Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, faced questions on Wednesday in a closed-door session of the House Oversight Committee over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.

Mr. Lutnick is one of the highest-profile cabinet members to come under scrutiny in connection with Mr. Epstein. The commerce secretary’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, a review by The New York Times found.

Asked whether Mr. Lutnick’s credibility had been undermined, Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky who chairs the House Oversight Committee said Wednesday, “we’re going to ask him all these questions, and we’ll let the American people judge whether the credibility was damaged or not at the end of the day.”

Mr. Comer said that Mr. Lutnick “wasn’t 100 percent truthful with whether he or not he had been on the island.”

He added that it was the first time in the last decade that a chairman of the oversight committee had brought in a cabinet secretary of his own party.

During the hearing Mr. Lutnick downplayed his ties to Mr. Epstein, claiming their relationship was inconsequential, according to two people familiar with his testimony.

Mr. Lutnick lived next door to Mr. Epstein on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for over a decade. Until recently, he had claimed to have not been in the same room with Mr. Epstein after an encounter in 2005. But millions of documents that were released by the Justice Department earlier this year showed that Mr. Lutnick had traveled to Mr. Epstein’s private island in 2012.

The documents suggest Mr. Lutnick had another encounter with Mr. Epstein at his house in 2011, years after Mr. Lutnick claimed to have cut ties with him. The records also indicated that the men invested in the same privately held company together and dealt with each other on neighborhood and philanthropic issues.

Mr. Epstein, who was convicted in Florida in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor, died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while being held on federal sex-trafficking charges.

Mr. Lutnick has received questions from lawmakers about his connections with Mr. Epstein in congressional hearings on other topics, first in February and again last month.

All Democrats and some Republicans on the Oversight Committee signaled that they would try to force a vote on a subpoena for Mr. Lutnick. But the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said that Mr. Lutnick had volunteered to testify.

The Commerce Department said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Lutnick looked forward to “putting to rest the inaccurate and baseless claims in the media.”

Though the committee’s investigation into Mr. Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling of the case against him has sprawled to include a number of political figures, Mr. Lutnick is the first current Trump administration official to testify before the panel.

The committee also issued a subpoena to Pam Bondi, the former attorney general who Mr. Trump fired last month, before she was dismissed from her position. She has not yet appeared for a deposition.

Questions by lawmakers in the closed-door session on Wednesday could touch on Mr. Lutnick’s former nanny. The files showed that Mr. Epstein expressed an interest in meeting the nanny in 2013 and had her résumé sent to him. It is not clear if they ever met.

Mr. Lutnick said in February that he did not know if the nanny had met Mr. Epstein, or if she was one of the nannies Mr. Lutnick had brought to the island. Mr. Lutnick has four children.

In October, Mr. Lutnick said in a podcast interview that he had decided after a 2005 incident not to associate with Mr. Epstein, after Mr. Epstein alluded to his sexual encounters with women while giving Mr. Lutnick and his wife a tour of his house.

“My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” Mr. Lutnick said on the podcast, “Pod Force One.” “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy.”

But in a congressional hearing in February, Mr. Lutnick told lawmakers that he not only met with Mr. Epstein after that encounter, but that he and his family also traveled to his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 for lunch. Mr. Lutnick was traveling aboard his yacht, accompanied by his wife, children, nannies and another family.

The visit took place four years after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor as part of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.

An actress accused the director James Cameron of stealing her likeness to create an “Avatar” character in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in California — a case that reflects a core fear among Hollywood performers in the artificial intelligence age: losing control of their own faces.

The actress, Q’orianka Kilcher, also sued Disney, which controls the multibillion-dollar “Avatar” franchise, which started in 2009.

“In the age of A.I., our likeness is no longer safe,” Ms. Kilcher, 36, said in an interview. “While what happened to me is personal, it’s also a big warning that, if we don’t act now, this type of thing will become standard. This case is about the future of identity.”

The lawsuit involves Neytiri, the digitally created, blue-skinned warrior princess in Mr. Cameron’s three “Avatar” blockbusters. According to the complaint, Mr. Cameron used a photo of Ms. Kilcher as a teenager — without her knowledge — as the foundation for Neytiri, incorporating her features “directly into his production art” and digital production pipeline.

“Neytiri’s lips, chin, jawline and overall mouth shape” in the trilogy “are Q’orianka Kilcher’s,” the complaint said. “This was not a fleeting inspiration or a vague homage; it was a literal transplant of a real teenager’s facial structure.”

In 2010, Ms. Kilcher, who is also an Indigenous rights activist, met Mr. Cameron by chance at a charity event in Hollywood, where he told her that she was the “early inspiration” for Neytiri’s look, according to the complaint. “She did not take this to mean that her actual face had been replicated,” the complaint said.

Ms. Kilcher is suing now, the complaint said, because of an interview that Mr. Cameron gave to a French media outlet in 2024. In the interview, Mr. Cameron mentions Ms. Kilcher and “points to an image of Neytiri and says unambiguously: ‘This is actually her lower face,’” the complaint said. The interview came to her attention a year later.

“For the first time in a public forum, Cameron explicitly admitted the full truth about Neytiri’s design,” according to the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles. “One of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers exploited a young Indigenous girl’s biometric identity and cultural heritage to create a record-breaking film franchise, without credit or compensation to her.”

A lawyer for Mr. Cameron did not respond to a request for comment. Disney had no immediate comment.

Ms. Kilcher’s action is the latest in a large number of legal attacks on “Avatar” over the years — almost all of them resolved by courts in Mr. Cameron’s favor, including five separate lawsuits accusing him of copyright infringement or the stealing of ideas. A sixth infringement lawsuit is ongoing and was expanded last month.

In part, Ms. Kilcher is suing under California’s decades-old “right of publicity” statute, which allows people to bring claims against unauthorized use of their identities. It’s a complex area of the law that has taken on a new immediacy in the age of generative A.I., an emerging technology that allows anyone with an internet connection to easily create images that replicate existing art, photographs and human likenesses.

Generally speaking, right-of-publicity laws (about 25 states have one) balance First Amendment protections by distinguishing between commercial exploitation (using a likeness to sell a product) and expressive works (such as news, art, parody). But “there is not always a bright line,” said Jennifer E. Rothman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School who is viewed as a leading authority on right-to-privacy law.

Ms. Kilcher’s break in Hollywood came in 2005 when, as a 14-year-old, she was cast as Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s “The New World.” She has since acted in films like “Dog” and TV shows like “Yellowstone,” and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Ms. Kilcher is asking for damages that include “all profits” attributable to the unauthorized use, including from the sale of “Avatar” tickets; the three “Avatar” films have collected $1.8 billion at the North American box office alone.

“The damages we are asking for are commensurate with the exploitation,” Arnold P. Peter, one of Ms. Kilcher’s lawyers, said in an interview.