Hilton Head accuser claims Trump sexually assaulted her as a teen, Epstein files say
A new set of documents released by the Justice Department includes a series of interviews from one of Jeffery Epstein’s earliest-known accusers: a woman who claims she was abused in the 1980s not only by the disgraced financier, but by Donald Trump, who’s now the U.S. president.
The woman was interviewed by the FBI four times, according to an index that catalogued dozens of pages connected to her case number, but a summary of only one of those interviews had previously been included in the publicly released files.
On Thursday, the Justice Department quietly released the remaining interview summaries, claiming that those files had been “incorrectly coded as duplicative,” according to The Associated Press. The interviews are witness materials in the trial against Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted for helping the financier sexually exploit and abuse minors.
The previously released interview summary described memories of the abuse the woman, faced at the hands of Epstein in the 1980s while working as a teenaged babysitter in the then-Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island. The man, who she came to know as “Jeff,” requested her services after her mother — who worked in real estate — distributed a flyer advertising them. But when the woman, who was a teenage girl at the time, arrived at the home, there were no children.
The interview — conducted on July 24, 2019, nearly 30 years after the alleged abuse — includes graphic accounts that span across several interactions with Epstein in the house, with allegations ranging from forced oral sex to rape, among other violent abuses.
In the follow-up interviews, the woman told investigators additional details about her interactions with Epstein when he visited the island. Epstein urged her to recruit other girls on the beach to “come party” at two different houses he lived in while visiting the island, she said. She began thinking she had to “eat or be eaten.”
Epstein also showed up to hotel pools where she and her friends hung out at night. He surprised her at a concert in Savannah. He took Polaroid photographs of her, depicting her breasts, her face and sometimes her entire body, according to interviews.
Claims against Donald Trump
The woman told agents she didn’t know the man’s identity at the time, but decades later concluded he was Jeffery Epstein when a friend texted her a widely distributed photo of Epstein and Trump. She allowed investigators to take a photo of the image, but asked them to crop out Trump.
When asked why, the woman’s lawyer told investigators that she was “concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation,” according to the memo. Trump was otherwise not mentioned in the interview the Justice Department initially released.
The newly-released interview summaries explicitly lay out claims that the woman made against Trump.
In her second interview with federal agents, she claimed that Epstein either flew or drove her from the South Carolina island to New York or New Jersey when she was between 13 and 15 years old. There, she was “introduced to someone with money, money... It was Donald Trump,” the summary says.
She claims that Trump asked others in the huge room in a “very tall building” to leave. He “unzipped his pants” and put the girl’s head “down to his penis,” she told investigators. After she bit down, he struck her, the summary says. In later interviews, the woman claimed that Trump pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head after she bit him.
The woman told investigators she had two more interactions with Trump, but would not go into further detail. She did not name any of the other men Epstein trafficked her to, other than a man she called “Jim Atkins,” whom she believed ‘may have been the Dean, or the “money guy” ‘ at an unidentified Ohio university. She claimed he participated in blackmailing her mother.
Atkins, she said, either owned or rented a house on the island.
‘Keep your mouth shut’
During her third interview with federal agents, the woman detailed threats she and her mother had received in the years following the alleged assault. She said she felt the threats were not coming directly from Epstein or Trump, but were connected to them in some way.
They received a number of threatening phone calls and voicemails, she said, telling them to “leave the island” and to “keep your mouth shut.” She told investigators she had several “close calls” where she was almost run off the road since moving to the Pacific Northwest. It is unclear if the woman notified police about the ongoing threats.
She told investigators Epstein blackmailed her mother, claiming he had explicit photographs of her daughter. Her mother, she said, went to federal prison for embezzling money from her job in an effort to keep the images from circulating. The blackmailing, she told investigators, “ruined my family.” Her mother has since died, she said.
Nearly three months after her first interview with investigators, the woman had her last. Investigators asked her to talk more about her interactions with Trump, but their conversation was cut short.
She asked whether continuing to participate would lead to any meaningful outcome, given there was a “strong possibility nothing could be done about it.”
Some of the records relating to the woman’s case have still not been made public, including a photograph, interview notes, a law enforcement report and license records.
This story was originally published March 6, 2026 at 11:16 AM.
