Virginia Roberts Giuffre is one of dozens of women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexual abuse. Previous reports claimed she flew in a helicopter with Bill Clinton and Ghislaine Maxwell to Epstein’s island.A 2016 deposition that was unsealed Wednesday contradict that report.
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Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre said she did not recall flying to Epstein’s private island with Bill Clinton, contradicting prior reporting that said she’d been in a helicopter with the former president, according to newly unsealed court records.
Giuffre made the statement in a deposition she took for a civil lawsuit she brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, who trafficked girls to Epstein for sex. Giuffre alleged that Epstein and Maxwell both sexually abused her and that they trafficked her to other people, including Prince Andrew.
The full deposition was unsealed as part of a cache of documents related to the names of about 170 of Epstein’s associates.
In the deposition, taken on May 3, 2016, Maxwell’s attorney Laura Menninger asked whether Giuffre was “ever on the helicopter with Bill Clinton and Ghislaine Maxwell as the pilot of the helicopter” or “on the helicopter with Bill Clinton’s Secret Service and Ghislaine Maxwell as the pilot.”
Giuffre answered “no” to both questions, contradicting an earlier report that claimed she had ridden on a helicopter with the former president.
As a follow-up, Menninger asked Giuffre if she had ever seen an article written by Daily Mail reporter Sharon Churcher that claimed Giuffre was on the helicopter with Clinton and Maxwell. The story was the first report indicating that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island on the US Virgin Islands, where the now-dead financier was said to rape girls.
“No, I do not recall reading a press article saying that I was on a helicopter with Bill Clinton,” Giuffre responded, according to the deposition.
Menninger also asked if she recalled telling the reporter about Clinton and Maxwell being in a helicopter.
Giuffre responded that her conversation with Churcher was “taken out of context” and that Maxwell often exaggerated.
“Ghislaine told me that she flew Bill Clinton in. And Ghislaine likes to talk a lot of stuff that sounds fantastical,” Giuffre said. “And whether it’s true or not, that is what I do recall telling Sharon Churcher.”
Churcher published the story with The Daily Mail in 2011, purporting to quote Giuffre talking about flying with Clinton and speaking with the former president when she was about 17 years old.
“‘I’d have been about 17 at the time,’ she says. ‘I flew to the Caribbean with Jeffrey and then Ghislaine Maxwell went to pick up Bill in a huge black helicopter that Jeffrey had bought her,” Churcher wrote, purportedly quoting Giuffre.
In another purported quote, Giuffre said, “I used to get frightened flying with her but Bill had the Secret Service with him and I remember him talking about what a good job she did,” according to Churcher’s article.
Giuffre also is quoted stating that she met Clinton “twice.”
In the sworn deposition, however, Giuffre offered a different account of her story.
Giuffre told attorneys that she told Churcher information that was given to her by Maxwell, not based on any interaction with Clinton.
When asked if she read the story after it was published and attempted to seek corrections, Giuffre said that she tried to “stay away” from the stories, only read “some articles,” and that she never circled back to Churcher to “correct anything.”
She added about Churcher: “And a lot of the stuff that she writes she takes things from my own mouth and changes them into her own words as journalists do.”
Giuffre had written in her unpublished memoir, “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club,” about her experiences being trafficked as an underage girl and how she spotted numerous powerful players in Epstein’s social circle, including Al Gore, who was a presidential candidate at the time, and Clinton.
In an email to Business Insider, Angel Ureña, a spokesperson for Clinton, reiterated his statement in 2019, stating that Clinton knew “nothing about the terrible crimes” Epstein committed.
“In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane, Ureña wrote.
“It’s been nearly 20 years since President Clinton last had contact with Epstein,” Ureña told BI.
There is no evidence that Gore ever visited the island.
Clinton’s name has surfaced in other documents unsealed on Wednesday. Johanna Sjoberg, another one of Epstein’s accusers, said in her own 2016 deposition that Epstein told her Clinton likes girls “young.”
In 2021, a Manhattan jury convicted Maxwell of trafficking girls to Epstein for sex and sexually abusing them herself. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for his own sex-trafficking charges.
Prince Andrew settled a civil lawsuit in 2022 from Virginia Giuffre, accusing him of trafficking her for sex and defaming her when he denied it and called her a liar. He’s denied wrongdoing and said he regrets his association with Epstein.
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