Ted Lieu

Claim:

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of California said, "The unreleased Epstein files show Trump raping children. That's what's being hidden. That's why the files stay sealed. That's why there are no arrests."

Rating:

Incorrect Attribution

About this rating

Context

The claim appears to stem from a real news conference Lieu held in February 2026 in which he said the Epstein files contained allegations that Trump raped and threatened children, not that they contained actual evidence to substantiate such allegations.

In May 2026, several memes and videos purported to quote Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of California saying unreleased files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein showed President Donald Trump raping children.

One YouTube video of Lieu speaking was titled "'Trump R*P*D 13-Year-Old Minors': Ted Lieu And Victims CONFRONT Trump, Reveal HORRIFYING Details."

Per the memes, Lieu allegedly said: "The unreleased Epstein files show Trump raping children. That's what's being hidden. That's why the files stay sealed. That's why there are no arrests."

(Facebook user Familia)

We found no evidence that Lieu made that statement; as such, it is incorrectly attributed to him.

The claim appears to stem from a real news conference Lieu held in February 2026 in which he said the Epstein files contained allegations that Trump raped and threatened children, not that they contained actual evidence to substantiate such allegations.

Snopes previously reported on a rumor that a U.S. senator saw a video of Trump "raping" a child, which appeared to stem from the same misinterpretation (or misrepresentation) of what Lieu said in his February news conference. Lieu's spokesperson confirmed via email at the time that Lieu wasn't claiming he saw any such video, just that the publicly released files contained allegations of such an act. We reached out to Lieu to get his response to this latest claim and will update this story accordingly.

Searches on sections of the quote on Google, Bing (archived) and DuckDuckGo found no evidence that Lieu made the statement attributed to him in the memes and videos. Instead, these searches directed us to what he actually said during his February news conference.

A video of the news conference available on C-SPAN documents that Lieu said:

So why are Republicans so interested in Bill and Hillary Clinton? It's because they're trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there's highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children. Of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.

As we reported before, Lieu shared a video of this statement to his X account the same day. Lieu also reposted a clip shared by an X user who added, "That's a sitting member of Congress, on the record, describing what's in the files."

While Lieu did mention Trump and the Epstein files at the news conference, he was mainly calling for the resignation of then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (acting attorney general as of this writing) over his comments during a Feb. 2, 2026, appearance on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" in which he said it wasn't a crime to party with Epstein.

The rest of Lieu's statement on Feb. 3 addressed Blanche's comment:

And I'm highly disturbed that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got the law wrong yesterday. He said essentially that it is not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein. Well, that's actually not correct. If Jeffrey Epstein was human trafficking minors for these sex parties and you show up and patronize the establishment at that party, yes, you're guilty, because patronizing is part of the law—the federal sex trafficking law.

So Deputy Attorney General Blanche just got that wrong, which maybe explains why they aren't investigating all these folks, including Donald Trump. He needs to read the law and investigate these people. He also needs to resign, not only for not knowing the law, but for a massive — not only a screw-up, but the biggest privacy violation in history.