US declassifies documents of a woman who accuses Trump of assaulting her when she was a minor
The Justice Department explains that the files were not released earlier: they were incorrectly coded as duplicates.
BarcelonaThe U.S. Department of Justice has declassified new documents related to the Epstein case. These include FBI files containing a woman's accusation against President Donald Trump. According to the documents released early this morning, Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was between 13 and 15 years old. In 2019, the woman told federal agents that Jeffrey Epstein took her "off the island" of Little Saint James to "New York or New Jersey," where she was introduced to someone "with a lot of money" who "was Donald Trump." There, in the presence of other people whom the woman could not identify, the current U.S. president allegedly sexually assaulted her. "Let me show you how little girls should behave," the victim recounts Trump saying before taking her to a room. There, according to her testimony, he began sexually assaulting her, but when she, then a teenager, resisted, Trump hit her and had her taken away.
The justification for the delay
These documents were made public a month after the release of more than three million files related to the Epstein case. The Justice Department issued a statement on social media justifying why some documents were not released at the time, along with the rest of the information. It claims the new files are part of a group "incorrectly coded as duplicates."
The Justice Department also explained that it will make the documents available to members of Congress in their entirety: the new typed files transcribing interviews with the whistleblower are redacted, and some information is being withheld from the public and journalists who consult them. In February, several US media outlets reported that documents were missing and that some were part of a complaint against Trump by a woman that appeared to be incomplete. This created unease among victims and the public, since the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress in November 2015, required the government to release all investigative files related to the case.