Former President Bill Clinton submitted a one-paragraph note as part of a leather-bound album to mark Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
"It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends," Clinton allegedly wrote, according to the Journal.
A spokesperson for Clinton declined to comment to the Journal on the message, referring the Journal to a previous statement that the former president cut off ties more than a decade before Epstein was arrested in 2019 and didn't know about Epstein's alleged crimes. The book was assembled three years before Epstein was first arrested in 2006, the Journal reported.
The former president was among five dozen people who allegedly submitted letters in the book, including now-President Donald Trump, Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, fashion designer Vera Wang, and media owner Mort Zuckerman, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.
Trump has filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal for reporting that he submitted a raunchy letter for the album, put together by jailed British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a former girlfriend of the convicted sex offender.
The letter, which the Journal reported it reviewed, included several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman.
"The president is absolutely confident that this is not his letter … and he's very confident about the filing of this lawsuit because there's a malicious intent behind publishing stories such as this, making allusions to this [birthday] card and not having even had the decency to communicate with him," Alejandro Brito, the lead attorney in Trump's lawsuit, told Newsmax on Monday.
"Even after we reached out to them, they alluded to the fact that they would address this problem, and despite making such statements to him and to the administration, they published the article and went ahead with this false, defamatory, really, really harmful story that, as we noted in our lawsuit, has now been disseminated to hundreds of millions of people. And it's been rebroadcast, republished. It's really a political attack on him. It's a personal attack on him."
A spokeswoman for Dow Jones & Co. Inc., the Journal's publisher, said Monday, "We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit."
News Corp., the Journal's parent company, as well as the parent company of Fox News, was also named in the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida.
Epstein died in federal custody in August 2019 while he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide. Maxwell was found guilty in 2021 of aiding in Epstein's sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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