FBI Interviews Reveal Graphic Abuse Claims Against Trump as DOJ Source Says Agents Found Accuser Credible

The Justice Department quietly published three previously withheld FBI interview files on March 6, 2026, containing some of the most explosive allegations ever recorded against a sitting US president.

The documents, known as FBI 302 forms, are written summaries of formal investigative interviews and detail what a woman from South Carolina told federal agents in 2019 about alleged sexual assault by President Donald Trump in the 1980s, when she was between 13 and 15 years old.

The release came only after multiple news organisations, including CNN and NPR, discovered the files were absent from the department's publicly searchable database, an omission that drew accusations of a deliberate cover-up. The White House has flatly denied the claims as fabricated. A DOJ source told the Miami Herald, which broke the credibility detail, that agents who interviewed the woman found her believable, and that four separate interviews would not have taken place if they did not.

The Documents the DOJ Had Marked as Duplicative

When the DOJ released the final major tranche of the Epstein files on Jan. 30, 2026, the three 302 forms from August and October 2019 were not among them. A DOJ-affiliated account posted on X that the records had been 'incorrectly coded as duplicative,' claiming human error. The department said it had reviewed similar coded documents and found 15 total files misfiled in this way.

Congressional Democrats remained unconvinced. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, previously disclosed that the files relating to this woman were also missing from the unredacted set made available for lawmakers to view in person at the Justice Department, a separate access point from the public database.

The subpoena pressure proved decisive. A majority of the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the handling of the files, with five Republicans joining Democrats to support the motion. The same day, the DOJ published the 302s.

What the Woman Told FBI Agents

The accuser's name is redacted throughout all four interview summaries. Her first interview, conducted on July 24, 2019, was included in the January release but contained no allegation against Trump — it focused on her alleged abuse by Epstein in South Carolina when she was approximately 13 years old. The three newly published files cover subsequent conversations on Aug. 7, 2019, Aug. 20, 2019, and Oct. 16, 2019.

In the second interview, she told agents that Epstein had transported her from South Carolina to what she believed was either New York or New Jersey, where she entered a building she described as very tall with unusually large rooms. That was where she alleged Epstein introduced her to Trump.

According to the NPR review of the newly published files, she described Trump forcing her head toward his exposed genitalia; she bit him, at which point Trump allegedly struck her and had her removed from the room. The FBI summary, also described in an email chain that appeared in earlier file releases, recorded the alleged sequence in similar language.

She also told agents she had two further interactions with Trump but stopped short of detailing them, asking to move on to another subject. During the fourth and final interview in October 2019, when agents asked whether she felt comfortable expanding on her contacts with Trump, she reportedly said she saw little point given how long ago the alleged incidents occurred and how unlikely she felt it was that anything could be done. According to multiple reports corroborating the Miami Herald account, the FBI ultimately lost contact with her after that session. She declined to continue cooperating.

The alleged assault, she told agents, took place in approximately 1983, making her around 13 years old at the time. She also described years of threats she attributed to Epstein, including phone calls warning her to stay silent, two incidents in which she said she and her mother were run off the road, and sustained blackmail against her mother, who had placed a babysitting advertisement in a tenant packet that brought her into Epstein's orbit in the first place.

The White House Response and the Credibility Question

The White House did not wait long to respond. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement calling the allegations 'completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence' and describing the accuser as a 'sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.'

She argued that the Biden-era DOJ had possessed the interviews for four years without action, and said Trump had been 'totally exonerated' by the Epstein files overall. The Justice Department had made a similar pre-emptive claim in January, stating in its release notes that some files would contain 'untrue and sensationalist claims' submitted to the FBI ahead of the 2020 election.

The Miami Herald, which has led coverage of Epstein since Julie K. Brown first exposed his non-prosecution agreement in 2018, directly challenged the White House's characterisation of the accuser's criminal history. The Herald found no extensive record. Public documents showed a prior arrest for theft, but the charges were dismissed. The woman had also filed a civil lawsuit against Epstein's estate in 2019, a case the Herald confirmed was settled, in which Trump was not named.

The question of credibility sits at the centre of this story because the 302 forms themselves are not evaluative documents. As CNN noted, FBI 302s record what a witness said and do not contain agents' assessments of truthfulness, corroborating evidence or investigative conclusions.

A separate piece of context does exist, however. The accuser's allegations appeared in two internal FBI documents that predated the public file release: a July 2025 FBI PowerPoint presentation summarising the Epstein case prepared for internal use, and a spreadsheet from the bureau's Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force, which logged tips mentioning Trump. The majority of tips in that spreadsheet were deemed not credible or lacked contact information.

The woman's claim appeared separately, with the notation that she had been an identified victim who ultimately declined to cooperate.