Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported a 50th birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein that included a drawing, note, and signature from Donald Trump — an album compiled by Epstein’s longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison for conspiring with him to sexually abuse minors.
Given the president in turn filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the WSJ and owner Rupert Murdoch for “knowingly and recklessly” publishing “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements” allegedly causing Trump “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” there has been a minimal amount of reporting on and discussion of other documents, if not evidence per se, that have made accusations of in tandem sexual abuse of minors involving Epstein and Trump.
For example, Salon has reported on Maria Farmer, a sexual accuser and former employee of Epstein who on two occasions, in 1996 and 2006, told the FBI to look into Trump.
Similarly, Raw Story has reported on one lawsuit filed by Katie Johnson (a pseudonym) against defendants Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein in 2016.
In that lawsuit, Katie Johnson v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, filed on April 26, 2016 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, the plaintiff alleges that the defendants “did willfully and with extreme malice violate her Civil Rights under 18 U.S.C.: 2241 by sexually and physically abusing” her, “by forcing her to engage in various perverted and depraved sex acts by threatening physical harm to Plaintiff Johnson and also her family.”
In the same complaint, “Katie Johnson” further alleges that the defendants violated her civil rights “by making her their sex slave.”
She also “alleges that she was enticed by promises of money and a modeling career to attend a series of underage sex parties held at the New York City residence of Defendant Jeffrey E. Epstein and attended by Defendant Donald J. Trump.”
The lawsuit sought $100 million in damages.
You can read the complaint for yourself if you are interested in the scandalous details. I am more interested in referencing a similar federal lawsuit filed in New York not long after Johnson’s case was dismissed on the grounds that it had not raised civil rights claims under federal law.
In that second case, Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, filed in the United States District Court Southern District of New York on October 3, 2016, the plaintiff’s complaint alleges that she was the victim of “rape, sexual misconduct, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, assault, battery, intentional and reckless infliction of emotional distress, duress, false imprisonment, and defamation.”
However, when the accuser was to hold a news conference on November 2, 2016, it was abruptly called off.
Attorney Lisa Bloom had previously arranged for her client to appear at Bloom’s Woodland Hills law office. At the appointed time, Bloom told the assembled journalists and TV cameras that “Jane Doe has received numerous threats today…she is too afraid to show her face…She is in terrible fear.”
“Katie Johnson” spelled out in the California lawsuit: “I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop, but he did not. Defendant Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. … Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, other lawsuits and claims by 26 women were made against Trump for sexual assault.
Only two defamation lawsuits and a sexual abuse claim filed by E. Jean Carroll, that resulted in damages totaling $88.3 million, ever came to fruition.
Nevertheless, it is highly likely that those California and New York filed lawsuits are among the flagged items mentioning Trump collected by the thousand-plus FBI agents working on 24-hour shifts to comb through some 100,000 pages of the Epstein files.
Needless to say, this type of information is precisely what Trump does not want revealed now or anytime in the future to the American people of any political persuasion.
Of course, should Donald J. Trump v. The Wall Street Journal not be tossed out of court, then most if not all of this material would become available to the Journal’s attorneys through discovery.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy. The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.
