For years, a rumor circulated online that the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein owned a painting of former President Bill Clinton in a blue dress.
The image resurfaced on social media after the U.S. Department of Justice released the first installment of additional Epstein files following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated the release of these documents.
The image and its alleged connection to Epstein had spread on Reddit, Facebook and X.
A photo of the painting of Clinton hanging on a wall was, indeed, included in the Epstein files (see page 17 and download EFTA00000862.pdf). As such, we have rated this claim true.
It was unclear whether Epstein owned a copy of the portrait or the original painting. The original was painted by Australian-American artist Petrina Ryan-Kield with oil on canvas, as Snopes first reported in 2019.
As of this writing, prints of the painting, titled “Parsing Bill,” were available to purchase from the prominent online art gallery Saatchi. A photograph also showed Ryan-Kield standing next to the work at the 2012 Tribeca Ball, an annual art exhibit run by the New York Academy of Art and a popular event for New York socialites.
In a 2019 interview with Snopes, Ryan-Kield told us she did not know who, ultimately, ended up with her original painting. Here’s what she said in an email:
In 2012, as a grad student at the New York Academy of Art, I painted pictures of Presidents Clinton and Bush as part of my Master’s thesis. When the school put on a fundraiser at the Tribeca Ball that year, they sold my painting to one of the attendees. I had no idea who the buyer was at the time. As with most of my paintings, I had completely lost track of this piece when it was sold seven years ago. So it was a complete surprise to me to learn yesterday that it wound up in Epstein’s home.
Ryan-Kield told Artnet News that Clinton’s attire in the painting is a reference to Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, a central part of the media circus around his affair with his former intern, who later became an anti-cyberbullying activist. According to ArtNet, Ryan-Kield said the painting, which was part of a series of works she made, was supposed to be about “how opposition parties caricature presidents.”
Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sexually trafficking minors. His ties to people like Clinton and U.S. President Donald Trump have been under renewed scrutiny amid Congress’ investigation into the handling of the Epstein case.
