United States (US) First Lady Melania Trump has sought to create distance between herself and the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in a statement that took most observers by surprise.<\/p>\n
She said she had never been friends with Epstein and had no knowledge of the abuses he was perpetrating.<\/p>\n
It all happened very unexpectedly and had some searching for an answer to \u201cwhy now?\u201d.<\/p>\n
After what she described as \u201clies\u201d and \u201csmears\u201d linking her to Epstein, Melania called on Congress to hold victim-centred hearings on Epstein and listen to their testimony in a public setting.<\/p>\n
In pointed language, the Melania said Epstein was not alone and that several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions when the matter became \u201cpoliticised\u201d.<\/p>\n
She urged a transparent process to uncover the truth.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast also reported that it had recordings of Epstein bragging about his \u201cclose relationship with Trump and Melania\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2014Reuters\u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":31277,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-31274","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"She said she had never been friends with Epstein and had no knowledge of the abuses he was perpetrating.","published_date":"","news_description":"She said she had never been friends with Epstein and had no knowledge of the abuses he was perpetrating.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31276,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31274\/revisions\/31276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=31274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}