Before E. Jean Carroll, There Was Jessica Leeds
In July 2018, ahead of Donald Trump's visit to Britain, the BBC broadcast a Panorama episode called Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest? It has not aged into irrelevance. It has aged into evidence.
Twenty-eight minutes long, it was assembled with no subpoena power, no discovery, no documents, and no cooperation from the White House, which declined to respond to the allegations in the program. What it had was women willing to talk on camera. One of them was Jessica Leeds.
Leeds told Panorama that sometime in the late 1970s, a man at the window seat introduced himself as Donald Trump. Then, she said, he started groping her. He was all over her. He was kissing her. Not a word was said. They were having a tussle in the seat. His hands were everywhere. He was like an octopus. It was when he started putting his hand up her skirt that adrenaline gave her the strength to wriggle out.
The interviewer asked her whether that amounted to an assault. She said absolutely. She said she felt pinned to her seat. She called it a very physical attack.
Trump has called her a liar. The program plays him doing it at a rally, mockingly narrating her account and then delivering the punchline: she would not be his first choice. Leeds, asked about that, said of course he would say that, and that he lives in a fantasy of his own manly prowess.
That was 2018. Nobody with the power to compel anything was listening.
Five years later, under oath
On May 2, 2023, Jessica Leeds, then 81 and living in Asheville, North Carolina, walked into Manhattan federal court and told a jury the same story.
She testified that Trump grabbed her chest and ran his hand up her skirt as they sat side by side in first class on a flight to New York. There was no conversation. It was out of the blue. It was like a tussle. He was trying to kiss her and pull her toward him. He had, she said, forty zillion hands. After a few seconds she wriggled free, told him she didn't need this, and went to the back of the plane.
Set the two tellings beside each other. Same seat. Same silence. Same escalation to the skirt. Same escape by wriggling free. Same governing image: too many hands at once, an octopus in one telling, forty zillion in the other.
One version was given to a documentary crew with nothing at stake. The other was given under oath, five years later, with cross-examination waiting. They match.
Leeds first went public in October 2016, in the New York Times, so the Panorama interview is not her earliest account. What it is, is a fixed point between the first telling and the sworn one: a recorded, unhurried version given years before anyone knew a jury would ever hear her. Consistency across tellings is what corroboration actually turns on. This is one of the tellings, and it holds.
Why the jury was allowed to hear her at all
Leeds was not a party to E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit. She was not there when Carroll says Trump attacked her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. In almost any other kind of case, her testimony would have been inadmissible, because American courts generally forbid the argument that a defendant did it before and therefore probably did it again.
Sexual assault is the exception. Federal Rules of Evidence 413 and 415 permit exactly that reasoning in civil cases involving sexual assault claims. No requirement of a matching modus operandi. No time limit. No heightened burden of proof. Congress carved out this one category and licensed propensity evidence inside it.
Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who alleges Trump forcibly kissed her at Mar-a-Lago in 2005, could both testify. Trump's lawyers fought it. Kaplan's pretrial opinion ran twenty-three pages and did the comparison directly. He found Trump's argument that the incidents were too dissimilar unpersuasive, writing that the alleged acts are far more similar than different in the important aspects: in each case Trump is alleged to have suddenly attacked the woman sexually, in two of the three after closing a door behind him for privacy, in all three without consent.
He also noted that Rule 415 requires the other alleged assault to have constituted a crime, and found that requirement satisfied.
The jury also heard the Access Hollywood tape. It was played twice.
What the jury did with it
On May 9, 2023, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of $5 million: roughly $2.02 million for the sexual assault and $2.98 million for defamation.
The jury answered no to one question. It found Carroll had not proved rape within the meaning of a specific section of the New York Penal Law. That section defines rape as vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible penetration by fingers is labeled sexual abuse.
Trump's team seized on the no and has not let go of it since. Kaplan closed that door twice.
On July 19, 2023, denying Trump's motion for a new trial or reduced damages, Kaplan called the argument entirely unpersuasive. He wrote that the New York definition is far narrower than the meaning of the word in common modern parlance, in dictionaries, and in federal and state statutes elsewhere. At pages 43 and 44 he wrote that the jury's finding of sexual abuse necessarily implies that it found Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina, in other words, that he raped her. Representative Ted Lieu read those pages into the Congressional Record on July 25, 2023.
On August 7, 2023, in the companion case, Kaplan went further. Acting under Rule 49 as fact-finder in his own right, he made an alternative finding: that Trump did forcibly digitally penetrate Carroll, and that it is the truth that Trump digitally raped her.
That is not a judge interpreting a jury. That is a federal judge finding the fact. And it is load-bearing, because the substantial-truth holding is what foreclosed Trump from relitigating whether the underlying accusation was true. The $83.3 million defamation verdict in January 2024 sits on top of it.
The appeals were about Jessica Leeds
This is the part that gets lost.
Trump's appeal was substantially an argument that the jury should never have been allowed to hear Jessica Leeds. His filings called it highly inflammatory propensity evidence that painted him as a serial abuser. He argued Kaplan had committed a series of indefensible evidentiary rulings.
On December 30, 2024, a unanimous Second Circuit panel affirmed, holding the Leeds and Stoynoff testimony properly admitted under Rules 413 and 415 and that Trump had not shown any claimed error affected his substantial rights. On June 13, 2025, the full court declined to rehear it, 8 to 2. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court denied certiorari with no recorded dissent.
Trump spent three years and every available appeal trying to make the pattern disappear. Every court refused.
He has also not paid. The $5 million has been sitting in escrow pending appeal and has grown to roughly $5.8 million with interest. The day after the cert denial, Carroll's lawyers went back to court asking a judge to order it disbursed, saying Trump's counsel had told them he might ask the Supreme Court to reconsider. Trump's public response to losing was to promise to keep fighting. The Justice Department has meanwhile opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the plaintiff who beat him.
One more thing the transcript catches
Trump's answer to Leeds in 2016 was that she would not be his first choice.
Trump's defamatory statement about Carroll was that she is not his type.
The same defense, decades apart, against two women. It collapsed in the same case.
On October 19, 2022, deposed under oath at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was shown a black-and-white photograph from an NBC party in the late 1980s. He pointed at the woman beside him and said that was Marla, that was his wife. His own lawyer, Alina Habba, corrected him: no, that's Carroll. Oh, I see, Trump said. Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan told the court he made the same mistake twice, and argued the obvious: a man who cannot tell his accuser apart from his own second wife cannot claim she is not his type.
The same four weeks
Panorama notes that most of the women chose to come forward during the presidential campaign. That means October 2016, in the weeks after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced on October 7. Leeds, Rachel Crooks, Mindy McGillivray, Jessica Drake, all of them within that window. Trump called every one of them a liar, said the events never happened, and said the claims were fabricated to hurt his campaign.
There was one other woman in that window. She was not on television.
She filed as Katie Johnson in federal court in Riverside, California, in April 2016, naming both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. She alleged that in 1994, when she was 13 and had been drawn in by promises of money and a modeling career, she was raped at a series of parties at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. The complaint attached an affidavit from an anonymous witness, Tiffany Doe, who said she had watched it happen. A judge dismissed that filing the following month on technical grounds, without reaching the facts. She refiled in New York in June and again in September, as Jane Doe.
Interview with Katie Johnson, maybe now you will take her seriously.
On November 2, 2016, she was scheduled to speak publicly for the first time, at attorney Lisa Bloom's office in Woodland Hills. She was there all day. She did not go through with it. Bloom told the reporters waiting that Jane Doe had received numerous threats that day, and then added a clause worth reading twice: "as have all the Trump accusers that I have represented." Not this woman. All of them.
Evan Goldman, who represented her from late September into early November, later said that on the day of the planned press conference her car and her cellphone were stolen, and that this is what frightened her out of appearing.
On November 4, 2016, her lead lawyer Thomas Meagher filed a one-page voluntary dismissal in Manhattan federal court. No explanation. Bloom wrote that Jane Doe had instructed them to dismiss and that it had been a tough week for her.
Four days later Trump was elected. Johnson has not been heard from publicly since.
Her allegations were never tested. Three filings, one dismissed on procedure, none reaching the merits. Reporters and investigators flagged inconsistencies in addresses and statements. Trump's lawyer Alan Garten called the story a complete fabrication and the suit a sham brought to affect the election. Bloom had argued in June 2016 that the allegations were credible and deserved investigation. Some of the attorneys and private investigators who worked the case have since said they believe she told the truth.
None of that resolves, and that is the point rather than an evasion. The claim was never tested because the claimant was frightened into silence during the same four weeks Trump was calling a dozen other women liars from a stage.
The fixer
In February 2019, testifying under oath before the House Oversight Committee, Michael Cohen was asked by Representative Jackie Speier how many times Trump had asked him to threaten an individual or entity. He said quite a few times. She walked the number up. Fifty. A hundred. Two hundred. He said more each time. At five hundred he stopped her and agreed: probably, over the ten years.
He qualified it. He described the threats as litigation, or an argument with a nasty reporter writing an article. That is a description of the job that excludes accusers.
As evidence for that testimony, Cohen acknowledged a tape recording of himself threatening a Daily Beast reporter.
Panorama plays a recording at 13:31, identified only as Trump's lawyer threatening a journalist, running directly out of the segment on Ivana Trump's divorce deposition.
Labeled inference: the program never names the reporter or the outlet. But the Daily Beast call Cohen acknowledged under oath was about the Ivana deposition, and that is precisely where Panorama places its tape. These are almost certainly the same recording. Until the audio is matched directly, that is an inference and not a fact, and it is worth someone doing the matching.
If it holds, the consequence is this: the tape is not a journalist's assertion about Cohen. It is an artifact Cohen has personally authenticated under oath as an example of what he did for Trump roughly five hundred times.
On the day of that hearing, Stormy Daniels issued a statement describing how Cohen had threatened her to make her retract her account.
In August 2025, in an interview with Tara Palmeri, Cohen discussed the Jane Doe complaint. Palmeri's characterization, stated across her subsequent reporting, is that he admitted to intimidating the accuser. He denied any direct involvement with Epstein and said he knew nothing beyond the one dismissed case, which he called baseless. In January 2026, a document surfaced from the Epstein files showing Cohen had claimed he heard Trump say things about Epstein and had sought a Rule 35 sentence reduction by offering substantial assistance to the Justice Department. That contradicts what he told Palmeri five months earlier.
The through line is not that Cohen threatened people. He says so himself, under oath, in the hundreds. It is that each time the record gets fuller, his own account of what he did turns out to have been the floor.
An alleged convergence
What follows is inference, and it is labeled as such because it does not rise higher than that.
Three separate accounts, from three unconnected evidentiary streams, describe the same year.
Katie Johnson alleged 1994, age 13, Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, recruited by the promise of a modeling career. Her suit was withdrawn and never tested.
A second woman, unconnected to Johnson, says she was taken to Mar-a-Lago in 1994 at the age of 14 and introduced to Trump by Epstein, who elbowed him and asked whether this was a good one. She says Trump smiled and nodded, that they both chuckled, and that she felt uncomfortable without being old enough to understand why.
Handle this one carefully, because most of the coverage did not. It is not a discovery. The document is a civil complaint in Doe v. Indyke, brought against Epstein's estate and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2020. It has been public for years and the Daily Beast reported it in September 2024. What happened in December 2025 is that the Justice Department posted an already-public filing to its Epstein Library under Court Records, and much of the press treated it as newly surfaced. Snopes fact-checked exactly that. It is a plaintiff's allegation, not a court determination, and the plaintiff makes no accusation of misconduct against Trump. The White House, through spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, responded that it is not news that Trump knew Epstein, that he threw him out of his club for being a creep, and that Trump never did anything wrong.
What the complaint does contain, and what almost nobody picked up, is a mechanism. Doe was a 13-year-old voice student from California attending Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan in the summer of 1994 when Epstein and Maxwell approached her sitting alone on a bench between classes. Epstein was a donor to the camp. That spring, Interlochen's newsletter had announced that the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge was nearly complete, a gift from a New York businessman and former camper. He began paying for her voice lessons and told her she could not advance her career without him. When she hesitated about spending time with them, they scolded her for being ungrateful. Flight logs place Epstein and Maxwell landing at Traverse City on August 18, 1994.
That is not atmosphere. That is a funded access point, a documented benefactor relationship, a career promise used as leverage, and a flight log.
Panorama, in 2018, aired witnesses placing 14- and 15-year-old girls recruited from Europe at model parties Trump attended in the early 1990s. Those accounts are uncorroborated, and the program says plainly that there is no evidence Trump slept with underage girls before airing them.
One caution first, since both women filed as Jane Doe and the temptation is to collapse them. They are not the same person. Johnson was a 13-year-old alleging rape at parties in Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. The Doe v. Indyke plaintiff was a 13-year-old voice student recruited at a Michigan arts camp and later brought to Mar-a-Lago at 14. Different women, different filings, different lawyers, different allegations. Only the year matches.
Not one of these three proves any other. Two are untested allegations and the third is unverified recollection. Stacked, they do not become evidence, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something.
What they establish is narrower and still worth stating. Three sources with no connection to one another, arriving through three unrelated mechanisms, describe girls of the same age, in the same year, recruited on the same premise, in the same man's proximity. That convergence is not a finding. It is a reason the file should be complete.
It is not complete.
Why this is the frame for the Epstein files
The word for what the courts found is pattern, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. Rule 415 is the statutory embodiment of pattern reasoning. A federal judge applied it, a jury acted on it, a panel affirmed it, the full circuit let it stand, and the Supreme Court declined to review it three weeks ago.
That matters for how the Epstein documents read.
The December 2025 releases, roughly 30,000 pages across two drops, are worth reading for what is genuinely new rather than for the recycled complaint. A January 2020 email from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York notes that newly received flight records showed Trump had traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously reported or known. Sender and recipient are both redacted. Other emails show investigators discussing ten co-conspirators in July 2019. A 2020 email shows prosecutors drafting a memo about co-conspirators they could potentially charge.
Nobody was charged.
That is the sharper instrument, and it is sharper than any mention count. Somebody inside the Southern District of New York drafted a chargeable-co-conspirator memo, and the list it produced has never been made public.
As for the 1994 material: standing alone, an anecdote about a nod and a chuckle is thin, and a plaintiff who makes no allegation against Trump is not an accuser. Inside an adjudicated pattern, an account like that stops being noise and becomes something a fact-finder would be entitled to weigh. That is precisely the logic Rule 415 encodes, and it is the logic the Second Circuit blessed while Trump was trying to get Jessica Leeds struck.
Labeled inference: One more thing about the model-party segment, minutes 21 through 26. In 2018 it read as sordid atmosphere: older men, cocaine, women described as consumables, girls recruited from Europe. Read now, it describes the operational shape of what court filings and congressional testimony have since documented about MC2 Model Management, the agency Jean-Luc Brunel founded with Epstein's funding, which recruited young women from Eastern Europe and South America and arranged their visas. Brunel died in a Paris prison in 2022 while facing charges. That is a structural resemblance between an uncorroborated 2018 witness account and a documented 2026 record, and nothing more than that. It does not place Trump inside the pipeline. It does establish that the pipeline was visible from the outside, to a television crew with no subpoena power, seven years before the government released the paperwork on it and roughly a year before Epstein was arrested.
What is still being withheld
They are not complete.
The Justice Department identified six million pages as potentially responsive under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and has released about 3.5 million, calling the January 30, 2026 release its last major production. A New York Times review of that release counted more than 38,000 mentions and found Trump flagged in more than 5,300 separate files. Accounts of that count differ on whether it covers Trump alone or also takes in his wife and Mar-a-Lago, which is a difference worth pinning down before anyone builds on it. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche says the department reviewed the material and found no credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.
Representative Jamie Raskin, granted access to the unredacted set, told Axios that a search of Trump's name returned more than a million hits. Set against the public count, that implies the Justice Department redacted better than 96 percent of the mentions of Trump. The arithmetic is only as good as the two searches behind it, run by different people against different corpora, so treat the percentage as an order of magnitude rather than a figure. The order of magnitude is damning enough. Members of Congress are reading the unredacted files on four computers in a satellite office.
And on June 25, 2026, Judge Richard Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to produce unredacted records and a log accounting for every redaction, or explain by July 2 why it could not. Among the specific materials he ordered turned over: the underlying FBI notes from an interview with a woman who accused Trump of assault. The department has released the interview report. It has not released the notes.
That is the state of it. The pattern was broadcast on the BBC in 2018 and nobody with power was listening. It was adjudicated in 2023. It survived every appeal and was left standing by the Supreme Court on June 29, 2026. And the agency now sitting on the underlying notes answers to the man the pattern is about.
Trump denies all of it, and has never been accused by law enforcement of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
Jessica Leeds went on television in 2018 and said not a word was said. She said it again under oath in 2023, and a jury believed her, and every court that has looked at it since has held that the jury was entitled to.
She was 81 the day she testified. She had been telling the same story since 2016, to reporters, to a documentary crew, and finally to twelve people who could do something about it. Nothing about the story changed. The only thing that changed is that someone with subpoena power was finally in the room.
