DOJ Quietly Takes Down FBI Interview of 13-Year-Old Victim Accusing Trump Of Sexual Assault

The US Department of Justice appears to have removed records showing the FBI conducted multiple interviews with a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was between 13 and 15 years old.

Investigative journalist Roger Sollenberger broke the story on 17 February 2026, and the Daily Beast subsequently confirmed his findings.

A single FBI interview summary from July 2019 is still accessible on the DOJ's public Epstein database. That is it.

A document that reportedly catalogued at least three additional formal interviews — conducted in August and October of that year — is no longer available at its original web address.

Trump has denied all wrongdoing related to Jeffrey Epstein. He told reporters aboard Air Force One on 17 February that he has been 'exonerated' by the files. 'I have nothing to hide,' he said.

What The FBI Records Actually Show

The woman is identified in government files only by case number 3501.045. She told agents she met Epstein as a 13-year-old in South Carolina in 1983 or 1984, after her mother placed an advert for babysitting services; there were no children at the property. She alleged Epstein drugged and abused her over the course of several encounters.

A 21-page internal FBI slideshow presentation — still accessible on the DOJ's Epstein library, for what it's worth — includes the Trump allegation under a slide headed 'Prominent Names.' It states that Epstein allegedly introduced the woman to Trump, who allegedly forced a sexual act upon her. She allegedly resisted. Trump allegedly struck her in the head. The slide notes she would have been 13 to 15 at the time, and places the alleged incident in the early-to-mid 1980s.

That same allegation turned up in a separate internal FBI email chain from July 2025, Sollenberger reported.

Biographical details from the FBI's records match public reporting about a South Carolina woman identified as Jane Doe 4, who sued the Epstein estate and received a settlement in 2021. Her lawsuit — filed through the Lisa Bloom firm — alleged Epstein flew her to New York on several occasions and offered her as 'fresh meat' to 'prominent, wealthy men.'

Whether the DOJ expected anyone to connect those dots is another matter entirely.

Where The Paper Trail Goes 'Cold'

Sollenberger's reporting, later expanded upon by the Daily Beast and by journalists Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth at American Freakshow, identified what they described as systematic gaps in the public record for this victim.

Start with the titling. The surviving FBI 302 — the standard write-up of an interview — is headed 'Interview One,' rather than the usual format 'Interview of [person]'. Burleigh and Chenoweth pointed out that the FBI's own conventions throughout the Epstein files reserve numbered titles for cases involving multiple interviews. If there is only one interview, you do not number it.

Then there is the case index. One document in the files lists five entries marked 'PROTECT SOURCE' — a designation their FBI source described as typically reserved for high-risk informants, the kind of tag you'd see on a mafia rat — apparently relating to the same woman. Only two of those entries appear in the released material. Where are serials 252, 264 and 312?

Sequential numbering tells its own story: records jump from serial -001 to -008, with six items unaccounted for. Those missing items could be transcripts, photographs or something else. Nobody outside the DOJ knows.

Mind you, gaps in a massive document dump are not proof of a cover-up. The release of 3.5 million pages was chaotic; victim attorneys have accused the DOJ of thousands of redaction failures. But a gap that lands precisely on the file of a woman who accused the sitting president does rather concentrate the mind.

A Pattern Of Convenient Disappearances

This is not the first time Epstein documents touching Trump have gone walkabout from the DOJ website.

On 30 January 2026, the day the Justice Department released its largest tranche of files, a spreadsheet summarising FBI tip-line complaints that mentioned Trump was quietly taken down. It reappeared hours later. A DOJ spokeswoman attributed the removal to server 'overload' and insisted the document was restored unchanged.

That spreadsheet contained unverified tips, many of them secondhand. The Justice Department issued a statement calling some of the material 'untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,' adding: 'To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false.'

Fair enough — tip-line spreadsheets attract conspiracy theories and fantasists alongside genuine victims. But the interview records are a different category of document. The tip-line sheet came back. The file showing multiple FBI interviews with this particular woman has not.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who served as Trump's personal criminal defence lawyer before joining the administration, has not commented on the specific removals.

What Sits Underneath All Of This

The sole surviving interview record is dated 24 July 2019 and was logged into the FBI's system on 9 August — one day before Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Manhattan.

During that interview, the woman showed agents a photograph on her phone of Epstein and Trump. She asked whether she could crop it to show only Epstein. Her attorney stepped in, explaining she was 'concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation,' the FBI document states.

The allegation of assault by Trump was not raised during this particular interview.

She never named him publicly. She stopped cooperating with the FBI. The Bloom firm settled her case against the Epstein estate and declined to comment.

Researcher Thomas Volscho has urged caution around certain claims in the files, and that caution is warranted — the FBI tip line attracted everything from credible victim testimony to stories about child sacrifice and murder on yachts. Not all of it was investigated; not all of it deserved to be.

But Sollenberger's reporting points to a distinction that is hard to wave away. This woman was not a random caller to a hotline. She was interviewed multiple times by FBI agents, designated PROTECT SOURCE, represented by counsel, and later settled a claim against Epstein's estate. The DOJ included her allegation in an internal slideshow and email chain circulated among investigators who were — or at least should have been — taking it seriously.

None of that proves the underlying allegation. It does, however, suggest the government documented it extensively. And that at least some of that documentation is no longer where it ought to be.

What Congress Is Doing About It

Democratic members of Congress, including Representative Ted Lieu, have pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi on the completeness of the file release. Representative Ro Khanna and others accused the DOJ of withholding FBI 302 victim interview statements, a draft indictment and hundreds of thousands of emails from Epstein's computers.

Bondi told the House Judiciary Committee on 11 February 2026 that 'there is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime.'

The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in November 2025, requires the release of all unclassified records relating to Epstein and convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Whether the DOJ's handling of case 3501.045 meets that standard is now a question Congress appears willing to ask out loud.