Lurid allegations against Jeffrey Epstein have been set out in a trove of thousands of documents released by the US Department of Justice.
The release, which contains thousands of photographs, documents and phone records, has intensified scrutiny of the network of powerful men cultivated by the paedophile financier.
Epstein pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18, and was sentenced to 18 months in jail in June 2008.
He was released in July 2009 and remained under house arrest until July 2010. Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking of minors.
Epstein abused girls as young as 12, according to often harrowing records of interviews with alleged victims.
Among the revelations detailed in the documents released are files showing the tycoon insisted that identity checks to ensure those sent to perform massages and sex acts were of school age and met other specific demands including being “thin and blonde”.
Epstein appears in many images with girls or women whose identity has been redacted
HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE DEMOCRATS/REUTERS
A grand jury interview with an FBI agent in May 2007 included the claim that a 15-year-old girl was recruited to give “topless” massages to Epstein at his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
The agent said the witness recruited other masseurs and “Epstein liked girls like her, which is thin and blonde and attractive.”
• Messages show Jeffrey Epstein’s depravity: ‘I have a female for him’
Another witness, allegedly tasked with finding masseuses for Epstein, said: “There were a few girls he wasn’t crazy about. He didn’t really like.” The witness said Epstein rejected a woman who was 23 as “too old.”
A handwritten note of an interview in May 2019 with a witness said she saw Epstein “asking for ID to girl, wanted make sure under 18 b/c he wasn’t believing them b/c [redacted] messed up by bringing more older girls.”
The witness, who has identified herself as Marina Lacerda, noted that: “JE [Epstein] didn’t want Spanish or dark girl[s],” and requested young girls “but not dark”. Lacerda, now 37, told the Daily Telegraph that Epstein stopped abusing her when she was 16 or 17 because she was too old and not bringing him girls who were young enough.
Two months later the record of an interview with another girl recorded how she gave topless massages after her sister introduced to Epstein, who “showed a lot of interest in my life [and] offered to pay for my school”.
She claimed that before the age of 18 she was the victim of four sexual assaults, including two rapes, in Paris, Florida and New Mexico, where Epstein owned a 10,000-acre ranch.
The interview recorded the witness saying: “JE believes monogamous way of life, is not way to live. It’s not healthy to be monogamous relationship. Idea is to build harum [sic]. I trusted him a lot and believed a lot of what he said. It was all mind control.”
The girl produced photographs of her with Epstein on Little Saint James, his private island in the US Virgin Islands, where she claimed to have met Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model scout who was previously alleged in unrelated court papers to have supplied girls for an orgy.
Other photographs showed the girl preparing to board Epstein’s private jet, on holiday in Paris and at the Disney resort in Florida.
Missed chances to stop Epstein
Authorities may have missed the chance to stop Epstein as early as 1996, the release revealed.
A document corroborated the claim of Maria Farmer that she reported Epstein to the FBI in Miami in 1996 for stealing pictures of her sisters, then aged 14 and 16, after he asked her to take photographs of young girls at swimming pools. Farmer was recorded as telling the FBI that she believed Epstein sold the photographs and threatened to “burn her house” down if she told anyone.
Farmer claimed in 2019 that she was sexually abused by Epstein and Maxwell at the home of Les Wexner, an executive at the Victoria’s Secret lingerie company. A spokesman for Wexner previously said he had “severed all ties with Epstein in 2007 and never spoke with him again” and had no knowledge of the incident Farmer alleged.
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE VIA AP
New York house of horror
Images from the inside of Epstein’s New York townhouse show artworks and photographs featuring children and naked and topless women.
One girl claimed Epstein tried to rape her at the townhouse when she was 14 years old. She told the FBI she was paid $300 cash for each visit and described how the library “looked like it was something out of Beauty and the Beast”, the animated Disney film.
Guests at the townhouse included Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Lord Mandelson, 72, the former Labour minister who was removed as UK’s ambassador to Washington in September because of his close friendship with Epstein.
A large painting displayed in a bright pink bedroom showed a young boy dancing with an erection. The painting, 83in (2.1m) by 126in (3.2m), is by Jorge Alvarez, a Cuban-American artist based in Florida. Another room contained a life-sized sculpture of a seated schoolboy.
Seven computer monitors were pictured in one room. A lawsuit filed last year by two alleged victims claimed Epstein’s “New York mansion had a room in which men that Epstein hired monitored what was happening in the home”.
Closeness to Royals
A photograph of Mountbatten-Windsor lying across five women was taken in December 2000 at a party to celebrate the 39th birthday of Ghislaine Maxwell. The guests were in the saloon at Sandringham, the Norfolk estate where Mountbatten-Windsor will be exiled in the new year after being stripped of his royal titles. Images of individuals pictured with Epstein and/or contained in the files do not in themselves suggest wrongdoing.
The Spitting Image puppet of Mountbatten-Windsor that was allegedly used to “grope” Virginia Giuffre can also be seen in one of the photographs. The caricature can be seen propped up in the background of a photograph showing Maxwell in the New York mansion.
Ghislaine Maxwell photographed in New York, with a Spitting Image puppet caricaturing Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in the background
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/AP
In her autobiography, Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre claimed that “when Andrew cupped my breast with a doll made in his image, I only giggled away”. Mountbatten-Windsor has consistently denied all allegations.
Epstein files: photo of Andrew on women’s laps was at Sandringham
Maxwell, 63, who is serving a 20-year jail sentence for sex trafficking underage victims on behalf of Epstein, is pictured smiling in the background of the photograph.
Mountbatten-Windsor appears in a photograph with Epstein and Maxwell in the royal box during Ladies Day at Royal Ascot in June 2000. Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother also attended.
Epstein and Maxwell were photographed on shooting on moorland at Balmoral having been invited by Mountbatten-Windsor to stay at his mother’s Scottish estate in 1999. Two of the photographs show Mountbatten-Windsor’s former wife Sarah Ferguson alongside women whose faces have been redacted to protect their identities.
Ferguson, 66, sent Epstein an email in 2011 in which she described him as a “supreme friend” when he threatened to sue her for defamation after she described her association with him as a “gigantic error of judgment”.
Mountbatten-Windsor and Ferguson have denied any wrongdoing.
Bill Clinton with an unknown person
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE VIA AP
Other celebrity connections
Bill Clinton appears in many photographs including in a swimming pool with Maxwell and with his arm around Epstein.
The former president was also pictured with Maxwell and Kevin Spacey, the actor, inside Winston Churchill’s war rooms in London. The visit occurred when Clinton travelled to the UK to give a speech to the 2002 Labour Party conference.
Clinton wrote in his memoir published last year that he had only two “brief meetings” with Epstein, both in New York. Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross are among celebrities who appeared in photographs with Epstein in routine social settings with no suggestion of impropriety.