How Marjorie Taylor Greene crossed Donald Trump to help unleash the Epstein files

"The president called me a traitor because I stood with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein … That was a significant turn. He was upset, angry with me, and yelling at me."

Marjorie Taylor Greene has spoken candidly about the moment she decided to go her own way and the wrath of US President Donald Trump that followed, in an interview with the ABC.

Greene had been a very loyal MAGA soldier. She rarely veered off party lines, voting with Mr Trump's position on an overwhelming majority of bills in the US Congress.

She had always been vocal in her support for Trump, campaigning for him across the country, stumping for him at rallies and spinning for him on conservative television. In the words of political commentator Gretchen Carlson, Greene was "full-blood MAGA".

Greene shot to prominence for her firebrand style of unapologetic far-right politics and picked up supporters of her own with often outrageous and unfounded claims about government control, sometimes whistling to conspiracy theorists and Russian sympathisers.

Epstein was an uber-wealthy financier who lured women and girls to his properties, where he sexually assaulted them. He was already a convicted sex offender when federal prosecutors charged him with trafficking minors for sex in 2019.

His trial was expected to reveal more about his network and who else was involved in the operation, but before the case made it to court, Epstein was found dead in his cell. The FBI and Department of Justice have identified 1,200 victims who were sexually abused by Epstein.

Recently, Greene became resolute in her belief that the US federal government should release all the information it had on Jeffrey Epstein — the touted "client list" and what has become the Epstein files.

For a time, the promise suited Donald Trump just fine. Throughout the 2024 campaign, he repeatedly told voters he would declassify the Epstein files, returning to the pledge as election day drew closer. When 77 million Americans voted for him, many did so believing that promise would be kept.

Then the tone changed. Back in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to retreat from the certainty of the campaign trail, suddenly questioning how much the public should be allowed to know about the clients, friends and confidants of his former fellow Palm Beach fixture and whether the Epstein files should ever be fully exposed at all.

Jeffrey Epstein has been both a political lightning rod for Trump and a ghost haunting him from the grave. In the past, Trump has shown an instinctive ability to walk through the fire of contradiction without being burned. He rode into office on the banner of "America First", only to deploy its military might in new arenas of battle. He promised to lower taxes only to place tariffs on American importers.

But his promises around the Epstein files could not be forgotten, and the electorate and political players like Greene gave him no slack when it came to delivering. Eventually, they forced what was arguably the most blatant backflip in Donald Trump's political career.

The unlikely alliance that broke Trump

Speaking to the ABC the day after her departure from the US House of Representatives, Greene seems subdued.

"I stood for transparency. I stood for victims. I stood for women who were raped as teenagers and have … wanted their files released. They've wanted justice and they've fought very hard for it," Greene said.

"So when it came down to a role that I could play, to me, it was a matter of right and wrong. And so it was an easy choice for me to do that. And I'm glad I did."

Three Republican women went against Trump's wishes at the time and signed their names on what's called a discharge petition. But that move was initiated by a Republican too, Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie.

"It really came to the forefront when President Trump and people in his cabinet made it an issue and they promised that they were going to release these files. I endorsed … candidate Trump for president and this was part of the reason," Massie told the ABC.

Massie said there was a moment when he realised "it might be politically possible" to use the House to force the issue via a discharge petition and so he reached out to his friend, Democratic representative from California Ro Khanna.

"I reached out to him and said, 'Ro, if I do a discharge petition, do you think you could get every single Democrat to sign it?' And he did deliver on that promise," Massie said.

With every Democrat on board, the four Republicans — Massie, Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace — added their names, pushing the petition to the crucial 218 signatures.

Trump responded by publicly attacking the four Republicans for breaking ranks. He was particularly vicious toward the three Republican women.

"They were woken up at 5am in the morning with the president saying, "F this, F that. Get your effing name off of this thing.' They were threatened in the same way, politically, that I was," Massie said.

"But to their credit, all three of those women stayed strong. It cost Marjorie Taylor Greene an incredible amount of political capital."

And in a Truth Social post that ricocheted through MAGA, Trump called Greene a "traitor". For America-first diehards, that is the ultimate insult and one not easily forgotten by Trump's base.

"The way he treated me and the names he called me, sent death threats upon me and then my children," Greene said.

Despite his fury, this alliance had backed the president into a political corner and what came next was complete capitulation in the Oval Office.

"House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide," Trump posted to Truth Social.

The green light from the president unshackled his fellow Republicans in both the House and Senate and the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by a near-unanimous vote, becoming law in late November and giving the US Department of Justice (DOJ) 30 days to publish everything it had on the case.

Since then, more than 3 million files have been released.

While House Democrats have long been pushing for more transparency over the Epstein case, then-president Joe Biden did not use executive powers to release the files during his term.

Speaking to the ABC, Khanna said victims had been failed by both sides of politics.

"These women and working-class families have been abandoned for decades. And everyone in power was culpable for not working hard enough, but now we've passed a law. And now this is about the survivors," he said.

Donald Trump and 'the Epstein class'

Greene talks about right and wrong and that in this instance, the right thing to do was completely obvious. 

"I don't understand why the president fought it so hard," she said.

Trump's name is all over the files the DOJ has released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. His name is on the flight log of Epstein's private jet. He is pictured with Epstein and his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump's previous association and friendship with Epstein were well known before the Epstein files were released, and part of his campaign pitch was that he would be the one to lift the lid on them anyway, according to Massie.

"He travelled in those social circles in West Palm Beach and New York City and he dined with them and the promise was that he would be like us and he would bring those types of people to account, that they would no longer be outside of the justice system," he said.

"It sort of epitomises the populist promise of the Trump campaign."

Massie's take is that in Trump attempting to deny the release of the files once he was in office, the president was covering for "his friends and the Epstein class".

"There are at least six billionaires. There's a movie producer. There's a magician. There's a foreign prince."

Massie said he believed the president was trying to preserve his relationships with "the billionaires that he hung out with before he became president and the billionaires he will hang out with after he's no longer president".

Newly retired investigations editor from the Palm Beach Post Holly Baltz called the Epstein story "the gum he can't get off his shoe". And as Baltz pointed out, Trump only really had himself to blame.

"Donald Trump was the one who really prompted that," she said of the public outrage that spilled over when he changed his mind.

"It seems to be the one thing that Trump can't seem to get rid of. On the campaign trail, he was talking about transparency and the Epstein files, and then something happened. We're not all sure exactly what."

The power of survivor stories

In September and November 2025, Massie, Khanna and Greene gathered with Epstein survivors in Washington DC to really bring the fight and the plight of those to whom it matters most to the capital.

These were powerful moments, and many of the women, among the safety of other survivors, spoke out for the first time.

"We were standing in solidarity with each other and saying to the world, 'There is more of us than you thought,'" survivor Ashley Rubright told the ABC.

Rubright said she met Epstein when she was 15 years old and still in school, but working part-time at a restaurant. One day, a co-worker at that restaurant asked her if she would like to give a man a massage for $200.

"I was shocked when I walked into the bathroom. But then I calmed myself down, thinking of course he's naked because that's how people get massages and I just should just not be so shocked," she said.

"He asked me to take off my bra and to pull up my skirt and he was touching himself the whole time. He would grab me. I was just trying to not be there."

Rubright has only recently started telling her story and said speaking up became a matter of necessity. Like many survivors, she has taken issue with the Epstein story being used by politicians who might forget women are at its heart.

"The lack of justice, the using us as pawns, using our story as pawns, the lack of care to or maybe recognition that people actually were traumatised by this man and it's not just like some fantasy story," she said.

She said the Epstein files became integral to the fight for justice.

"There's only so many dots that we as survivors can connect ourselves. We need to know what institutions and what people were the driving force behind him being able to continue to operate for so long … they need to be held accountable," Rubright said.

The September survivors rally and press conference in Washington DC coincided with Massie filing his discharge petition and lit a new momentum behind the campaign to see the files released.

A few months later, the pressure on the president was immense.

"For Trump, it must have been excruciatingly frustrating to have somebody who was so much like him, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, to say, 'I 100 per cent disagree with you on this, and I'm going to continue to fight for the other side,'" Carlson said.

"I think it was a sense for him, likely, that he was losing control of the situation.

"It was the survivors who came back to do yet another press conference. That is really what put the pressure on the administration and on the president to change his mind."

The result was a stunning backflip, one most commentators and Washington watchers applaud Epstein's survivors for securing.

"The Epstein survivors were instrumental in winning the release and I don't think it would have happened, but for the pressure [and the] national attention," legal journalist Adam Klasfeld said.

"I think that when Trump backflipped on it, it was clear the writing was on the wall."

The MAGA meltdown

There have been bold predictions made about what Trump's refusal to release the files in 2025 did to his MAGA movement. Right-wing commentator and former Trump supporter Candice Owens called the episode "terminal cancer".

As Massie explained: "For him to get elected and then turn around one day and point his finger in the camera and say, 'If you want these Epstein files released, you are no longer my supporter. Don't consider yourself a supporter of mine', it was a complete betrayal of his base."

Greene said: "What happened is the American people reacted in such outrage. I'm talking about extreme outrage over the cover-up … that it was the public pressure that really helped us get across the line."

Like Greene, Rick Frazier is a longtime supporter of Donald Trump. He calls himself a "front row Joe". He told the ABC he would "sleep on the sidewalk for four or five days" ahead of a Trump rally and often help set them up. He considers his efforts part of the massive machine that helped get Trump elected, twice.

When he cast his vote in 2024, he expected transparency.

"If he says it's a hoax, why not lay it all out there and let us know," Frazier said, referring to Trump calling the Epstein files a "Democrat hoax" in 2025.

As Carlson explained: "When you call something a hoax and yet people know there is a tremendous amount of evidence out there that it's not a hoax, it makes them only want to know more about it."

Frazier had been concerned "other people in the government" would be protected by redactions in the files.

"I honestly, in my mind, don't think [Trump is] involved. When you're in that social circle down in Palm Beach, you're going to be in the same room. A picture doesn't make you guilty, [but] until we get transparency, how do we know?" Frazier said.

"Donald Trump came to Washington DC [with] his promise to drain the swamp. Well, now we've got the swamp monsters."

Frazier has not forgotten that while Trump was refusing to release the files, the president called Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor. He said that comment "hurt us all". Frazier has also not forgotten one detail from Trump's angry call to Greene that cut to the heart of his greatest fears over Epstein.

Trump reportedly told Greene he could not release the files because it was going to hurt people. Asked who Trump was referring to, Greene told the ABC: "I don't know. I still don't know that to this day."

While countries across Europe have launched investigations based on new evidence revealed in the Epstein files, United States agencies are being criticised by a frustrated public for their lack of action.

"Trump built a coalition of followers who are very conspiratorial in their world views and were already Epstein conspiracy theorists," political scientist and conspiracy theory expert Joe Uscinski said.

"Many of these folks, for the last several years, wanted to send people off to the gallows. They wanted to find out who the paedophiles are, what they were doing, rescue the victims, send the perpetrators to the nooses and they're not getting it.

The day Marjorie Taylor Greene left office was a very sad day for Frazier. He understood what had shifted with the president and the break-up of two MAGA heavyweights. Asked if she believed MAGA supporters were now losing heart and trust in Trump over the Epstein files, Greene said: "Many of them, yes."

"It was a line in the sand for them. They couldn't understand it, the same way I couldn't understand it. Why would he cover this up?

"That was something that none of us ever expected from President Trump."

Diabolical: The Epstein Files airs Monday 2 March at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.

Credits:

Writer: Emily Clark

Editor: Clare Blumer

Digital video: Jessicah Mendes, Kenny Ang and Jack Fisher

Diabolical: The Epstein Files, ABC NEWS documentary team

Reporter: Grace Tobin

Researcher: Alison McClymont

Producer: Jennifer Feller

Executive Producer: Caitlin Shea