In a surprise address from the White House on Thursday, first lady Melania Trump publicly denied any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, or Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime co-conspirator.
“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” she said in a five-minute statement in which she also called on Congress to hold public hearings for his victims to testify on Capitol Hill.
“I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump,” she told reporters. She and the president would attend some of the same parties as the late sex abuser in New York City and Palm Beach, Florida, she explained, but the connection ends there.
Her call for public hearings comes as President Donald Trump and the West Wing have stressed that it’s time for the country to “move on” from the Epstein files and as the war in Iran has largely pushed the story out of the headlines. With that in mind, many wondered what prompted the first lady’s address.
Crisis PR specialists say her speech was a near-perfect example of the Streisand effect, when an attempt to censor or hide something unintentionally draws more attention to it.
