True to his word, we set up a time to talk by telephone that week. Mr. Trump called me at exactly the time he was supposed to, said that he’d heard I had questions about Jeffrey Epstein, and asked me how he could help. Mr. Trump explained that he was a business acquaintance of Mr. Epstein’s from many years earlier. He said that the two of them had attended many of the same events and parties, but that he was not as close with Epstein as the media had made it seem. I reminded Mr. Trump that he had been quoted in a 2002 New York magazine article by Landon Thomas Jr. stating, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen 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.”
Mr. Trump explained that when that article was being written, Epstein had called him and explained that he needed people to say nice things, so he asked Trump if he would attribute the quote—written by Jeff himself—as his own words. Seeing nothing wrong with that and having been asked for the favor long before the allegations of Epstein’s abuse had surfaced, Trump agreed.
Trump did say that he always saw Epstein around younger girls, but to his knowledge, none were underage. He said Jeffrey was not secretive about his lifestyle, and whether it was at a party, a private event, or a public event, there were always multiple young women at Epstein’s side. I asked about a rumor I had heard that Mr. Trump had expelled Epstein from the Mar-a-Lago Club for trying to take home a member’s fifteen-year-old daughter. He paused before saying that something along those lines happened but that he could not recall the exact details and instead referred me to his Mar-a-Lago manager, Bernd Lembcke. (Mr. Lembcke would neither confirm nor deny the rumor.)
Mr. Trump explained that he had not spoken with Mr. Epstein in years. The last time he remembered seeing Epstein personally was when he had gone to Epstein’s house in Palm Beach one day for a business meeting before Epstein’s legal troubles came to light. Mr. Trump looked outside and saw young women, who Epstein explained were part of a mentoring-type program that he was involved in, which Mr. Trump thought was a bit odd. He quickly said, “The guy was always strange. Even back when I ran into him more, I never really liked him.” He then gave me names of some other people that would know Epstein’s propensities better, so I jotted down the information to follow up. Before I finished the interview, Mr. Trump told me to say hi to his lovely daughter Ivanka, who had apparently just walked in the room. He then talked about her for a few seconds before saying I could give him a call anytime and he would try to answer my questions if I came across anything else of interest.
In 2015, I was working a class action case on behalf of sixty-five members of one of Trump’s golf clubs in Palm Beach against the Trump Organization. That April, I flew to New York to take Donald Trump’s deposition at the Trump Tower. At the end of his deposition, I reminded him of our 2009 conversation regarding Jeffrey Epstein and asked if we could discuss it again. We went to his office and talked. He framed most of the information he had about potentially relevant leads as rumors that he had heard over the years. Still, his rumors were helpful. He maintained that his relationship with Epstein was primarily centered on business, which, because of the circles in which they traveled, resulted in them running into each other at social gatherings on occasion.
The conversation turned to the class action case that we were there to talk about and why it should be resolved. Before we left, he yelled to his son Eric to settle the case. Eric should have listened to his father but didn’t—that case went to trial in August 2016 and we won.
Over the next few years, I spoke to several other witnesses who told us that they had been introduced by Jeffrey Epstein to Donald Trump. Some had seen him at Epstein’s office, others at one of Epstein’s homes, at parties or social events, and even on Epstein’s plane. In fact, Epstein bragged to certain young women in his life about how he had bailed Trump out of bankruptcy and how Trump was indebted to him. None of them knew whether there was any truth to that claim, but given Epstein’s life it seemed believable to them.
In 2019, I saw video from 1992 of Epstein and Trump together, suggesting that Epstein and Trump were closer social friends than I had been made to understand during my discussions with Trump. However, whether Trump was ever a closer friend than he let on was really of no concern to me. None of the people I interviewed who had met Trump through Epstein ever claimed that Trump had engaged in any improper sexual activity at all, nor did they say that he was around when minors were present. More important, he was one of the only people who didn’t resist talking with me about Epstein and instead provided helpful, often corroborating, information (couched as rumors) that I used to focus my investigation on some of the people “rumored” to have more knowledge.
* * *
Leslie Wexner, owner of the Limited Brand and Victoria’s Secret, was by all credible accounts Jeffrey Epstein’s mentor, friend, and the source of Epstein’s wealth. My sources had told me that Wexner held the key to knowing exactly who Epstein was, who protected him, and what his weaknesses were. By any objective measure, their mysterious relationship was an odd one.
They met through a mutual friend, insurance mogul Bob Meister, in the mid-1980s. At the time, Epstein—a college dropout from Brooklyn, who had been fired from his job as a math teacher at the Dalton School in New York in 1976, and left a five-year stint at Bear Stearns in 1981 after an SEC insider-trading investigation—was rumored to be a high-end financial bounty hunter, tasked with recovering money stolen from the government and wealthy individuals. There were also whispers that he was associated with the CIA, Mossad, or another intelligence agency. Whatever Jeffrey Epstein was or was not before he met Les Wexner, Wexner was intrigued.
Before long, Wexner turned the management of his billion-dollar fortune over to Epstein. Wexner even gave Epstein his eight-story town house at 9 East Seventy-First Street on New York’s Upper East Side. While Epstein claimed J. Epstein & Company, the wealth management company he founded after leaving Bear Stearns, managed the fortunes of clients with net worths that were each more than a billion dollars, he never left his fingerprints on any public trades, which makes this doubtful. The only publicly known client of J. Epstein & Company was Les Wexner.
Until at least 2006, Epstein managed and controlled Wexner’s finances and personal life. Epstein would also brag that he scouted models for Victoria’s Secret. There was some truth to that, in the sense that Jeffrey used his connection to Wexner to enhance the credibility of his model scout pickup line in order to grope models. (In October 2014, we uncovered a police report from Santa Monica, California, alleging that Epstein posed as a scout in order to lure an aspiring actress to his hotel room and sexually “manhandle” her. Nothing ever came of that report.)
The deposition of Wexner was a big pressure point for Epstein, and I knew it.
We served someone affiliated with Wexner with a subpoena for Wexner’s deposition outside his office in New Albany, Ohio, in the summer of 2009. Within an hour I received a call from his New York attorney, Stan Arkin, who was screaming into the phone with every other word an expletive because he didn’t want his client dragged into this case. This was the exact opposite response to the one I received from Trump’s lawyer. Arkin complained about some technical deficiency with the subpoena. (David Copperfield’s attorney had done the same thing after I served Copperfield a subpoena outside one of his magic shows in Las Vegas; regrettably we never were able to depose Copperfield due to a number of legal and logistical roadblocks.) I am not sure that I ever understood what Arkin thought the problem was because all that I heard was f***, f***, f***. Either way, by the end of that call he set a time to come meet me and other lawyers representing some of the victims in Florida. It was obvious I had hit a nerve.
Once in Florida, Wexner’s lawyers made it clear that Wexner intended to avoid having his deposition taken at all costs. Whatever his relationship had been with Epstein, a deposition w
as going to be embarrassing. He contended to have been an Epstein victim from whom Epstein stole hundreds of millions of dollars and offered to provide a road map to Epstein’s money if we ever needed to execute a judgment. After hours of talking, Wexner’s lawyers were effective in convincing the other lawyers representing plaintiffs against Epstein that Wexner’s help behind the scenes would be of greater benefit than his testimony. We reluctantly withdrew the deposition subpoena in exchange for Wexner’s promise to help. This was a bad deal for us. I knew it at the time, but figured we had found a pressure point and would come back if we needed to.
* * *
During that summer, another witness was coming into focus as perhaps the most important of all: Ghislaine Maxwell. There was a wealth of publicly available information regarding the mysterious death of her well-known, wealthy father, Robert Maxwell, who drowned after “falling” from his megayacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in November 1991. Robert Maxwell was known to have links to many international intelligence organizations, including MI6, the KGB, and Mossad. In fact, at least six heads of Mossad attended his funeral in Israel, and the eulogy was given by Israeli president Chaim Herzog. The most popularly reported theories relating to Robert Maxwell’s death are either that he committed suicide that night, or that his involvement as a superspy for Mossad got him murdered. Ultimately, his death was ruled an accident. (These suspicions are strikingly similar to those surrounding Epstein’s death. Coincidence?)
Regardless, whether Epstein’s connection to Ghislaine Maxwell had anything to do with Epstein’s rumored intelligence agency affiliation, she was crucial to understanding his sexual deviancy. Ghislaine was the one woman who, by all appearances, Epstein treated as his equal. They had typically presented themselves as boyfriend and girlfriend; sometimes she even referred to him privately as her husband. They were a strange, inseparable pair.
An elegant woman with a British accent, Ghislaine had short dark hair and captivating, warm facial features. She was, and I am sure still is, a chameleon, able to blend in with high and low society as it suits her. She could sit at a dinner table having the most sophisticated conversation with a brilliant scientist and an hour later attend a burlesque show and make the raunchiest joke in the aisle. Everyone described her as fun, funny, and crass—as open-minded as she was intelligent. Her circle in London included the highest-powered businessmen and members of the British royal family. But after losing her father, Ghislaine was heartbroken. She was also broke after it was learned that her father had stolen nearly $900 million from employee pension funds—one of the largest frauds of its kind. Humiliated, Ghislaine fled London for the United States soon thereafter. Because her media tycoon father had been connected to the world’s most powerful people, she grew up with an impressive list of friends. Later, she expanded on the Rolodex her father created for her, becoming close with the likes of Prince Andrew and President Bill Clinton.
To fully appreciate Ghislaine’s importance to Epstein, some background is necessary. At the height of their relationship, Maxwell had everything that Epstein needed, and he had everything she wanted. She had connections; he had money. By all public appearances and witness accounts, they were inseparable for almost two decades. They slept in the same bed and traveled together on private planes all over the world.
By the summer of 2009, when I was deciding who to subpoena, I had also been contacted by a former New York City police officer who had spent significant time researching and investigating Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.
The former police officer spent most of the time stressing how important Ghislaine was. This was no surprise, of course. During the Palm Beach Police Department’s criminal investigation of Epstein in 2005, her name was mentioned as someone the police wanted to speak with. From the messages that had been confiscated in the infamous trash pulls, we learned that callers were leaving messages for Maxwell as if she lived at the house during a time when high school girls were regularly being shuttled there. As soon as the criminal investigation began, however, she became a ghost. She completely distanced herself from Epstein. This looked like someone with a guilty conscience; even more reason to track her down. But she had her connections and Epstein’s financial resources, so she was able to make herself difficult to locate.
We learned through other sources that she was a close friend of Bill Clinton’s. If that was true, then surely she would attend the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers. We hired investigators to get into the event and serve her with a subpoena for her deposition, which they did. To say she was upset about being publicly served at this function is an understatement. She had a profound determination to avoid her deposition, both before and after being served. Unlike in most cases, when Epstein was involved, serving witnesses with subpoenas didn’t mean they would acquiesce to having a deposition taken. It just meant new strategies to avoid the deposition would begin. And such was the case with Ghislaine.
* * *
While wrangling with Ghislaine over setting a date for her testimony, we continued finding and serving other members of Epstein’s inner circle. Another character with valuable information for our case who could not deny his long-standing relationship with Epstein was Jean-Luc Brunel, a model scout and owner of Karin Models, which later became the MC2 modeling agency. Jean-Luc was considered one of the most talented scouts in the business—he had discovered models such as Christy Turlington, Sharon Stone, and Milla Jovovich. But he also was rumored to use cocaine heavily and had a history of soliciting sex with the talent. He had been banned from his modeling agency in Europe for being included in the scandalous 1999 BBC MacIntyre Undercover report, an investigation into modeling agency owners who preyed on teenage girls. Jean-Luc was revealed as one of the most egregious perpetrators of the bunch.
After the release of the devastating report, a group of agency owners retreated to the Caribbean for a meeting to figure out how to deal with it. Jean-Luc allegedly showed up at this crisis management meeting with—yes, you guessed it—a teenage model. The reaction from his colleagues was by all accounts utter incredulity.
Though he still had an unusual eye for talent, after the scandal he had little money, and without money he had no way to pursue his passion. Enter Jeffrey Epstein. Jean-Luc had something that Epstein wanted, and Epstein had something that Jean-Luc needed. The symbiosis that made Epstein effective was once again in play.
Ghislaine met Jean-Luc in the 1980s when she was working with her father. She later introduced Jean-Luc to Epstein in New York. It was a match made in some sort of messed-up heaven. Epstein eventually agreed to fund Jean-Luc’s new modeling agency, and Jean-Luc continued to do what he always did: find new girls. The Palm Beach police captured a message memorializing the naming of MC2 Model Management in the trash pull conducted at the house. The agency was named to give credit to Epstein as being the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain—E (Epstein) = MC2.
We tracked down Jean-Luc in New York City with the help of other MC2 employees who had informed us that the agency brought many young foreign girls into the United States. No surprise to us, most were housed at 301 East Sixty-Sixth Street, in the apartments owned by Dara Partners, a company co-owned by Mark Epstein, who rented eight to ten units to his brother, Jeffrey. Employees of MC2 told us they were paid to help obtain visas for the young girls living in these apartments. Those employees later quit after learning that the work some of the girls were doing was not limited to modeling.
MC2 employees told me where I could find Jean-Luc in New York City to serve him with a subpoena. Sure enough, Jean-Luc was hailing a taxi, right where his employees told us he would be, when our investigator approached him. When the investigator attempted to introduce himself, Jean-Luc turned around and put his hands behind his back for handcuffing, believing he was being arrested. Our investigator spun him back around, announcing, “You aren’t being arrested. Just take this subpoena.” Jean-Luc, too, would eventually wiggle out from his depos
ition date, but he was also under Jeffrey’s control so we should have seen that coming.
* * *
In our continuing efforts to obtain hard evidence, we also served subpoenas on Epstein’s current and former employees. Up until this point, the only documentary evidence that we had was from the trash pulls conducted by the Palm Beach Police Department in March, April, June, July, September, and October 2005. Those in Epstein’s inner circle were unbelievably loyal. So loyal that almost everyone who had worked for him showed up at their depositions with an attorney paid for by Epstein, including Epstein’s former housekeeper Juan Alessi and his wife, Maria Alessi; housekeeper Louella Rabuyo; pilots Dave Rodgers, Larry Morrison, Larry Visoski, and of course Sarah Kellen and Nadia Marcinkova.
In fact, Sarah Kellen and all of Epstein’s pilots were represented by Bruce Reinhart—a lawyer who had been a supervisor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida when Epstein’s lawyers were negotiating his non-prosecution plea agreement. Reinhart left his government post in October 2007 and opened up his law firm at the same address that would later house Jeffrey Epstein’s Florida Science Foundation.
The depositions of the pilots were important because they could identify the individuals who flew on Epstein’s different airplanes with him. The individuals on the flights could have been witnesses or they could have been victims. Regardless, the pilots had powerful information that could incriminate their boss.
This was particularly true of Larry Visoski, who, despite having worked for and known Epstein for nearly two decades, claimed to have no idea that Epstein had placed various boats, properties, and cars in Visoski’s name. In fact, Visoski maintained he had no idea what Epstein did for a living, how he made his money, what type of business Epstein conducted, or even the circumstances surrounding the assets that were placed in Visoski’s name. This know-nothing testimony was capped by the fact that Larry Visoski’s wife was also employed by Epstein and yet he claimed not to know what she did during her employment. Visoski came across as someone who would have literally gone down with the plane for Jeffrey Epstein.
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