In late February 2026, a rumor resurfaced that someone claiming to be a victim of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein submitted a tip to the FBI accusing U.S. President Donald Trump of witnessing her baby being killed in 1984.
The claim originally circulated after the Department of Justice released a slew of files related to Epstein in December 2025. According to posts from February 2026 (archived, archived), the complainant's newborn baby was murdered and thrown in Lake Michigan.
The document is authentic; the complainant, whose identity was redacted, submitted the tip to the FBI National Threat Operations Center on Aug. 3, 2020, while Trump was running against Joe Biden, then a former vice president, for a second term in office.
Although many users online took this rumor as fact, the claims that person made have not been independently substantiated, and the information did not line up with the established timeline of Trump's friendship with Epstein.
Some posts claimed the DOJ removed the tip from its database — this is not true, as of this writing.
In an email to Snopes, the FBI declined to comment on whether it had investigated the tip.
What did the tip allege?
The complainant submitted the tip — still viewable on the DOJ's website — on the FBI's website as a follow-up to a phone call she allegedly had with a detective who had reached out to her after she submitted an initial anonymous tip three or four weeks earlier. The text read, in part:
I talked to [the detective] for about 20 or 30 minutes about my being sex trafficked by my uncle and Jeffrey Epstein in 1984 while I was 13 and pregnant. I told him some other important information about other high profile individuals involved in my sex trafficking and the murder and disposal of my newborn daughter because I gave birth to her while in the middle of this sex trafficking ordeal.
The tip went on to allege that Epstein and the complainant's uncle arranged a scheme "where different men, and a few women and girls, would come to a variety of boats and yachts and pay money to force me to [redacted] with them."
The complainant wrote that Trump "participated regularly in paying money to force me to [redacted] with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan." There was no additional mention of Trump in the tip.
Is there evidence the tip isn't legitimate?
While the tip alleged the incident occurred in 1984, Trump reportedly did not meet Epstein until the late 1980s.
Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in December 1985, and Epstein bought his Palm Beach residence in 1990, though evidence suggests he may have frequented Palm Beach in the 1980s. In 2002, Trump told New York magazine he'd known Epstein for 15 years — suggesting they met in or around 1987. The New York Times published a 1986 photo of Epstein with Wall Street stockbroker Nikki Haskell, whom the Times described as a close friend of Ivana Trump's — Trump's then-wife, indicating they may have had overlapping social circles in New York before Epstein bought property in Palm Beach.
It's unclear why Trump and Epstein would have been in a small town in Michigan when neither of them had any documented links to the immediate area at the time. Trump did own a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan for years — but that riverboat, based in Gary, Indiana, did not open until 1996, according to news reports from the time.
We reached out to the Muskegon County Sheriff's Office seeking any information regarding a sex trafficking ring in the county — where the incident allegedly took place — in the 1980s, and did not hear back.
The complainant did not name any other prominent people involved in the alleged incident besides Trump and Epstein — who were both heavily featured in the news cycle shortly after Epstein's death by suicide in 2019 and leading up to the 2020 presidential election. She wrote only: "I told [the detective] some other important information about other high profile individuals involved in my sex trafficking."
Has the White House responded to the allegations?
We reached out to the White House seeking comment on the allegations, and a spokesperson responded with a link to an X post (archived) by the DOJ that read: "Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election."
In sum …
The document containing an FBI tip alleging Trump witnessed infanticide involving an Epstein victim is authentic and was available on the DOJ website. Snopes has not substantiated any of the claims in the tip, some of which did not align with the established timeline of Trump and Epstein's relationship, and the FBI declined to comment on it.
For further reading, we investigated a letter the DOJ released, purportedly from Epstein to fellow sex offender and former U.S. gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, that said, in part, "Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls."