What’s in Epstein’s birthday book: Lewd jokes, revealing photos and a nude sketch linked to Trump

In the book that Ghislaine Maxwell prepared in 2003 as a gift for the 50th birthday of her friend/lover/accomplice, the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, there are plenty of jokes about his preference for women — preferably very young; depictions of female nudity; compromising photos and mathematical formulas; a drawing of Epstein giving a group of girls balloons and later receiving a massage from those same girls years later; images of lions and zebras mating; and even the honoree’s birth certificate.

Sixteen years later, the millionaire pedophile would die in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial in 2019 for sex trafficking, after decades of abusing hundreds of minors with the complicity of Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year sentence in a Texas prison.

There are also many portraits of Epstein from different periods of his life, showing him dressed — in a suit or ready to ski — and in a few, semi-nude, as well as letters and affectionate dedications from dozens of friends, mostly men.

This includes a message that made headlines this week, after the U.S. Congress, which received a batch of Epstein’s documents from his heirs following a court order, attributed it to U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump denies having written those lines, which are full of complicity, as well as the drawing of a woman’s nude silhouette, in which, at the location corresponding to pubic hair, there is a spiky signature that simply reads “Donald.”

The existence of that birthday greeting was revealed last July by the conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journal, which Trump subsequently sued, along with its owner Rupert Murdoch, for defamation and libel. The U.S. president is seeking more than $10 billion in damages, claiming that he never sent a birthday greeting to his then-friend. This Monday, the world finally got to see the message in question after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee made it public. Since then, Trump, his team, and Republican members of Congress have insisted that he did not write it and that the signature is fake.

Trump’s alleged contribution appears on page 165 of the book, which EL PAÍS has had access to. It was a gift that Maxwell clearly took seriously: the volume has 238 pages and was bound “by hand” in “calfskin” at a refined specialty shop in New York.

Trump makes another appearance in the birthday book: on page 156, Epstein is seen alongside a man described by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee as “a long-time Mar-a-Lago member,” and a young woman whose face has been blacked on. They are holding a check, supposedly signed by Trump, the kind one might receive from winning a television contest. The accompanying text claims that the then real estate magnate gave it to his pedophile friend to buy “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500. It seems as obvious as it is in poor taste that it was meant as a joke. It is also the kind of sexist humor that permeates the entire book, humor that today is certainly less common — and far less conceivable — than it was 21 years ago.

The president of the United States, who had a 15-year friendship with Epstein before it ended around 2004 — that is, before the pedophile’s first trial for child abuse — appears in the “Friends” section alongside other famous figures. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton also appears in the section, as does Alan Dershowitz, who served for decades as Epstein’s defense lawyer; Peter Mandelson, the current U.K. ambassador to Washington; modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel (who died by suicide in a French prison before being tried for rape); and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.

For the birthday book, Minsky created a complex diagram of Epstein’s personality (Jeffrey E.) and wrote: “There are six billion intellects on Earth, but this is the quickest one I’ve met (aside from Isaac Asimov); he sees things differently from all the rest, asks questions that no one else ever asked, and suggests answers that no one would ever expect.”

In an unsigned poem, one can read (with some discomfort, given the sinister prospect of impunity that awaited Epstein): “Jeffrey at half century, with credentials plenipotentiary, though up to no good whenever he could, has avoided the penitentiary.”

And throughout the birthday book, there are dedications with sexual references. In one, there is a joke about the possibility of Epstein traveling with an “escort” to Iowa. In another, Les Wexner, the main shareholder of the lingerie company Victoria’s Secret and one of the original sources of Epstein’s wealth, draws a woman’s breasts under a text that says his intention is only to give what she seeks. “Well, here you go,” he adds.

And throughout, there are dedications with sexual references. One jokes about the possibility of Epstein traveling with an escort to Iowa. In another, Les Wexner, the main shareholder in the lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret and one of the early sources of his wealth, draws a woman’s breasts. The text below reads: “I wanted to get you what you want...so here it is...”

In her introduction to the birthday, titled The First Fifty Years, Maxwell writes that the idea was “simply to gather stories and old photographs to jog your memory about places and people and different events.” “Some of the letters will definitely achieve their intended goal — some well... you will have to read them to see for yourself,“ adds Maxwell, who included a good number of photographs of herself with Epstein, including ones where she appears topless (they have been blacked out for publication), and one from their “first date, in 1991.”

If anything, those 238 pages (slightly censored and divided into sections such as “Family,” “Children,” “Brooklyn,” “Science,” “Business,” or, in two separate parts, “Girlfriends”) show just how extraordinarily well-connected Epstein was across different spheres: from philanthropy to politics, and from academia to finance.

His extensive list of influential friends is one reason conspiracy theories have proliferated over the years, both around him personally and around the suspicion that many of these men may have been involved in his crimes — and that this is why authorities have yet to release the so-called “Epstein list,” which would expose all of these dealings.

Shadows of doubt have also been cast on his death: the coroner concluded that he died by suicide, but the strange circumstances of that August night, the glaring lapses in his custody, and his powerful connections have fueled the imagination of conspiracy theorists.

Being listed in the pedophile’s phone agendas, having flown on his private plane (as Clinton did at least 26 times, according to court records), or having sent him a 50th birthday greeting does not prove the commission of, or complicity in, any crime. There is also no evidence that Trump — who told NBC News this Tuesday that he did not plan to comment on a ”dead issue” — knew anything about the crimes of his old friend.

The scandal surrounding the U.S. president’s relationship with Epstein has followed Trump for years, but this summer it resurfaced with force. It began in early July, when a joint statement from the FBI and the Department of Justice announced that, contrary to what had been promised in the preceding months, U.S. authorities did not plan to release new documents about the pedophile.

Since then, Trump has done everything possible to divert attention from the case, which has triggered his first major crisis within the MAGA movement — a movement that has long speculated about what authorities are hiding by not making the case file against “the most dangerous sexual predator in U.S. history” public.

The publication of his old friend’s birthday book promises to make that task even more difficult. Although his supporters have rallied around the claim that it is all a setup and that the signature is fake — among other reasons, because it uses only his first name, not the full name he usually signs on the presidential decrees he approves every day in the White House — the problem is that, in recent hours, examples have emerged of letters from the period when Epstein turned 50 in which Trump indeed signed simply as “Donald.”

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