WASHINGTON – Jeffrey Epstein spent his final free years telling people he was afraid of Donald Trump. He just did not say so publicly. Now, in the Epstein files emerging piece by piece from the federal archives and the private notebooks of those who knew him, the shape of that fear is coming into focus.
On Monday, biographer Michael Wolff published the twenty-first installment of his Epstein Diaries on his Substack newsletter HOWL, drawing on more than one hundred hours of recorded conversations he conducted with Epstein over several years. The entry, titled “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” contains what may be the most direct statement yet attributed to Epstein about his relationship with Trump: “I may be a pedophile, but I don’t have a death wish.”
Wolff writes that by the time Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Epstein was “afraid of Trump, terrified perhaps,” viewing Trump’s rise to power not as distant political developments but as a potential personal threat.
The two men had been close during the 1990s and into the early 2000s, attending parties at Mar-a-Lago and moving within the same social circle. Their relationship ended bitterly in 2004. According to Epstein’s account, the rupture was more than a personal falling-out. Epstein claimed to possess damaging information concerning Trump’s alleged ties to a Russian oligarch money-laundering scheme, describing the information as potential leverage over a powerful figure.
In a January 31, 2019 email that Wolff shared in the piece, Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” The email was sent four months before federal prosecutors arrested Epstein in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges.
In Wolff’s account, Epstein believed his arrest had fundamentally altered the political stakes for Trump and that Trump understood the implications as well. The significance of Epstein’s claims rests on their attribution: they are statements presented as Epstein’s own account, rather than independently established facts.
The Epstein files have documented a corresponding effort to suppress that history. An NPR investigation published in February found that the Department of Justice withheld at least 53 pages of Epstein-related documents that mention Trump by name. Among the suppressed records was an FBI account of a survivor’s statement in which she described Trump sexually abusing her at approximately the age of thirteen. Only the first of two FBI interviews with the survivor appeared in the public database: the July 2019 conversation that did not name Trump. The second interview, in which the survivor named Trump directly, was among the pages withheld.
The Wolff diaries do not prove any of Epstein’s specific allegations about Trump. Epstein was a convicted sex offender who had every reason to present himself as possessing dangerous secrets about powerful people. His private statements functioned as a form of insurance, and whether the underlying claims were accurate is something neither the available evidence nor the surviving witnesses can confirm.
But the pattern of suppression documented in the Epstein files has given those private statements new institutional weight. A federal judge, reviewing the Justice Department’s conduct in the Epstein files transparency litigation, found that the DOJ had repeatedly failed to meet statutory disclosure deadlines and had applied redaction standards that federal law does not permit in this context.
What Wolff’s latest entry adds to the Epstein files is something court documents cannot supply: Epstein’s private reading of Trump’s psychology. Whether Trump “saw Epstein as a problem to be solved,” as Wolff suggests Epstein believed, is not something any document has confirmed. Epstein did not survive to testify. He died in federal custody in August 2019, in what the New York City medical examiner ruled a suicide by hanging. That finding has been disputed by forensic experts and contested by members of Epstein’s family.
What can be said is simpler: Epstein feared Trump. He said so, on tape, more than once, to a biographer who has now published twenty-one chapters of those recordings. Whether that fear was based on specific, credible knowledge of an actual threat, or whether it was the calculation of a man who had built his life around knowing which secrets belonged to which people, is a question the Epstein files have not yet resolved.
The House Oversight investigation remains open. European authorities are still waiting for responses that have not come. And Wolff says he has more.
