South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Behind closed doors with Epstein and Maxwell
His obsessions, their threesomes, her exit
A fresh batch of court documents unsealed Friday provides new evidence of the lengths Ghislaine Maxwell went to satisfy Jeffrey Epstein’s obsessions, and the Svengali-like hold Epstein had on her years after their romantic relationship had come to an end.
The documents show Maxwell’s constant efforts to find new young women and girls to satisfy Epstein, including having threesomes with other women, which she insisted involved adults and were consensual.
“I recall a blonde and I recall a brunette,” Maxwell said according to testimony that was newly unsealed in the court records.
His estate in Palm Beach was a revolving door of women and young girls, all ushered in to give a naked Epstein massages that turned into sex.
The records are part of discovery in a 2015 defamation lawsuit brought against Maxwell by victim Virginia Giuffre, who took legal action when Maxwell called her a liar for describing Maxwell and Epstein as sex traffickers. The suit was settled in 2017, with Maxwell reportedly paying Giuffre millions of dollars. The file was then sealed by the judge, who has since died.
Giuffre’s ex-boyfriend, Tony Figueroa, describes the constant demands by Epstein and Maxwell to supply Epstein with “more girls” — and Figueroa’s efforts to fulfill their demands. He was paid $200-$300 for each new girl he brought Epstein at his Palm Beach estate, he testified during deposition.
“Pretty much every time there was a conversation with any of them, it was either asking Virginia [Giuffre] where she was at, or asking her to get girls, or asking me to get girls,” Figueroa said in his 2016 deposition, included among the newly unsealed documents.
Johanna Sjoberg, an Epstein victim whose May 18, 2016, deposition was unsealed in full this week, recalled Maxwell telling her that, “she would not be able to please him as much as he needed and that is why there were other girls around.”
Sjoberg said that Maxwell originally recruited her on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic College and told Sjoberg that she wanted to hire girls to do work a butler typically would do — but that butlers were “too stuffy.”
The 132 documents unsealed Friday by a new presiding judge contain numerous new names and details, including disgraced film producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, whose 2005 call to Epstein is among more than 190 messages included from a message pad in Epstein’s house, many of which are still heavily redacted.
The documents also include Epstein’s response to the publication of his “black book” by the website Gawker.
“[S]hould not be legal.,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell in a 2015 e-mail.
The Miami Herald and its parent, McClatchy, sued to have the documents unsealed in 2018 and to date more than 600 documents from the case have been released as a result of that challenge.
Epstein’s abuse of hundreds of girls — and the lenient deal he struck with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida that allowed him to escape harsh punishment 15 years ago when arrested on charges of sexually exploiting young girls — was the subject of the Herald’s 2018 series Perversion of Justice.
In the wake of the Herald’s reporting, federal prosecutors in New York brought new sex charges against Epstein in July 2019. He was found hanged a month later in his New York prison cell, a day after the first documents from the Giuffre-Maxwell case were unsealed, albeit in highly redacted form. Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide.
In July 2020, Maxwell was arrested and charged for her role in facilitating Epstein’s abuse. She was convicted in late 2021 on five of six charges related to sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison the following year.
The documents unsealed Friday provide more insight into Maxwell and Epstein’s complicated relationship.
When asked during her April 22, 2016, deposition whether Maxwell ever considered herself Epstein’s girlfriend, she replied that it was “a tricky question.”
“There were times when I would have liked to think of myself as his girlfriend,” she said.
Maxwell has said that her contact with Epstein was limited after his plea deal in 2008 and stint in a Florida jail, but the e-mails suggest that she was still in regular contact with him years later, and still under his influence.
Maxwell’s emails and messages show the British socialite was almost paralyzed over trying to decide whether to distance herself from Epstein after Giuffre first went public with allegations about Maxwell’s role in Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme in late 2014.
Maxwell’s first instinct was to seek Epstein’s help.
“Philip [please] call jeffrey lawyer and see what you can understand from him and perhaps craft something in conjunction with him?” Maxwell wrote in an e-mail to her British attorney, Philip Barden, on Jan. 10, 2015.
Barden counseled her against contacting Epstein, insisting that Epstein “will want your silence as whilst you are being attacked there is less heat on him.”
In a series of e-mails, Barden grew increasingly frustrated with Maxwell’s inability to break with Epstein.
“I can see why JE doesn’t want this as it may not suit him but he is already toast,” Barden wrote the following day.
In subsequent weeks, Epstein was in regular contact with Maxwell, checking on her decision to issue a statement and offering her advice on how she should respond to the accusations.
“Ask press to investigate whether Clinton was ever there,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell on Jan. 21, 2015, presumably a reference to Giuffre’s claim that President Bill Clinton had visited Epstein’s Little St. James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which Clinton has denied.
The following day Epstein wrote again, “ive tried to call. what have you decided?”
Several days later, Epstein wrote again, “what has happened to you and your statmenet (sic)??”
Maxwell responded, “I have not decided what to do.”
While Epstein counseled Maxwell in the emails to deny responsibility for his actions, Friday’s unsealed documents suggest he didn’t spring to her defense when given a chance during the defamation lawsuit.
Epstein declined to answer approximately 600 questions posed to him during a Nov. 10, 2016, deposition, citing his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and indicating that he would do the same if called upon to testify at a trial.
The newly released documents continued the slow drip of salacious details from the sex trafficker’s saga that ended many years ago.
An Epstein employee, Nadia Marcinkova, who was accused by Epstein victims of sexually abusing girls, was asked, “Is it true that Jeffrey Epstein makes you dress up as a 12-year old?” She invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to every question.
Marcinkova has never been charged in relation to Epstein.
Adriana Ross, one of Epstein’s massage schedulers, was asked whether she remembered a certain birthday gift.
“On one of Epstein’s birthdays a friend of Jeffrey Epstein sent to him three 12-year-old girls from France who spoke no English for Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse and after doing so he sent them back to France the next day. Are you familiar with that?” an attorney asked her. She refused to answer.
She has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Celebrities also were scattered throughout the files.
Epstein’s former house manager, Juan Alessi, recited the glitterati he came into contact with. In a Sept. 8, 2009, deposition, he was asked if he’d ever heard Epstein “talking to any people that you would consider celebrities?”
Alessi said he wasn’t one to listen in on his boss’ conversations, but he saw celebrities himself at the Epstein home.
The first two celebrities he named remain redacted in the documents released Friday.
But he said Prince Andrew “spent weeks with us” and had daily massages, and Sarah Ferguson, the prince’s then-wife, visited the home. He said he saw beauty queens, including Miss Yugoslavia and Miss Germany, “very famous” lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, who slept at the house; and Princess Diana’s secretary, who stayed a week with her kids, “and we took care of her.”
“Who else?” Alessi went on. “Mr. Trump. That’s a celebrity. Mr. Robert Kennedy Junior. Mr. Frederic Fekkai” the celebrity hairstylist.
Alessi said he met a Noble Prize winner.
“It was an old gentleman. He was a Nobel Prize [winner], chemistry, I think, or mathematics.” Another time, Epstein hosted a “reunion of … Nobel Prize winners.”
He met President Clinton on Epstein’s plane, he said, in Miami.
In response to this week’s unsealed documents, a spokesman for Clinton directed the Herald to a statement issued on behalf of the former president in 2019 indicating that Clinton had no knowledge of Epstein’s “terrible crimes.”
In a statement, Maxwell’s attorneys, Arthur Aidala and Diana Fabi Samson, said she took no position on the release of documents and is focused on her appeal. Maxwell is serving her 20-year sentence in federal prison in Tallahassee for her role in the sex-trafficking scheme.
“Ghislaine’s focus is on the upcoming appellate argument asking for her entire case to be dismissed,” the lawyers said. “She is confident that she will obtain justice in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She has consistently and vehemently maintained her innocence.”