I would love to see how Fox and MSNBC would react to this. Would Fox attack Clinton while defending Trump? Would MSNBC attack Trump while defending Clinton? Or would they both avoid the story altogether because it may hurt a member of their “team”.
The BBC’s TWISTED Response To Ghislaine Maxwell Verdict
Watch the full episode here: https://novara.media/johnsonsbiggamble
Attorney General Sees Too Much Secrecy in Epstein Estate
The top prosecutor in the U.S. Virgin Islands says the estate needs to provide more detail about Jeffrey Epstein’s finances and is insisting on clauses that could protect others from wrongdoing.
Some of the same furtive techniques that Jeffrey Epstein employed in life are showing up in the litigation over dividing up the wealth he left behind when he died.
There are mysterious companies, lingering nondisclosure agreements and contractual clauses that some lawyers fear could protect anyone who took part in Mr. Epstein’s wrongdoing.
The estate’s lawyers say they have a plan to fairly distribute money to dozens of women who have accused Mr. Epstein of sexually abusing them as teenagers. But the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Mr. Epstein built a complex web of corporate entities, says Mr. Epstein’s money is still buying silence.
And in the middle is a fortune estimated at well over a half-billion dollars.
“We have a lot of concerns with respect to the transparency of the estate and its finances and the accounting of the estate,” the attorney general, Denise N. George, said in an interview last month.
Ms. George filed a civil forfeiture lawsuit against the estate in January, roughly five months after Mr. Epstein committed suicide while being held in federal custody in Manhattan after his arrest on sex trafficking charges. She said she sued to protect the interests of Mr. Epstein’s accusers and recoup some of the money that Mr. Epstein made during his two decades in the Virgin Islands.
The estate has insisted it is acting in the best interest of Mr. Epstein’s accusers. But it has also provided an incomplete accounting of his finances, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.
At least one business — IGO Company L.L.C., a corporate entity established by Mr. Epstein in December 2006 — was left out of the estate’s court filings. The company, which lists Mr. Epstein as its sole owner, was still active and in good standing as of Monday, according to a U.S. Virgin Islands government site.
Lawyers for the estate did not respond to a request for comment. The co-executors of the estate are Darren Indyke, a lawyer, and Richard Kahn, an accountant. Both men worked closely with Mr. Epstein for many years and were listed as officers for some of his businesses.
Much of the fighting between the estate and Ms. George’s office involves a plan to establish a victims’ compensation fund, which would allow accusers to receive payments from the estate without a potentially costly court case. The estate’s representatives say the proposed fund — which would be set up with the help of the specialist who ran the compensation program for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — would allow accusers to receive money quickly and privately.
But Ms. George said the estate wanted to attach too many strings to those payments.
On April 7, Ms. George’s office told the probate court handling Mr. Epstein’s will that she and the estate had reached an impasse over the estate’s demand that victims who take part in the fund agree to a broad release that would bar them from suing any party “whether they participated negligently or intentionally in wrongdoing themselves.”
To Ms. George, the estate’s conduct was a reminder of the legal maneuvers that surrounded Mr. Epstein’s guilty plea 12 years ago to soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida. In 2007, federal prosecutors agreed to a wide-ranging nonprosecution agreement that covered Mr. Epstein’s named and unnamed co-conspirators. (A federal appeals court this month rejected a legal challenge brought by one of his victims to the agreement.)
Ms. George’s office said the estate now wanted to “secure similarly broad protection for Epstein’s compatriots-in-crime from their victims.”
Lawyers for the estate reject that argument. In their response, they said Ms. George had mischaracterized the situation and said two lawyers representing several accusers were ready to move forward with the fund. The estate’s lawyers contend the liability release is “modeled on releases employed in multiple voluntary compensation programs.” Its intent, they say, is to make sure a victim does not double-dip by getting compensation from the fund and then suing an individual affiliated with the estate who might be entitled to be legally reimbursed by the estate.
The particulars of how Mr. Epstein made his millions have long been a mystery, in particular after his 2008 conviction. Financial filings the estate has made so far have raised as many questions as they have answered.
In January, the estate filed a required report that, along with routine transactions to pay bills and other expenses, showed the estate had transferred more than $12 million to Southern Country International, a little-known private bank Mr. Epstein had established in 2014.
The magistrate judge overseeing the probate of the will, Carolyn Hermon-Purcell, questioned the estate’s lawyers about the transfers and asked for a fuller accounting. The estate has not yet filed an explanation; the territory’s courts have granted blanket extensions because of the coronavirus outbreak.
But according to four people familiar with the matter, the estate’s $12 million payment to the bank involved preparations for Mr. Epstein’s criminal case. Mr. Epstein used the bank to pay a $12 million retainer fee to the criminal defense attorney Reid Weingarten, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter has not been made public.
In mid-December, Mr. Weingarten’s law firm, Steptoe & Johnson, returned the unused portion of that retainer — roughly $11 million, according to the estate’s first quarterly filing. The next day the estate sent that money to the bank.
What happened to the money in Southern Country after that is not clear; the estate reported the bank had a year-end balance of just $500,000.
Southern Country is an unusual kind of bank: an international banking entity, which is limited to conducting business for customers overseas. Mr. Epstein was approved for his license in 2014, but the bank had not commenced doing business as of April 2018, according to a letter the bank sent to its regulator.
According to two people briefed on the matter, Mr. Epstein began to move money to Southern Country last spring after Deutsche Bank, his longtime bank, decided to sever all ties with him in response to a series of stories about Mr. Epstein by The Miami Herald.
Ms. George’s office is small compared with her mainland counterparts, and she has bulked up its resources by hiring a forensic accountant and outside lawyers with Motley Rice, a large plaintiffs’ litigation firm. But it has been active.
In recent weeks, Ms. George’s office sent a subpoena seeking bank records for Mr. Epstein’s businesses in the Virgin Islands, according to two people briefed on the matter. She also subpoenaed some records from the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority, the government agency that granted lucrative tax benefits to Mr. Epstein’s companies, said Tracy Bhola, an authority lawyer.
According to one person familiar with the matter, Ms. George’s office has also made a demand for information from Mr. Epstein’s former girlfriend and business associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who recently filed a lawsuit against the estate asking it to cover her legal fees for any claims brought against her by his accusers.
Ms. George’s office has also reached out to some of Mr. Epstein’s former employees in the Virgin Islands. She said her office was trying to navigate around nondisclosure agreements that Mr. Epstein had signed with many of his them. She said the estate should commit to releasing the employees from those agreements.
“Just the existence of an N.D.A. casts a shadow or chilling effect on anyone speaking freely,” she said.
While many of Mr. Epstein’s companies — including IGO Company L.L.C. — continue to exist on paper, there is little left of their physical operations.
Those include Southern Trust, once Mr. Epstein’s main business venture, which generated $300 million in profits in just six years. Mr. Epstein had said it was a DNA research firm, although Ms. George said her office had found no evidence it engaged in that kind of work. Southern Trust alone is valued at $234 million, and the estate has yet to disclose where most of its assets are being held.
For months after his death, employees still showed up at the company’s office in the American Yacht Harbor club on St. Thomas. That stopped in late February, and by the start of last month the office doors were secured with a padlock.
‘Massage’ Was Code for ‘Sex’: New Epstein Abuse Revelations
A cache of documents offers disturbing testimony about what happened inside the Florida mansion owned by Jeffrey Epstein.
A rotating cast of girls would sit around Jeffrey Epstein’s waterfront mansion, drinking milk.
To Alfredo Rodriguez, Mr. Epstein’s butler in the mid-2000s, that was one reason he suspected that his boss was engaged in sexual activities with underage girls. At times, Mr. Rodriguez later told a Florida police detective in a sworn statement, he was instructed to dispense hundreds of dollars to the girls after they performed massages for Mr. Epstein; at other times, Mr. Rodriguez gave them “tips” in the form of iPods and jewelry.
Manhattan federal prosecutors last month charged Mr. Epstein, 66, with sex trafficking of girls as young as 14, and details of his behavior have been emerging for years.
But a cache of previously sealed legal documents, released on Friday by a federal appeals court, provides new, disturbing details about what was going on inside Mr. Epstein’s homes and how his associates recruited young women and girls, including from a Florida high school.
The documents — among the most expansive sets of materials publicly disclosed in the 13 years since Mr. Epstein was first charged with sex crimes — include depositions, police incident reports, photographs, receipts, flight logs and even a memoir written by a woman who says she was a sex-trafficking victim of Mr. Epstein and his acquaintances.
The documents were filed as part of a defamation lawsuit in federal court that Virginia Giuffre brought in 2015 against Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion and confidant. Ms. Giuffre and Ms. Maxwell settled the lawsuit shortly before the trial was to begin in 2017.
The Miami Herald and other media outlets petitioned the court to have the lawsuit documents unsealed. The request was initially denied, but an appeals court ordered them released last month, just days before Mr. Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Epstein, a financier with opulent homes, a private jet and access to elite circles, had been dogged for decades by accusations that he had paid dozens of girls for sexual acts in Florida. He previously avoided federal criminal charges in 2008 after prosecutors brokered a widely criticized deal that allowed him to plea to solicitation of prostitution from a minor and serve 13 months in jail.
About 2,000 pages of the materials were posted online by the appeals court on Friday, providing a high-definition glimpse inside what federal prosecutors have said was Mr. Epstein’s long-running sex-trafficking operation.
The fullest account is provided by Ms. Giuffre, who claims that Mr. Epstein forced her into being a “sex slave.”
In a sworn deposition, she said she first met Ms. Maxwell, the daughter of the British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, and Mr. Epstein in the summer of 2000, when she was 16. At the time, Ms. Giuffre was working as a masseuse at the spa at Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where her father was a maintenance worker.
She said she was sitting outside the locker room, reading a book on massage therapy, when Ms. Maxwell approached her. She said she knew someone who was looking for a traveling masseuse. “If the guy likes you, then, you know, it will work out for you. You’ll travel. You’ll make good money. You’ll be educated,” Ms. Giuffre recalled Ms. Maxwell telling her.
Ms. Giuffre took the job. Ms. Maxwell trained her on how to give erotic massages, and Ms. Giuffre soon began providing them to Mr. Epstein at his mansion in Palm Beach, Fla. Before long, she said, she was being flown on Mr. Epstein’s private Gulfstream jet to perform sexual services on Mr. Epstein’s acquaintances, including politicians and high-powered businessmen.
The word “massage” became code for “sex,” she said in the 2016 deposition. “My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy,” she said. “Their whole entire lives revolved around sex. They call massages sex. They call modeling sex.”
Ms. Maxwell’s depositions provide, for the first time, a glimpse at her perspective. She denounced Ms. Giuffre, saying that “everything Virginia has said is an absolute lie.” Lawyers for Ms. Maxwell were out of the country and unavailable for comment on Friday, their office said.
In court papers, the lawyers painted Ms. Giuffre as a troubled woman with a history of substance abuse and a turbulent personal life. They said her allegations shifted and became more lurid as she sought to sell her story to the media and publishers.
Ms. Giuffre had said she wrote her recollections of her experiences in a journal, but burned it in a bonfire that she and her husband built in their Titusville, Fla., backyard in 2013, according to court papers.
Back at Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home, partially shielded from view by a large hedge, it was hard for workers to miss what was happening.
John Alessi, a maintenance worker there from 1990 until about 2001, said he saw about 100 female masseuses at various times in the house.
After massages, Mr. Alessi said in a deposition, he occasionally found sex toys in Ms. Maxwell’s bathroom in the mansion. He said he put gloves on, rinsed the instruments and placed them in a closet.
Mr. Rodriguez, Mr. Epstein’s butler, had a similar recollection. In July 2006, he told a Palm Beach police detective in a sworn statement that after girls gave massages to Mr. Epstein, Mr. Rodriguez would go into his bedroom to wipe down vibrators and sex toys and then stash them in a wooden armoire near Mr. Epstein’s bed.
On occasion, Mr. Alessi said, he drove Ms. Maxwell from one Palm Beach spa to another, where she left her business cards in order to recruit massage therapists for Mr. Epstein.
Ms. Maxwell recruited Johanna Sjoberg in 2001 on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic College, where she was a student. Ms. Sjoberg said in a deposition that Ms. Maxwell dangled a job as a personal assistant. She figured she could make some quick money answering phones for Mr. Epstein.
But that was not what the job entailed. Once at Mr. Epstein’s mansion, Ms. Sjoberg said, she was told to perform sexual massages on Mr. Epstein — and was punished when he did not have an orgasm.
Around the mansion, massage tables were ubiquitous, even in outdoor spaces and in guest rooms, where Mr. Epstein would send women to service houseguests. “A massage was like a treat for all the guests at Mr. Epstein’s home,” Mr. Alessi said in an affidavit.
Mr. Rodriguez, the butler, told a Palm Beach police detective, Joseph Recarey, that he suspected the girls were underage in part because their eating habits reminded him of his daughter, who was in high school.
“Rodriguez stated they would eat tons of cereal and drink milk all the time,” according to a report Detective Recarey filed. Mr. Rodriguez died in 2015.
Also among the unsealed materials was an Amazon shipping document that shows a book on “erotic servitude” and a “Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners,” both of which were delivered to Mr. Epstein at his Palm Beach home.
Lawyers for Mr. Epstein did not respond to requests for comment.
The documents traced the investigation conducted by the Palm Beach Police Department, led by Detective Recarey. With the help of the local sanitation department, investigators sifted through Mr. Epstein’s trash, which yielded written phone messages, sometimes leading the police to potential victims.
Detective Recarey, who retired in 2013 after more than two decades on the force, said in a 2016 deposition that he interviewed about 30 girls who were sought to give massages. Some of the girls were terrified and tearful as he interviewed them.
A number of the girls, including one who was 15 at the time, said they were brought to Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach house and told they could make money by modeling lingerie for him, according to reports that Detective Recarey filed and that were unsealed.
Once at the mansion, a chef would prepare the girls a meal. Then they would be escorted upstairs to the master bedroom. Mr. Epstein, clad in a towel, often would request a massage of his feet and calves. He would touch the girls while masturbating under his towel. They were generally paid $200 per visit.
Mr. Rodriguez told Detective Recarey, who died last year, that he was a “human A.T.M.,” required to always have at least $2,000 on hand to pay the women and girls. Once, Mr. Epstein instructed him to deliver a dozen roses to one of the girls at her high school after a drama performance.