Do flight logs show that the man who anonymously donated $130 million to pay American soldiers during the October 2025 U.S. government shutdown flew on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express plane? No, that's not true: The flight log page cited in social media posts making the claim does show that Paul Mellon, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, flew with Epstein between Mellon's Virginia horse farm and Richmond, Virginia, on April 6, 1998, but Mellon could not have been the donor since he died in 1999.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by the @anthon7yandrews X account on October 25, 2025. The caption with the flight log image read:
The man who anonymously paid $130 million to pay our soldiers, because Trump shutdown the government to hide the Epstein files, is IN the Epstein files and flew on the Lolita Express. JE=Jeffrey Epstein, Paul Mellon, 2 females. Trafficked children were only referred to as gender.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of X.com)
The image used in this post only includes the right side of the flight log page covering the last week or March and first week of April, 1998. Here is the full page, which offers more context about where the flight took off and landed:
The page shows that "Paul Mellon" was on two flights, both on April 6, 1998. The flight just prior to Mellon's boarding originated at TEB, which is the airport code for New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, with "JE" (Jeffrey Epstein) and two unnamed females as passengers on April 6, 1998. The notation indicates the destination was Rokeby Farms (archived here), banker Paul Mellon's horse farm near Upperville, Virginia. The farm had a private landing strip at the time.
The log recorded that the same plane took off that same day from the farm airport with Epstein, Mellon, an unidentified woman named Carolyn, and two unnamed females, and then landed 125 miles away at RIC, which is the airport code for Richmond International Airport.
The plane flew back to the Rokeby Farms landing strip later in the same day with Epstein, Mellon, and two unnamed females, the log said. Carolyn was not recorded as being on board. The plane continued from there with just Epstein and two unnamed female passengers back to where it began the day at Teterboro Airport, it said.
Paul Mellon died at his Upperville, Virginia home less than a year later, on February 2, 1999, at the age of 91.
His only son, Timothy Mellon, is reported to be the anonymous billionaire who donated the $130 million to the federal government to help pay U.S. military personnel during the government shutdown in 2025, according to The New York Times (archived here.) There is no documentation that the younger Mellon was ever a passenger on the Epstein jet.
The Epstein flight logs (archived here) handwritten by pilot David Rogers were filed as an exhibit in a federal lawsuit filed by some of Epstein's young victims. Page 61 documented the Mellon flights. You can download them and check them here:
