A senior legal reporter for MS NOW reportedly faced backlash Friday after publicly speculating that a photograph of President Donald Trump standing alongside several women with their faces redacted “suggests” lawmakers believed he was pictured with minors or victims connected to convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
That claim, however, was quickly undermined by reporting that showed the women were adult models with no connection to Epstein’s crimes.
The controversy erupted after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a large cache of Epstein-related photographs.
One of the images shows Trump smiling next to six women whose faces were obscured with black boxes. During a segment with host Ana Cabrera, MS NOW’s Lisa Rubin offered an interpretation that went well beyond what the image itself established.
Rubin said that what “stood out” to her was the contrast between photos where faces were visible and others where women’s faces were redacted or blurred. According to Rubin, that “suggests” either the Epstein estate or the Oversight Committee believed some of the women in the Trump photo were “minors and/or survivors” of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Rubin contrasted the Trump image with another released photo showing Epstein, Maxwell, former President Bill Clinton, and an unidentified couple, where faces were fully visible. She claimed that visibility indicated those individuals were known and not considered survivors.
From there, Rubin speculated that Trump may have been photographed with individuals believed to have been trafficked or abused, while adding a disclaimer that she was “not saying President Trump is complicit in any wrongdoing.”
That narrative quickly collapsed under basic fact-checking.
The New York Post reported that the women in the Mar-a-Lago photograph were adult models representing Hawaiian Tropic, the suntanning lotion brand. The photo was taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 1998. The Telegraph further reported that the women were all in their twenties at the time the picture was taken — directly contradicting any suggestion that they were minors or trafficking victims.
One of the women photographed with Trump told The Telegraph that the president was a “gentleman” and said he went out of his way to make sure the group enjoyed their evening at his Florida home. Those details stand in stark contrast to the insinuations floated on air.
The episode highlights how speculation, when presented under the guise of legal analysis, can quickly mislead audiences — especially in the emotionally charged context of the Epstein case. Rubin’s interpretation was based solely on the presence of redaction, without confirmation of who the women were or why their faces were obscured.
Trump himself brushed off the release of the Epstein photo trove when asked about it Friday. “I haven’t seen it, but everybody knew this man; he was all over Palm Beach, he has photos with everybody,” Trump said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of people that had photos with him. So that’s no big deal.”
The incident underscores a broader pattern in media coverage of Trump, where innuendo and implication are often elevated before basic verification. In this case, the facts were readily available — and once they surfaced, the insinuations collapsed.
