Donald Trump and Katie Johnson Accusations: Everything We Know

A viral post has gone viral on social media spreading court documents containing sexual assault allegations against former President Donald Trump, made in a lawsuit that was dismissed nearly a decade ago.

The post accuses Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, of “forcing” young girls to “perform lesbian sex acts.” As of Monday, the post has amassed more than 17 million views on X, formerly Twitter, and has been shared more than 34,000 times.

Some X users appeared to believe the document was a recent filing. The post was shared after about 150 pages of transcripts related to the 2006 grand jury investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s rape and sex trafficking were made public on Monday.

However, the document included in X’s post is not related to these papers, but actually comes from a lawsuit filed several months before the 2016 election by an anonymous plaintiff using the name “Katie Johnson.”

That lawsuit, filed in federal court in Riverside, California, in April 2016, named Trump and Epstein, the deceased convicted sex offender, as defendants. It alleged that the men held Johnson as a “sex slave” in 1994, when she was 13, and forced her to perform sex acts.

As Politico reported at the time, a judge dismissed the case in May of this year, ruling that the complaint did not raise valid claims under federal law.

Another version of the lawsuit was filed in June but was reportedly withdrawn several months later. A third version of the lawsuit — with the plaintiff identified as “Jane Doe” — was filed in September 2016, accusing Trump of rape. That lawsuit was also withdrawn several months later.

The Trump accuser was expected to appear at a news conference in early November 2016, but her lawyer, Lis Bloom, said she had received threats and was afraid to show up. Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Meagher, filed a notice of dismissal at the time, without providing an explanation. There has been no word from her since.

Alan Garten, Trump’s lawyer at the time, dismissed the woman’s allegations as “categorically untrue.” “It’s completely frivolous. It’s baseless. It’s irresponsible,” Garten told Politico. “I won’t even discuss the merits, because it gives him credibility that he doesn’t deserve.”

A Trump spokesman was contacted for comment by email.

The allegations in the now-dismissed lawsuits are resurfacing on social media amid the release of documents related to Epstein.

A similar social media post appeared in January after previously sealed court documents from a settled lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims against Ghislaine Maxwell were made public.

Epstein was charged by federal prosecutors with sex trafficking in 2019. He was found dead in his jail cell while awaiting trial.

Maxwell was convicted of human trafficking in December 2021. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.