A viral post on social media is circulating a court document with allegations of sexual assault against former president Donald Trump made in a legal filing that was dismissed almost a decade ago.
The post alleges that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for this year's presidential election, "forced" young girls to "perform lesbian sex acts." It has amassed more than 17 millions views on X, formerly Twitter, since Monday, and has been shared more than 34,000 times.
Some X users appeared to believe that the document is a recent filing. The post was shared after about 150 pages of transcripts related to a 2006 grand jury investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's rape and sex trafficking of teenagers was released to the public on Monday.
However, the document included in the X post isn't connected to those papers, but actually comes from a lawsuit filed in the months leading up to the 2016 election by an anonymous plaintiff using the name "Katie Johnson."
That lawsuit, filed in federal court in Riverside, California, in April 2016, named Trump and Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, as defendants. It claimed the men held Johnson as a "sex slave" in 1994 when she was 13 and forced her to perform sex acts.
A judge dismissed the case in May that year, ruling that the complaint didn't raise valid claims under federal law, Politico reported at the time.
Another version of the lawsuit was filed in June, but reportedly withdrawn months later. A third version of the suit—with the plaintiff going by "Jane Doe"—was filed in September 2016, accusing Trump of rape. That suit was also dropped months later.
Trump's accuser had been expected to appear at a news conference in early November 2016, but her attorney, Lis Bloom, said she had received threats and was too afraid to show up. Doe's attorney, Thomas Meagher, then filed a notice to dismiss the case, without providing an explanation. The woman hasn't been heard from since.
Alan Garten, Trump's then-lawyer, dismissed the woman's allegations as "categorically untrue" at the time. "It is completely frivolous. It is baseless. It is irresponsible," Garten told Politico. "I won't even discuss the merits because it gives it credibility that it doesn't deserve."
A Trump spokesperson has been contacted for comment via email.
The allegations in the now-dismissed suits appear to resurface on social media when documents related to Epstein are unsealed.
A similar social media post circulated in January after previously sealed court documents from a now-settled lawsuit filed against Ghislaine Maxwell by one of Epstein's victims were made public.
Epstein was charged by federal prosecutors with sex trafficking in 2019. He was found dead in his jail cell while awaiting trial.
Maxwell was convicted of sex-trafficking charges in December 2021. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
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About the writer
Khaleda Rahman is Newsweek's National Correspondent based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on abortion rights, race, education, sexual ... Read more
