Ghislaine Maxwell has said Donald Trump "was never inappropriate with anybody" when he was friends with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. The British socialite repeatedly denied witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with Mr Trump, according to court documents released on Friday.
The White House issued transcripts from interviews carried out by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche with Maxwell in July as the Trump administration was hit by a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to disclose records from the sex-trafficking case.
Maxwell repeatedly showers the US President with praise and denies she saw Trump taking part in any kind of sexual encounter.
According to the transcript, Maxwell said: "I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody.
"In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects."
Maxwell recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990 when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was owner of the New York Daily News.
She said she often visited Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, but hadn’t seen Mr Trump since the mid-2000s.
Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Mr Trump had done "anything inappropriate" with masseuses or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied: "Absolutely never, in any context."
Maxwell was interviewed over the course of two days last month by Blanche at a Florida courthouse and was granted limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said except in the event of making a false statement.
The Epstein case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer’s social connections to figures, including Prince Andrew, former US President Bill Clinton and Mr Trump, who has said he had a falling-out with Epstein years ago and well before the financier was under investigation.
Maxwell told Mr Blanche that Mr Clinton was initially her friend and she never saw him receive a massage — nor did she believe he ever did. She said the only times they were together were the two dozen or so times they travelled on Epstein’s plane.
She also spoke glowingly of Prince Andrew. She dismissed as "rubbish" the late Virginia Giuffre’s claim she was paid to have a relationship with the Duke of York and that he had sex with her at Maxwell’s home in London.
Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein’s conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made at her trial about her role. Though she acknowledged that at one point Epstein began preferring younger women, she insisted she never understood that to "encompass children".
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls. He was found dead a month later in a New York jail cell in what officials said was a suicide.
The saga has consumed the Trump administration after an announcement from the FBI and Justice Department last month. It said Epstein had killed himself despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, a "client list" that Attorney General Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk did not actually exist and no additional documents from the high-profile investigation were suitable for release.
The announcement sparked outrage among conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and some of Mr Trump's supporters, who had been hoping to see proof of a government coverup.
After her interview with Mr Blanche, Maxwell was moved from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas to continue a 20 year sentence for luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
