Editor's note: In September 2025, the U.S. House Oversight Committee released the contents of Jeffrey Epstein's 50th-birthday book, which included the purported letter from Donald Trump. Read more here.
On July 17, 2025, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an exclusive report claiming U.S. President Donald Trump once sent a birthday letter to now-deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday that depicted the rough outline of a nude woman. Since the story was published, a number of online posts claimed to share an image of that very letter, with the text cited by the WSJ.
Readers asked us to confirm whether the letter in the image below was the original birthday letter Trump sent to Epstein (censored by us):
(Image via reader submission)
We looked closely at the above image and compared it to the description of the letter provided by WSJ. We found a number of inconsistencies that led us to conclude the image above doesn't depict the actual letter in question. As such, we rate this claim as fake.
We reached out to the WSJ reporters who covered this story to confirm the veracity of the image, and will update this post if we hear back.
As we noted in previous coverage, the report describes the note from Trump thus:
The letter bearing Trump's name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy — like others in the [birthday] album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman's breasts, and the future president's signature is a squiggly "Donald" below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The letter concludes: "Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."
Trump's letter to Epstein allegedly contained a typewritten, imaginary conversation between the two men:
Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
The WSJ described the typewritten text as "framed" by the body of a nude woman. The above image does not frame the text. Most of the text is outside the sketched outline. While the drawing also uses heavy marker and Trump's signature is placed to mimic genital hair, the woman's breasts are described as "small arcs." The breasts in the above image are not "small" and take up a significant amount of space on the page.
Furthermore, the text in the image does not exactly coincide with the text in the letter as reported by WSJ. The last line begins with "Trump:" which is missing from the text above, and also has a "—" missing before "and may every day be another wonderful secret."
The above letter correctly uses Trump Organization letterhead as we compared it to other examples of the letter reported on in the media. However, the WSJ report made no mention of letterhead.
In an interview with the Journal, Trump denied sending such a letter to Epstein: "This is not me. This is a fake thing. It's a fake Wall Street Journal story […] I never wrote a picture in my life. I don't draw pictures of women. […] It's not my language. It's not my words. […] I'm gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else."
The WSJ report came out after the U.S. Justice Department published a memo saying it would no longer release documents related to Epstein and concluded he did not maintain an elite "client list," angering Trump supporters who have long spread conspiracy theories about the files. The disgraced financier died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and investigators concluded he committed suicide.
Snopes also reported on a February 2025 letter between U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI head Kash Patel, which many people online said contradicted the Justice Department's claim that there was no Epstein "client list." The letter from Bondi to Patel never explicitly mentioned a client list, though it did say Bondi received "Epstein's list of contacts" in response to her request for the Epstein files.