In this episode we’ll be exploring how Jeffrey and Ghislaine came to socialise with some of the world’s most powerful and influential individuals, will listen to Ghislaine herself explain Jeffrey’s sexual anomalies, and will dive into more allegations and Jeffrey’s life as it swiftly began to slide into insatiable sordidness.
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.
