Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Donald Trump a “rapist” while jabbing him for the MAGA crisis over his handling of the files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?” the New York congresswoman wrote on X Friday.
Trump and his administration have faced a loud and very public outcry, particularly from inside the MAGAsphere, after announcing that there was neither a client list in the Epstein files nor any evidence that Epstein was murdered, shutting down two popular conspiracy theories.
ADVERTISEMENT
In another post Friday, Ocasio-Cortez shared a WIRED story reporting that what the Justice Department called the “full raw” surveillance footage from Epstein’s prison cell block the night he died was likely modified.
The DOJ’s release of the footage was intended to dispel theories that the footage contained revelations about Epstein’s death, which was officially ruled a suicide.
At the Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump shut down a reporter’s question about the Epstein files.
“Are you still talking about Jeffery Epstein?” Trump asked. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”
“We have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable,” the president continued.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung sounded off on Ocasio-Cortez in a statement to the Daily Beast.
“AOC likes to play pretend like she’s from the block, but in reality she’s just a sad, miserable blockhead who is trying to overcompensate for her lack of self-confidence that has followed her for her entire life,” he said. “Instead, she should get some serious help for her obvious and severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted her pea-sized brain.”
The president has often lashed out at AOC, who is one of his harshest critics in the House. Last month, he called her “stupid AOC” and the “dumbest member of Congress.”
In 2023, Trump was found civilly liable of sexual abuse against writer E. Jean Carroll by a Manhattan jury, which awarded her $5 million.
Under New York’s penal code, the legal definition of rape only encompasses nonconsensual penile penetration, which was not what happened in Carroll’s case.
Trump earned a $15 million payout from a defamation lawsuit he settled with ABC News in 2024 after anchor George Stephanopoulos said on air that Trump was found liable for “rape.”
During Trump’s appeal of the Carroll case, however, a judge clarified that the jury still found Trump to have raped Carroll as the word is used colloquially.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in July 2023.
It isn’t the first time Ocasio-Cortez has called Trump a “rapist.” She said during a rally in April of this year, “If Donald Trump wants to find the rapists and criminals in this country, he needs to look in a mirror.”
Trump’s relationship to Epstein has long faced scrutiny.
Although Trump was photographed alongside Epstein long before becoming president, he has denied that he flew on Epstein’s jet or visited his private island.
In 2024, the Daily Beast exclusively published audio tapes recorded in 2017 in which Epstein called himself Trump’s “closest friend.”
Epstein was awaiting trial on charges of sex-trafficking minors when he died by suicide at New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center on Aug. 10, 2019.
