Senior Trump officials sat in a secure bunker at the White House and debated a discredited accusation that the president is fixated on women’s nipples.
The discussion unfolded during a crisis meeting in the Situation Room last August over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the New York Times reported in an explosive exposé Wednesday.
Donald Trump’s team was weighing whether a planned, searchable Justice Department database would dredge up humiliating claims about him and his past relationship with the late pedophile.
One of those claims had reportedly surfaced fast while stress-testing a prototype for the database. Official searches of the early version of the site found that among the first Trump-related hits was an allegation from Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome, drawn from a settled civil case.
In emails to a reporter, Ransome alleged that a girl Epstein had trafficked, known as Jen, told her she slept with Trump and described him as fixated on nipples and physically rough with hers.
The nipples, Ransome added, looked “incredibly painful as they were red and swollen” when she glimpsed them in a shared bathroom.
Vice President JD Vance argued for releasing the material anyway, telling the group Trump would be alright with doing so. “I think we should put it out,” he said. “It would cause people to say we’re going further than we need to.”
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, shot back that the president would not be fine with it, ending the debate. One official called it “surreal” to have been discussing the president’s alleged sexual preferences in perhaps the most heavily fortified location in the country.”
An official had already flagged that the claim was effectively public. “This is out there,” the person reportedly said. “They’re going to make a huge scene of this, even though it’s not true and everybody knows it.”
Ransome’s account carried heavy caveats. She had separately claimed to possess sex tapes of powerful men, then walked that back, citing fears for her family. Much of the room treated the nipple allegation as long discredited, the Times found, while some aides were hearing it for the first time.
The accusation was never charged or independently verified. Trump’s director of communications Steven Cheung previously called Ransome’s claims “baseless accusations” that had been “fully retracted because they are simply false and have no merit.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for further comment on this story.
