When Bill Clinton looked out of the private plane window as it came to land in Africa, he likely had no idea how much the 2002 trip would change his life.
The tour was to launch his new nonprofit AIDS initiative, taking in five countries and even spending the day with former South African president Nelson Mandela.
But those aspects of the trip have long been forgotten as the ex-president, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker and others were flying as guests of Jeffrey Epstein about the infamous jet later to be known as The Lolita Express.
William J. Clinton Presidential Library
Devious Epstein, later exposed as a pedophile, had staffed the jet with young girls — one of the tactics he is said to have employed to impress and coerce powerful people.
“I felt Epstein put the President at risk with those young girls on board,” said Spacey in an interview with Piers Morgan last year. “It was disturbing. There were young girls on those flights. I didn’t understand at the time who they were or why they were there.”
An eyebrow-raising photo which later surfaced from that trip shows Clinton, then 56, reclining in an airport lounge in a yellow shirt while Chauntae Davies, a 22-year-old massage therapist in Epstein’s employ, rubs his shoulders.
This week Clinton and his wife, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were subpoenaed to testify before the House Oversight Committee about Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The Committee’s letter to Hillary Clinton described a potential “close relationship” between her family and Epstein and Maxwell, according to reports.
By the time of the 2002 trip, Clinton had been linked to mysterious Manhattan financier Epstein for at least a decade.
Epstein donated $1,000 to Clinton’s election campaign in 1992, and later gave his wife $20,000 for her US Senate campaign in 1999, according to public records.
In between, both Epstein and Maxwell visited the White House 17 times during Clinton’s two terms in office, starting in 1993.
Epstein also later visited Clinton at the Harlem office of the Clinton Foundation in 2002, according to reports.
The African trip was the second of Clinton’s estimated 26 trips on Epstein’s “Lolita Express,” on which he occasionally traveled without the Secret Service, according to flight logs — a breach of presidential protection protocol.
Now federal lawmakers are re-examining those trips and the former president’s relationship with Epstein amid a widening probe into the financier. The move comes after the Justice Department interviewed Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for recruiting underage girls for her and Epstein to abuse. She is said to have given her lawyers 100 names associated with Epstein.
After the September 2002 Africa trip, Clinton’s former close aide Doug Band claimed to Vanity Fair that he tried for years to keep Epstein at a distance, but Clinton just couldn’t stay away.
Band said in early 2003, the former president visited Epstein’s private Caribbean retreat, Little St. James — now known as “Pedophile Island.”
The Clinton camp has many times insisted the former president never set foot on the island.
However, according to late Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Clinton was spotted sitting across the dinner table with “two lovely girls” on Epstein’s private Caribbean Island.
Giuffre, who also said she was parceled out as a sex slave to Prince Andrew, made the claim in a fictionalized “memoir” she wrote that was included in a legal complaint against Maxwell, who she sued for defamation in 2015.
“Teasing the girls on either side of him with playful pokes and brassy comments, there was no modesty between any of them,” Giuffre wrote in the never-published manuscript, “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club.”
“We all finished our meals and scattered in our own different directions. Strolling into the darkness with two beautiful girls around either arm, Bill seemed content to retire for the evening.”
Clinton has sought to downplay his relationship with Epstein over the years, saying that he cut off their friendship well before either of his arrests — in 2007 and 2019 — and he was unaware of his crimes.
In 2019, a spokesman for Clinton said he “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.”
A representative for Clinton did not return a request for comment Wednesday and Clinton has not been accused of any sexual misconduct regarding Epstein’s victims.
Spencer Kuvin, a Florida lawyer who represented some of the first victims of Epstein to come forward in 2007, said during his investigations he didn’t find any evidence of Clinton engaging in “inappropriate behavior” but said that he had “a pattern of socializing” with Epstein.
“He was seeking influence from all sides,” said Kuvin, referring to Epstein. “He wanted to befriend as many high-profile people and have them in his orbit. If they were stuck on a plane with him for a long time, they had to speak to him and he could build a relationship that way.”
While Bill sought to distance himself from Epstein, the financier liked to remind his acquaintances of the association. A reporter who met Epstein a year before he died noted how he kept a picture of himself with Clinton on display.
After his death, when the FBI raided his mansion, they uncovered a large painting of Clinton in a brightly colored blue dress — resembling the one worn by Monica Lewinsky, whom Clinton was embroiled in his own sex scandal with — from the property.
