David Bolling: Did Donald Trump Rape 13-Year Old Jane Doe?

As Donald Trump basks in the glow of his unauthorized assault on Iran, countless victims of his alleged illegal assaults against women are publicly wondering if the Middle East war he has started is not a diversion from the one he can’t escape at home. 

That suspicion is directly connected to the discovery that FBI files involving Jeffrey Epstein released by Pam Bondi’s rigidly-controlled Justice Department are missing dozens of unredacted pages with allegations and biographical details that match with FBI interviews. 

NPR conducted its own investigation into the missing documents by reviewing multiple sets of unique serial numbers, called Bates stamps, appearing before and after the pages in question. From that review of serial numbers Bates stamped onto documents in the Epstein files database, FBI case records, emails and discovery document logs published at the end of January, NPR’s investigation found dozens of pages that appear to be catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly. 

It is not entirely clear which alleged sexual offenses those missing files refer to, although among the at least 28 women who have accused this president with a variety of acts of sexual misconduct, including rape, simple sexual assault, looking under women’s skirts, groping and kissing without permission and, when he owned a beauty pageant, walking into women’s dressing rooms unannounced when some contestants were naked, the most egregious ones are alleged to involve a 13-year-old girl. 

That girl, variously known as Jane Doe, or the pseudonym Katie Johnson, filed two separate lawsuits against Trump in 2016 – one in California that April, that was subsequently withdrawn, and another in New York that June, in which she claimed she was raped and sexually assaulted by both Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, in Epstein’s New York mansion, where she had been recruited with the promise of a modeling career. 

In a video deposition conducted for the New York suit, the girl describes how she was recruited at a New York bus terminal by a young woman, identified in the deposition with the pseudonym Tiffany, who promised Jane Doe she would be paid to entertain men at parties, and could get some modeling jobs. Jane Doe’s deposition details the sexual assaults that occurred over the course of four different events she describes as “orgies,” at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion, some or all of them attended by Donald Trump. During the last party she attended, she testified in the deposition, “On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied me to a bed, exposed himself to me, and then proceeded to forcibly rape me. During the course of this savage sexual attack, I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but he did not. Defendant Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed.” 

To back up Jane Doe’s allegations, her former recruiter, “Tiffany” also agreed to a deposition as a witness, and corroborated all of Jane Doe’s claims about the alleged rape and the threats that followed. 

The lawsuit was refiled in September of that year, and Jane Doe scheduled a press conference in the office of her New York attorney, Lisa Bloom, for November 2. It never happened, Jane Doe dropped the case and was not heard from again. Attorney Lisa Bloom has famously represented a long list of sexual assault victims of prominent men, including victims of Bill O’Reilly and Bill Cosby. She has reported that Jane Doe disappeared because she had received threats on her life. 

The Jane Doe depositions have circulated widely since 2016, but how thoroughly they have been investigated by the FBI or other law enforcement agencies is unclear. They should almost certainly be part of any FBI investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and if they do not ultimately turn up in documents released by the Justice Department that should be cause for further suspicion. 

The Jane Doe case does not prove Donald Trump’s guilt, but it certainly deserves a full criminal justice accounting. Whether criminal justice is possible in the current Justice Department is an increasingly disturbing question

California congressman Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, is trying to find an answer. He says he has visited the Justice Department to examine unredacted files and could not locate them. The Republican oversight committee chair, James Comer, also said lawmakers would be looking into the allegations that accusations of Trump assaulting a minor were removed from the DOJ’s database.

In a letter to Attorney General, Pam Bondi, Garcia demanded “a full accounting” of why the files had been withheld, writing that the DOJ had “illegally withheld FBI interviews with a survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”

Garcia added, “I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor.”

Every victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s Big House of Pedophilic Horrors deserves that the full ugly truth comes out. And we, the American public, have an absolute right to know if our president is himself a pedophile. No foreign war can make that right go away.