Nobody could really have expected her to finally spill the beans. And Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted accomplice of disgraced paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, didn’t budge from the script.

Interviewed in July by US Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche from prison, where she is serving 20 years for child sex trafficking, Maxwell doggedly stuck to the story she’s told since Epstein was first investigated in the mid-2000s: that, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, neither of them ever did anything wrong, and nor did the rich and powerful men drawn into their orbit.

In recently released tapes of the interviews, she insisted, among other things, that the infamous photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around one of Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Giuffre, now deceased, had been faked. She said former US president Bill Clinton had not, as has been suggested in a congressional subpoena, been given a massage on Epstein’s plane, which some had dubbed the “Lolita Express”.

She denied the existence of a list of “clients” for whom she and Epstein had allegedly arranged sexual encounters with minors. Pertinently, given the political pickle in which Donald Trump now finds himself, she said that the president, on record as having been a friend of Epstein’s until they apparently had a falling out, had always acted like a “gentleman” in her company. Trump had never been “inappropriate”, she said, she’d never seen him in “any type of massage setting” and she had “never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way.”

Trump has landed in an awkward position over the so-called Epstein Files. While his supporters have long demanded their release, Trump now appears far less enthusiastic about the prospect, calling the files boring, a hoax and “something nobody cares about”.

“The questions on everyone’s minds, I think, are whether high-powered men took part in the abuse or helped to cover it up,” says Holly Baltz, investigative editor at The Palm Beach Post, one of the Florida newspapers responsible for surfacing many of the Epstein revelations, alongside the Miami Herald. “They also want to know whether the government buried information in order to protect them.”

What are the Epstein Files? Who wants them exposed? What might be revealed?

Who was Jeffrey Epstein and what did he do?

It’s 2005 in the affluent town of Palm Beach, Florida, where middle-aged, grey-haired multi-millionaire bachelor Jeffrey Epstein owns a waterfront mansion. It is arranged for a girl to come to the house to give him a massage. She is 14 but has been coached to say she is 18 if anybody asks.

Epstein, who divides his time between Florida, New York and other properties, is known as a “financier”, although what he actually does to make money is opaque. Possibly, he gives friends and acquaintances investment advice, managing their money and clipping the ticket; maybe he conjures up business deals; he almost certainly liaises between wealthy acquaintances and his preferred banks.

“He makes it sound as though his job combines the roles of real-estate agent, accountant, lawyer, money manager, trustee and confidant,” is how British journalist Vicky Ward describes him in her 7500-word profile for Vanity Fair in 2003, “The Talented Mr Epstein”, which unpicks some of Epstein’s nefarious business dealings in great detail but only hints at his penchant for “pretty ladies”. (Ward will later claim that Vanity Fair put a lid on abuse allegations; the magazine will say there were legal issues.)

We also know that Epstein has an unusual relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, the high-society, Oxford-educated daughter of media tycoon and fraudster Robert Maxwell. They have apparently been intimate, but the relationship is now better framed as friends or co-conspirators. One reporter describes Maxwell and Epstein as “soulmates” who “serve each other’s purposes”.

As will later be revealed in testimony to a grand jury, it is part of Maxwell’s job as a charming “fixer” to seek out and persuade girls of high-school age to “massage” Epstein. She then encourages these girls to rope in their friends and acquaintances to do the same in return for a finder’s fee – a pyramid scheme of child sex trafficking.

Then he asks, would she like to make another $100? She says ‘sure’, what does she have to do?

Today’s victim doesn’t know who Epstein is, she only knows she will be paid $US200. She is told to undress and gives Epstein a massage, after a fashion. He is relaxed and chatty, asking the girl about her school and home life. Then he asks, would she like to make another $100? She says “sure”, what does she have to do?

She is apparently not the first child to experience Epstein’s modus operandi, which typically starts with a massage that escalates into illegal sex acts as he tests the waters. She finishes, dresses, is paid in cash (Epstein is always flush with cash) and leaves.

A few days later, at the girl’s school, there are rumours. She gets into a fight and is called to the principal’s office. The principal asks to see inside her purse and discovers the $US300, a vast sum for a 14-year-old in 2005. A story about dealing pot rapidly unravels. Police investigate and eventually the FBI gets involved too.

That’s how it all began, says Holly Baltz – and it’s how it should have ended, with Epstein properly investigated, multiple witnesses examined and him and his cronies ending up jailed for decades. “Had that original prosecution been robust,” she tells us from Florida, “you and I wouldn’t be talking today.”

It starts out well enough. A grand jury (of citizens which, in the US, hears evidence and decides whether going to a full trial is warranted) hears testimony. The FBI collects its own evidence from dozens of victims. But then the investigation goes awry. Epstein’s crack legal team, which includes flamboyant Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr – whose investigation into Bill Clinton when he was president led to Clinton’s impeachment (he was ultimately acquitted) – persuades the local attorney-general, Alexander Acosta, to make a favourable deal called a non-prosecution agreement.

‘If the justice system in the US were a nightclub, then the saga around Epstein shows that there’s a VIP entrance.’

In return for the FBI parking its parallel investigation, which could have seen Epstein jailed for life for child sex trafficking, the “financier” agrees to a no-contest jail term of just 18 months on two counts of soliciting prostitutes, one of them a minor. An additional clause grants four named co-conspirators and “any potential co-conspirators” immunity from any future prosecution. “That whole saga, if you will, was very, very unusual,” says Markus Wagner, professor of law at the University of Wollongong. “A friend of mine said if the justice system in the US were a nightclub, then the saga around Epstein shows that there’s a VIP entrance.” An assistant state attorney later describes it as the “deal of the century”.

Epstein gets favourable treatment when he goes to jail in 2008, with his own TV, and ends up serving 13 months of the 18-month sentence, much of that on day release, allowed to travel to his office for 12 hours a day for “work”.

Flash forward a decade and Epstein, now a registered sex offender, is once again living the life of Riley, his crimes apparently forgiven and forgotten by high society. He mingles with celebrities, royalty and the political elite. He makes extravagant donations to institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and Harvard University. He has homes in New York and Florida, apartments in Paris, a ranch in New Mexico and owns two neighbouring islands in the US Virgin Islands, to which he flies friends and hundreds of girls, many believed to be originally from Eastern Europe, on his private aircraft.

Some of his victims are also abused by his acquaintances, it is later alleged. One alleged victim, Virginia Giuffre, will later claim she had been sexually assaulted by Prince Andrew in London when she was 17, and that she had been “passed around like a platter of fruit” to other abusers. (She settles a civil lawsuit against Prince Andrew out of court in 2022, which includes him making a donation in the millions of pounds to Giuffre’s charity; there is no admission of guilt and the prince memorably claims on television that the incident could not have happened because he had been at a Pizza Express restaurant with one of his daughters that day.)

‘The facts underlying this case, as we understand them, are beyond scandalous. They tell a tale of national disgrace.’

Epstein is eventually charged with sex-trafficking minors, in New York, but dies in jail in 2019 before the trial, by what investigators find is suicide. (The CCTV camera footage is patchy, contributing to conspiracy theories that he was murdered.) Maxwell is found guilty in 2021 of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex-trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor. In 2022, she is sentenced to 20 years in jail.

The FBI today tallies Epstein’s victims at more than 1000, most of them teenagers aged between 14 and 17. “The facts underlying this case, as we understand them, are beyond scandalous,” noted an appeals court in 2021. “They tell a tale of national disgrace.”

What are the so-called Epstein Files?

While Epstein never faced a trial, police and other investigators had gathered what is believed to be hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence, including video files taken from security cameras in Epstein’s homes, flight logs, photographs (some allegedly of victims and possibly their abusers), scraps of paper such as reminder notes gleaned from Epstein’s rubbish, computers, innumerable memory sticks, hard drives, lists of his so-called “masseuses”, contact books, audio recordings, transcripts and, if it exists, the recently surfaced Birthday Book, a leather-bound album allegedly made for Epstein’s birthday in 2003.

Many documents have been made public already thanks to victims’ compensation claims, civil cases against Epstein while he was alive and against his estate after he died, a defamation case brought by Giuffre against Maxwell (who had called Giuffre a liar), a compensation claim brought by Epstein’s victims against the FBI in 2008, and associated cases such as the government of the US Virgin Islands suing the bank JPMorgan for its alleged involvement in abetting Epstein’s sex crimes in its territory.

The latter lawsuit, which the bank settled for $US75 million ($115 million), claimed “JPMorgan knew and recklessly disregarded and concealed the fact that it was Epstein’s pattern and practice to use the channels and instrumentalities of interstate and foreign commerce to recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide, obtain, and maintain young women”. The case surfaced documents from an internal investigation at JPMorgan named “Project Jeep” (J for Jeffrey, E for Epstein) that included thousands of private emails between Epstein and his personal banker, Jes Staley, who had visited Epstein at his ranch and in the Virgin Islands. One piece of correspondence was subsequently seized upon as particularly cryptic, from the banker to Epstein: “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.”

‘Many of the documents are heavily redacted ... and many more remain under lock and key.’

Also publicly available is a list of hard evidence taken from Epstein’s estate, including massage tables and sex toys.

But many of the documents that have been released are heavily redacted, ostensibly to protect the identity of victims and the success of any ongoing investigations, and many more remain under lock and key.

Far-right Trump supporters, podcasters and internet conspiracy promoters, such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Loomer, have long alleged that documents yet to be released contain evidence of more crimes against children by well-known people, which have been covered up by the government (it’s a long-running theme in US far-right circles – in 2016 a man fired shots at a pizza parlour in Washington, DC, because he’d become convinced it was the hub of a child sex-trafficking ring, an incident inevitably dubbed Pizzagate).

During the 2024 election campaign, Trump said he would have no problem releasing the Epstein files once elected; after the election, asked whether he would “declassify” the files, he replied: “Yeah, yeah, I would.”

In January, FBI director Kash Patel told a Senate committee during his confirmation hearing that he would ensure “the American public knows the full weight of what happened”. Attorney-General Pam Bondi made the extraordinary claim that she had the “client list” sitting on her desk. The White House later amended her comments as meant to be referring to some of the broader files.

Then came the release of the so-called first batch of Epstein Files, to a hand-picked group of far-right influencers, and it was a fizzer: nothing new was revealed. Nor did an internal review of the files by the Justice Department and the FBI earlier this year apparently come up with anything, despite searches by some 1000 agents of digital assets such as databases and hard drives as well as “squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored”.

‘You have hardline Republicans who want to go after Democrats, and Democrats who want to go after Trump.’

The review, which reported publicly in a memo in July, said it had found no evidence of any incriminating “client list”, no evidence that Epstein had blackmailed or planned to blackmail prominent individuals, no evidence that could warrant an investigation against uncharged third parties, and no evidence that Epstein did not die by suicide but was murdered in jail, as Ghislaine Maxwell and others have alleged. The memo concluded: “While we have laboured to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

Meanwhile, in June, the billionaire Elon Musk, who until recently had headed a government cost-cutting push before falling out with Trump, posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.”

By July, Trump was posting on his social channel that his supporters should “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about”. Says Bruce Wolpe of Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre: “I think he’s nervous that something could come out.” But there was now enough momentum within Congress for Republicans and Democrats on the House oversight committee, led by Kentucky Republican James Comer, to agree to subpoena the Justice Department for the entire tranche, albeit redacted to protect the identity of victims. “You have hardline Republicans who want to go after Democrats, and Democrats who want to go after Trump,” says Wolpe.

‘It turns out that two girls testified and that they were actually called prostitutes by the prosecutor in front of grand jurors.’

Requests by the Justice Department, meanwhile, for three judges to release grand jury files relating to Epstein cases have been denied, with one judge calling the exercise a diversion orchestrated by the government to create the illusion of transparency. While courts have unsealed grand jury material in historical cases such as the Watergate conspiracy, judges have to meet specific criteria that are a very high bar. The only successful Epstein grand jury application to date has been the one made by The Palm Beach Post, which last year persuaded a judge to release the notes, including witness transcripts, that led to Epstein’s original indictment.

It was a worthwhile exercise.

While it had previously been thought that just one victim had testified, says Holly Baltz: “It turns out that two girls testified and that they were actually called prostitutes by the prosecutor in front of grand jurors. They were questioned on what underwear they wore when they went to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and whether they’d thought about what this could do to their reputations – all classic victim blaming.” The second victim, who testified that she had had sex with Epstein when she was 17, said she had not wanted to appear before the grand jury because she didn’t want her father to find out what had happened and because, “It was also stupid of me to put myself in that situation.”

What might come out now?

One victim who was 14 when she met Epstein told the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown: “Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right.”

‘Epstein hobnobbed with a number of famous and powerful people, but has law enforcement found evidence of criminal wrongdoing by them? They say no.’

We don’t know categorically whether any of the people in Epstein’s circles committed similar or other offences to him, but victims have said they did. The only other person charged in the conspiracy was a French photographer believed to have been involved in trafficking who was, like Epstein, found dead in jail before he could stand trial. Says Baltz: “Epstein hobnobbed with a number of famous and powerful people, but has law enforcement found evidence of criminal wrongdoing by them? They say no. And now in cases such as Prince Andrew, the chief witness, Virginia Giuffre, is dead.” Giuffre took her own life in April this year.

We don’t know what else the FBI in the mid-2000s might have uncovered had its investigation not been suspended as part of the deal with Epstein, or what might be in the materials it collected back then. Former US attorney for the southern district of Florida, Alex Acosta, who oversaw Epstein’s deal there, was later widely criticised by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility for having “resolved the federal investigation before significant investigative steps were completed”. Acosta later joined Trump’s cabinet in its first administration as labour secretary but resigned after a 2018 exposé by The Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown into the backroom dealings.

We don’t know yet what the high-profile people subpoenaed to testify before Congress will reveal, if anything. Trump’s former attorney-general, Bill Barr, has already spoken behind closed doors. “What Attorney-General Barr testified in there was that he never had conversations with President Trump pertaining to a client list, he didn’t know anything about a client list,” James Comer subsequently told reporters. “He said that he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this.”

We’re yet to hear from former US attorney-general Loretta Lynch, former FBI director Robert Mueller, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton – whose subpoena contends her family had a “close relationship” with Epstein and Maxwell – and Bill Clinton. “By your own admission,” the subpoena for Bill Clinton claims, “you flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane four separate times in 2002 and 2003 … You were also allegedly close to Ms Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein co-conspirator, and attended an intimate dinner with her in 2014, three years after public reports about her involvement in Mr Epstein’s abuse of minors.”

[Maxwell] is believed to be seeking an outright pardon from Trump and has also appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that Epstein’s 2008 plea deal should have guaranteed her immunity from future prosecution.

Epstein’s banker, Jes Staley, went on to become head of Barclay’s bank but then stepped down and was subsequently fined and banned from working in financial services by Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority for misleading authorities about his relationship with Epstein. Fighting (and failing) to clear his name earlier this year, he was forced to admit in court that he had engaged in con­sen­sual sexual inter­course with a woman on Epstein’s staff.

Maxwell, who was moved to a minimum-security prison after her recent testimony, continues to fight to have her jail sentence overturned. She is believed to be seeking an outright pardon from Trump and has also appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that Epstein’s 2008 plea deal should have guaranteed her immunity from future prosecution. The case, should the court hear it (and it has already been rejected by a lower court of appeal), will centre on whether that deal, made by state authorities, should be binding federally.

Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, set for release on October 21, may contain more revelations.

Then there are the files themselves, now trickling into Congress. If there is “explosive evidence regarding Trump or regarding other Republicans, that would then elevate this to another level,” says Bruce Wolpe. “If there’s some ugly sexual innuendo, sexual events involving [Trump], that could be trouble.”

The first tranche, delivered on August 22, numbered more than 33,000 pages but contained little that had not already been known, according to Democrat Robert Garcia. Nevertheless, Trump is trapped, says Markus Wagner of the University of Wollongong. “This goes back to transparency. Every time you don’t release something that people expect, then someone’s going to yell insincerity and failure to be transparent. Some people will always say, ‘Well, you’re not releasing all the information.’”

Have Epstein’s victims at least seen some justice? “No, not even close,” says Holly Bantz. “Maxwell’s conviction was only a sliver. They have been denied again and again. The charges Epstein pleaded guilty to essentially labelled them prostitutes. At least two women have died of drug overdoses in Palm Beach County that their relatives pin on Epstein’s abuse. Many struggle emotionally still. And there was other shaming: for example, a judge ruled that one victim in a lawsuit she filed was required to let Epstein see her history of abortions. While the first case was being investigated, private investigators hired by Epstein visited them at work and made sure people knew they were involved with Epstein. They were run off the road. It goes on.”

Crisis support can be found at Lifeline (13 11 14 and lifeline.org.au), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467, suicidecallbackservice.org.au) and beyondblue (1300 224 636 and beyondblue.org.au).