BOOK THAT WILL ROCK THE WHITE HOUSE AND BUCKINGHAM PALACE
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 Royal Family, was the one woman whom Epstein appeared to
treat as an equal. She was a chameleon, blending in with high and low society as it suited.
The most seemingly outrageous claim that Virginia made during our interviews was that she was taken by Epstein and Maxwell to London, where she was lent out to Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.
During my first conversation with Virginia, I asked her to provide proof of some of her allegations.
She sent me the envelope that Maxwell had given her when they first met with directions to Epstein’s address as well as travel and hotel receipts charged to Epstein’s card.
Not long afterwards, Virginia showed me a photograph of herself, aged 17, wedged in between Maxwell and Andrew. She said it was taken by Epstein in Maxwell’s apartment in London in 2001. Of all the people she claimed to have been
He had a type. The younger the better. White. No tattoos and no piercings
introduced to and made to have sex with, the Duke of York sounded the most preposterous.
Yet here was a picture of the two of them arm in arm, smiling like a happy pair out for the night – even though he’s 23 years her senior.
It was further confirmation of an extraordinary sex abuse enterprise that I was discovering went far beyond what was uncovered in Florida. I knew that Epstein was addicted to sex with children and had assistants scheduling multiple appointments per day with different girls.
He travelled all the time, all over the world, with the same assistants, who clearly knew what he was up to.
While there had not been any evidence of Prince Andrew spending
time at Epstein’s Palm Beach house while young girls were upstairs with Epstein, witnesses had confirmed that the billionaire and the Prince were close friends.
Next, I obtained evidence of at least one more encounter between Andrew and Epstein. Another of his victims, Johanna, said she vividly remembered seeing Andrew at Epstein’s New York mansion.
She described how Virginia was sitting on one of Andrew’s knees and Johanna herself was sitting on the other. While the two girls were in his lap, Ghislaine Maxwell took out a puppet figure of Andrew and placed the puppet’s hand on Virginia’s breast, at which point Andrew placed his hand on Johanna’s breast. Everyone laughed.
Pursuing Epstein on behalf of his victims became my life mission.
He was an intellectually gifted sociopath with unlimited wealth who lived a virtually unconstrained life. The rules he – and those in his fold – lived by were his own.
The problem was that his rules didn’t account for laws.
Epstein had amassed extensive political and worldly connections. For decades, he used his tremendous fortune to sexually exploit women and girls, some as young as 14. Our team was working hard to stay focused on what mattered to secure a conviction. Virginia had important revelations that should not be silenced.
While Epstein and his entourage were looking to shut her down, she was determined to be heard. Because Virginia liked Amy Robach, of the ABC network, we chose her and flew with Virginia to New York in April 2015 for the taping of an interview in which she would set down her full story.
The interview was powerful. In fact, we were told it was one of the best interviews anyone had seen and would air on Good Morning America. The Epstein organisation was finally going to be exposed.
BUT after being strung along for weeks, we were told that because Virginia talked about her interactions with Prince Andrew, the network had to seek comment from the Royal Family and from an attorney for Epstein, since nearly the entire story discussed the inner workings of his sex-trafficking organisation. For some reason, both presented a problem for ABC. We were not told much other than the network was scared it would lose access to the Royal Family if it aired the interview.
For whatever reason, the interview never made it on screen, which deeply frustrated Amy Robach.
More than four years later, after Epstein’s sexual abuse was widely reported, Amy expressed her frustration: ‘I’ve had the story for three years.
‘I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air. I was told the Palace found out that we had her whole allegation about Prince Andrew and threatened us in a million different ways.
‘We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate [Middleton] and [Prince] Will. That also quashed the story.’
While Virginia Roberts was travelling the world with Epstein and Maxwell, she had a boyfriend – one much closer in age – called Tony. He didn’t ask many questions, even though he knew what was going on. Virginia had told him, for example, that she didn’t wish to sleep with Prince Andrew but that it was necessary if they were to maintain their lifestyle.
There came a time, however, when life inside Epstein’s debauched world became too much for even a strong soul such as her.
At the age of 19, when she had been involved in the sex cult for over two years, Epstein and Maxwell came up with a proposal that turned her stomach: they wanted her to carry his baby.
They told Virginia she would be taken care of for the rest of her life if she would agree to give Epstein and Maxwell a child, although there were some strings attached. In particular, she would have to sign a contract agreeing that the baby was not her own, but the legal child of Epstein and Maxwell.
It was the final straw. She couldn’t bear the thought of Epstein and Maxwell raising her child. She knew she had to escape.
Her chance came during a trip to Thailand.
At Epstein’s direction, Virginia had been dispatched there to pick up a young girl, interview her, and let Epstein know if she was ‘qualified’.
But rather than meet the girl,
Virginia recognised her chance to escape. She went into town and met a man from Australia who fell in love with her and promised to take care of her.
She married him days later, hopped on a plane with him to Australia, and never looked back.
She hid in Australia for nearly ten years, during which time she had three children.
Over 11 years, I represented more than 30 victims in lawsuits and claims against Epstein and in the end, justice was finally served. He was arrested.
But he convinced a psychologist to let him off suicide watch. Of course he did. He could convince anyone of anything. He was the most notorious child molester on the planet.
He had fallen overnight from a jet-setting billionaire who controlled everyone around him to a caged animal at the mercy of prison guards and inmates. All signs indicated a high risk for suicide. A month later, he was found hanging in his cell. He’d escaped responsibility once again.
Even though he died, the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes should not. I owe it to the brave women, such as Virginia Roberts, who came forward to seek justice, to share what really happened. By The Mail on Sunday, based on Relentless Pursuit: My Fight For The Victims Of Jeffrey Epstein, by Bradley J Edwards, published by S&S on March 31, priced at £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until April 30. To preorder, go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Free delivery on all orders – no minimum spend.