Epstein victim's lawyer uses CNN to put Donald Trump on the spot

The attorney for Jennifer Araoz, who says Jeffrey Epstein sexually assaulted her at age 15, challenged President Trump on CNN Saturday, inviting him to meet with her “one on one” amid speculation he may pardon Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Jennifer would like to invite the president to meet with survivors like her so he can understand the pain they went through and why a pardon should not be granted under any circumstances,” said Eric Lerner, Araoz’s attorney, extending the invitation for the first time to CNN’s Fredricka Whitefield.

Trump has faced increased scrutiny over his Justice Department interviewing Maxwell last week, with speculation growing that the president may be considering pardoning the convicted sex offender, and in exchange for compromising information on Democratic figures like former President Bill Clinton, who, like Trump, has had a well-documented relationship with Epstein.

Epstein died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and is alleged to have operated a blackmail operation targeting powerful figures.

And on Friday, Trump sparked further outrage when Maxwell was quietly moved from a maximum-security prison in Florida to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, a move that required the Bureau of Prisons to bend the rules to facilitate.

Lerner said that Araoz and other victims of Epstein “can’t understand why a convicted sex trafficker like Maxwell would be transferred to the lowest-level security prison in our federal system,” noting that at Maxwell’s new prison, “prisoners can literally walk off the facility,” as most minimum security prisons have “limited or no perimeter fencing.”

Whitefield asked Lerner how he intends on delivering the invitation to meet with Araoz to Trump, to which Lerner suggested he would get it to the president one way or another.

“We hope to get the message out today, we hope that this will be reported on, and we hope that the president is watching; if it's not reported on, or the president isn't watching today, we're going to keep talking about it,” Lerner said.

“I think they could talk one on one and she could really explain to him, face to face, what she's been through and what the other survivors like her have been through. How, under no circumstances, should a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell be considered.”

Lerner also laid into Trump’s supposed reason for facilitating a meeting with Maxwell, which was to, as his DOJ Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche put it, “to ask: what do you know?” Instead, Lerner said, the Trump administration had ample tools at its disposal to find additional co-conspirators in Epstein’s crimes.

“The justice system clearly has Epstein's emails: Google has it and the justice system has it,” he said. “Those emails would reveal a lot of what is being looked for. The Justice Department confiscated over 70 computers, hard drives, iPads, cell phones, so release what they have, but getting names from Ghislaine is not worth giving her a pardon or an easier sentence.”

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