EPSTEIN: HOW HE DID IT
Hanged self on his knees with bedsheet
Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself using a bedsheet tied to the top of a bunk bed, with the 6-foot pedophile leaning forward on his knees. The feds are investigating the security lapses that allowed Epstein to take the coward’s way out.
Jeffrey Epstein’s jailhouse death has shifted the focus of federal authorities to the accomplices who helped him sexually traffic and abuse underage girls, Attorney General William Barr said on Monday.
The nation’s top lawman delivered the stern warning to the late pedophile’s cronies during a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police in New Orleans, saying, “Any co-conspirators should not rest easy.”
Barr did not name any suspects, but the feds’ list is most likely headed by Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, who has been described variously over the years as the late multimillionaire financier’s girlfriend, closest pal and key player in his alleged sex-trafficking ring.
Court papers unsealed Friday — just hours before Epstein was found “unresponsive” in his cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center in lower Manhattan — also claim that she served as the “madam” in his alleged ring.
The papers, part of a defamation suit that Maxwell settled with Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre shortly before a scheduled 2017 trial, said “multiple witnesses” had testified that Maxwell was responsible for “recruiting, maintaining, harboring and trafficking girls for Epstein.”
Even worse for Maxwell, the court papers allege that she was a“‘co-conspirator’ in Epstein’s sexual abuse,” taking “numerous sexually explicit photographs of underage girls involved in sexual activities” and engaging in three-way sex with Epstein and various girls, according to an opinion written by the late Manhattan federal Judge Robert Sweet.
Among the witnesses who testified against Maxwell — the socialite daughter of the late, disgraced British media mogul Robert Maxwell — during pretrial proceedings was Rinaldo Rizzo, the house manager for her friend and Epstein’s ex-girlfriend Eva Dubin.
“Mr. Rizzo testified — through tears — how, while working at Dubin’s house, he observed [Maxwell] bring a 15-year-old Swedish girl to Dubin’s house,” Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley wrote in motion papers.
“In distress, the 15-year-old girl tearfully explained to him that [Maxwell] tried to force her to have sex with Epstein through threats and stealing her passport.”
McCawley also wrote that it was an “undisputed fact” that one of Epstein’s private pilots, David Rodgers, “testified that he flew [Maxwell] and Ms. Giuffre at least 23 times on Epstein’s jet, the ‘Lolita Express,’ and that ‘ GM’ on the flight log stands for Ghislaine Maxwell.”
Rodgers and another Epstein pilot, Larry Visoski, have cooperated with the federal investigation, The New York Times reported last month.
Another “undisputed fact” that McCawley cited in her motion was testimony by Juan Alessi, the house manager at Epstein’s waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., that Maxwell was “one of the people who procured some of the over 100 girls he witnessed visit Epstein, and that he had to clean [her] sex toys.”
Maxwell “has not been able to procure a single witness — not one — to testify that [she] did not procure girls for sex with Epstein or participate in the sex,” McCawley wrote.
“Even one of her own witnesses, [former Giuffre fiancé] Tony Figueroa, testified that she both procured girls and participated in the sex.”
Maxwell’s debt-ridden dad, a former member of British Parliament, went missing from his yacht while cruising off the Canary Islands in 1991.
Robert Maxwell’s naked body was found by a Spanish fisherman about 15 miles away, and three pathologists who examined it differed on the cause of death, blaming it on a heart attack and/or drowning.
Ghislaine Maxwell is believed to be living in London, where she has a historic townhouse in the swank Belgravia section near Hyde Park and a brick country cottage about 90 miles southwest of the city.
A lawyer for Maxwell did not return a request for comment.
She was last photographed in public by The Post, which in January 2015 caught her coming out of an Upper East Side townhouse in which she lived at the time.
The five-story Beaux Arts
mansion at 116 E. 65th St., about nine blocks from Epstein’s townhouse at 9 E. 71st St., was purchased for $5 million in July 2000 by a limitedliability company that was represented by Epstein’s longtime lawyer Darren Indyke.
The property was sold for nearly $15.1 million in April 2016, records show.
Workers in the neighborhood said that they often saw Maxwell jogging in the morning and that she would wave while walking her dog, a Hungarian vizsla, until she abruptly moved out.
“She was very nice lady,” said a parking attendant who works nearby.
“When I read in the newspaper she was working as a madam, I couldn’t believe it.”
The super at a building on the block described Maxwell as a “very elegant lady, a beautiful woman.” “Nice dog, too,” he added. Meanwhile, as part of their probe, FBI agents raided several locations, including Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, in the US Virgin Islands on Monday, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
The feds were looking for sex toys and other evidence that could corroborate the claims of women who say they were sexually abused by Epstein when they were underage.
A team of feds was seen swarming around the Caribbean island in golf carts at around 10:30 a.m., NBC News reported, and several were photographed on a thatchedroof dock where a catamaran was tied up against a background of tropical greenery.