In early July 2024, a mix of old claims that former U.S. President Donald Trump committed acts of sexual violence against minors in the 1990s reemerged . These claims asserted that newly released "Epstein documents" contained evidence "confirming Trump as a co-conspirator with Epstein in an underage sex trafficking scheme," referring to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein:
The reason "no major media outlet covered it," at least in July 2024, is that none of these recently released documents contained any such evidence, or even any mention of Trump.
On social media, as Snopes has previously reported , "Epstein docs" or "Epstein files" generally refer to grand jury testimony relating to the multimillionaire's 2008 conviction on, and controversially lenient sentence for, the charges of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. Produced for a lawsuit between Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, these documents are periodically unsealed by a Florida judge per a court agreement.
While Trump's name has appeared in past releases , the July 2024 release of documents did not once mention him. Despite this, several social media users shared images of court documents describing a graphic rape allegedly perpetrated by Trump while claiming the documents were new:
These court documents are part of a lawsuit that allege in 1994 an associate of Epstein recruited a 13-year-old girl, originally identified as Katie Johnson, to become his sex slave. Epstein raped the girl, the documents claim, and also forced her to have sex with Trump on multiple occasions in both New York and Florida. The filings also include testimony from an anonymous witness corroborating the allegations.
These images accurately show real court documents, but not ones connected to the ongoing release of Epstein grand jury files. Instead, these allegations were made in late April 2016 , and Snopes first covered the court filings in June 2016 .
The written complaint included graphic accounts of the alleged rapes, including the claim that Trump refused to wear a condom and instead threw money at the girl and told her to use it for an abortion.
The case was filed in U.S. District Courts in California and New York. Though these lawsuits were dismissed or withdrawn , the claims attributed to Johnson laid the groundwork for, and lent perceived credibility to, other entirely unsourced rumors that the former president had settled myriad other lawsuits with underage assault victims, pointing to evidence of an alleged "pedophilic disorder."
Memes referencing that latter series of claims, which originated in a subscription-only blog post from a conspiracy theorist with a history of false claims, reemerged following this recent dump of "Epstein docs." As Snopes discussed in August 2020 , there was — and remains — no basis to the claims stemming from those rumors.
During their 2024 round of promotion on social media, however, these two categories of child rape and abuse claims often merged into a single assertion about Trump settling lawsuits related to the purported sexual assault of multiple minors :
Despite their centrality to the "Trump is a pedophile" narrative and to allegations mainstream media has been "ignoring" them, investigations by reporters at Jezebel and The Guardian found numerous red flags in the 2016 court filings and story. Among those red flags was evidence that tied the case to an aggressive media campaign initiated by an individual calling himself Al Taylor.
Taylor's story, as told to Jezebel, was "that he'd heard Katie's story for the first time [in 2014], after meeting her at a party" and that "as a former psychology major in college and reality TV producer … people were always telling him things unsolicited, even now that he's retired from television." To Jezebel, he claimed ( without evidence) to have worked as a producer for "Inside Edition."
In the months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, however, The Guardian connected the Taylor persona to a former producer for "The Jerry Springer Show" named Norm Lubow. In 2016, Lubow strongly denied to Jezebel and The Guardian that he was Taylor.
However, when Snopes spoke to Lubow in July 2024, he confirmed that he was, in fact, Taylor and said he did aid the accuser in her first lawsuit and in promoting the claims within it to journalists. Thomas Meagher, an attorney who represented someone identifying herself as Johnson in 2016, declined to comment for this story. In this story, Snopes shows how Lubow's involvement remains a key red flag undermining the Johnson claims.
Since Donald Trump entered the presidential race in 2015, opponents have highlighted his connections to Epstein. The two ran in the same Palm Beach social circles in the 1990s, and they appeared together in video from a 1992 party at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club:
In 2006, Epstein became the subject of local and federal investigations into alleged sex and human trafficking probes, and in 2008 — later reporting would reveal — he was given a "sweetheart" deal by federal prosecutors in Florida that allowed him to plead guilty to crimes involving only one victim.
Beginning in 2015 , however, details of the potentially large number of victims not a party to the plea deal were reported, including stories of Epstein taking large cadres of girls to parties with powerful men and testimony from numerous women who say they were lured into Epstein's orbit and sexual servitude with promises of fame and connection. Against this backdrop, as well as the rise of Trump during the GOP primaries, the Johnson claims first became public.
On April 26, 2016 — apparently without a lawyer — a person identified as Johnson filed a lawsuit against Trump and Epstein in a California U.S. District Court. According to the complaint, Epstein trafficked Johnson as a sex slave in 1994 after another girl recruited her at a bus stop when she was 13. She wrote that she was forced to sexually gratify both Epstein and Trump on multiple occasions.
The gossip site Radar Online published a short story on April 28, 2016, noting the filing, but even it was skeptical, highlighting the fact that the person filing the claim had given apparently bogus contact information, using the address of a foreclosed house whose owner had recently died.
Indeed, that California case was dropped for failing to state a proper claim under the law it cited. Filings indicate that the court was unable to contact the person who filed the complaint at the address she provided or locate a forwarding address for her. A few months later, however, an anonymous Jane Doe filed a nearly identical case in a New York U.S. District Court.
For the New York case, Doe was represented by a New Jersey patent attorney, Thomas Meagher, who later confirmed to news outlets that his client was the same person who filed the Johnson claims. By then, a widely shared video of a woman identified as Johnson, shown with a pixelated face and disguised voice, accompanied press coverage of her case.
Numerous journalists, advocates and political operatives had attempted to get, or had been promised, in-person access to Johnson. These promises never panned out. Steve Baer, a conservative mega-donor whose extensive email contacts helped to push the claims, for example, told Jezebel that he never met the accuser in person, despite many attempts.
Only one outlet, the now defunct millennial-targeting site Revelist , scored any sort of interview with the accuser. In July 2016, after first being promised an in-person meeting by Meagher, Revelist's Emily Shugerman had to settle for a conference call that left her questioning whether Johnson really existed. "I don't know if the Katie Johnson I spoke to is the same girl who Trump allegedly raped in 1994, or if that girl even exists," she wrote .
The next month, Lisa Bloom, a prominent attorney known for fighting high-profile sexual abuse cases, helped organize and publicize a news conference at which Johnson was to appear and outline her allegations against Trump. But the accuser backed out at the last minute, leaving "a room full of waiting reporters," as Vox described , without answers — and dropped the New York case days later.
These 2016 allegations did not spread far despite being covered at that time. This was partly for the reasons outlined above, and also due to the aggressive way in which the story was being promoted to the press.
To that end, a large factor inhibiting large-scale coverage of the Johnson claims was that journalists figured out that a former "Jerry Springer" producer with a history of trolling the media had been a key player in promoting them from their inception and played a role in crafting the initial California filing.
This crucial backstory may have been lost in the drama of the final months of the 2016 election and Trump's surprise victory, and this context is often ignored when the Johnson claims are referenced in the context of the 2024 presidential election, the purported release of "Epstein files," or in support of anonymously sourced claims of serial sexual abuse of minors by Trump.
As Jezebel's Anna Merlan reported in June 2016, the campaign to alert news outlets to the claims against Trump began nearly a year before the California filing. In August 2015, Gawker — which was, at the time, part of the same media group as Jezebel — was approached by a self-described PR representative named Al Taylor. "I've got some good info on Donald Trump for you," Taylor told the outlet.
Taylor's contact with Gawker apparently ceased by March 2016, and Gawker "never purchased anything, or published any stories, related to the info that it received from Taylor," wrote Merlan, who was uninvolved with Taylor's initial outreach. The California complaint was filed a month later, receiving limited press coverage.
That initial filing garnered enough attention, however, to attract the interest of lawyers who helped file a lawsuit in New York, and of political operatives like Baer, who pushed the claims aggressively. Though central to the promotion of her story, these individuals had, at best, limited access to the accuser, and that access was largely controlled through Taylor.
In July 2016, based on several lines of compelling evidence, The Guardian's Jon Swaine linked the person using the name Al Taylor to former "Jerry Springer Show" producer Lubow, who reportedly staged the fights for which the show became famous. Lubow never confirmed the allegations to The Guardian.
Instead, when Swaine quizzed Taylor on his true identity, he replied: "Just be warned, we'll sue you if we don't like what you write. We'll sue your a**, own your a** and own your newspaper's a** as well, punk." When Merlan confronted Taylor on the allegation that he was actually Lubow he told her — texting from the phone number listed as Johnson's in the initial sexual assault complaint — to "suck my d***, b****."
Snopes reached out to Lubow through an email associated with the Al Taylor persona and through a Facebook profile of a "Norm Lubow" who described himself as a past segment producer for "The Jerry Springer Show." Through both channels, we asked whether Taylor and Lubow were the same person and whether that person played a role in crafting the April 2016 complaint filed against Trump.
Lubow eventually confirmed to Snopes via a blocked phone number that he was, indeed, Taylor and that he had, under this pseudonym, helped the accuser with her first legal filing, with the video that accompanied her claims and with promoting those allegations to the press. He claimed to Snopes that he wasn't trying to be tricky by using the name Al Taylor, but that past media smears leveled against him by "The Jerry Springer Show" necessitated the new name.
Lubow's involvement in the case is relevant, in Snopes' view, because Lubow has pushed false stories about celebrities to the press in the past, and because one of Lubow's main professional jobs was, other outlets have reported, to make up salacious stories for television segments, to enlist people to pretend that they were players in those stories and to keep them from telling anyone it was all a lie.
Lubow was referring to a 1998 scandal in which former guests of the show alleged that the over-the-top and often violent segments they participated in were entirely scripted. In a report aired by the investigative news program "20/20," several former "Springer" guests named Lubow as the producer who recruited people for numerous entirely made-up segments.
Lubow first made a name for himself in the late 1980s as a pro-marijuana "revolutionary" character named Rev. Bud Green who frequently appeared on television talk shows — including "Springer" — only to be "kicked off" after lighting up.
Lubow also reportedly has a history of pushing false stories about celebrities to news outlets. As described by The Guardian in 2016, "Lubow was connected to a contentious claim, raised in the 1998 documentary movie Kurt and Courtney, that Courtney Love offered a fellow musician $50,000 to murder her husband, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana." The New York Post reported that, in 1995, Lubow was behind a tabloid newspaper story alleging that O.J. Simpson bought illicit drugs on the day Nicole Brown was killed.
In the Revelist interview, the person identifying herself as Johnson explained that "Al Taylor" — i.e., Lubow — had played a pivotal role in helping her craft the complaint against Trump. "She said they had been introduced through a mutual friend, who urged her to go to Taylor with the story," Revelist reported . "The friend believed Taylor had the resources to bring her accusations to light."
Lubow's involvement does not prove that Johnson's claims are false or that she does not exist. However, it does show that the claims attributed to this person were aggressively promoted and aided by someone who has a professional history of using individuals to create fictional salacious drama. This is a fact both Lubow, and lawyers working for Johnson, attempted to downplay or hide.
"I definitely don't mind you answering this question," Meagher advised the person identifying herself as Johnson during the interview with Revelist. "But because of all the hoopla about the peripheral characters in this, I certainly don't mind you saying that you got help, but I don't want you to identify who helped you."
Lubow told Snopes he stands by his story — in that he heard about the Johnson allegations from a friend at a party sometime around 2014 and then helped her move forward with the lawsuit, produce the video and publicize her allegations to the media.
The accuser's attorney, Meagher, told Shugerman, the Revelist reporter, that centering the narrative on Lubow allows "the sins of others to be visited upon my client." The problem, though, is that all the evidence for this case came to the public through him or with his apparent involvement.
Some commentators — including Lubow himself in a phone call with Snopes — have argued that the similarities of Johnson's stories to other victims of Epstein — recruitment by other young women with promises of modeling gigs, trafficking those girls to parties with powerful men — makes the Johnson claim compelling, regardless of Lubow's involvement. That argument becomes circular, however, when one considers that detailed stories from Epstein's victims were publicly known well before any Johnson filings were made.
Julie K. Brown, the journalist who uncovered the federal government's plea deal with Epstein in 2008, pushed back on the notion that journalists had ignored the Johnson claims, writing on X that, "The woman just wouldn't talk, and her lawyer would not confirm she was even legit. … The address she gave on her first lawsuit was false. She was linked to political operatives at one point."
Lubow's involvement does not preclude the reality of the Johnson allegations. "Could her story be true?" Brown wrote. "Yes. As we speak, there are probably some powerful men associated with Epstein who have hired lawyers to pay off women. There are probably NDA's attached."
Trump, for his part, has previously been held liable for sexual assault in civil court, and has been found guilty of charges that involve paying off a woman to silence her about sexual contact with him. Further, the former president has bragged about sexual misconduct on tape.
Such facts provide documentary evidence supporting the notion that Trump has a history of sexual assault, but not against children. The actual documentary evidence in support of the latter claim is inexorably linked to Lubow and is tied to a person — Johnson — who may, in all reality, not exist.
Recent claims that new documents prove the validity of the Johnson claims are false, because these documents are from 2016 and have nothing to do with what have become known as the "Epstein docs."
Viral claims that Trump has a history of sexually assaulting children first emerged with the Johnson lawsuits in 2016. Pictures of court documents related to the case have lent perceived credibility to additional unsourced claims of child abuse that followed, and memes frequently combine the two claims.
Such claims are not new, come with several red flags and originated with an aggressive push by a serial fabulist.
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Alex Kasprak is an investigative journalist and science writer reporting on scientific misinformation, online fraud, and financial crime.
