In The Red Letter community, one name keeps resurfacing: “Katie Johnson.”
She was a Jane Doe who accused President Trump in three different lawsuits of raping her in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 1994, when she was a 13-year-old aspiring model. She was planning to hold a press conference in Los Angeles days before the 2016 election, but instead, she dropped her suit and vanished. Her attorney Lisa Bloom cited death threats. Her lead lawyer, Thomas Meagher, filed a one-page dismissal in Manhattan federal court.
For years, I’ve wondered why.
Then, this weekend, a clip of Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, was forwarded to me by a fellow reporter, who remarked that he hasn’t heard Cohen say a nice thing about Trump since he went to prison for making hush money payments for him, and yet he seemed to be clearing him on MSNBC: "I don't believe that Donald Trump was on Epstein's island. Why? He said it more than 5, 6 times, and he says it very openly. Now, Donald Trump says many things openly — but this is different. I know Trump, and I know that he's saying it for a purpose."
It didn’t make sense to me because Trump says many things openly, often lies, like that he won the election. But still there are no flight records of him on Epstein’s island. Earlier, Cohen cast doubt on the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump doodled Epstein a depraved 50th birthday card of a naked woman because he said Trump doesn’t doodle and doesn’t use the word enigma. Even though Trump’s doodles were sold at auction at Sotheby’s, and he’s used the term “enigma” in tweets. Cohen, in this interview, backed up his assertion, suggesting that some of Trump’s secretaries were “phenomenal artists” and must have done it.
Then it hit me: if anyone knew what happened to Katie Johnson’s case, it would be Cohen. He was in Trump’s orbit in September 2016 when her final suit was filed in the Southern District of New York. He was simultaneously arranging payouts for Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. This was exactly the kind of mess Trump’s fixer would “fix.”
When we started the conversation, I simply mentioned that he would have knowledge of Epstein and Trump’s relationship from being in the orbit. He became defensive, saying “trolls” were trying to tie him to Epstein and to get him to say inaccurate things about Trump and Epstein, even though he did not work for Trump at the height of their friendship.
"I've never met Jeffrey Epstein. There's so much misinformation, disinformation, malinformation about me, which goes all the way back to the Steele dossier," he said.
"I've never met [Ghislaine Maxwell.] I've never spoken to her, you know."
He even revealed that he was asked about Epstein during that infamous marathon hearing in Congress on alleged Russian collusion that he sat through in February 2019. “Do you really think that of all of these members of Congress that asked me questions for a total of 63 hours, do you think they didn't bring up this sort of stuff with Jeffrey Epstein?”
"And I turn around and I say the same thing. I have no knowledge of anything with Jeffrey Epstein," he said. "Zero, I didn't handle it.”
He said that he had no knowledge of Trump’s breakup with Epstein, even though their feud was so well known that Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Epstein survivor Courtney Wild, knew to depose Trump because they hated each other and he believed that Trump would give him intel Epstein and his powerful friends. And according to my interview with Edwards, he did.
But then Cohen admitted something crucial just four minutes into our conversation: that he had worked on one Epstein case for Trump — one that seemed very similar to the timeline and details of the Katie Johnson case, which was filed right before the election and then withdrawn on November 4, 2016.
"And as far as the only case that I was involved with was a Jane Doe, an infant, by and through her mom, Mary Jane Doe, right, as legal guardian," Cohen said.
"And the allegations in it are awful. They're despicable. It talks about, basically, rape of an underage female, claiming and alleging that Donald was involved in it and all that other nonsense."
🔐 What Cohen told me next - about how he tried to track the girl down, what his investigator found and what then-candidate Trump said about it - adding more mystery to the Katie Johnson case.
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