New Epstein records cache offers names of VIP pals, victim’s efforts to get him arrested
She doesn’t remember exactly how she got to Jeffrey Epstein’s room or what she was told to lure her there.
“I was just there, and all of a sudden something horrible happened to me,” the girl recalled during a June 2016 deposition made public Thursday among a cache of 19 court documents related to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The victim, whose name is redacted and who was about 16 or 17 at the time, was vague on the details. But that was by design.
As she explained, “I worked very, very hard to not recall anything specific about my sexual encounters with this person as one of his victims.”
Sometimes she joined the scantily clad girls and young women who sat around Epstein’s swimming pool, but the victim makes clear that there was nothing social about the gathering.
READ MORE: First look at Jeffrey Epstein ‘John Doe’ files: Clinton, Copperfield, Trump and more
“None of those girls were [my] friends. We were all there just through that mutual connection,” she said, referring to being with Epstein.
The victim’s deposition is part of a defamation suit filed by another Epstein accuser, Virginia Giuffre, against the financier’s longtime girlfriend, Maxwell. The court file relating to the settled lawsuit has long been sealed by the presiding judge, now deceased. The depo, and and scores of other related documents, are being released this week by the court in stages in response to a years-long court fight by the Miami Herald.
The documents are a stark reminder of what the lawsuit was about in the first place: the sexual assault of countless underage girls at Epstein’s Palm Beach estate and other homes he owned.
And of the many people who, according to Giuffre’s legal team, had “knowledge of” Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking crimes. The legal team submitted a list of such persons.
The suit was filed by Giuffre against Maxwell in federal court in New York in 2015 after Giuffre accused Maxwell and Epstein of abusing her and insntructing her to have sex with their friends. Maxwell called Giuffre a liar.
Evidence gathered as part of the discovery process, now released, provide details about the couple’s association with powerful people, including men with whom Giuffre claimed she was forced to have sex as a teen.
Thursday’s documents show her lawyers’ first disclosures of witnesses who, they said, could potentially help Giuffre prove that Maxwell and Epstein sexually abused her and other underage girls. Such initial disclosures are used in civil litigation to identify individuals or witnesses who a party may use to support its claims or defenses. They include a brief description of what the witnesses were anticipated to testify about.
In this instance, the documents unsealed by the court do not explain how these individuals would have knowledge of Epstein and Maxwell’s trafficking of Giuffre — if in fact they did. Most of those identified have previously stated they did not witness or know anything about the couple’s crimes.
Among the potential witnesses who were listed: former president Bill Clinton; Clinton advisor Doug Band; lawyer Alan Dershowitz; Britain’s Prince Andrew; insurance mogul Robert Meister; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; hedge fund investor Glen Dubin and his wife, Eva; and millionaire businessman Ron Burkle, as well as about a dozen others, primarily former Epstein housekeepers, pilots, assistants and other staff. More than 20 of the 87 potential witnesses were listed as having knowledge of Maxwell and Epstein’s “sexual trafficking conduct,” with the names of four of those potential witnesses still redacted.
READ MORE: Dershowitz joins Miami Herald effort to get full list of Epstein ‘John Does’ unsealed
Documents released earlier this week included names of others in Epstein’s social circle, including Donald Trump, David Copperfield and Michael Jackson. None of the three appeared on the witness list.
The documents provide a deeper window into Giuffre’s quest to get the FBI and federal prosecutors to arrest Epstein. Some of the documents include emails to FBI agents and a former federal prosecutor, Maria Villafana, who was thwarted in her efforts to get her superiors to agree to charge Epstein around 2011. That was years after he was able to negotiate an extraordinarily lenient plea deal with Palm Beach County officials amid allegations that he had sexually exploited more than a dozen young women and girls.
More than 70 pages are devoted to email exchanges between Giuffre and Sharon Churcher, a journalist who first wrote about Giuffre’s allegations against Prince Andrew for the Daily Mail. The emails show they developed a friendship, as Churcher coached Giuffre into recording her experiences in a diary that could be published as a book.
Maxwell’s lawyers intended to use the emails to show that Giuffre’s allegations were motivated by money and that Churcher prodded her to embellish those allegations against prominent men.
“Don’t forget Alan Dershowitz...JE’s buddy and lawyer..good name for your pitch as he repped Claus von Bulow and a movie was made about that case...title was Reversal of Fortune,” Churcher wrote in a May 2011 email. “We all suspect Alan is a pedo and tho no proof of that, you probably met him when he was hanging put w JE.”
Dershowitz denied having sex with Giuffre, and in settling a lawsuit with the Harvard professor in 2022, she admitted that she might have been mistaken in identifying him as one of the men she was forced to have sex with as a teenager.
A June 2011 email from Churcher praised the synopsis for Giuffre’s book, “The Billionaires Playboy Club,” advising “the one thing you need to address is how many names to name [of men] and when.”
“I would download and attach every article you can find about you and Jeffrey,” she advised in another June 2011 email.
The book was never published.
In a May 30, 2011 email, Giuffre said Vanity Fair wanted to purchase a photo of her with Prince Andrew, one of several powerful men she said she was coerced into having sex with. She and Churcher weighed the benefits of the exposure.
“When i was doing some research into VF yesterday,” Giuffre wrote,”it does concern me what they could want to write about me considering that B.Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficking articles about his good friend J.E.”
Churcher responded saying that it would be a gamble to mention to Vanity Fair that she was writing a book.
“... The reason this is a gamble is Jeffrey knows some of the most powerful people in publishing and, once alerted, will inevitably try to scare off potential buyers. But the upside is it should help you get a good agent.”
In response to this week’s unsealed documents, a spokesman for the former president directed the Herald to a statement issued on behalf of Clinton in 2019, which indicated that Clinton had no knowledge of Epstein’s “terrible crimes.”
After the Miami Herald published a series of stories in 2018 titled Perversion of Justice, the Justice Department took a fresh look at Epstein, ultimately arresting him on sex trafficking charges. He was found hanged in his cell a month after the arrest.
Maxwell was charged as well with sex trafficking, convicted in New York and is serving a 20-year-sentence at a prison in Tallahassee, Florida.
