Two of television’s biggest names broke days of silence on their networks over the bombshell tapes revealed by the Daily Beast in which Jeffrey Epstein speaks about his relationship with Donald Trump.

Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC both spoke of their shock over the tapes, with the late-night host complaining that they had not been widely reported by other networks.

A small fragment of the tapes was first revealed last Thursday by author Michael Wolff, and on Saturday The Daily Beast published recordings in which Epstein made extraordinary claims about his friend of ten years.

The convicted pedophile suggested an intimate knowledge of the West Wing. He claimed that Trump liked to cheat on his best friends, that Trump first made love to Melania Trump on Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express plane’, called Trump a serial cheat who bragged about ‘damn black girls’, and claimed without evidence that Trump had had an affair while in the White House. The tapes were made in a federal prison cell two years before Epstein’s death, when he spoke to Wolff as a source for his international bestseller: Fire and fury. Wolff said Epstein showed him a collection of photos of Trump with topless young women on his lap.

Such dramatic claims about a presidential candidate’s character on the eve of a campaign would normally be immediately picked up by the major television networks, especially given the light they shed on Trump’s largely unexplored relationship with one of America’s most notorious sex offenders.

But instead, they were greeted by silence, despite being highlighted by leading Democrats, including Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC who posted on X: “Trump is all over the Epstein files .”

The wall of silence lasted until the eve of the election, when MSNBC’s Maddow and ABC’s Kimmel spoke about them Monday night.

On MSNBC, Maddow listed what she called “October surprises,” likening the tape to the revelation that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said Trump is a textbook fascist. the Iowa poll that gave Harris a three-point lead in the deep-red state. Both have received mainstream coverage on the liberal-leaning MSNBC and other networks.

The Beast can reveal that Maddow has spoken out despite a ruling from NBC News not to report on the tapes. The network’s ‘standards’ unit had warned its staff that the tapes were ‘DNU’, meaning ‘Do not use’, and said they should not be mentioned until ‘an attempt had been made to get to the full, unedited version to listen to the recording. to notice what has been left out.” Wolff has said he has 100 hours of recordings.

Notably, MSNBC has not posted the segment in which Maddow talks about the tapes on X until Tuesday.

On ABC, Kimmel, who is not bound by news standards, spoke freely about his shock at the recording and alluded to the silence surrounding the Beast’s bombshell.

“We heard a great audio tape of Jeffrey Epstein saying he was Trump’s ‘best friend’ and sharing a lot of crazy stories. This hardly moves the needle,” Kimmel said. ‘Remember when Mitt Romney went down because he installed a dog carrier on the roof of his car? We just had 100 hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying he and Trump were best friends; I didn’t even get a notification about it on my phone.”

Wolff revealed in a post on I say ‘most’ instead of ‘all’ because after a while, when I had worked out the obvious candidates, the effort seemed distinctly unproductive and unlikely to yield a different answer anywhere else.”

While television has ignored the tapes, Substack’s most subscribed commentator, historian Heather Cox Richardson, has brought them to the attention of her 1.6 million subscribers and 2 million Facebook followers. Google’s interest in Epstein, and especially in the term “Epstein-Trump,” has also increased significantly since the Daily Beast first reported on the existence of the tapes on November 1.

The Daily Beast has reached out to NBC News for comment.