Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., secretly begged a Republican donor to pay her credit card debt while she was waiting to be confirmed as ambassador to Greece, according to an interview with the donor.
The donor, Eric Deters, said that Ms. Guilfoyle had asked him to wire $100,000 to pay off her American Express card just before her Senate confirmation hearing in early July 2025, promising to serve as his “ride or die in Trump world” if he did.
“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote in what appeared to be a text message. Communications between Mr. Deters and Ms. Guilfoyle were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Deters provided what appeared to be screenshots of their correspondence to The New York Times.
Mr. Deters sketched out a tawdry tale in which a member of the Trump family’s inner circle promised access to top administration officials as part of a financial arrangement she insisted be kept hidden. The donor wanted to connect with Pam Bondi, then attorney general, and Billy Long, then the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, for business and personal reasons.
“Every secretary you know defense, transportation, treasury commerce IRS commissioner everyone gets right back to me,” she appears to have written the donor in late June 2025, shortly before her Senate confirmation hearing.
The texts suggest that Ms. Guilfoyle warned him to call her on Signal and keep their interactions strictly private. “You’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship,” she wrote, according to one of the screenshots Mr. Deters shared with The Times.
“Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” another message said. “It’s really dangerous.”
Democrats immediately pounced on the allegations as evidence of a pay-to-play pattern during the second Trump administration. Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said such influence-peddling “would be a brazen abuse of power.” Representative Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Ms. Guilfoyle should be fired.
A lawyer for Ms. Guilfoyle declined to comment. Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to answer questions on Thursday about the ambassador’s conduct as he wound up a visit to Athens.
“Just because some source told you something,” he said vehemently, does not mean “it’s gospel.”
Mr. Deters, who has hosted annual pro-Trump events in Kentucky, is a firebrand with his own controversies. In the interview, he said he retired as a lawyer in 2013 after facing disciplinary actions in Kentucky and Ohio. He is now battling an adversary’s motion to hold him in civil contempt in an Ohio case.
He said that he supported President Trump’s policies, but not his administration’s “open grifting and enrichment,” which he said Ms. Guilfoyle exemplified.
Mr. Deters said he met Ms. Guilfoyle after he began holding an annual “Patriots Day Freedom Fest” in Kentucky in 2020. He said he paid $300,000 to Ms. Guilfoyle, $200,000 to Donald Trump Jr. and $100,000 to Eric Trump to speak at the events between 2021 and 2024.
He also donated $125,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2022, according to Federal Election Commission records.
His relationship with Ms. Guilfoyle seems to have intensified after she and Donald Trump Jr. ended their engagement in 2024 and the president nominated her to be an ambassador.
At that point, Mr. Deters asked Ms. Guilfoyle to help him resolve an issue with the I.R.S. involving his tax deductions. He also wanted her to influence the Justice Department to extradite from Pakistan a doctor who had been criminally charged in connection with botched spinal surgeries and to investigate the doctor’s medical insurance company. He said in the interview that he was representing patients in litigation over their operations.
He promised Ms. Guilfoyle a million dollars if he got a legal settlement, and if Tucker Carlson invited Mr. Deters on his podcast to talk about the case.
In the early summer of 2025, as Ms. Guilfoyle’s confirmation hearing neared, he grew increasingly frustrated with what he saw as a lack of results. He claimed that she never broke through with either Ms. Bondi or Mr. Long.
She insisted that she had pulled out all the stops. “I have never worked harder in my life than to promote and protect you,” the texts indicate that she wrote.
She shared with him a copy of a message she said she had sent to Mr. Long, asking him to look into Mr. Deters’s situation. “Don Jr. and I are very close with Eric Deters,” that message reads.
On June 25, 2025, the texts indicate she wrote Mr. Deters: “Please call IRS commissioner Billy Long wrote me back. BOOM.”
Two days later, the texts indicate that Ms. Guilfoyle said Ms. Bondi was the only cabinet member who did not respond immediately to her — even though she claimed that “we are tight.”
Earlier that month, the texts suggest that Ms. Guilfoyle had asked Mr. Deters for backdated invoices. He sent her a letter on June 11 proposing to pay her $50,000 on July 1 — an amount he wrote that he owed — followed by $50,000 on August 1.
“At the time, I’m her friend, I was considering doing it,” he said in the interview. He described the letter as “bs,” saying she wanted it to disguise their arrangement.
On July 3, six days before her confirmation hearing, Ms. Guilfoyle sent an urgent plea for money, a text indicates. “Banks are closed tomorrow,” she wrote with a praying emoji.
“You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show,” she said in the text exchange. She included a PDF with American Express instructions, adding that he would be her “special guest” at her confirmation hearing the following week.
He turned her down, saying his wife would divorce him if he paid.
“Your needing $100,000 urgent unfortunately is not going to work,” he wrote. “I wish you luck.”
Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
The post Donor Says Kimberly Guilfoyle Sought Money From Him to Cover Debt appeared first on New York Times.
