Donald Trump Claims He 'Didn't Know Anything' About Wife Melania's Epstein Speech

President Donald Trump claimed he did not know anything about First Lady Melania Trump's baffling Thursday, April 9, televised address regarding her alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein until it happened.

During a brief phone call with reporter Jacqueline Alemany of MS NOW, the POTUS stated he was in a meeting regarding the ongoing Iran war and had no prior knowledge of the statement. He reiterated that Melania "didn’t know" Epstein before hanging up.

However, the 79-year-old POTUS’s statement didn’t match what his wife’s office said.

A spokesperson for the 55-year-old first lady told The New York Times that the president was aware she would make a statement.

CNN reported that while Donald knew a statement was planned, he may not have known the specific topic.

Melania’s office sent an email to the press the day before announcing a "statement," but did not include any details.

The model's six-minute speech from the White House Grand Foyer was highly unexpected, especially given that she is typically evasive, aloof and rarely speaks in public.

Despite a plethora of photos of Donald’s third wife with both Jeffrey and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, she inexplicably emphasized, "The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today," and said that, despite no one ever saying she was, she was not a victim of Jeffrey's.

"I've never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” Melania said. “At the time, I had never met Epstein and had no knowledge of his criminal undertakings.”

She dismissed a seemingly cozy 2002 email exchange with Ghislaine as "casual correspondence" and characterized social media images linking her to Jeffrey as "fake.”

She denied that Jeffrey introduced her to her husband, stating they met by chance at a 1998 New York City party.

Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agency exec who the president tapped as U.S. Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, is credited with introducing Donald to Melania in 1998. In 2025, Paolo contacted a top ICE official to have his ex-girlfriend, model and mother of his child, Amanda Ungaro — who was in a Miami jail on fraud charges — deported to Brazil following a custody battle.

Just before Melania’s statements, a tweet from Amanda went viral, in which she threatened to "tear down the whole system" and "expose" personal secrets, claiming she had known Melania for 20 years.

Some speculated that this is why the mother-of-one decided to speak out. Author Michael Wolff, who is embroiled in lawsuits against the FLOTUS, who has sued him for his allegations of her ties to the dead child predator, had his own theory: that a new British book about former Prince Andrew alleges that she slept with Jeffrey a year before meeting Trump.

Critics and some survivors have called the strange speech a "deflection." In contrast, others noted the timing was peculiar, given the current administration's focus on the conflict in Iran, which many worldwide have said was a disastrous loss for the president, and suggested that a major bomb was about to drop regarding the Epstein scandal.

Melania also urged Congress to hold public hearings for Jeffrey's survivors to testify under oath, much to the dismay of many of his victims, who slammed her statements.

A joint statement signed by over a dozen survivors described FLOTUS' remarks as a "deflection of responsibility.”

They argued that survivors have already shown extraordinary courage by testifying in court and that asking more of them now under "politicized conditions" shifts the burden of justice from the government to the victims.