The youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. has joined the chorus of critics calling on President Donald Trump to release the Jeffrey Epstein files in response to the federal government unveiling thousands of investigative documents relating to her father’s assassination.
Bernice King expressed disapproval in a series of statements on Monday regarding the Trump administration’s move to declassify more than 230,000 files relating to her father’s 1968 murder. She questioned the value of releasing the files now and condemned “any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the [civil rights] movement.”
She also challenged Trump to do the same with federal records regarding Epstein, the disgraced and deceased sex trafficker.
“Now, do the Epstein files,” Bernice King wrote on X Monday evening along with a Black and white picture of her father.
Capital B Atlanta has reached out to the White House for comment.
The King Center CEO went into greater detail about her feelings regarding the publication of the MLK files in a lengthy Vanity Fair article that explained the lifelong trauma she has endured since first learning of her father’s murder when she was just 5 years old.
“Today, I am not writing in my role as CEO of The King Center to address the government’s recent release of assassination records,” Bernice King wrote. “Today, instead, I wonder why I have to be confronted once again with something that was very confusing and distressing for me as a five-year-old. I am, honestly, not prepared to revisit the gruesome details of this painful history. For me, there is no real value in it; there is only reliving the trauma.”
It’s been six months since Trump issued an executive order shortly after his inauguration that directed his administration to prepare to release the MLK files in conjunction with the release of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy.
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump said in January. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
Bernice King, her brother Martin Luther King III, and other members of the King family were given advance notice of Monday’s release and had their own teams examine the records prior to their disclosure, according to the Associated Press.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the MLK files include information connected to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of fatally shooting King on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
In her writings on Monday, Bernice King maintained her family’s stated belief that Ray “was not the assassin, but a scapegoat used by a large and powerful network, one that included informants whom the FBI recruited from within my father’s camp.”
She recalled Ray telling her late brother, Dexter King, that he did not kill their father, a revelation revealed after the King family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Shelby County, Tennessee, in 1999.
“After hearing from some 70 witnesses over the course of four weeks during the wrongful death trial, a Memphis jury concluded that government entities conspired in the assassination,” Bernice King told Vanity Fair. “Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs.”
Trump’s second inauguration coincided with MLK Day in January, sparking interest in what the slain civil rights legend’s family would say about the occasion. Bernice King told Capital B Atlanta during a follow-up interview in February that she feared the country was entering uncharted territory.
