I talked to the woman accusing Donald Trump of rape
UPDATE 9/16:
Jane Doe and her attorney filed to dismiss their case on Friday, September 16. An email to Revelist indicates that the complaint will be re-filed, with the addition of a new witness. Meagher did not respond to requests for comment.
Story continues below:
I first learned about the newest rape lawsuit against Donald Trump from a New York real estate website. The website itself is small, but the allegations are massive.
"Defendant Trump tied plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape plaintiff," the suit, filed in New York District Court on June 20, said. "During the course of this savage sexual attack, plaintiff loudly pleaded with defendant Trump to stop but with no effect."
The court documents tell the story of a 13-year-old girl hired in 1994 to attend private sex parties in New York City. The parties were said to be hosted by billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from underage girls.
The suit also claims that Trump attended at least four of these parties. At each of these, the suit alleges, he initiated sexual contact with the 13-year-old. At one of them, he violently raped her.
The plaintiff, using the name Katie Johnson, originally filed the lawsuit in California. Johnson represented herself in that suit, but the judge threw it out for failing to make an adequate civil rights claim.
At the time, Trump's attorney denied the claims, calling them "not only categorically false, but disgusting at the highest level and clearly framed to solicit media attention." But less than a month later, Johnson was suing again — this time with legal representation and a tightly-edited lawsuit.
Astounded by the claims, I wrote an impassioned plea to Johnson's lawyer, asking him for an interview. He wrote back, simply, "Sure."
A quick Google search revealed that Johnson's lawyer, Thomas Meagher, is a patent lawyer in Princeton, New Jersey.
Meagher took on this case independently of his law firm, and openly admits that he has never tackled this kind of case before. He told me in our first conversation that he discovered the case via the website Gossip Extra. The South Florida-tabloid ran an article about Johnson's failed first filing, and her fruitless search for legal representation. Moved, Meagher contacted the site to offer his help.
Meagher sounded nervous when we spoke for the first time. He asked for the whole interview to be off-the-record, and still refused to answer some of my questions. Not that I blamed him — Trump frequently boasts that he is a litigious man who never settles cases.
After hanging up with Meagher that day, I knew four things for certain: Trump had a history of assaulting women; Epstein is a known sex offender; a woman was accusing both men of sexually assaulting her as a minor; and hardly any media outlet was covering it. I wrote up my take on these four facts and hit publish.
Two weeks later, I got an email from Meagher.
"As I recall, you had asked to interview my client," he said. "Would you be interested in coming here to Princeton to interview her via FaceTime?"
At that point, The Daily Beast and Jezebel had both published articles casting doubt on the case — or at least the men involved in it.
The reports claimed that a man named Al Taylor had been acting as a go-between for Johnson and the press. He was allegedly shopping around a video of someone, claiming to be Johnson, recounting her allegations to the camera. He had also told a Jezebel reporter to suck his dick.
Though there were several unpleasant interactions with Taylor on record, no one had spoken to Johnson.
I agreed to do a Skype interview on Friday, July 8, from Meagher’s office. That same day, The Guardian ran an article claiming that Al Taylor is actually Norm Lubow, a former producer for the Jerry Springer show and known purveyor of celebrity scandals. "Taylor" become violent when reporters asked him about these claims.
"Just be warned: we"ll sue you if we don't like what you write," Taylor told The Guardian's Jon Swaine. "We'll sue your ass, own your ass and own your newspaper's ass as well, punk."
I received another email from Meagher while traveling to Princeton to ask Johnson about all of these issues.
"Sorry but she has changed her mind and will no longer do it," he wrote, referring to my interview with his client. "Alas."
I finally spoke to Johnson on July 11 — three days later — at 11:45 pm.
After several days of back-and-forth with Meagher, I secured a conference call with him and his client. Johnson's voice sounded muffled and far away when she answered — she said she was speaking softly because she didn’t want anyone to overhear her. Several times she paused mid-sentence, and I could hear her moving something.
"She has dogs," Meagher explained.
We started by discussing how she began working for Epstein. Johnson said she'd traveled to New York, alone, to launch a modeling career. She told me that one of Epstein's female associates approached her while she waited for a train at New York's Port Authority bus terminal. The woman told her about a party that night, where she could meet people to jump-start her career. Plus, she'd be paid to attend.
"Basically it was, 'Oh, I could definitely help you out with connections — modeling connections — and could definitely get you a modeling career,'" Johnson told me. "There wasn't really any description of what I'd be doing."
That female associate is identified in the lawsuit as Tiffany Doe.
More than 20 years after that first interaction, Tiffany has signed an affidavit to Johnson’s lawsuit, in which she supports her allegations and claims to have recruited young women for Epstein for years.
This is consistent with several reports of women who signed on to recruit their peers for Epstein in the past — several of whom were granted immunity during Epstein's 2008 trial. It also eerily mirrors reports about Jean Luc Brunel, the co-founder of of MC2 Model Management, who allegedly helped Epstein procure young women:
"He would bring young girls (ranging from ages as young as 12) to the United States for sexual purposes and farm them out to his friends, especially Epstein," a case filed in Southern Florida District Court states. "Brunel would offer the girls 'modeling' jobs. Many of the girls came from poor countries or impoverished backgrounds, and he lured them in with a promise of making good money."
Johnson told me that Tiffany invited her to seven more parties that summer. She attended all of them.
"She would contact me and say 'Oh there's gonna be this guy that you need to meet, and he's ready to offer you a contract — a modeling contract,'" Johnson told me. "You know, you’ve already done this, you’ve already done one, why don't you do two? This could be the one that makes you a model.'"
Epstein is widely known for throwing lavish parties, with celebrity guests like Katie Couric, Kevin Spacey, and of course, Donald Trump.
In a 2011 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein, a young woman recounted her experience with the guests at one such party:
"'These were not women you'd see at Upper East Side dinners,'" the woman recalls. "'Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.' This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models. 'Some of the guests were horrified,' the woman says."
Johnson, however, was more vague in her descriptions of the parties. She told me she was given outfits to wear, but wouldn’t go into detail about what she was asked to do. I asked her how many people attended the parties, and she couldn’t put her finger on an exact figure.
"I mean, I don't know if I can put number on it," she said. "It wasn’t just like a small party, but it wasn’t a huge party either … I don't know, I can't really explain it. It was just … So many things that I wasn't aware of even happened, or existed, I saw at these parties.”
Hearing her answers that night, I had to remind myself that PTSD from sexual trauma is known to damage victims' memories — and that the parties she recalled allegedly happened more than two decades ago. But Mike Fisten, a retired Miami-Dade detective who conducted research for several of Epstein's victims, denied such parties ever even took place.
"Jeffery never had parties like described in their complaint," Fisten told me. "Jeffery had sex parties, for sure, with two or three girls … but never with other guys."
There were men in attendance at Epstein’s more large, lavish affairs, Fisten said, but nothing illicit ever happened at such events.
"He loved having these young girls around him," Fisten acknowledged. "…But at these parties, with everyone around, nothing ever happened."
When I asked Johnson to describe the parties she attended, she spoke mainly of how awestruck she felt.
"One of the main things I remember seeing and feeling were just things that were way more elegant than I had ever seen," she told me. "I felt like, this is worth a lot of money, more than I would ever probably see in my life. Just very elegant stuff, and very rich people…"
A large staircase, which matches one Vicky Ward described in the Vanity Fair profile, is among the "elegant stuff" Johnson mentioned in our interview. Johnson also described Epstein as looking "put together," and "under-dressed when everyone else was over-dressed," which also matches Ward’s description of Epstein’s uniform: jeans, knit shirts, and loafers.
Another common theme in both women's accounts is the fear Epstein strikes in those he meets.
"He has a way of spooking you, does Epstein. Or he did," Ward later reflected in a piece for The Daily Beast. "…He'd asked which hospital I was giving birth at — and I was so afraid that somehow, with all his connections to the academic and medical community, that he was coming for my little ones that I put security on them in the NICU."
When I asked Johnson if she ever considered pressing charges before this, she said yes.
"I mean I knew that what they did was wrong," she told me, "but I didn't know … I was afraid something bad would happen if I did."
These women had reason to be scared: Epstein’s predatory behavior is well-documented.
Less publicized, however, is the predatory behavior of one Donald Trump.
In 1993, Trump’s former wife, Ivana, accused him of raping her after an altercation over her cosmetic surgeon. The description of the event, contained in Harry Hunt’s Trump biography "Lost Tycoon," is hauntingly violent. A former co-worker, Jill Harth, accused him of forcing her into her daughter's bedroom and attempting to have sex with her in 1997. Ivana later retracted her claims, but Harth is standing by hers.
"The same year that Harth accused Trump of assault, he was photographed "out on the town" with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend — and another of his underage-girl recruiters. Virginia Roberts, who said Epstein made her a "sex slave" and loaned her out to his friends, was allegedly recruited by Epstein at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump has also been documented attending parties at Epstein’s townhouse in the early 2000s, and message pads from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion show calls between the two in 2004.
Epstein plead the fifth during a 2010 trial, when asked whether his social outings with Trump ever included underage women. Trump, however, openly discussed Epstein’s penchant for younger women in an interview with New York Magazine.
"I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy," he said. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
But Epstein entertained dozens of high-profile guests, including Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman, real-estate tycoon Leon Black, and even former president Bill Clinton. Is Trump and Epstein’s friendship enough to place him at Epstein’s apartment on the night of the alleged assault? Detective Fisten doesn't think so.
"I interviewed hundreds of victims — people who were victimized by Jeffrey, worked with him, were part of his organization," Fisten told me. "I interviewed them, the FBI interviewed him … Trump never came up involved in this part of his life anywhere, at any time, by anybody."
Asked why Trump was named in this lawsuit, Fisten said flatly, “They threw Trump’s name in there.”
With the allegations against Epstein and Trump covered, I turned my attention to the other shadowy figure in this story: Al Taylor (or according to The Guardian, Norm Lubow).
Toward the end of our interview, I asked Johnson whether anyone helped her file her initial lawsuit.
"I'm sorry?" she responded.
"Did anyone help you or encourage you in the filing of that first lawsuit?" I repeated. "I'm sure it was a very monumental decision."
That's when her lawyer jumped in.
"I definitely don't mind you answering this question," Meagher told Johnson. "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."
When I finally convinced Meagher to allow Johnson to speak openly, she admitted that Taylor had been instrumental in the filing of the lawsuit. She said they had been introduced through a mutual friend, who urged her to go to Taylor with the story. The friend believed Taylor had the resources to bring her accusations to light.
"[Taylor is] for lack of a better term, a good team player," Johnson told me. "If I need help with something, he's there to help me. ... He knows a lot about a lot of different fields that just have been really helpful to this entire thing, and I couldn’t have done it without him. I wouldn’t have done it without him."
But when I talked to Steve Baer, a conservative donor who has been rallying media attention around this case (and against Trump) he told me a different version of the story.
"Al says he's a friend of Katie's," Baer told me. "He met her at a party that a friend held — I think it was a Christmas or holiday party — about two years ago."
At that party, Baer recounted, Taylor asked Johnson conversationally whether she had any good celebrity gossip. Eventually, Johnson told him the story of her assault. At the time, Baer claims, Taylor didn't want to touch the story. But when Trump's campaign started picking up steam, he circled back around to Johnson.
"They concluded, I think on advice of friends of Al's in media, that the way journalists would feel comfortable about writing about this story would be if it were attached to a lawyer and a plaintiff's case," Baer told me. "Because that way Katie doesn't have to be out front and at personal risk for her life and safety."
As for Meagher, he thinks all the focus on Taylor's involvement is a distraction from the real issue at hand: The alleged rape of a 13-year-old-girl. As he put it in a recent email to me, centering this narrative on Taylor is "allowing the sins of others to be visited upon my client."
The day after my interview, Baer forwarded me a letter Johnson looked to have written that day.
The letter's recipient is none other than Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives.
"I am an independent person who wants only one thing," the politically-charged letter says. "I want to stop the evil, sick, pedophile pervert who raped me when I was only 13 from becoming president of this great country of ours."
I don't know if Johnson wrote that letter. In fact, 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. I have never seen Johnson — in person, or via FaceTime, as I was originally promised — and I have not spoken to her only eyewitness, Tiffany Doe. To my knowledge, no journalist has.
All I know is the reason why the woman I spoke to on July 11 chose to speak to me at all.
"I just want to get justice,” she told me. "I mean, these things happen to girls everywhere ... I just want people to know."
Revelist reached out to the Trump campaign twice for comment and received no response.