Donald Trump “was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women” and personally committed numerous sexual assaults, according to a new report compiled by Democrats on the House Committee on the Judiciary and released last week by Rep. Jamie Raskin, the committee’s ranking Democrat. The report also charges Trump’s Department of Justice with covering up the charges and withholding information in the Epstein files that implicates him.

The report uses  FBI records, survivor accounts, legal filings and interviews by Democratic staffers to document the stories of 11 women who say they were pursued and sexually abused by Trump and/or Epstein between 1992 and 1997 in New York City and Palm Beach. At that time, the authors note, Trump and Epstein were close friends who took part in “a shadowy subculture organized around young female modeling” that left the models prey to abuse. 

Four of these women, identified by name, say Trump sexually assaulted them. One of them, Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, told Judiciary Committee staff members that Trump raped her in November 1993 in a suite at the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, ripping her dress and leaving her bruised and bloodied. She was at the hotel attending a beauty pageant for 16-to-22-year old girls known as the “Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant.” Earlier that day, the report said, Trump had talked briefly with her and told her he would help her with a visa and get her enrolled in New York University.

 The 53-page report also charges that Trump and Paolo Zampolli, a longtime Trump friend who ran a modeling agency and brought to the US numerous models, including the future Melania Trump, took part in Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking network.

The report says the Department of Justice and FBI failed to investigate the allegations and “are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” It also calls for an independent special counsel investigation, offering a preview of accountability efforts that Raskin and House Democrats will pursue if they win a majority of seats in tomorrow’s mid-term election.

“We’re not prosecutors, but we’re saying the Department of Justice has completely abdicated their responsibility,” Raskin told MS Now’s Nicole Wallace. “We cannot understand any reason other than they’re trying to protect Donald Trump.”

A Justice Department spokesperson told MS Now that the report was “nothing more than a last‑ditch effort by House Judiciary Democrats to mislead the public.”

The report says the Justice Department failed Epstein’s victims, including by moving Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former companion and the only person in his network to be convicted of sex trafficking, to a lower security facility after Attorney General Todd Blanche, then the department’s No. 2 official, met with her in a Florida prison. The meeting itself “potentially constituted witness tampering and obstruction of an official proceeding,” the report says, because a transcript of the meeting suggests that Blanche directed Maxwell not to discuss one of Epstein’s victims at a House committee hearing less than two weeks later. 

In addition, the report contains detailed accounts from the 11 women who tie Trump to Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, adding that five of them, including Keul, “directly accused Trump of raping or sexually assaulting them.”

In an interview last week after the release of the report, Keul told Newsweek that Trump had threatened her after the assault if she reported it.

“He told me to be quiet, otherwise bad things will happen to me,” Newsweek quotes her as saying. “I said everything he wanted to hear to make sure that I escaped alive.” 

Keul told committee staff members that after managing to get through the pageant, she returned to Sweden. She refused to participate in another Trump-sponsored pageant in Hawaii and said that several months later,  Trump called her  in Switzerland and repeated a previous offer to set her up with a visa. Again, she said no.

Keul told Newsweek that after the report was released, she received a threatening phone call warning her to stop talking about the alleged attack. “It was from the U.S. and clearly directed to me and my family if I continue to spread the word in America,” Keul said. “I am scared. They have the power and the money.”

The report details other incidents in which women have accused Trump of sexual abuse, including Stacey Williams, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who dated Epstein in the 1990s after meeting him at a Christmas party at the Plaza Hotel. She said she accompanied Epstein on a visit to Trump Tower, where Trump groped her while he and Epstein continued talking and smiling as if nothing unusual were happening.

“His hands were all over me,” she told committee investigators. “They were on my breasts, they were on my butt.”  She later received a postcard of the Mar-a-Lago Club from Trump, saying, “Stacey, your home away from home. Love, Donald.”

The report also cites allegations by two women that Trump had sexually abused them as teenagers. One filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym Katie Johnson, accusing Trump of raping and sexually abusing her on multiple occasions in 1994, when she was 13, at a Jeffrey Epstein party in New York. These allegations were found in complaint forms submitted to the FBI by Johnson’s attorney, which also claimed that Johnson had been raped by both Trump and Epstein and was then “threatened with violence by both men not to make any report of what happened.” 

However, the case was voluntarily dismissed and a planned press conference in November 2016 was cancelled, reportedly due to death threats that Johnson received. 

The bottom line, the report says, is that the Justice Department has “actively obstructed the Epstein investigation“ by attempting to block the release of the Epstein files and then releasing a heavily redacted set of documents to the public. 

“As a result, this investigation has given a pass to all the individuals who took part in this decades-long, multibillion-dollar international sex trafficking ring that victimized over 1,000 women and girls, the report says, calling on Congress to use its powers “to pursue justice for survivors and bring an end to the Trump Administration’s shameful, bureaucratic and political coverup.”