In his own words, why Bill Clinton bitterly regrets his relationship with Epstein. But, asks TOM LEONARD, is he telling the full truth?

'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'

Bill Clinton was once so categorical – and so categorically wrong – about White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Today, 26 years later, he is just as forthright about another relationship now casting a shadow over his later years.

In his new memoir, 'Citizen: My Life After The White House', the former US President tackles his controversial connection with pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein – a connection that some felt was so toxic that it might derail Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential bid.

In the event, Bill's friendship with Epstein was effectively cancelled out because Donald Trump, Hillary's election opponent, had also been a friend and Palm Beach neighbor of the sex predator.

Clinton now says he wishes he'd never met Epstein – who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting sex trafficking charges – which is hardly surprising in the circumstances.

In significantly underplaying their relationship, however, Clinton might leave sceptics wondering if there isn't more he could have said.

When the privacy-loving Epstein started attracting media curiosity more than 20 years ago, he was sometimes referred to as 'Clinton's pal'.

Yet the former president now suggests he wasn't friends with Epstein at all but merely connected through their shared interest in philanthropy.

He writes: 'In 2002 and 2003, he invited me to fly on his airplane to support the work of the [Clinton] Foundation, and in return for flying me, my staff, and my Secret Service detail who always accompanied me, Epstein asked only that I take an hour or two on each trip to discuss politics and economics.'

Clinton's spokesman has previously said the former president made four trips on 'Air Epstein' in those years, twice to Africa and once each to Asia and Europe.

Clinton goes on: '[Epstein] had just donated $10 million to Harvard for brain research and he asked a lot of questions. That was the extent of our conversations.'

Clinton insists that his 'only other interactions' with Epstein were 'two brief meetings, one at my office in Harlem [in 2002] and another at his house in New York.'

Yet there are photographs of the two men together dating back to 1993, smiling warmly to each other when they met during a VIP tour of the White House. Perhaps Clinton's memory is failing him.

For that was one of many visits Epstein reportedly made to the Clinton White House.

While Clinton disputes the accuracy of the White House logs, there are also flight records logged with the Federal Aviation Administration indicating he flew on Epstein's private jet at least 26 times.

Clinton continues: 'I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing. He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it, and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him.'

The former president goes to some lengths in his memoir to disprove one particular Epstein-related accusation against him: that he visited the multi-millionaire's notorious private island in the US Virgin Islands.

Little St James was dubbed 'Orgy Island' as Epstein allegedly hosted underage sex parties there.

In 2019, it was revealed that Virginia Giuffre, the most famous of Epstein's alleged sex trafficking victims, had told her lawyers years earlier that she knew Clinton definitely stayed at least once on the island because she and two 'lovely girls' from New York flew down there with him some time after his presidency.

Giuffre, who alleges she was a teenage 'sex slave' for Epstein and his friends, says they all joined Epstein and his partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, for dinner.

Clinton, she said, was teasing the other women with 'playful pokes' and 'brassy comments' before leaving with them at the end of the night.

In an unpublished memoir, she wrote: 'Strolling into the darkness with two beautiful girls around either arm, Bill seemed content to retire for the evening.'

Giuffre, who never accused Clinton of any wrongdoing but who claimed orgies were 'a constant thing' on the island, said that when she asked Epstein what the ex-president was doing there, the financier laughed and answered mysteriously: 'He owes me a favor.'

Giuffre added: 'He never told me what favors they were. I never knew. I didn't know if he was serious.'

She hasn't always been totally accurate in her recollections, but Giuffre isn't the only one who has claimed Clinton visited the island.

In 2020, Steve Scully, an IT engineer who worked for Epstein on the island, told a Netflix documentary he'd once seen Clinton there with Epstein. Mr Scully claimed there had been nobody else with the pair, who were allegedly sitting on the porch of Epstein’s villa. A Clinton spokesman denied the claim. 

In the same, Doug Band, a former key aide, confidant and bagman who worked closely with Clinton for 20 years, made further allegation to Vanity Fair.

Band – who once had a stormy relationship with First Daughter Chelsea Clinton and later fell out with her father – claimed he'd advised his boss to have nothing to do with Epstein.

That was after the two men had joined Kevin Spacey on a well-publicized philanthropy trip to Africa in 2002, aboard Epstein's private Boeing 727, notoriously known as the 'Lolita Express'.

Band later said he knew nothing about the sex allegations against Epstein at the time but still got 'bad vibes' from him. As reported by Vanity Fair, however, 'Clinton continued to socialize with Epstein and take his money', including a 2006 donation of $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

According to Band, Clinton did visit Epstein's private Caribbean island in January 2003 – one of the few of his trips which Band declined to join.

A Clinton spokesman told Vanity Fair that the president never went to the island and provided details of his movements at the time specified by Band that did not include such a visit.

The former president has now personally addressed Band's allegation, writing in his memoir about an unnamed staffer who 'fed the story' to Vanity Fair: 'He knew it wasn't true when he said it.'

Yet there have been myriad other indications over the years that, while there was never any suggestion of illegality on Clinton's part, his relationship with Epstein was rather closer than the dry, business-like and very limited association he now outlines in his book.

As long ago as 1993, Epstein and Maxwell were pictured greeting Clinton inside the White House at an event for donors to the White House Historical Association after Epstein stumped up $10,000.

That was one of at least 17 occasions on which Epstein reportedly visited the White House during Clinton's first term as president.

In 2020, photos emerged showing Clinton getting a neck massage from another of Epstein's accusers, Chauntae Davies, then 22, during a Lolita Express refueling stop on the 2002 Africa jaunt.

Then in January of this year, hundreds of pages of court documents relating to Epstein were released.

They included the testimony of Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg, who told lawyers in 2016 that Epstein once told her, 'Clinton likes them young, referring to girls'.

Various people have said that Epstein used to play up his connections to powerful people such as Clinton in order to impress others. He'd sometimes have phone calls with them while women with whom he was in a relationship listened in.

In 2003, New York Magazine reported that Epstein once threw a party at his mansion in Clinton's honor.

Clinton didn't attend but guests included Donald Trump, magician David Blaine and Clinton aide Doug Band.

In the same New York house, Epstein kept a somewhat disturbing portrait of Clinton dressed in Monica Lewinsky's famous blue dress and heels, and reclining in the Oval Office. Epstein also had a signed photo of Clinton.

Odd behavior for two men who – according to one of them – hardly knew each other.

'The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein's plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,' Clinton now writes. 'I wish I had never met him.'

He might have similar feelings about Monica Lewinsky, with whom he had an affair when he was a 49-year-old leader of the Free World and she a 22-year-old intern. Although nowadays he's too diplomatic to say so.

That wasn't always the case.

Clinton severely damaged his reputation in 2018 when he gave a disastrous interview to NBC's Today show in which – only months after the shaming of Harvey Weinstein and birth of the #MeToo movement – he denied that he owed Lewinsky an apology as he'd already publicly said sorry.

Still smarting from that, he brings it up in the new memoir, complaining that the NBC interviewer had been badly briefed, in what, surprisingly, is the only reference to Lewinsky in the book.

Others will say that it was Clinton who was badly briefed – in not appreciating the crucial distinction between a public mea culpa and a private one.

At least he doesn't need to apologize about Jeffrey Epstein – because, of course, he barely knew the man.