Trump did not say what the people’s jobs were or where they worked, and the White House had no immediate comment. But with the fresh comments, Trump shed a little light on the reason why he has said he had ended the relationship with Epstein, though Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, recently said on X that, “The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep.”

Epstein killed himself, authorities say, in a New York jail cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Trump and his top allies stoked conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death before Trump returned to power and are now struggling to manage the fallout after the Justice Department said Epstein did in fact die by suicide and that it would not release additional documents about the case.

The president and his allies, some of whom are now in the administration, had promised to release the files.

The case has dogged Trump at home and abroad and even followed Vice President JD Vance during an appearance in his home state of Ohio on Monday. A small group of protesters assembled outside a factory in Canton that Vance toured, holding signs that spelled out “JD Protects Pedophiles” and indicating that “GOP” stands for “Guardians Of Pedophiles.”

The Republican president spoke at his golf property in Turnberry, Scotland, as he sat with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after the leaders had met and were answering questions from U.S. and U.K. journalists. Asked to explain why the relationship had faltered, Trump said, “That’s such old history, very easy to explain, but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it.”

He then explained, saying he stopped talking to Epstein after “he did something that was inappropriate.”

“He hired help and I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump said. “He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata.”

“I threw him out and that was it. I’m glad I did, if you want to know the truth,” Trump added.

Trump recently directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the public release of sealed grand jury transcripts in the case. One federal judge has denied that request; a second judge has yet to rule.

Vance on Monday visited the factory to promote Trump’s tax cut and border bill, but also addressed the Epstein matter, saying the president wants “full transparency” in the case.

“The president has been very clear. We’re not shielding anything,” Vance said in response to a reporter’s question. “The president has directed the attorney general to release all credible information and, frankly, to go and find additional credible information related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.”

“Some of that stuff takes time,” Vance said, adding that Trump has been “very clear. He wants full transparency.”

Trump had said back in 2019 that Epstein was a fixture in Palm Beach but that the two had had a falling-out a long time ago and he hadn’t spoken with Epstein for 15 years.

Trump on Monday also denied contributing to a compilation of letters and drawings to mark Epstein’s 50th birthday, first reported on by the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper said the letter believed to be from Trump included a drawing of a woman’s body.

“I don’t do drawings of women, that I can tell you,” Trump said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Social media has been rife in recent weeks with posts speculating that a judge is about to release a list of clients or co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein, the jet-setting financier who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

There is no such list and the truth is less scandalous.

Previously sealed court documents related to Epstein are being released, but the great majority of those whose names appear in the documents aren’t accused of wrongdoing or have been mentioned previously in legal proceedings or news accounts.

Still, the document release has fueled misinformation. Social media users baselessly claimed that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s name might appear in the documents, spurred by a crack New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made Tuesday on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show.”

Kimmel said in a response on X that he had never met Epstein and that Rodgers’ “reckless words put my family in danger.”

“Keep it up and we will debate the facts further in court,” Kimmel wrote.

Here’s what we know about the documents:

WHO IS JEFFREY EPSTEIN?

A millionaire known for associating with celebrities, politicians, billionaires and academic stars, Epstein was initially arrested in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2005 after he was accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex.

Dozens of other underage girls described similar sexual abuse, but prosecutors ultimately allowed the financier to plead guilty in 2008 to a charge involving a single victim. He served 13 months in a jail work-release program.

Some famous acquaintances abandoned Epstein after his conviction, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, but many did not. Epstein continued to mingle with the rich and famous for another decade, often through philanthropic work.

Reporting by the Miami Herald renewed interest in the scandal, and federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein in 2019 with sex trafficking. He killed himself in jail while awaiting trial.

The U.S. attorney in Manhattan then prosecuted Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, for helping recruit his underage victims. She was convicted in 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison term.

WHAT ARE THESE RECORDS ABOUT?

The documents being unsealed are part of a lawsuit filed against Maxwell in 2015 by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre. She is one of the dozens of women who sued Epstein saying he had abused them at his homes in Florida, New York, the U.S. Virgin Islands and New Mexico.

Giuffre said the summer she turned 17, she was lured away from a job as a spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to become a “masseuse” for Epstein — a job that involved performing sexual acts.

Giuffre also claimed she was pressured into having sex with men in Epstein’s social orbit, most famously with Britain’s Prince Andrew. All of those men said her accounts were fabricated. She settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew in 2022. That same year, Giuffre withdrew an accusation she had made against Epstein’s former attorney, the law professor Alan Dershowitz, saying she “ may have made a mistake ” in identifying him as an abuser.

Giuffre’s lawsuit against Maxwell was settled in 2017, but the Miami Herald went to court to access court papers initially filed under seal, including transcripts of interviews the lawyers did with potential witnesses.

About 2,000 pages were unsealed by a court in 2019. Additional documents were released in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

This next batch of around 250 records had sections that were blacked out or were sealed entirely because of concerns about the privacy rights of Epstein’s victims and other people whose names had come up during the legal battle but weren’t complicit in his crimes.

WHAT CAN WE EXPECT TO SEE?

U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska, who evaluated the documents to decide what should be unsealed, said in her December order that she was ordering the records released because much of the information within them is already public.

Some records have been released, either in part or in full, in other court cases. Much of the rest involve topics and people who have been exhaustively covered in nearly two decades’ worth of newspaper stories, TV documentaries, interviews, books and testimony at Maxwell’s criminal trial.

The people named in the records include many of Epstein’s accusers, members of his staff who told their stories to tabloid newspapers, people who served as witnesses at Maxwell’s trial, people who were mentioned in passing during depositions but aren’t accused of anything salacious, and people who investigated Epstein, including prosecutors, a journalist and a detective.

There are also boldface names of public figures known to have associated with Epstein over the years, but whose relationships with him have already been well documented elsewhere, the judge said.

One of them is Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent close to Epstein who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls when he killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022. Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse.

Clinton and Trump both factor in the court file, partly because Giuffre was questioned by Maxwell’s lawyers about inaccuracies in newspaper stories about her time with Epstein. One story quoted her as saying she had ridden in a helicopter with Clinton and flirted with Trump. Giuffre said neither of those things actually happened. She hasn’t accused either former president of wrongdoing.

The judge said a handful of names should remain blacked out in the documents because they would identify people who were sexually abused. The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they decide to tell their stories publicly, as Giuffre has done.

WHEN WILL THE DOCUMENTS BE MADE PUBLIC?

On Dec. 18, the judge gave the people whose names appear in the records 14 days to appeal, then directed the lawyers to confer, prepare the documents for unsealing and post them on the docket.

Two people whose name appears in the records have been given additional time to make arguments to the court as to why their names should stay redacted.

A small batch of documents was made available publicly on Wednesday.

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NEW YORK (AP) — One of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime accusers sued Prince Andrew on Monday, saying he sexually assaulted her when she was 17.

Lawyers for Virginia Giuffre filed the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court.

In a statement, Giuffre said the lawsuit was brought under the Child Victims Act to allege she was trafficked to him and sexually abused by him.

“I am holding Prince Andrew accountable for what he did to me,” she said. “The powerful and rich are not exempt from being held responsible for their actions. I hope that other victims will see that it is possible not to live in silence and fear, but to reclaim one’s life by speaking out and demanding justice.

“I did not come to this decision lightly,” she added. “As a mother and a wife, my family comes first — and I know that this action will subject me to further attacks by Prince Andrew and his surrogates — but I knew if I did not pursue this action, I would be letting them and victims everywhere down.”

In late 2019, Prince Andrew told BBC Newsnight that he never had sex with Giuffre, saying, “It didn’t happen.”

He said he has “no recollection” of ever meeting her and told an interviewer there are “a number of things that are wrong” about Giuffre’s account, which alleges the encounter occurred in 2001.

“I can absolutely categorically tell you it never happened,” Andrew said.

According to the lawsuit, the prince abused Giuffre on multiple occasions when she was under the age of 18.

It said that on one occasion, the prince sexually abused her in London at the home of Ghislaine Maxwell when Epstein, Maxwell and Prince Andrew forced her to have sexual intercourse with the prince against her will.

On another occasion, Prince Andrew sexually abused Plaintiff in Epstein’s New York mansion, the lawsuit said.

Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in Manhattan federal court, where she faces trial in November.

Epstein, 66, took his own life in a federal jail in Manhattan in August 2019, a month after he was arrested on sex trafficking charges.

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Any parent with adolescent daughters ages 14 and 15 years old, must feel a sense of fear and revulsion when learning that a man like Jeffrey Epstein preyed upon underage girls for purposes of forcing them to have sexual relations with him and many other men of prominence.

Several years ago in Florida, Epstein was accused, tried and found guilty of predatory conduct against minor girls, and was handed a laughable jail sentence by the court, that paled in comparison to the magnitude of his crimes.  At the time, he was found keeping company at his mansions, with high profile individuals who would later acquire an even higher profile.

Jeffrey Epstein is now dead and punishment for his heinous acts has been left in suspension, hanging over the victims and every decent person, like an immovable granite boulder, leaving a sense of tragic impotence.

Questions abound as to how a high profile criminal, locked up in a maximum security jail cell with 24/7 sound and video, where even the use of the toilet is under vigilance, who had been on suicide alert as a result of a prior attempt to take his life, hangs himself without being detected until he was found unresponsive. Events like this only take place in third world countries where corruption is rampant in penal institutions.  

The FBI is now investigating and will undoubtedly find the truth. Jail staff has been placed on leave and the warden has been reassigned.  Will the facts of the demise of this despicable man be made public or will they be covered up? Will the main stream press apply its investigatory resources towards discovering the truth and publishing their findings?

Too many names of important and influential persons have been connected to the depraved conduct of Epstein, to not be mistrustful about the outcome of the investigations, and if the occasion arises, only a public outcry for justice can blunt the thrust of those in power to maintain the facts hidden.

There is no worse sin than to violate the trust of innocent and unwary children, perverting them from their original course and changing their lives forever.  Men and woman who have no respect for the people whose lives are affected by their misdeeds must be made to pay heavily and punishment for those individuals who made possible Epstein’s escape should be swift and exemplary.  

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