How Andrew’s accuser f led Epstein and Maxwell after they asked her to have their surrogate baby

The book that will rock the White House AND the Palace – by lawyer who devoted his life to nailing billionaire paedophile

FOR 11 years, top American lawyer BRADLEY EDWARDS made it his ‘life’s mission’ on behalf of countless young women victims to put Jeffrey Epstein behind bars. Now in a compelling new book, entitled Relentless Pursuit, stories from which we are featuring over three weeks, he tells how he brought the ‘sociopath with unlimited wealth’ to justice…

VIRGINIA ROBERTS was a striking 16-year-old with drive and a determination to improve herself. She was doing just that – reading a book on a bench one lunchtime – outside Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Her father, who worked at the club as a maintenance man, had helped her to get a job there that summer of 1999 as a towel girl in the women’s changing rooms.

Suddenly, the teenager was approached by a smartly dressed and rather charming woman. A British accent added to the sense of allure.

The woman showed an interest in the book Virginia was reading – on massage therapy, as it happened – and wasted no time telling her that she could get her a job with a billionaire friend who owned a house just around the corner.

Virginia’s reaction was disarmingly honest, telling the well-spoken stranger that she knew little about massage and was merely interested to learn about it as a potential career.

This didn’t matter, said the woman: she and the billionaire friend would teach Virginia anything she needed to know. ‘I’m Ghislaine. See you tonight,’ she added, handing over an address written on an envelope.

This, of course, was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell.

Virginia’s head was spinning. A girl from a family where money had always been a struggle was really about to start working for a billionaire?

She ran to her father, excited. Someone thought she was important. This was her chance and she couldn’t let it slip.

For Virginia, as I was to learn when I became her lawyer, had endured a difficult childhood. As a teenager, her parents had put her in a home for troubled girls but she ran away to Miami. There, she had been groomed by a man almost 50 years her senior who was running a prostitution racket.

AFTER a brief involvement with the police, her parents rescued her and got her the job at Mar-a-Lago. I first met Virginia a decade after her initial encounter with Maxwell and a year after taking on the case of 20-year-old Courtney Wild, who had been sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein.

Having listened to Courtney’s testimony, my blood pressure rose. This man needed to be stopped.

At first, the case sounded easy. It was anything but. Over the course of 11 years, the investigation took me all over the United States and beyond.

Virginia Roberts, I discovered, was one of countless young girls involved with Epstein and had begun a civil lawsuit against him.

She had been to his house in New York (one of the largest townhouses in Manhattan), his ranch in New Mexico (which had its own airplane runway), his apartment in Paris, and his private island in the US Virgin Islands, Little Saint James (which was nicknamed Little Saint Jeff’s).

She had travelled the world with Epstein and was a true insider with detailed knowledge of the structure of his organisation.

She held the key to building a water-tight case against him and putting him where he belonged – behind bars.

I found Virginia to be a powerful woman who would not scare easily or be bullied by anyone.

She recounted how her father had driven her that evening in 1999 to Epstein’s palatial Palm Beach mansion at El Brillo Way.

Too naive to be scared, Virginia hopped out of the car and went to the front door boiling with excitement, ready to learn. She was pinching herself to remember that this wasn’t just a dream.

‘Jeffrey has been waiting to meet you,’ said Maxwell as she greeted her at the door, before heading up the stairs. ‘Follow me.’

Virginia was taken to a bedroom, where Maxwell instructed her on every aspect of how to perform a massage, from the location and placement of the oils to the length of time she would need to spend on each portion of the body.

Then, standing by the massage table, Virginia turned to look and saw an older man walking in her direction wearing only a towel and a big, childish grin. ‘I’m Jeffrey,’ he said, before lying down.

Maxwell and Jeffrey seemed almost giddy while asking Virginia questions about her life and her future, interspersed with Maxwell’s instructions on how to give a proper massage.

The older woman wasted little time before stripping off all her clothes and telling Virginia to do the same. Epstein then sexually assaulted Virginia. ‘Doesn’t that feel good?’ he asked.

She wasn’t sure what to think and definitely wasn’t sure what to say. Yet such was Maxwell’s confidence that Virginia simply assumed this was the way massages were performed in the world of the rich and famous. That she should, in other words, get with the programme or get another job.

‘You did great. He really loved you,’ Maxwell told Virginia afterwards. ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’

‘Of course,’ Virginia responded. But her mind was still whirling and she spent the rest of the night crying in the bathroom of her parents’ house.

What had just happened? Was everyone like this guy?

Yet she also knew that Epstein had just paid her more money than she had been paid in her entire life for no more than an hour of her time.

By the time she was 17, Virginia was travelling around with this billionaire and Maxwell, part of what Virginia called their ‘dysfunctional family’. She was interacting – mostly as a sex slave – with powerful people.

If she wasn’t servicing Epstein, Virginia was being made to please one of his friends.

Maxwell called Epstein’s girls her ‘children’, referring to herself as ‘mother hen’. She was the one who knew what Epstein liked.

Sex seemed vital to Epstein’s survival. As another of his victims, Johanna, told me: ‘He needed to have three orgasms a day. It was biological, like eating.’ Epstein had a particular type of girl. The younger the better. White. No tattoos. No piercings. No pregnancies. The girls had to look ‘pure’.

Once, Courtney Wild brought an African-American girl to Epstein’s house. He took Courtney inside and left the other girl outside. He handed Courtney $200 and said: ‘Do not ever do that again.’

Maxwell taught Virginia all the skills she needed to keep him happy. Those included how to act in front of important and powerful people, how to dress, how to hold her knife and fork, and, of course, how to please him – and his friends – sexually.

Maxwell, an elegant figure whose social circle included not just leading business figures but members of the British royal family, was the one woman whom Epstein