MAXWELL SUIT SHEDS LIGHT
DOCS INVOLVE EPSTEIN’S METHOD, FAMILIAR FIGURES
The documents released so far — with more to come — are sprinkled with names of celebrities and politicians who socialized with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein or worked with him in the years before he was publicly accused nearly two decades ago of paying underage girls for sex.
They also contain the accounts of some of Epstein’s young victims, many of whom were high school students who took payments of $200 to give him illicit massages.
Unsealed this week, the documents are part of a 2015 lawsuit filed against Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre. The lawsuit was settled in 2017, but the documents in the case are still being released years later.
They add several hundred pages to a trove of information detailing how the financier leveraged connections to the rich, powerful and famous to recruit his victims and cover up his crimes.
Most of the names in the records are familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely.
It was during Maxwell’s criminal trial two years ago that Epstein’s victims, some of whom aspired to be models or artists, described how he dropped the names of his famous and influential friends to suggest that he was the victims’ ticket to reaching their dreams. Maxwell, 62, was convicted of sex-trafficking charges and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Epstein killed himself in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. The roughly 250 documents being unsealed this week by a judge’s order in December mostly rehash what has long been known about a man who travelled in elite circles until his arrest.
But they have included a few fresh details about a pyramid of abuse that grew over three decades and damaged dozens of teenage girls and young women.
The documents unsealed this week included an excerpt from the deposition of one those victims, a girl who was in high school when she went to his house, thinking she had been hired to give him a massage.
“I don’t recall exactly how I was propositioned to get there. I was just there, and all of a sudden something horrible happened to me,” she said, adding Epstein removed her clothes without her consent the first time they met.
She said she had worked “very, very hard” over the years to forget the details of her sexual encounters.
The victim, whose name remained sealed, said a highschool classmate had suggested the job to her. Later, she learned that girls who referred other girls to Epstein were paid kickbacks.
She herself brought other girls from her high school to Epstein’s house. None of them were her friends, she said.
“Sometimes I would go over and I would just swim and I would get paid, or I would take a nap and I’d get paid, or I would just hang out and I’d get paid,” she said. “It wasn’t my assumption that they were coming over to do anything. I did not know, once the door was closed or once they went to another area of the home. I often just went over and did my own thing while they were doing whatever they were doing. It was none of my business.”
Other documents largely focused on legal squabbles over Giuffre’s lawsuit and her connection to a British tabloid reporter whom Maxwell’s lawyers accused of compelling her to fabricate some of her allegations.
Among the famous people in Epstein’s orbit before he was exposed as a sexual predator were former U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, singer Michael Jackson and magician David Copperfield, according to the accounts of his victims and other witnesses quoted in newly released documents. None of those men were accused of wrongdoing.
In a 2016 filing, Maxwell’s lawyers said that FBI and Secret Service records disproved claims that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean and said Clinton has not been accused of any sexual misconduct tied to Epstein. Maxwell said in a deposition that the “allegations that Clinton had a meal on Jeffrey’s island is 100 per cent false.” She added she was “sure he had a meal on Jeffrey’s plane.”
Clinton previously said through a spokesperson that although he travelled on Epstein’s jet several times, he never visited his homes, had no knowledge of his crimes and hadn’t spoken to him since his conviction.
Trump is mentioned in a 2016 deposition of Johanna Sjoberg, a woman who has also accused Epstein of abuse. Sjoberg said she was on Epstein’s private plane once when it diverted to Atlantic City because of bad weather. She said they went to one of Trump’s casinos, where she and Giuffre, who was then too young to gamble, walked around before returning to the plane, where Epstein mentioned an idea to “call up Trump.” It was not clear from the deposition whether Epstein and Trump had a conversation about the visit.
Asked if she ever massaged Trump, Sjoberg said she did not.
Trump has said he once thought Epstein was a “terrific guy,” but that they later had a falling-out.
The documents also contain repetitions of wellknown stories about Britain’s Prince Andrew. He was sued by Giuffre, who said she had sexual encounters with the royal when she was 17. The prince, who denied the allegations, settled the lawsuit in 2022.