President Donald Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen revealed in a new interview that he handled a rape complaint against him and the late financier Jeffrey Epstein just weeks before the 2016 election.
Cohen mentioned the Jane Doe complaint almost in passing during an interview with journalist Tara Palmieri, who wrote on her "Red Letter" website that the details revealed by the former attorney resembled allegations made at that time by a woman known as Katie Johnson.
"She was a Jane Doe who accused President Trump in three different lawsuits of raping her in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 1994, when she was a 13-year-old aspiring model," Palmieri wrote. "She was planning to hold a press conference in Los Angeles days before the 2016 election, but instead, she dropped her suit and vanished. Her attorney Lisa Bloom cited death threats. Her lead lawyer, Thomas Meagher, filed a one-page dismissal in Manhattan federal court."
"For years, I’ve wondered why," the journalist added.
Palmieri has been thinking about that accuser as the Epstein case has been foregrounded by the Justice Department's announcement that no new details would be released, and she decided to speak to Cohen after he seemingly cleared Trump's involvement in the disgraced financier's sex trafficking network.
"If anyone knew what happened to Katie Johnson’s case, it would be Cohen," Palmieri wrote. "He was in Trump’s orbit in September 2016 when her final suit was filed in the Southern District of New York. He was simultaneously arranging payouts for Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. This was exactly the kind of mess Trump’s fixer would 'fix.'"
Cohen insisted he had never met Epstein, who'd had a falling out with Trump a year or so before Cohen joined the Trump Organization, and he also said he had never spoken to co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell – although he said lawmakers asked him about the pair during his February 2019 testimony about Russia collusion.
“Do you really think that of all of these members of Congress that asked me questions for a total of 63 hours, do you think they didn't bring up this sort of stuff with Jeffrey Epstein?” Cohen said. "And I turn around and I say the same thing. I have no knowledge of anything with Jeffrey Epstein. Zero, I didn't handle it.”
But he did bring up work he had done for Trump on one Epstein-related case, which Palmieri said had a similar timeline and details from Katie Johnson's rape complaint, which was filed right before the election and then withdrawn on November 4, 2016.
"As far as the only case that I was involved with was a Jane Doe, an infant, by and through her mom, Mary Jane Doe, right, as legal guardian," Cohen said, "and the allegations in it are awful. They're despicable. It talks about, basically, rape of an underage female, claiming and alleging that Donald was involved in it and all that other nonsense."