The late Jeffrey Epstein’s butler is speaking out for the first time since his former boss’s death in a New York City jail cell, and what he had to say about former President Bill Clinton is turning heads.
According to the Times of London, which also published a grainy dated photo of Valdson Vieira Cotrin standing next to Clinton, the butler said he met the former president in Paris when he traveled to Le Bourget airport to pick up Epstein.
Clinton had reportedly accompanied Epstein, whom he praised at the time as a “highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist,” on his personal Boeing 727-100 jet on a humanitarian trip to Africa.
At the time, Epstein asked Cotrin if he wanted to meet “the president,” and the butler assumed that it would be George W. Bush. But when he arrived, he saw that it was Bush’s predecessor, The Times noted.
“I was trembling as it’s not every day you meet someone of that stature,” Cotrin said in an interview with The Telegraph.
Cotrin, who worked for Epstein for 18 years, spoke out for the first time last week since authorities said Epstein killed himself in 2019 while in custody awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls. Cotrin told The Telegraph that Epstein “loved life too much” to kill himself.
Last week, the former president his wife, Hillary Clinton, were both summoned to testify as part of an expanding congressional investigation into Epstein.
Flight logs reveal that Clinton took as many as 26 trips on Epstein’s plane between 2001 and 2003. During a 2002 trip to London, Epstein and Clinton—along with actor Kevin Spacey and Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who both accompanied them—were invited by Prince Andrew for a tour of Buckingham Palace.
Cotrin, 63, who holds dual French and Brazilian citizenship, began working for Epstein, whom he refers to as “Monsieur,” in that same year.
“There were many girls,” Cotrin recalled of Epstein’s life during that period. “At that time, he was at the height of his powers, both financially and as a young man. In terms of women, it was a merry-go-round. Two arrived and two left every day.”
Clinton, now 78, has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities and has expressed regret over ever having met him, The Times report noted.
After his arrest in 2019, a spokesman for the ex-president said Clinton “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.”
The two reportedly first crossed paths in the early 1990s. In 1993, Epstein donated $10,000 to the White House Historical Association and attended a donors’ reception hosted by the Clintons, accompanied by Maxwell.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Epstein contributed $1,000 to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and $20,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign seven years later.
After leaving office in 2001, Clinton traveled with Epstein to locations including Siberia, Morocco, China, and Armenia on trips described as humanitarian missions for the Clinton Foundation.
A subpoena issued to the Clintons last week alleges that Bill Clinton was photographed “receiving a massage” from one of Epstein’s alleged victims—a photo that has circulated online for years.
Their friendship seems to have ended by the mid-2000s, with no public sightings together after 2005, when Epstein was charged in Florida for prostitution involving a minor.
In Cotrin’s much more modest house in France, a photograph hangs on the wall of him and Clinton aboard the “Lolita Express,” but it’s not the only picture tying Clinton to Epstein.
In the late convicted pedophile’s New York mansion, Epstein had a painting of Clinton in the Oval Office wearing stilletos and a dress similar to one worn by Monica Lewinsky, the infamous intern whom Clinton was found to have had a sexual relationship during his terms in office.