A Witness Made Up Epstein ‘Sex Tapes.’ The Right Ran With It Anyway

Monday brought another round of unsealed documents in the ongoing disclosure of files related to the sex-trafficking operation run by Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. And once again, right-wingers pounced on damning accusations against former president Bill Clinton. But the alleged Epstein victim who made those claims admitted in 2019 that she made them up.

“This seems like a big deal if true why has nothing been done about it?” tweeted Donald Trump Jr., sharing a headline that read: “Court documents allege Jeffrey Epstein recorded sex tapes of Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and Sir Richard Branson.” Indeed, many media outlets — from Sky News to the New York Post and the London Times — ran such headlines, with several mentioning that Donald Trump Sr. had been accused of appearing in such videos as well. Along with Trump Jr., right-wing conspiracy theory and misinformation influencers likewise took the supposed revelation at face value, including Chuck Callesto and Laura Loomer, with the latter teasing a “BILL CLINTON PEDO SEX TAPE.” A QAnon-affiliated account baselessly claimed that “the FBI covered this up” due to payouts from the Clinton Foundation. (Many liberals, meanwhile, tended to focus on former president Trump’s alleged sexual abuse of an underage girl as described in the same document. The witness has not recanted those claims.)

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But in their excitement about incriminating evidence against the Clinton family, the conservative blue checks overlooked some crucial context about the documents they’re quoting. These unsealed files date back to a settled 2015 defamation case brought against Maxwell by alleged Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, and the “tapes” are referenced in a series of emails from another alleged victim, Sarah Ransome.

As the document in question shows, the legal team of attorney and Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz sought to remove the “confidentiality designation” on the emails in order to demonstrate that Ransome’s “inflammatory, salacious, and defamatory testimony concerning [Dershowitz] and others is false” and that she was not a credible witness. (Ransome had claimed in an affidavit that Epstein had directed her to have sex with Dershowitz.) In the messages, Ransome claimed that the CIA hacked her emails and she was visited by “Special Agents Forces Men sent directly by Hilary [sic] Clinton herself,” vowing to leak damaging photos and footage to WikiLeaks to simultaneously derail the 2016 presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump.

Ransome claimed to be in possession of such material more than once. “[M]y friend had sexual intercourse with Clinton, Prince Andrew and Richard Branson, sex tapes were in fact filmed on each separate occasion,” she wrote. “I eventually managed to persuade her to send me some of the video footage which she kept, implicating all three men … I have backed up the footage on several USB sticks and have securely sent them to various different locations throughout Europe.”

These incendiary comments might indeed shift the political landscape if substantiated, but in 2019, when interviewed by reporter Connie Bruck for a New Yorker article on Dershowitz, Ransome took it all back: “In the fall of 2016, she had suggested to the New York Post that she had sex tapes of half a dozen prominent people, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — but couldn’t provide the tapes when asked,” wrote Bruck, adding, “(Ransome told me that she had invented the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior, and to make him believe that she had ‘evidence that would come out if he harmed me.’)”

In other words, untrustworthy commentators are trying to hype a “bombshell” about sex tapes that first dropped two presidential elections ago and has since been exposed as false. Nonetheless, the right-wing media machine and anyone else with an interest in seeing President Biden unseated is clearly holding out hope that the newly unsealed Epstein documents can land prominent Democrats in deep trouble and somehow shake up the 2024 race. In a campaign email on Monday, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reiterated his previous call in a Fox News appearance for “the total and complete release of the Epstein Files.” (In that December interview, Kennedy admitted that he had been on Epstein’s private jet twice himself in the 1990s, both times with his wife and family.)

So far, the papers have proved less than earth-shattering, with plenty of details and names already common knowledge after years of interwoven legal battles. The conspiracy theorists, however, can always make do with crumbs.

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