar-A-Lago source said.
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partied together for years in Palm Beach, Florida(Image: Getty Images)
“He and Jeff would party up a storm in West Palm Beach. At times, they seemed joined at the hip… It is the exact same moves he honed back in the early nineties while partying with Jeff." It’s not just their socialising that raises red flags. At the time the footage was taken, Epstein would describe Trump as his “best friend.” Trump, in turn, famously told New York Magazine in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do – and many of them are on the younger side.”
That comment, casually tossed off during Trump’s playboy era, has not aged well. It begs questions of why the businessman would make such a statement. Court testimony from a woman known only as “Jane Doe” adds further fuel to the Trump-Epstein fire. She told jurors she first met Trump when Epstein brought her to Mar-A-Lago at age 14.
She did not accuse the president of any wrongdoing, but placed him squarely in Epstein’s orbit at a time when the financier was grooming minors. Another woman, former model Stacey Williams, claimed that Trump groped her during a visit to Trump Tower in 1993. She said she was dating Epstein at the time, who introduced her to the future president.
“The second he [Trump] was in front of me, he pulled me into him, and his hands were just on me and didn’t come off,” she alleged. “It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together.”
Jeffrey Epstein once said he and Donald Trump were "best friends" for years
Author Michael Wolff has claimed he has seen explosive material from Trump’s years-long friendship with Epstein – including a set of lewd photographs that he says, if made public, could severely damage the former president.
The writer, who spent hours interviewing the financier before his arrest in 2019, said: “I have seen these pictures. I know that these pictures exist and I can describe them,” Wolff said, referring to a trove of alleged images featuring Trump and Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
“There are about a dozen of them,” Wolff alleged. “The ones I specifically remember is the two of them with topless girls of an uncertain age sitting on Trump’s lap. And then Trump standing there with a stain on the front of his pants and three or four girls kind of bent over in laughter – they’re topless, too – pointing at Trump’s pants (trousers).”
The president has denied all wrongdoing. The US leader used the Epstein files as a vote winner while campaigning last year for the White House. He had hyped the Epstein files as a bombshell – a revelatory moment that would bring justice to victims and expose the powerful figures complicit in the cover-up. Instead, it has been a damp squib.
Trump and Epstein attended a party which was filmed by the US broadcaster NBC. It showed the two men leering at NFL cheerleaders who were dancing(Image: NBC)
The documents contained flight logs, a redacted contact book, and a masseuse list — almost all of which had already been disclosed in court or through investigative reporting. No new names. No meaningful accountability. No answers.
“He made a big deal about releasing these files, but in the end, we got nothing,” one victim told the Mirror. Critics say the release had all the hallmarks of a smokescreen: a heavily redacted, incomplete document dump designed more to protect than expose. Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump loyalist, admitted she had received only 200 pages, despite reports that thousands more exist.
So, where are the missing files? What names are still being protected? And why, after promising transparency, has Trump delivered silence? While figures like Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton have spent years attempting to distance themselves from Epstein, Trump’s tactic has always been deflection.
He has downplayed and dismissed Epstein as a “guy I didn’t like” while ignoring the decade-plus of mutual admiration and frequent encounters. But as each new detail emerges – whether in a flight log, a court testimony, or a viral clip – the picture becomes harder to deny.
Among Epstein's friends was Prince Andrew(Image: Getty Images)
Trump didn’t just know Epstein. He welcomed him into his private club. He praised him. He partied with him. He danced beside him while Epstein preyed on girls. Trump once claimed that if the truth about Epstein ever came out, “a lot of very important people” would be taken down.
What he never clarified was who those people are.
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