Relentless Pursuit

by Bradley J. Edwards

  Sarah had grown to admire Virginia’s coming forward after all these years, though, and sympathized with her story. Sarah had googled Virginia to get in touch with her and discovered the Victims Refuse Silence Facebook page. It told her what Virginia was trying to do for other victims, so Sarah knew she wanted to help.

  She started her story long before a time we needed to know about, but we didn’t want to interrupt her. It was hard enough to establish a rapport with her across the Atlantic without trying to redirect the thoughts of someone who clearly needed an open forum to express herself. She explained how she had moved to New York to pursue a modeling career and had been living the New York City high life before she met Jeffrey Epstein.

  During that initial call, she explained that she had been to Epstein’s island on multiple occasions in 2006 and 2007. She even claimed to have photographs of herself on the island with Epstein, Maxwell, Brunel, and other women. Any time a witness had photographic evidence, it bumped that person up on our priority list because no matter how many high-paid lawyers Jeffrey Epstein and his gang hired, photographs were hard to deny. That didn’t mean that they wouldn’t try, of course.

  Sarah then told us about an incident when she had gotten into a situation in New York and needed legal advice. She said Epstein had referred her to a lawyer named “Ellen” in his office in New York City. Sarah kept going on and on in a very rapid, thick accent about her troubling experiences with this lawyer named Ellen, then suddenly shifted to a new subject.

  One of us stopped her and said, “Wait, this was the lawyer Ellen that you had met with before?”

  Sarah replied, “Yes, Ellen Dershowitz.”

  At that moment, I looked straight at Sigrid. Sigrid looked up and we realized that for the last ten minutes, she had been talking about Alan Dershowitz. We told her to stop talking. “Are you saying that the lawyer you have been talking about is Alan Dershowitz?” I asked. Sigrid and I kept asking the same question in different ways. I think Brittany and Meredith each even took a shot at clarifying the story. Finally, Sarah yelled, “Yes, you idiots, the lawyer Alan [still sounding like “Ellen”] Dershowitz!”

  By this point in the conversation, Sarah was corroborating so many different parts of Virginia’s story that we knew we needed to see her in person. Before figuring out how to orchestrate a meeting with her, I inquired about other evidence that she might have had. “Do you have any emails from anyone in Epstein’s organization during that time period? What do we need to do to get the photographs that you say you took back in 2006 or 2007?” She told us they were in storage in London and she was in Spain with no money to get to them.

  Sarah swore that the photographs were there. She had the address of the storage facility. We told her we would pay her to go get the photographs. At the same time, we had all heard from witnesses before about magical photographs and evidence that often failed to materialize. Sometimes the photographs would turn up, and most times they wouldn’t. Nonetheless, we worked with her over the next month to retrieve boxes of documents from storage. When the London Boies Schiller Flexner team delivered the boxes to her, none of the photographs were there. She was very frustrated. But she eventually found them on her old computer and started sending them one at a time, including photographs of her with Jeffrey Epstein, and his crew, including Ghislaine Maxwell. The photographs had been taken in December 2006. Sarah was twenty-two at the time.

  These photographs were a big deal. In December 2006, Epstein was under federal investigation. The case against him that was initiated by the Palm Beach Police Department had already been transferred to the FBI. At that time, Epstein’s dream team of lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz, was speaking frequently with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, telling them one way or another that Epstein’s accidental misbehavior was now a thing of the past and that he was living a good, wholesome life. Yet while his lawyers were negotiating a plea deal over his receipt of sexual massages for money, he was also traveling to his island to receive sexual massages for money—from Sarah Ransome and others.

  Based on those facts alone, it made sense that if Sarah Ransome had a legal problem in early 2007, Jeffrey Epstein would have introduced her to his friend and lawyer at the time, Alan Dershowitz. Plus, we knew from flight logs that Sarah was traveling with Epstein to New York and his island at a time when Epstein had to be in regular contact with Dershowitz.

  We couldn’t, of course, get a picture of a relationship between Epstein and Sarah based only on finding her name written on a flight log or in an email. Photographs, though, are different. Once Sarah started sending the photographs of Sarah Kellen, Ghislaine, Jean-Luc, and Epstein on the private island, it became obvious that she had spent enough time with them to know more about how the organization worked, and who was involved in what.

  The photos also revealed that Maxwell was still very much a part of Epstein’s traveling sex circus in 2006 and 2007. At a time when most defendants would be on their best behavior, or hiding, Epstein was frolicking with young females on his private island. Was he thinking their adult ages protected him now? Was he thinking no one would find out? Could he really just not help himself?

  This was all happening amid Maxwell’s concerted effort to make herself a ghost in Florida after the search warrant had been executed on Epstein’s home in late 2005. Yet there she was, too, front and center in the pictures confirming Sarah’s account. This didn’t jibe well with her defense that she was no longer part of Epstein’s life during that time.

  To evaluate Sarah’s importance any further, we needed to pay her a visit. I was going to go to Barcelona and needed a partner for the trip. This was a mission for Stan, being the 007 that he was. On January 4, 2017, we flew to Barcelona and went to the hotel where we had arranged to meet Sarah. We had seen her in photographs, but those were taken in 2007 and here we were ten years later, not really knowing what to expect. I saw her walk in.

  Of course, the thought crossed my mind that this could be an Epstein setup, which is why we took the extra precaution of flying across the world to meet with her in person. Sarah was extremely paranoid. She was probably thinking that somehow, we were the ones working with Epstein. Those who crossed paths with him believed he was able to do anything, at any time, to anyone. I don’t think I met a single witness who didn’t believe they were being followed or investigated by him. And what made their paranoia reasonable was that, many times, they were right.

  Sarah didn’t want to talk in public at all, not even to give greetings in the lobby. She told us that she was checking in to her room and would find us in the meeting room that we had reserved. Once she joined us, we spent at least eight hours straight with her. She had a lot to say. The time period when her life intersected with Epstein’s was not very long—less than a year—but she had emails to prove it and she had more photographs. As suspected, Epstein was getting “massaged” as usual while his legal team was negotiating a deal with prosecutors on his behalf. The pictures were enough to reveal that, even then, Epstein had no concern that the federal government was ever going to do anything to him.

  The email communications between Sarah Ransome and Jeffrey Epstein, Sarah Kellen, and Jeffrey’s assistant Lesley Groff were even more powerful than the photographs. In 2007, Epstein had paid for Sarah Ransome to go back to South Africa, in part with the mission to retrieve a new young model for him.

  I knew Jeffrey Epstein’s scheme. While in his presence, each girl was expected to be on call for a “massage,” which, of course, meant sex. Every time. When not in his presence, everyone was expected to be looking for the next girl to bring to Jeffrey for a massage. In exchange, he made promises, and Ghislaine made promises, and others made promises on his behalf. Sometimes the promises were kept; other times, they were not. Jeffrey was very calculated in that way. He made sure that the small promises were kept so that his girls always believed that he would make good on that one big promise that in all reality he never intended to fulfill and instead used as a carrot t
o dangle.

  For Sarah, Epstein had promised to get her into the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), a fashion design school in New York, if she continued to grant him sexual favors. Sarah knew that Epstein had the ability to get her in, but with Jeffrey, there was always a catch, always a negotiation, and nothing was ever as it seemed. To Sarah, it was simple: she had to do as Jeffrey and Ghislaine and his other associates demanded and, in turn, Jeffrey would get her into the school of her dreams.

  Once she was back in South Africa, Jeffrey told her to write an essay that he would submit to FIT as part of her admission application. He also told her that she needed to weigh less than fifty-two kilograms (114 pounds) before he would help her. It seemed he had made this requirement intentionally unattainable, or just didn’t care how much anyone suffered to meet his needs. Sarah was five foot ten, she weighed more than 114 pounds, and she was twenty-two years old, which by his standards was too big and too old. He preferred teenagers but would settle for young adults who resembled children in ways that mattered to him. Given that he was being investigated, he couldn’t run the risk of getting caught with a minor, so he had no choice but to find older girls and try to make them look as young or as small as possible. But even with all the power, coaxing, promises, and dictates he used on them, it was not easy to achieve.

  The body type that he liked most—one that was not completely developed, or one with small breasts, narrow hips, few curves, and the “purity” of having had little or no sexual experience—did not exist among twenty-two year-olds in the same frequency it did among teens. This frustrated Jeffrey. He had a lot less patience with someone Sarah’s age.

  Still, without quite achieving the lower weight he required, she returned to the United States without having recruited any girls abroad, and lived in one of Epstein’s apartments at 301 East Sixty-Sixth Street. She stayed there only a few months before she left the United States in May 2007, after realizing she was never going to reach Epstein’s weight requirement and he was never going to get her into FIT.

  Sarah was very convincing, and she had the evidence to support all major aspects of what she was saying. Even the parts where she didn’t have absolute proof were generally supported by the circumstantial evidence that we had gathered from other sources.

  After our two-day debriefing with Sarah, Stan and I headed for the airport. We split up because we were going different places on different flights.

  I had a connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany, on my way home from Barcelona where I had to get off the plane, walk out onto the tarmac, and board one of the buses that would take connecting passengers on a short haul over to the terminal. When I got off the plane, I saw that the bus I was about to board had a long line of people waiting to get on, and there was another one—without a line—about a hundred feet in front that was about to shut its doors. I ran for it, got on just before the doors closed, and rode it to my next gate.

  After boarding my flight, I was sitting in my seat looking over my notes when I realized the plane was taking an unusually long time to take off. It didn’t concern me, though; I knew I had a long flight ahead of me anyway and figured it wouldn’t make a big difference.

  Suddenly, an airline official appeared on the plane looking very concerned. She came directly over to my seat and asked me my name. I told her Brad Edwards and she asked me if I was okay. I said, “Yeah, I’m fine.” She kept asking me if I was sure I was okay. As she was saying this, the only thing that made any sense at all was that I must have been followed by someone who was trying to do something really bad to me.

  She said, “Were you on the plane from Barcelona?” I told her that I was. She asked me how I got from the plane to the terminal, so I told her I’d boarded a transport bus, like everyone else. She said she needed to talk to me about that because something I was telling her didn’t make sense.

  When I asked her what she meant, she brought me up to the front of the plane and told me in private that the bus I was on had been hit by a huge luggage transporter and knocked upside down, killing three people and seriously injuring more. She asked me how I had managed to be on this airplane in one piece.

  Having gotten the picture, I explained that I had not boarded the bus I was supposed to take but got on another one in front of it and didn’t even know anything that had happened to the one behind. I wanted to ask her if the driver of the luggage transporter worked for Jeffrey Epstein, but I didn’t, I swear. This was a surreal experience. By some miracle born of impatience, I had escaped a disaster.

  Even more surreal was that there was a mass shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport on the same day, which caused a panic for everyone who knew I was flying home. Thankfully, I had flown into Miami instead of Fort Lauderdale, which in and of itself was odd because I almost never fly into Miami. When I landed, I had dozens of text messages from people who knew I was flying home that day and were worried. Not knowing about the shooting, I thought the text messages were asking if I was okay because of the bus accident in Germany, when in actuality no one at home even knew about that. In one day, I discovered twice that I was lucky to be alive.

  Fast-forward a year and a half to 2018 and I was representing the victims from the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting.

  FORTY-TWO THE BODYGUARD

  ON MY TRIP HOME, I thought about a story that Sarah Ransome had shared with us where she explained that she was so desperate to escape, she attempted to swim off Epstein’s island. She explained that Epstein’s bodyguard witnessed the whole thing and would corroborate her story. When I returned, I called the bodyguard right away. He told me to meet him at the Starbucks.

  This former bodyguard was a Russian mixed martial arts fighter hired by Epstein to provide security. With this type of background, I mistakenly assumed he was a coldhearted tough guy who protected whomever he was hired to protect, and who would never share details. By all appearances, he truly seemed like a movie character who was meant to defend someone evil. The bodyguard seemed like someone whom Russian mobsters would hire. But he didn’t sound like a bad guy when I called to set up our meeting.

  He had a secretive way about him, like a robot that was put on earth not to gossip about anyone or anything. But he wasn’t the heartless character whom I had previously believed him to be. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t excited to meet me, but he had agreed to do so.

  When I got to the Starbucks that night, I was early, as usual. It was nice out, so I picked a table outside. He had no idea who I was or what I looked like, even though we had crossed paths outside of depositions and meetings I’d had with Epstein several years before. He arrived within minutes, walked inside to grab a coffee, then looked around until our eyes met. He didn’t hesitate before walking in my direction, knowing somehow that it was me. He didn’t want me taking any notes. I put my pen down and prepared to listen.

  I asked him how he got started with Epstein and what he saw during his employment. He was hired initially because Epstein was worried that some girl’s dad would try to kill him. While I had never heard anyone say that Epstein had this fear, I had often wondered how it never happened. He continued to talk in a low voice, primarily on the subject of the young females in Epstein’s life. He confirmed what many others by this point had said—that Epstein’s entire life, from the time he woke up to the time he went to sleep, revolved around young women.

  As soon as Jeffrey got out of jail in 2008, there were girls at his house all the time—the only thing that changed was the target age of his victims. They were all promised something that Jeffrey would do for them, and at some point, this bodyguard expressed his concern to Jeffrey about his misleading them. He said, “You just got out of jail, you can’t keep doing this with these girls.” He made it clear that Epstein was engaging in the same conduct that landed him in trouble in the first place but with a slightly older age group, focusing his attention not on rounding up high school kids, but on the modeling industry as his recruiting playground.

  These we
re girls who believed they were there—wherever “there” was at any given moment—for a legitimate reason, not illicit sex. But Jeffrey’s purpose with them was sex and only sex. His bodyguard watched as dozens of young aspiring models were lured into Epstein’s world before being discarded, more broken than before. When this bodyguard told Epstein that he shouldn’t keep doing this with girls, he said Epstein responded, “Don’t act like my grandma or you will be fired.”

  Yes, he confirmed that Sarah tried to swim off the island, but her attempt showed no greater level of distress than he’d seen in other girls throughout the years. The rest of our meeting had little to do with girls, and much to do with the danger he saw me putting myself in with Epstein. He was himself a real-life tough guy, yet I could tell he was frightened by Epstein. And he stressed that I should also be frightened. He had no precise information; it wasn’t as if Epstein had told him I was a target. He simply made it clear that I was somebody Epstein had talked about, and not in a friendly way. But of course, I already knew that.

  As we got to know each other, he increased the seriousness in his voice. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. I worked for him for years and I still don’t know who you’re dealing with. He knows everybody who’s powerful in this world.” He went on to explain that Jeff’s connections were not just to the local police, who were “definitely in his pocket,” and from whom “when he was in jail and on house arrest, he got so many favors.” He elaborated that Epstein “made very clear that the federal government would never prosecute him.”

  He also snuck stories in to give me examples of how scary Epstein was. On one occasion, a lawyer was found at the bottom of a swimming pool. Epstein asked him if he thought people would believe it was a suicide, as if it wasn’t, and suggested that he, Epstein, had something to do with the woman’s demise. It wasn’t someone I had ever heard of during my years of investigating Epstein, so I had no reason to believe it was a connection to any case I was working on, but the purpose of the message was clear.