If sunlight is the best disinfectant, it has taken many years and traumatic testimony from scores of victims for its beams to reach the dark recesses of the Jeffrey Epstein story — a grim tale of the routine sexual abuse of young women and girls, covered up by the wealth and influence of a New York celebrity financier and the complicity of his British enabler Ghislaine Maxwell.
The roll call of the victims of trafficking and abuse is lengthy — 200 women are receiving compensation via the JP Morgan bank, which financed Epstein’s businesses. Now that a US court has unsealed a vast cache of documents pertaining to the legal cases brought against Epstein and his estate, there is more evidence of the sex-trafficking network that flourished as two social magnets globe-trotted and partied with some of the biggest names in transatlantic politics, society and royalty.
The new disclosures have sent shivers down many celebrity spines as backwash or association with Epstein and Maxwell threatens to do more damage to reputations. “It’s like a sudden tap on the shoulder that makes you shudder,” says one screenwriter who featured in Epstein’s “black book of contacts”. “And that’s just for those of us who had nothing to do with his wrongdoing.”
One response to the reams of information, allegations and insinuations is that there is nothing essentially new here — the characters behind many of the “Jane Doe” and “John Doe” aliases applied in court were already widely known.
But the scope of detail matters — and that is especially bad news for Prince Andrew, whose protestations that he knew nothing of Epstein and Maxwell’s predatory behaviour is wearing thin to incredible given that, as the evidence of the financier’s valet claims, the Duke was in such frequent touch with Epstein that they spoke as often as once a week.
It is also a vast embarrassment for former president Bill Clinton, who sought and retained Epstein’s company on “humanitarian” missions and praised his acumen. And one of the presumed names in redacted parts of the documents is suspected to be the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who became a friend of Epstein even after the financier had been found guilty of soliciting a teenager for prostitution by a Florida court in 2008.
Gates — lionised as a philanthropist and courted by elites from Davos to Silicon Valley — has seen his personal brand tarnished by the association with Epstein, a friendship which his ex-wife Melinda French Gates clearly disliked and which, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, ended when Epstein allegedly tried to blackmail Gates over an affair.
Gates has told the paper recently that he “didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him” despite visiting his home.
Many of these stories may never end in clarity about what exactly happened in Epstein’s orbit. One of the many curses he brought to the society around him — as well as the principle damage to victims he assaulted and intimidated — was the trail of suspicion and rumour he left behind when he took his own life in a prison cell in 2019.
That has drawn in scores of A-listers — from the model Naomi Campbell to the actors Cate Blanchett and Kevin Spacey, who have nothing to do with Epstein’s criminal activities and in many cases, may never have met him (Epstein, as one of his victims notes in her deposition, was a compulsive name-dropper).
More details are likely to emerge of contact with a “well-known prime minister”, as well as US Democrat politicians including Al Gore and the late Bill Richardson.
Besides those who were simply acquaintances who can genuinely claim to have known nothing of his and Maxwell’s network of exploitation and abuse are others who had enough reason to suspect wrongdoing — and were either complicit or chose not to be bothered by the many hints that something was badly wrong.
None more so than Clinton, who has always fiercely denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and insisted that his multiple jaunts on the financier’s jet were part of a shared commitment to humanitarian causes. Clinton has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing. But the ill-advised friendship has taken its toll on a man whose two-term presidency defined the centre ground of politics.
His discomfiture is evident in a stilted response issued this week to the new revelations: “It has been nearly 20 years since President Clinton last had contact with Epstein.”
This is certainly true but hardly an exoneration. Inevitably, much of what is in the new disclosures is unsubstantiated or second hand. Johanna Sjoberg, who worked as a masseuse for Epstein and was assaulted by him, claims he told her the former president “likes them [girls] young”.
Watching Clinton give a touching address at the funeral of his friend, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, in London in 2022 was a reminder of his rhetorical gifts — but also of his infirmity. Clinton now speaks huskily and with a hesitation which has led to speculation about damage to his nervous system — a far cry from the hale and energetic politician who bestrode the Atlantic and inspired Tony Blair and many European centrists with his panache and pragmatism.
It was also a rare outing — Clinton has cut his travel and public appearances for health reasons, but also, a close friend says: “Because there is no doubt that the Epstein connection had damaged him. It has also made him a lot less at ease with the press, because he knows the question will arise. So on top of his frailty, it’s one of the main reasons you hardly see Bill give an interview alone.” His last major one was alongside Hilary Clinton about the couple’s philanthropic work.
A glaring problem for all of those named repeatedly in these documents, however, is that even when innocent of any criminal activity, they associated freely with someone whose predilection for young women was so well-known that there were crude jokes about his private jet, which was dubbed “Airf*** One”.
When I made a documentary on Ghislaine Maxwell for Channel 4 last year, one of the themes that fascinated and appalled me as someone who had known her in her carefree Oxford years and when she first moved to New York after her father Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991, was how brash and repetitious Epstein’s misconduct was. This is reflected in the document cache.
Researching the film (although not on camera) a mutual friend told me that Ghislaine had joked to her about not being able to spend much time with her at a New York party because she had to “find some girls” for Epstein.
She reflected that this remark, in the giddy context of their glitzy social life, could be taken to mean simply bringing attractive young women to Epstein’s many parties to balance out the numbers of male financiers of a certain age.
But when I asked if she suspected more, she shrugged and said: “Of course — everybody knew that Epstein liked young women and there were a lot more of them at his social events than you would find at parties with a bunch of middle-aged Wall Street guys.”
This context makes it hard to fathom why Prince Andrew, who kept up his friendship (and the financial benefits of using Epstein’s town house in New York as a free base) has proved petulant (in the infamous Newsnight interview) and still tells friends that he is hopeful of being ultimately vindicated.
But he does, however, have one ally, in the form of Maxwell, who is appealing her conviction and has insisted that Andrew did not have sexual relations with Virginia Giuffre despite reaching an out of court financial settlement with her in the wake of her claims that he had sex with her as a 17-year-old, after being introduced by Maxwell.
Andrew settled the claim with no admission of liability for an undisclosed sum. At the time this was reported to be as much as £12 million.
The Giuffre case, allies of the Duke point out, was never heard in court and a London lawyer who remains closely in touch with Maxwell in prison says that that is the result of multiple inconsistencies in her stories of which famous figures were allegedly where and on which dates.
Maxwell, sentenced to 20 years for her role in the sex trafficking, is currently in a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida. She has frequent contact with her legal team and corresponds regularly with two close London friends — one a former lawyer, the other a well-known City figure.
“Ghislaine inspires loyalty”, says one former friend — and despite a hostile press on both sides of the Atlantic, there are many on the social circuit in London and New York who fundamentally believe that she was led astray by Epstein after her love affair with him — or that her complicated relationship with her late father, the tyrannical newspaper magnate Robert, made her susceptible to Epstein’s demands.
Maxwell sees herself as a victim — saying that she “rues the day” she met Epstein. But she is also a combative figure who relishes a fight and is used to getting her way. The idea of winning an appeal, however unlikely in law, is one of the factors which sustains her self-belief.
The Epstein-Maxwell story is a tale of exploitation and entitlement, with a legacy of life-long damage to the principle victims — and a the stench of complicity from a lot of people who either didn’t see what was in plain sight or saw only the glitz hiding the grime.
