Jeffrey Epstein files: ‘It’s a bigger story than the world has ever known’
The paedophile financier has been linked to countless famous people but what could Trump’s task force uncover about his crimes and contacts?
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The flight logs of Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet read like a who’s who of the rich and famous.
The pilots took meticulous records of its many passengers and later testified in court to their veracity. In one handwritten entry dated March 21, 2002, “Bill Clinton”, the former United States president, and “Secret Service” were listed in the ledger. The following day, it was the supermodel Naomi Campbell.
Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime girlfriend, ran one of the most prolific and widest-reaching sex-trafficking rings in history, flying victims - the youngest of whom was just 14 years old - to Epstein’s various homes to be abused by the financier and his circle of friends.
Epstein died in a New York prison in 2019. Maxwell would be sentenced to 20 years in jail for her involvement.
Dozens of testimonies have been given as part of civil lawsuits and criminal trials. Documents including the flight logs and Epstein’s infamous black book of contacts have been made public, yet those most intimately involved with the case say they are the tip of the iceberg.
Victims and their lawyers are hoping that the promised investigation by the Trump administration into the classified Epstein files will provide answers to their most searching questions.
FLIGHT LOGS
Epstein’s flight logs have been released through various legal proceedings, notably during the trial of Maxwell, Epstein’s “right-hand woman”. The documents detail passengers on board Epstein’s private jet, often referred to as the “Lolita Express”. The logs include information such as dates, departure and arrival locations, flight numbers and passenger names.
Celebrities, businessmen and politicians have been linked to Epstein through the manifestos. The presence of an individual on the logs, however, does not necessarily imply involvement in any illegal activities and many of those listed have denied flying on the jet.
According to the records, President Trump flew eight times on Epstein’s plane between 1993 and 1997, most of the time to and from the airport in Teterboro, outside New York in New Jersey.
Trump’s wife at the time, Marla Maples, and their young daughter, Tiffany, tagged along on a trip to Washington on May 15, 1994.
Clinton was on board at least 17 flights in 2002 and 2003 after he left office in 2001. The former president took a number of long-haul flights, including to Siberia, Morocco, China and Armenia, often with some famous names such as the actor Kevin Spacey and the comedian Chris Tucker. Clinton’s travels were described as humanitarian trips with the Clinton Foundation. He praised Epstein as a committed philanthropist, although said he later cut ties with him.
Prince Andrew appears on the flight manifestos, as does his family. In 1998, a pilot noted that Sarah Ferguson and her children, without Andrew, flew on the plane from Fort Lauderdale executive airport, Florida. Juan Alessi, Epstein’s housekeeper at his Palm Beach mansion in Florida, testified that Ferguson, who was divorced from Andrew, dropped by on one occasion. The duke and Ferguson have denied any wrongdoing.
Campbell took five flights aboard the Cessna in 2001 and 2003. Two originated in the US Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned his own island. The model has repeatedly denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sexual offences.
BLACK BOOK
Epstein’s “little black book” contains entries of high-profile figures. A copy of the contacts book was first published in 2015 by the now-defunct blog Gawker. It was recovered from Epstein’s home after his arrest in 2019 and was submitted into evidence in lawsuits and criminal proceedings against Maxwell.
The contents of the book have raised questions about Epstein’s connections and immense network, with the private phone numbers of Andrew and the former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, as well as Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, and the former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and John Kerry.
Some of the entries were listed under the chapter “massage in Palm Beach”. Epstein’s victims were often made to give massages to visitors to his Florida mansion.
CIVIL LAWSUITS
A tranche of files were released in January in an old civil lawsuit brought against Maxwell by the Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre after Judge Loretta Preska ordered a New York court to make them public.
The files included references to another victim, Johanna Sjoberg, who has claimed that Andrew groped her breast while sitting on a couch inside the financier’s Manhattan apartment in 2001. The duke has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Many of those named had already been identified by the media or in Maxwell’s criminal trial.
However, names newly linked to Epstein included the late singer Michael Jackson and the magician David Copperfield. Sjoberg said she had met the pair through Epstein, although she did not allege any wrongdoing by them.
Other names included Sir Richard Branson, the British billionaire and founder of the Virgin Group, Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and author, and Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister.
Lord Mandelson, the newly appointed UK ambassador to the US, was featured in about 900 released files. A photograph showed Mandelson, watched by Epstein, trying on a white leather belt in a boutique in St Barts.
The picture was taken in 2005 or 2006 when the former Labour Party grandee was EU trade commissioner. He was on holiday and arranged to meet Maxwell, who was likely to have been staying on Little Saint James, Epstein’s Caribbean island.
“I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell,” he told the Financial Times last week. “I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.”
FORMER BARCLAYS BOSS JES STALEY AND THE EMAILS
The Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s financial watchdog, has been investigating links between the former Barclays boss Jes Staley and Epstein.
Staley resigned from Barclays in 2021 after failing to disclose the full extent of his ties with the sex offender when he joined the bank as a client.
Dozens of private emails forming part of the investigation show Andrew was in contact with Epstein longer than he had previously admitted. According to the court documents, on February 27, 2011, Epstein emailed: “jes staley will be in London on next tue afternoon, if you have time”.
The Duke of York told the BBC he had cut all contact with Epstein in 2010.
QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED
The Epstein case, given its high-profile nature and the many influential individuals potentially involved, has led to much public scrutiny and speculation.
What was recovered by the FBI?
Questions have been asked about what was recovered from FBI raids on his various homes following his arrest.
Large black binders holding labelled CDs, as well as hard drives, were discovered in several rooms in Epstein’s eight-storey Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, including in a so-called massage room. Federal prosecutors said CDs found in a safe featured lewd photographs of women and under-age girls.
Investigators reportedly found multiple hidden cameras in Epstein’s properties, including in his Manhattan townhouse and on his private island.
At least one victim, the Briton Sarah Ransome, has claimed that Epstein secretly filmed sexual encounters between victims and high-profile figures to use for blackmailing purposes.
It is possible that certain items discovered contain classified information or other sensitive material related to Epstein’s connections. The FBI has not confirmed whether any other associates were implicated in the evidence that was gathered from the properties. No new charges have been brought.
How did he build his vast wealth?
When federal prosecutors announced sex-trafficking charges against Epstein, they described him as “a man of nearly infinite means”.
At the time of Epstein’s death, a filing in his criminal case reported his net worth at about dollars 560 million. Epstein’s assets included a number of lavish properties, a dollars 50 million home in Manhattan; a dollars 12 million mansion in Palm Beach; a ranch in New Mexico valued at more than dollars 17 million; and an apartment in Paris worth an estimated dollars 9 million. His two private Caribbean islands, Great Saint James and Little Saint James, were together valued at dollars 86 million.
Epstein began his working life as a floor trader at Bear Stearns bank before launching his money management business in the 1980s.
He offered his services to billionaires including Les Wexner, the founder and chief executive of the underwear makers L Brands and Victoria’s Secret, and Leon Black, the chairman of Apollo Global Management, the asset manager.
Black paid Epstein dollars 158 million for tax and estate planning services, according to the Senate finance committee.
Epstein claimed to friends that he was a shrewd investor. However his firm, Financial Trust Company, never released audited financial statements or performance reports to back up his claims.
Investigations into the source of his money made by journalists, the US government and lawyers trying to claim compensation for his victims, have largely drawn a blank.
Experts say prosecutors with the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York would probably need to subpoena Wall Street business figures in Epstein’s inner circle to find out more.
Was Epstein working for Mossad?
Epstein, who is Jewish, was accused of working for the Israeli spy agency Mossad.
A former girlfriend and victim of Epstein claimed in a lawsuit that Epstein boasted of being a Mossad agent before raping her at his New York mansion. The woman, who sued under the pseudonym “Doe”, said Epstein and Maxwell hinted that he was an agent for Mossad, just like Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell. Maxwell allegedly “warned Doe that it was not good to be Epstein’s enemy”.
Ari Ben-Menashe, an Iranian-born Israeli businessman and alleged former Mossad spy, claimed in the book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales that Epstein ran a “honeytrap” operation in which he provided young girls to prominent politicians from around the world for sex, then used the incidents to blackmail them to attain information for Israeli intelligence.
“What we uncovered was compelling evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a spy - largely for Israel’s Mossad - and allowed to operate in the United States seemingly without consequence,” Dylan Howard, one of the book’s authors, said. “This is a much bigger story than the world has ever known and is continually being ignored or glossed over in much of the new reporting about Epstein.”
Julie Brown, an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, who broke the story of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, claims that credible details making the link “are not far-fetched and need to be explored in further detail and examined”.
Others, however, have dismissed it as an antisemitic trope. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School faculty member and former attorney for Epstein, who struck his plea deal with Florida prosecutors for the 2008 charges on sex offences, denied the claims. “Believe me, I would have known about it,” he said of the suggestion that Epstein was passing intelligence to foreign spy agencies. “I would have used it to my advantage and to his advantage.”
What will the task force seek to declassify?
Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida who is heading the newly formed task force aiming to declassify federal secrets, said in a press conference on Tuesday that they would look at releasing “Epstein’s contact list”.
Thomas Volscho, a sociology professor at the College of Staten Island, who has been researching a book on Epstein, questioned why information into a criminal enterprise would need to be classified by the federal government. “When and why would Epstein documents undergo a formal classification process: are they national security documents? What agency possesses which documents?” he said to The Times.
Volscho wondered what exactly the Trump administration was seeking to release. “The ‘client list’ does not exist that we know of, the ‘unredacted black book’ has been floating around the internet for years and the ‘full flight logs’ have been around in various forms since 2015. But maybe they will surprise us.”
This story originally appeared in The Times.
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