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Marilyn Thompson and Mitchell Black of The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina have done a lot of old-fashioned investigative reporting on the contents of the 2019 interviews of the woman who claimed that she was sexually assaulted and beaten by Donald Trump in 1984, when she was 13 years old. Notes on the three interviews the FBI conducted with the victim in 2019 were initially withheld by the Department of Justice, but were finally released on March 5.
The previous assaults on her by Jeffrey Epstein began on the tiny resort island of Hilton Head in South Carolina. The girl’s mother was in real estate and the girl was originally hired by Epstein as a babysitter, but when she got to Epstein’s place, she realized there were no children to babysit. Epstein plied the girl with drugs and booze and raped her. He later took nude photos of her and extorted money from her mother to keep the images from circulating. Her mother got the money to pay Epstein by embezzling it from her employer, and went to prison for it, derailing her life.
The assaults by Donald Trump happened when the girl traveled to New York and New Jersey with Epstein. Trump had just opened the Trump Plaza casino on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The girl was led to Trump in a “very tall building with huge rooms.” “From the get-go,” she said, “he didn’t like that I was a boy-girl” (that is, a tomboy). Trump told others to leave the room and then said to her, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.” He unzipped his pants and forced her onto his penis. She then “bit the shit out of it,” and Trump pulled her hair, punched her in the head, and cursed at her. Then he raped her.
In the FBI interview notes, it says she “bit TRUMP’s penis because he disgusted her.” And then comes this passage in the interview notes: “She got the feeling the relationship between EPSTEIN and TRUMP included a certain amount of jealousy. She thought TRUMP appeared jealous of EPSTEIN, but at some point, they ended up on level playing fields. TRUMP and EPSTEIN sometimes used the terms ‘fresh meat,’ ‘untainted’ and ‘not jaded’ while referring to girls. At the time she heard it, she did not understand the term ‘not jaded.’ She subsequently looked up the word ‘jaded.’ She stated she had two additional interactions with TRUMP, but she asked that the interview move on to a different subject for the time being.”
“Jaded” means “tired, bored, or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something.” A “jade” is a woman regarded as promiscuous, but beyond her prime, carried over from the sense of a broken-down mare, a nag. Trump and Epstein wanted girls who were not jaded.
The interviews go into great detail about Epstein from the time the girl spent around him. “On one occasion, [she] asked EPSTEIN, ‘why he [EPSTEIN} does those things to me?’ EPSTEIN responded by disclosing he had been molested as a child by a ‘boy’ in his family, and possibly his aunt. She thought the boy was either an uncle or a cousin; he definitely mentioned abuse by both a male and female.”
“EPSTEIN talked about blackmailing people in front of her. She was confident TRUMP knew EPSTEIN blackmailed people because she heard EPSTEIN and TRUMP talking about it. She stated she knew TRUMP had illegal building permits. She heard him (TRUMP) talking about washing money through casinos. Number 6 is Donald Trump’s favorite number. She was not sure how she knew that, but she had heard it at one point. She stated that EPSTEIN’s blackmailing of her mother ‘ruined my family.’”
The woman also detailed how Epstein kept track of her long after the events on Hilton Head island, and she continued to get anonymous calls for years threatening her if she didn’t “keep her mouth shut.”
She was battered, assaulted, and raped by other men that Epstein brought her to, but she was especially afraid of talking about what Trump had done to her, because, by the time of the interviews, he had already been President of the United States for three years, and she was afraid of repercussions.
The Post and Courier is not revealing the name of the victim, in keeping with its policy on protecting victims of sexual assault. The woman in question sued Epstein’s estate in 2019 as Jane Doe 4, and received a financial settlement to drop the suit. But she continued and continues to live in constant fear. Her encounters with Epstein and Trump more than 40 years ago are among the earliest reported allegations in a long line of such accounts.
In 2019, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking of minors. On August 10, 2019, Epstein died in his jail cell, leaving an estate valued at $635 million.
It is unclear why the FBI didn’t pursue prosecution of Trump and the others involved in Epstein’s sex trafficking at the time. Arick Fudali, the lawyer who represented “Jane Doe 4” in her suit against Epstein’s estate in 2019, told Thompson and Black of The Post and Courier: “We were able to get money directly from the estate without having to go further into litigation.” Referring to the many victims of Epstein’s abuse, Fudali said, “Most of them are staying quiet. Even though Epstein has been dead for almost a decade, most of them continue to live in fear.”1
1. Mitchell Black and Marilyn W. Thompson, “She Accused Jeffrey Epstein of Assaulting Her in SC. Decades Later, Women Like Her Live in Fear,” The Post and Courier, January 11, 2026.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.