First lady Melania Trump waves as she walks with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
President Donald Trump’s first lady, Melania Trump, issued an unexpected public statement on Thursday about her relationship with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — and one journalist has a theory to why.
“A new book was published yesterday in the US and UK, entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of The House of York,’” journalist Michael Wolff posted on the social media X on Thursday. “It's by a British journalist by the name of Andrew Loney, and it's about the life of Prince Andrew. But it is also about his connection to Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Melania Trump.”
Wolff added, “In fact, it contains a passage in which Epstein is quoted — apparently from a 2007 interview — where he says that he had sex with Melania a full year before Donald Trump commenced his relationship with her.”
New York Times writer Wajahat Ali offered a similar theory regarding Melania Trump’s surprise press conference.
“My speculation: Michael Wolff has said Epstein told him the first time Trump and Melania had sex was on Epstein's Lolita Express Jet,” Ali wrote on X. “He might release the audio of their interview or a similar story might confirm some of the sordid details. Melania is trying to get ahead of it.”
Trump, who was friends with Epstein from the 1980s until they had a falling out over a business transaction in the 2000s, is alleged to have sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in the 1980s. In 2019, a woman who claimed to have been trafficked by Epstein as a teenager alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Trump on one of those trips. The White House denies the allegations, even though the Post and Courier later found additional details about the claim that did not make it into the formally-released files, including the names of four young teenage girls who were at a pool party attended by Epstein.
Even though they could verify the accuser’s claim through eyewitness accounts, one of them told the Post and Courier that the FBI never contacted her. They allege that Epstein “drove her and flew her” to New York and New Jersey to meet Trump, which is true would constitute sex trafficking as well as sexual assault.
Earlier this week, in his weekly Lincoln Project podcast, Rick Wilson mocked Trump’s failure to distract from the Epstein scandal, despite launching two wars since the start of 2026. He also alluded to a document that had been released pertaining to Epstein despite Trump’s increasingly-desperate efforts to keep the news out of the headlines.
"In it, Trump's attorney at the time, Alan Garten, I believe, is the name, revealed a few small things," Wilson said. "One of which is that Trump never threw Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago."