Below is a timeline of all the publicly available information (to the best of my knowledge) about the relationship between Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell. It is sourced with original media, social media, and court documents.
The timeline contains rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories but my intention is not to be a curator of content. Please use your common sense.
January 1993: Bill Clinton is inaugurated as the 42nd president of the United States.
September 1993: Epstein donates $10,000 to the White House Historical Association for refurbishments of the White House and attends a donors’ reception hosted by Bill and Hillary [DB].
Unknown 1994: Epstein met with Clinton associate Mark Middleton in the White House “several times” [DB].
Unknown 1995: Survivor Maria Farmer claims in an interview with Whitney Webb that Clinton visited Epstein and Maxwell in New York at least three times during her time in their orbit[Youtube]:
Unknown 1995: Lynn Forester de Rothschild wrote a personal letter to Clinton thanking him for their talk about the financier. She wrote [DB]:
Unknown 1995: Clinton attended dinner at Palm Beach home of Revlon mogul Ron Perelman where Epstein was also in attendance [The Palm Beach Post].
January 1997: Clinton inaugurated for a second term.
October 2000: The Trafficking Victims Protection Act signed into law by Clinton.
Unknown 2000: British socialite Lady Victoria — a former model within Epstein’s orbit — claims she stayed at Epstein’s New York property and attended a 14-person dinner party that included Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump [Good Morning Britain]:
January 2001: Clinton presidency ends.
May 2002: Clinton and Epstein take a five-leg Asia trip between May 22 and May 25. Fox claim (with no hard evidence) that no secret service agents are listed on flight manifests [Fox]. Clinton and Epstein photographed together in Brunei [Snopes].
September 2002: Clinton travels to Africa with Epstein, Keven Spacey and Chris Tucker. This trip is said to begin media interest in Epstein including the 2002 NYM and 2003 VF pieces. Since 2020 multiple photos of the trip have been released in the NY Post and The Daily Mail (twice). Two survivors report being on the trip as flight attendants, Chauntae Davies [Daily Mail] and Juliette Bryant [NYPost]. Both deny witnessing any misconduct.
October 2002: In 2002 NYM puff piece, Clinton said this about Epstein (through a spokesperson):
Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science.
In the same piece Epstein also stroked Clinton’s ego:
If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician.
Unknown 2002: Clinton seen dining with Maxwell at Nello’s on Madison Avenue [NYM]. In 2020 book A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper quote a source claiming Clinton and Maxwell were involved in a sexual relationship through this period.
Unknown 2002: Epstein donates $4 million to kick start the Clinton Global Initiative, according to a source quoted in Sarnoff’s book. Sarnoff writes:
I have been unable to verify or refute the amount of this claim since the organization’s accounting records do not disclose the information and Clinton did not return my call. However, one media report claimed that one of Epstein’s lawyer’s, Gerald Lefcourt confirmed in a media report that his client was among the founders.
This is later corroborated by one of Epstein’s lawyers Gerald B. Lefcourt in a letter attached to a court filing in 2016 [ABC].
January 2003: Former top Clinton aid Doug Band places Clinton on Epstein’s island Little St. James. Band said it was one of the few trips he declined to go on in his time with Clinton [VF]. Survivor Virginia Robert’s Giuffre also claims she saw Clinton on Little St. James sometime from 1999–2001 [Daily Mail]. IT contractor Steve Scully also claims seeing Clinton on the island [Law and Crime], however it is difficult to place the account in time because Scully worked for Epstein for a decade.
Unknown 2003: Tax records indicate Maxwell donated $2,500 to the Clinton Library and Foundation through her charity [Business Insider].
Unknown 2006: Epstein’s charity, the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, donated $25,000 to one of Bill and Hillary’s charities [DB]. The charity is still listed among past and present donors on the Clinton Foundation’s website.
March 2007: Maxwell contributed $2,300 to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton [opensecrets].
Unknown 2007: Hillary Clinton receives a $25,000 donation from Epstein after his indictment. She does not return donation [Sarnoff].
April 2009: Virginia Roberts Giuffre identifies Clinton among Epstein’s close friends and implicates him as a material witness in a phone call to lawyers Scarola and Edwards that was later filed in court in an unrelated case [Sarnoff, Chapter 5]:
Scarola: Do you have any recollection of Jeffrey Epstein’s specifically telling you that Bill Clinton owes me favors?
Virginia: Yes, I do. I remember asking Jeffrey what’s Bill Clinton doing here… he laughed and said, ‘Well he owes me a favor.’ He never told me what favors they were. I never knew… He told me a long time ago that everyone owes him favors. They’re all in each other’s pockets…
July 2009: Chelsea Clinton, Marc Mezvinsky and Maxwell rendezvous with Maxwell’s lover Ted Waitt to holiday on his yacht [Politico].
July 2010: Maxwell is photographed trying to be photographed at Chelsea’s wedding to Mezvinsky at the former Astor estate in Rhinebeck, NY [Daily Mail].
September 2012: Maxwell’s Terra Mar Project is launched. According to one article and also mentioned in Sarnoff’s book, it was partially or wholly funded by the Clinton Foundation [Daily Caller].
October 2012: A photo taken of a painting of Bill Clinton in a blue dress in Epstein’s NY property [Daily Mail]:
September 2013: Clinton Global Initiative trumpeted a TerraMar initiative among it’s “commitments to action” [Politico, Clinton Foundation, TerraMar].
January 2015: Roger Stone starts sounding off about Clinton was involved in the abuse which occurred in Epstein and Maxwell’s orbit [see, for example, The Daily Caller, Hannity 1, Hannity 2, Sunshine State News, Salon]. The usual amplifiers happily hone in on the message [see, for example, Fox, Real Clear Politics, RadarOnline, Breitbart, Bubba and the Palm Beach Pedophile].
The reporting coincides with Virginia Roberts Giuffre joining Bradley Edwards CRVA case against Epstein’s illegal 2008 non-prosecution agreement. Giuffre did interviews with ABC — who suppressed the story — and David Pecker’s perennially suspicious AMI media [for example The National Enquirer, RadarOnline, RadarOnline].
February 2015: At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump brought up Epstein and Clinton’s relationship [Youtube].
It has been reported that Trump met with AMI CEO David Pecker in the week leading up to the conference and discussed copies of the National Enquirer’s coverage of the Prince Andrew scandal [VF]:
“Trump said that Pecker had told him that the pictures of Clinton that Epstein had from his island were worse,” recalls a former Trump Organization employee [Sam Nunberg].
The journalist also corroborated these claims with Michael Cohen from his prison cell. The claims also make an appearance in Roger Stone’s October 2015 book The Clinton’s War on Women:
A former editor of the National Enquirer told us that his reporters had learned that Maxwell has retained a photo of former president Bill Clinton in a compromising position with a seventeen-year-old.
I wonder if that former editor —no doubt David Pecker or his fat henchman Dylan Howard — told Stone a little more than that. For example, during this interview segment on Infowars in November 2016 Stone said:
And it’s very clear this fellow Epstein was trafficking young men and young women to super elites, many whose names you’d recognize: at least one former Democratic US senator, at least one former Democratic governor, a couple of cabinet officers, some athletes, some scientists, some bankers, some extremely well known you know A-list celebrity types.
We the public learned about the allegations against former Democratic senator George J. Mitchell and former democratic governor Bill Richardson in the Giuffre v. Maxwell unsealing in 2019.
May 2016: Donald Trump secures the nomination for Republican candidate for president in the 2016 election.
October 2016: Pizzagate — a bizarre conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats to satanism and a clandestine sex child trafficking ring — begins to light up social media. A Rolling Stone investigation traces the original Facebook post to a user out of Joplin, Missouri named Carmen Katz. She links Bill and Hillary directly to the Epstein scandal, by now a trope in conservative media:
Over the coming days and weeks, the conspiracy would be propagated by GOP operatives such as Erik Prince, Mike Cernovich, Roger Stone, and Alex Jones, possibly in an attempt to apply pressure to reopen the Hillary email investigation and/or to deflect from the Johnson allegations. It would culminate two months later in a shooting incident at DC pizza shop called Comet Ping Pong.
January 2017: Trump inaugurated as 45th president of the United States.
April 2018: QAnon, another bizarre conspiracy theory about a global cabal of infanticidal pedophiles against which Donald Trump is waging a secret war, first brings up Clinton’s ties to Epstein in drop #1055, elaborating in multiple other drops such as #3131, #3133, #3363, #3362, #3508. It is notable that QAnon recycles many Pizzagate themes including Democratic Party ties to Epstein. “Q” also made 37 drops containing the word “Epstein”, 6 containing the word “Maxwell”, and multiple others touching on Epstein related themes such as the temple on Little St. James, Les Wexner, and survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
6 July 2019: Epstein is arrested at Teterboro Airport in NJ in a joint investigation by the FBI and the NYPD. The QAnon theorists go wild. An explainer from New York Magazine:
On the Fourth of July, or maybe on the fifth… John F. Kennedy Jr., who faked his own death 20 years ago, would reveal himself, and then, as QAnon interpreter Will Sommer puts it, “team up with Trump and ship a huge number of top Democrats off to Guantanamo Bay” for their participation in these global child-sex rings… Of course, this wild theory turned out to be bogus. It wasn’t until July 6 that the feds handed out an indictment over a global underage sex-trafficking ring implicating U.S. presidents, heads of government, top lawyers, world-famous actors, and a member of the English royal family.
8 July 2019: Clinton owns up to six encounters with Epstein, starting in 2002: four trips on Epstein’s private jet (11 flights, from other sources, and 26 according to uncorroborated Fox News reporting), a single trip to his Harlem office, and one “brief visit” to his New York apartment, all with staff and security detail in tow [Twitter]:
In making this statement, Clinton contradicts contemporaneous reporting, four survivors, and ignores issues such as donations from Epstein and Maxwell’s charities.
10 August 2019: Epstein found dead in his NY jail cell.
11 August 2019: Trump retweets two (QAnon tangential) conspiracy theories linking Bill and Hillary Clinton to Epstein’s death [Bloomberg, Trump Archive 1, Trump Archive 2]. In his usual style Trump would later double down on the statements and deflect to unverified claims from Fox News that Clinton had traveled on Epstein’s plane without his secret service attache:
2 July 2020: Ghislaine Maxwell arrested.
