In this episode we’ll continue exploring the mind-boggling contradictions in Virginia Giuffre’s allegations against Prince Andrew - allegations that the media have intentionally been hiding from you. We’ll then be continuing our journey through the scandal by diving into the shocking events that led to Jeffrey’s arrest.

Below is the full explosive episode. You can either listen to it or read the full transcript, with images.

You don’t want to miss this one!

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After a quiet shift, Ross and Nicola had clocked off from their work at the local Solstice bar and set about walking home/ Their trip would lead them past that very underpass, and the screams would be Nicola’s. Seeing Bin Laden’s attacks on America as a call for global Jihad, around ten local young Muslim men lurked, balaclava-clad in the shadows.

There they waited menacingly, beneath the pale, dusty glow of a flickering streetlamp, their darkly-clothed frames casting a foreboding row of shadows that finally met with the silhouettes of Ross and Nicola as they strolled hand-in-hand up the path.

“They started walking towards us,” said Nicola. “That’s when suddenly I heard one of them hiss ‘you better start running!’”

“Ross squeezed my hand. And then they attacked. One of them sprayed Ross in the face with a can of CS gas. Another punched him in the stomach, and he fell to the ground. It was at that point that he was torn away from my hand.

“They started kicking him on the ground and then one of them turned to me. Something at that moment made me turn and run. I have no idea what it was. Everything just seemed to be going in slow motion and didn’t feel real.

“I also remember at that point hearing what I thought at the time was someone exclaiming ‘What, shit!’ But now I know that it was one of the attackers shouting ‘white shit’.”

Knocked to the ground, Ross Parker was brutally murdered. The gang of radicalized thugs kicked him as hard as they could, bruising his body all over before stabbing him three times from behind, through the throat and chest with a foot-long hunting knife. So hard were the blows that a coroner later concluded that on two occasions the blade penetrated his body from one side and came fully out of the other.

Finally, as the 17-year-old who had recently completed a GNVQ in business studies and was hoping to apply for a career in the police force, lay dying, a member of the cowardly gang came forward with a panel beater’s hammer and smashed in his skull.

The murderers then fled.

Nicola, who had managed to flag down a police officer, returned to the scene to find Ross’ body laying limp on the cycle path. She checked his pulse but couldn’t find one.

She was soon whisked away to the nearest police station.

“I was given a wipe to clean my hands, which I did half-heartedly and stared at the blood drying under and around my nails. I didn’t want to scrub it away.

“The officers told my family to bring me a complete change of clothes. When they arrived, my Mum and a female FLO took me to another room where I had to stand on a plastic sheet and take off all my clothes which were then bagged up.

“After I’d put my clean clothes on and we left the room, I noticed that the wipe I’d been given to wipe the blood from my hands had gone. It sounds silly, but that really upset me because I felt like the last thing I had left of Ross had been stolen from me.”

In the days and weeks that followed, more details of the horrific crime were revealed. After their heinous plan had been executed, four of the murderers returned to a nearby garage they had been using as the headquarters to plan out their twisted plot; their own act of terrorism. Brandishing the bloody knife that had slain Ross Parker, ringleader Ahmed Ali Awan held it aloft, and as the blade glinted turned to his wannabe Jihadist accomplices, proudly uttering three chilling words: “cherish the blood”.

On Monday, September 24th 2001, the focus of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary’s investigation fell upon seven young Muslim men; some as young as 16. A further five murder suspects were released on bail whilst enquiries continued.

“I was kept up-to-date with the arrests” Nicola said. “I believe there were over 10 arrested, but only 4 were charged. I think some of those arrested became witnesses in the end. It was upsetting as I knew there were so many people responsible who got away with it, but I’m still confident that the four charged were the main culprits”.

These four men were Sarfraz Ali, Shaied Nazir, Ahmed Ali Awan, and Ziaraff Mahrad. Ali, 25, was a delivery driver whose father played a major role at a local city mosque. Nazir, 22, was a door-to-door salesman brought up in a family of strict Muslim principles, but who rebelled during adolescence, smoking drugs and drinking heavily.

Of the twelve or so young men arrested for the murder of Ross Parker, some were secretly recorded inside their cells callously chanting “Taliban!” and “Bin Laden!”

During the six-week trial that followed, the jury were able to listen to transcripts of covert police recordings of all four suspects discussing the attack. Recorded inside police vehicles, Shaied Nazir was heard describing Ross’ death as a “bloodbath” and detailed how one of the knife blows had “split the whole of his neck open”.

The murder weapons that police had recovered from Nazir’s shed at his family home were also submitted, along with two bags of bloodied clothes.

A pathologist confirmed that the marks on Ross’ body matched the hammer, and DNA and fingerprints belonging to both Nazir and Mahrad were also discovered on the hammer and knife, with Ross’ blood being found on both.

Nazir’s youngest brother, Wyed Nazir, was brought to the stand and confirmed to the court that he had seen his brother cleaning the murder weapon on the night of the killing and that he had witnessed all four defendants, Mahrad, Ali, Nazir and Awan, with bloodstains on their clothing.

With the evidence stacked against them, Nazir confessed to spraying Ross with CS gas and killing him. Sensationally, he also accused Ali of hitting Ross with the hammer and Awan of wielding the knife, and accused prosecution witnesses Zaheer Abbas and Adeel Rehman of being involved in the attack too.

Like so many others who had allegedly participated in the attack of Ross Parker, Abbas and Adeel Rehman were never charged. In fact, Rehman, who later refused in court to swear an oath over the Koran, was even given the chance to turn Queen’s Evidence (an offer he accepted), providing a damaging account against the other attackers and thus avoiding any jail time.

Whilst Mahrad, whose socks had been found soaked-through with Ross’ blood, was acquitted, the other three were found guilty of racially-motivated murder and condemned to life imprisonment.

Passing the final sentences, the judge summarised the actions of the brainwashed terrorists involved: “You put your heads together with the purpose of arming yourselves and of attacking an innocent man you might find by chance simply because he was of a different race to yourselves. A racist killing must be one of the gravest kinds of killing”.

When asked about the radicalisation of the murderers, Nicola seems conflicted. “From what I can tell, extremists use religion as an excuse to justify their actions. They’re just bullies. But I don’t know what can be done, if anything, to stop them. If punishments were harsher, would that be enough of a deterrent? If we tried to educate people to be more tolerant, would they listen? Ross’ murderers went to school in multicultural environments, at least at secondary level. it doesn’t seem to have made a difference”.

“The Muslim community [of Peterborough] condemned the attack, but some in the community knew who did what” she replied. “Some evidence was disposed of. There were others who were there that night but who never came forward.”

Nicola is now married with three children. After bravely rebuilding her life, she pursued a career in the pub trade whilst studying healthcare and forensics. She now plans to continue with her studies in an effort to pursue her dream career.

“At the moment, my family is my life,” she said. “I try not to think about Ross and what happened as much as possible. These days I only really think about it on anniversaries such as Ross’ birthday or if I’m in a situation where I feel intimidated”.

“I think there definitely should have been a retrial for Ziggy (Ziaraff Mahard),” Nicola reflects. “I do believe that life should mean life. With time served before the trial, at least two of them could likely already be out now, which terrifies me, especially as I won’t be notified of their release dates or any conditions that might be put on them.”

“The thought of it all makes me feel sick,” she admits. “With each day that passes I find myself thinking more about who the jailed ones will connect with when they’re released, if they haven’t been released already, what views they’ll share and what trouble they’ll get up to together. If I ever bump into one of them, I don’t think I’d be able to cope.

“They could even end up living just around the corner from me and my family, and I wouldn’t know about it”.

Since I interviewed Nicola, Ross’ killers - the few who were punished, at least - have been released.

I managed to track ‘Ziggy’ down a few years ago. He is now running a fried chicken takeaway in King’s Lynn, but firmly refused to answer any of my questions. Likewise, when I knocked on the door of Nazir Ali’s family on Cromwell Road, I was greeted with a wall of silence.

First a young woman in a hijab answered, her face flushing when I asked to speak to Nazir and told her the reason. She disappeared and, a few moments later, out came a man in a black polo shirt who declined to give me his name no matter how many times I enquired.

I told him that I simply wanted to get some on-the-record comment. But as he stared me down, his eyes dark and smug, it suddenly dawned on me from my memory of the contemporary photographs who was standing before me, his arms crossed.

It was Nazir himself.

I asked him one last time what his name was, this time adding, “you’re Nazir, aren’t you?”

“You better leave and never come back ‘round here again” was his abrupt and last reply.

The door closed on me, I spent a final half-hour or so strolling around the scene of the crime, finishing off at the haunting underpass not far from Nazir’s Victorian era home. But before I did, I walked to the rear of the property and peered over the fence.

The shed where the jihadist-wannabes of Cambridgeshire held up the bloody knife is still there.

It’s all that now remains of a horrific yet mostly forgotten terrorist act inspired by the tragedy of 9/11 - just four crooked walls and a fading story of hate and injustice.

This article is part of a longer series that I’ll be releasing next year, including much more testimony from Nicola, but also exclusive evidence from the case.

Almost nothing you’ve read in the media is the truth.

Over the past six years, Giuffre’s claims have been my ma…

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Almost nothing you’ve read in the media is the truth.

Over the past six years, Giuffre’s claims have been my main focus. I’ve interviewed her ex-partners, members of her inner circle, and the men whom she accused.

The facts behind the fiction are explosive. So, without further delay, let’s get stuck in.

Below is the full episode along with a full transcript with images. You can listen to the full episode (including my audio interview with President Trump’s former lawyer, Professor Alan Dershowitz) or you can read - it’s your choice.

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Ransome states that she was 22 years old when she first encountered Jeffrey Epstein, during which time she was working as a high-end escort for the infamous Emperor’s Club, charging up to $10,000 for her services.

In 2016, when numerous women began filing lawsuits against Epstein’s estate, Ransome joined them, claiming that she had been kept a prisoner on his island and raped multiple times.

Yet Ransome’s credibility was shattered in 2019. In the frenetic days following Epstein’s arrest and death, she publicly alleged that she possessed compromising sex tapes involving high-profile figures including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Richard Branson. She attempted to sell these to numerous newspapers, demanding payment upfront before sending any proof of the existence of the tapes.

But within days the story collapsed. Ransome admitted that the tapes did not exist and that the claims were untrue.

Since then, she has also been found to have made false allegations against Professor Alan Dershowitz.

After blowing her significant compensation payouts, obtained through controversial Epstein-related lawsuits, Ransome has recently embarked on a campaign of extortion and harassment targeting a large number of individuals, from the King of the Netherlands and the creator of the video game Grand Theft Auto, to Lady Victoria Hervey, the nieces and nephews of the late Virginia Giuffre, and me.

As Ransome’s mental health began to spiral, ignored by the many journalists who previously profited from peddling her many false allegations, she first sent sinister threats to fellow Epstein accuser Juliette Bryant, relentlessly harassing her and accusing her of a long list of things that Bryant was entirely innocent of before disgracefully threatening to harm Bryant’s son.

She then focused on Sky Roberts Jr, a brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, to his wife Amanda Roberts, and to Giuffre’s former publicist, Dini Von Mueffling.

Ransome attached photographs of Mr Roberts’ partner and children, along with photographs of Mueffling, her family members, and her children, warning that they now ‘have targets on their backs’.

“I will come after your children,” she told them. “The fucking Ayatollah [the Supreme Leader of Iran] will be fucking terrified of me after what I do to you and your children.”

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Coming up later this week: My ‘Epstein News in a Nutshell’ newsletter, an op-ed I’ve written that exposes how lawyers conspired with psychologists to influence the testimonies of Epstein accusers (for cash, as usual), some coverage of ongoing high-profile criminal cases, and the first entry of my long overdue war diary (typed away at whilst spending most of my time in a bomb shelter in Kyiv).

In case you missed the last episode of The Life & Death of Jeff, in which I cover Virginia Giuffre’s back story and first false allegations, you can watch, listen or read it by clicking the link below.

Please scroll below the paywall to listen to the latest episode, episode seven, ‘Epstein’s Favourite Recruiter’.

Without further delay, here is the full transcript for episode seven:

Welcome to part seven of The Life and Death of Jeff. In this episode we’ll continue the rocky journey through the Jeffrey Epstein scandal by exploring how Virginia Giuffre became one of Jeff’s biggest recruiters. This episode also contains parts of my interviews with Virginia’s ex-boyfriends and with the mother of one of her victims.

So, let’s begin by me taking you back to the fateful day when that victim’s life was pushed down a path from which she’d never return.

It was a typical Floridian Spring Sunday. A heat haze rose above the sun-battered car bonnet. Inside, the blonde-haired, tanned 18-year-old Virginia Roberts sat beside her boyfriend Tony, staring through the windscreen, eyes fixed on the front door as it finally swung open. A 15-year-old brunette stepped out onto the driveway. She’d dashed down from her bedroom, a room festooned with pinks and purples and blu-tacked boyband posters where, moments earlier, with a mixture of excitement and anxiety, Virginia, three years her senior, had helped her get ready for her first “business trip”.

Virginia, a legal adult then known by her nickname, Jenna, had willingly chosen Carolyn Andriano as her next mark, a girl whom she could use to make some easy “commission” by grooming her and delivering her to the old rich guy’s house in their hometown of Palm Beach. She’d already told Carolyn how she needed to dress, instructing her how to do her makeup and present herself as being older than she actually was. For Carolyn, already more physically developed than many of the other girls her own age, it wasn’t particularly hard to pull off. “Virginia gave me clothes,” she would later tell the Daily Mail. “She gave me these really tight skimpy shorts with a spaghetti strap top with all my cleavage hanging out. She just said, ‘whatever you do, don’t say your age.’”

But as a precaution, just in case the man in the mansion asked questions, Virginia had prepped her to say she was over 18. This wasn’t something new to Carolyn. She’d done it before, initially having told her boyfriend, Shawn (a close friend of Tony), that she was 17, her deception being quickly rumbled, however, when he arrived at her birthday party and saw her true age printed on the shiny balloons. But this time, there wouldn’t be any glaring indicators to give the game away. No friends and family. No birthday balloons. Just a short drive with a young adult, Virginia, an awkward introduction, a massage, and then she could depart, $300 wealthier. Shawn was with her, too, seemingly fine with the arrangement. But was it really going to be as easy as Virginia had pitched it to her? Was a guy really willing to pay her, an unqualified schoolgirl, such a huge sum of money just to rub down his back?

Pushing these questions to the back of her mind, she slumped casually into the leather passenger seat of Virginia’s car and buckled up her seat belt. Virginia darted her a smile, asking her how she was, reminding her of the importance of lying about her age should Jeffrey probe her on it – then she turned the Britney Spears song up to full blast, and Tony reversed them all out of the driveway.

Arriving at the pink mansion (Jeffrey Epstein would eventually have it painted white), Shawn and Tony waited in the car as Virginia lead Carolyn through the gates, into the tiled kitchen, and up a flight of stairs. Within moments, the 15-year-old Carolyn found herself standing beside Virginia in Jeffrey’s en-suite, curiously scanning the dresser, closet, steam room, and a polka-dot-patterned couch.

But she didn’t get a chance to sit down. “We walked into the little closet area, and she [Virginia] was pulling out the massage table,” Carolyn would recall many years later during her examination on the stand, adding that Virginia then showed her “where all the massage oils and lotions were kept, in the bottom drawer of the dresser that is on your left-hand side”.

Her testimony, given under oath, continues:

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Coming up later this week: My ‘Epstein News in a Nutshell’ newsletter, an op-ed I’ve written that exposes how l…

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Hello to you all. I hope you’re having a great week so far!

I’ve been busy editing my new podcast series, The Life & Death of Jeff, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay focused amidst constant Russian missile attacks here in Kyiv, grabbing a foldable chair and dashing down to the bomb shelter multiple times a day every time the air raid sir…

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Maxwell had appealed against her five felony convict…

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In next week’s episode we’ll be continuing our quest for the truth by diving into the seedier side of Virginia’s life, and will be listening to my interviews with Epstein accuser Rina Oh, with Professor Alan Dershowitz, two of Virginia’s boyfriends, and the mother of one of Virginia’s victims.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Long before the sensationalist headlines, the incarcerations, and the accusations that have destroyed the reputation of a British prince, that directly contributed to the deaths of Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel, and that helped to imprison Ghislaine Maxwell, a simple, pleasant rural family home stood, just a stone’s throw away from the wild and luscious Loxahatchee River that snakes its way through the southeast coast of sun-kissed Florida.

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter of a middle-class family, Virginia Louise Roberts was afforded a comfortable and loving lifestyle along with her two brothers. Her father, Sky, hailed from the gold rush-haunted wooden sidewalks of Old Sacramento. A hardworking handyman, Mr. Roberts was known locally for being a Stetson-wearing horse-loving “cowboy”. He was also a cross-dresser, and a not-so-private cross-dresser at that. On social media, he would share photographs of himself in wigs, makeup and crop tops. Virginia’s mother, Lynn, was a well-liked bank manager and, as her sister-in-law Kimberley would later attest, “came from money”, with Virginia herself being given a lucrative trust fund by her maternal grandmother.

From the outside looking in, Virginia’s early life was one of some privilege, easy living, frequent horse rides, and being spoiled by her doting parents. “Lynn’s mother took the family on lavish holidays when Virginia was a child,” said Kimberly. “She was brought up with good morals; respect your parents, don’t talk back, don’t drink or do drugs.” Yet the idyllic Roberts’ family ranch would soon be shaken to its foundations when Virginia alleged she’d been sexually abused.

I investigated this serious allegation, but for legal reasons was unable to release my findings until after they were revealed by Virginia in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl.

Giuffre alleged that she had been sexually abused by her father Sky from early childhood, further claiming that Sky had engaged in the vile act of, in Giuffre’s own words, “daughter swapping”. Allegedly, Mr. Roberts would visit his friend, Forest Jones, and would sexually abuse Jones’ daughter in exchange for Jones being allowed to abuse Virginia. I could find no evidence suggesting her father’s guilt, but I was able to confirm that Forest Venable Jones was indeed arrested and convicted of abusing another child in 1997, coinciding with the timeframe alleged by Virginia.

I was also able to unearth an even more sinister allegation by Giuffre, that either her father or Forest Jones got Jones’s daughter pregnant. When the scandal broke at the time, Virginia’s parents separated, Sky temporarily moved to North Carolina (to the hometown of Forest Jones), and Virginia went to live with her aunt Carol. “He [Virginia’s father] said he needed to send Virginia to live with me,” Carol told the press. “Of course, I said yes immediately. I’m a Mormon. I don’t drink, smoke or drink caffeine. Virginia needed stability.”

Yet Virginia began to run away before eventually moving back to her parent’s home and, according to Virginia herself, it was at this point that the troubled young teen rebelled even further; drinking alcohol, taking drugs, and running away to live with boyfriends and friends with whom she partied and engaged in prostitution.

“She smoked weed and didn’t spend a lot of time at school,” an old friend of Virginia recently stated. “Her elder brother Daniel took her to rehab aged just 15 or 16. Virginia was definitely troubled.” This is also verified by other accounts, including the deposition of an ex-boyfriend who, under oath, confirmed that Virginia had been visiting a rehabilitation centre, and by a former short-term fling who would attest to having wiled away his days with her there.

The facility in question, Growing Together Behavioural Center, was, in Virginia’s own words, “Like a group home that sent you away to foster parents every night. You stayed at Growing Together during the day and then at night you get sent home to the foster parents. They also offered education there.”

Virginia – who during that time and for many years after called herself “Jenna” or “Jen” – continued to rebel, often spending nights out with friends and strangers smoking drugs and swilling back liquor.

“I ran away from Growing Together quite often,” Virginia would later write in a memoir. “I did end up being abused by another older guy who I stayed with, Ronald Eppinger.” Eppinger, who was later convicted for money laundering and running Perfect 10, a modelling agency reportedly serving as a front for an international sex trafficking operation, would allegedly train Virginia to be a prostitute.

Much of my investigation into this entire case has focused on Virginia’s own words, often contradictory, yet undoubtedly valuable – none more so than her unpublished memoir, ‘The Billionaire’s Playboy Club’, written years later and officially submitted as evidence, now in the public domain.

The following is Virginia’s own written account, read by an actress, and which I have left unedited.

“It was coming up to my third night camping out at Miami Beach in the summer of 1997. I was 13 years old and hiding from a world full of hurt… Out of nowhere, it seemed, a black stretch limousine turned the corner and stopped in front of the curb where I had been hopelessly lost. The back door opened to reveal a heavy weight and balding, old man with a big cheesy smile. Neatly dressed in black trousers and a collared shirt, he was sitting next to a striking young blonde girl. Drop dead beautiful and dressed in a foxy red mini dress, she looked like a model just stepping off a runway. Their smiles greeted me warmly and he kindly asked, ‘What is such a sweet little girl like you doing sitting alone on the street looking so upset?’ Shocked from this stranger’s concern I was hesitant in telling him the truth. Reluctantly I decided to tell him that I was a runaway, not from around here, and really hungry, hoping at most I would get some money for food from him. He instantly displayed a chilling excitement and offered me to come into his car so we could talk some more.”

It was here, in Virginia’s written account of her first meeting with Ron Eppinger, that I found a serious contradiction – one of many to come. In 2022, in the run-up to a planned speaking gig for the Childproof America National Education Summit on Human Trafficking, she provides a completely different version of how she came to be associated with Ron. Instead of claiming, as per her memoir, that she had been sleeping on the beach for three nights, the organisation’s website states: “Finally, the streets caught up with Virginia after being physically and sexually assaulted by a man with a gun. He made her taste the metal by putting the gun in her mouth, it was quite scary for her. She thought at least she would get what she wanted, death. The beatings and raping were so painful. While her abuser was on a phone call and had to step outside the hotel room Virginia made her dash. Bleeding profusely from every orifice wrapped in a white sheet with blood stains, she ran as fast as she could waiting for him to pull up in his white van that she was forced to get into at gun point. Virginia went to a bus stop and was picked up by her first trafficker, Ron Eppinger.”

She has not repeated this questionable story since.

In her memoir, she continues by claiming that Eppinger took her back to his home, where she met a group of female escorts. Over the following days and weeks, she claims to have been trained to join them in escorting and regularly having sex with Eppinger.

“Needing some contact with someone of my adolescent mentality I called one of my school friends from the past, whom I won’t name out of privacy, but I’ll call him,” she continues.

It has now been made public that friend she was referring to is in fact Tony Figueroa, an ex-boyfriend of Virginia’s whom I’d later interview and garner valuable information from.

“The sound of my voice radiated a chill in him. ‘It’s you, oh my God Jenna. Are you okay?’ He was so shocked to hear from me and the sheer fact I was still alive. Nearly three months now without a single word to my family or friends, everyone doubted my return.”

Giuffre claimed that she was eventually sent by Eppinger to stay with a man named Charlie. I could find no records confirming Charlie’s existence. Regardless, Virginia claimed that police raided Charlie’s home, found her laying in his bed, and took her down to the police station.

“Over the next few hours, I sat down and told the agents how Ron’s business worked and what I part I had to play to him,” she continues in her memoir. “Ron had so many countless charges put up against him, eventually when the FBI were able to track him down they were able to have him arrested in Yugoslavia and extradited back to Miami, he was finally held accountable for being a paedophile, soliciting women for prostitution, and running many illegitimate and illegal businesses. By the time the FBI caught him he was in his mid-seventies when he died of old age serving his second year of a prison sentence.”

Eppinger was in fact 65 when he pleaded guilty to charges involving money laundering and the smuggling of immigrants into America for the purpose of prostitution. He was never charged for allegedly recruiting minors, as Virginia suggests. No evidence was presented to show that the females he trafficked between 1997 and 1999, predominantly, with the help of two Czech women, Lucie Faubert and Tereza Benesova, from Eastern Europe to work as escorts, were under the legal age of consent.

Sentenced to 21 months behind bars, he died while incarcerated two years later.

Back to Virginia’s own words:

“Hours later I was still twirling myself in the same office chair when I spun around to see my father walking in my direction. I nearly fell off my seat at the sight of him… He contemplated putting his arms out to hold me but instead anger and shame took over and he just shook his head. I never saw my Dad cry until that day and I have to say it made me feel young again and sad I had disappointed my parents again. The agents now standing beside us led both of us together back into the interrogation room to retell my journey to my father who they said I had no choice to tell, or they would have to tell him for me, being I was an underaged minor and Ron violated the statutory rape law, among many others, when he took me back to his apartment and kept me as his sex slave. My Dad couldn’t believe what he was hearing and for his lack of better choice in words asked me to stop talking, he was just happy to know I was alive… The next discussion was led to where I would go to from here. Before anyone could put his or her suggestion forward, I leapt in with my two bits and made it obviously clear to my Dad that if I was sent away to another lockdown facility and if he betrayed my trust, again, he would never see me again. I would disappear for good this time and for all he would know I could be dead in no time on the streets. He looked at me and for the first time in my life he saw the many years I had grown up in the time I was gone and heard the seriousness in the tone of my voice when I made my vow to him. He put his head in his hands and told me the bad news, my mom didn’t want me to come home and she was making his life hell for even suggesting bringing me back into their lives. I for some reason threatened her lifestyle and drove her crazy… My dad said he had no choice but to put me back into the facility, but he made a sincere promise that he would not take any longer than a week to try to find a place for me to stay and to go to school.”

Virginia claimed that she went on to again run away from the facility she was returned to, on one occasion heading over to a phone box to call her father, who finally agreed to allow her to come home. There, she writes that she quickly made amends with her parents and began enjoying family time with them and her brothers, sitting around bonfires together, and adding, “I loved being with my family again.” Shockingly, it must be noted here that there is evidence to suggest that Virginia invented her entire story relating to Ron Eppinger and may have learned of the Eppinger case only when researching stories she could add into her fiction-riddled first memoir. She omitted several important events from this section of her timeline, not least of all the following, as detailed in a court filing in a defamation lawsuit between Virginia and Ghislaine Maxwell: “November 1997 – Plaintiff, then 14 years old, was observed by law enforcement officers drunk in the backyard of a home during the middle of the school day. She was not “raped,” as the Motion claims. She was observed engaging in a simulated sex act with her boyfriend who was then 17 years old. As all of the witnesses described, Plaintiff had voluntarily become intoxicated, made numerous passes at various members of their group, almost fallen into a canal, and then, when spotted by the school truancy officer, offered to have sex with him in exchange for not telling her parents she had failed to go to school that day. Both Plaintiff and her 17-year old boyfriend verified they had had sexual intercourse in the days before the report, and the boyfriend was charged with having sexual contact with a minor. Those were not the false allegations of sexual contact. Rather, on the way to the detox unit at the hospital, Plaintiff claimed she had been forcibly sexually assaulted by her friends. Plaintiff’s claim of forced sexual assault was expressly refuted by the witnesses, who also verified Plaintiff’s attempt to get out of trouble by offering to have sex with the truancy officer. While the young man was charged with statutory rape based on the admitted sexual intercourse, charges against him were ultimately dropped.”

In 1998, while she was a resident at the rehabilitation center, she would make another rape accusation. It is something that the press has largely, and strangely, overlooked too, with Virginia having told her social worker that two young men whom she had sneaked out of the facility to socialise with had raped her. The troubled 14-year-old claimed she’d been drinking and smoking marijuana in a wooded area near West Palm Beach with friends Josh, 18, and Kevin, 17, when she passed out. She said she then woke up to find both of the young men taking turns to penetrate her – an ordeal she claimed went on for up to seven hours, after which she said she went back to Josh’s house and had sex with him again.

Officers tracked down the two men the following summer. Both testified that it was a consensual threesome. A detective who spoke with Josh reported that after the three drank, the young man urged Virginia to get some sleep, stating she then said to him something to the effect of “why don’t you keep me awake”, before the two engaged in a further “consensual” sexual encounter. In the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office documents relating to the case, Virginia’s mother, Lynn, is recorded as telling a detective about her daughter’s “past drug abuse” and how “many kids in Royal Palm Beach are involved in drugs, witchcraft and animal sacrifice”. The accusations were vehemently denied.

“I wasn’t hiding anything,” Josh, who voluntarily came forward to detectives, told a local newspaper, adding that he only knew Virginia as ‘Jen’, never saw her again after that night, and that her accusation caught him by surprise. “Of course, I was concerned,” he said, “somebody tried to press serious charges against me!”

Following a months-long investigation mired by a series of contradictions in Virginia’s account, prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing “the victim’s lack of credibility.” Michael Salnick, the defence lawyer who represented Kevin in the rape allegations, would, years later amidst the furore of Virginia making public her allegations against numerous high profile individuals, tell the Daily News that the fact prosecutors didn’t believe Roberts would be a believable victim could hamper her lawsuits, adding, “She needs to be careful that the past doesn’t come back to haunt her.”

The following year, after being reunited with her parents, she was offered another opportunity to turn her life around. By then Sky was a well-respected employee at Donald Trump’s prestigious resort in Palm Beach. And it was there, after bagging his daughter a summer job as a locker room attendant, that her life would once again take a drastic turn.

Employed by Mar-a-Lago as a $9 an hour maintenance manager on April 11, 2000, Mr, Roberts had, in under a year, already proven himself to be a valued member of staff. His stint working there would later be rewarded by a glowing reference from the establishment’s owner himself, Donald Trump, who wrote in 2003: “Sky Roberts has been a most valuable employee at the Mar-a-Lago Club since April of 2000. While employed as a maintenance crew team member, he has been responsible for maintaining the five championship red day tennis courts as well as keeping all the individual air conditioning units working and in tip-top shape. It is my understanding that Sky is relocating to Colorado. Should he ever return to Florida, he would be eligible for rehire.”

Despite initially telling the press and her lawyers that she was 15 when she worked at Mar-a-Lago, employment records, and later her own admission during one of her depositions, prove that her employment began in 2000. Mar-a-Lago closes every Mother’s Day and reopens on November 1st every year. Thus, Virginia could only have started working there sometime after November 2000, when she was already over the age of 17.

A relatively easy job, with reasonable pay for a now 17-year-old Virginia, who with a tall thin frame, long blonde hair and eyes like sapphires combined gave her the appearance of being older than she actually was, now had the opportunity to earn some honest cash while catching-up on her education. ”There was a girl who already worked there at the front desk,” she would later recall. “She helped make appointments and greeted people, and then she just told me my duties in the locker room were to make tea. Clean up after the ladies who had been in the locker room. Make sure the bathrooms were kept nice and tidy. Fold the toilet paper into a little triangle every time anyone went to the toilet. Clean up the sink area.”

It was one fateful shift at Mar-a-Lago, however, that Virginia now claims brought her into the fold of Jeffrey Epstein. And yet, it is from this single day that her accusations and varying accounts begin to wildly contradict each other in places, and in others prove to be nothing more than complete fabrications. She details the following in her memoir:

“Surrounded by lush acres of tropical landscapes, manicured gardens, and a mansion made into a beach club for the rich and famous it [Mar-a-Lago] is known as the ‘Jewel of Palm Beach’. I was in sheer awe at the gold arched ceilings and the grand ballrooms. The spa where I worked was world-class, not only oozing in style but in the way each and every client was treated with the utmost service. My focus was now set on becoming a massage therapist and working my way into a luxurious spa like the one I worked for now, only I was a locker room attendant there. I studied many books about the anatomy of the human body and how you can affect a person’s wellbeing and health for the better through a simple healing touch. It was amazing to me the way the body responded to massage. I was more than just interested. I was determined to become a therapist. It was one of those anatomy books that I had my nose buried in one afternoon on a quiet Tuesday, and it could get pretty lonely in the locker room, so if weren’t busy I’d sit outside by the spa’s reception and read my books in the warmth of the Florida sun.

“A lovely looking woman in her late 30s who spoke with a proper English accent approached me. I assumed it was a general question, like ‘where’s the lady’s room?’ or ‘was that the famous model from so-and-so?’ But she was more interested in the book I was reading. Only believing at first we were just making small talk, she was really intrigued at my choice of reading. She then asked if I did massage on the side. I stated I was only reading the book and had not yet begun to study, but one day I would love to practice massage therapy. She introduced herself as Ghislaine Maxwell. I would later find out that she was the daughter of the late prominent businessman and disgraced newspaper tycoon, Robert Maxwell. I told her my name is Jenna, pointing to my nametag on my shirt, and offered her a cold or hot beverage, as those were my instructed duties at work. She accepted a tea and went on to chat a bit about this rich guy that she worked for, and she knew off-hand that he was looking for a massage therapist. Just doing me a good deed out of her kindness of her heart, I’m sure, she offered to introduce me to him.”

Virginia claims that she was driven to Epstein’s home that evening.

“He gave me a big squeeze and wished me the best. He walked me to the front door and I rung the door chime. Moments later we were greeted by an older gentleman dressed in a casual butler uniform. I told him I was here to meet Ms. Maxwell for a massage trial and he opened the doors for my father and telling us to wait in the entry as Ms. Maxwell would be on her way any second, and she was. Down the stairs she walked with a warm smile, her short black hair seeming very proper and elegant, for now. She shook my father’s hand and thanked him for bringing me and kissed us both on the cheeks. They spoke briefly about whom she worked for and about Mar-a-Lago where we worked. She was in hurry, you could tell, to end the conversation and say goodbye to my dad, which she did so ever pleasantly. She said the boss was upstairs and waiting my arrival, so with that I said bye to my dad and began to follow Ghislaine up the stairs.

She next alleges that she was shown into Epstein’s massage room, where Epstein was already laying on the massage table, surrounded by oils and lotions. She alleges that Ghislaine then showed her how to massage his body, before the massage took an inappropriate turn, with Epstein rolling over and exposing himself.

“He wasn’t the first man to show me his penis, so I wasn’t shocked at the appearance of his manhood, but I was incredibly shocked at his complete ease to present himself with an erection. I tried to ignore it, waiting to follow the next directions off of Ghislaine, who surprisingly now stood behind me bare-breasted. Before I had a chance to even think of replying, hastily she began to slowly undress me, while Jeffrey started to stroke his manhood while watching us… Acting as my madam, she instructed me to start by licking his nipples and after I had sufficiently pleasured both of them, then prompted me to go down on Jeffery orally while she rubbed her breasts along his body tantalizingly.”

Virginia alleges that she was then instructed to have penetrative sex with Epstein before having a sauna, being paid $200, and leaving. A Maxwell family member would later tell me, “Ghislaine specifically states what she has always said, which is she has no memory of meeting Virginia at all, let alone introducing her to Jeffrey Epstein. It was also very possible that Jeffrey Epstein himself met Virginia Roberts at Mar-a-Lago as Jeffrey went for massages there by himself, so he could have easily met her and asked her to come for an interview. She [Virginia] was also sporting an engagement ring, so why on earth would anyone think she was anything but an adult?”

It is true that Virginia was indeed engaged at the time.

The fiancé in question was 18-year-old Michael Austrich. Inside the rehabilitation centre, she’d befriended a kindred spirit, a young girl of similar age whose mother had agreed to take Virginia into her home and allow her to live there while she attempted, with help, to get her life back on track. Within weeks, the girl, accompanied by Virginia, made the short journey to Broward County, to a large suburban house, to pay a visit to her stepbrother, Michael, and her father. Introducing Virginia as “Jenna”, both brother and friend immediately warmed to one another.

“We got to talking,” Michael said during his 2016 deposition. “We liked each other, and we just got to know each other…we fell in love.” Virginia and Michael’s stepsister stayed with them in Broward County for a few weeks, Virginia and Michael becoming closer with each day, swiftly blossoming into a relationship. The two moved out of Michael’s father’s house shortly thereafter, first moving into an apartment in the small suburb of Oakland Park, rented under Michael’s name due to Virginia not yet being over the age of 18. There they lived with Michael’s friend and work colleague, Mario, with the two friends, both night managers, getting Virginia a job with them at a Taco Bell fast food restaurant beside a nearby shopping mall. Over a year had passed when, on Valentine’s Day, Michael strolled along the beach with his girlfriend, got down on one knee and, looking up at her from the sand, his grandmother’s old engagement ring held outstretched in his hand, asked her to marry him.

She said yes.

Now engaged, the pair decided they needed an apartment of their own, the best way to save up the means to do so being to briefly move in with Virginia’s parents. Living there for as many months as it took to save up a deposit, they slept in a trailer in the back garden, spending their days working, socialising, and sitting around the dinner table with Virginia’s family. Eventually, having scraped some cash together (though evidence shows that it is more likely that the means were provided by her ‘employer’, Jeffrey), the pair heaved their boxed-up belongings into a van and drove to their new home, a third-floor apartment in Royal Palm Beach. Again, Michael’s was the sole name to appear on the lease contract, with Virginia still around half a year shy of her 18th birthday. During their relationship, she drifted from one random job to the next, first working at KFC, then with Michael at Taco Bell, then at a supermarket, a childcare centre, an avicultural breeding facility, and then, finally, at Mar-a-Lago, from where she would leave to work for Jeffrey Epstein.

She had been with Michael the entire time, even during much of her time with Jeffrey. She had allegedly presented herself as an adult, wearing her engagement ring and openly talking about having a fiancé. But their engagement was not to last, broken off not because of her new “job” as a “travelling masseuse”, but because of her own infidelity, not with Jeffrey, but with her old flame, Tony Figueroa.

I managed to track down Tony through social media, my interview with him (the interviewee initially reluctant to speak) taking place in the summer of 2024. What he told me conflicted slightly with Virginia’s own account and provided yet another valuable first-hand insight into Virginia’s shameful recruiting of underage girls for Jeffrey. I listened to the dial tone and waited, eventually being connected to a calm voice on the other end.

“I first met Virginia in 1998, when we were both in high school, and she was dating some other guy at first,” Tony Figueroa told me. “I just thought she was hot as hell, and I wanted to get to know her. And it turned out the feeling was mutual. She wanted to get to know me. From the time we met, we clicked instantly. It was like lightning in a bottle. We lit each other up, like there was no going back. We did everything together. From the time we started talking, it was like we were inseparable. She came and stayed with me at my house with my parents. She had run away from home to stay there, so she was staying with me for a few weeks while we were still going to school. We were basically inseparable from the time that I met her. It was unstoppable. She was definitely very sexually active, and that went back to all the stuff that she had gone through, but that’s a whole ’nother story, a whole ’nother thing with this other older guy, and it was a whole big ordeal. She had been through a lot of trauma. I don’t think she really had too many feelings involved other than just trying to have fun with it. But as far as I’m concerned, once me and her started hanging out, having sex, being together, there was nobody else.”

It’s clear that Tony still holds a torch for his ex-girlfriend.

“To this day, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had that kind of connection with anybody else,” he told me. “I’m not saying that we didn’t have our ups and downs, but, like, as far as a person goes, she was amazing. She was loving, caring. I loved everything about her, except for all the messed-up shit she had been through. But she was a fucking amazing person. Yeah, she was very sexually active with a lot of people, but I mean, so was I. We were teenagers.”

Their first relationship, however, was brief. Yet when it was later rekindled, it would not only lead to the dramatic end of her relationship to Michael, but would lead to years of criminality.

But I’ll cover that in the next episode.

Contrary to the MeToo movement’s mantra to “believe all women”, it is imperative that all evidence, including the accounts of accusations made by abuse victims, though as uncomfortable as it may be, are scrutinized and tested. In her comments to the press, Virginia originally said that she was 15 when she first met Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. This claim – though easily proven to be false when I compared her birth certificate to Mar-a-Lago employment records – was published verbatim by the world’s media, seemingly with little to no fact-checking having taken place, Sensational headlines and stories taking priority over basic journalistic ethics and integrity. When I contacted The Sun newspaper, asking its editor why, despite Virginia’s age being established as having been 17 during her time at Mar-a-Lago, they printed that she had been 15, their response was simply that they were “quoting what she said”. During a later deposition, Virginia said she only received two pay cheques from Mar-a-Lago before she met Ghislaine and went to work for Jeffrey Epstein. This means that she would have started work for Jeffrey sometime in late November, early December (she stated in her 2016 deposition that she quit Mar-a-Lago a few weeks after meeting Epstein). During the deposition of Ghislaine Maxwell, when asked about her alleged involvement in the recruitment of Virginia, she said:

“Virginia Roberts, who you are referring to, was a masseuse aged 17. I was somebody who hired a number of people to work for Mr. Epstein and hiring is one of my functions. Virginia Roberts held herself out as a masseuse and invited herself to come and give a massage. She was a masseuse and, in the form, and as my job, I was to have people who he wanted for various things including massage. She came as a masseuse.”

Other important factors are worth considering, including those which completely contradict, even destroy, Virginia’s in-depth and lurid account of that first meeting. The first that sheds doubt on her claim that Ghislaine Maxwell opened the front door of Epstein’s home and led her upstairs during her first alleged encounter with Epstein, comes in the form of Ghislaine Maxwell’s deposition and the deposition of Virginia’s father, and that of her own mother, Lynn Roberts. In her memoir, Virginia claims that her father drove her to Epstein’s Florida home, going on to say:

“He walked me to the front door and I rung the door chime. Moments later we were greeted by an older gentleman dressed in a casual butler uniform.”

During cross-examination at her 2016 deposition, she essentially acknowledged that what she had claimed in ‘The Billionaire’s Playboy Club’ was untrue:

“When you got there, a butler or someone answered the door, is that what you said?” the questioner asked.

“No, Ghislaine answered the door,” Virginia replied.

Interestingly, Virginia’s claim that Ghislaine answered the door only came about after she decided to implicate Maxwell and sue her for defamation. Her father provided a different account – that he never met Maxwell, and that on an occasion when he drove Virginia to the house, he only met Epstein, and not Maxwell. Virginia was forced to accept this account during her 2019 defamation case, with her legal representation confirming: “She [Virginia Roberts] does not contest her father’s testimony that Mr. Epstein came out of the house and greeted her father and that her father never met Ms. Maxwell”. There is also ample reason to believe that her father took her to Jeffrey’s home on a different occasion, not the first, with her mother being the person who gave her a ride for her ‘interview’.

In her own deposition, Ghislaine Maxwell said:

“Her [Virginia’s] statement that she was driven by her father to Palm Beach – she was driven by her mother, as a matter of fact… I was outside speaking to her mother… You can be a professional masseuse at 17 in Florida, so as far as I am aware, a professional masseuse showed up for a massage… Her entire characterisation of her first time at the house was to me an obvious lie, given it was impossible for her entire story to take place given I was speaking to her mother the entire time she was at the house.”

The questioner then asked her, “So it was impossible that day, that first day she came and you were speaking to the mother, for Virginia Roberts to have had sex with Jeffrey Epstein during the time that you were outside with her mother?”

Maxwell replied, “Absolutely, 1,000 per cent – she did not have any type of sexual relations as described by you in your court papers that took place, because those allegedly, according to her lies, involved some aspect of me. As I was standing outside with her mother the entire time, her entire story is a lie. Therefore, to ask me what she did or didn’t do during that time, I can only testify to what she said about me, which is 1,000 per cent false.”

Another serious contradiction relating to her account of the first meeting is that, despite Virginia now claiming that once inside Epstein’s home, Ghislaine Maxwell led her upstairs into a room where Jeffrey Epstein was lying naked on a massage table before engaging in sexual activity with her, in a story she sold to the Daily Mail for $40,000 in 2011, Virginia is clearly recorded as claiming that ‘another woman’, not Ghislaine Maxwell, led her upstairs, and Maxwell is not recorded as having engaged in any form of sexual activity. The article reads: “Virginia says, ‘Ghislaine said I was to start immediately and that someone would drive me home. My father left and I was told to go upstairs.’ She was led by another woman through Epstein’s bedroom… Virginia was then told to start massaging Epstein, under the instructions of the woman who had shown her in.”

To some, such contradictions may, on first appearances, seem innocent and trivial. They are anything but. The fact is that, despite newspaper articles and Virginia’s own memoir originally stating that Ghislaine Maxwell had committed a crime by engaging a 17-year-old in sexual activity – an illegal act in the state of Florida – the evidence heavily suggests that Maxwell did not do anything of the sort. What is more likely, after analysing testimonies from Virginia, Ghislaine, Sky and Lynn, is that Virginia came to the house with her mother, that Virginia briefly went upstairs, led by another female, to meet Jeffrey Epstein, and that Virginia’s mother waited for her outside, exchanging small talk with Ghislaine before she came back out again and left. In other words, it was an interview. Yet years after clearly stating that Maxwell had not been involved in any sexual encounter during her first visit to Epstein’s Florida home, Virginia Roberts changed her story, implicating Maxwell.

Of another alleged visit a couple of days later, Virginia writes:

“Instead of driving me to work the next morning, my Dad dropped me off at Jeffrey’s mansion. He told me not to worry about calling Mar-a-Lago, he’d take care of it for me. We said our goodbyes outside in the driveway, Jeffrey even coming outside to meet with my father to shake his hands and assure him that his daughter will be more than looked after… Juan drove Jeffrey, Ghislaine and me to Palm Beaches’ Private Airport, and the luggage handlers escorted us on the tarmac where we all boarded on Jeffrey’s black jet. Larry was his main pilot; he had shiny grey hair and long, lanky legs, but a very sincere smile that instantly made you feel at ease.”

Virginia continues by writing that, during her subsequent trip to New York, where the legal age of consent is 17, she provided Jeffrey with multiple erotic massages. What Virginia says happens next fits a pattern, a modus operandi that Jeffrey seemed to have employed to ensure he maintained access to a steady flow of attractive young women to satisfy his sexual appetite. It would also, as we will later explore in depth, lead to Virginia breaking the law.

“On the day before we were to be heading back to Palm Beach, Jeffrey had a new proposition for me,” she continues in her memoir. “I could make double the money I was making if I would look for pretty girls and convince them to come back to Jeffrey’s to be further persuaded with money to engage in bisexual and sexual acts with Jeffrey. And I asked him how does one actually propose such a thing to a complete stranger? ‘Well,’ he said in a build-up to another kind of lesson, ‘if I were you I would use your charm to entice them and my money to bring them, I would tell them you work for a multi-billionaire who has a taste for young, beautiful girls, and with his contacts in the acting, modelling, or rich husband world, your boss could help them. All they have to do is come meet me first.’

Virginia now had a decision to make.

It is important to note here that, regarding that decision, she was not threatened by Epstein in any way, wasn’t warned that there would be any repercussions if she declined his offer. She had two options: Number one, she could easily return to her job at Mar-a-Lago and get on with her life. Or number two, she could take Jeffrey up on his offer and become his recruiter.

It didn’t take her long to come to a conclusion. She would, she decided, continue to make money through sex work, through selling her body and company, and, now, would earn extra commission by finding Jeffrey other women to satisfy his out-of-control sexual desires.

Many years later, during her interview with Todd Blanche, Ghislaine Maxwell would claim that it was Virginia Giuffre, or most notably Giuffre’s own aforementioned decision, that essentially helped spawn the entire Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And it is also important to note here that at no time did Jeffrey ask Virginia to go out and find him underage girls. Instead, as with the women before Virginia, his personal preference, as all of the evidence demonstrates, was for women in their early twenties who looked even younger.

Jeffrey was one of those seedy men who straddled the border of legality and enjoyed the girls whom the sex industry advertise in their ‘barely legal’ category.

His instructions to Virginia and other young women were simple: To bring him attractive girls willing to perform sex acts for money, with one strict caveat, a caveat that police reports confirm and yet that has been completeely ignored by the media: All of the girls MUST be over the age of 18.

But Virginia had a problem. Her social circle was small. It consisted predominantly of drug dealers, drug users, and not the ‘barely legal’ types, but girls who weren’t of legal age at all.

But the proposal was too good to turn down. Thus, she decided she needed to be sly.

She would head off and recruit the underage friends, girlfriends and relatives of her boyfriends. She when lie to Jeffrey that they were over eighteen and would instruct them that they too would need to lie about their ages should Jeffrey enquire.

She would, against Jeffrey’s instructions, seek out school girls and vulnerable dropouts, writing in her memoir that she considered them as nothing more than, in her words, “easy commission”.

Again, she could have stopped.

She didn’t need to do what she did next.

But there was one thing drawing her in, motivating her to sacrifice her own morality and the safety of others.

Something that had drawn so many others to Jeffrey Epstein.

Something that this entire scandal is overwhelmingly dominated by.

She wasn’t seeing the pain she’d soon help inflict upon a string of school girls.

For now, Virginia was only seeing dollar signs.

Thanks for listening to episode six of ‘The life and Death of Jeff’!

In the next episode we’ll continue our journey through the Epstein scandal, including listening to my exclusive interviews with Tony Figueroa and Philip Guderyon, another ex-boyfriend of Virginia. We’ll also be going through Virginia’s life as a recruiter for Jeffrey Epstein, and listening to my shocking interview with the mother of one of Virginia’s underage victims.

Until then, don’t forget to click the subscribe button, catch-up on my other interviews, and, most importantly, have a wonderful week!

Maxwell had appealed against her five felony convictions, claiming her constitutional rights had been "v…

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In this episode we’ll be continuing our journey through the sordid Jeffrey Epstein scandal by taking a stroll through Jeffrey’s infamous island. You’ll also be able to listen to my interview with the French designer who helped develop the island and the mysterious so-called ‘temple’. And then we’ll be diving into another scandal - a honeypot scandal that has never before been fully exposed and that I can reveal, for the first time, involved one of Jeffrey’s girlfriends, the son of the United Kingdom’s Queen Camilla, cocaine, and a dodgy tabloid newspaper.

So, without further delay, let’s push forward on our quest for the truth…

“AN ENCHANTED ISLAND HAUNTED BY THOSE NYMPHETS OF MINE AND SURROUNDED BY A VAST, MISTY SEA” – Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

The island, nicknamed ‘Little St. Jeff’, rises out of the Caribbean and into the warm tropical air, a dusty green teardrop floating in deep blue water. White stone terraces step down toward quiet coves. A single pier stretches outward like a finger testing the temperature of the sea. Sculpted hedges, pristine lawns and palm trees are arranged as if by careful hand.

Around the same period of buying the island, Jeffrey began assembling his physical offshore infrastructure.

The United States Virgin Islands occupies a peculiar position in American law. It is under U.S. sovereignty, but treated as a separate tax jurisdiction. For Jeffrey, this meant that advisory fees earned from mainland U.S. clients could be booked through Virgin Islands entities and legally taxed at a fraction of what would have been owed in New York. It was offshore without appearing foreign. This was the same logic exploited by global tycoons whose empires run through island jurisdictions, including figures such as Richard Branson, whose island Jeffrey visited and whose companies for decades have routed ownership, licensing, and profits through low-tax island regimes. Jeffrey mastered both worlds at once: the private offshore universe of international billionaires and the quasi-domestic offshore territory used by American elites.

Internal banking records later showed Jeffrey routing massive wire transfers through Virgin Islands entities labeled only as “consulting” or “services,” with layered shell companies shielding beneficial ownership. Prosecutors would later describe his corporate web as a structure deliberately designed to conceal transactions and frustrate scrutiny. The island was not merely a destination. It was a financial instrument. Construction contracts, aviation fuel, maritime services, payrolls, security, and logistics all flowed through the same tax-advantaged architecture. Visitors arrived by private plane into a jurisdiction engineered for barely-legal tax evasion and reduced oversight.

That was the service that Jeffrey sold.

But he did, as Ghislaine Maxwell attests, clearly love his island and saw it as far more than just a convenient tax loophole.

“He purchased the island in 1996 and he was friendly with the owners,” Ghislaine told Todd Blanche. “And originally, we went to the island as guests of the owners. And then I guess at some point the owners told him they wanted to sell and he decided to purchase it. The island was very rustic. I loved it.

“We were often on the island, because he loved it. He really, really loved it. And we would go all the time. Mostly the early phase was based on improvements that could be made on the island, always going with new architects, new designers, new construction people. I’d say the first two years, almost every trip, not every one, but almost every trip contained an individual who would be brought on board to have an opinion as to how to -- I don’t want to use the word ‘improve’ the island, because I don’t think you could improve it, but to develop it.”

The island itself has become a symbol of the entire scandal and the focus of many a conspiracy theory. Around 30 hectares of rocky hills, forested groves, sheltered inlets and coral-fringed shores graced by a year-round tropical climate, he purchased it for $7.95 million in 1998 and instantly began construction work. A large main residence was built in a villa-style with colonnades, guest villas, a helipad, a private dock, swimming pools, a tennis court, slipways, and roads linking the buildings that he had surrounded by extensively landscaped lawns and gardens. Only reachable by boat or helicopter, the secluded island became his home from home, and a place where he could entertain a variety of famous friends and associates, from Peter Mandelson to Stephen Hawking, all waited on by hired members of staff.

Its most distinctive feature, now referred to by the press as “the Temple”, was a blue and white-striped box-shaped building topped with a golden dome. Could it have been built to facilitate his harem in some capacity? Or did it, as many unhinged conspiracy theories would have us believe, house an underground tunnel and chamber used in the trafficking and ‘ritual satanic abuse of children?

The evidence tells us that the answer is no. According to construction and permit records, the original plan submitted around 2010 described it as a music pavilion intended to house a grand piano, an instrument of which we already know Epstein was somewhat a master at playing. Somewhat pokey inside compared to the turquoise-ceiling cabanas, grand fireplace-adorned main residence, and the comfortable guest pavilions nearby, the two-floored structure was visited by Patrick Baron, a piano tuner who was flown in to work on the piano, and who confirmed that the interior simply consisted of, “a black grand piano, bookshelves, a dark wood desk, and a portrait of Epstein or the Pope.” Dressing the dome outside, two gold bird-like statues on the roof were removed or lost when Hurricane Maria battered the island in 2017.

One of the people brought to help develop the island and the temple was famous French architect and designer Robert Couturier.

I reached out to Mr. Couturier and, late one night, we discussed his involvement with Jeffrey and Little St. James. The following is a recording of what he told me:

I also asked him about the so-called ‘Temple’ and the conspiracy theories surrounding it, not least of all the claims that it had some sort of esoteric influence and purpose.

“I never felt that someone like Jeffrey Epstein had any inclination for the spiritual world,” he said. “The idea of, of, you know, evil, devil worshipping, and all of that is, in my opinion, complete bullshit. Sure, it was a weird building, even the builders thought it was weird. But it was fun to build.”

Some of the viral conspiracy theories have focused on the ominous patterns on the floor outside the front of the structure, with armchair detectives insinuating they were influenced by ritualistic pagan designs. But Robert was clear that this is hogwash, revealing that Jeffrey had simply asked for a unique design, that several were drawn into a sketchbook at random, and that eventually he chose one he preferred.

The dome was fabricated and painted on the mainland. The ceiling was partially decorated with a Greek-themed mural. Computers, a sound system, air conditioning and a giant carved bookcase soon followed. But Robert didn’t stay to see its ongoing development.

“I came back from the island with him,” Robert remembered his final day in Jeffrey’s company. “And I was sitting in his plane. I was very embarrassed because when we had got to the airport, and if the person who is, you know, the owner of the plane and he’s a sex offender, then you have the police there. You sort of try not to see, and try not pay attention, but it’s very difficult not to. And on that flight back, I was looking at his hands. It had been only four, maybe six weeks I had worked for him, but I told him, I said, ‘Listen, I can’t work for you anymore. I just can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.’”

By now, Jeffrey had a reputation for being a mysterious figure dripping in sleaze.

His sexual appetite having gone completely out of control some time ago, he now made sure that he had a long list of women to visit him every day for happy ending massages and B.D.S.M sessions. Sarah Kellen was the main assistant who scheduled his so-called appointments. The women, mostly beautiful aspiring models, artists, sugar babies, prostitutes and any of their friends whom Jeffrey found attractive, would come and go every day, with Jeffrey receiving at least three massages daily. And some of the women, at least his favourites, were often invited to come to his island.

The often came in small groups. They would would be shown how to provide massages. They would be told Jeffrey’s sexual preferences and how best to please him - being topless. Massaging his feet. Straddling his back and then, when he flipped over, letting him use vibrators on them while they did one of his favourite things: squeezing his nipples and giving him oral sex.

In between massages, Jeffrey would often work while the women enjoyed the island, went jet skiing, sunbathed by the pool or on the beach. They would sleep in the cabanas, each seemingly taking turns to visit Jeffrey whenever her wanted a massage, though they would all frequently also have lunch with him outside on one of the verandas or spend time with him watching movies in the main house.

Oddly, it doesn’t seem that Jeffrey’s close girlfriend at the time, British-born Shelley Lewis, was particularly bothered about the arrangement, continuing to spend time with Jeffrey despite it being obvious that he was taking unfaithfulness to another level.

One of the women who visited his island was blonde-haired, blue-eyed Anouska Honey de Georgiou, who, like Shelley, also came from England.

Born in the late 1970’s in Ascot, Surrey, by 1993 Anouska was a 16-year-old fashion model navigating the competitive London agency scene. The daughter of a wealthy British financier and a former debutante model, she possessed an upper-class pedigree but carried the emotional fractures of her parents’ recent, bitter divorce.

The official introduction to Jeffrey took place in London, initiating a ten-year career mentorship whereby Jeffrey bankrolled her high-end modelling portfolio shoots, bought her expensive designer wardrobe pieces, and footed the bill for luxury, first-class flights across the Atlantic.

Over the next decade, she was routinely flown to his Upper East Side townhouse in New York, his Parisian apartment, his Palm Beach mansion, and his private island.

They would spend time together, engage in sexual activity, and Jeffrey would shower her with expensive gifts and, as with his other young women, act as somewhat of a sugar daddy to her.

Anouska had turned down a place at Oxford University to pursue a career as a model and actress. Working as a model for Playboy, she became connected to numerous high-profile stars, including having a relationship with Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff.

A former friend of Anouska informed me that, at the time, it was rumoured that the pair split partly due to Anouska allegedly tipping off the press as to when and where they would be out together in public, in an attempt to snag herself some media attention and raise her own profile.

She also allegedly had ties to Donald Trump. In November 1997, the Mirror on Sunday reported the following in its “Confidential” gossip page written by the late Chris Hutchins: “Just weeks after ditching his second wife, America’s best-known billionaire Donald Trump has fallen under the spell of a 20-year-old English girl. Trump, 50, who has failed in his bid to secure the services of Princess Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, was in search of another British trophy when he met London model Anouska De Georgiou at a party in Manhattan. Several millionaires already had their eyes on Anouska. But she was there with Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer. And none of his would-be rivals owned a vast mansion in Florida like Donald does: Mar-a-Lago (where I have dined with him and his outgoing wife Marla) is enough to make any young girl go weak at the knees. After their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the Sunshine State, where all three enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, Anouska was installed in one of Donald’s many apartments there. Ms De Georgiou likes older men – she went out once or twice with Joanna Lumley’s ex-husband Jeremy Lloyd, who is 45 years her senior.”

Whilst never having accused Donald Trump of any inappropriate behaviour, Anouska has since claimed that, whilst over the legal age of consent, she was abused by Jeffrey for several years.

“Jeffrey Epstein manipulated me, coerced me and abused me,” she told the Evening Standard. “He cannot fathom what he did to us… The abuse, spanning several years, was devaluing beyond measure and affected my ability to form and maintain healthy relationships, both in my work and my personal life.”

Anouska attending the premiere of children’s film, Charlie and the factory. Her top ‘happened’ to come unfastened on the red carpet... ‘conveniently timed for when she stepped in front of paparazzi

Using the pseudonym ‘Kate’, she was also a prosecution witness against Ghislaine Maxwell at her trial. However, the judge instructed the jury during that trial that the testimony of neither “Kate” nor Annie Farmer could be used to indict Ghislaine, because both were over age when they claimed they were abused.

It was later revealed during that trial that Anouska had sent Jeffrey letters whilst he was in prison and had even offered to send him photographs of herself.

And something else was also briefly touched upon in that trial - the revisiting of a famous tabloid scandal, since long forgotten and never fully revealed, until now.

For the record, I see no reason for Anouska to have been allowed to use a pseudonym when acting as a witness. Outside the court room, she wilfully sold her story to the press and has given numerous interviews using her full name. But it is because of that pseudonym being used that journalists have been unable to tell you the truth about her involvement in an infamous incident that pocketed her tens of thousands of pounds.

It is ironic that Anouska’s middle name is ‘Honey’, for she acted as a honeypot to entrap the son of Queen Camila in a cocaine scandal.

Tom Parker Bowles was born in London on the 18th of December, 1974, the first child of Camilla Shand and Andrew Parker Bowles. His father was a senior British Army officer, a former cavalryman and an old friend of Prince Charles. His mother, who would eventually become Queen Camilla, had herself been part of the same aristocratic and equestrian social world as Charles since the 1960s and had long been in love with, and having an affair with, Charles himself…

Read more

In this episode we’ll be continuing our journey through the sordid Jeffrey Epstein scandal by taking a stroll through Jeffrey’s infamous island. You’ll also be able to listen to my interview with the French designer who helped develop the island and the mysterious so-called ‘temple’. And then we’l…

Read more

In the next episode, episode 5 (out on Tuesday), I’ll be exposing, for the first time, the honeypot scandal involving one of Epstein’s girlfriends. It is a scandal involving cocaine, a beautiful Brit, and the downfall of the son of the Queen of the United Kingdom.

FULL TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE FOUR

Welcome to part four of the life and death of Jeff.

In case you missed the first three episodes, you can listen to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. As I touched upon in the last episode, Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s romance certainly wasn’t lifted from the pages of a fairy tale.

“Epstein told me that he had a heart condition,” she told Todd Blanche, “which meant that he didn’t have Intercourse a lot, which I didn’t mind, because I actually do have a medical condition which prevents me having a lot of intercourse.

“He liked other forms of sexual acts. He told me he didn’t - he couldn’t get a full erection. And I believed him.”

“When you said he said that, do you mean he regularly told you that?” Blanche asked.

“Because when I didn’t have sex with him after the first time, I asked him, ‘was it me?’ And he told me it was him. And so I also know now, which I didn’t know at the time, was that he saw lots of other women.”

Jeffrey’s claim that he suffered from erectile dysfunction wasn’t a lie. Interviews I’ve conducted with his former sexual partners and countless records I’ve spent hours examining, including emails sent by Jeffrey himself, confirm that he was almost completely impotent. With growing frustration and amidst an ever-increasing and out-of-control sexual appetite, he searched for ways to cure his problem, but to no avail. Instead, he often used Viagra and resorted to the other forms of sexual activities that Ghislaine referred to: handjobs by prostitutes at local massage parlours and, predominantly, masturbation.

The 90s, beginning to see computers and the internet available to households, also provided another outlet… Pornography.

Like most men, Jeffrey downloaded it, shared it with friends and, having the financial means, even associated himself with porn stars and facilitated their careers (more on that in a future episode of this series).

But he compartmentalised his life. His day was filled with business deals and communicating with associates. His evenings were filled with pornography and happy endings.

“But I had no keys to his house,” Ghislaine continued. “I had no free access to his house. And in the entire time that he lived there, which was, I believe, until the beginning of 1996, I never slept a single night in that house. Ever. Not once. I did travel with him. I would go to his houses in Palm Beach. He only had that house, actually. No, that’s not true. He had the house in Palm Beach and he had a house in Ohio. He had the house in Ohio because of Leslie Wexner.”

She confirmed that she was a paid employee of Jeffrey at this time, earning $25,000 a year to begin with, this eventually significantly increasing.

“My responsibilities increased with each acquisition that he put on and each new project. So I believe the first thing that he purchased after was the ranch in New Mexico.”

Ghislaine had introduced Jeffrey to the area and helped arrange the sale, taking him to view different properties across America, none quite suiting Jeffrey’s taste, until they arrived in Santa Fe and viewed the ranch.

“And I arranged for us to go to New Mexico, and he just loved New Mexico. And then, I don’t remember how the ranch happened, I don’t remember that, now it’s lost. And he ended up buying the ranch, and I think In February, it came from the Kings who named him the governor and bought the ranch. And then I had to deal with that. And dealing with that was extensive. I mean, the way that I think of myself and the way that I think is the best way to explain probably my role was as a general manager. Because each property to me was like a hotel. So the ranch was very challenging because not only that, but it had BLM land. So to maintain your BLM, you have to have cattle. And I love animals. And so the first thing are horses. If you’re going to have a ranch, I like authenticity.

Jeffrey’s new property, which he named the Zorro Ranch after one of his favourite fictional characters, lay in the high desert of central New Mexico, about 30 miles southeast of Santa Fe, surrounded by endless horizons of sagebrush, juniper and low sunburned mesas.

He bought the property in 1993 from former New Mexico Governor Bruce King, acquiring it through a web of trust entities that kept his direct involvement largely concealed for years.

Though Ghislaine had found it for him, he claimed to have had long shown an interest in the area. In a 2019 interview conducted by Steve Bannon, he stated that he became interested in New Mexico as an investor after 1990, when he learned that many scientists who had previously worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory were working at private spin-off firms doing pure and applied research, such as the Santa Fe Institute. Jeffrey controlled the property through a shell company called Zorro Trust, later renamed Cypress Inc. It spanned thousands of acres, making it a domain unto itself. And, eventually, at its heart stood a vast, hacienda-style mansion, often cited as being between 26,000 and 30,000 square feet. Built in the stucco and adobe tradition of the region, its cream-coloured walls and terracotta roofs rose in sharp relief against the open blue sky.

The main house, not completed until later 1999-early 2000, formed a wide U-shape around inner courtyards with shaded porticos, fountains and terraces that looked out toward distant mountain ridges. From above, the estate seemed less like a single dwelling than a small compound, a deliberate echo of the Spanish colonial architecture that still defines much of northern New Mexico.

It had guest houses, staff quarters, a fire station and a sprawling heated garage with multiple bays. There was a short private air strip and hangar, a large swimming pool, stables and fenced pasture land dotted with cattle. But that was after he’d had it renovated. Before then, in the early years, Jeffrey and his guests, including Ghislaine, would often resort to using static buildings set up on the dusty landscape and even a small converted railroad train, a caboose that doubled as a makeshift dining room.

It was at the ranch, before its development was complete, that one of the earliest allegations in the Epstein-Maxwell saga began.

The allegation was made by the Farmer Sisters.

Maria Farmer was born in 1969 or 1970 in Paducah, Kentucky to Frank Farmer and Janice Swain. She has two younger brothers and two younger sisters.

The family lived for a time in Phoenix, Arizona, before Maria studied at the Santa Clara University and then moved to New York, earning her master’s degree from the New York Academy of Art in 1995. She attended a postgraduate workshop at the Santa Fe Art Institute the same year.

At her graduate exhibition in 1995, the school’s dean, Eileen Guggenheim, introduced Farmer to Jeffrey, who served as a board member at the Academy from 1987 to 1994, and to Guyland. Although Maria claims she’d already sold one of her paintings for $12,000 to a German buyer, Jeffrey reportedly voiced his desire to purchase it for half the price, and Guggenheim urged Maria to cut him a deal as it was beneficial to the Academy.

Jeffrey had made numerous large donations to the Academy. In the summer of 1995, Maria was one of four artists chosen to attend an all-expenses-paid trip to Santa Fe. Several of the artists confirmed that they attended a dinner party at Jeffrey’s Zorro Ranch, at which it was allegedly promised that one of them would be rewarded with a major commissioned artwork for Jeffrey’s New Mexico property. However, no commission materialised. Back in New York, Maria was hired to work for Jeffrey, first allegedly as his art advisor, where she oversaw the acquisition of artwork by Chuck Bowdish and Damien Loeb. She continued to work for him at the front desk of his New York mansion, signing in tradesmen, decorators and friends. In the summer of 1996, she was commissioned to create two artworks for the film set of the Jack Nicholson film, As Good As It Gets. At the time, Maria was living in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, but Jeffrey offered her more space to create the artwork as an artist in residence at a 10,600-square-foot guest home on Leslie Wexner’s property in New Albany, Ohio.

Excited, Maria travelled there in a rental truck loaded with art materials and supplies.

“During that same summer of 1996, when I was working on my art project at Wexner’s Mansion, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein came to Wexner’s Mansion,” she would later claim. “They asked me to come into a bathroom with them and then proceeded to sexually assault me against my will. I fled from the room and called the Sheriff’s Office but did not get any response. The Wexner’s security staff refused to let me leave the property. I pleaded with them and my father drove up from Kentucky to Ohio to help me. I was held against my will for approximately 12 hours until I was ultimately allowed to leave with my father. Upon my return to New York, I went to the New York 6th Precinct Police Department for help, and they counselled me to contact the FBI to make a report about the assault in Ohio. I called the FBI and made the report, but to my knowledge, the FBI did not take any action against Epstein or Maxwell.”

In October 2019, a Wexner family spokesperson said, “Mr and Mrs Wexner had no knowledge of her, never met her, never spoke with her. The Epstein house, where Maria claims to have stayed, was not a Wexner guest house.”

This claim is corroborated in property records which show that the guest house in question was deeded to Epstein in 1992.

A driving licence reviewed by the Washington Post corroborates Maria’s claim that she stayed at the property. In an October 2019 interview, Maria claimed she was told by security staff that she was not allowed to leave the grounds of the property, adding, “where I stayed that summer, in that house and working in that garage, all of it was within view of the Wexner house.”

But this has been disputed by a former member of Wexner’s security staff who, remaining anonymous, told the Washington Post that the house was effectively the guest house and that the two houses were half a mile apart.

This is also confirmed in property records and by viewing the two properties on Google Maps. The Epstein house was not on land owned by the Wexners and was nearly half a mile away from the Wexner home, the former member of Wexner’s security staff added. The entrance to the Epstein residence was not through the Wexner gate.

The art collector Stuart Pivar confirmed, however, that he learned of Maria’s experience shortly after it occurred. Artist Eric Fischel also corroborated her account and confirmed being contacted by her. Later that summer, Maria Farmer claimed she learned that her younger sister Annie had also been assaulted by Epstein when Annie had visited him at his Zorro ranch in April 1996. Maria claimed she called the New York City Police Department and the FBI on August 26th, 1996 and reported the assault.

Maria herself was the person who had introduced her sister Annie to Jeffrey. Annie later claimed that on one occasion Jeffrey and Ghislaine took her to see the film Twelve Monkeys in 1996, recording the event in her diary. However, this cannot possibly be correct. The film was only available to watch in cinemas the year before, leading some to speculate that Annie’s diary entry must have been written many years later in an attempt to deceive readers.

Annie and Maria Farmer filed a complaint against Ghislaine and the executors of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in late 2019, almost 25 years after the alleged incident, accusing the pair of false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress under New York law. However, multiple contradictions exist in Maria’s story, including her claim that, in 1996, she had filed a police report about Jeffrey’s alleged abuse. The police report, which I managed to obtain many years ago, clearly relates to an accusation that Jeffrey had stolen photographs of her underage sister and had threatened to burn Maria’s home down if she told police. The contemporary report suspiciously made no allegation of sexual abuse, lending one to believe that her abuse allegations were a later invention.

It is important to also note that in her report to the police, Maria made no mention of Ghislaine Maxwell.

When making their true crime series, Epstein Filthy Rich, Professor Alan Dershowitz informed Netflix of various contradictions and rabid antisemitism in Maria Farmer’s statements.

But he was ultimately ignored, with none of his concerns about her being shown in the subsequent series. In an article for Newsmax, Dershowitz wrote:

The central witness in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, the person relied on by Netflix in its documentary series Jeffrey Epstein, Filthy Rich, is a 50-year-old woman named Maria Farmer.

It now turns out that she may have been motivated by the anti-Semitic attitudes she has long harboured to falsely accuse prominent Jews of sexual misconduct. This is some of the bigotry Maria Farmer spewed during a recorded two-hour interview that can be heard online, such as... “I had a hard time with all Jewish people. I think it’s all the Jews. They think Jewish DNA is better than the rest of us. These people truly believe they are chosen, every one of them. All the Jewish people I met are paedophiles that run the world economy. They are Jewish supremacists, and they are all connected through a mysterious organisation called MEGA, which is run by Leslie Wexner, who is the head of the snake.”

Farmer claimed to have evidence that the Israeli Mossad hired Jeffrey Epstein to videotape prominent American political leaders committing acts of paedophilia so that Israel could blackmail them into doing their bidding and that the entire conspiracy was under the protection and direction of the Rothschilds.

These anti-Semitic canards sound like they could have come directly from the protocols of the Elders of Zion and other classic anti-Semitic forgeries and screeds, but all of this and more come from the bigoted brain and malicious mouth of Maria Farmer. Although she hadn’t accused me directly of any wrongdoing, she has provided a sworn affidavit claiming the following.

“Alan Dershowitz was an individual who came to visit Epstein at his New York mansion a number of times when I was working for Epstein. Dershowitz was very comfortable at the home and would come in and walk upstairs. On a number of occasions I witnessed Dershowitz at the NY mansion going upstairs at the same time there were young girls under the age of 18 who were present upstairs in the house.”

The problem is that Farmer acknowledges that she terminated her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in early summer of 1996, after she was allegedly raped by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on Leslie Wexner’s premises.

She never entered Epstein’s New York home after that, but I didn’t meet Epstein until well after that, as I can prove. She couldn’t possibly have ever seen me in Epstein’s house because I was never in his house at any time that she could possibly have been there.

So, it’s impossible for her to have ever seen me there during the time period she knew him. Moreover, on the few occasions when I was in Epstein’s New York house, well after Pharma was long gone, I never went into the private areas of that home.

I was generally with my wife or other lawyers or academics in the public areas, dining room, living room, den. And I never saw any young girls around. I’ll dive deeper into Professor Dershowitz’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and the false allegations levelled against him in a later episode of this series, including video recordings of my interviews with him.

After submitting her lawsuit in 2019, defence lawyers requested envelopes that Maria had claimed, while speaking in a podcast, were still in her possession and that, in her words, still have the touch DNA and fingerprints of Jeffrey and Ghislaine. She claimed she had offered them to the FBI. However, to date Maria has not provided any such envelopes and no evidence has been presented to prove that they even exist. By now he owned his huge art-filled home in New York, a mansion in West Palm Beach and a sprawling ranch in New Mexico. He and Ghislaine continued to fly between each property, stopping to socialise.

Lady Victoria Hervey, an outspoken defender of Prince Andrew, whom I’d later meet for the first time in a hotel restaurant near Hyde Park, recalled those early days of the relationship vividly. “She was definitely a flirtatious character for sure,” she said in an interview with Netflix. “She exuded this mysterious air about her and whenever you saw Ghislaine, it was Jeffrey this and Jeffrey that and all she spoke about was him. You got this feeling like she was just so loyal to him.”

The pair also rubbed shoulders with some of the world’s most influential individuals, most notably Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much and I think it should be said that he also very much liked Ivana because she was also from Czechoslovakia,” Ghislaine told Blanche. “I just want to say for my relationship with President Trump, Relationship’s a big word. But I just want to say that I met him, or I believe I may have, because of my father in the 90s. So my father liked him very much, and he really liked his wife as well, because they were both Czechoslovakian. And as far as I’m concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I admire his extraordinary achievements. In becoming the president now. And I like him. And I’ve always liked him. So that is the sum substance of my entire relationship with him.”

“What about Mr. Epstein’s relationship with him?” asked Blanche.

“I don’t know how they met,” Ghislaine replied. “And I don’t know how they became friends. I certainly saw them together. And I remember the few times I observed them together that they were friendly I mean, they seemed friendly.”

“Was that in social settings or was that in private settings?” asked Blanche. “I believe I only ever saw them in social settings. I don’t recall any private settings.”

“Have you ever been to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach?” Blanche asked.

“I have.”

“In what time period are you thinking about when you say yes?”

“I don’t remember when the president purchased Mar-a-Lago. So from whenever it turned into a club, I went there and loved going there.”

“Did you go there alone or with Mr. Epstein?”

“Mostly alone. Many times I went there, I was for an event maybe once or twice.”

“And do you know whether Mr. Epstein ever went there?”

“I believe he did, but again... We really were... He didn’t... Take me with him all the time, so he would go and... Oh, right. He never... I never... Well, he did from time to time, but he would go alone. I think he would maybe go himself to the spa. I certainly did.”

“Did you ever observe President Trump receive a massage?”

“Never.”

“Did you ever observe - You said that you were, I mean, have you seen, there’s photographs, public photographs of Mr. Epstein and President Trump together.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s photographs of, I think you’re in some of the photographs as well. Those all appear to be social settings.”

“Yes. That’s my memory. There were social settings. I don’t know Epstein’s, if he had, whatever the nature of the president’s friendship, if you will, or however you want to define that with Epstein, I was never witness. I think they were friendly, like people are in social settings. I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the president in any of... I don’t recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance. I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody.”

Described by an acquaintance as being tight and each other’s wingman, Trump and Jeffrey sparked up a friendship that would last from the mid-90s well into the 2000s. The rich duo, along with investor Thomas Barrack, were regulars on the social scenes of New York City and Palm Beach, where both Jeffrey and Donald owned large homes.

Their friendship, which entailed dinner parties, and even the pair reportedly holding a private party-come-makeshift beauty contest with a throng of models, was remarkably captured on camera, with video footage shot in 1992 and since widely circulated, showing them together at Donald’s private members club, Mar-a-Lago.

In a profile of Epstein in New York Magazine, Trump remarked, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s 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.”

But by 2007, their friendship had soured, with Trump reportedly abruptly banning Jeffrey from Mar-a-Lago following a bitter battle over real estate. Three years earlier, when Maison de l’Amitié, translated ironically as the House of Friendship, a beautiful oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, described by Trump as the finest piece of land in Florida and probably the US, came up for grabs.

Both men were both keen to get their hands on it, not least of all for the millions it would make for its new owner if quickly renovated and flipped. A bidding war ensued between the two parties and their legal teams, once social friends, now business enemies.

“It was something like Donald saying, ‘you don’t want to do a deal with him, he doesn’t have the money’,” Joseph Luzinski, the trustee in the case later recalled, “while Epstein was saying, ‘Donald is all talk, he doesn’t have the money’, they both really wanted it.”

Ultimately, Trump won the bid, securing the property for $41.35 million and selling it four years later to a Russian businessman for more than double the price.

Their friendship well and truly over, Trump and Epstein were never seen out in public together again.

During one of my interviews with Professor Dershowitz, he casually told me a little anecdote. In the middle of the 1990s, Alan was at a dinner party hosted by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President Kennedy, at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. Around the table sat Alan’s wife, Caroline, two of his friends and a small gathering of VIPs taking a day off. Across the table was Bill Clinton, then America’s charismatic president, and his wife, the famous politician Hillary. Suddenly, the Secret Service pulled President Clinton away, Alan recalled.

An important telephone call was on hold, important enough to warrant the President of the United States to excuse himself from the dinner party guests and withdraw to a separate room. He would sit there alone on a secure phone for 15 minutes. “I thought maybe he was speaking to, you know, Angela Merkel, maybe Tony Blair,” Alan told me.

But then Clinton strolled back into the dining room, still grasping the telephone, the caller lingering on the line. He held the handset towards Alan. Alan, a friend of yours wants to talk to you, the President told him with a smile. Alan took the phone from his outstretched hand, bemused at who might be so bold as to request that the Commander-in-Chief end their chinwag and convert into a PA. He raised the receiver to his ear. ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice echoed four words back down the line. ‘Hey Alan, it’s Jeff’.

How Jeffrey and Bill Clinton first met remains unclear, as no publicly available record identifies the exact date, place or person responsible for introducing them. Clinton himself has stated that he does not specifically recall when he first met Epstein.

What is known is that Jeffrey began moving within democratic donor and political circles during the early 1990s, around the time of Clinton’s rise to the presidency.

Jeffrey was accumulating so much cash that he didn’t know what to do with it. So he turned to philanthropy. “I invest in people,” he said in 2003, “be it politics or science, it’s what I do”. At the time of making that statement, he had already donated over $139,000 to the Democratic Party, to federal candidates and committees, and over $18,000 to Republican Party candidates and groups. He contributed $50,000 to Democrat Bill Richardson’s successful campaign for Governor of New Mexico, a territory in which Jeffrey built a spacious ranch, and the same amount again for his successful run for re-election in 2006.

His generous donations courted favour from all sides of the political spectrum, including from Bill and Hillary Clinton after donating tens of thousands of dollars to the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation. A spokesman for Bill Clinton lauded Jeffrey as a committed philanthropist with insights and generosity, with the President inviting him to events at the White House at least four times.

Bill flew with Jeffrey too.

Flight logs show the pair journeyed on Jeffrey’s private Boeing 727, later nicknamed the Lolita Express, multiple times, with Clinton’s spokesperson saying in 2019, In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane, one to Europe, one to Asia and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton, the spokesperson confirmed, “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York”.

On one particular trip with Jeffrey, Clinton appeared in a photograph that has since become infamous, despite it merely depicting an innocent encounter.

That encounter was with one of Jeffrey’s many young assistant slash sexual interests, Chauntae Davies. Chauntae was a 21-year-old trainee masseuse living in L.A. when she was hired by Jeffrey. Her guru, simply known as Gypsy, who was teaching her massage, invited her to come with him to Beverly Hills. It was there, at the Four Seasons Hotel, that Gypsy allegedly provided Ghislaine with a massage, after which Ghislaine, spotting a potential new masseuse for Jeffrey, allegedly offered her a private plane trip to meet him in Florida, an offer she accepted. Chauntae claims that during the first massage she gave to Jeffrey, he began masturbating, but that she chose to continue working for him and travelling with him as one of his masseuses, working for him for several years until 2005.

The now infamous photograph shows that she provided Clinton with a massage in 2002, but she told the Daily Mail, “although the image looks bizarre, President Clinton was a perfect gentleman during the trip and I saw absolutely no foul play involving him. He turned his back to me and I reached up and I started to rub out the kink in our former president’s neck and shoulder.”

She said they had stopped over for the jet to refuel and, “while we were in the terminal the ex-president was complaining of stiffness from falling asleep in his chair. Ghislaine chimed in to be funny and said that I could give him a massage.”

Chauntae enjoyed her role with Jeffrey so much that she eventually introduced her sister Teala to him.

After numerous women began seeking compensation from Jeffrey, however, Davies joined them in 2019, changing her story and claiming that Jeffrey had raped her during the years he employed her.

Massages had become a firm fixture in Jeffrey’s daily routine. Most of them were purely just that, massages, but some of them were not.

“Whereas in the past, in the early nineties, I don’t remember travelling so much with other people,” Ghislaine said. “There would be a masseuse or a yoga person, but now he started to travel with more, always a masseuse. Whereas in the past, it wasn’t always a masseuse or always an instructor. There was now starting to be always an individual or a friend or whatever. There’s always a, like maybe the word would be, entourage. But these were always people in their twenties, late twenties, early thirties.”

Ghislaine bought her own Manhattan townhouse at 116 East 65th Street in 2000 for approximately $5 million. Property records show that the buyer was an anonymous limited liability company, but the transaction was handled by Darren Indyke, Jeffrey’s long-time lawyer, and the LLC used an address associated with J. Epstein and Co.

“By 1999, our relationship had founded,” Ghislaine said. “We were never sleeping together again, so we stopped having sexual relations in 1999. Not full sex, sorry. To be clear, it didn’t mean that we didn’t still share a bedroom or something, but he had another girlfriend.

“I definitively knew that it was over after 9-11, actually, because we were both from New York. And I don’t know, were you in New York? I mean, 9-11. And it was a scary time if you were in New York. You didn’t know. I didn’t know. Nobody knew what was going on. And he was in 71st Street and I was in 65th Street, my house. And he wouldn’t see me. At all. I asked me, his mum, everyone very close to, who’s in the hospital at Lenox Hill, just asked me to look after her. And then I knew As anyone did at that time, you’re not going to be there for someone of 9-11, you’re never going to be there. So for me, that was the line set. I wanted to get married and have children. And Epstein had encouraged me to believe that that, I don’t know about them, certainly by the late 90s, I mean, the marriage part was never going to happen. I had believed that maybe. In 96, 97, 98 maybe, but then I realised it wasn’t that. But I did think that we might have a child, which is what I had proved. So we stopped having physicality. I mean, that doesn’t mean we weren’t friends. I certainly did stay sometimes in his room. I mean, friends with benefits, it’s a lot, just not sex. And he had another English girlfriend, actually.”

Though conveniently left out of all media reports, the girlfriend whom Ghislaine referred to was Shelley Lewis.

Shelley Anne Lewis is a British-born art specialist and entrepreneur. Born in 1976, Shelley was 23 years old when she met Jeffrey in 1999 after having moved from England to New York to work in the contemporary art department at Christie’s Auction House.

It was through Jeffrey’s many close dealings with Christie’s that he met her. Flight records place Shelley aboard Epstein’s private aircraft on multiple occasions and later correspondence suggests they maintained a close relationship, with Ghislaine even communicating her warmly through email. Though Shelley was his main girlfriend, Jeffrey still couldn’t help but continue with his playboy lifestyle, regularly meeting with other women.

One of them, one of many, was Sarah Kellan. Kellan, who had essentially run away from a Mormon cult in her late teens, had met Jeffrey in the belief that he might have been able to help her get into modelling. Instead, the pair began engaging in sexual activity, but Sarah soon realised that she was not the only female Jeffrey was interested in. Instead, as with Ghislaine, she quickly slipped into an employee/friends-with-benefits role, though largely took over most of the handling of his day-to-day affairs.

Feeling somewhat rejected, Ghislaine remained Jeffrey’s friend with benefits and employee, but tension was never far away.

“Their relationship was strange,” Rina Oh told me. “They were constantly arguing or snapping at each other, and he’d start laughing and she’d start laughing too, but like a sarcastic, bitter laugh that filled the room with tension. I never knew if they loved each other or hated each other.”

“It’d be true to say that Jeffrey tried very hard to keep working for him,” said Ghislaine. “Because, I mean, this is a complex operator. I’m not talking about anything. I’m talking about just the sheer size of the projects. I’m talking about construction projects, the houses, the staff. It’s a really significant job. And I ran all the properties, the staff in the properties, the management of the properties, and all the construction.”

Jeffrey also employed butlers, assistants, house managers, and, of course, lots of masseuses.

“He would have a masseuse, right?” Ghislaine continued. “And he did. Male and female, by the way, in the 90s. It’s never been discussed. Both in yoga and everything, there were men as well as women. And so if he would travel, and I can show them to you, I highlighted them on the flight record so you could see that there really were men that He would say, ‘would you like to do yoga with Tito?’ Or ‘would you like a massage with this one?’ But they would be in their late 20s and professional masseuses.

“So if you were staying with him and you had a massage, he would often travel with a masseuse. He would say, ‘hey, would you like a massage?’ And he did do that. In the entire time I was with him or friends with him or had anyone, no one ever reported to me or came to me and said that Anything inappropriate happened or was upset, but I never saw tears. I never saw ever any of them.”

“He asked me to find masseuses for him,” she continued. “And I did do that. So the first person I believe that I introduced him to as a masseuse was somebody called [redacted]. She was, I don’t know, mid to late 20s, a professional masseuse.”

“Was this something that happened early on in your relationship?” asked Blanche.

“So in terms of massage, I have a lot of injuries. I do a lot of dangerous sports and have had multiple serious accidents and walk without any Lameness because of physical therapy and massage. That to me is a very, it’s medicinal for me. So Epstein, whatever his massage situation, whatever, he loved massage. And if I met somebody who I thought was a good masseuse or masseur, I introduced them.

“I guess there’s been a ton of testimony as well, but also... public reporting about how the recruiting was a very aggressive effort that you were a part of and that he was a part of and others to try to find more and more masseuses,” Blanche interrupted her. “Is that true and what role did you have in that?”

“That is partially true,” Ghislaine replied. “So it is true that I found masseuses and he became more insistent. He liked new all the time. He got bored. So he would be bored with that masseuse and he would say, find me a new masseuse. I am the entire opposite. If I find someone that I like, I stay with them. I’m like, I don’t want new. He would drive for new. So that is true. And in my effort to find them, I would go to massage spas, like legitimate spas. We’re not talking funky ones. If I got a massage from somebody in a spa that I liked, I asked them if they would do home visits. If they said yes, I would ask them to come to the house and he would see if he liked them or not. But these were people who worked in spas. I never, ever checked their age and I never checked their credentials. I never asked for a certificate.”

“But just to be clear, you never thought anybody was underage?” one of her lawyers asked.

“I never, no, that was never my, that was never a drive,” she confirmed.

“I’m sure that he didn’t suddenly start having relations with masseuses in 2002,” Ghislaine continued. “I’m sure he must have had relations with masseuses who knows when.”

“But you’re saying as far as you, I use the word abuse, you’re saying that as far as you sit here today, you would describe that more as consensual, meaning the masseuse did this willingly?” Blanche asked.

“I saw him with lots of masseuses,” she replied. “I never saw a single masseuse ever look unhappy or not come back or whatever. So based on my observation, I don’t think that if you are being raped, as now he’s saying, this prolific, I just can’t imagine why you would return.”

“Again, I know we’re talking about a decade-long period, but during the period we’re talking about, In a seven-day week, how often would Mr. Epstein get a massage?” Blanche asked.

“In the 90s, when we’re talking, he would get one every day,” Ghislaine answered. “I think as that time progressed, he would get one maybe twice a day. I do want to say that there was maybe a reason that things altered or morphed or And it is maybe part of the reason also that he and I, our relationship, or however somebody wants to call it, altered. And he started doing testosterone, and that altered his character. And I believe that started in the late 90s. And I believe that the FBI has his medical records and you may see that on his medical records.”

“So you believe that he started taking testosterone in the 90s and when you say that altered his behavior, you’re saying it made him get more massages or that was just one part of what changed about him?” asked Blanche.

“Well he became more aggressive,” said Ghislaine. “And I think that he may be - well, now I’m just imagining that the testosterone altered his desires or something.”

“And so, given what you’ve said the past couple hours about his kind of progression or change, let’s focus on that time period,” Blanche said. “So more towards the late 90s, 96, 97, 98, when you’ve said that he changed. Did you know flat out that he was having sex or otherwise some sort of sexual conduct with masseuses regularly?”

“Flat out, no,” she replied. “I denied that. I couldn’t imagine that he would. But I think, looking back now, that... I did not. But I started to suspect that he was not faithful.”

Ghislaine was then asked by Blanche if she had known that some of the females massaging Jeffrey did so topless at Jeffrey’s request. She denied that she had, insisting that she believed the topless massages were introduced later by a now famous Epstein accuser whom I’ll be exposing extensively in an imminent episode of this series.

The evidence suggests beyond any reasonable doubt that over time some, if not perhaps a large percentage of those massages would involve sexual activity, with Jeffrey, it has been said by several witnesses, reportedly needing to orgasm at least three times a day.

It is also worth recalling at this point what Stuart Pivar claimed when talking to Mother Jones that Jeffrey had the disease of satiriasis, the male equivalent of nymphomania.

“Nor, on the other hand, did he actually rape any of them or anything like that,” he said. “If you want to make a list of, let us say in the past several years, of the kind of stuff going on of sexual abuse of children and what the hell not, Jeffrey never did anything like that. Everything he had to do with these girls was complicit and it was just interesting to the rest of the world who don’t understand that Jeffrey was a very sick man.

“A nymphomaniac is a girl who is insatiable in her sexual appetite. There are men who are like that and it’s a disease. It’s called satiriasis and Jeffrey was afflicted with that. He couldn’t help himself, but he didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it big time.

“There are plenty of people with satiriasis, like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls.”

My subsequent interviews with numerous key witnesses and, indeed, accusers of Jeffrey over the years would largely corroborate the notion. A startling fact, startling in that it contradicts the established narrative surrounding the scandal, is that the vast majority of Jeffrey’s masseuses were well over the legal age of consent.

What is even more surprising to learn is that those who weren’t of legal age, the evidence, including victim statements found in official police reports, confirms were told to lie to Jeffrey about their age so that he would believe them to be of the legal age to give him messages and provide sexual services in exchange for money.

The omission of this vital facet of the case from any news report you will come across is curious, to say the least.

The following was written by Jeffrey himself in a draft statement in 2011:

“The girls, who were brought to my house by their close friends, worked in local massage parlours. West Palm Beach has scores of massage parlours, happy ending places that routinely advertise in the same local papers that have chastised my behaviour or strip clubs.

I am, and have always been, a bachelor. I have used massage parlour girls, licensed massage therapists, and girls with no massage experience. I have never ever used force, coercion, or in fact had intercourse with any of these girls. I am a pleasure seeker, a hedonist. I chose not to lead a convention, monogamous, domestic life.

I have also frequently paid for sex.”

Either way, throughout the late 90s, things seemed to be ticking along nicely in Jeffrey’s hedonistic world.

His wealth continued to soar.

He was travelling the world.

He had a throng of women, mostly prostitutes acting as masseuses (though he did in fact pay for some of them to be trained in massage) filtering in and out of his home each day, providing him with happy endings.

Life for Jeffrey was rosy.

But scandal was just around the corner.

Thanks for listening to part four of The Life and Death of Jeff.

In next week’s instalment we’ll be taking another deep dive, this time into Jeffrey’s infamous island, his other relationships, and a curious honey trap cocaine scandal involving an Epstein accuser and the son of the Queen of England.

This episode contains audio footage of Ghislaine herself, and also clips from my in…

Read more

We’ll be listening to my interview with Ghislaine’s brother, Ian, to recordings of Ghislaine herself, and will be able to obtain a better understanding of Maxwell before we move on to the story’s seedier developments.

Please remember to subscribe, share on social media, and feel free to message me with any questions.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE TWO

A year before I ever set foot in New York, I’d been on one of my regular visits to London. The person I’d planned to meet for lunch, Michael, not his real name, had been corresponding back and forth with me, mostly through email, for over a year.

I’d first contacted him to get a better understanding of Ghislain Maxwell, with whom he’d enjoyed a friendly relationship on London’s elite social scene. I wasn’t so much interested in the monster portrayed in the media. I wanted to learn about the human behind the headlines. We met in a small Italian deli near Kensington Gardens, a vast park I fondly remember strolling through with my Bermondsey-born grandmother after begging her to show me the statue of Peter Pan. We sat, cramped at one of the small tables, businessmen and locals scurrying in and out around us as I unclipped my briefcase, removed some pre-written questions, a wad of printed sheets, and placed them on the table with a light thud. He seemed surprised, moving his eyes from the paperwork to the clock above the counter, rightly guessing that the interview wouldn’t be as short as he’d envisaged or perhaps hoped. I suppose we’d best get cracking. Over the next couple of hours, he told me he had first met Ghislaine in 2010, the pair introduced by a mutual friend, an L.A. film producer.

“I was living and working in L.A. at the time,” he told me. “We’d meet up whenever she was over and would go for dinner or drinks. Then we met up a few times in New York. I went to a Christmas party one year with some friends of hers in Chelsea, all nice people.

“Dame Vivian Duffield and others were there and everyone was happy to see her. That’s the thing about Ghislaine. She has room presence. When she walks into a room, she lights it up. She’s witty, gregarious. She was always somebody who would befriend anyone, a politician and a supermodel, all on the same night.

“She was lovely, warm and funny, very interesting to be with and always full of stories. Not precious or high maintenance in any way. The monster they depict her to be in the newspapers has no resemblance to the real Ghislaine at all.”

He told me he believes Jeffrey didn’t commit suicide. He surmised that he was murdered, though he had no idea who by. And upon hearing the news that his former friend had, following Jeffrey’s death, suddenly become a named suspect, Michael said he was in a state of shock and bewilderment, immediately becoming fearful for her safety.

So staunch in his belief of her innocence was he that he even wrote her a character reference in the hope it would be used by her attorneys when requesting bail.

“I believed in her innocence then, and I still do now,” he said. “The evidence that was presented and the witnesses themselves don’t appear credible.”

Like most people I’ve interviewed, his focus quickly shifted to the most vocal of her accusers.

“Virginia Giuffre’s a fabricator,” he said, frowns forming on his forehead. “A loudmouth, a hustler.”

He told me he’d been following my investigation closely. “You’re doing a brilliant job in getting to the truth. I think that you need to keep focusing on the victims,” he added, his fingers making inverted comma marks in the air. “Their credibility, or lack of, is ultimately what will exonerate Ghislaine.”

Though deploring any form of sexual abuse and believing the harrowing abuse stories of numerous victims of Epstein, I had highlighted major discrepancies and flat-out fabrications in some of the accusers’ claims, and I was incredibly keen to learn more about all the characters involved and to understand Ghislaine and her potential role as best as I could. Michael told me I would need to become educated on her background.

In the following months and years to come I would find myself frequently speaking to some of Maxwell’s siblings.

Ghislaine’s mother, Elizabeth Maxwell, née Maynard, was of aristocratic stock. A Huguenot descendant whose distant lineage boasted French kings, her father, the mayor of a small French village, owned a profitable silk-weaving factory that supported his two daughters comfortably enough to send a nine-year-old Elizabeth to England, where she attended a convent in Birmingham before returning to her homeland in 1932 and studying law. Following the liberation of Paris, whilst working as a translator, she was introduced to Czechoslovakian-born British Army Captain Robert Maxwell. Robert wasn’t in fact named Robert at all.

His birth name was Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hock. Throughout the war he went by numerous aliases, including Ivan de Maurya, before settling upon Ian Robert Maxwell in 1948. For some reason, everyone dropped his first name Ian altogether, referring to him only as Robert, or more often Bob.

Awarded the Military Cross for bravely storming a Nazi machine gun nest, Maxwell, an Orthodox Jew, had returned from the war to discover that many of his relatives had been murdered in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The pair married on March 15, 1945. Living in Maison Lafitte, part of the affluent outer suburbs of north-western Paris, the children would soon fill the expanding family’s household, most of them delivered by Elizabeth’s sister Yvonne, an obstetrician described to me by one of the Maxwell siblings as an extraordinary woman and one of the very rare women to become, and obstetrician after the war, and, even rarer, to own her own clinic.

Ghislaine was born on a crisp Christmas Day morning in 1961.

“It’s important that you understand that we were originally nine children in this family,” Ian Maxwell, a rather friendly and likeable man of 68, told me. “There was an eldest brother, Michael, and there was a little girl, Karine, and they died young. Kareem died in 1957, age three, from leukemia, and Michael, who was the eldest son, was in a terrible car crash. That didn’t kill him but left him in a coma for eight years. And he never recovered and died.

“And so what that meant is that the little girl was exactly between me and my twin sisters. And so instead of having a natural bridge, the family in a sense split into two because the age gap between me and my twin sisters is six years. And therefore Kevin and I and Ghislaine were very close.

“As children and my four elder brothers and sisters were very close. And obviously, as we grew up in age, we became equally close. But in terms of our childhood, Kevin and I and Ghislaine were closest in age. I’m six years older than her or five and a bit and three years older than my brother.

“And so we spent quite a bit of time together, although we were educated separately. And so I’ve got pretty clear memories of childhood with Ghislaine. She was a funny little thing. She was very funny. That’s a key thing. Ghislaine’s always been quite funny. She had a very good sense of humor.

“And in terms of things that we did together, you know, we gathered about. She was in the same bedroom as Kevin and I for at least the first three years of our life. There’s one anecdote that sticks in my mind, is that we, Kevin and I quickly understood that the way to shock our parents was to use swear words, which generally got a cuff around the ear hole. And so we thought if we could avoid cuffing, we would teach these words to Ghislaine because she was too small to be cuffed. And one day she’s held in the arms of my mother, my father’s next to her and some Worthy Oxford College head turns up and says, ‘and who is this adorable little thing?’, to which Ghislaine said, ‘piss off!’.

“It was a hell of a - my father didn’t know where to go. Anyway, so she’s always had a sense of humour. She always, even as a young child, loved animals. She had dogs and dogs. Then cat and some budgies, an hamster and the pony. My father was rich and could afford to give her these things. I thought she was perhaps a little spoiled because that’s what happens when you’re the youngest of the family. And also because the day of her birth, which was Christmas Day 1961, was only two days before my brother Michael’s car accident. This traumatised the whole family desperately. My parents didn’t know where to go. They were lost in grief. And Ghislaine was, in some sense, ignored, really, in the very early months of her life, even the first year or two.

“And there’s another story told about her that at one point, age, I think, some two and a half, three, something like this, she stood in front of our mother, legs apart, and said, Mommy, I exist. An amazing idea for a child. So there may have been some compensation on the part of my parents. They may have felt guilty about that.”

By now, a publishing company founded by Robert Maxwell Pergamon Press was booming. The boy from humble beginnings, from a two-room wooden shack with earthen floors and a pit latrine, where he and his siblings would share one pair of shoes during winter, had done good. So good, in fact, that he moved the family to the company’s leased headquarters,

Headington Hill Hall, a grand Italianate mansion in East Oxford. Boasting more than 50 rooms, the new family home, described by Robert as the best council house in the country, had hosted countless high society parties throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Attending an all-night May Day ball there in 1878, Oscar Wilde had arrived in flamboyant style, gaudily dressed as Prince Rupert.

“I was very young when we moved to Headington Hill Hall, or Triple H as we called it,” Isabel Maxwell, the entrepreneurial, warm and spirited sister of Ghislaine told me. “We moved into it during Easter of 1961. Our mum had been fixing it up for all of the past year as it was, in our mother’s own words, from her book, A Mind of My Own, a Victorian mansion built in 1858 for the brewer James Morrell. It was in 15 acres of wooded parkland with a magnificent view over the dreaming spires of Oxford.

“It was owned by Oxford City Council, who were looking for a tenant to take over this white elephant. During the war years, Headington Hill Hall had been transformed into a Red Cross rehabilitation centre for injured servicemen, and by 1959 it had been unoccupied for 15 years, so it was very dilapidated.

“My parents got permission to build new modern headquarters for Dad’s Pergamon Press on the site, so that went up at the same time. I remember that the house, when we first saw it, was frog green on the outside sills and window frames and pale yellow in all the rooms. There were giant radiators everywhere.

“It took Mum a good year of living by herself in the one habitable room while architects and contractors repaired and recreated the original plan of the house. Once complete, the house would serve as a magical playground for the Maxwell children. We spent hours and hours exploring the house and the cellars it had and old tunnels that we thought would lead all the way down to Oxford if we dared crawl through incredibly narrow places, Isabel said. For kids, it was a wonderful place to explore and play, that’s for sure. Every weekend our father would have a string of guests for meals, either from the constituency when he was in Parliament [Robert Maxwell became an elected Labour MP in 1964] or from science and business across the world. And often guests would stay over, and we would be expected to entertain them and be present at all the meals too, take them for walks, or visit Oxford or whatever they wanted, whatever was required.

“We learned a lot, and this developed our social skills for sure, as well as a knowledge about the world and different cultures. That was endlessly fascinating and important for understanding differences in the world too.”

As it had under previous tenants, many important people would be welcomed into Triple H’s walls while the Maxwells lived there. As Wired Magazine records, “Isabel might come home from school to find Sir Robert Robinson, the Nobel Laureate in Organic Chemistry at the dinner table, or Mrs Pandit Nehru, the wife of the Prime Minister of India, or Professor Murray Gelman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the quark. Politicians too, like former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Like her father, the dinner guests were of heroic stature. There was no place for dilly-dallying in a life of this scale. Over every mistake, every mishap, her father would demand, what did you learn from that, he made her think. Why did you say that, he would insist, pushing for clarity. He berated people for what he called mental laziness and for stumbling, vague conversation.

“My father had boundless confidence,” Isabel told me, “but over time his manner became authoritarian. He could dress you down pretty rotten. I can tell you that from the time our eldest brother was all but killed in a car accident, the night of December 27th, 1961, all our lives were shattered. The next two years from that time remain utterly like a grey fog. I remember going to school and babysitting our little sister Ghislaine from time to time, but everything was full of grief. We could barely go anywhere, and if our request was to be taken somewhere in a car, the answer would be no.

Ian has similar recollections of this melancholy period, when his father, often flying into Triple H in his helicopter, would arrive with a stern disposition, though never failing to treat his children, particularly Galen, with luxury, if not with physical affection.

“She was, I think she was quite protected by my father. And, you know, who was very aware that, you know, she was quite a young thing and a girl with it. And following the accent of our brother, all of my older brothers and sisters were kind of corralled.

“They couldn’t go anywhere from, you know, they had to be escorted everywhere. My parents were really just so worried I’m going to lose another child in some horrible way. So Guillaume was in some senses quite protected. She went to quite a few schools, boarding schools and day schools.

“But she grew up pretty independent, able to think for herself, do her own stuff. My father really lived for work. He was, I’m just a workaholic, it’s not quite the right word, but he didn’t have any small chat. This wasn’t a man interested in the minutiae, you know, because I meant what football team was winning or he was interested in work and in matters of consequence and of substance. And we were brought up in this way. We had lots of advantages because he could afford to give us those advantages, the most important of which was a damn good education. And he took the view, if I give you this education and I give you other things to make your life comfortable, you owe society something back for that. In other words, this wasn’t just a question of take, take, take. You’ve got to give something back. And he therefore taught us From very, very young, the responsibilities associated with having wealth and opportunity. And as a result of his professional life, which was both political and business, there wasn’t a Sunday in our childhood where we didn’t have some big shots for lunch. I mean, there won’t be much to you now, but these were some very serious scientists and maybe some Labour government figures from the 60s. And the children were expected To have something to say for themselves, know what was going on in the world, make speeches at the drop of a hat, entertain our father’s guests and so on. That was standard. And actually, it was exhausting because we would want to come home on a weekend from school and chill and just have a nice time. And he was not in the let’s have a nice time business. I’ve got here the deputy leader of the Labour Party. You’re going to sit with him and have a drink. So it was a bit - it was quite pressured.”

Repercussions awaited any of the Maxwell children who failed to meet their father’s high expectations.

“If we displeased him in some way, and that was very easy, we brought back bad results, we ummed and erred instead of giving a straight answer to a straight question, we didn’t have any programme to keep ourselves occupied, bang, you were in trouble. And, you know, sometimes it was serious.

“If we lied to him and we discovered that I was belted and Guylain would have been smacked. Not that often, but that’s the way he was brought up. And that’s the way that the kind of stuff that we had to deal with. So it was pretty it was pretty heavy, I would say. But at the same time, he loved us. I was never an only dad of my father’s love, and nor was my sister. He had lost everything in his life as a young man. His parents were killed in the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were put in the gas chambers. So his entire family was wiped out. He had nothing, nothing. And he ended up having to fight his way across Europe, join the British Army, had a good war. But he built everything from scratch. So family meant a hell of a lot to him. In fact, it was the only thing that didn’t mean anything really to him. And he never let us forget it.

“And so I would say it was a good childhood. We had lots of presents, holidays, nice time. But it was... You were never in any doubt that life was more important than having a good time. One incident I remember, like, yesterday, and that is I’d gone on to university at Oxford. We lived in Oxford.

“That was where our family home was, and so it was down the road for me. And one Sunday afternoon, I guess Gilliam would have been 16, 17 years old. The telephone rings in my parents’ home. I was about to get the phone and I noticed that my father picked it up and the conversation went something like this: ‘Who are you? Jones. How old are you? Yes. You want to speak to my sister? To my daughter? You’re too old for my daughter.’ That was the end of that. She ended up going to spend quite a few months in Spain in her year off between She always had a lot of good friends, mostly girls, mostly a lot of very strong, close girlfriends whom she has remained friends with to this day.”

Ghislaine was sent to Marlborough College, where she threw herself into her A-levels before going on to earn a degree in modern history with languages from Balliol College, Oxford. It was during this time that Ghislaine met Prince Andrew. They’d first been introduced during her days at Oxford University in the 80s, with sources telling ITV that they grew so close that Buckingham Palace staff believed they dated. Their friendship grew stronger throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, their outings together on the New York and London social scenes regularly being splashed across front pages. Speaking to ITV, Paul Page, a former Royal Protection Officer, said that he first met Ghislaine in 2001 and that Buckingham Palace staff suspected that she and Andrew were involved in an intimate relationship.

“From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace, at will, we realised, suspected that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew,” Page said. “A colleague of mine remembered her coming in four times in one day from the morning till the evening. She kept coming in and out, in and out. I got the sense that Prince Andrew and Ghislaine had probably been girlfriend and boyfriend in the past, Maxwell’s friend Euan Rellie later recalled. They had an easy warmth around each other.

Though her father was understandably keen to filter his daughter’s potential love interests, at least two suitors managed to make the cut. For a while, Ghislaine dated David Faber, the grandson of former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Both met as undergraduates at Balliol in the early 1980s. Multiple accounts describe him as her first serious boyfriend.

They were regularly photographed together at fashionable London venues such as Annabelle’s and the Chelsea Arts Club. The relationship was short-lived, however, with Faber going on to marry television presenter Sally Gilbert in 1988 and becoming a Conservative MP.

Then there was another man who occupied a central place in Ghislaine’s world, Count Gianfranco Cicconia Mazzoni, the wealthy Italian aristocrat whose relationship with her lasted for several years. Two met in the late 1980s through the privileged social circles in which they both moved. At the time, Ghislaine was a prominent figure among London’s so-called Sloan set, a fixture at society events, exclusive clubs and charity functions. Siconia, meanwhile, was already well known in European high society as a member of one of Italy’s most distinguished families. Born into Italian nobility in 1962, Count Mazzoni inherited not only an aristocratic title, but also membership of a family whose influence extended deep into Italian business and finance. The Siconia family was closely connected to the Kiger Empire, the luxury hotel group that owned some of Europe’s most prestigious properties and served wealthy international travellers for decades. His family connections reached even further back. Ciccogna was a descendant of Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, one of the most influential Italian businessmen and politicians of the 20th century. Volpi helped shape modern Italian industry, played a major role in the development of Venice’s industrial port and accumulated enormous wealth through banking, infrastructure and hospitality ventures. By the time Gianfranco inherited his title following his father’s death, he belonged to a lineage that had long occupied the highest levels of European society. Educated in Britain, Siconia attended Millfield School, one of the country’s best known independent schools. He later studied economics and developed a reputation as an intelligent and highly accomplished businessman. Unlike many aristocrats who simply lived off inherited wealth, he pursued an active professional career. Among his early roles was a position at Credit Suisse First Boston, one of the world’s leading investment banks.

Colleagues and acquaintances described him as sophisticated, cosmopolitan and ambitious. Over time, he built a career that ranged across finance, telecommunications and international business. Yet wealth and status were only part of his appeal. Those who knew Siconia frequently remarked upon his charm. He spoke multiple languages, travelled extensively and cultivated a range of interests that included skiing, aviation, scuba diving and motorsport. He projected the image of a modern European aristocrat, equally comfortable at a business meeting in London, a ski resort in the Alps or a society gathering in Venice. He seemed the perfect match for Ghislaine, whose own background and business acumen and attributes were respected and indeed accepted by Sikonya’s circle.

Their relationship quickly became serious. Friends and observers later described Sikonya as Ghislaine’s first love. The couple were frequently seen together at society events in London and on the wider European social circuit. For several years, they appeared to be one of the most glamorous young couples in elite international society.

For years there had been speculation that Robert Maxwell hoped Ghislaine would marry into aristocratic or political circles. A union with an Italian count from a wealthy and influential family would certainly have satisfied those aspirations. Accounts from friends suggest that Ghislaine herself viewed the relationship as serious, with it being reported that she hoped to marry Chikonya and become a contessa. Whether an engagement was ever formally discussed remains unclear, but the relationship endured for approximately four years and was widely regarded as more than a mere casual romance. But a future together, one that would have seen Ghislaine’s life projected onto a completely different path than the one she later found herself on, wasn’t to be. And their relationship ultimately fizzled out and ended in either 1990 or 1991. The precise reason for the breakup has never been publicly established. Neither Maxwell nor Seconia appears to have discussed it in detail. However, multiple accounts agree that for Ghislaine, the separation was painful.

Timing also made the situation particularly significant. The relationship ended just as her father’s business empire was collapsing. Meanwhile, Sikonya moved on and continued building his career. He became particularly prominent in South Africa, where he established business interests and earned recognition within the aviation community. Flying became one of his greatest passions.

But, long after his relationship with Ghislaine had ended, that passion ultimately led to his death. On June 30th, 2012, Sikogna was participating in the Clarksdorp Air Show in South Africa. He was flying an Aero L-39 Albatross, a high-performance, Czech-built military jet trainer that had become popular among experienced civilian pilots.

During a formation display with fellow pilot Charles Urban, something went terribly wrong. Witnesses reported seeing Seconia’s aircraft fall out of formation while flying at low altitude. The jet appeared to tilt before entering a steep dive. Seconds later, it slammed into the ground in front of thousands of spectators and exploded in a fireball. The impact was catastrophic.

Seconia was killed instantly. He was just 49 years old. Throughout her early life, Ghislaine would form a close bond with her father to the extent of being trusted to get involved in some of his many business affairs.

But Robert Maxwell’s illustrious career couldn’t and wouldn’t last forever.

“Father had had an interest in the press since the war,” Ian said. “He was the Allied press officer in Berlin during the working for the control commission. After the war, this was the administrative administration that Britain set up to run Germany, the occupied part of Germany, that it was responsible for post-war.

“My father was in charge of press relations, so he had an early exposure to the press. And then he met some of Germany’s publishers and then learned very quickly about the importance of science and then of science publishing and made his way in the world. And then he had a number of cracks at buying newspapers in Britain, News of the World, Sun, losing on each occasion to Rupert Murdoch. And... Eventually, he gets the mirror in 1984. But during the whole of our childhood, he was an MP from 1964 to 1970. And there was this brilliant period of his life, really up until about 1968, I would say.

“Pergamon had been taken, that was a scientific publishing business, had been taken public. He was a very, very wealthy man, multimillionaire. He was a Labour MP. He was somebody who was a coming man. And then he made a disastrous, absolutely disastrous sale of the bulk of his shares to an American financier, which then caused the whole of that takeover to be scrutinized, the very first public company takeover by the then new takeover mergers panel. He was excoriated. And a famous judgment was passed on him that he was a man not fit and proper to be steward of a public company which dogged him to the end of his life.”

The business headache Ian was referring to took place in 1969, before his father’s acquisition of the Daily Mirror. In that year, Saul Steinberg, head of Lisco Data Processing Corporation, was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable.

But at the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969, and dealing in Pergamon shares was suspended on the London Stock Exchange. Maxwell subsequently lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from the board in October of that year. Steinberg purchased Pergamon. An inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry was conducted, resulting in a widely published report that, much to Robert’s embarrassment, concluded, We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not, in our opinion, a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company. It was also concluded that Maxwell had contrived to inflate Pergamon’s share price through transactions between his private family companies. However, at the same time, the United States Congress was investigating Liasco’s takeover practices. Judge Thane Forbes was critical of the inquiry that had damned Ian’s father and launched what was perceived to be a public smear campaign fuelled by the press.

“Life was not so rosy anymore,” Ian said. “I remember my parents were thinking they should take me out of school because the press was so bad. So if you like, the good press, bad press, it goes back a long way in my life, certainly to 1970. And my father was always very, not quite easy come, easy go, but he had a clear understanding that if you’ve got to go ahead in the world, the press is on your side. Choose to fight them. It was a famous phrase when he was running a newspaper and somebody wanted to have a pop at him. He said, ‘be careful what you’re doing, taking on a newspaper owner, because I buy ink by the barrel and I will have the last word’. And he often did. But it meant that we were quite scarred by some of this negative publicity. And it was very, very bad. And then he went on to have a very, he had a really a renaissance of his business life and went on to achieve some very great things, including the purchase of the Mirror and purchase of Macmillan in the United States and football clubs and certainly bought lots of things. But he was quite protective of us, notwithstanding all of that. And I knew from the word go that I didn’t really want to be in this limelight. I didn’t seek anything. I know Ghislaine didn’t either, and we felt really kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, and it’s not for us, and so on. So, I mean, I was a bit ambivalent about it, although I thought my father was on the rough end of a lot of attacks, and some of which I think were anti-Semitic, looking back on it, which were very unpleasant. But eventually, he had one saying, which was, you know, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And so he had an astonishing hide of a rhinoceros and he would ride that out. And, you know, if you’re young and easily influenced, it’s not so obvious how you ride it out and you take these things to heart. He may have done, but he didn’t show it.”

But Maxwell was far from beaten. In 1974, with Pergamon largely failing under Steinberg’s ownership, he borrowed funds and bought the company back. The judge’s initial assessment and the subsequent smears, however, had a profound impact. Leaving education in the 1980s, Galen had exploded onto London’s vibrant social scene, her father’s connections helping her rise as somewhat of an it girl. She founded the Kit Kat Club, a women’s club inspired by the 18th century politician-filled club of the same name. She was also made a director of Oxford United FC, owned at the time by her father. As father and daughter grew closer, she was given a position at Robert’s publication, The European, until after Robert purchased the New York Daily News in January 1991, he sent her to America to act as his emissary, the pair arriving in New York in May. She would continue to fly back and forth between America and England, sometimes for work, other times to catch up with family. Years earlier, in 1986, she had attended the naming in her honour of her father’s new multi-million pound yacht, aboard which she would continue, when she could, to spend a large portion of her time indulging in the vessel’s ample facilities, not least of all its jacuzzi, sauna and well-stocked gym. Aboard his boat, along with other family members, friends and associates, Robert would take many voyages, including his last. After purchasing the struggling New York Daily News, further adding to his debts, Maxwell was forced to sell a 49% stake in the Mirror Group.

Meanwhile, other cracks were forming beneath the surface of the Maxwell Empire. A BBC Panorama documentary on his business dealings had revealed allegations of financial irregularities. The Mirror’s finance director, Lawrence Guest, was chasing him about the disappearance of millions from the company’s pension funds. Maxwell assured him the money would be restored. But the pressure must have been overwhelming.

In November 1991, while back home, London analysts were busy predicting the breakup of his business empire under the pressure of multi-billion pound debts. Robert flew to Gibraltar before boarding his 164 foot yacht and sailing away from a financial scandal that was just days away from being made public.

It appeared to be the perfect break, one spent in his typical flamboyant and extravagant fashion, stopping off to play roulette at a local casino, whining and dining and swimming in the cool waters of the Canary Islands. And while bonfires were being lit in the UK for Guy Fawkes’ night, he headed back on board his boat and went to bed, reportedly stirring in the early hours of the morning. The last time he was seen alive was 4.25am. At around 9am, as the boat arrived at Los Cristianos, a crew member strolled down the corridor and tapped on Robert’s door to try to wake him. There was no reply.

A call was made to his cabin at around 11am, but Robert didn’t answer. At around 1pm, the alarm was raised by a satellite telex via Norway. Panicking, the Lady Ghislaine’s captain then notified the Spanish authorities of Robert’s mysterious disappearance, sparking an air and sea search. Soon after, a fisherman peered over the bow of his small boat and spotted Maxwell’s naked body bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean. A helicopter quickly joined them, winching Robert from the water.

Elizabeth and her son Philip immediately flew out to Gando Air Base in Gran Canaria, where they had the grim task of identifying his body. At a hastily improvised midnight press conference at Reina Sofia Airport in the south of Tenerife, the island’s civil governor, Angel Delgado, said the Lady Ghislaine left Santa Cruz in the north of the island at 10pm on Monday and put into Puerto de los Cristianos at 9am. But, he said, Robert’s body was found 19 to 20 miles from Gando on the other side of the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria - more than 100 miles from the obvious route between the points of departure and arrival.

Ghislaaine flew to Tenerife, where an inquiry was set to be held.

On Sunday, November 10th, she and her family attended a funeral put on for her father in Jerusalem, where Robert was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives.

Alongside Israeli intelligence figures, President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir were in attendance, the latter of whom delivered a warm eulogy. It was said that Robert, with a sense of there being no way out of his vast financial woes, rose from his bed, headed up on deck and threw himself into the ocean.

But although a verdict of death by accidental drowning was recorded, Ghislaine wasn’t having it, later commenting in 1997, “He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered.”

Following his death, Robert’s empire quickly began to unravel. He was found to have fraudulently appropriated the pension assets of Mirror Group newspaper to support its share price. Pension funds in excess of £400 million were said to be missing, with around 32,000 people affected.

Kevin, the heir to the Mirror Group, became Britain’s biggest bankrupt after he was left with Maxwell’s $764 million in debt. And while still grieving over their immeasurable loss, both he and his brother Ian found themselves in a courtroom, accused of taking part in the fraud.

“Following my father’s death and the explosion of our business, and then Kevin and I, my younger brother, were arrested and charged with conspiracies as a fraud. We had a long, long fight to get to trial. It lasted three or four years of preparation and so on.

“And then an eight-month trial and we were exonerated at the end of it. During that entire time, all of our family were highly supportive and remained so and are so to this day. We don’t know any other way than to support each other. When you’ve had an alpha male like Bob Maxwell is your father. In some senses, there’s an old Arabic proverb that says, ‘I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousins, my brother and I and our cousins against the world’. So it’s another way of saying blood is thicker than water. So yes, we have remained close at all times.

“And we don’t need to be living in the same country or even the same town to remain close. We were broadly aware of the important things going on in each other’s lives, if not the detail. We know you’re going out with X or you’re living in Y or you’re doing X or Z or whatever it is. That’s fine. So long as you’re not hearing anything bad, it’s probably good. I guess the period 91 to 96, Kevin and I were knocked out. We were on trial for our lives. The passports were taken, couldn’t travel anywhere, and it was a very dark time.

“Ghislaine was getting on with her own life, mostly up until then had been in London. She had a lot of friends and knocked around in town. But then somewhere towards the end of 1990, she goes to America. My father had a lot of business over there. She started to help with various... some specific tasks, mostly to do with the newspapers over there. And then the business blows up. And Kevin and I said to her, ‘stay in America. Don’t come home because this is not a place for a Maxwell to be happy right now’. England just turned on us big time, which I get, but there was no reason why I should turn on my sister. So we said ‘stay in America, get on with your life, do whatever you’re doing. And, you know, we’ll just fight our battle the best we know how’.”

That said, life, at least financially, took a downward spiral for most of the Maxwells following the death of their father, particularly, her mother said, for Ghislaine. “Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” Elizabeth, better known as Betty, told Vanity Fair in the weeks following her husband’s death. “The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed and it will be very difficult for her to continue.”

“I’m in great financial difficulty,” she added. “My husband’s will is impounded. I haven’t salted away anything because I never for a minute believed that he’d leave me destitute.”

Ghislaine denied claims that a secret fortune had been hidden away.

By 1992, she had moved to an apartment of an Iranian friend overlooking Central Park. By now she was working at a real estate office on Madison Avenue, began eating out and partying with celebrities and quickly rose to wider prominence as a New York City socialite. Of the Maxwell’s troubles and her own, she told Vanity Fair, “I’m surviving, just, but I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.”

And she was right.

As their father had during the early years of his business career, the Maxwell’s bounced back. They carved out their own way in the world, including Christine going into publishing and producing a spelling dictionary to teach people how to spell, and Isabel embarking on a successful career in television and film production. The twins later joined forces and created the early online search engine Magellan.

“I met Ghislaine in November 1989,” Christopher Mason, one of her former friends, said in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein, Filthy Rich. “At the time she was visiting New York from London, I was going to a nightclub and having dinner with some friends who had been at Oxford with her. She was the life of every party, knew absolutely everyone, was extremely popular, had a vivacious personality. I remember she told a lot of very funny, dirty jokes.

“That night I went home and wrote in my diary, ‘Met Ghislaine Maxwell, hilarious sense of humour, incredibly good fun, she’s a real live wire, and I hope I get to see her again’. Striking up a friendship, Mason recalled visiting her apartment on the Upper East Side.

“She was suddenly out of money,” he said. “Robert Maxwell had left his family in the lurch. It was as if she was bravely weathering this challenge, the mysterious death of her beloved father.”

Another friend, Ewan Relly, also first met her in New York.

“We had a fair number of friends in common, a couple of people I knew had dated her, and she was a connector. She was gregarious and quite glamorous, and a bit raunchy and quite wild. Her father had set her up in this life which allowed her to be at the fulcrum of New York society. She was like the sparkling debutante.”

Another former associate backed up Ghislaine’s alleged raunchy side, as have others whom I’ve interviewed.

Nicola Glucksmann claims that during a party at Headington Hill Hall in 1991, Ghislaine encouraged guests to get involved in a harmless, but certainly raunchy, game whereby the women in attendance removed their tops and bras and the men were blindfolded and felt their bare breasts before trying to guess who each pair belonged to.

“I’m extremely sad that my father is no longer here, Ghislaine said during a 1991 interview, sitting on a bench in Central Park. “But I don’t feel in any way smaller or lesser than what I was before. The future’s the future. You just get on and do whatever you can do.

“If I have a wish for myself, it’s to do something positive with my life.”

Living her new life in America, her wealth and social standing rose rapidly.

Already she had been introduced to a rich local financier, a man who could provide her with the money and lifestyle she was accustomed to, whose circle of contacts would nestle neatly into her own, yet who would ultimately lead to her life being turned entirely upside down.

He had dark, greying hair and Ted Danson-like features.

He had unimaginable wealth and mansions and apartments across the world.

And his name was Jeffrey Epstein.

Thanks for listening to episode two of The Life and Death of Jeff. In the next episode, I’ll continue the story with an exclusive interview with Ian Maxwell, who will talk about how his sister really met Jeff, and will be following the murky journey of Epstein’s rise to riches, serious allegations, and ultimately, a prison cell.

In the meantime, have a fantastic week.

I realised long ago that global press and media coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has been so disorganised, so chaotic and polluted with disinformation ad sensationalism, that I wanted to take a pause from pumping out interviews and solo articles, and to focus on what I truly believe is needed: The entire scandal explained, from start to finish, in chronological order.

There’s a reason why the media hasn’t done this.

They want to keep the public confused, for during this state of perpetual confusion and conspiracy, when no-one quite knows what is true and what isn’t, newspapers can continue to produce lucrative clickbait, social media influencers and commentators can keep profiting from lies, political agents can keep the heat on the politicians they despise, and lawyers can ensure that the multi-million-dollar compensation gravy train keeps rolling.

The Epstein scandal has become a moral panic, outgrowing in scale the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the early 1990s, that continues to defame and destroy innocent lives.

When it comes to the life of that seedy, salt and pepper-haired billionaire from West Palm Beach, you have never been told the full truth about what really happened. That much is a fact.

During my six-year investigation into the Epstein scandal, travelling the world to interview key witnesses, accusers and the accused, I’ve not only unearthed the facts behind the fiction, but have come to realise that this case is the most extraordinary example of media manipulation, corruption, extortion, blackmail, and erosion of basic journalistic integrity that we will likely ever see.

But the truth is what you deserve. To that end, I’ve created a podcast, The Life and Death of Jeff.

Consisting of over twenty episodes, and containing all of my interviews - from Donald Trump’s lawyer and Ghislaine Maxwell’s siblings, to Epstein’s brother, Epstein’s accusers and former girlfriends - it constitutes a masterclass of sorts. By the end of listening to it (though you can also watch it, for each episode contains relevant images and video footage), you’ll without doubt be more educated on the entire scandal than 99.9% of the general public… and 100% of the press and media.

I do need your help to get the truth out, however. Though the first four episodes (which essentially give background and set up ‘the story’ to come) are all being released today, future episodes will be released individually, once a week, to give people time to digest what they are learning.

Episode one is free and can be listened to/watched by anyone. After that, as we dive into the seedier story, episodes will only be available for paid subscribers. The reason for this is simple: By carrying out my investigation over the past six years, and for refusing to stay quiet and hide the truth from people, I was sacked from my job as a news editor. To continue getting the truth out (for surely that’s what journalists should always strive to do, yet sadly seldom ever aim for these days) I have to ask that you kindly sign up for just a few dollars a month.

It’s more than worth it: You will be able to watch countless exclusive interviews and see evidence that you won’t find anywhere else.

If you aren’t already signed up, please do so by clicking the button below - it takes just a minute to get access to the truth that the media has intentionally been hiding from you.

I’ll also continue producing a free fortnightly newsletter covering all latest Epstein scandal developments and my coverage of other cases.

The Life and Death of Jeff is a podcast not for the fainthearted or easily offended.

It will take you on a journey from the births of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, through their childhoods, early relationships, how they met, who accused them and why, and will forensically examine the scandal of the century without care for who the evidence and conclusions upsets.

Episode one covers Jeffrey’s curious childhood and his murky rise to riches. Moving away from the media’s typical one-dimensional coverage, you will see his human side, his ambitions, his relationships, his early financial crimes, and how his insatiable addiction to sexual gratification shaped his future.

I look forward to any feedback on this, and will be holding a ‘Crime over Coffee’ live chat at the end of each month where we can all discuss the scandal, the podcast, and recent developments, and I’ll answer any questions you might have.

In the meantime, thanks for sticking around - I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

All the very best,

Jay.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE ONE

Welcome to episode one of my new series, The Life and Death of Jeff, where I take you on a chronological journey from the very beginning right up to Epstein’s death and beyond. With exclusive interviews with key witnesses and insight into the case that you won’t find anywhere else, by the end of reading it, I’m certain that you’ll be more clued up on the scandal than 99% of the general public and 100% of the media.

As well as trying my best over the years to look past the Epstein case clickbait and get to the truth, I’ve been keen to understand the humans behind the headlines, from accusers to the accused, investigating and interviewing my way through America and beyond so that we can finally get a glimpse at the real characters in the scandal, not just their media-invented one-dimensional caricatures.

Back in New York, I glanced back at the tall prison where Epstein breathed his last. Though now closed following a damning report into its numerous failings, a solitary blue-shirted guard sat inside his shack in front of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Lower Manhattan. In a taxi driven by a silent driver, I headed further downtown, passing early rising and onto the leafy suburbs straddling Central Park. With the yellow cab rolling to a gradual halt,

I paid the fare and stepped out onto East 71st Street, Upper East Side. I’d gone there to see No. 9, a brooding French neoclassical townhouse shaded by an equidistant row of calorie pear trees. Opulent, 15-foot-high oak doors stood framed by carved limestone angels, crowned by a pan-like bearded figure that scowled down at me menacingly.

The gouges beside the door’s brass plates made by FBI agents have long since been smoothed down. Described by former Vanity Fair journalist Vicki Ward as the crown jewel of the city’s residential townhouses, almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-storey neighbours, and seeming more like an institution than a house, the decadent Herbert N.

Strauss House was completed in 1932, reportedly the largest private residence in Manhattan. Strauss, the sixth son of the co-owners of RH Macy and Company, in fact never spent a single night within its walls. The cost of property taxes was too much to shoulder, even for such a renowned retail heir. Thus it remained unfinished when, in 1944, it was donated to the Archdiocese of New York, its 21,000 square feet, nine-floor interior converted into a hospital, and, in the 1960s, a school. That was until 1989 when billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, a man now firmly ingrained in Epstein scandal lore, snapped it up for a not-so-modest $13.2 million.

Wexner, the former CEO of lingerie chain Victoria’s Secret, was quick to have the building remodelled, transforming it into a mansion fit for the setting of a Gothic novel, plastered with paintings and grand fireplaces. The present owners are understandably keen to maintain their privacy. Understandable, that is, owing to the identity of the previous homeowner. In 1995, when his life was approaching the peak of its ominous wealth and success, a 42-year-old Jeffrey Epstein proudly strolled into number nine and claimed it as his own.

Although ownership was initially registered through a trust connected to both Wexner and himself, this was officially changed in 2011 to a trust controlled solely by Jeffrey, as Wexner had long since married and moved to Ohio. Standing alone outside its facade, I was left to imagine the rest of its sprawling interior eventually extended to more than 50,000 square feet. Though I can rely on the accounts of others, including Vicky Ward, who visited Jeffrey at the house when writing her 2003 profile piece titled The Talented Mr Epstein. Upon entering the house, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu, she recounted. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. Adorning the entrance hall walls were rows of individually framed prosthetic eyeballs manufactured for injured English soldiers.

They were accompanied by a twice life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior. A nearby room, described then simply as the leather room, came dressed in cordovan coloured fabric and leopard print chairs, a large oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lion skin, draping down from one of its walls. Though Jeffrey, a teetotaler who abstained even from smoking tobacco, was neither a fan nor partaker of drugs, his taste in furnishings, particularly art, seemed intentionally to present itself as an unsubtle nod to a free, almost bacchanalian mindset. Beneath a flight of stairs tucked away from prying eyes, a bathroom lined in lead came accompanied with closed-circuit televisions and a phone, both concealed in a cabinet under the sink and both the source of much speculation, now connected to claims, including from Jeffrey’s own brother, that Jeffrey had intentionally gathered dirt on some of the House’s most prominent visitors, not least of all, allegedly, Donald Trump and the Clintons. To this day Jeffrey’s acquisition of the property and the precise means behind his sultan-style wealth remain shrouded in mystery. He hadn’t always lived in such luxury. Far from it, in fact. Although Epstein had lived in several extravagant homes, including a former Iranian government building on 34 East 69th Street and a mansion outside Columbus, Ohio, close to Wexner’s own residence, he came from humble beginnings.

And though we might never fully ascertain what his early life was like, his brother Mark told me that he might write a book about it himself one day. A skeletal biography can be gleaned from personal, financial and business records. Born in Brooklyn on January 20th, 1953, his parents Pauline Paula Stolowski and Seymour George Epstein married when Paula was in the late stages of pregnancy. She was a school aide and homemaker and Seymour a groundskeeper and gardener for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The pair brought home a modest income, just enough to raise Jeffrey and his future younger brother in working to middle class, relative comfort in an apartment.

Seagate has had a significant Jewish presence for almost 100 years, with Epstein’s parents, both practising Jews, regular visitors to nieces Israel, the neighbourhood’s oldest synagogue situated just across the street. Like many of the local townsfolk, Jeffrey was the child of European immigrants. And, like most of his neighbours, who had harrowing tales of extended family members being brutally murdered during the Holocaust, Seymour and Paula had their own, often unspeakable family history that was steeped in persecution. Faith was the cornerstone of the Epstein family life. By all accounts, the Epsteins were doting parents, with neighbours later describing them as the most gentle people, the most simple people in the world.

Both affectionately gave their two children nicknames within the walls of their family home. Bear for Jeffrey, Puggy for Mark. He was a little nerdy boy, a former neighbour who grew up on the same block recalled, detailing how she and Jeffrey would play punchball in front of his house and in the schoolyard. He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling, she added. There was absolutely no indication at that time of the vile, disturbed man that he was to become. Encouraged to learn the piano from five years old, Jeffrey was regarded by friends, most of whom lived in the same vibrant neighbourhood as a talented budding musician. Both boys attended public schools, then a junior high school where Jeffrey, a model student, earned extra pocket money by helping fellow students in their studies before heading off to Lafayette High School in Gravesend.

Pictures of Jeffrey in high school don’t feature the smug smile seen in photos from the past 20 years. His features are softer and calmer, the forward newspaper, formerly known as the Jewish Daily, reported. Consisting predominantly of Italians, Jews and African Americans, Jewish students often faced anti-Semitism at the school and in South Brooklyn in general.

“There was a lot of volatility at Lafayette,” one graduate told the Forward. “It was a blue-collar area that was at one time 90% Italian. Then a small number of Jews moved in and there was anti-Semitism. The Italians didn’t want the Jews to be there.” One classmate, Beverly Donatelli, said that she and a curly-haired Jeffrey were sweethearts for a time, but that Jeffrey was notably shy. His shyness didn’t last long. Letters to Jeffrey and contemporary photographs detail that, from a late teen onwards, he was popular, often got into mischief with his friends and had countless sexual encounters, one-night stands and more serious relationships.

He graduated from Lafayette in 1969, shortly after his 16th birthday, skipping two grades due to his evidently advanced intellect, far excelling his peers. Of particular interest to him was mathematics, a subject at which he was abnormally adept. Numbers and equations seemed to play like tunes before him as though lifted from his many collected music sheets.

Advanced mathematics classes at the private Cooper Union College and enrolment at New York University soon followed, where the teenager studied mathematical physiology. Strangely, however, he left in the summer of 1974 without receiving a degree. Even stranger was his subsequent hiring, devoid of any qualifications, as a physics and mathematics teacher for teens at Dalton School, a prestigious private and progressive establishment on the Upper East Side.

“I’m teaching a bunch of little brats next year,” Jeffrey had sarcastically scribbled in his yearbook. The school’s eccentric headmaster, Donald Barr, had made several unconventional staff recruitments in the run-up to the new term. The appointment of 21-year-old Ralph Lauren look-alike Jeffrey onto the faculty, rumoured to be one of them. Just one year prior, Barr wrote and published Space Relations, a heavily criticised science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. Described by Kirkus Reviews as a coruscatingly literate tale for grown-ups and derided by reporter Becky Ferreira as highly unsettling due to its depiction of the rape of enslaved teenage girls. The book would, understandably, be scrutinised further in the months and years after Jeffrey’s death, with parallels drawn between the book’s plot and the grim accusations made against him.

It was not the only Barr-Epstein connection to be highlighted. Donald’s son, William Bill Barr, would go on to serve as US Attorney General, his nomination proudly announced by President Trump, another close friend of Jeffrey’s. At his confirmation hearing, Barr was questioned as to whether or not he would investigate the handling of Jeffrey’s decade-old plea deal, signed off in Florida and with the involvement of his former law firm and with Alex Acosta, the former US attorney in Miami, who served in Trump’s cabinet and whom Barr would work alongside.

The US Attorney General said that he would not, recusing himself from anything related to Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, though refusing to recuse himself from the later case in 2019. He did, however, initially voice his suspicions that Jeffrey’s death was not a suicide, eventually towing the official line, leading to Mark Epstein accusing him of helping to orchestrate a cover-up. Three months after Barr’s departure from Dalton, a fuzzy-haired Jeffrey packed his briefcase and arrived at the school to begin his first day as a modestly paid teacher. There he quickly became known for having a charismatic personality and for treating the teenagers in his classroom more as friends than pupils. This friendship, it has been alleged, would cross the line on multiple occasions, with former students claiming he exhibited inappropriate behaviour towards underage female pupils under his care, paying them constant attention, and once showing up to a party where young people were drinking.

Other former students alleged they also often saw him flirting with females in their class. Predictably, his teaching career would be short-lived. A chance encounter with Alan Greenberg, the then Chief Executive Officer of Bear Stearns, a successful investment bank, securities trading and brokerage firm, and the father of two of Jeffrey’s pupils, would undoubtedly provide the big break that would set him on a path to immeasurable wealth and influence.

In June 1976, when Epstein was dismissed from his position as a teacher at Dalton for poor performance, Greenberg, perhaps beguiled by Jeffrey’s mathematical talent, hastily offered him a job. Though starting out as one of Bear Stearns’ low-level junior assistants to a floor trader, Jeffrey proved himself to be a sponge, soaking up every piece of knowledge about the industry and swiftly moving up to become an options trader before advising some of the bank’s wealthiest clients on tax migration strategies. So rapid was his rise, and so well regarded were the skills he brought to the table, that in 1981, just four years after joining the firm, he was made a limited partner. It was a promotion that stunned those who understood the firm’s rigid hierarchies. Some colleagues later suggested he had a peculiar gift for structuring trades and identifying arbitrage. Others said his real talent lay in cultivating wealthy clients and in manipulating his way into their confidence. But there was another, more obvious reason for Jeffrey’s sudden rise within the company. Greenberg quickly came to see the young recruit as something of a protégé. Not long after Epstein arrived at the firm, Greenberg invited him to dinner at his home and placed him beside his 20-year-old daughter Lynn.

She later said she suspected the seating arrangement was deliberate. The two connected immediately and began a relationship. News that the newcomer was dating the boss’s daughter travelled fast through the office and with it came an unspoken understanding. Epstein now occupied a privileged position inside the firm. Before long, Jeffrey was reporting directly to Michael Tenenbaum, one of Bear Stearns’ senior executives. “He showed real promise,” Tenenbaum recalled. But that impression was jolted in late 1976 when Tenenbaum received an unsettling call from Bear Stearns’ personnel department. Someone had finally bothered to check Jeffrey’s resume, which claimed degrees from two California universities. “You may want to sit down,” the HR executive said, before informing him that neither institution had ever heard of him. Unsure how to proceed, Tenenbaum raised the issue with Greenberg. The guidance he received, Tenenbaum later said, was to handle Jeffrey no differently than any other employee, a directive that quietly underscored the opposite reality: Jeffrey was anything but ordinary within the firm’s hierarchy.

Tenenbaum called Jeffrey into his office and confronted him directly. He told him that his educational background was false and that he’d lied on his application. But Jeffrey did not flinch. Yes, that’s true, he said evenly. He had never completed college. Tenenbaum later reflected that the candour itself was disarming. Years afterwards, he would see the exchange as an early demonstration of Epstein’s talent for controlling the dynamics of an encounter. Pressed on why he had fabricated his credentials, Jeffrey offered a simple explanation. Without prestigious degrees, he said, “No one would ever give me an opportunity.”

The answer struck a chord.

Tenenbaum, who had himself benefited from second chances, decided to extend one to Jeffrey. He would be allowed to stay to continue his work, though his rise paused for the time being. But Epstein had little interest in slow conventional advancement. In 1980, he attended a conference in the Caribbean at the firm’s expense. While there, he spent more than $10,000 on jewellery and clothing for a new girlfriend and billed the purchases to Bear Stearns. The charges caught the attention of the accounting department, which escalated them to the firm’s financial controller. The controller determined that the expenses were inappropriate and reported the matter to Greenberg, who by then was chief executive. As before, nothing happened, but the following year Jeffrey would set off into the financial world alone, and although his departure wasn’t voluntary, he was dismissed according to his own testimony for being guilty of a regulation violation, reportedly having lent a friend $20,000 to buy stock.

He remained close to Greenberg and a client of Bear Stearns until its eventual collapse in 2008. He did not depart with millions, but he left with something far more valuable, contacts. By now, Jeffrey had polished up his image. His chiselled face now resembling that of a young Ted Danson, he was photographed in black suit and tie and well-groomed dark hair, staring confidently into the lens for a glossy advert in the July 1980 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine in which, named the Bachelor of the Month, he was described as a New York dynamo seeking a cute Texas girl. Going it alone, he announced the founding of his own consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group, Inc., and would make a crust assisting wealthy clients in recovering stolen cash from fraudulent lawyers and brokers. Describing his role as akin to being a high-level bounty hunter, he reportedly bragged that he only spoke to people who earned over a million dollars a year.

His clients ranged from the Spanish actress and heiress Ana Obregon, whom he helped to recover her father’s millions in lost investments, to billionaire Leslie Wexner, who would open doors for him that no other client possibly could. With the latter, it appears that a relationship developed that was more than just business.

The same might be said for his other acquaintances in the world of finance. By this time, he had begun dating Patricia Schmidt, an employee at Bear Stearns, but she soon discovered she wasn’t the only romantic interest in his life. In 2025, the New York Times interviewed Schmidt and released some of her contemporary diary entries. In them, she described having sex with Jeffrey, but noted that he preferred to kiss and cuddle, adding that he was like a little boy almost. She also wrote that on one night at around 1am she arrived at Jeffrey’s apartment to find him speaking on the phone to another woman, Eva Anderson.

Jeffrey had met Eva Anderson in the late 1980s when she was a Swedish-born model moving through New York’s upper social tiers and he was beginning to harden into a discreet but powerful financial presence. Friends from that period described their connection as unusually intense for Epstein, less transactional than many of his later relationships. Anderson Dubin was intelligent, socially polished and emotionally steady, someone who could move easily between fashion, philanthropy and high society. Those close to Epstein would later say that for a time she grounded him and more than one friend referred to her as the love of his life. Unlike many women who passed briefly through his orbit, she was treated with a level of respect and permanence that stood out. They were seen together frequently and Epstein appeared unusually open about the relationship. Local newspapers reported that they had gotten engaged. Even after their romantic involvement ended, the bond did not dissolve into estrangement. Instead, it softened into something resembling family.

Their separation was not marked by scandal or hostility, but by a quiet recalibration of roles, from partners to lifelong confidants. That closeness endured. Anderson later married billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, yet Epstein remained embedded in her life. He maintained regular contact with her and her family and was trusted deeply enough that he became the godfather of one of her children. You were staying on 79th Street. “I picked you up in my Rolls Royce,” he recalled in an email sent to Eva many years later. “You were wearing cowboy boots. You told me that your English was not very good. You came from a little fishing village and you enjoyed playing cards with your grandparents. The rest is history.”

In 1987, Stephen Hoffenberg, the founder, CEO, president and chairman of Towers Financial Corporation, a debt collection agency, set up offices for Jeffrey in the sought-after property of Villiard House in Madison Avenue.

Hoffenberg’s corporation was later revealed to be a Ponzi scheme. Swindling at least $475 million from his unwitting clients, the fraudster rescued the New York Post from imminent bankruptcy and hired Jeffrey to help run the day-to-day operations of the fraudulent corporation, paying him a generous $25,000 a month salary and giving him a whopping $2 million loan that Jeffrey would end up never having to pay back. The two quickly became friends, frequently travelling together on Hoffman’s private jet. With suspicious timing, Jeffrey parted ways with Hoffenberg shortly before Towers Financial’s inevitable collapse. Hoffenberg, who was subsequently sentenced to 20 years behind bars, stated in court documents that Jeffrey was intimately involved in the Ponzi scheme, going as far as to claim his former pal was the architect of the scam. Never charged in relation to the massive fraud described by the US Securities and Exchange Commission as one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history,

Jeffrey was not only a free man, but now a multi-millionaire. In July 2019, following Jeffrey’s arrest, Hoffenberg again claimed that Jeffrey was his uncharged co-conspirator in the Ponzi scheme. Former Towers investors made similar allegations in a lawsuit filed in August 2018, alleging that the millions in stolen investments were the seed capital for Jeffrey’s hedge fund, which it valued, evidently excessively and incorrectly, at $50 billion.

In 1988, while Epstein was still consulting for Hoffenberg, he founded his financial management firm, Jay Epstein & Company, later changing its name to the Financial Trust Company. How Jeffrey met Hoffenberg to begin with is another point of intrigue.

His introduction to the fraudster came via former US Attorney General John Mitchell and a British defence contractor by the name of Douglas Lees. This has led to many an investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist tumbling down rabbit holes, mainly because, according to former associates, Jeffrey Epstein had claimed he also held contracts with governments and secretly worked in intelligence.

It is a fact that, during the 1980s, Jeffrey possessed an Austrian passport containing his photograph, but with a false name. Curiously, the passport recorded his place of residence as Saudi Arabia. Jeffrey, yet to form the jaw-dropping connections he’d later managed to cultivate, was unable to completely escape justice for his financial crimes relating to the Hoffenberg scandal.

In 1993, he and two other defendants were charged in federal court with three counts of postal larceny and theft and one count of property theft. Epstein pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiring to steal US Treasury checks from residential mailboxes and received five years’ probation. The remaining charges were dropped.

None of this stopped him from partying hard and working his way through a string of sexual relationships. By now, his fortunes had already pivoted decisively toward Leslie Wexner. Wexner, the only child of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States with little money and a practical understanding of retail.

His parents ran a modest women’s clothing shop called Leslie’s. It was functional rather than aspirational, fluorescent lights, practical dresses, slow seasonal turnover. The store was not a dream. It was a ledger. From an early age Wexner absorbed the meaning of margins, unsold stock and supply a risk.

Victoria’s Secret, a small California lingerie chain founded by Roy Raymond, was losing money. Its vaguely British boudoir aesthetic appealed to novelty buyers but could not sustain scale. Wexner bought it in 1982 and rebuilt it completely. He shifted the customer from male gift buyers to female self-purchasers. He standardized stores, refined catalogues, and sold lingerie as everyday apparel wrapped in aspiration. The product was repositioned as both functional and idealised. The stores became brighter, sleeker, more uniform. The catalogue became a nationwide distribution tool. What followed was one of the most aggressive brand engineering exercises in modern retail history. Victoria’s Secret was transformed from a dying niche novelty into a vertically integrated global lingerie empire. Advertising was no longer quiet suggestion but spectacle.

In the 1990s, the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show became an international broadcast event. It was at the height of this expansion that he met Jeffrey. The circumstances of their meeting were never clearly explained in public. What is known is that by the late 1980s, Jeffrey had positioned himself as a private financial advisor to a tiny circle of ultra-wealthy individuals.

Remarkably, and for reasons still not fully understood, Wexner placed almost immediate extraordinary confidence in him. That trust was formalised in 1991 when Wexner granted him a sweeping power of attorney, giving him control over cheques, loans, property transfers and asset restructuring across Wexner’s personal and corporate empire. Epstein became in practice the financial steward of billions. The documents granted him authority over nearly every aspect of Wexner’s personal financial life. He could transfer funds, open and close accounts, buy and sell securities, establish trusts, direct charitable donations and negotiate with banks in Wexner’s name without individual approval for each transaction. It was not advisory authority. It was operational control. Epstein, in effect, ran Wexner’s private financial world. One journalist at the time said, “he’s Wexner’s Mr Fix-It. He has the spook connections and pulls the strings worldwide. He handles all the logistics and moves the portfolio around for him.

“Mr Epstein is linked to several controversial land deals in rural America where farming land has been quietly acquired by interlinked companies. Then developed at vast profit, he is currently listed as owning huge tracts of land in Dutchess County, New York.”

Through a network of entities, Jeffrey created an opaque financial lattice around Wexner’s wealth.

Trusts fed into advisory companies. Advisory companies fed into offshore registrations. Central to the structure was the US Virgin Islands. Under the Territory’s Economic Development Commission programme, qualifying companies could receive corporate income tax reductions of up to 90%, exemptions from certain local taxes, and rebates on withholding taxes. Jeffrey registered multiple advisory firms under this regime, allowing income booked as consulting or services to be taxed at a fraction of mainland rates while remaining technically within US jurisdiction. Jeffrey used to say he invested in people. Not companies, not public offerings, but flesh and blood access. Billionaires, officials, scientists, heads of universities...

Men who chaired boards.

Men who drafted policy.

Men who could change tax codes with a phone call.

Men who had so much money that it came with incredibly high tax bills. Bills they didn’t want to pay, at least not in full, if they didn’t have to. That’s where Jeffrey came in. Fees paid to him by Wexner and Black could be booked through entities in the US Virgin Islands, transforming tens of millions that would once have been taxed in the continental United States into lightly taxed Caribbean revenue. In other words, he could get richer and richer. And he did. There is no public evidence that Jeffrey was some sort of trading genius delivering spectacular returns.

What the record shows instead is that his value lay in discretion and structure. He built and tended opaque vehicles that let clients reduce their tax bills, move money offshore and keep assets hard to trace. Here and there you see the same logic applied to his own wealth. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, his personal fortune appeared to have exploded far beyond what could be explained by consulting fees. When he bought his properties, the transactions were routed through offshore entities that permanently obscured the origin of the capital. It was during this period that he aggressively began leveraging his proximity to Victoria’s Secret and its owner as a recruitment tool.

The most documented early allegation came in 1997 from model Alicia Arden in Santa Monica. She told police that Jeffrey contacted her, claiming he was a Victoria’s Secret scouting executive. When she agreed to meet him at a hotel for what she believed was a professional opportunity, she later stated that the encounter turned predatory.

In her criminal complaint, Arden said, “He asked me to take off my top. I said no. He began to manhandle me, grabbing my breasts and my buttocks. I was fearful he was going to rape me. I ran out of the room.”

Police classified the case as sexual battery. Jeffrey was questioned but never charged. Decades later, Arden said she was discouraged at the time and ultimately chose not to press charges. The case quietly died. It would later be viewed as one of the earliest missed warnings about how Jeffrey was allegedly using the credibility of major brands and billionaires to access attractive women. When I briefly spoke to Arden a couple of years ago, since her brief encounter with Jeffrey, she has starred in TV shows such as Baywatch, as well as multiple adult entertainment films. I had no reason to doubt her allegations, and I still don’t. They are backed up by a contemporary police report. I did, however, question the motivation behind her fairly recent insertion into the Epstein scandal media circus, particularly after she sent me email after email demanding that I pay her large sums of money to include photographs of her in my book, Naked Lies, and then getting rather angry when I declined.

The incident left Jeffrey unscathed. Soon, the one-time math teacher would own a private jet and multiple residential properties.

His name echoed throughout executive offices and VIP circles in New York and across America. As the new man about town, he often attended Victoria’s secret fashion shows and even hosted the company’s models at his newly acquired, via Wexner, New York townhouse. Osser Properties, which is owned by Jeffrey’s brother Mark, purchased numerous additional buildings in the 1990s, including a complex from Wexner.

At 11 East 71st Street, Jeffrey housed his girlfriend, Eva Anderson, now married to his former hedge fund friend, Glenn Dubin, with Jeffrey and Eva still remaining friends. The building was also used to provide accommodation for the MC2 Models founder, Jean-Luc Brunel. We’ll cover Brunel in a later episode, who would later commit suicide after being accused of running a sex trafficking operation and, on occasions, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Put simply, the boy from Coney Island was now dripping in dough. Apart from his shady former dealings and alleged involvement in a Ponzi scheme, the truth behind how he got his hands on the bulk of his fortune enough to make these extravagant purchases seems far more straightforward than the many theories conjectured over the years.

He stole it.

Wexner claimed that whilst Jeffrey was controlling his financial affairs, he swindled him out of at least $46 million.

His allegations focus on $46 million of investments in a Wexner charitable fund controlled by Jeffrey. Wexner said that when he severed their relationship, he discovered Jeffrey had returned only a portion of the money in the fund. He declined to say if he had reported the loss to authorities.

We discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family, Wexner said. This was frankly a tremendous shock, even though it clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now. Now a man renowned for his wealth, mystery and charisma. Anyone who was anyone wanted to be a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

But despite being thrust into New York’s elite social scene, he remained the introvert from his youth. He preferred eating at home, referring to dining out being similar to eating in the subway. He liked to be alone, and when he was in the mood to not be alone, he enjoyed the company of attractive females.

That, and engaging in borderline batty projects, predominantly related to his unusual interest in science, sometimes even merging the two. Stuart Peaver is a controversial scientist, art collector, and former friend of Jeffrey. “One day in the early 1970s, a friend of mine brought me to Sir James Jimmy Goldsmith’s mansion on the east side,” he told Mother Jones, “and I walked in, and there in the grandiose lobby was a grand piano, and there was somebody playing the piano with great virtuosity, and it was Jeffrey Epstein. That’s how I met him. We became friends for a very long time, daily pals.” The allegations against Jeffrey, whom Pivar broke away from when they came to light, “are very severe, they’re very alarming, but they’re totally, totally, totally misunderstood.” Jeffrey, he claims, “was with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years they went, came there time and time and time again, and if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed except he made an industry out of it. And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. A nymphomaniac is a girl who is insatiable in her sexual appetite. There are men who are like that and it’s a disease.

“It’s called satirisis and Jeffrey was afflicted with that. He couldn’t help himself. But he didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it. Big time. There are plenty of people with satirisis, like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls.”

His attempt at an explanation is controversial, to say the least. He does, however, acknowledge that some of Jeffrey’s behaviour was completely unacceptable.

“I was a sort of an art consultant for him,” he said, recalling one particularly troubling incident that took place at the art gallery of famous dealer Ruth Blumka. “I was furnishing his numerous houses and at one point I took him to a very prominent art dealer to buy furniture and what have you. I brought along an assistant I had who was a very attractive young girl and there we were in those precincts of art and renaissance furniture and he grabbed her up from behind and lifted her up and squeezed the hell out of her and she screamed. I said, ‘Jeffrey, put her down. What are you doing?’ And the three or four of us who were watching were horrified. And he put her down.

“He was out of control.”

In 2000, Jeffrey established the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, an endeavour to fund scientific research and education. Stephen Hawking visited the island with his entourage. So too did Bill Gates, whose relationship with Jeffrey began in 2011, a few years after Jeffrey’s conviction.

In August 2021, Gates said the reason he had meetings with Epstein was because he’d hoped Epstein could provide money for philanthropic work, though nothing came of the idea. It was a huge mistake to spend time with him, to give him the credibility of being there, he added.

“I’m a scientist,” said Pivar, “and I saw all the incredible, wonderful things he did for science, which nobody’s managed to have the intellect to understand. I observed that Jeffrey Epstein was a very important person in the scientific world. He brought to science something which nobody else did. He brought together scientists for the sake of trying to inculcate some kind of a higher level of scientific thought, even though he himself has no compunction about approaching Scientists like Steven Gould, like Pinker, like all of those people, and myself even, at dinners, and would propose interesting, naive ideas. He would say, ‘oh, what is gravity?’, which of course is an unanswerable thing to present at a dinner to a bunch of scientists, and because he was Jeffrey, they would listen to him and try to give answers. He was attempting somehow, in his ignorant and scientifically naive state, to do something scientifically important. He had no compunctions about inviting people, and since he had money, they would listen.

“He would promise money to people, so people would come to his dinners, including myself. Jeffrey brought these people together and thought that he was causing basic thought processes to happen, which he sort of was, even though they were sort of irrelevant."

“We began to realise he didn’t know what he was talking about,” Pivar continued. “Then, after a couple of minutes - Jeffrey had no attention span whatsoever - he would interrupt the conversation and change it and say things like, ‘what does that got to do with pussy?’ That was his favourite expression. It was a subject changer. And it revealed what was really in his mind.

“Of course, that was the only thing that was going on in his mind. Jeffrey had lots and lots and lots of dough. Scientists are always looking for lots and lots of dough because most scientists spend most of their time writing grant proposals to raise money. Jeffrey didn’t require a grant proposal.

“Jeffrey would promise money and so they crowded around. And he also was an extremely personable, amusing kind of person to talk to. He was full of incredible ideas. He was charming in the extreme and that’s why everyone paid attention to him. He came up with some fascinating ideas.”

Some of these scientific ideas, however, would seemingly be a petri dish of genuine curiosity mixed with his own sexual proclivities. According to various sources, beginning in the early 2000s he developed a strong interest in improving the human race through genetic engineering and artificial intelligence including using his own sperm. He addressed the scientific community at various events and occasions promoting his unhealthy fascination with eugenics. He had, according to reports in 2019, planned to seed the human race with his own DNA by impregnating up to 20 women at a time using his vast property in New Mexico as a baby ranch where mothers would give birth to his offspring.

Walking away from Jeffrey’s townhouse, I was suddenly conscious of the time. I glanced at my watch. It was now well past midday and I had a very important interview to conduct in New Jersey. I caught a graffiti-riddled train from Penn Station, then a taxi driven by a chirpy Lithuanian man chain-smoking menthol cigarettes.

I watched his smoke coil out the window, dispersing into the fresh air as we speedily passed through one of the projects, rows and rows of terraced houses. Many of them were empty, an abandoned shanty town haunted by its former residents who had either moved on or been moved along. Like many other worn-down areas, they’d soon see the wrecking ball replaced by more upmarket apartment blocks and bistros. But all in all, this side of the city maintains a great deal of charm. And, compared to the relentless noise of New York, New Jersey is a peaceful affair. Racing down the highway, buckling in my seatbelt, we reach the forest-straddled other side of it, a place oozing in wealth. Huge houses, sporadically placed amidst Chinese elms and picked straight from the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines, stood perched on artificial mounds broken by clean cobblestone driveways bordered by pristine groomed lawns and low shrubs.

Past them, beyond the suburbs and re-entering the city, we reached an industrial park beside a railway line and rolled to a stop in front of an ominous lump of a building. I headed inside, finding myself in a vast open foyer. I walked into a freight elevator and pressed the floor number my interviewee sent to me moments earlier. It glided upwards and then groaned to a halt.

The doors opened. I strolled down a maze of wide corridors, floor-to-ceiling doors donning names of various artists. If it weren’t for the few large display cabinets filled with both bizarre and brilliant exhibits, I’d have sworn I was in a somewhat creepy abandoned factory. No one was around. But then, someone...

The tapping of her high heels echoes down the hallway. An attractive, smiling woman came into view. She was a former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, a woman both burdened by unsubstantiated accusations levelled against her and a need to make the world hear the truth. And regarding this entire murky scandal, the explosive story she was about to tell me would change my view on everything.

Thanks for listening to episode one of The Life and Death of Jeff. In the next episode, I’ll continue the story with a deep dive into Ghislaine Maxwell and her time in Epstein’s orbit, including exclusive comments from Ghislaine’s sister Isabel and an exclusive interview with her brother Ian. Until then, I hope you have a wonderful week.

Welcome to part four of The Life and Death of Jeff. In case you missed the first three episodes, you can read them below (all episodes will be released in a podcast for you to listen to very soon):

UNREQUITED LOVE

As I touched upon in the last episode, Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s romance certainly wasn’t lifted from the pages of a fairytale.

“Epstein told me that he had a heart condition which meant that he didn’t have intercourse a lot, which suited me fine, because I actually do have a medical condition, which precludes me having a lot of intercourse,” she told Todd Blanche during her recennt interview.

“He liked other forms of sexual activities. He told me he had difficulty having an erection, and I believed him.”

Jeffrey’s claim that he suffered from erectile disfunction wasn’t a lie. Interviews I’ve conducted with his former sexual partners, and countless records I’ve poured hours examining, including emails sent by Jeffrey himself, confirm that he was almost completely impotent. With growing frustration, and amidst an ever-increasing and out-of-control sexual appetite, he searched for ways to cure his problem, but to no avail. Instead, he often used viagra and resorted to the ‘other forms of sexual activities’ that Ghislaine referred to - handjobs by prostitutes at local massage parlours and, predominantly, masturbation.

The 90s beginning to see computers and the internet available to households also provided another outlet. Pornography. Like most men, Jeffrey downloaded it, shared it with friends, and - having the financial means - even associated himself with porn stars and facilitated their careers (more on that in a future episode of this series).

But he compartmentalised his life. His day was filled with business deals and communicating with associates. His evenings filled with pornography and happy endings.

Read more

Good day to you all! The week so far has been an interesting one. I attended an Ivana Kupala festival in Kyiv, an ancient event that sees Ukrainians sing folk songs, jump over bonfires, and women weaving flower wreaths before casting them into lakes amidst muttered wishes. It was beautiful.

I also interviewed a new witness in the Epstein scandal, chased up some FOI requests relating to a potential murder, and unearthed more exclusive Epstein-related stories (I’ll be publishing these very shortly).

Now let’s jump into the week’s main Epstein-related headlines:

POLICE OPEN INVESTIGATION INTO DEATH OF VIRGINIA GIUFFRE

Western Australia’s police commissioner has confirmed that an investigation has been opened in which officers’ interactions with Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre in the months before her death will be formally reviewed.

Giuffre died by suicide in April last year at the age of 41 at her rural home north of Perth. Her family has since called for a coronial inquest into the circumstances surrounding her death, a request that has also been supported by a coalition of specialists in domestic and family violence.

Earlier this month, 16 experts in the fields of domestic abuse, family violence and violence against women submitted an open letter to Western Australia’s coroner urging a comprehensive investigation.

The signatories argued that failing to closely examine whether public institutions “let Giuffre down” during the final months of her life would itself be a serious injustice.

They also suggested there were indications she may have experienced domestic violence before her death, with Giuffre herself alleging that her husband Robbie had been physically abusive.

Robbie successfully obtained a restraining order against Virginia Giuffre, while a judge removed Giuffre’s children from her custody over safety concerns.

According to the letter, the publicly available information about Giuffre’s final months closely mirrors patterns identified in research into domestic violence related deaths. The experts said a thorough inquest, conducted with those circumstances fully considered, could produce recommendations that extend well beyond Giuffre’s case and potentially help prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Police Commissioner Col Blanch said the internal review will specifically examine officers’ handling of “a dispute between Giuffre and a former partner”. That partner was Robbie Giuffre, and during that dispute, Giuffre was charged with breaching her restraining order.

Speaking before the Western Australia Parliament on Wednesday, Blanch confirmed the review was being initiated after receiving a letter from Giuffre’s family.

“We respond to over 100,000 family violence incidents every year,” Blanch told the hearing. “I’d love to give assurance on every single one, but I can’t. But that one will be subject to a review.”

Blanch added that the state’s coroner and the Ombudsman also have the authority to undertake their own independent investigations if they choose.

Meanwhile, the legal battle over Giuffre’s estate continues, with family members (and even a former cleaner) wriggling out of the woodwork in attempts to grab the late accuser’s cash.

You can read the last article I wrote about the legal wrangling over Giuffre’s estate by clicking on the above link. I’ll be posting an update very soon.

There is one question I’d like to be answered, however: While it’s good that Giuffre’s family have demanded an investigation into her death, why aren’t they demanding an investigation into the sexual abuse allegations Giuffre made against her own father?

More on that next week.

BILL GATES NAMES EX-LOVERS

During his closed-door, voluntary testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Bill Gates named three women whom he had affairs with while he was married to Melinda French. In a transcript for the interview, the Microsoft co-founder claimed that Jeffrey Epstein knew about his infidelity and alleged that Epstein may have been contemplating blackmailing him.

Gates, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has denied any “illicit” actions, spoke to the committee as part of an ongoing probe linked to the Justice Department’s Epstein Files release.

Gates stated that his association with Epstein was purely business-related.

“It was after this that I learned Epstein had become aware of sensitive information about my personal life, including the fact that I had been unfaithful in my marriage,” he said. “These affairs had nothing to do with my interactions with Epstein, but they were painful for my family.”

Emails I found in the Epstein Files, however, do show that Epstein knew at least two of the three women whom Gates had affairs with.

Gates, whose divorce was finalised in 2021 after 27 years of marriage, confirmed that he’d engaged in affairs with professional bridge player Mila Antonova and nuclear scientist Karima Nigmatulina.

Emails I reviewed earlier this month demonstrate Jeffrey Epstein attempting to facilitate, via Prince Andrew’s former associate David Stern, a meeting between Karima (who at the time held a senior position for planning and development in Moscow) with Boris Johnson’s office (Johnson was, at the time, the Mayor of London).

Despite insinuations in the media, there is no evidence to suggest that Johnson himself ever met Karima - in fact, emails instead document that a senior member of London’s planning department met with Gates’ Russian lover.

Some of you may recall that I wrote a fact-check article regarding David Stern, one of Epstein’s UK-based fixers - after I exposed that the BBC and other news outlets had falsely reported that Jeffrey Epstein may have had a baby. You can read that article below (Note: The BBC still hasn’t issued a correction, despite a BBC representative acknowledging to me in writing that their coverage was misleading):

Of Gates’ affair with Mila Antonova, Epstein wrote in an email that Gates had essentially left her a penniless couch surfer.

Gates then identified doctor and medical entrepreneur Alice Jacobs Nesselrodt, whom he met at a conference, as being the third woman with whom he had an extramarital affair.

“Epstein was working to use information about my infidelities, in addition to many lies that he layered on top, to pressure me to re-engage with him,” Gates told the House Oversight Committee. “He was unsuccessful in this effort, but it shows some of the ways he tried to leverage his interactions with me to further his agenda. I should never have met with Epstein in the first place.”

“There was never an explicit, ‘Hey, if you don't do something, I will reveal this’,” the billionaire philanthropist asserted. “There was the veiled type of language, ‘Hey, should all want to be friends.’ And as I've said, I took that on very explicitly and said, ‘Look, if you think you're going to get more money out of this, it's not going to happen, and if that means you go out and talk to people about things, I will just bear the pain of that and deal with it.'”

Gates later added, "He never blackmailed me, but looking at these emails, it raises a serious probability that he contemplated blackmailing me."

The Epstein files show that Epstein wrote a series of bizarre emails/notes to himself (sometimes pretending to be Gates’ former advisor, Boris Nikolic), in which he alleged that Gates had contracted a sexually transmitted disease following “sex with Russian girls” and that he had asked for antibiotics to “surreptitiously give” to his then wife Melinda French Gates.

“In my role as his right hand I had been asked on mulitple occassion [sic] and in hindsight, wrongly acquiesced into participating in things that have ranged from the morally inappropriate, to the ethically unsound and had been repeatedly asked to do other things that get near and potentially over the line into the illegal,” Epstein wrote as Nikolic, presumably in the hope that he could get Nikolic to release the statement himself if needed, as part of a blackmailing scheme or smear campaign.

Boris Nikolic is a prominent biotech venture capitalist and former science advisor to Gates who became entangled in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Their relationship involved close social and professional ties, and Nikolic was controversially named in Epstein's final last will and testament. Nikolic was also the man who introduced Karima, Alice, and Mila to Epstein and Gates.

From emails within the Epstein Files, we learn that Epstein portrayed himself as holding compromising material and hinted at using it as leverage, particularly in the event of a public divorce that could harm Gates’ philanthropic image.

“I am concerned that if Melinda decides as you said to file for a public divorce, the damage done to the pledge program alone would result in billions of dollars of money no longer being used for social good as Im [sic] sure that some wives and husbands would feel free to retreat from their commitments,” he wrote.

The same email alleges that Gates “begged him” to delete emails regarding “your STD, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda, and the description of your penis.”

Responding to the release of the emails, a spokesperson for Gates said that the claims were “absolutely absurd and completely false. The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”

You can read the full transcript of Gates’ testimony/interview below:

Bill Gates Transcript

645KB ∙ PDF file

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MAXWELL FILES AMENDED PETITION

Ghislaine Maxwell has claimed that newly-released evidence contained within the Epstein files further demonstrates that her constitutional rights were breached.

The 64 year old is attempting to overturn her December 2021 conviction in Manhattan federal court by seeking a writ of habeas corpus, a legal mechanism that allows courts to examine whether a person’s imprisonment is lawful.

In an amended habeas petition released on Wednesday, Maxwell argued that documents made public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act demonstrate that her right to due process was compromised. According to the filing, lawyers representing Epstein’s accusers operated as “de facto prosecutors” while working in close coordination with government officials.

As part of her argument, Maxwell cited a letter written by a former federal prosecutor, who stated, “I did what I could,” when describing efforts to help attorneys representing Epstein’s accusers challenge the 2007 non-prosecution agreement reached between Epstein and federal prosecutors in Florida.

Maxwell has long contended that the 2007 agreement should also have shielded her from criminal prosecution.

The amended petition highlights various startling flaws in her prosecution - including witness tampering and withheld evidence - and reveals fresh evidence supporting her claim of innocence. It also marks her broadest attempt so far to have her conviction overturned.

In response, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, whose office prosecuted Maxwell, urged the court to reject the petition, arguing in a filing released on Wednesday that several of her claims were submitted after the applicable legal deadlines had expired.

Clayton, however, appears to be misleading the court and the general public in this respect. A sibling of Ghislaine Maxwell told me this week that filings have been made on time, but that (as seen with earlier filings by Maxwell) the court has failed to upload and register them on time.

EPSTEIN SPEAKS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE - NEW DRAFT STATEMENT REVEALED

In case you missed it, this week I found another draft statement written by Jeffrey Epstein.

The statement is shocking and enlightening in equal measure, with Epstein confirming that he was a hedonist, but revealing that he was ‘stitched up’ by police and prosecutors.

EXCLUSIVE: READ A SHOCKING WITNESS STATEMENT CURRENTLY UNDER SEAL IN MAXWELL’S PETITION - YOU WON’T FIND THIS ANYWHERE ELSE

while investigating the Epstein scandal, I interviewed the mother of one of Virginia Giuffre’s victims. After this, she sat down with a notary and signed a witness statement that alleges bribes, false testimony, and a long history of abuse.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the important document came to be included in Ghislaine Maxwell’s habeas petition. It is currently under seal and the public are unable to view it. But considering I own the document, and for the sake of transparency, I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to read the scanned, full 6-page document - and you can do so for the first time by clicking the PDF below:

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“These women, most of whom worked in local massage parlors and strip clubs, came to my house to give massages, often with a happy ending, sometimes more,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in one of the statements he’d intended to release to the press (against the advice of his lawyers and his PR guy).

“I am a John. I have used sex workers,” he wrote in another.

“Some of those women turned out to be underage”.

The draft statements were written around 2011, at a time when Epstein’s case was receiving renewed press attention, mostly after one of Epstein’s former ‘girlfriends’, Virginia Giuffre, sold her story to the Daily Mail, in which she claimed she’d had sex with Prince Andrew on multiple occasions.

Those allegations have since been debunked (I’ll be covering them over the next few instalments of my ongoing series, Everything Epstein), but they nevertheless piled considerable pressure onto Epstein, who had hoped he’d be able to move on from the scandal following his brief imprisonment in the mid-2000s.

From what I have unearthed so far, Epstein was becoming increasingly frustrated with Michael Sitrick, whom he’d hired to manage his PR.

Sitrick, in Epstein’s eyes, wasn’t being reactionary enough to defamatory and inaccurate statements being reported in the press and media. He also felt that the public were being misled about the circumstances surrounding his first arrest and conviction (you can read the true, startling story behind that arrest by clicking the article below).

Seeing his pals targeted by journalists with unsubstantiated smears, insinuations and guilt-by-accusation, Epstein decided to take matters into his own hands.

He contacted his friend, the now-infamous former politician Peter Mandelson.

“Peter said a statement needs to be drafted,” Epstein wrote in an email to Ghislaine Maxwell on March 6th, 2011.

In the email, he included what amounted to just one long skeleton paragraph:

“I am not attempting to justify my past behavior. I have paid a price, I have served a jail term, and I continue to pay a heavy price as do friends and acquaintances of mine who have no involvement in my story. It is important to point out what is really going on here. The lawyers that represented many of these girls are currently in jail. They maliciously and malevolently exaggerated the actions and behaviors, and created false complaints in an attempt to get money. Scott Rothstein manufactured, fabricated, and sold wild allegations about my behavior and past. Brad Edwards was a partner in Rothsteinds firm. Many if not all of the newspapers involved in printing many of these wild and salacious stories are offering money in return for a quote. I believe that the adage of ‘Why let a good story get in the way of the truth’ applies in this case.”

Over the proceeding days and weeks, in his typical writing style (riddled with typos, misspellings and grammatical errors) Epstein continued to add to the draft statement.

The below version, that I found over the weekend and that hasn’t been published elsewhere until now, appears to be one of his earliest. I include it here in full, unedited (Note: Epstein wrote ‘TK’ in some parts of the document, for figures, names and dates he was uncertain of and needed to later clarify):

“I am Jeffrey Epstein. For twelve years I have been the subject of greater and lesser media attention. In that time, I have never before spoken publicly. This was in part because I did not recognize the person portrayed in the media: I know who I was, the media did not. I believed that I could at least reclaim my privacy, if not my good name, by being private. That, obviously, is not the case.

So, now, reluctantly, let me try to overcome the media’s version of me and tell you a little about myself and my circumstance…

I am a successful investor and have devoted a significant amount of the money I’ve made to scientific and medical research. I am also an unmarried man and have openly devoted a significant part of my life to sexual adventure. I am a pleasure seeker, a hedonist. I chose not to lead a convention, monogamous, domestic life. I have also frequently paid for sex…

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