Media Outlets Bury Epstein Accuser’s Retracted Trump Allegations
In a shocking revelation on Monday, numerous media outlets ran headlines linking former President Donald Trump to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein based on court documents that included emails from Epstein victim Sarah Ransome. However, buried within these reports was a critical detail: Ransome had retracted her allegations against Trump back in 2019.
The headlines, splashed across various news platforms, suggested that Trump had been named in the latest Epstein documents, creating a media frenzy. Yet, the crucial fact that Ransome had withdrawn her claims went unnoticed in the lead paragraphs of these articles.
Court documents disclosed on Monday contained Ransome’s 2016 emails to the New York Post, claiming she possessed Epstein-related sex tapes involving prominent figures such as Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Sir Richard Branson. However, when pressed for the tapes, Ransome failed to provide any evidence, and no such footage has ever been uncovered.
The New Yorker reported in 2019 that Ransome admitted to fabricating the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior and to make him believe she had evidence that would be revealed if he harmed her. Despite this retraction, media outlets ran with the old and debunked news, burying the lead that Ransome had already disavowed her claims years ago.
The Daily Mail’s headline, “Donald Trump named in latest Epstein documents: Sarah Ransome said he had sex with ‘many girls,'” failed to mention Ransome’s retraction until four paragraphs down. Similarly, the New York Post’s headline, “Epstein accuser claims pedophile had sex tapes of Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew and Richard Branson: new docs,” only acknowledged the retraction four paragraphs later.
Author and investigative reporter Vicky Ward, known for her 2003 profile on Epstein for Vanity Fair, emphasized the complexity of covering such stories in a video on her Substack. Ward stated, “Very importantly, Sarah Ransome has since said that isn’t true — that she invented the sex tapes because she was so terrified of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the time.”
