She's a famous model, is linked to Putin, and offered Jeffrey Epstein 30 young women in a single day - Meet the secret Russian recruiter
Best pals with Putin's lover. Took a lie detector test live on national television. Supplied Epstein with multiple beautiful young women. And yet you've likely never heard of Kira Dikhtyar.
For years, Kira Dikhtyar floated around the edges of glittering rooms and powerful men like a figure from a half-forgotten tabloid fever dream. A Russian gymnast turned model with sharp cheekbones, expensive friends, and a photo album stuffed with snaps taken beside diplomats, oligarchs, and billionaires. One moment she was discussing women’s rights campaigns at the United Nations. The next, Department of Justice records would place her inside Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit for more than a decade.
The newly examined records paint a far more detailed picture of Kira’s relationship with Epstein than has previously been publicly understood.
Emails released through the Department of Justice show her repeatedly helping arrange meetings between Epstein and women between 2009 and 2018, long after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea in Florida. Hundreds of emails I’ve examined reveal a steady stream of introductions, recommendations, photographs, logistical discussions, and conversations about vulnerable young women, some identified by age.
The emails document a close relationship with Epstein that stretches across many years.
They also place Kira unusually close to several powerful figures whose names continue surfacing around the Epstein story, among them Paolo Zampolli, the former modelling agent credited with introducing Melania to Donald Trump in the late 1990s and now serving as President Trump’s special representative for global partnerships at the State Department.
The scale of the recruitment described in the emails is striking.
By sending Epstein new women’s names, ages, and organising hook-ups, Kira appears to have helped source scores of women for Epstein for almost a decade.
Long before any of that, she had emerged from a very different world.
As a teenager in Russia, she trained in rhythmic gymnastics alongside her close friend, Alina Kabaeva, the Olympic gold medalist and President Vladimir Putin’s longtime lover.
She won gold at the 1998 Junior Olympics at just 9 years old, and by 13 she was a member of the junior Russian national team, training at the elite Novogorsk Training Center.
“I had very happy, sporty childhood where we were protected from any kind of danger,” Kira told Airmail in 2022. “We were under the total control of coaches and the bodyguards and other employees.… The worst thing that happened is that I dropped a hoop and lost to Ukrainian gymnast.”
A source I have spoken to - another former friend of Kira who was also a gymnast - claimed to me that Putin briefly ‘dated’ Kira before taking a shine to Kabaeva, whom Kira allegedly introduced him to.
Epstein himself spent years trying to win an audience with Putin, according to the emails published by the US justice department in which the Russian president/war criminal is mentioned 1,055 times.
The files show how Epstein jostled friends and political associates, including Israel’s Ehud Barak, to set up a meeting for him to discuss foreign investment in Russia from at least 2013 and until 2018, a year before Epstein died in prison.
There are also emails to former Norwegian PM Thorbjørn Jagland pressing him to help broker a Putin meeting. In another exchange from 2018, Epstein suggested Russian Foreign Minister and infamous propagandist Sergei Lavrov could gain “insight” into Donald Trump by speaking with him.
It is unclear whether Putin and Epstein eventually saw each other in the flesh, although unsubstantiated claims allege that Epstein boasted to friends that such a meeting did in fact take place.
Either way, Putin eventually began a longterm relationship with Kira’s pal, Alina Kabaeva, with Kira allegedly remaining her close friend and continuing to occasionally see the president.
In April 2008, the Moskovsky Korrespondent reported that Kabaeva was engaged to Putin. The story was instantly denied by state-controlled media, and Putin’s oppressive regime had the newspaper shut down. In the following years, the status of Kabaeva and Putin’s relationship became a topic of speculation, including allegations that they have multiple children together, something which my source who was formerly close to Kira alleged that ‘Kira was fully aware of’.
In March 2015, Kabaeva was reported to have given birth to a daughter at the VIP hospital of Saint Ann in Ticino, Switzerland.
In 2019, she reportedly gave birth to twin sons at the Kulakov maternity clinic in Moscow. The Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung reported in 2022 that a Swiss gynecologist of Russian origin assisted at both births, stating that the first in 2015 was of a boy and the second in 2019 of another boy… and that both were Putin’s sons.
Kira later claimed that, during her time spent in Kabaeva’s orbit, while still involved in gymnastics, modelling scouts began approaching her.