A Jeffrey Epstein survivor who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 has called out the president for suggesting that the sex trafficker’s victims are “lying,” urging him to imagine it was his own daughters who were abused.
Jena-Lisa Jones, who was 14 when she was abused, spoke to Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word on Wednesday evening. She described speaking out in front of the Capitol with other survivors as “intense,” and said she felt she was “putting my life on the line.”
Jones and other victims, along with family members, joined members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier on Wednesday for a press conference to recount their harrowing experiences and demand the full release of the Epstein files.
Jones became tearful when O’Donnell said she and her fellow survivors were “believed”—although the host added that President Trump doesn’t believe them.
Just after a planned flyover had disrupted the survivors speaking about their abuse, Trump lashed out in the Oval Office during a meeting with Polish President Karol Nowrocki. He dismissed the Epstein files issue as a “Democrat hoax that never ends.”
Jones responded on MSNBC. “I voted for him. I voted for Trump. And for him to say what he’s saying is beyond me, because I put my hope in him and he’s supposed to protect us,” she said.
“For him to say that this is a joke and that it’s sides, this is not sides. We will say it time and time again, none of us are up there accusing him of anything. There is no one that is accusing him of any wrongdoing, so the fact that he’s saying it’s a hoax, who are you hiding for then? Because if it’s not you, then who is it? And that scares me, who is it.”
She later declared that “the government has been protecting Jeffrey Epstein from the beginning.”
Asked what she would say to Trump, who sometimes watches The Last Word, Jones asked the president to imagine Ivanka or Tiffany Trump being abused by Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
“You have daughters. You know what it is like to raise children and to be a parent. Outside of all this hoopla that you’re the president or you’re Donald J. Trump and you have your Trump stuff, you know what it is to be a parent. You know that. Could you imagine if that was your daughter that was trafficked to people? Could you imagine your 14-year-old daughter having to go through what we had to go through?” she said.
Returning to his cries of “hoax,” Jones added: “And then you sit here and say what you said. You should be supporting us, you should be backing us. We spoke our truth and you are telling us pretty much that we’re lying. I put my hope in you when I voted for you and you can’t even back us when we need you the most? We need to heal, we’re not healing.”
Asked about the push to release all the documents relating to Epstein’s sex trafficking operations and networks, Trump told reporters: “Nobody’s ever satisfied.”
“But it’s really a Democrat hoax, because they’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president.”
The push for transparency came the day after more than 30,000 documents relating to Epstein were released by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.
Most of the documents produced were already public, prompting Democrats to accuse Republicans of an ongoing cover-up.
“There is no hoax,” survivor Haley Robson, who introduced herself as a registered Republican, said on Capitol Hill. “The abuse was real.”
Epstein and Maxwell were both longtime friends of Trump, partying with him in New York and at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, but he has always insisted that he knew nothing about the late billionaire’s crimes.
Speaking at the press conference, survivor Chauntae Davies said that this connection was Epstein’s “biggest brag” and that he kept a framed photograph of him and Trump on his desk.
