High-flying American hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein had been in the headlines for weeks, dragging along powerful names such as former US presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, when he died in prison in New York in August 2019.

Already a convicted paedophile – he served a 13-month prison sentence 11 years prior – the multimillionaire had been arrested a month earlier for the suspected sex trafficking of dozens of minors in New York and Florida.

Even after his death, which was deemed suicide, Epstein continues to generate controversy. And now the world is carefully scrutinising hundreds of pages of unsealed court documents for names of associates, more details on known cases and a better understanding of his network of seemingly high-powered individuals cultivated with help from his entourage.

Who was Epstein?

Born in 1953, Epstein grew up on Coney Island in New York and was described by the Miami Herald as “poor, smart and desperate to be rich”.

An apparent maths whiz, he skipped two grades in high school and studied at a division of New York University but he did not gain a degree.

Despite this, he went on to teach calculus and physics at an Ivy League preparatory college for the children of New York's elite before becoming an options trader.

Next he became a top fund manager to the rich and powerful, despite not being a registered investment professional, Bloomberg reported. None of his clients reportedly had portfolios smaller than $US1 billion. They included Leslie Wexner, owner of lingerie behemoth Victoria's Secret.

Officially, he was worth more than half a billion dollars in cash, investments and six properties – a New Mexico ranch, a Florida villa, a Paris apartment, two Virgin Island islands and a New York mansion. His wealth may have also extended to diamonds and art.

He gave a lot of money to research institutions, schools and sports programs, some involving children.

One of his better known philanthropic acts was a $US6.5 million gift to Harvard University to fund research into the mathematical principles that guide evolution.

Of particular interest to him were eugenics (a discredited science of controlling populations by breeding practices) and cryonics (deep-freezing bodies with a view to one day reviving them).

Reports emerged that he hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch, and that he had hosted dinner parties and “science salons” with a number of prominent scientists.

What was he accused of?

Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking and conspiracy charges connected to the sexual abuse of dozens of girls at his homes in Florida and New York between 2002 and 2005.

His lawyers claimed the charges were similar to ones he faced in Florida in 2008, which resulted in a controversial plea deal, but it was an investigation into that secret deal by the Miami Herald in 2018 that prompted the new investigation in New York. Prosecutors called for, and interviewed, new victims and conducted property searches during which they found images of nude, underage girls.

In court documents, prosecutors said Epstein “enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, minor girls to visit” his homes “to engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash”.

They said that, “to maintain and increase his supply of victims, Epstein also paid certain of his victims to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused by him”.

He was arrested by the joint FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force at New Jersey's airport after landing on his private plane from Paris. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Who are his alleged victims?

The Florida case for which Epstein cut a plea deal involved up to 40 under-age girls but, since the new investigation was announced, some reports have estimated the number of potential victims at 80.

Young and vulnerable, some were runaways looking for work and recruited by Epstein’s staff with promises of networking and jobs in modelling. Many said they were employed to give Epstein massages and to attend exclusive parties at his addresses, where they were abused. Some allege he “lent” them to his friends for sex.

One accuser, make-up artist Jennifer Araoz, told NBC’s Today show that Epstein raped her in New York when she was 15. “She was a child – a child on welfare with no father, who was groomed, recruited and preyed upon,” her lawyer said.

One high-profile victim is Virginia Giuffre, who now lives in Queensland, Australia (see below).

What did Donald Trump have to do with it?

One alleged Epstein victim, Katie Johnson, filed two lawsuits in 2016 claiming she was told to perform sexual acts on Trump during Epstein’s “orgy parties” decades ago, when she was 13.

Before he became president, Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy”. In 2002, he told New York magazine Epstein was “a lot of fun to be with”. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life,” he was quoted as saying.

But Trump said they were no longer friends and he had barred Epstein from his Florida resort a decade ago after a disagreement – believed to be related to Epstein hiring a young Mar-a-Lago staffer as a "masseuse".

What about Bill Clinton and others?

Clinton was listed many times on the flight manifests of Epstein’s plane – known as the Lolita Express. Flight logs obtained by Fox News showed Clinton took at least 26 trips on the Boeing 727 from 2001 to 2003.

But Clinton’s spokesman, Angel Urena, told The New York Times Clinton took just four trips on the plane, including “stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation”, and that staff and Secret Service detail travelled with him on “every leg of every trip”.

In Britain, the Epstein scandal gripped Prince Andrew who featured in snaps from 2001 partying with women on Epstein’s yacht in Phuket, and in the photo above with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, then 17, in the London flat of Epstein’s former personal assistant Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell.

Giuffre, who now lives in Australia, had run away from home to be a model when, she says, Maxwell recruited her to work as a masseuse. She had been employed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as a spa attendant. She claims to have been a sex slave to Epstein who “lent her” to Andrew and others.

Andrew denied any involvement with Giuffre, as did Buckingham Palace. He gave an interview to the BBC which did not have the intended benign public relations effect.

Then he paid millions to settle a civil case with her in 2022. She sued him for unspecified damages, claiming she was forced to have sex with him on three separate occasions in 2001 when she was 17.

The majority of the £9.9 million ($17.6 million) settlement went to Giuffre, while about $3 million was donated to her sex-trafficking charity, according to the London Telegraph.

What happened in the end?

There has been no end, so far. Epstein was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York when more accusations against him surfaced. He faced up to 45 years in prison if convicted on the sex-trafficking charges. His trial had been set tentatively for mid-2020.

On August 10, 2019, some time after he was taken off suicide watch, he was found in his cell suffering a cardiac arrest and was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Then-US attorney-general William Barr was “appalled” to learn of Epstein’s death while in federal custody.

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Barr that “heads must roll”.

The New York City chief medical examiner found that Epstein’s death was caused by hanging and he had ended his own life.

But conspiracy theories still abound.

The medical examiner publicly reiterated her finding in late October 2019 after a noted forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother Mark to oversee the autopsy said the millionaire’s injuries were more consistent with strangulation than suicide. He called upon law enforcement authorities to dig deeper into how the millionaire died.

Four years after Epstein was found dead with a bedsheet tied around his neck, a damning probe by the Justice Department’s own watchdog concluded that a negligence was largely to blame “and effectively deprived Epstein’s numerous victims of the opportunity to seek justice”.

In 2020, the FBI arrested Maxwell in a quiet country property in Bradford, New Hampshire, in the US. She was charged with luring underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse, was convicted of five federal sex-trafficking charges and was sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years behind bars. She is being held in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.

On January 4, 2024, thousands of pages of previously confidential documents related to Epstein were unsealed in New York after a long battle over their release.

The first of what are expected to be hundreds of documents identifying more than 150 individuals were made public following an order in December by US District Judge Loretta Preska. The documents were filed in redacted form as part of a 2015 lawsuit against Maxwell.

Those documents included emails, transcripts of depositions and legal filings.

With agencies

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