SECRETS OF EPSTEIN’S LOLITA EXPRESS
Mirrored walls. A bottle of baby lotion. And seats that can all convert into beds... It was the scene of many alleged sordid liaisons with the paedophile tycoon. Now it’s mouldering on a Georgia airstrip
MIrrOrED walls, a garish red sofa, thick carpets and a queen-size bed with drawers full of fresh linen and clean towels. It could be the private jet of any multi-millionaire with a taste for the tacky.
But the rusty Boeing 727 gathering mildew on a landing strip in the U.S. state of Georgia offers a few clues to its owner.
First, there is the plane’s tail number: N908JE — note the last two letters, which also appear as monograms on its towels and even tissues.
Every seat can be turned into a bed. And perhaps another telling detail is the bottle of Johnson’s Baby Lotion, discarded in a mouldy bathroom cupboard.
Was it used by some of the last young women to travel on the jet, to administer to passengers — frequently powerful men — who enjoyed the attentions of its masseuses?
For this is the late Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, the extravagantly customised private plane that was a key accessory in his crimes.
It was the pride of his £62million fleet (there were also two smaller Gulfstream jets and a helicopter that his friend Ghislaine Maxwell liked to fly herself) in which the paedophile financier ferried some of his famous friends — including Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Naomi Campbell, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Prince Andrew — around the world.
There is no suggestion any of these people were guilty of sexual misconduct on the plane. But, as its nickname implies, many of Epstein’s victims claim he used it to transport young women and underage girls to sex parties.
Nor was it just a glorified air taxi. The Boeing was allegedly the location for in-flight orgies involving Epstein, some of his friends, and the young flight attendants, who frequently dressed in sexy versions of flight-crew uniform.
EPSTEIN bought the jet — designed for 200 passengers but customised to fly just 29 in luxury — in 2000 for nearly £8million from a company owned by his friend and reported client, Victoria’s Secret billionaire Les Wexner.
The brown-and-beige decor smacks of the Seventies, although Epstein reportedly modernised the plane in 2014.
Clearly no expense was spared on the interior — although the sable and mink throws are long gone, the velvet seating, teak and mahogany panelling and inlays are still evident.
There is a spacious bathroom next to the bedroom, a ‘trading room’ where Epstein conducted business, and a lounge with a ring of well-cushioned chairs.
But just as its most frequent flyers ended up behind bars — Epstein killed himself in a New York jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges, and Maxwell is in custody awaiting trial on charges, which she denies, that include sex trafficking — the plane, which was stripped of its engines, has spent years languishing here in the humid Southern heat, even as its hand-written flight logs have continued to throw up revelations about those who flew on it.
It has not been in the air since July 2016, when it arrived from Palm Beach, Florida, where Epstein had a mansion.
Until his arrest three years later, he reportedly continued to fly with underage girls. Air traffic controllers in the U.S. Virgin Islands have claimed they saw him disembarking another aircraft, his Gulfstream IV, with young girls on several occasions in 2018. One girl appeared to be only 11 or 12 years old.
Mark Stambaugh, owner of the ramp on which the plane sits, said he initially agreed to store it for free as he assumed his company, Stambaugh Aviation, would be paid to do maintenance on it.
‘As a father of two daughters, I’m not really thrilled with having it here,’ he told the Mail. ‘But I guess an airplane is just an airplane. Somebody needs to come and do something with it, or it needs to be scrapped because it’s just going to sit here and keep deteriorating.’
He estimates it will cost up to £2.3million to repair. It has apparently changed hands several times and costs its current owner, a Florida-based aviation company, nearly £800 a month in storage fees.
A sales prospectus for the jet claims it is ‘tailored to enhance the experience during long-range travel’. Certainly, Epstein tried to ‘enhance the experience’ of many of his male passengers with young women — some below the age of consent — serving as masseuses and air hostesses on his planes.
Chauntae Davies, then a struggling 22-year-old actress who became Epstein’s ‘personal masseuse’ and a flight attendant on the Lolita Express, has said she and other attractive young women were expected to give massages and yoga instruction to passengers.
Davies accompanied Epstein, Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey and comic Chris Tucker on a humanitarian tour of Africa in 2002 — the same year she played a lingerie model in a soft core porn film.
Although Davies insisted on American TV in 2015 that nothing untoward happened on the flight and that she never gave Clinton a massage, a picture recently emerged of her doing exactly that — her hands kneading his shoulder muscles in a small airport terminal in Portugal when the Lolita Express landed to refuel. Another picture from the same trip shows the former president on board playing cards and puffing on a cigar.
When they arrived in Africa, Davies claims Clinton took her jewellery shopping — to buy a present for his daughter Chelsea. She insisted nothing improper ever occurred and that he was a ‘complete gentleman’.
However, Davies says she had already been sexually abused by Epstein and feared the worst during the Africa trip: ‘I was praying Jeffrey wouldn’t make a move on me, desperately wanting
everything about this trip to be kept professional,’ she has said.
Davies has described arriving at the airfield with three other young female assistants and being given uniforms to wear. Epstein said he wanted them to look more professional.
AformEr co-pilot on the plane reportedly compared the uniforms to ‘sexy nurse’ outfits. ms Davies has since said she now realises she was ‘used’ and that all was not what it seemed.
‘on almost every trip I went on, there were young girls around,’ she said. ‘And why fly anyone out to be a masseuse when there are plenty of masseuses in the city you’re in?’ And why, she might have asked herself, hire novice masseuses and air hostesses when there were plenty of less nubile but more experienced people available.
further evidence of the nature of some flights is provided by pilots’ log books in which the presence of young women was camouflaged by listing them simply by their first name (possibly a pseudonym) or simply as a ‘female’.
Before his death, Epstein was facing a string of lawsuits from women, some of them minors at the time, that alleged sexual abuse happened on his planes. Some accusers claimed Ghislaine maxwell was involved in organising underage sex parties on board. The plane’s long-time pilot Larry
Visoski has acknowledged that he knew there were minors on board but has insisted he never suspected Epstein was having sex with them on the plane — despite the large bed, the well-upholstered seats and the padded floor, which reportedly feels like mattress foam and where Epstein apparently urged his young crew to sleep.
A former model told Vanity fair in 2003 that Epstein gave her and a group of older men a tour of the jet. She noted the padded floors, she said, and thought: ‘Why are padded floors cool? I was too young to get it.’ The men, however, joked and winked at each other knowingly.
It is hardly surprising that famous people have tried to distance themselves from the plane. mr Clinton has insisted he travelled on it only four times — once to Europe, once to Asia and twice to Africa — between 2002 and 2003, and that bodyguards and staff of his charity foundation accompanied him on ‘every leg of every trip’.
But according to the logs, it is suggested that he was a passenger on at least 26 occasions. Destinations included Brunei, russia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Belgium.
Prince Andrew told the BBC he had flown on Epstein’s ‘private plane’ but didn’t specify which one or how many times.
flight logs say that in 1999, the Duke flew from New York to Epstein’s private Caribbean island on his old jet — a Gulfstream — and returned with another passenger, russian model Anna malova. Epstein’s regular pilot, David rodgers, last year testified that the Duke was aboard on several flights, including the plane’s maiden flight in August 2001.
He claimed that on two of those trips, the Duke’s accuser, Virginia roberts Giuffre, was also on board. The pilot made no claims that the Prince was involved in sexual misconduct on any flight and the Prince has vehemently denied any involvement in any wrongdoing.
roberts Giuffre, who claims she was ‘farmed out’ to Prince Andrew by Epstein and maxwell for sex in 2001 — an allegation the Prince strenuously denies — says she flew to that fateful rendezvous in London on the Lolita Express.
SHE ALSo claims in legal papers that she had sex on the jet with U.S. lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, when another girl was present. Although flight logs show he flew on the plane at the invitation of Epstein, a friend, mr Dershowitz insists ms roberts’s claims of sex never happened.
The log books have also revealed how Clare Hazell, now the Countess of Iveagh and a member of the Guinness clan, flew more than 30 times on the jet. maria farmer, one of Epstein’s accusers, said the future countess ‘liked having nice drinks, piles of cash and nice outfits’.
Another passenger who took scores of flights was recently alleged to have been Epstein’s ‘secret’ British girlfriend, Cheshire-born Shelley Anne Lewis.
In July last year, ex-crew members were ordered to appear before a federal grand jury in the U.S. and hand over flight logs, passenger manifests and personal notes. Prosecutors hoped they would corroborate accounts given by Epstein’s accusers and provide details of those who flew with him.
The Lolita Express could yet yield further secrets.