The United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, while in Washington a fight over the Epstein files was still grinding on, and one of the most explosive parts of that fight was a South Carolina woman’s accusation that Donald Trump sexually abused her when she was 13.
Before the strikes, reporting on her account was closing in on the front pages of America’s newspapers. She first contacted the FBI in 2019, days after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, and told investigators she had been trafficked after answering an ad for a babysitting job. She said Epstein abused her on Hilton Head Island as many as twenty times and later took her to New York or New Jersey to be introduced to wealthy men. One FBI summary said she was introduced to someone with money, money, money and that it was Donald Trump.
The woman’s story has become part of the larger struggle over what the government knew, what it kept, and what it allowed to disappear. Her interviews appeared in evidence logs for the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, and the FBI interviewed her four times between August and October 2019. But three of those four interview summaries went missing from the Justice Department’s public database, a gap that has fueled the pressure on officials to explain what happened to the records and why they were not all available.
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The Post and Courier spent months investigating her account and could not independently verify her accusations against Trump. It did corroborate her family background, her legal history and her account of a third alleged abuser, a Hilton Head businessman named Jimmy Atkins. The newspaper said Atkins’s Ohio college affiliation, physical description, age and connections to the area all matched the period she described, and it also reported that the FBI’s official typed summaries diverged from the bureau’s handwritten interview notes.
That disconnect sits at the center of the broader Epstein files fight. Congress has been demanding documents the Justice Department withheld, and Pam Bondi has been under pressure to explain why pages tied to the woman’s allegations vanished from the public record. The dispute has now widened beyond a single allegation or a single file set, because it touches both the credibility of the government’s recordkeeping and the willingness of elected officials to force those records into the open.
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Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, put the political edge of the moment in one sentence, saying bombing a country on the other side of the globe will not make the Epstein files go away. That is the problem facing Washington now: the Iran strikes have changed the day’s headlines, but they have not erased the unanswered questions around the woman’s oath-bound account, the missing summaries and the rest of the Epstein record that lawmakers still want to see.
