Of all the weird decorations – from a stuffed black poodle to a framed collection of fake eyeballs – that Jeffrey Epstein acquired for his New York mansion, possibly no item invited quite so many questions as a painting of President Clinton sprawled suggestively on an Oval Office chair, wearing a blue dress and heels.
It wasn’t as immediately disturbing as the first-edition copy of Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 novel in which a man develops a sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl – which Epstein kept displayed in his office. Or the paintings of naked women, and large silver ball and chain he kept in the massage room where he allegedly raped local schoolgirls.
However the prominently displayed 2012 Clinton portrait – created by Australian satirical artist Petrina Ryan-Kleid and inspired by the stained blue dress worn by White Office intern Monica Lewinsky during her sexual liaison with the libidinous president – raised questions that went far beyond Epstein’s questionable taste in art.
Insiders claimed it showed how close Epstein was to Clinton, a man usually surrounded by sycophants, that he could make light of such a painfully sensitive subject.
Epstein, who also displayed in his living room a signed and framed photo of him and Clinton grinning at each other, delighted in ‘collecting’ famous people as friends and associates. It not only flattered his huge ego but made him seem more respectable to the girls and women on whom he preyed.
And while President Clinton would naturally have been one of that collection’s prize exhibits, he has always strenuously insisted he barely knew Epstein and only once visited his seven-floor Manhattan town house.
However, the Daily Mail can reveal that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime companion and convicted accomplice in his sexual abuse of young women, has now contradicted Clinton’s claim that Epstein was never more than an acquaintance.
Questioned about Bill Clinton and his family during her controversial interrogation by the US Justice Department two weeks ago, Maxwell insisted she and Epstein knew Clinton well, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
Jeffrey Epstein, convicted peadophile, and former US president Bill Clinton, date unknown
Clinton posing with Ghislaine Maxwell at the top of the stairs of Epstein’s jet, dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’, in 2002
Maxwell – who became sufficiently close to the Clintons to attend the 2010 wedding of their daughter Chelsea – said she had been a friend of the 42nd president for some time and had flown around the world in his company. She also said he’d given her private gifts.
The interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche took place behind closed doors in a courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida, near the jail where Maxwell was serving her 20-year sentence. (She has since been transferred.)
Were Maxwell’s attempts to link Epstein to the Clintons a ploy to endear her to Trump, who hates the Democrat family and could, as president, pardon her? She certainly won’t want to alienate the White House. But it is also understood that Maxwell resents the Clintons’ decision to distance themselves from her following her public disgrace.
The relationship between Clinton and Epstein is now once again centre of a scandal that won’t go away, after the former president and wife Hillary were subpoenaed to testify about Epstein to a congressional investigation.
Clinton and his wife, a former Secretary of State whose 1999 Senate run benefited from a $20,000 contribution from Epstein, will be compelled to testify in October before the Republican-led ‘House Oversight Committee’.
A raft of senior federal officials, including five former attorney-generals and two FBI chiefs, have also been summoned to be grilled on what they know, amid continuing accusations from angry MAGA supporters that the Trump administration is engaged in a cover-up over the Epstein scandal.
The bipartisan House Committee says it is examining how federal agencies handle sex-trafficking cases and offer plea deals, and specifically the prosecution of Epstein and Maxwell.
In 2008, the former escaped with a minimal custodial sentence that’s been described as a mere ‘slapped hand’ after agreeing an extraordinarily lenient deal with Florida’s federal prosecutors.
Bill Clinton has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s ‘terrible crimes’ or involvement in any wrongdoing. And that, scoff critics, is despite the fact that flight logs show that he flew at least 26 times on Epstein’s private jets – planes which the paedophile staffed with teenage girls in an alleged attempt to entice the powerful men on board. However, Clinton has been repeatedly challenged over his claims that his relationship with Epstein was fleeting.
Only last month the Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton had been among friends and associates who were asked by Maxwell to write a tribute to Epstein for a commemorative book celebrating his 50th birthday in 2003.
In a handwritten note, Clinton said: ‘It’s reassuring isn’t it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends.’ Hardly the sort of insight, surely, that one might have gained from merely a passing acquaintance.
Perhaps it was no surprise then that James Comer, the committee’s Republican chairman, didn’t mince words in his recent letters to the Clintons, mentioning how Bill has admitted flying on Epstein’s private plane and how ‘during one of these trips, you were even pictured receiving a “massage” from one of Mr Epstein’s victims’.
Comer also mentioned claims that Clinton once ‘pressured Vanity Fair not to publish sex trafficking allegations’ against his ‘good friend Mr Epstein’, adding there are ‘conflicting reports’ about if he ‘ever visited Mr. Epstein’s island’.
The congressman told Mr Clinton: ‘You were also allegedly close to Ms Maxwell, an Epstein co-conspirator, and attended an intimate dinner with her in 2014, three years after public reports about her involvement in Mr Epstein’s abuse of minors’.
Comer’s letter to Hillary cited a further connection, noting that Maxwell’s nephew was employed by Mrs Clinton’s 2008 failed presidential campaign and then hired by the State Department after she became Secretary of State. At least they were spared mention of a 2020 book, A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Death Of Jeffrey Epstein, by reporters Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper, which sensationally claimed Clinton had an affair with Maxwell.
A Clinton spokesman dismissed the allegation as a ‘total lie’.
The House committee certainly has enough on its agenda to make the Clintons shift uncomfortably in their seats (if they don’t try to claim ‘executive privilege’, which allows senior members and former members of the US government to withhold information in certain circumstances).
And while it’s clear that even Trump’s most loyal supporters want greater transparency over the Epstein scandal, critics have pointed out that congressional Republicans will be doing the President a favour by distracting attention from their leader’s own controversial association with Epstein.
Trump himself has over the years repeatedly urged the media to focus attention on Clinton’s relationship with the predator – particularly his reported visits to Epstein’s Caribbean home, dubbed ‘Paedo Island’ – rather than on his own links.
During his recent trip to Scotland, sitting beside Keir Starmer, Trump claimed: ‘I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times.’
For the record, Clinton insists he never visited the island, Little St James, although at least three people claim they saw him there.
In 2019, it was revealed that Virginia Giuffre, who accused both Epstein and Prince Andrew of sexual abuse, had years earlier told her lawyers that she and two ‘lovely girls’ from New York once flew there with him some time after his presidency ended in January 2001.
The late Giuffre, who alleged she was a teenage ‘sex slave’ for Epstein and his friends, said they all joined Epstein and Maxwell for a dinner at which Clinton teased the women with ‘playful pokes’ and ‘brassy comments’, adding ‘there was no modesty between any of them’ before leaving with the pair at the end of the night.
In an unpublished memoir, she wrote: ‘Strolling into the darkness with two beautiful girls around either arm, Bill seemed content to retire for the evening.’
Jeffrey Epstein had a painting which appeared to be Bill Clinton wearing a blue dress and red heels hanging inside his Manhattan home
According to Giuffre, who never accused Clinton of any wrongdoing, when she asked Epstein what the ex-president was doing there, he laughed and answered cryptically: ‘He owes me a favour.’ Giuffre added: ‘He never told me what favours they were. I never knew. I didn’t know if he was serious.’
Steve Scully, an IT contractor who worked for Epstein on the island, said he once saw Clinton with Epstein at his villa on the estate. Scully, a father of three girls, said there were photos of topless women everywhere on the island and he eventually left Epstein’s employ because he became uncomfortable about the groups of young girls who appeared to be underage.
And in 2020, Doug Band, Clinton’s former key aide and confidant for 20 years, told Vanity Fair that Clinton visited ‘Paedo Island’ in January 2003 after he’d flown the previous year with Kevin Spacey and Epstein on the latter’s capacious Boeing 727 (the plane nicknamed the Lolita Express) during a ‘humanitarian’ five-country trip to Africa for the Clinton Foundation.
Band said Epstein gave him ‘bad vibes’ and he’d repeatedly advised his boss to have nothing to do with him, but to no avail. (In 2006 – the same year that Clinton accepted a $25,000 Epstein donation to his foundation – the latter was charged in Florida with ‘procuring a minor for prostitution’.)
A Clinton spokesman repeated the ex-president’s insistence that he’d never visited the island and provided Vanity Fair with details of his movements at the time that clashed with Band’s chronology.
In a memoir published last year, Clinton tackled a connection that has been considered so toxic, it was widely feared it could derail his wife’s 2016 White House run.
He insisted that he and Epstein had not been friends but merely shared an interest in ‘philanthropy’. Epstein had flown him on his plane for four trips – twice to Africa and once each to Asia and Europe, according to his spokesman – only asking in return ‘that I take an hour or two on each trip to discuss politics and economics’.
Clinton stressed that he was always accompanied by his Secret Service bodyguards.
He went on: ‘[Epstein] had just donated $10million to Harvard for brain research and he asked a lot of questions. That was the extent of our conversations.’ He said his ‘only other interactions’ with Epstein were ‘two brief meetings, one at my office in Harlem [in 2002] and another at his house in New York’, both accompanied by his Secret Service minders.
Critics have pointedly asked whether 78-year-old Clinton’s memory is failing him. For there are photographs of the two men together dating back to 1993, when Epstein and Maxwell greeted him during a VIP White House tour after Epstein donated $10,000 to the White House Historical Association.
That was one of at least 17 occasions from 2002 to 2003 on which Epstein reportedly visited the White House during Clinton’s first term as president.
The Palm Beach Post says it has traced 17 trips that, according to flight logs, Clinton made after he was president on Epstein’s planes – some of them without his Secret Service detail. They included a 2002 flight from Siberia to a US Naval base in Japan, and another in 2003 from Hong Kong to China’s Sichuan province. The flight logs didn’t indicate the purpose of the trips, which also included such ‘exotic’ destinations as Morocco and Armenia.
One flight in particular raised eyebrows. In 2020, photos emerged showing Clinton getting a neck and shoulders massage from another of Epstein’s accusers, Chauntae Davies, then 22, during a Lolita Express refuelling stop in Portugal on the 2002 Africa trip with Kevin Spacey.
The actor, who has since been accused by young men of being a sexual predator himself (which he denies), later complained that Epstein ‘put the president at risk… because there were these young girls on board’. He added: ‘It was disturbing… I didn’t understand at the time who they were or why they were there.’
Davies said Epstein had been anxious to impress Clinton, so he made her and the three other young women wear uniforms to look more professional.
Then, early last year, hundreds of pages of court documents relating to Epstein were released.
They included the testimony of another Epstein accuser, Johanna Sjoberg, who told lawyers in 2016 that Epstein once said to her that ‘Clinton likes them young, referring to girls’.
Spencer Kuvin, a Florida lawyer who represented some of the first victims of Epstein to come forward, said he didn’t find any evidence of Clinton engaging in ‘inappropriate behavior’ but said the ex-president had ‘a pattern of socialising’ with Epstein.
Various insiders have said that Epstein used to play up his connections to powerful people such as Clinton to impress others, inviting people to listen in when he was on the phone to them.
According to New York Magazine, Epstein once threw a party in Clinton’s honour at his New York home, even though the politician didn’t attend.
Epstein’s fawning attention has since proved to be anything but a boon for its recipient.
‘I wish I had never met him,’ Clinton wrote in his recent memoir. He may soon have cause to feel that with even more passion.
