The media, and Donald Trump, have found the great summer diversion of 2025.
The Wall Street Journal reports (archived):
It was Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, and Ghislaine Maxwell was preparing a special gift to mark the occasion. She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump.
Maxwell collected letters from Trump and dozens of Epstein’s other associates for a 2003 birthday album, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
…
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
In an interview with the Journal on Tuesday evening, Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” he said.
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
He told the Journal he was preparing to file a lawsuit if it published an article. “I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else,” he said.
And suing he will:
Trump said he had personally warned the Journal’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its editor in chief, Emma Tucker, that the letter was “fake” before the report was published, calling the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
“President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal,” Trump wrote on social media hours after the Journal published its report.
In the immediate wake of the report’s publication, the White House rushed to decry it as false. Vice President JD Vance said on X it was “complete and utter bullshit” — echoing the expletive Trump used this week to describe the Epstein news cycle. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt — whom Trump said had also told Tucker the story was “fake” — called it a “hatchet job article” and claimed the outlet “refused to show us the letter and conceded they don’t even have it in their possession when we asked them to verify the alleged document.”
Trump’s denials are so strong that I believe the letter is his.
Not that it matters.
I doubt that there is a large file about whatever Epstein has done. If there ever was such it has by now been destroyed by the powers and services involved in it.
Ghislaine Maxwell is currently sitting in jail for trafficking teenage girls under the legal age to have sex with Epstein. There is no hard evidence (but their well payed-off assertions) that these girls were pushed to have sex with other people. There is no hard evidence that Epstein was blackmailing those people.
It seem likely though that both has been the case.
However neither has anything to do with a letter Trump wrote (or maybe didn’t write?) in 2003.
It is just entertaining fun to divert the people from all the other bad stuff the U.S., under Trump, is currently – domestically and internationally – actually doing.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.
