Author Michael Wolff stated on a recent episode of his podcast that Jeffrey Epstein had shown him pictures of Donald Trump with “topless young women.” Speaking to journalist and co-host James Truman, Wolff said the pictures dated from the late 90s, and described how they showed Trump poolside at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, surrounded by the half-naked girls, and that “in some of the pictures, they’re sitting in his lap.”Wolff says that Epstein showed him the pictures when he was being interviewed for Wolff’s 2018 book on Donald Trump, Fire and Fury (which is also the title of his current podcast).
Describing the scene to Truman, Wolff said that Epstein “would go and he would take them out of the safe” to show him and then “return them to the safe.” Wolff only began hinting that Epstein was a source for his controversial book on the former president years after the sex trafficker’s death in 2019. He speculates that the photos are in possession of the FBI, who raided Epstein’s home that same year. Wolff also thinks that Epstein agreed to speak with him due to a sense of “personal fear” towards then-President Trump
An award-winning magazine writer, Wolff says he came forward with his information about Trump after the allegations earlier this week from former Swiss beauty queen Beatrice Keul, who alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her in 1993. The Trump campaign has responded to Wolff’s allegations, calling him a “disgraced writer” who is “resorting to lying for attention.”
Wolff’s book on Trump was indeed met with a great deal of controversy, as many of his peers across the media landscape pointed out sloppy tradecraft on numerous details (e.g. getting the year wrong for certain events, misspelling names, etc.), but also more serious issues regarding sourcing for crucial scenes Wolff describes. Angie Drobnic Holan, writing for Politifact, went into these issues shortly after the book’s release in 2018 regarding a scene that portrayed an ongoing feud between Ivanka Trump and Steve Bannon: “How does Wolff know this scene happened? We don’t know. Was he there? It’s not clear. Did Bannon tell him? Did Ivanka Trump tell him? Did President Trump tell him? There’s no way to know, and many scenes in the book are like this.”
Going into the final weekend before election day, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris find themselves in a virtual dead-heat in the polls.
