Someone on Twitter mentioned an email from Ghislaine Maxwell to Melania Trump in which Maxwell called the future First Lady "Sweet pea." We went looking.
The email exists. It is in the DOJ release. It is exactly what the tweet described, and it is also nothing like what the tweet implied.
Here is what the archives actually contain.
The Exchange
October 23, 2002. 3:40 PM Eastern. Melania Knauss — then thirty-two, five years into her relationship with Donald Trump, three years from her wedding — sends a short email to an address belonging to Ghislaine Maxwell. The subject line is "HI!"1
Dear G!
How are you?
Nice story about JE in NY mag. You look great on the picture.
I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY.
Have a great time!
Love,
Melania
The raw header shows Melania wrote the message in Bookman Old Style, color-coded blue. The tone is what it looks like — chatty, light, a little starstruck about a mutual friend appearing in a magazine.
"JE in NY mag" is Jeffrey Epstein in the October 28, 2002 issue of New York Magazine. The profile was Landon Thomas Jr.'s "Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery" — the piece best remembered for a single on-the-record quote:
"I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
— Donald Trump, to New York Magazine, October 2002
Melania had either just read that profile or was about to. The cover was on New York newsstands the week she wrote.
Nine minutes later, at 3:49 PM Eastern, Maxwell replied.2 Her Eudora client stamped the outgoing message. Four sentences, total:
Sweet pea — thanks for your message. Actually plans changed again and I am now on my way back to NY. I leave again on Fri so I still do not think I have time to see you sadly. I will try and call though.
Keep well
Gx
That's the email. All of it. One sentence of greeting, two sentences of scheduling, one sentence of polite fade-out. "Sweet pea" at the top, "Gx" at the bottom.
It is the only documented direct communication between Ghislaine Maxwell and Melania Trump that exists in the entire DOJ Epstein release.
About That Nickname
The viral framing is that "sweet pea" is evidence of intimacy — that Maxwell had a pet name for the future First Lady of the United States, the kind you reserve for someone close to you.
It isn't. "Sweet pea" was Ghislaine Maxwell's standard-issue greeting. We found it more than twenty times in the released files, addressed to half a dozen different people. A sample:
| Date | To | Opening | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 23, 2002 | Melania Knauss | "Sweet pea — thanks for your message" | 2 |
| Feb 22, 2011 | Jeffrey Epstein | "Hi sweetpea — There was a picture of you and Andrew in the paper yesterday" | 3 |
| Dec 13, 2012 | Jeffrey Epstein | "sweet pea dont forget you have the meeting with Larry Delson at 4.30pm" | 4 |
| Apr 4, 2013 | Jeffrey Epstein | "Hi sweetpea — having lovely holiday in Jamaica" | 5 |
| Dec 3, 2014 | Jeffrey Epstein | "Hi Sweetpea — miss you! Had a terrible few weeks" | 6 |
| Jun 16, 2016 | Jeffrey Epstein | "Hi sweet pea — Coming to NY late September — you around for tea?" | 7 |
| Aug 26, 2017 | Jeffrey Epstein | "Sweet pea — So what have you decided to do about the stone?" | 8 |
| Jan 20, 2019 | Jeffrey Epstein | "Hi sweet pea — Sending you happy birthday wishes!" | 9 |
Whoever was writing these (several senders, several mailboxes — the pattern is consistent and the tone matches Maxwell's in the 2002 email) was using "sweet pea" as an ambient term of endearment across a circle of correspondents and across at least seventeen years of correspondence. Jeffrey Epstein himself got it repeatedly. The "you and Andrew in the paper yesterday" line refers to a picture of Epstein with Prince Andrew.
"Sweet pea" was not a name Ghislaine Maxwell had for Melania Trump. It was a name Ghislaine Maxwell had for most people she liked.
This changes the reading of the 2002 email substantially. It isn't evidence of private intimacy. It's evidence that Melania sent Ghislaine a friendly note, and Ghislaine wrote back the way she wrote back to everybody.
What Was Around Them
If the email was a one-off, that raises a question: did they know each other at all, or did Melania just fire off a note to a passing acquaintance?
They knew each other. Here's the ambient evidence, in order:
February 12, 2000. Mar-a-Lago. The Davidoff Studios photograph — Trump, Knauss, Epstein, Maxwell — is the single most-cited piece of visual documentation that all four were in a room together. Versions of the photo turn up in at least six separate places in the DOJ release, saved years later as investigators pieced the circle together.10 The caption in the Epstein files is matter-of-fact: "American real estate developer Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife), former model Melania Knauss, financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell."
October 2002. The email. The correspondence above.
2010. Peggy Siegal's William Astor dinner. Siegal, the Manhattan publicist whose name runs through the Epstein files like a thread, kept guest lists with shorthand tags — "BUSINESS," "LI" (Long Island), "400" (as in The Four Hundred), "NY 100," "LONDON." On the list for Astor's dinner, both "Mr. Donald Trump (Melania Knauss)" and "Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell (Ted Wiatt)" appear, categorized into the same elite NY/London social layer.11 They were still on the same invite lists a decade after the Mar-a-Lago photo was taken.
February 28, 2015. A Google Alert. Maxwell had a standing Google Alert for "jeffrey epstein." That morning the alert surfaced a Daily Mail item about Trump publicly predicting Bill Clinton would "face new troubles related to his friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein." Maxwell forwarded it to Epstein at 3:47 AM with a three-word note:12
Check out trump
No mention of Melania. But the forward establishes that by 2015 Maxwell was tracking Trump as a hostile public figure in relation to Epstein — not as a friend of the circle.
2019. An FBI interview. After Epstein's July 2019 arrest, an unnamed witness told FBI agents she had once been taken to Mar-a-Lago "along with Epstein and Maxwell" and had shaken hands with "President Donald Trump and his wife Melania," describing the event as some kind of "sorority celebration." The same witness immediately qualified her account: "the details are very fuzzy at the moment."13 The report is in the archive. The fuzziness is in the archive too.
That's the ambient record. A 2000 photo, a 2002 email, a 2010 party list, a 2015 forward that doesn't mention Melania, a 2019 witness statement flagged as unreliable by the witness herself.
What Isn't There
Here is what we looked for and did not find.
We searched the jmail archive — every thread and message from Epstein's email accounts, including the full yahoo, gmail, mindspring, and Ellmax mailboxes. 1,258 messages sent by "G. Max." 239 more by "G Maxwell." Exactly one of them mentions Melania.2 It is the 2002 reply above.
We searched the House Oversight release — 25,791 additional documents obtained by Congress. Zero emails between Maxwell and Melania.
We searched the full-text corpus of 1,409,216 DOJ and congressional documents for every variant we could think of: Melania, Knauss, Knavs, Mrs. Trump, First Lady, in proximity to Maxwell, Ghislaine, G. Max. No additional direct correspondence. No mentions of Melania in Maxwell-authored messages to anyone else. No mentions of Melania in Epstein-authored messages to Maxwell.
We searched the kabasshouse investigative dataset — 5,766 curated dossier entries, 3,038 reconstructed timeline events, 49,770 financial transactions, 143 investigative records. Zero Maxwell↔Melania entries in any of them.
We searched the CourtListener filings from Giuffre v. Maxwell — the civil case that put Ghislaine Maxwell's own correspondence and deposition testimony under the legal microscope. Melania Trump does not appear.
The complete documented record of communication between Ghislaine Maxwell and Melania Trump is two emails, sent nine minutes apart, on a single afternoon in October 2002. Total word count: 142. Total elapsed time: under ten minutes. After that afternoon, the archive goes silent for twenty-three years and counting.
What the Silence Means
It is possible the two women stayed in touch by phone. It is possible later correspondence exists but hasn't been released. It is possible they drifted apart after 2002 the way social acquaintances drift apart all the time. It is possible they were never really close in the first place, and that the October email is exactly what it looks like — a chatty note from one well-connected woman to another after both appeared in the same social orbit.
What isn't possible, given what's in the files, is the story the Twitter rumor wanted to be true: a deep, secret, long-running intimacy revealed by a single pet name. The pet name was generic. The exchange was brief. The follow-up is empty.
This is the sort of finding that rarely goes viral, because it resolves a lurid implication into something considerably duller. Two socialites knew each other in 2000. One of them emailed the other in 2002 about a magazine article featuring their mutual friend. The friend was Jeffrey Epstein. The magazine article contained the most-quoted piece of on-record Donald Trump Epstein-praise in American journalism. The reply took nine minutes and ended with "Gx."
That is all that exists. We looked.
This article draws on the Trump in the Epstein Documents research dossier. Previous in this series: The Speakerphone Call, Recruited at Mar-a-Lago, Innocent Bystanders, Your Pal Donald, One Victim, One Refusal, The Double Game.
Sources & Documents
- EFTA02332411 — Melania Knauss to "G," October 23, 2002. Subject: "HI!" Original message, archived in DOJ Data Set 11. View →
- EFTA00579769 — Ghislaine Maxwell reply, October 23, 2002. Subject: "Re: HI!" Four-sentence response quoting Melania's original in full. Sent from a Eudora client nine minutes after Melania's message. DOJ Data Set 9. View →
- EFTA02001358 — "Hi sweetpea — There was a picture of you and Andrew in the paper yesterday." February 22, 2011. View →
- EFTA01910606 — "sweet pea dont forget you have the meeting with Larry Delson at 4.30pm." December 13, 2012. View →
- EFTA00875037 — "Hi sweetpea — having lovely holiday in Jamaica." April 4, 2013. View →
- EFTA00670208 — "Hi Sweetpea — miss you! Had a terrible few weeks." December 3, 2014. View →
- EFTA02460384 — "Hi sweet pea — Coming to NY late September — you around for tea?" June 16, 2016. View →
- EFTA00653715 — "Sweet pea — So what have you decided to do about the stone?" August 26, 2017. View →
- EFTA01027282 — "Hi sweet pea — Sending you happy birthday wishes!" January 20, 2019. View →
- EFTA01228144 — Davidoff Studios photograph, Mar-a-Lago, February 12, 2000. Trump, Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell. Additional copies: EFTA01600353, EFTA01600354, EFTA01615159, EFTA00043963, EFTA01164603. View →
- EFTA02421758 — Peggy Siegal guest list for William Astor's dinner, 2010. Forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein via Lesley Groff, September 16, 2010. Both "Mr. Donald Trump (Melania Knauss)" and "Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell (Ted Wiatt)" appear on the list. View →
- EFTA02363400 — Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein, February 28, 2015. Forward of Google Alert with note "Check out trump." View →
- EFTA01249188 — FBI 302 interview report, July 11, 2019. Witness describes Mar-a-Lago visit with Epstein and Maxwell; details described as "very fuzzy." View →
