The now-infamous photograph of Bill Clinton lounging in a hot tub with an unidentified woman was taken during a 2002 trip to Brunei, one the former president made aboard Jeffrey Epstein's private jet with convicted pedophile Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in tow. The Post revealed the origin of the image, placing it in the Emperor suite of the Empire Hotel in Brunei, a room that runs $20,000 a night.
Clinton sat for a deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Friday, where he was grilled on the photo. He insisted he did "nothing wrong" and did not have sex with the woman, whose face was redacted in the version released as part of the Department of Justice's files on Epstein.
He also denied knowing who the woman was, according to a source.
Flight entries made public in court proceedings paint a detailed picture of the trip. According to The NY Post, on May 22, 2002, Epstein's private jet, widely known as the Lolita Express, picked up Clinton at a US naval air base in Japan. On board were Epstein, Maxwell, Epstein associate Sarah Kellen, Clinton's chief advisor Doug Band, someone named Mike, and two women listed only as "Janice" and "Jessica."
The group stopped in Hong Kong for an evening, then spent two nights in Shenzhen, China, before landing in the Brunei capital of Bandar Seri Begawan on May 25.
Clinton visited the oil-rich Southeast Asian country just one year after leaving office. While there, he played golf and had dinner with Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, the same sultan who donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton presidential library through the foundation.
Then he took his dip in the jacuzzi.
Additional photos from the trip show Clinton, Maxwell, and the mystery woman together in the pool of the Emperor suite. In another image, Epstein was photographed sitting at the piano in sweatpants. The whole scene carries the energy of people who assumed no one would ever see these pictures.
They were wrong.
The images surfaced through one of the Department of Justice's file dumps, the same tranche that has steadily peeled back the curtain on Epstein's network. Every new release adds names, dates, and locations. Every new release makes the "I barely knew the man" defense a little harder to sustain.
What's remarkable about the Clinton-Epstein connection isn't any single photo or flight log entry. It's the accumulation. The repeated trips on the private jet. The presence of Maxwell and Kellen, both of whom faced legal consequences for their roles in Epstein's operation. The exotic locations were funded by a man whose wealth was intertwined with the exploitation of young women.
Clinton has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. That denial now has to coexist with:
None of this requires speculation. The flight logs are public. The photos exist. The DOJ released the files. Clinton himself sat before a congressional committee and answered questions about them.
Consider the media environment surrounding any other figure with this level of documented proximity to a convicted sex trafficker. The coverage would be relentless. The calls for accountability would be deafening. The assumption of guilt would be baked into every headline.
Clinton has received something closer to institutional protection, a slow drip of revelations met with minimal sustained pressure from the outlets that once treated him as the most gifted politician of his generation. The deposition happened on Friday. It did not lead every broadcast.
The Epstein files continue to do what investigative journalism largely refused to: follow the evidence wherever it leads, including into the orbit of a former president. The facts don't require editorial embellishment. A former leader of the free world flew on a pedophile's jet, stayed in his hotel suite, and was photographed in a hot tub with a woman whose identity remains hidden behind a black bar.
The picture speaks for itself. It always did.
