Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine says he avoided meetings that Jeffrey Epstein tried to arrange with him in the years following the late disgraced financier’s 2008 Florida conviction on sex offenses.
Mitchell was a longtime friend of Epstein and served as a Maine senator from 1980 to 1995. His name appears more than 300 times in more than 3 million pages of files from criminal investigations of Epstein that were released by the Department of Justice on Friday.
The newly released files include several emails showing Epstein tried to arrange meetings with Mitchell until 2013. There is also an FBI record containing a graphic depiction of a young woman making what appear to be new allegations about sexual encounters with the former Maine senator, a Democrat and one of the most powerful politicians in state history.
Since 2019, Mitchell has denied a woman’s allegations that Epstein sent her to have sex with him. That year, Epstein was charged with federal sex trafficking offenses and died by suicide in prison. Fallout from the case has been a big issue in politics since then given Epstein’s ties to powerful men, including President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
Mitchell has never been charged with a crime. He has long said that he never met nor had sex with notable Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre and did not know of Epstein’s abuse of underage girls until the 2008 conviction, after which he cut off contact with Epstein.
In a Sunday statement issued through a spokesperson, Mitchell repeated that and said he “declined or deflected” invitations from Epstein that came afterward.
“Senator Mitchell profoundly regrets ever having known Jeffrey Epstein and condemns, without reservation, the horrific harm Epstein inflicted on so many women,” the spokesperson said.
Mitchell, who is now 92 and has been a revered figure for his role as a peace envoy to Northern Ireland, is seeing reputational damage after last week’s release. A U.S.-Ireland group removed his name from a scholarship on Sunday, while a Northern Ireland university said it would take his name off a peace center and remove a bust of him from school grounds.
Epstein was paraphrased as saying the Waterville native was the world’s greatest negotiator in a 2003 magazine profile. That same year, Mitchell wrote Epstein a letter calling their friendship a “blessing.”
The files released last week show Epstein trying several times to meet with Mitchell after 2008. In one email from 2010, he tells someone whose name is redacted that he called Mitchell’s assistant and left a message on the former Maine senator’s cellphone to urge him to come to a Yom Kippur event.
In February 2013, someone associated with Epstein made a note to themselves to see if Mitchell was available for a lunch with Epstein and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. (Epstein’s relationship with Gates began in 2011. He wrote notes to himself suggesting that Gates engaged in extramarital sex, while the billionaire denied after the recent release.)
A schedule that was sent to Epstein noted an appointment with Mitchell at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. It does not say who was supposed to meet with him, but the schedule follows with what appears to be a haircut scheduled for Epstein at a salon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near where he lived.
Epstein’s high profile continued after his conviction on state charges in Florida of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. He served just 13 months as part of a controversial plea deal involving federal prosecutors that came under heavy scrutiny following a November 2018 report in the Miami Herald.
Mitchell’s 2019 denial came after documents containing allegations against him by Giuffre were unsealed as part of a civil court case. A 2020 FBI document made public as part of the Friday release mentions graphic details of alleged sexual encounters between Mitchell and a young woman whose name is redacted but is described as someone who spoke poor English.
That woman is paraphrased as saying she was sent by Epstein to see Mitchell for two multiday trips — one in California and another in Washington, D.C. — during which she had sex with him. There are no specific dates mentioned, although these encounters are generally described to have taken place between 2003 and 2004.
She alleged that she left Mitchell in Washington, saying she wanted to go back to school. Epstein is said to have called her the next day to berate her, being “loud, angry and mean.”
When asked to respond to this document, the Mitchell spokesperson pointed to part of an original statement: “Senator Mitchell reiterates unequivocally that he never met, spoke with, or had any contact of any kind with Ms. Giuffre or with any underage women,” underlining “any.”
