Doe 174: Trump in the Unsealed Epstein Files, Giuffre Testimony

Doe 174 in the unsealed Epstein files is Donald Trump. The pseudonym was assigned in Giuffre v. Maxwell, the defamation case Virginia Giuffre brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, as part of a court protocol that gave numbered aliases to more than a hundred non-parties whose names appeared in sealed filings. Trump’s name surfaces in nine of the documents, and none of them accuse him of criminal conduct. Giuffre herself testified under oath that Trump never behaved inappropriately toward her.¹

Why Trump Had a Pseudonym in the First Place

Giuffre sued Maxwell in 2015 in the Southern District of New York after Maxwell publicly called her a liar for alleging that Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein ran a trafficking operation involving underage girls. The case, No. 15-cv-07433, settled in May 2017, but it left behind a large sealed record. During discovery, Judge Robert W. Sweet had granted sealing requests prospectively, and roughly a fifth of the docket ended up under seal.²

After the settlement, journalist Julie K. Brown and the Miami Herald pushed to unseal those filings, and litigation over public access ran for years.³ Under a March 31, 2020 protocol, the parties and the court flagged non-parties whose privacy interests were implicated by the sealed material and gave each one a number: Doe 1, Doe 2, and so on. The pseudonyms were a placeholder while Senior U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska worked through the documents and weighed each individual’s privacy interest against the public’s presumption of access to judicial records.² Trump was designated Doe 174 in that protocol.

How the Court Decided to Name Him

On December 18, 2023, Judge Preska entered her final unsealing order, setting January 1, 2024 as the first release date so that named individuals had a window to object. The initial batch went public on January 3, 2024, with more batches following. By mid-January, more than 215 documents totaling thousands of pages had been released.⁴⁵

Preska’s reasoning for unmasking Doe 174 was that his “association with Epstein and Maxwell has been widely reported in the media already, and his or her name came up during Maxwell’s public criminal trial.”¹ In ordering the material unsealed in full, she wrote that “no interests that outweigh the presumption of access have been identified with specificity.”⁶

Whether Trump or his lawyers actively fought the unsealing is not clear from the record. For Bill Clinton, designated Doe 36, Preska specifically noted the absence of any objection. Her language on Doe 174 was different: she focused on the lack of identified countervailing interests rather than describing a failure to object. An attorney for Trump did not respond to a media request for comment about the unsealing.⁶

What the Nine Documents Actually Contain

Trump’s name appears in nine court documents from the case. As of January 2024 reporting, six were fully unsealed and three remained partially redacted.¹ They fall into a few categories.

Depositions account for the bulk. Johanna Sjoberg, an Epstein accuser, recalled a trip to an Atlantic City casino aboard Epstein’s jet but denied ever massaging Trump at any of Epstein’s properties. Testimony from Giuffre herself and from Juan Alessi, Epstein’s former Palm Beach housekeeper, also mentions Trump without accusing him of anything.

Legal filings and attorney correspondence make up another slice. Lawyers for Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Epstein referenced Trump only in passing, generally by citing press coverage of his social connection to Epstein. One of the nine documents is a 2016 New York Post article that was already in the public domain.¹

Preska herself observed that many references to individuals in the unsealed material were “not salacious,” often arising from deposition questions that were never answered or reflecting associations already established during Maxwell’s criminal trial.⁷

What Giuffre Said Under Oath About Trump

Giuffre’s statements about Trump shifted over time but never crossed into an allegation of misconduct. A March 2011 Mail on Sunday article attributed to her the claim that Trump “flirted with me” and told Epstein, “You’ve got the life.” In a November 2016 sworn deposition, she recanted those specific claims, testifying: “Donald Trump never flirted with me” and “I never said that to her” about the quoted remarks.⁸

She testified she had met Trump “a few times” at Mar-a-Lago, where her father worked, but said, “I’ve never been in Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s presence with one another,” and could not recall seeing Trump at any of Epstein’s homes. Her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, describes being introduced to Trump by her father at Mar-a-Lago when she was 16 or 17. She recalled him being friendly and asking whether she babysat. The book contains no allegations of wrongdoing.⁸

The Sarah Ransome Emails

One set of documents contained separate allegations by Sarah Ransome, another Epstein accuser. In emails to a New York Post reporter in the fall of 2016, Ransome wrote that a friend had told her she had “sexual intercourse” with Trump “on regular occasions” at Epstein’s New York mansion. Ransome also claimed to possess videotape evidence of encounters involving Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson.⁹

Ransome retracted the allegations soon after making them, writing, “I want to walk away from this … I shouldn’t have contacted you and I’m sorry I wasted your time.” She later told The New Yorker in 2019 that she had “invented” the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior and to create the impression she held evidence that would surface if Epstein harmed her. The claims are described as “discredited” in the court documents, and no supporting evidence was ever entered into the record.¹⁰

The Trump–Epstein Relationship Behind the Filings

The reason Trump’s name recurs in the record at all is a social relationship with Epstein that dates to the late 1980s. Photographs place the two together at a Mar-a-Lago party in 1992, at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, at a 1997 Victoria’s Secret event, and with Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in 2000.¹¹ Flight logs confirmed by the Department of Justice show Trump took at least eight flights on Epstein’s private jet between 1993 and 1997.¹²

In a 2002 New York Magazine profile, Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” who was “a lot of fun to be with,” adding that Epstein liked the company of beautiful women, “many of them on the younger side.”¹¹

Trump’s accounts of the falling out have shifted. At different times he has said Epstein poached spa employees from Mar-a-Lago after being warned not to; that Epstein behaved inappropriately toward a club member’s teenage daughter, leading Trump to bar him from the property around 2007; and that a bidding war over a $41.35 million oceanfront mansion in 2004 soured things.¹³ In July 2025, Trump said Epstein “stole” Virginia Giuffre, who had worked at the Mar-a-Lago spa. Social Security records from Giuffre’s 2017 lawsuit confirmed she worked there in the summer of 2000.¹¹

After Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019, Trump said he was “not a fan” and that he had not spoken to Epstein in 15 years. Law enforcement has never accused Trump of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.¹⁴

What the Later DOJ Release Added

The Doe 174 filings are only one slice of the material now public. In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R. 4405), signed into law November 19, 2025, requiring the Attorney General to release all Epstein-related records in the Department of Justice’s possession.¹⁵¹⁶

The DOJ subsequently released roughly 3.5 million documents, along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Trump’s name appeared over 1,000 times across those files. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche stated the release contained nothing implicating Trump in criminal wrongdoing or inappropriate contact with victims. The files did include a list of unverified sexual assault allegations against Trump compiled from tips to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, which the DOJ described as “unfounded and false.”¹⁷¹⁸

An NPR investigation reported that the DOJ withheld or removed dozens of pages from the public database that mentioned Trump, including more than 50 pages of FBI interviews and notes from conversations with an accuser. The DOJ said any unpublished documents were privileged, duplicates, or related to an ongoing federal investigation, and that records were not withheld for political sensitivity.¹⁹

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