After going viral online this week, a statue of President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein disappeared from view on Wednesday morning.
The circumstances of the removal remain uncertain. The anonymous artists behind the artwork, titled The Secret Handshake, said they had obtained a legal permit to put up the statue on Sunday and that the work had been “physically destroyed and removed” at 5:30 a.m.
“We found out at the end of the day that some people within the parks department aka most likely the Trump administration were trying to find ways to say we were not in compliance,” a representative for the artists wrote in an email to ARTnews. “We were then told everything is okay and that if the administration decided to remove it we would have 24 hours notice to take it down ourselves.
“Instead,” the email continued, “they showed up in the middle of the night without notice and physically toppled the statue, broke it, and took it away.” The artists said they did not know the work’s current location.
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ARTnews reviewed video of the sculpture’s removal that the artists obtained. In the footage, an unseen man approaches the person filming, saying that he is a member of the National Parks Service and that the sculpture is non-compliant, given that the permit called for the statue to be six feet tall or less. The Secret Handshake measures 12 feet tall.
Several workers then appear to pull away aspects of the Trump and Epstein figures, along with pedestals upon which they appeared.
A Department of the Interior spokesperson told ARTnews that the sculpture was “removed because it was not compliant with the permit issued.” The White House did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.
The White House said in a statement to the New York Times, “Democrats, the media and the organization that’s wasting their money on this statue knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”
The statue depicted Trump and Epstein smiling at one another as they dance together. The work had three plaques, one of which featured text reading, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Those words were appropriated from a birthday message that Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein while he was still alive. The message was printed in a drawing resembling the silhouette of a nude female body. The White House has said that Trump “did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it,” and Trump sued the New York Times for an article that noted similarities between the signature on the letter and his own. That suit was dismissed by a judge.
The artists behind The Secret Handshake previously told ARTnews, “There’s a lot of uproar on the left and the right about releasing the Epstein files. We have nothing to do with that. The information about their bond that’s public says a lot.” They said their work was meant to mark Friendship Month, which takes place in September.
In an email on Wednesday, the artists said, “This is a literal example of the Trump administration toppling free speech when it has been legally permitted and approved because they are scared about whatever Trump is hiding in the Epstein files.” The artists noted that the removal occurred not long after Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show returned to the airwaves following its pause over his comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing.
Other Trump-related sculptures have appeared near the Capitol during his second administration. One featured a golden TV with an eagle atop it; another featured the President holding a Bitcoin and was mounted by crypto investors. Neither work was removed in such a public-facing way.