Manhattan Federal Ghislaine Maxwell trial evidence exhibits.

Ghislaine Maxwell via U.S. Justice Department

Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell was born on Christmas Day, December 25, 1961, in Maisons-Laffitte, France. She was the ninth and youngest child of Czech born British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell and his French born wife, Elisabeth “Betty” Maxwell. Ghislaine held British and French citizenship by birth.

Her entrance into the world was marked by tragedy, for just three days after her birth, her 15 year old brother, Michael, was in a devastating car accident that left him in a coma from which he never recovered, dying in 1967. Her mother later wrote that the traumatized family “hardly gave a glance” to baby Ghislaine during this period, and that she even developed "anorexia as a toddler. This neglect eventually gave way to overcompensation, and Ghislaine soon became her powerful father’s undisputed favorite — earning the unique distinction of having his superyacht named after her: the Lady Ghislaine.

The Bouncing Czech

Robert Maxwell, father of the notorious Ghislaine, was born Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch in 1923 in Slatinske Doly, a small village in what was then Czechoslovakia. He was the son of poor Jewish parents, and by the time he was a teenager, the Nazis had occupied his homeland. His parents, his grandparents, and most of his siblings were murdered in the Holocaust.

Global Economic Panel Amsterdam, 1989. Left to right: Wisse Dekker, Hans van den Broek, Henry Kissinger and Robert Maxwell
Source: nationaalarchief.nl

He arrived in Britain penniless — he joined the British Army, fought with distinction, and was decorated. After the war he changed his name. He went into business using contacts in the Allied occupation authorities to distribute scientific publications across Europe. Robert built a publishing empire — he bought the Mirror Group of newspapers. He also bought his infamous super yacht and named it after his daughter.

The Dancing Hare — formerly Lady Ghislaine, is a superyacht built by Amels in 1986. Built for Emad Khashoggi, it was then purchased, also in 1986, by Robert Maxwell, who died by drowning in 1991 while cruising on the yacht off the Canary Islands. It was then owned by an Arabian businessman who sold it in 2017. The new owner, Anna Murdoch, had it refitted and renamed Dancing Hare. — Dancing Hare Wikipedia
Photo Source: Andrew Rutherford

He bought Oxford United Football Club, and he ran for Parliament as a Labor MP and won. Robert didn’t just carry power—he wore it like a second skin, something he could never shed.

The British press called him ‘Cap’ n Bob’ — They called him the Bouncing Czech. Private Eye called him a fraud and was sued for it, repeatedly. He was litigious, volcanic, vain. Maxwell bugged his own employees because he believed they were disloyal to him. He could be a monster to his family, also. His son Kevin later said his relationship with his father was strained in his final months of life. Biographer John Sweeney described Robert Maxwell as a ‘sadist who loved sadism as spectacle’.

He was also, according to multiple intelligence sources and at least two book length investigations, a long serving asset of Israeli intelligence.

‘He has done more for Israel than can today be said.’
— Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir; eulogy at Robert Maxwell’s funeral, Jerusalem, November 1991

In the 1970s, Mossad reportedly stole PROMIS — a sophisticated case management and intelligence gathering software developed in the United States — and modified it into a surveillance tool. According to Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, authors of Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, Maxwell was the primary salesman. He sold the modified software to governments and intelligence agencies across the world, including China, Russia, and India. Each installation was a listening post. Maxwell, per the authors’ sources, was Mossad’s representative in those transactions and received tens of millions of dollars for it.

Separately, former Israeli Military Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe has stated publicly that he encountered both Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein in Maxwell’s offices in the 1980s, during arms transactions. Ben-Menashe’s account, which he gave to journalist Zev Shalev, places Epstein inside Maxwell’s intelligence network before Epstein ever met Ghislaine. That account is unverified. It has not been retracted.

What is not disputed: Robert Maxwell was buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives on November 10, 1991. The service was attended by six former heads of Israeli intelligence, the President of Israel Chaim Herzog, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who delivered the eulogy. It was a state funeral for a man who held no public office in Israel. The mourners who showed up to bury him tell you something about who he was.

Death Aboard Lady Ghislaine

On the night of November 4 to 5, 1991, Robert Maxwell went overboard from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, into the Atlantic ocean near the Canary Islands. He was 68 years old. By morning, his body — naked — had been recovered from the water.

Spanish authorities initially reported no suspicion of foul play. Yet when three pathologists examined Robert Maxwell’s body, they failed to reach a unified conclusion. The official ruling ultimately settled on a heart attack followed by accidental drowning. His widow, Elisabeth Maxwell, and daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, publicly rejected that finding — insisting instead that he had been murdered.

Shortly before his death, Maxwell had discovered that £400 million was missing from his companies’ pension funds. He had been raiding them for years to prop up his failing business empire. The fraud was about to become public, the exposure imminent. Debt was tightening around him and the creditors were closing in.

Investigative journalist Gordon Thomas later argued — citing sources within Mossad — that Robert Maxwell had attempted to blackmail the agency into rescuing him financially, and was killed when they refused. A former Mossad operative, identified as Efraim in interviews with Thomas and Martin Dillon, claimed participation in the operation. Mossad has never confirmed these allegations, and the official cause of death has never been revised.

How Ghislaine Met Jeffrey Epstein

The exact circumstances of how Ghislaine Maxwell first met Jeffrey Epstein remain disputed. In a 2016 deposition, Maxwell said they met in 1991 through a mutual friend. Other accounts — including the documentary series, Filthy Rich: Jeffrey Epstein series on Netflix — suggest Epstein was introduced to her by her father, Robert Maxwell, implying he had already been moving within the family’s orbit in the 1980s.

Steven Hoffenberg — who was imprisoned for the Towers Financial Corporation fraud while Epstein avoided charges at the time — claimed before his death in 2022 that Epstein had acknowledged ties to Mossad and credited those connections with enabling his access and wealth.

What is well established is that by 1992 they were together. British photographers spotted them at Heathrow Airport and by 1993, they had attended a White House reception for donors hosted by Bill Clinton. By the mid 90s, they were photographed together regularly at elite events across New York, Palm Beach, and Europe.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Ghislaine Maxwell. via U.S. Justice Department

Their relationship resisted all simple labels. To some, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein appeared to be a romantic couple. To others, she functioned more as a household manager, an executive assistant, a social architect then a lover. Epstein himself called her his best friend. Flight logs from his private jets would later show she was his most frequent co-passenger over more than a decade. What emerged was a relationship that fused intimacy, logistics, and mutual advantage — and, as federal prosecutors would later establish, criminal conspiracy.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell aboard his private jet, undated. via U.S. Justice Department

What she brought him was irreplaceable — access. Her father had been at the center of three intelligence services, a publishing empire, and the highest levels of British and Israeli political life. Ghislaine had grown up inside that world and could move in it without effort. She connected Epstein to the Clintons, to Prince Andrew, to the British royal household, to European aristocracy, to academics and politicians and financiers who would otherwise have taken years for a former math teacher from Brooklyn to reach. In return, Epstein bankrolled her life completely.

‘Ghislaine is the contact between Epstein and Clinton. She ended up being close to the family because she and Chelsea ended up becoming close.’
— Source familiar with the relationship, Politico, 2019

Isabel Maxwell and the Tech Pipeline

While Ghislaine Maxwell was building Jeffrey Epstein’s social network in the United States, her older sister, Isabel Maxwell, was building something else entirely.

Investigative reporter Whitney Webb has described Isabel as a kind of “back door” into Silicon Valley for Israeli tech interests. In 1997, she became president of Commtouch — an Israeli firm that, under her leadership, attracted investment from Bill Gates and other major U.S. tech figures. According to Haaretz, she stated in 2001 that she intended to work only on projects involving Israel — reflecting a clear alignment with Israeli technological development. Over time, she became a recognized liaison, connecting early stage Israeli tech companies with private angel investors in the United States.

Around the same period, parallel efforts were underway inside the U.S. intelligence ecosystem to solve what became known as the “connecting the dots” problem after 9/11. Firms like Chiliad Inc. developed software capable of integrating vast, siloed datasets across agencies — allowing analysts to uncover hidden relationships across millions of records in real time . The goal was to fuse fragmented information into a single, searchable intelligence environment.

Placed side by side, these developments point to a broader shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s: networks — social, financial, and informational — were no longer just being built. They were being mapped, integrated, and made searchable.

Isabel Maxwell’s son, Alexander Djerassi, went to work for Hillary Clinton’s 2007 presidential campaign shortly after graduating, contributing policy memos, briefing materials, and debate preparation.

Virginia Giuffre: The Recruitment That Broke the Network Open

In the summer of 2000, Virginia Giuffre was 16, working as a spa attendant at Mar a Lago — a job her father had helped her get. She had already endured childhood sexual abuse, run away as a teenager, and been briefly pulled into a trafficking operation that ended with an FBI arrest. On a break, she sat reading a book on massage therapy.

Ghislaine Maxwell noticed the book and struck up a conversation — asked about her interests and plans. Then came the offer — a wealthy man in need of a traveling massage therapist, no experience necessary.

Years later, Giuffre would tell Julie K. Brown:

“They seemed like nice people so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then. That was the worst thing I could have told them—because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”

The grooming began immediately, and by Virginia Giuffre’s account, Ghislaine Maxwell ran it. She testified that Maxwell gave detailed instruction on Jeffrey Epstein’s preferences—explicit guidance on what he wanted and how to provide it. “A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself,” she told the Miami Herald. The abuse, she said, continued from 1999 through 2002. During that period, Giuffre alleged she was directed by Maxwell and Epstein to have sexual contact with multiple powerful men, including Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, Glenn Dubin, Bill Richardson, and Marvin Minsky. All of those named have denied the allegations.

In 2002, Giuffre said Maxwell gave her a plane ticket to Thailand with instructions to attend a massage school and return with a specific Thai girl for Epstein. Instead, Giuffre went to Thailand, met an Australian man, married him, and did not ever return. Virginia later said that decision saved her life.

Virginia Giuffre died by suicide on April 25, 2025, at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41 years old, and a mother of three. Over the final decade of her life, she pursued civil actions and spoke publicly on behalf of herself and other survivors. Her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, was published in October 2025. Maria Farmer, the first known survivor to report Epstein and Maxwell to law enforcement in 1996, called her “a fierce warrior” who “did this for everyone’s daughters.”

“She did this for everyone’s daughters. Let’s now demand all the dominos of power and corruption begin to fall.” — Maria Farmer, April 2025

The Clinton Connection

According to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, these pictures were captured by White House photographer Ralph Alswang on Sept. 29, 1993. Epstein and Maxwell were photographed speaking with Clinton after the president made remarks at an event for donors to the White House restoration project.
Source: wikimediacommons

Ghislaine Maxwell was not merely adjacent to the Clinton family. By multiple accounts, she moved within their social and institutional circle for years.

She was present at a White House reception for donors in 1993. She has also said that she suggested to Jeffrey Epstein that he make his Boeing 727 available to Bill Clinton for international travel in 2002 and 2003. Flight logs from that period show Clinton and his entourage traveled on Epstein’s plane to destinations including Rwanda, Russia, and China, with “GM” appearing in the passenger records on those trips.

In 2009, Maxwell vacationed on a private yacht with Chelsea Clinton, and in July 2010, she attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding at the Astor Courts Estate. Photographs confirm her presence. Hillary Clinton later told the House Oversight Committee that Maxwell attended as the guest of another invitee, declining to elaborate further.

Let’s look at the timing: by July 2010, Maxwell had already been publicly named in civil litigation, Virginia Giuffre filed a federal civil suit in 2009 naming Maxwell as a participant in her abuse, and Epstein had already served a jail sentence in 2008–2009. Maxwell attended the wedding while facing those allegations.

In 2013, Maxwell was an honored guest at the Clinton Global Initiative annual conference, where she received applause during a luncheon on ocean conservation. Reporting by CNN’s KFile later found she had been placed on a list for complimentary access reportedly recommended by either Bill or Hillary Clinton. Her TerraMar Project was recognized as a “Commitment to Action” partner, a designation that remained associated with the Clinton Foundation through at least March 2015.

Maxwell later told the U.S. Department of Justice in a 2025 interview that she last saw Bill Clinton between 2016 and 2018, recalling a dinner in Los Angeles. She characterized the relationship directly: “President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend.”

Clinton and Epstein via U.S. Justice Department

Prince Andrew and the Balmoral Emails

Prince Andrew was introduced to Epstein in 1999 by Ghislaine Maxwell, whom he had known since Oxford. Their social circle overlapped extensively: Andrew attended events Maxwell hosted, Maxwell visited Buckingham Palace, and Epstein appeared at Windsor Castle parties including one hosted by the Queen to mark four family birthdays in 2000, at which Harvey Weinstein was also a guest.

Weinstein, Epstein and Maxwell via U.S. Justice Department

In August 2001, emails now in the DOJ Epstein files show correspondence between Maxwell and an individual using an address under the name The Invisible Man, at a dial up account with the handle abx17. The person wrote: ‘I am up here at Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family.’ The person referenced leaving the Royal Navy, losing their valet, and having their life ‘in turmoil.’ Prince Andrew left the Royal Navy in July 2001. Maxwell responded that she had only been able to find ‘appropriate friends.’

Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew in an undated photograph via U.S. Justice Department

Virginia Giuffre alleged that Maxwell told her in early 2001 that she had to ‘do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey.’ Giuffre described being taken to Maxwell’s Belgravia townhouse in London, where she had sexual contact with the prince. Andrew has denied any recollection of meeting Giuffre. A photograph of Andrew with his arm around a then 17 year old Virginia Giuffre, alongside Maxwell, was confirmed authentic by multiple parties including the DOJ.

Andrew, Virginia, and Maxwell via U.S. Justice Department

Andrew settled Giuffre’s civil lawsuit against him in February 2022 without admitting wrongdoing, for an undisclosed sum reported to be in the millions. In October 2025, amid renewed scrutiny triggered by the release of Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, King Charles III initiated a formal process to strip Andrew of his remaining styles and titles. In February 2026, Andrew was arrested by British police on suspicion of misconduct in public office, following the release of emails appearing to show he had forwarded confidential trade documents to Epstein. He was released under investigation.

— EFTA00266220

The bad actors are better at connecting with each other than the good actors are at stopping them. That is the only explanation for how long this lasted.

TerraMar: The Cover Story

In 2012, as her name was beginning to appear in civil lawsuits, Ghislaine Maxwell founded the TerraMar Project, a nonprofit organization nominally dedicated to ocean conservation. She gave a TED Talk, she spoke at the United Nations. She even wrote for the Huffington Post. She appeared on Bloomberg and CNN International — she was honored at the Clinton Global Initiative.

The New York Times later described TerraMar as ‘an opaque organisation that had no offices and gave no grants to other organisations.’ Its greatest accomplishment, the Times said, was helping Maxwell maintain social capital.

At a 2013 conference in Reykjavik, she was introduced to Scott Borgerson, a former Coast Guard officer and tech entrepreneur who had founded a maritime data analytics company called CargoMetrics. He was married with two children. His wife later alleged he was abusive, which he denied. He filed for divorce in December 2015, and he and Maxwell reportedly married on Christmas Day, 2016, exactly 55 years after she was born. Their union was kept secret from the public, from press, and from Maxwell’s own family.

When Maxwell was arrested in Bradford, New Hampshire, on July 2, 2020, it was in a property purchased under a shell company called Granite Realty. The FBI located her using a stingray mobile phone tracking device that intercepted a phone she was calling to Borgerson, her sister Isabel, and one of her lawyers. She had been hiding in the rural property with former British special forces personnel as security. She had moved 36 times since Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

In a 2021 phone call from jail, Borgerson told Maxwell he had moved on. The marriage ended there and then.

The Trial and the Verdict

Maxwell’s federal trial began in November 2021 in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors charged her with six federal counts: enticement of minors, transportation of a minor for criminal sexual activity, sex trafficking of a minor, and related conspiracy charges. She pleaded not guilty to all counts.

Four women testified against her at trial, identified by pseudonyms. Their accounts spanned from the early 1990s to the mid 2000s. They described being recruited as teenagers, being trained by Maxwell in what Epstein expected, and being directed to perform sexual acts on Epstein. Trial evidence included a photograph of Maxwell and Epstein together at a log cabin on the Balmoral estate, admitted to establish the nature and duration of their partnership.

Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell at Balmoral Estate via U.S. Justice Department

On December 29, 2021, the jury convicted Maxwell on five of the six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor. On June 28, 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. At sentencing, prosecutors said she had shown absolutely no remorse and had made misrepresentations when it suits her. The judge said: ‘The evidence at trial established that Ms Maxwell directly and repeatedly and over the course of many years participated in a horrific scheme to entice, transport and traffic underage girls, some as young as 14, for sexual abuse by and with Jeffrey Epstein.’

She is currently incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security women’s prison in Bryan, Texas, where she is scheduled for release on July 17, 2037.

Her defense maintained throughout trial and appeals that she was a scapegoat, prosecuted as a substitute for Epstein after his death. In February 2026, Maxwell appeared before the House Oversight Committee and invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on every question, declining to answer — but stating she would speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump. Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out a pardon.

Dancing Hare, Emad Khashoggi, and the Murdered Journalist

The yacht Robert Maxwell named after his daughter has its own tangled history, one that ties the Maxwell-Epstein network to another tragedy: the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

To mark the one year anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder, POMED and 12 other human rights and press freedom organizations held a public event on Capitol Hill to commemorate Jamal’s life, to call for accountability, and to cast a light on the Saudi government’s repression of those who are perceived to be critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his regime.
Source: POMED

The vessel was built in 1986 for Emad Khashoggi, a wealthy Saudi businessman and arms dealer who was the cousin of Jamal Khashoggi. Emad’s older brother Adnan Khashoggi was also a legendary arms dealer, known for a lavish lifestyle that included the superyacht Nabila (later owned by Donald Trump). Emad abandoned the project, and the yacht was sold to Robert Maxwell the same year it was launched. Maxwell then renamed it Lady Ghislaine.

Jamal Khashoggi — a prominent Saudi journalist, Washington Post columnist, and critic of the Saudi crown prince — was murdered on October 2, 2018, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. According to Saudi Arabia’s own investigation, a 15 man hit squad killed Khashoggi, dismembered his body, and removed it from the building. His remains have never been found. A CIA assessment concluded with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the operation. The United Nations special rapporteur called it an ‘extrajudicial killing’ for which Saudi Arabia is responsible.

To be clear: the yacht is not connected to Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. That crime occurred in a diplomatic building in Turkey, not on a yacht. The connection is familial, but I felt necessary to add. The yacht was built for Jamal’s cousin Emad, and Emad’s brother Adnan was the original owner of Trump’s yacht Nabila. A small number of online sources have noted the Khashoggi family link as a curiosity — the TravelSkite blog, for example, observed that the yacht was ‘built for the Saudi businessman cousin of recently murdered (and dismembered) journalist Jamal Khashoggi’ — but there is no evidence of any direct involvement by the Maxwell or Epstein network in Khashoggi’s death. But in the shadow world these people occupied, it is one more thread connecting billionaires, weapons deals, intelligence operations, and the mutilated bodies of journalists.

What Has Not Been Answered

Maxwell was convicted, Epstein is dead, and the network that enabled them for three decades is, as far as the public record shows, largely still intact.

No other individual has been federally charged in connection with the trafficking operation Maxwell ran with Epstein and the DOJ’s Epstein Files Transparency Act releases have confirmed the scope of the network, identified figures including Prince Andrew in email correspondence, and documented the scale of Epstein’s access to political and financial power. No client list has been produced. The FBI stated in 2025 that no list was found. The Department of Justice has also acknowledged that it withheld some files from public release, including documents containing allegations against President Trump — an admission that undercuts the promise of full transparency.

Maxwell herself told the DOJ in 2025 that she had information about individuals who had committed crimes against victims. She has not provided that information publicly. She has provided it, under a grant of limited immunity, to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in a jail interview. What she said has not been disclosed.

The mechanism that made all of this possible — the social legitimization, the elite access, the tolerance of powerful institutions, the intelligence community connections that appear throughout the record — has not been publicly examined at the institutional level. Robert Maxwell’s intelligence connections were buried with him. His daughter carried them forward into a relationship with a man who used them to build a blackmail infrastructure that reached into the White House, Buckingham Palace, and the highest levels of finance and academia across the Western world.

Ghislaine Maxwell did not appear from nowhere, she was built for this. The question that has never been adequately put to power is who, exactly, was running the operation she helped operate — and whether it ended with her conviction.

The record says it did not.

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Sources

Wikipedia — ‘Ghislaine Maxwell’ (updated March 2026)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghislaine_Maxwell

Wikipedia — ‘Robert Maxwell’ (updated March 2026)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell

Wikipedia — ‘Virginia Giuffre’ (updated March 2026)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Giuffre

Wikipedia — ‘Relationship of Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein’ (updated March 2026)
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ABC News — ‘How Ghislaine Maxwell went from high society to being accused of sex trafficking’ (2021)
https://abcnews.go.com/US/ghislaine-maxwell-high-society-accused-sex-trafficking/story?id=78306149

NBC News — ‘Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent abuse survivors, dies by suicide’ (April 26, 2025)
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Times of Israel — ‘Did father Robert Maxwell’s early abuse taint Ghislaine long before she met Epstein?’ (January 2023)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/did-father-robert-maxwells-early-abuse-taint-ghislaine-long-before-she-met-epstein/

Times of Israel — ‘Ghislaine Maxwell’s family history marked by scandal, secrecy and conspiracy’ (December 2021)
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Electronic Intifada — ‘US media barely touches Epstein links with Israeli intelligence’ (July 2025)
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MintPress / ZNetwork / ScheerPost — ‘The CIA, Mossad, and Epstein: Unraveling the Intelligence Ties of the Maxwell Family’ (August 2025)
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Oxford Student — ‘Tracing former Oxford socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s path to convict’ (March 2026)
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Outlook India — ‘Ghislaine Maxwell: The Woman at the Center of the Epstein Files Saga’ (2026)
https://www.outlookindia.com/international/ghislaine-maxwell-the-woman-at-the-center-of-the-epstein-files-saga-news-401337

CNN — ‘Ghislaine Maxwell was honored at a prestigious Clinton event years after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced’ (August 2025)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/politics/ghislaine-maxwell-clinton-event/index.html

GV Wire — ‘Epstein Files Reveal Scope of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Role in Clinton Circle’ (February 2026)
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John Sweeney — Hunting Ghislaine (2022)

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https://www.justice.gov/epstein-files-transparency-act

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https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-sentenced-20-years-prison-conspiring-jeffrey-epstein-sexually

EpsteinExposed.com — Ghislaine Maxwell connection profile (sourced from court filings)
https://www.epsteinexposed.com/ghislaine-maxwell

TravelSkite — ‘Hare, and there’ (January 6, 2021)
http://www.travelskite.com/2021/01/hare-and-there.html

Wikipedia — ‘Dancing Hare’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Hare

https://www.inknowvation.com/sbir/story/chiliad-company-solved-911-connecting-dots-problem-hires-dan-ferranti-ceo-industry

https://nypost.com/2021/12/07/take-a-look-inside-jeffrey-epsteins-creepy-manhattan-lair/

This piece contains sworn testimony describing the sexual abuse of a thirteen year old child.
Reader discretion is advised.

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Case No. 9:08-cv-80994 (S.D. Fla.). Filed September 10, 2008. Case documents hosted in the DOJ Epstein Library (justice.gov/epstein). Settlement terms, if any, remain sealed. No public record of criminal charges related to this victim.

She only weighed eighty pounds

That detail is horrifying, and I keep coming back to it. Not the marble floors of the Palm Beach mansion, not the cab ride across the bridge and not the massage table, or the robe, or what came after. This 13 year old girl weighed only eighty pounds. A child so small she knew — even at thirteen — that there was no version of this where she could run.

She knew that before he even said a word.

Cover page — Videotaped Compulsory Medical Evaluation of Jane Doe No. 6. Case No. 08-CIV-80119-MARRA/JOHNSON.
November 23, 2009. This examination was commissioned by Jeffrey Epstein's legal team. She was 19 years old, 13 when he abused her. — EFTA00723681

The document I am publishing today is not a news article, not a summary. It is a transcript — 204 pages of sworn testimony taken on November 23, 2009, in West Palm Beach, Florida. The deponent is identified only as Jane Doe No. 6. She was nineteen years old when she sat in that room but she had been only thirteen when Jeffrey Epstein abused and raped her.

The evaluation was commissioned by Epstein’s own legal team. The doctor asking the questions — Dr. Ryan Hall, M.D. — was retained by the defense. This was not a safe space, at all This was not a therapist’s office. This was a forensic examination designed to find cracks in her story, inconsistencies in her history, reasons to dismiss her.

But, they did not find any.

“He didn’t need to threaten me. He was bigger than me, and he was — I was a child, you know.”

She answered every question for nine hours straight. She talked about her parents, her neighborhood, her fights at school, her father’s drinking, the car accident on I-4 that still makes her grip the passenger seat. She talked about the boyfriend who shot himself in front of her house when she was sixteen. She talked about cutting herself, about Xanax and marijuana and depression that swallowed her whole.

And then, somewhere around page 108, she started talking about August 8, 2004.

What Happened

She remembered the date because of her friend Melissa. Melissa’s birthday was 8/8/88 — four eights — and she was turning sixteen that day. She remembered it because Melissa had gotten into a car accident on her birthday. That is how memory works when you are thirteen and something happens that will follow you for the rest of your life — you anchor it to something else, something ordinary — because the event itself is too large to hold alone.

A girl she knew — referred to in the transcript as E.W — had approached her. E.W told her they would go to ‘some guy’s house,’ give him a massage, maketwo hundred dollars. A mutual friend, another Jane Doe, told her it would ‘be okay.’ She had been there before. She went all the time.

Her description of the room — sworn testimony.
— EFTA00723710

E.W told her to lie about her age.

She was only thirteen years old.

They took a cab from her neighborhood to Palm Beach Island. When they arrived, E.W walked into the house like she had been there before — because she had. They went up the stairs and into a room with a massage table, a sauna, and another door that led to an office.

Epstein was already lying on the table.

E.W started rubbing his back and less than a minute later, she left the room.

And then it was just the two of them.

“I was by myself. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel like I could say yes... tell him no and then try to run? I mean, like, you know, I weighed like 80 pounds. I mean, I was terrified.”

The core testimony. This is the most critical evidentiary page in the document.
— EFTA00723711

He flipped over, looked at her, and asked her if she wanted to take off her clothes.

She undressed and did not resist, knowing she stood no chance. She kept her underwear on — she stood there, frozen, while he touched her chest and ‘pleasured himself’.

She did not scream, she did not run. She stood there frozen — stuck — in her own words, because that is what children do when a powerful adult has engineered a situation where every exit has already been removed from them.

When Epstein was done, he walked into the sauna. She went into the office to wait for E.W, where she retrieved her two hundred dollars from his robe on the way out.

They walked to City Place, caught a bus and left.

She never went back.

Why She Didn’t Tell Anyone

This is the question people always ask. Why didn’t she report it. Why didn’t she tell her parents. Why didn’t she go to the police.

She answered it under oath. In her own words, with no coaching, while sitting across from a doctor hired by Epstein’s defense team, at only nine teen years old.

“What’s to tell? I mean, I feel more, like, low and lousy that I would even consider to go over to somebody’s house like that. Why would I tell somebody, so then they think of me low.”

The shame. The calculation that no one would believe her, or worse, that they would think less of her for going. This page is the reason survivors don’t report.
— EFTA00723713

She was thirteen years old, and she had already internalized the shame that this man had engineered for her. She didn’t even know the street she had been taken to. She remembered seeing his first name on a nameplate on the desk and she didn’t know his last name until years later, when the FBI came to her probation officer’s office looking for her.

She didn’t go looking for justice. Justice found her, sort of, in the way it always seems to find these women — incomplete, delayed, dressed up as a forensic evaluation on behalf of the man who hurt her.

She joined the civil lawsuit because, as she put it:

“It’s not fair. It’s not fair that he like does this to people, like to little girls. Kids shouldn’t have to go through stuff like that. They are young and innocent.”

She said that at nineteen, sitting in a room full of strangers, on behalf of a defense doctor, while her babysitter waited at home and her 22 month old son was asking for her.

She said it crying, then she asked to go home.

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A Note to Paid Subscribers

You paid for this — that means you paid for what doesn’t make it into the article — the full document stack, the claims I can prove versus the ones I can’t yet, the threads that are still open, and the question that hasn’t been answered.

This archive exists because accountability journalism lives or dies in the primary sources. The article above tells you what happened. This tells you exactly where to find it, what every claim rests on, and where the investigation still has work to do.

The $50,000 Governor is one of the cleaner stories in the EFTA corpus — not because it’s simple, but because the documents are unusually direct. A campaign finance list, an email routing an introduction through Epstein’s personal blessing. Staff monitoring their own exposure in real time and years of contact after the conviction. A lawyer calling SDNY proactively before anyone asked.

That last one still gets me — nobody does that unless they’re worried about something.

Everything below is primary sourced or clearly labeled where it isn’t. The one claim that couldn’t be documented is logged here, not in the article.

Read more

This is our 6th dispatch on the Epstein Files and Depositions

The Epstein investigation is no longer stalled in the same places it was. Some doors are slowly moving, while others are closing.

A subpoenaed deposition came and went with no witness. A federal judge signed off on another bank settlement and new witnesses have been scheduled — some of them are names you know. The civil money keeps climbing and the criminal charges remain a big fat zero.

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ANOTHER DEPOSITION THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee for a sworn deposition on April 14, 2026, following a bipartisan subpoena issued in March.

Not surprising to anyone, she did not appear.

The Department of Justice informed the committee that Bondi would not show up, arguing that the subpoena was issued in her official capacity as attorney general and no longer applied after President Trump fired her on April 2.

Democrats, along with some Republicans, rejected that argument. Representatives Nancy Mace and Ro Khanna sent a letter to Chairman James Comer insisting that Bondi was subpoenaed by name, not by title.

“Leaving office doesn’t mean you get to dodge accountability,” Mace said. “Pam Bondi was subpoenaed by name, not by title.”

Ranking Member Robert Garcia announced that Democrats would initiate contempt proceedings following Bondi’s failure to appear. On April 17, Garcia sent another letter to Comer pressing for action, noting that Republicans had given “zero indication” they had taken steps to enforce the subpoena or reschedule the deposition.

The committee’s Republican majority said they are working to reschedule Bondi’s appearance but have provided few details.

Status: Subpoena outstanding. Deposition not rescheduled. Contempt proceedings pending.

THE MONEY: BANK OF AMERICA SETTLEMENT WINS PRELIMINARY APPROVAL

On April 2, 2026, US District Judge Jed Rakoff granted preliminary approval to Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with Epstein accusers. The lawsuit alleged the bank ignored suspicious financial transactions tied to Epstein because it valued profit over protecting victims. Judge Rakoff ruled in January that Bank of America must face claims that it knowingly benefited from Epstein’s sex trafficking and obstructed enforcement of federal trafficking laws.

In agreeing to settle, Bank of America did not admit wrongdoing.

A final approval hearing is scheduled for August 27, 2026. Lawyers expect between 60 and 75 women to submit claims.

The settlement brings the total recovered through civil litigation against financial institutions to $437.5 million.

Bank/Settlements/Date

JPMorgan Chase — $290 million — June 2023
Deutsche Bank — $75 million — May 2023
Bank of America — $72.5 million — March 2026
Total $437.5 million
(BNY Mellon case dismissed, appeal pending)
None of the banks admitted wrongdoing and no executive has been criminally charged.

THE DEPOSITION THAT DISAPPEARED

Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, was considered a “critical witness” by victims’ attorneys. He was scheduled for an 8 hr deposition on March 26, 2026, in connection with the Bank of America lawsuit.

The deposition never happened. Black did not appear after the Bank of America settlement was announced and the settlement scuttled the deposition entirely.

Black has not been charged with any crime and has denied wrongdoing. He has separately been asked to testify before the House Oversight Committee on May 13, 2026.

Status: Civil deposition canceled. House interview scheduled.

OPERATION CHAIN REACTION

A 69 page DEA memorandum tied to Epstein and alleged co-conspirators remains partially redacted and largely withheld from Congress. On March 18, 2026, Senator Ron Wyden stated that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was blocking the release of the unredacted version.

The document outlines a 2015 OCDETF investigation — codenamed “Operation Chain Reaction” — into alleged drug trafficking, prostitution, and illicit financial activity tied to Epstein and others. Reports indicate the investigation involved alleged distribution of drugs including ecstasy, methamphetamine, and ketamine.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse separately requested details on a related OCDETF operation known as “Trip Knot,” tied to money laundering and trafficking networks. Wyden argued the document is unclassified and there is “no reason” to withhold it from Congress.

Status: Unredacted file withheld. No public release date.

TOVA NOEL — RESCHEDULED

Read out piece that goes more into Tova:

Tova Noel, the correctional officer on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein died, was originally scheduled for a House Oversight Committee interview on March 26, 2026. No public transcript of that interview has yet been released to the public.

On April 7, 2026, Scripps News reported that Noel has been rescheduled for a transcribed interview on May 18, 2026.

In 2019, prosecutors charged Noel with conspiracy and falsification of records, accusing her and another guard of failing to conduct required inmate checks during the overnight shift when Epstein died. Noel entered a deferred prosecution agreement that allowed her to avoid jail time.
Please read our article at the top of this section as there are a lot of detail being skipped here.

The committee has also expressed interest in a $5,000 deposit Noel made 11 days before Epstein’s death that a bank flagged as suspicious.

Status: Interview scheduled for May 18, 2026.

WHAT ELSE IS SCHEDULED

The House Oversight Committee has lined up a series of transcribed interviews in the coming months, according to sources familiar with the investigation:

Ted Waitt April 30, 2026
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick May 6, 2026
Leon Black May 13, 2026
Tova Noel May 18, 2026
Lesley Groff (Epstein’s executive assistant) June 9, 2026
Bill Gates June 10, 2026
Sources: Scripps News, MS NOW

Chairman James Comer told Newsmax on April 17 that the committee has “5 to 8 more scheduled depositions” involving high profile figures named in the Epstein Files, and that the next phase could include sworn testimony from victims.

WHAT REMAINS

• $437.5 million has been paid through civil settlements. Judge Rakoff has given preliminary approval to the Bank of America agreement, and a final hearing is set for Augustof this year.

• A subpoenaed deposition from a former attorney general did not happenontempt proceedings have been threatened but not yet initiated. The committee says it is working to reschedule.

• A 69 page DEA file remains withheld from Congress. The Justice Department has blocked its release.

• Key testimony from Leon Black never entered the public record — the deposition was canceled entirely after the bank settled.

• New witnesses have been scheduled. Some of them are powerful people. Some of them are still in office.

• The question is no longer whether the record is incomplete.

• It’s whether anyone will be compelled to complete it.

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This work is entirely reader supported. No grants, no advertisers, no editorial board — just primary documents and the time it takes to read them. If you want to keep this going, donating is the most direct way to help. Thank you.

Support Jana Said

Sources

• Reuters — Bank of America $72.5M settlement preliminary approval (April 2, 2026)

• Bloomberg — Bank of America–Epstein Victims Deal Gets Preliminary Approval (April 2, 2026)

• GV Wire — Bank of America’s $72.5 Million Settlement Wins Preliminary Approval (April 2, 2026)

• NBC News — Bank of America agrees to pay $72.5M to settle Epstein survivors suit (March 2026)

• CNN — DOJ says Bondi will not appear for Epstein deposition (April 8, 2026)

• Courthouse News — Democrats blast Bondi for dodging House deposition (April 14, 2026)

• House Oversight Democrats — Garcia statement on Bondi failing to appear (April 14, 2026)

• The Hill — Bondi’s no-show in Epstein case prompts contempt move (April 14, 2026)

• MS NOW — Bondi will not appear for April 14 deposition, DOJ says (April 8, 2026)

• Senate Finance Committee — Wyden sounds alarm as DAG Blanche intervenes (March 18, 2026)

• Senate Finance Committee — Wyden questions DEA over mystery Epstein investigation (February 26, 2026)

• CBS News — Justice Department blocked release of secret Epstein drug probe file (March 2026)

• Quiver Quantitative — DOJ blocks release of unredacted Epstein DEA file (March 18, 2026)

• Scripps News — House Oversight sets interview dates with Lutnick, Gates in Epstein probe (April 7, 2026)

• MS NOW — Bill Gates and Howard Lutnick scheduled to testify before House on Epstein (April 7, 2026)

• CNBC — Bill Gates interview about Jeffrey Epstein by House Oversight set for June 10 (April 7, 2026)

• CNN — Epstein files shed new light on what prison officials were doing the night he died (March 26, 2026)

• Corrections1.com — Tova Noel recounts final hours before Jeffrey Epstein’s death at MCC

• Bloomberg Law — BNY Wins Dismissal of All Claims in Epstein Victims’ Lawsuit (January 29, 2026)

If you read our original investigation into Nicole:

None of what happened at the start of this year, in February 2026, will surprise you. LPF documented her connection to Jeffrey Epstein in detail — the emails, the flight logs, the surveillance company built alongside a former Israeli prime minister (also in thousands of DOJ files) and a retired commander of Unit 8200. We named her when most mainstream outlets wouldn’t even touch her name.

Now the rest of the world is catching up, thankfully.

Following the Department of Justice’s release of a new tranche of Epstein files, Junkermann lost two prominent positions in British public life within days of each other. She resigned as a trustee of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity — a charity closely tied to the royal family — and was terminated from a visiting professorship at Lancaster University that she had held for less than five months.

Her spokesperson issued a statement describing her as a victim of manipulation. The emails released in the DOJ files tell a more complicated story.

Screenshot of the DOJ Epstein Library. At least 1000 files under Junkermann’s named have been removed since our first report.

Emails between Nicole and Epstein showing their connection. 2013.

— EFTA01904585

Two Institutions in One Week

The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity confirmed it had accepted Junkermann’s resignation in a statement that read: “In view of the ongoing media interest and her wish to support the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Nicole Junkermann has offered her resignation as Trustee, which has been accepted.”

The Royal Marsden Hospital, London — founded 1851. Nicole Junkermann resigned as trustee of its linked charity in February 2026, days after the DOJ's Epstein files were made public. Source: royalmarsden.nhs.uk

She had been a trustee since late 2023. The Royal Marsden Hospital is not a obscure institution — Prince William has served as its president since 2007, a role previously held by Princess Diana herself. In January 2025, William and the Princess of Wales became joint patrons of the charity, just as Kate Middleton announced she was in cancer remission after receiving treatment at the hospital the previous year.

Lancaster University moved faster and with less diplomatic language. On February 10 2026, the university confirmed that Junkermann’s visiting professorship had been terminated, and her staff directory listing removed. The original announcement of her appointment taken down entirely. She had been named visiting professor in Practice for Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in September 2025 — a role she held for approximately five months before the DOJ files landed.

No charges have been filed against Nicole, and as we are aware no deep investigation into her. Just the documents that speak, loudly, for themselves.

Lancaster’s public statement included the standard disclaimer that appearing in the Epstein files does not automatically “imply wrongdoing.” That disclaimer is standard, and what it doesn’t explain is whether either institution knew what was already in the public record before they invited her into the charity.

The Spokesperson’s Statement

Junkermann’s spokesperson issued the following after the resignations:

“The scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes is appalling. As a woman and a mother, Nicole was completely deceived and misled by him and deeply regrets their conversations regarding personal and professional matters. These conversations took place at a time in her life when she was vulnerable, and she was manipulated into trusting him and consulting him with the most personal of matters.”

A few things about that:

"A time in her life when she was vulnerable" implies a window, normally a narrow point of time, a small chapter — something that opened and closed — but, the EFTA files show correspondence between Junkermann and Epstein spanning from at least 2002 to 2019, the year of his death. That is not a vulnerable chapter, Nicole. That is the better part of two entire decades. Tweny long years.

The emails continued after his 2008 conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution, and they continued after he was required to register as a sex offender in NYC in 2011. Among the correspondence documented in the files was a 2013 email in which she told him “you make me smile, you are in my heart,” and a 2010 message with the subject line “Will you have a baby with me?” The Telegraph’s reporting on the files shows the earliest documented email between them is from May 2009 — two months before his release from prison — and that in it, she referred to him as “Mr. Wonderful” and suggested she come visit him while he was still behind bars.

Jeffrey Epstein emails Nicole Junkermann, November 2009. He had been released from prison three months earlier. She signs as Executive Partner, United in Sports.
— EFTA00768536

Another Mr Wonderful email dated 2014— EFTA01747371

Junkermann has not been charged with any crime. Now, the “deceived and misled” is a framing that asks the public to set aside nearly twenty years of documented contact and accept that none of it reflected genuine knowledge of who he was.

The Telegraph’s reporting also establishes something the statement struggles to accommodate — Epstein was actively useful to Junkermann’s career, and she used him as such. The files show he lobbied former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to write a glowing recommendation on her behalf, which Summers provided, securing her a nomination for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders programme. And as late as 2019 — the year of his arrest and death — Epstein was advising Junkermann on business deals, including the Carbyne investment itself. That is not a woman who had been deceived and distanced. That is a woman who, by the documentary record, was still consulting the man three months before his arrest for sex trafficking of minors.

She also had a recommendation from bio tech investor Boris Nikolic. Boris was Bill Gates’ former science advisor, and a 2009 WEF Young Global Leader. He's mentioned over 7,000 times in the Epstein files and was named in Epstein's will as backup executor of his estate. His WEF profile was quietly removed on February 11, 2026.

Nicole Junkermann replies to a YGL nomination update copied to Jeffrey Epstein, June 2014. The email is from Boris Nikolic — confirming the nomination had been submitted and referencing Larry Summers. Junkermann replies "Merci!!"

— EFTA02584923

Carbyne — The Company Nobody's Talking About

The resignations from the Royal Marsden and Lancaster are getting attention. What is not getting attention — in nearly any mainstream outlet covering this story — is Carbyne.

Carbyne is the company formerly known as Reporty Homeland Security, later rebranded as Carbyne911. It is a public safety technology platform: a 911 call handling system that connects emergency callers to first responders using live location data, video, audio, smart car data, and indoor positioning accurate to within three feet — including from dropped calls. In promotional materials, Junkermann has presented the product herself.

The chairman is Ehud Barak — the 10th Prime Minister of Israel, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, and former head of Israeli military intelligence. Barak has been photographed entering Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse on multiple occasions. His ties to Epstein were raised repeatedly in Israeli domestic politics.

Another director is Brigadier Pinchas Buchris, former Deputy Commander of IDF special operations and former Commander of Unit 8200 — the Israeli military’s signals intelligence division, equivalent in function to the NSA. Unit 8200 alumni have founded a significant number of the commercial surveillance technology companies operating globally today.

The founder and CEO, Amir Elichai, is a former IDF special forces and intelligence officer. Co-founder and CTO Alex Dizengof previously developed machine learning algorithms and cybersecurity software for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

Jeffrey Epstein was a co investor in this company

— EFTA00699412

A surveillance company that routes your emergency call data, your location, your live video, and your biometric environment through its platform. Co invested in by Jeffrey Epstein. That business decision involved board governance and co investors Junkermann chose to sit alongside. And the platform they built together now handles emergency call infrastructure in multiple countries around the globe.

They Didn’t Ask

There is a secondary story here worth naming.

Junkermann served on the UK Department of Health’s Healthtech Advisory Board from 2018, appointed by then Health Secretary Matt Hancock. That board guides government on NHS technology transformation. Her portfolio company Owkin — a Paris based AI startup working with machine learning for medical research — works with NHS trusts directly. She became a trustee of the Royal Academy Trust in 2023, was appointed to the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity in late 2023, and in September 2025 Lancaster University made her a visiting professor.

At the time of every one of those appointments, the EFTA documents were not yet public, but the flight logs were. The Carbyne board structure was in the public record and independent researchers such as Johnny Vedmore, had documented her connection to Epstein for years. The question these institutions have not answered — and likely won’t — is whether anyone looked. Not whether they had the DOJ files, but whether they ran a basic search.

The Royal Marsden, Lancaster, and the UK Department of Health have all declined to comment beyond their initial statements. The Royal Academy Trust has not publicly confirmed whether she remains a trustee.

What This Means

Nicole Junkermann has not been charged nor investigated. She has issued a statement describing herself as a “victim of manipulation.”

Nicole Junkermann maintained documented correspondence with a convicted sex offender for nearly two decades. She co-invested in a surveillance company with his money and with former heads of Israeli military intelligence. She was appointed to positions advising the British government on NHS data and technology. And the institutions that appointed her — after years of public reporting on her Epstein connection — have responded with resignation acceptances and statements about values, not with answers.

The paper trail was always there and Nicole deserves to see the inside of a court room.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.
If this investigation has been useful to you — if it gave you something to think about, something to share, something to act on — consider supporting Last Page First. Independent investigative journalism doesn’t have institutional backing behind it. It has the readers ♥

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Have a tip? A lead you want to share?

Submit anonymously

This work is entirely reader supported. No grants, no advertisers, no editorial board — just primary documents and the time it takes to read them. If you want to keep this going, donating is the most direct way to help. Thank you.

Support Jana Said

Sources

EFTA00699412 — Ehud Barak email to Epstein and Junkermann re: Reporty board report, February 12, 2016

Lancaster University statement, February 10, 2026 — The Tab / Lancaster Tab

Royal Marsden Cancer Charity statement, February 2026 — GB News

Junkermann correspondence details (”Mr. Wonderful,” subject lines, email content) — The Telegraph / GB News reporting on EFTA files

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01747371.pdf

Carbyne board structure and Epstein co-investment — Wikipedia: Nicole Junkermann (citing DOJ EFTA files)

Royal Observer — Prince William and Kate’s charity faces scrutiny, February 17, 2026

Original LPF investigation: The Girl Who Doesn’t Exist — lastpagefirst.substack.com

Yahoo News — Cancer Charity Supported by Kate Middleton and Prince William Faces Epstein Fallout as Trustee Resigns

Jared and Ivanka at Buckingham Palace - @IvankaTrump

This is connected to our Zorro Ranch series, we recommend reading:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part 4 | Part 5

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If you have tips related to the Zorro Ranch and Epstein Investigation, contact:
https://nmdoj.gov/get-help/epstein-zorro-tips/

On January 21 2021, the day after the Trump administration ended, Jared Kushner incorporated a private equity firm called ‘Affinity Partners’ in Delaware. He had no prior experience in private equity and 6 months later, the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund — the Public Investment Fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — invested 2 billion dollars into that same firm. The Saudi screening panel had recommended against it, their internal review cited the inexperience of Affinity’s management, the fact that the kingdom would bear the bulk of the investment risk, that Affinity’s operations were unsatisfactory in all aspects, and that the deal carried serious ‘public relations risks’ given Kushner’s prior White House role. MBS personally overruled his own panel and approved it anyway.

To understand how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump got to that moment — to the point where a foreign sovereign wealth fund would wire two billion dollars into a firm run by a man with no track record, overruling its own expert panel to do so — you have to understand the network that built the infrastructure around them. Not just the Saudi relationship, not just the Qatar blockade and the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout — the whole architecture. The real estate developers who needed governors, the financiers who blessed introductions, the political figures who took money from both and kept coming back for more.

That architecture was already operating, fully formed, many years before Jared Kushner walked into the White House. It ran through Jeffrey Epstein’s network, it ran through Forest City Ratner. It ran through a 100kacre ranch in New Mexico and a 7 story townhouse on East 71st Street in Manhattan. It ran through the same building — 666 Fifth Avenue — where Kushner Companies was headquartered and from which a business plan connecting Forest City Enterprises and the Trump Organization to Epstein’s inbox was submitted.

This is the story of the family business — all of it.

5 Av 53 St entrance — Source: The All-Nite Image Flickr

The $2 Billion Question

Affinity Partners was incorporated the day the Trump administration ended. The timeline is worth looking at: Kushner spent 4 years as a senior White House adviser with a portfolio that included nearly the entire Middle East — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Israel, and Palestine. He attended classified briefings, he accessed the presidential daily intelligence report, and he held meetings with foreign heads of state. He shaped arms deals, blockades, peace plans, and sovereign relationships. Kushner did all of this while simultaneously negotiating deals that would enrich his family through the governments he was ostensibly conducting policy toward.

The day that access ended, he incorporated a private equity firm. 6 months later, the government he had spent 4 years cultivating sent 2 billion dollars to that firm.

The structure of the deal guaranteed Kushner income regardless of performance. Affinity collects 25 million dollars annually in management fees from the Saudis alone, plus a profit share. By 2024, Affinity had collected approximately 175 million dollars in total fees from foreign investors, including 87 million from Saudi Arabia, while returning zero profits to any of its investors. The money was not being deployed into productive investments it was sitting. The fees kept coming.

Senate investigators concluded that Affinity’s structure bore the hallmarks of a foreign compensation scheme. One hundred percent of Affinity’s Parallel Fund is owned by non-United States persons. There are no American investors at all.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden launched a formal investigation and concluded that Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations, but rather by the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family. His committee found that 100% of Affinity’s Parallel Fund I is owned by non United States persons, with 6 undisclosed foreign beneficial owners. The total foreign investment in Affinity reached approximately 3 billion dollars, from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou. There is a 5th investor Affinity still will not identify.

In September 2025, Affinity partnered with Silver Lake and the Saudi PIF to acquire video game company Electronic Arts in a deal valued at 52.5 billion dollars — the largest leveraged buyout in history. Kushner brokered the initial connection. He holds 5% equity. The Saudis hold majority control. National security concerns that had been raised about other foreign technology acquisitions were not applied.

The Qatar Reversal: A Billion Dollar Coincidence

In April 2017, Charles Kushner — Jared’s father — made a direct pitch to Qatar’s Finance Minister for financing on the family’s most distressed asset: 666 Fifth Avenue, a Manhattan skyscraper purchased in 2007 for one-point-eight billion dollars, the highest price ever paid for a New York office tower at the time. The timing was catastrophic — the property was bleeding money, the mortgage had ballooned toward 1.4 billion dollars, and the building was 1/3 vacant. The Kushner family was looking at potential financial ruin.

Qatar said no.

One month later, Jared Kushner traveled to Saudi Arabia as part of Trump’s first diplomatic trip abroad. Days afterward, Trump publicly backed a Saudi-UAE-led blockade of Qatar — a United States military ally that hosts Al Udeid Air Base, one of America’s most critical military installations in the Middle East. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was blindsided. He tried to mediate the crisis and was subsequently fired.

For the next year, as Kushner remained the White House’s point man on the Middle East, the Kushner family continued seeking a Qatar linked bailout for 666 Fifth Avenue. In August 2018, they got it. Brookfield Asset Management paid 1.28 billion dollars for a 99 year lease on the property, paid entirely upfront, rescuing the Kushner family from financial ruin. The Qatar Investment Authority was the second-largest investor in Brookfield Property Partners, the fund used to execute the deal. The fund contained 3billion dollars from sovereign governments, including 2billion from Middle Eastern ones.

The sequence: Kushner Companies asks Qatar for money. Qatar says no. Trump backs a Qatar blockade. One year later, Qatar-linked money rescues Kushner Companies. Two months after the bailout, Trump begins softening on Qatar.

Senate investigators found that Brookfield’s assurances that no Qatari entities were involved in the deal were false. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund later stated it had absolutely no involvement. Both statements were contradicted by the documented structure of the fund. The limited liability company used to sign the lease was controlled by BPY, the Brookfield fund in which Qatar held a 7 percent stake.

What the Senate investigation did not document — and what the Epstein production adds — is that 666 Fifth Avenue was also the address from which a business plan connecting Forest City Enterprises and the Trump Organization to Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox was submitted. The building at the center of the Kushner family’s financial crisis was also the building from which Epstein’s network received investment pitches naming Forest City and Trump as developer clients — the same Brookfield that rescued the Kushners would acquire Forest City Enterprises in 2018. The circles close.

The Network Behind the Network: Forest City, Epstein, and the Governors

To understand the full architecture of what Jared Kushner inherited and monetized, you have to go back further than the Trump administration. You have to go back to a large ranch in New Mexico, Zorro Ranch, a campaign finance filing from 2002, and a real estate developer named David Mitchell who spent years routing introductions through Jeffrey Epstein’s personal approval.

The Ratner family’s Forest City Enterprises — the Cleveland-based real estate conglomerate that built Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, redeveloped downtown Cleveland, and pursued a massive master-planned community called Mesa del Sol on the southern mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico — appears in the Epstein evidentiary production at multiple levels and through multiple documented relationships.

In 2002, Forest City Covington NM LLC donated thirty thousand dollars to Bill Richardson’s gubernatorial campaign in New Mexico. On the same donor list, seven lines away, Jeffrey Epstein donated 50,000 dollars to the same campaign. This is not an allegation. It is a public campaign finance filing, confirmed in the DOJ documents EFTA00203640 through EFTA02729107, compiled from records filed with the New Mexico Secretary of State.

Jeffrey Epstein, $50,000 donor to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Campaign finance disclosure. — EFTA02729080

Richardson was about to become the governor of the state in which Epstein owned Zorro Ranch — a 100,000 acre compound near Stanley, New Mexico, that federal investigators would spend years documenting as a site of serious criminal conduct. Richardson was also about to become the governor whose state government Forest City needed to approve the infrastructure commitments, tax incentives, and land deals required to develop Mesa del Sol. Both Epstein and Forest City needed Richardson. Both wrote checks to his campaign in the same election cycle.

Read more on the 50k governor here. Series also linked at the top of this article.

Bill Richardson on the campaign trail, 2008. He was running for President — he already knew Jeffrey Epstein. Source: Ryan Glenn

The ongoing relationship between Epstein and Forest City is documented through David Mitchell of Mitchell Holdings LLC, a New York real estate developer who served as an intermediary between Epstein and Forest City’s senior executives. In May 2012, Mitchell forwarded to Epstein’s personal email account a correspondence chain with James Ratner — a senior Forest City executive — regarding a waterfront development site in Long Island City. Mitchell’s forwarding note to Epstein read: ‘This is who I will introduce Heidi to win your blessing. Forest City is as blue chip as you can get.’ The phrase is unambiguous. A real estate introduction involving one of America’s largest developers required Jeffrey Epstein’s personal approval before it could proceed. Forest City’s legitimacy was not enough. Epstein’s blessing was the prerequisite.

— EFTA02017848

The connection to the Trump Organization runs through a business plan submitted to Epstein’s inbox from 666 Fifth Avenue — Kushner Companies’ address — by a lawyer and developer named Michael Bailkin of Arete Strategic Development. Bailkin’s biography, included in the plan, explicitly lists his economic development clients as including Forest City Enterprises, Vornado, Related, and the Trump Organization — all in the same sentence, as part of the same national incentives practice. Bailkin specifically names Metrotech, a 17mil sq ft redevelopment in downtown Brooklyn, as a project where he attracted Forest City Ratner to act as lead developer. The Trump Organization and Forest City shared the same economic development lawyer. That lawyer’s business plan landed in Epstein’s inbox, submitted from the building at the center of the Kushner family’s financial crisis.

— EFTA01197507

The Richardson relationship did not end with the 2002 campaign donation. The EFTA production documents it continuing across 17 years. In September 2016 — eight years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor — Richardson’s office coordinated a dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street. In October 2016, Richardson’s diplomatic center sent Epstein a formal funding proposal through Lesley Groff, Epstein’s personal assistant, accompanied by a personal video message from the Governor. The forwarding note from Groff to Epstein confirmed that Richardson had discussed the funding with Epstein at the September dinner. Epstein apparently made a verbal commitment. His own staff was tracking the promise a full year later. Richardson’s lawyer was on the phone to the Southern District of New York within weeks of Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, negotiating the governor’s status before prosecutors had even coordinated internally about who had spoken to whom.

This is the network Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump operated within — not a network they created — a network they inherited, activated, and monetized at a scale their predecessors had not imagined.

— EFTA02043130

Funding proposal — EFTA02337227

The Security Clearance

When Jared Kushner applied for a top secret security clearance to serve as a White House senior adviser, two career security specialists rejected his application. The FBI background check had raised concerns about potential foreign influence stemming from his family’s business entanglements, his foreign contacts, and his foreign travel during the campaign. Their supervisor overruled them. Kushner received an interim clearance. The CIA declined to grant him access to Sensitive Compartmented Information — the most sensitive tier of classified material. He operated without a permanent clearance for over a year, all while his portfolio included Middle East policy, the Khashoggi situation, the Qatar blockade, and United States - Saudi relations.

In February 2019, the New York Times reported that Trump had personally ordered Chief of Staff John Kelly to grant Kushner a full top secret clearance. Kelly found the situation so uncomfortable that he memorialized Trump’s order in writing. White House Counsel Don McGahn also documented his objections in a contemporaneous memo. Both Trump and Ivanka Trump publicly denied the president was involved. The contemporaneous memos proved otherwise.

Intelligence officials in at least four countries had privately discussed how to manipulate Kushner using his complex business arrangements and financial difficulties — while he held a clearance that career adjudicators had twice rejected.

Intelligence officials have noted that being denied a clearance by career adjudicators takes some pretty bad stuff. The specific concerns in Kushner’s case were never made public. Intelligence officials in at least four countries had, according to reporting at the time, privately discussed how to manipulate Kushner using his complex business arrangements and financial difficulties — the same financial difficulties that were driving the search for a Qatar-linked bailout for 666 Fifth Avenue.

Despite these documented concerns, Kushner attended classified briefings, accessed the presidential daily intelligence report, and issued requests to the intelligence community — all while simultaneously negotiating deals that would enrich his family through foreign governments he was ostensibly conducting policy toward.

The Khashoggi Calculation

On October 2, 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and was killed by a Saudi hit squad. The CIA concluded with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder. The conclusion was never seriously disputed by the intelligence community.

To mark the 1 yr anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder, POMED and 12 other human rights and press freedom organizations held a public event on Capitol Hill to commemorate Jamal’s life, to call for accountability, and to cast a light on the Saudi government’s repression of those who are perceived to be critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his regime. — Source Flickr

Kushner’s response, both at the time and in subsequent years, was to protect MBS. During the immediate aftermath, Kushner offered the crown prince advice on how to weather the political storm. Inside the White House, he became, by all accounts, MBS’s most important defender. In 2020, he publicly dismissed the murder as one of a couple of missteps by Saudi Arabia, calling MBS a visionary leader doing transformational things.

When asked at a public appearance in 2024 whether he believed the CIA’s conclusion that MBS ordered the killing, Kushner first responded: ‘Are we really still doing this?’ He said he had never read the intelligence report. He then said he knew the man personally and trusted his own judgment over the agency’s.

Kushner called a murder ‘a couple of missteps.’ Six months after leaving the White House, the murderer’s government sent two billion dollars into his bank account.

The timeline is inescapable. Kushner defended MBS through a state sanctioned killing, shielded the crown prince from consequences inside the United States government, and then, within months of leaving that government, received a multi-billion dollar financial relationship with MBS’s sovereign wealth fund. No criminal wrongdoing has been established. The ethical picture is another matter entirely.

Ivanka’s China Operation

While serving simultaneously as a White House senior adviser and retaining ownership of her fashion brand, Ivanka Trump received dozens of Chinese trademark approvals in a pattern that ethics watchdogs found alarming and that federal law appeared to prohibit.

Source: @IvankaTrump

On April 6, 2017, the same day Ivanka dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar a Lago as an official White House host, the Chinese government approved three new trademarks for Ivanka Trump Marks LLC. In May 2018, she received approval for several more Chinese trademarks one week before Trump announced he wanted to lift an export ban on ZTE, the Chinese telecom company, for violating United States sanctions. By the end of 2018, China had approved more than thirty-four trademarks for Ivanka’s brand in a single year, covering handbags, shoes, jewelry, wedding dresses, baby blankets, coffins, nursing homes, and voting machines.

Federal ethics rules prohibit senior White House officials from participating in any decision, approval, or advice on matters that will directly affect their own financial interests. Each willful violation carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Ivanka’s brand continued seeking and receiving foreign government intellectual property grants while she was simultaneously meeting with foreign leaders and shaping trade policy. The Office of Government Ethics found that she was the worst offender among White House officials in her use of personal email for government business — hundreds of emails about official White House matters sent from a private account, discovered not through White House disclosure but through FOIA litigation by the watchdog group American Oversight.

The irony required no elaboration. Her father’s 2016 campaign had been built, in significant part, around the slogan Lock her up, directed at Hillary Clinton for using a private email server. The methodology for reviewing the emails was identical, the political response was not.

The Near-Indictment: Trump SoHo

The documented record of Ivanka Trump’s proximity to legal jeopardy predates the White House by nearly a decade. In 2010, the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation into Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for misleading prospective buyers of units at Trump SoHo, a hotel condo development in lower Manhattan. The development was failing. By 2008, only 15.8 percent of units had actually sold. The Trumps told prospective buyers sixty percent had been purchased. They told a trade publication 55 percent. They told the press 31 percent.

Prosecutors found emails in which Ivanka and Donald Jr. discussed how to coordinate the false information they had given to buyers. Four people who reviewed the emails told ProPublica there was no doubt the siblings approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales. One source said: They knew it was wrong.

The case ran for two years, an indictment was approaching. Defense lawyers could not make the evidence go away. Then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case. He bypassed the career prosecutors entirely and went directly to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. He brought no new arguments, he simply repeated what the defense lawyers had already said unsuccessfully. Three months after that meeting, Vance overruled his own prosecutors and ordered them to drop the case. Kasowitz had donated 25 thousand dollars to Vance’s reelection campaign that year. Within six months of the case being dropped, Kasowitz helped raise fifty thousand dollars more for Vance.

An indictment was approaching. The Trump family’s lawyer met privately with the DA who had received substantial campaign donations. The case was dropped. The Trumps also extracted an unusual condition from the civil settlement: the plaintiffs agreed not to cooperate with prosecutors unless subpoenaed.

The Trumps settled the civil suit brought by defrauded buyers, agreeing to return ninety percent of their deposits. As part of the settlement, they extracted an unusual condition: the plaintiffs agreed not to cooperate with prosecutors unless subpoenaed. The near indictment and its resolution established a pattern that would define the family’s relationship with legal accountability for the next fifteen years.

The West Bank Donation

While Jared Kushner was serving as the Trump administration’s lead official on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the Kushner Companies Charitable Foundation was donating at least eighteen thousand dollars to American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva — an organization that funds the construction of Bet El, an Israeli settlement built on private Palestinian land seized by the Israeli military in the 1970s. Bet El is among the most politically radical settlements in the West Bank. The former president of the Bet El fund was David Friedman, whom Trump subsequently appointed as United States Ambassador to Israel.

The Trump administration’s formal peace plan, drafted in significant part by Kushner, adopted the Israeli government’s position on nearly every major issue. It called for Israel to annex approximately thirty percent of the West Bank where most Israeli settlers live. The Palestinian Authority refused to negotiate on this basis. The Kushner family continued funding the settlements the plan would have annexed into Israel. Following the White House years, Kushner’s Affinity Partners announced its first Israeli investment: a 150 million dollar minority stake in an Israeli car company. Affinity described the firm as an investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The relationships built during four years of Middle East policy, using American diplomatic leverage and classified intelligence, were being monetized directly through the same investment firm receiving Saudi government money.

The Through Line

The story of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in government is, at its core, a story about the privatization of foreign policy. A man with no intelligence background, no diplomatic experience, and no financial track record was handed the Middle East. The relationships he built with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Israel — using American government resources, classified access, and the full weight of presidential authority — were then converted directly into a private equity firm that those same governments fund.

But the story does not begin with Jared Kushner. It begins with the network he stepped into — a network in which real estate developers needed governors, financiers blessed introductions, political figures took money from both and kept coming back for more, and the same building at 666 Fifth Avenue sat at the intersection of the Kushner family’s financial desperation and the architecture of access that Jeffrey Epstein had been constructing for decades.

Forest City Enterprises, which donated thirty thousand dollars to Bill Richardson’s gubernatorial campaign in the same election cycle as Epstein’s 50k donation, was acquired by Brookfield Asset Management in 2018. The same Brookfield that had rescued the Kushner family’s 666 Fifth Avenue through a 1.28 billion dollar deal funded in part through the Qatar Investment Authority. The same Qatar that had refused to bail out the Kushners directly in 2017, and whose blockade Jared Kushner helped engineer one month after that refusal.

Ivanka functioned as a parallel operation, using her position to maintain and expand her brand’s commercial footprint in China while her father waged a trade war with Beijing. She violated federal records law, she received foreign intellectual property grants in apparent coordination with diplomatic events, she was nearly indicted for fraud a decade earlier, and that case evaporated under circumstances that remain, at minimum, suspicious.

None of this produced a criminal conviction. The systems that exist to prevent it — security clearance reviews, ethics offices, federal records law, congressional oversight, conflict of interest statutes — were either overridden, ignored, or stonewalled at each turn. The pattern held from the Trump SoHo near-indictment through the White House years through the post-administration foreign money flows. The family business was always the White House. The network that made the White House possible was already in place. The White House just didn’t know it was the product.

What you’re left with is a couple who entered the White House worth an estimated 740 million dollars and left it with Kushner’s net worth at least 900 million dollars — up 180 percent by the time Forbes measured it in 2024, almost entirely on the strength of money from the governments he had spent four years setting policy toward. And a network, built across decades by figures whose names appear in federal evidentiary productions, that made the access possible, maintained the relationships, blessed the introductions, and kept the governors and the developers and the financiers circling the same buildings, the same accounts, and the same names, year after year, until someone finally followed the paper trail all the way to the end.

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Primary Sources

AFFINITY PARTNERS / SAUDI INVESTMENT

Affinity Partners — Wikipedia | Confirms incorporation Jan 21 2021; $2B from Saudi PIF; $157M fees; zero profits returned; Kushner net worth grew 180% to $900M+; $52.5B EA acquisition

Jared Kushner’s Great EA Swindle — CEPR Oct 14 2025 | EA acquisition details; $25M annual Saudi management fee; Saudi PIF majority control

Chairwoman Maloney Launches Probe — House Oversight | Saudi screening panel objections; MBS personally overruled panel

Wyden Investigation Continues — Senate Finance Sept 24 2024 | $157M in fees; 100% non-US ownership; possible FARA circumvention

Kushner’s $3 Billion Conflict — Popular Information Nov 13 2024 | Total $3B foreign investment; fifth undisclosed investor; no US investors

QATAR BLOCKADE / 666 FIFTH AVENUE

Timeline on Kushner, Qatar, 666 Fifth Avenue — Just Security | Definitive chronological documentation

Wyden Castro Launch Investigation — Senate Finance Dec 2020 | QIA owned 7% of Brookfield Property Partners; $1.28B deal

Democrats Launch Probe 666 Fifth — The Real Deal Dec 2020 | Tillerson blindsided; QIA as second-largest Brookfield stakeholder

SECURITY CLEARANCE

Officials Rejected Kushner Clearance — NBC News Jan 2019 | Two career specialists rejected; CIA declined SCI access

Trump Ordered Clearance for Kushner — NPR/NYT Feb 2019 | Kelly memorialized in writing; Trump and Ivanka denied involvement

KHASHOGGI

Kushner Defends Saudis — CBS News Feb 14 2024 | ‘Are we really still doing this?’; called MBS ‘a visionary leader’

Rep Garcia: Why Did Saudi Give Kushner $2B — Robert Garcia press release | ‘A couple of missteps’; Chris Christie: ‘The grift from this family is breathtaking’

IVANKA CHINA TRADEMARKS / EMAIL

Ivanka Chinese Trademarks — CREW| 3 trademarks same day as Xi dinner; 34 trademarks in 2018

Ivanka Granted 7 Trademarks — CNN/news8000 May 2018 | ZTE sanctions context; ethics experts quoted

Ivanka Private Email — NPR Nov 2018 | Hundreds of emails; White House Counsel found Ivanka ‘worst offender’

TRUMP SOHO NEAR-INDICTMENT

Ivanka and Donald Jr Close to Fraud Charges — ProPublica Oct 2017 | 2-year investigation; 15.8% vs 60% claimed; Kasowitz meeting; $25K donation; case dropped

Near Fraud Indictment — Daily Beast | ‘They knew it was wrong’

WEST BANK / SETTLEMENTS

Kushner Donating to West Bank Settlement — ProPublica| $18,000+ to American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva; David Friedman role

Affinity Israeli Investment — PressTV/various Jan 2025 | $150M Shlomo Holdings stake; ‘investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel’

FOREST CITY / EPSTEIN / RICHARDSON NETWORK — EFTA PRIMARY SOURCES

Richardson Campaign Finance — EFTA00203640–EFTA02729107 | Epstein $50,000; Forest City Covington NM LLC $30,000; same 2002 campaign donor list

‘Win Your Blessing’ Email — EFTA02017848–EFTA02017850; EFTA00934747 | Mitchell to Epstein routing Forest City introduction through personal approval

Arete/Bailkin Business Plan from 666 Fifth Avenue — EFTA01197500–EFTA01197511 | Forest City Enterprises and Trump Organization named as shared economic development clients

Richardson September 2016 Dinner — EFTA02043130–EFTA02043132 | Dinner at 9 East 71st Street eight years after Epstein conviction

Richardson Funding Proposal — EFTA00461948; EFTA00438158; EFTA02337227 | Formal proposal; Gobernador New Mexico.avi; verbal commitment documented

SDNY Internal Richardson Emails — EFTA00032235–EFTA00032236 | Prosecutor scramble after Epstein arrest; Richardson lawyer contact

Brookfield Acquires Forest City — 2018 public record | Same Brookfield that executed 666 Fifth Avenue rescue through Qatar-linked funds

This is a part of the 49 Zorro Ranch Road Series
Part One | Victim Standalone | Part Two | Part Three | Part 4 | Part 5

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On September 19, 2016, a car carrying former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson pulled up to East 71st Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, where a narrow 70 story townhouse rose from the pavement like a sealed vault — its facade a dense slab of dark limestone, the windows tall and evenly spaced, their glass giving back nothing. There was no number on the door, no plate, placard — just stone, a heavy wooden door, and a bell on the right hand side.

The building also had no doorman. Richardson’s aide, Brooke Lange, had emailed ahead to ask about the entrance. She was told to ‘have the Governor ring the bell on the right hand side,’ that a staff member would let him in. “This place is like a museum,” the response read “It used to be a school.”

The museum was 9 East 71st Street. The owner was Jeffrey Epstein. The occasion was dinner

JE Townhouse 9 East 71st Street Source: Jim Henderson

Balcony/ Frick Art Reference Source: Jim Henderson

Bill Richardson was not a naive man. He had served in Congress, in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet as Energy Secretary, as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, and as Governor of New Mexico for 2 terms. He had even run for President

Bill Richardson on the campaign trail, 2008. He was running for President — he already knew Jeffrey Epstein. Source: Ryan Glenn

He was a prolific international hostage negotiator and one of the most decorated Democratic political figures of his generation — and he damn well knew exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was. By September 2016, the entire world did too. Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor in Palm Beach, Florida, served 13 months in county jail under a non prosecution agreement that federal prosecutors would later describe as a ‘corrupt sweetheart deal’, and registered as a sex offender. The FBI’s internal documents would later establish that agents had been prepared to indict him on federal charges as far back as 2007 — before that deal was quietly brokered and the case was closed.

And Richardson went to dinner anyway!

Then he went back — through his emissaries, again and again, for more than a year — carrying a formal funding proposal, a personal video message from the Governor himself, and a request that Epstein support his diplomatic center with what his staff described as the urgency of a man who needed an answer before the year’s program decisions had to be made.

The dinner at 9 East 71st Street was not the beginning of their relationship but a continuation of one that had started at least 14 years earlier, when both men wrote checks to the same campaign, in the same election cycle, for the same amount, in a state where one of them owned a hundred thousand acre ranch and the other was trying to become governor.

This is the story of how Jeffrey Epstein and the Ratner family’s Forest City Enterprises bought political infrastructure in New Mexico — how that infrastructure served their real estate ambitions, and how the relationship was maintained across more than a decade and a half. It also covers how a former governor of the United States kept walking back through the door of a convicted sex offender’s townhouse to ask for money — even after his victims had already told the world what happened inside the home.

Every document cited in this investigation is drawn from the EFTA primary document production — the evidentiary record filed in federal court, in the Southern District of New York.

The Same Donor List

The document that starts this story is a March 2006 publication from the Albuquerque Tribune — a detailed breakdown of campaign finance contributions to Bill Richardson’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign, compiled from filings with the New Mexico Secretary of State and entered into the public record. It appears in the EFTA production at Bates range EFTA00203640 through EFTA02729107.

— EFTA02729080

Buried in the contribution list, in the $50,000 tier alongside AFSCME’s political action committee and a Las Vegas gaming operation called Riviera Gaming Management, is a single entry: Jeffrey E. Epstein, Stanley, Investor. Fifty thousand dollars

— EFTA02729084

Stanley is a small community in Santa Fe County, New Mexico — the closest incorporated point to Zorro Ranch, the property Epstein had purchased from former Governor Bruce King’s family in 1993 and on which he had built a sprawling compound that federal investigators would later document in extraordinary and disturbing detail. By 2002, Epstein was not a casual New Mexico landowner. He was embedded in the state’s geography, its political economy, and its social infrastructure. He owned the land. He employed local staff. He had relationships with local officials. And in 2002, he wrote a 50k check to the man who was about to become governor.

Twelve lines below Epstein’s entry, in the $25,000 - $49,999 tier, is another: Forest City Covington NM LLC, Las Vegas, Nevada, Real Estate. 30, 000 dollars.

— EFTA02729086

Forest City Covington NM LLC was the New Mexico subsidiary of Forest City Enterprises — the Cleveland based real estate conglomerate operated by the Ratner family: brothers Charles, Albert, and James — and their cousin Bruce, who ran the New York division known as ‘Forest City Ratner Companies.’ At the time of the Richardson donation, Forest City was actively pursuing what would become one of the most ambitious development projects in New Mexico history — Mesa del Sol — an 8000 acre ‘master planned community’ on the southern mesa of Albuquerque, adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base.

Mesa del Sol required the state government, it required land deals, infrastructure commitments, tax incentives, rezoning approvals, and the active cooperation of the governor’s office. Forest City needed Richardson — so they gave him 30k.

Also on that same list, in the $45,000 tier: the Committee to Elect Diane Denish — Richardson’s Lieutenant Governor, his chosen successor, funded directly from his own donor network. The money moved in a coordinated circuit. From Epstein. From Forest City. Into Richardson’s operation. Outward into Denish’s.

Epstein gave $50,000 to Richardson’s campaign. Forest City gave $30,000 to the same campaign. They appear just lines apart on the same donor list.

Campaign finance disclosures do not establish intent but hat they establish is fact — Jeffrey Epstein and Forest City Enterprises were both writing large checks to the same governor, in the same election cycle, at the precise moment Forest City needed that governor’s state government to greenlight their most ambitious project. At the precise moment Epstein needed that governor’s New Mexico to remain a place where no one asked questions about what was happening at his ranch.

Neither the Richardson campaign nor Forest City has ever been required to explain the coincidence publicly and neither has been charged with any violation in connection with these donations. The New Mexico Secretary of State’s filings are public record.

The EFTA production made them federal evidence.

Forest City, the Ratners, and the Epstein Network

To understand what Forest City’s presence in the Epstein production means, you have to understand who the Ratners were and how they operated.

Forest City Enterprises was founded in Cleveland in 1920 and grew across the 20thcentury into a multi billion dollar real estate empire with projects across the United States. By the 2000s, the company was operating through multiple regional subsidiaries, the most prominent of which was Forest City Ratner Companies in New York — run by Bruce Ratner. Bruce Ratner’s most famous project was Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn — a massive, politically contentious mixed use development anchored by the Barclays Center arena, home of the Brooklyn Nets. Atlantic Yards required enormous political capital, complex negotiations with the City and State, and relationships at the highest of levels to New York’s real estate and political infrastructure.

Brett Ratner at a panel discussion for the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival — David Shankbone

The Ratner family’s connection to the Epstein network is documented in the EFTA production at multiple levels and through multiple individuals.

The most direct connection is Brett Ratner — the Hollywood film director, not a Forest City principal but a member of the extended Ratner social orbit — who appears in Epstein’s personal contact list alongside Michael Ovitz, Tom Barrack, Michael Bay, and Dan Adler. Brett Ratner’s former fiancee — Romanian model Alina Pascau — is documented in a May 2005 New York Post Page Six item as a former girlfriend of Epstein who obtained a modeling contract with Les Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret brand through Epstein’s introduction. The Post reported that Epstein paid for her to live in what they described as ‘high style.’ When that relationship ended, she dated Brett Ratner.

— EFTA00577390

American film director Brett Ratner poses with Jean-Luc Brunel. via U.S. Justice Department

— EFTA01334062

The more significant corporate connection is documented in a May 2012 email chain that appears in EFTA02017848 through EFTA02017850 and again at EFTA00934747 through EFTA00934749. The emails involve a real estate developer named David Mitchell of Mitchell Holdings LLC, operating from 815 Fifth Avenue in New York. Mitchell was a regular correspondent with Epstein — he emailed jeevacation@gmail.com, Epstein’s personal account, on multiple occasions about real estate projects and business introductions.

On May 16, 2012, Mitchell forwarded to Epstein’s personal email account a correspondence chain with James Ratner — a senior executive at Forest City Enterprises — regarding a waterfront development site in Long Island City, Queens. The property was described as 8 acres on the southern peninsula called Hunters Point South West, all on the water facing the United Nations, adjacent to the TF Cornerstone site, with zoning for 1.5 million square feet of mixed use and a 421 a tax abatement. A friend of Mitchell’s who was not in the real estate business owned the site and was looking for the right joint venture partner. James Ratner responded to the introduction with enthusiasm and professionalism, writing that he would forward the opportunity to MaryAnn Gilmartin, who he described as the head of development for Forest City’s New York office, responsible for the New York Times Building, the Gehry Building, and Atlantic Yards, and therefore the top person on development for them in New York.

— EFTA02017848
Mitchell forwarded the entire chain to Epstein with a single subject line: ‘This is who I will introduce Heidi to win your blessing. Forest City is as blue chip as you can get.’

The phrase “win your blessing” is not really a casual expression. It is a direct statement that a real estate introduction involving Forest City Enterprises and a Long Island City waterfront development site required Jeffrey Epstein’s approval before it could proceed. Mitchell was not informing Epstein of the introduction — he was seeking his sanction. Forest City, one of the largest real estate developers in the United States, was being brought into a deal through Epstein’s network, and Epstein’s blessing was the prerequisite. Let that hit.

— EFTA00755576

David Mitchell’s relationship with Forest City is separately documented in the EFTA production. In an October 2010 email to Epstein (EFTA00755576, EFTA02420212), Mitchell wrote “my direct contact at Forest City (my development partner in LV)” — Las Vegas — is taking a major job in Dubai as head of development for one of the large families. That contact, later identified as Dimitri Vazelakis, was described as a source of real intelligence on the ground in the Middle East. Mitchell forwarded that introduction to Epstein as well, suggesting he be connected to Vazelakis for access to the Majid Al Futtaim Group. Forest City’s personnel were being routed into Epstein’s network as intelligence assets and business contacts.

And then there is the relationship between Lesley Groff and Kelly Ratner.

Lesley Groff was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most trusted personal assistants. You can read our full profile on her here. She is documented extensively in the EFTA production as a scheduler, fixer, and coordinator of Epstein’s personal calendar. She arranged travel, meetings and contacts. She was one of four women indicted alongside Ghislaine Maxwell in the original superseding indictment, though she was ultimately not charged. Palm Beach police probable cause affidavits (EFTA02855412) identify “Sarah” — a woman whose date of birth matches Groff’s — as the person who arranged massage tables in Epstein’s bedroom, briefed girls on what to expect, and contacted recruiters when Epstein announced he was traveling to Palm Beach.

— EFTA02855414

Kelly Ratner is documented in the EFTA docs through a series of personal emails with Lesley Groff spanning July through October 2016 — the same period during which Richardson was being scheduled for dinner at Epstein’s townhouse. The emails (EFTA00322451, EFTA00322481, EFTA00320155, EFTA02192757) show the 2 women as close personal friends — taking fitness classes together at the YMCA, arranging playdates for their children, attending each other’s social events and gatherings. Groff refers to Epstein as “boss” in one exchange while coordinating childcare around his schedule. Kelly Ratner signs her emails with friendly warmth: “Xo, Kelly.”

— EFTA00322451

— EFTA02192757

The emails establish that while Groff was scheduling a sitting governor’s dinner at Epstein’s home and forwarding funding proposals from his diplomatic center to Epstein’s personal inbox, she was also maintaining a close social friendship with a member of the Ratner family network. The personal and the professional were not separate spheres in Epstein’s world — they were the same.

The Governor’s Long Relationship

The 2002 campaign donation was not an isolated transaction — it was the foundation of a relationship that the EFTA documents show persisted across at least seventeen years, maintained through personal meetings, calendar coordination, funding solicitations, and legal maneuvering that accelerated the moment Epstein was arrested.

The next documented contact between Richardson and Epstein in the EFTA production comes from September 2011 — 9 years after the campaign donation and 3 years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction and sex offender registration. On September 19, 2011, an Epstein assistant emailed Epstein’s personal account with the subject line “Gov. Richardson” and the following message: “Gov. Richardson is asking if he could see you at 10:30PM on Thurs or at 10:30AM on Friday. Please advise what you prefer.”

— EFTA01775294

The email was routine in its tone — a scheduling inquiry, no different in format from a dozen other appointment requests in Epstein’s calendar. Richardson was requesting a meeting with Epstein and JE’s office was accommodating the request. The Governor was offering two time slots and the choice was Epstein’s. It seems a lot of choices were.

The September 2011 calendar entry in which that email appears places Richardson alongside a tentative appointment with Woody Allen, a lunch with Jonathan Farkas and Charles Stevenson, and a TEDx event featuring Dan Ariely. The company Epstein kept was varied and prominent. A former governor of New Mexico, a filmmaker, business figures, academics. The meetings were social, professional, and — in Richardson’s case — ongoing.

5 years later, in September 2016, the relationship had not diminished. On September 2, 2016, Brooke Lange of the Office of Governor Bill Richardson emailed Epstein’s assistant asking whether Epstein might be available for a visit on September 6, 7, 8, or September 18, 19, or 20. The inquiry came from Richardson’s office, not from Epstein’s. Richardson was the one asking to visit this time:

— EFTA02043130

Epstein confirmed he would be available Monday, September 19. Then, onthat date, Brooke Lange emailed to confirm the dinner and to ask for the address. She was told: 9 East 71st Street between Fifth and Madison, there was no doorman, ring the bell on the right hand side. She was told that a staff member would let him in. They add “this place is like a museum. It used to be a school.”

The building at 9 East 71st Street was not a museum but it was a 70 story, 40 room Beaux- Arts mansion that Epstein had acquired for less than 10 million dollars from The Pilgrims of the United States, a private society, and had converted into his primary New York residence. The interior — described by multiple witnesses in federal court filings — was a ‘monument to Epstein’s predatory interests.’ Photographs of young women everywhere, a massage table in the upstairs bedroom, a communications infrastructure that investigators would spend years attempting to fully document. Bill Richardson walked into this building on September 19, 2016, for dinner and 8 years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Richardson walked into 9 East 71st Street on September 19, 2016 — eight years after Epstein’s conviction. He was not there as an investigator or a journalist — he was there for dinner.

What was discussed at that dinner is not documented in the EFTA production. What is documented is what happened immediately afterward:

— EFTA00461948

On October 17, 2016 Mickey Bergman — Vice President of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement( Richardson’s personal diplomatic and humanitarian organization) — sent a formal funding proposal to Lesley Groff at Epstein’s office. The subject line was “To Lesley, from Mickey Bergman (on behalf of Governor Richardson).” The email noted that it had been great speaking with Groff by phone a few weeks earlier and that he was following up with the proposal and a personal note from Governor Richardson to Jeffrey. The attachments included a formal funding proposal for the Richardson Center, multiple supporting documents, and a video file titled “Gobernador New Mexico.avi” — a personal video message from Bill Richardson to Jeffrey Epstein, recorded specifically for this solicitation.

On October 27, 2016, Bergman followed up by phone, and Groff forwarded the entire package to Epstein’s personal inbox (EFTA00438163 - EFTA00461948). Her forwarding note to Epstein read: “Mickey called to follow up on this on behalf of Governor Richardson... Mickey says you spoke to the Gov. about this when he was here last.”

The phrase “when he was here last” is the documentary confirmation that Richardson and Epstein had discussed the Richardson Center funding during the September 19 dinner. The proposal was not unsolicited. Epstein had apparently indicated, during dinner at 9 East 71st Street, that he might be willing to support Richardson’s organization. Richardson sent the formal proposal within four weeks.

By October 31, 2017 — a full year after the initial proposal — an Epstein assistant reminded Epstein directly in an internal note: “you told Gov. Richardson you would support his center but for tax reasons it will be done in November... (Mickey Bergman is assistant... we may be hearing from him soon).” Epstein had made a verbal commitment to Richardson. His own staff was tracking the promise and anticipating the followup call.

— EFTA02337227

The follow up call is documented in quite extraordinary detail. On January 5 2017, Bergman emailed Groff again, noting “per your and Jeffrey’s request” — confirming that Epstein’s office had specifically asked Bergman to resubmit the proposal. Richardson would be in New York on January 11th and could make himself available in case Jeffrey wanted to discuss it in person. A new attachment had been added to the package. An updated December 2016 brochure, prepared specifically for the Epstein solicitation:

— EFTA00442436

On January 30, 2017, Bergman emailed again (EFTA00443982): “Wanted to check in to see if Jeffrey had a chance to look over the proposal. I hope I’m not bothering you with these, and if Jeffrey decided not to do this, that is fine, but Governor Richardson wanted me to follow up, as we need to make program decisions for the year.”

On January 31, 2017, Lesley Groff responded to Bergman: “Hi Mickey. Jeffrey would be happy to speak with the Gov. Does today work? Jeffrey is pretty open at the moment.” A phone call was scheduled. Bergman confirmed the Governor would be on short flights but would call. Groff provided a number. Richardson called. Epstein was on another line. Richardson said he would call back in ten minutes. He did not reach Epstein. Groff emailed Bergman to have Richardson try again at 2pm (EFTA00444031).

The entire phone call sequence is documented in the EFTA production across multiple email threads. A former two term governor of New Mexico and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations was playing phone tag with Jeffrey Epstein, trying to reach him on a January afternoon to discuss a funding proposal for his diplomatic center, while Epstein’s scheduler coordinated the connection in real time.

The Arrest, the Lawyer, & the Scramble

On July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey as his private plane landed from Paris. He was charged by the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. The indictment covered conduct at his Palm Beach residence and his Manhattan townhouse. The investigation that produced that indictment had access to the EFTA document production — the emails, the calendars, the contact lists, the scheduling chains that form the evidentiary foundation of this investigation.

Within weeks of the arrest, the SDNY received a communication from a lawyer named Jeff Brown of the law firm Dechert LLP. Brown was representing Bill Richardson. He was contacting the office proactively, before Richardson had been contacted by investigators, to offer Richardson’s assistance with the investigation and to negotiate his status.

The internal SDNY email chain documenting this contact (EFTA00032235 - EFTA00032236) is a window into how quickly Richardson’s legal team moved and how unprepared the prosecutors were for the contact. On August 21, 2019, an AUSA forwarded an inquiry from the Public Affairs office: Richardson had issued a public statement claiming that his lawyer had been informed by the AUSA responsible for the case that “Governor Richardson is neither a target, subject, nor witness in the case and that there is no allegation against Governor Richardson that the government is actively investigating.” The statement concluded: “It’s fair to conclude that the federal prosecutors investigating this matter do not believe the Governor participated in or witnessed the criminal activity Jeffrey Epstein is alleged to have committed.”

— EFTA00032235

The forwarding AUSA added a blunt question to colleagues: “Has anyone talked to Jeff Brown and is this accurate?”

The response from another AUSA was more blunt: “I’ve never spoken to anyone who represents Bill Richardson. Have you guys? Am I missing something?”

A third AUSA then explained that she had spoken to “Jeff” — apparently Epstein’s attorney — and had told him that anyone they didn’t have reason to know had exposure would be considered a subject, and that with respect to Richardson specifically, they did not currently intend to subpoena or request to speak with him and that there were no specific allegations against him for which they were currently seeking a response. She had further said that an attorney proffer would be useful if Richardson had any knowledge of the charged conduct. She noted she had ‘contemporaneous notes’ and was going to call to correct what she described as an ‘apparent misrecollection of their conversation.’

‘I’ve never spoken to anyone who represents Bill Richardson. Have you guys? Am I missing something?’ — SDNY prosecutor, August 21, 2019

The SDNY scramble is revealing in several respects. First, Richardson’s legal team moved faster than the prosecutors expected — fast enough that the office was fielding questions from the Public Affairs division about statements Richardson had already made to the press before the relevant AUSAs had even established among themselves what had been communicated. Second, the internal confusion about who had said what to whom suggests that Richardson’s lawyer had been working channels within the SDNY that were not fully coordinated across the prosecution team. Third, the reference to an “attorney proffer” — an offer by a witness to provide information through their lawyer in exchange for some form of protection or clarity on status — is the language of exposure management, not innocent bystander cooperation.

Richardson publicly stated that he hoped the investigation continued so that Epstein’s victims could ‘have their day in court.’ He did not disclose that he had been to Epstein’s home for dinner literally 8 months before Epstein’s arrest, that he had been soliciting Epstein for funding for his diplomatic center through multiple email chains and phone calls throughout 2016 and 2017, or that his staff had maintained direct communication with Epstein’s personal assistant across a period of years.

Bill Richardson died in September 2023, he was never charged in connection with the Epstein investigation.

The Internal Alert

On November 6, 2017, a search alert was triggered within Epstein’s communications system. The alert carried the subject line: “Did JE/Rich donate to Gov. Richardson? Mickey Bergman.”

— EFTA02228567

The alert was generated by a monitoring system tracking communications related to specific search terms. The combination of terms — Epstein’s initials, “Rich” (possibly a second donor, possibly a shorthand for Richardson himself), the donation question, and Bergman’s name — suggests that someone within Epstein’s operation was actively monitoring the Richardson relationship for legal or financial exposure. This alert was generated in November 2017, one year after the initial funding proposal and two months after Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse allegations broke publicly, inaugurating the period that would become the Me Too reckoning.

The timing is significant here./ Epstein’s team was paying attention to who had been connected to him financially, who was asking for money, and what the documentary trail looked like. A former governor of New Mexico had been soliciting Epstein for donations. Epstein had apparently verbally committed to supporting his center. The question “Did JE/Rich donate to Gov. Richardson?” may have been an internal audit of financial exposure — an attempt to establish whether money had already moved, what the disclosure obligations were, and what the legal footprint of the Richardson relationship looked like.

What the EFTA documents stablishes is that the relationship was close enough, sustained enough, and financially entangled enough that Epstein’s own staff was running internal searches on it.

The Metrotech Connection

The thread connecting Forest City Ratner to the Trump Organization in the EFTA production runs through a single business plan document submitted to Epstein’s inbox from 666 Fifth Avenue — the address of Kushner Companies — by a lawyer and developer named Michael Bailkin of Arete Strategic Development (EFTA01197500 through EFTA01197511)

— EFTA01197508

Bailkin’s biography, included in the business plan, is a document of extraordinary specificity about the overlap between Forest City Ratner, the Trump Organization, and New York’s economic development infrastructure. Bailkin describes his Incentives Practice as national in scope, with significant completed assignments in New Mexico and other regions. His major projects in New York, he notes, include Metrotech — described as a 17mil sqaure ft re-development in downtown Brooklyn for ‘back office space’ — and a broad range of projects for local and national developers that he lists explicitly as: Forest City Enterprises, Vornado, Related, and the Trump Organization.

— EFTA01197507

Bailkin’s biography further describes his role in the Metrotech project specifically: he conceptualized the project, performed the entitlement and incentives work, and attracted Forest City Ratner to act as lead developer. Metrotech is one of the signature Forest City Ratner projects in Brooklyn, a precursor to Atlantic Yards, developed through exactly the kind of public/private partnership and economic development incentive work that Bailkin describes as his specialty.

The Arete business plan was submitted to Epstein from 666 Fifth Avenue — the building that Jared Kushner’s family company had purchased in 2007 for 1.8 billion dollars, the highest price ever paid for a New York office tower at the time, and the property whose near collapse would later drive the Kushner family’s desperate search for a Qatar linked bailout during the Trump administration. The plan itself proposed a $15 million capital raise for urban land development across Gateway cities, with Forest City Enterprises named among the developer relationships the principals would bring to the venture.

The docs do not establish that Trump was personally connected to the Epstein network through Bailkin or through Forest City, but, what it does establish is that the economic development infrastructure that bound Forest City Ratner to New York’s political and real estate establishment — the same infrastructure that produced the Richardson campaign donations in New Mexico, the same network through which David Mitchell was routing Forest City introductions through Epstein’s blessing — was visible at 666 Fifth Avenue and was being pitched directly into convicted sex offender and paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein’s private inbox.

The EFTA production is not finished, nor is the investigation. The documents that exist establish a pattern to which we can see the outline clearly. What remains in the unrendered attachments, the redacted exhibits, and the Bates ranges not yet reviewed may establish more.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.

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Sources

Epstein’s $50,000 donation to Richardson’s gubernatorial campaign — EFTA00203640

Forest City Covington NM LLC’s $30,000 donation to the same campaign, same cycle — EFTA00203646

Committee to Elect Diane Denish receiving $45,000 from the Richardson campaign network — EFTA00203646

David Mitchell’s Forest City partnership and the ‘win your blessing’ email to Epstein — EFTA02017848, EFTA00934747

James Ratner / MaryAnn Gilmartin introduction being routed through Epstein’s approval — EFTA02017849

Mitchell describing Forest City as ‘my development partner in LV’ in emails to Epstein — EFTA00755576

Brett Ratner in Epstein’s personal contact list — EFTA00577390

Alina Pascau as Epstein girlfriend / Ratner fiancée / Victoria’s Secret connection — EFTA01334062

Lesley Groff and Kelly Ratner personal friendship July-October 2016 — EFTA00322451, EFTA00322481, EFTA00320155

Groff referring to Epstein as ‘boss’ in Ratner email chain — EFTA00322451

Richardson 2011 meeting request through Epstein’s scheduling system — EFTA01775294

September 2016 Richardson dinner coordination at 9 East 71st Street — EFTA02043130, EFTA02043131, EFTA02043132

October 2016 formal funding proposal from Richardson Center to Lesley Groff — EFTA00461948, EFTA00438158

Groff note confirming Richardson discussed funding with Epstein at September dinner — EFTA00438163

October 31, 2017 internal reminder that Epstein verbally committed to Richardson’s center — EFTA02337227

January 2017 phone call coordination between Richardson and Epstein — EFTA00443982, EFTA00444031

‘Per your and Jeffrey’s request’ confirmation Epstein’s office solicited resubmission — EFTA00442436

November 2017 internal alert: ‘Did JE/Rich donate to Gov. Richardson?’ — EFTA02228567

August 2019 SDNY internal email chain on Richardson lawyer contact — EFTA00032235, EFTA00032236

Arete/Bailkin business plan from 666 Fifth Avenue naming Forest City and Trump Organization as developer clients — EFTA01197507

Palm Beach Police probable cause affidavit documenting ‘Sarah’ — EFTA02855412

This is a part of the 49 Zorro Ranch Road Series. Read in order:
Part One | Victim Standalone | Part Two | Part Three | Part 4

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If you have tips related to the Zorro Ranch and Epstein Investigation, contact:
https://nmdoj.gov/get-help/epstein-zorro-tips/

Zorro Ranch was searched on March 9, 2026 — the first known search of the property, nearly two decades after the FBI first developed leads tied to its operations.

The search was conducted with the cooperation of the current owners under the authority of New Mexico’s Epstein Truth Commission, which now has subpoena power.

Former ranch managers Karen and Brice Gordon — identified in FBI records as coordinating operations at the property, including the sourcing of massage therapists — have been named as people of interest.

No search results have been released. The Gordons have not spoken publicly. The investigation is ongoing.

The Ranch

Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch sprawled across 7,600 acres of wind-scoured high desert — a landscape of piñon and juniper, thirty miles south of Santa Fe New Mexico, where the land stretches quiet and unobserved.

The nearest small town to the ranch was Stanley.

Epstein purchased the property in 1993 from former New Mexico governor Bruce King, and it was there he built not just a ranch, but a network.

In the years following his purchase of the land, Epstein returned regularly — flying in four or five times a year on the infamous Lolita Express, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. The visits were often arranged with little notice, sometimes just a day or two for his staff to prepare. He would arrive by private jet into Albuquerque or Santa Fe, then be driven out to the ranch. He traveled with the same core group — his personal assistant, his bodyguard, and his trainer. Sometimes, he brought women.

When he traveled, as has been widely documented, he expected massages.

According to his chief pilot, Larry Visoski, it was understood among staff that Epstein received at least two a day. The arrangements were handled by the ranch’s manager, Brice Gordon, a New Zealand national. His wife, Karen Gordon, was also on staff. (More on them in the previous pieces linked above.)

When Gordon needed to find therapists, he turned to a very specific place — one that would come up repeatedly in FBI interviews conducted in 2006 and 2007.

A Japanese zen spa in the foothills above Santa Fe, about eight miles from the Plaza.

Ten Thousand Waves.

Ten Thousand Waves Day Spa, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Source: tenthousandwaves.com

What the FBI Heard in New Mexico

By late 2006 the FBI’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein had expanded far beyond Palm Beach Florida. What began as a local case had become a national probe — coordinated out of the Palm Beach County Resident Agency under case number 31E-MM-108062.

Leads were sent across the country, across the globe, and field offices were tasked with identifying Epstein’s employees, contractors, and anyone connected to his operations — wherever those operations reached.

One of those leads landed in New Mexico.

The Santa Fe Resident Agency was asked to determine how massages were being arranged at Zorro Ranch. On February 13, 2007, agents drove out to Stanley and interviewed the ranch’s manager, Brice Gordon, at the guest house located on the property.

FBI FD-302, Interview of Brice Gordon, 02/13/2007, Zorro Ranch, Stanley, NM. Source: EFTA00269599

Gordon told agents that the massage therapists were not flown in but were hired locally instead. He explained that his wife Karen handled the logistics — keeping the financial records and arranging appointments. When asked where the therapists came from, he gave a clear answer: their names were obtained from Ten Thousand Waves Day Spa or through personal referrals.

He said there had been approximately 5 therapists used at the ranch repeatedly. All were licensed and vetted. He also told FBI agents that Karen could provide their names along with records of what they had been paid at the ranch.

The agents of course, wanted to speak with her. But, before that could happen, Brice received a phone call.

It came from NY — what he described as the “main office” of Epstein’s operation. The message was direct and blunt, he and his wife were no longer allowed to speak with the FBI.

The interview ended immediately.

Brice never provided the names, and the payment records were never obtained. Based on the documents that were released to the public, there is no record of any follow up interview with Gordon or his wife, no attempt to identify the therapists, and no contact with Ten Thousand Waves Spa itself. The more I learn in this Epstein case, it does not even surprise me anymore.

But, Gordon was not the only person who pointed investigators in the direction of TTW.

FBI FD-302, Interview of Larry Visoski, 12/04/2006, West Palm Beach, FL. Source: EFTA00270164

Larry Visoski — Epstein’s well known personal pilot, whom had worked for him since 1990, (first as a pilot and later as his chief pilot) knew the schedules, the movements, and the logistics that held the entire operation together. When Larry spoke to the FBI in December 2006, he described what happened when Epstein was at the New Mexico ranch. He told investigators that Epstein received massages from both men and women. When agents asked how those therapists were arranged, Visoski named the same place Brice Gordon would name two months later:

“Bryce LNU, ranch manager, arranges masseuses from ‘Ten Thousand Waves’ salon in Santa Fe, to provide massages to Epstein and Maxwell.”

These were two separate interviews — conducted two months apart from each other with two very different people — both who pointed to the exact same spa, and the public record shows that lead was ignored, like so many other leads seem to be by the FBI.

The Spa

Ten Thousand Waves spa opened in 1981. Its founder, Duke Klauck, built it out of a “love for hot springs and Japanese bathing culture”. What started as a small bathhouse with eight outdoor tubs and a single massage room grew over the next 4 decades into one of the most well known premier resorts and wellness destinations in the American Southwest.

It became known as a spiritual retreat — a sanctuary set into the sprawling foothills above Santa Fe. By the time the FBI was investigating Epstein, the spa employed roughly 130 therapists across nearly 20 treatment rooms. By every public measure, it was a legitimate and respected institution, and that is what makes the FBI record so significant.

When the manager of Zorro Ranch needed licensed massage therapists in Santa Fe, this is where he liked to go, and Epstein himself also went there.

Source: EFTA02491440

“im going to ten thousand waves tomorrow at 430; so i thought some hamburger place in town or you can come here anyday you like”

The email was sent from Epstein’s personal Gmail account in August 2015, years after the FBI investigation had already reached Zorro Ranch — and years after the sweetheart Florida plea deal that Bondi and Acosta arranged for him.

He writes casually, suggesting lunch and giving a time to meet — as if the place were part of their regular ol’ routine.

The recipient — Joshua Cooper Ramo — was CEO of Kissinger Associates at the time of all this, and had visited Zorro Ranch at least once.
His reply reads:
“I assumed we were meeting at the pink bottom ranch.”

Ramo later said he did not recall sending the message or whether the two met that day.

The Denial

When New Mexico lawmakers established a Truth Commission in February 2026, NBC News contacted Ten Thousand Waves directly for comment.

A spokesperson stated that the spa neither provided nor referred massage therapists to Epstein’s ranch. They denied all allegations.

That denial now sits alongside what two FBI witnesses said independently in 2006 and 2007. There are possible explanations for that gap. Lets examine: Both witnesses could have been mistaken…right? Therapists may have been referred informally without the spa’s direct involvement — or payments may have been handled privately.

What is not in dispute is that the FBI was told not once, but twice by people directly involved in Epstein’s network, that Ten Thousand Waves was the source for the massage therapists at the ranch. The public record shows that lead was never properly followed — the names were not obtained, the payments were not traced, and no one at the spa was ever interviewed.

That trail ends with a phone call.

A Therapist From Santa Fe

Rachel Benavidez was a massage therapist in Santa Fe. She had just finished massage school when, she says, she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to work at Zorro Ranch.

She has spoken publicly about her experience, including in the documentary Surviving Jeffrey Epstein and in statements to the press. She says Epstein sexually abused her during visits to the ranch that began in 2000.

Her background matches what Brice Gordon described to the FBI: a local, licensed massage therapist sourced in Santa Fe and brought to work for JE at the ranch.

In February 2026, following the creation of the Truth Commission, she released a statement calling for accountability and further investigation into what happened at Zorro Ranch.

She has never publicly stated how she was recruited.

The FBI — in February 2007 — was close enough to find out but refused to pursue.

Rachel Benavidez, massage therapist. Screenshot: Surviving Jeffrey Epstein, Lifetime, 2020.

What Was Also Going On

While this was all happening in New Mexico, Epstein was also moving through elite intellectual and cultural circles all over.

Through literary agent John Brockman and the Edge Foundation, he was introduced into invitation only gatherings that included scientists, tech founders, investors, and artists. These events gave him access to “elite” rooms that conferred legitimacy.

Email, John Brockman to Jeffrey Epstein et al., August 15, 2014. Source: EFTA02588879

In August 2014, Brockman invited Epstein to an event near Sausalito featuring performance artist Marina Abramović. The guest list included some of the most influential figures in technology and finance at the time.

Brockman’s message was direct to Epstein: “Do not miss this.”

Epstein replied the same day: “as always — any help you need, i am there.”

More invitations to him followed, including smaller and more private gatherings.

Where the Investigation Stopped

In 2019, New Mexico’s Attorney General launched a state investigation into Zorro Ranch. Federal prosecutors asked him to pause it, citing concerns about interfering with their case.

He complied.

Epstein died months later and the federal case ended there, with him, in a cell, guarded by someone googling him. I have written all about Tova Noel, you can search my archive. The ranch was then sold in 2023 and there is no record that it was ever searched.

Until 2026.

A Truth Commission has now been established, and the investigation is active again. Survivors are being asked to come forward. The ranch has a new owner and the spa is still open. The names, the payment records, and the full scope of what was arranged were never obtained.

The call from New York came just in time.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.

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The people named in these files had lawyers, PR teams, and decades of institutional protection. The survivors had Rachel Benavidez’s words and a memorial of flowers and crosses outside a gate on Highway 41.

If you have tips related to the Zorro Ranch and Epstein Investigation, contact:
https://nmdoj.gov/get-help/epstein-zorro-tips/

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Sources

EFTA00269599 — FBI FD-302, Interview of Brice M. Gordon, Zorro Ranch, Stanley, NM, 02/13/2007. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA00270164 / EFTA01688744 — FBI FD-302, Interview of Larry Visoski, Palm Beach County Resident Agency, 12/04/2006. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA01613466 / EFTA02491440 — Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Joshua Cooper Ramo, 08/08/2015. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA01769958 / EFTA02588879 — Email, John Brockman to Jeffrey Epstein et al., 08/15/2014. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA01354232 / EFTA02361899 — Email, John Brockman to Jeffrey Epstein, 11/19/2014. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA00357054-55 — Email chain, John Brockman / Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant, 11/19/2014 and 12/08/2014. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA00359768-70 — Email, John Brockman to Epstein’s office, 10/29/2014. U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

EFTA01133735 — Kickstarter newsletter, Epstein inbox, 08/15/2013 (Marina Abramović Institute campaign). U.S. Department of Justice Epstein Files

NBC News, ‘New Mexico approves comprehensive probe of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch,’ February 17, 2026. nbcnews.com

NBC News, ‘How Epstein lured girls to his Zorro Ranch and kept authorities away,’ March 2026. nbcnews.com

Forbes, Survivors Tell Their Stories In Heartbreaking, Powerful Doc ‘Surviving Jeffrey Epstein’

Crime+Investigation UK, ‘Survivor: Rachel Benavidez.’

Ten Thousand Waves, ‘About / History.’

Santa Fe New Mexican, ‘Jeffrey Epstein files shed light on ties to Santa Fe Institute scientists,’ February 12, 2026

From New York to New Mexico: new Epstein files shed light on his sprawling ranch outside Santa Fe

Surviving Jeffrey Epstein: Rachel Benavidez Reads from Her Book (Extended Scene) | Lifetime

Joi Ito wants you to believe it all started innocently. Just coincidentally met Epstein at a conference in 2013 — a casual meeting. He says he did his homework and looked into Epstein, asked around. He says he just did not fully understand who Jeffrey Epstein was yet.

Now, the federal documents tell a completely different story.

This is documented — it was in Epstein's own personal calendar: April 2013. — 7 weeks before that dinner Ito pointed to as their first meeting — a reminder to bring Woody Allen to MIT, and to meet with “Joicho Ito” that same month. So, the relationship wasn’t an accident, it was being arranged months in advance, before Ito even says it started.

And then came 6 years of access. 6 years of MIT’s name, its scholars, events, even its official letterhead — handed over, piece by piece, to a convicted sex offender and paedophile. Money moved through the institution like a slush fund, which is exactly what Joi coined it. Leon Black’s cash flowed, Gary Gensler got brought into meetings, Steve Bannon was introduced and connected. The Dalai Lama? Apparently the next target. MIT channels helped arrange Japanese visas — and after the Miami Herald broke the story open? Ito’s own family flew once again on Epstein’s private plane.

The last time the documents show them in contact was in March 2019. Epstein was arrested just 4 months later, in July of 2019. That’s how close Ito was to the end. A true ride or die for Mr. Epstein.

None of this is speculation. Every claim here comes from primary source documents — the DOJ’s own “Epstein Library.” Every quote is exact. Every fact has a source attached for you to see. We believe that is truly important when reporting on the Epstein Network as it is all just so unbelievable without the reciepts.

WHO IS JOI ITO

Joi Ito was the director of the MIT Media Lab from 2011 to 2019. Before that, he was a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and prominent figure in the worlds of creative commons, open source, and internet governance. He served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and was a well known voice for innovation and decentralized systems. He was trusted by MIT to lead one of the most prestigious media research labs in the world — a position that came with access to billionaires, world leaders, and Nobel laureates. That trust is what makes what follows so difficult to read and why we are putting him in the spot light.

Joi Ito
Source: @Joi

I. THE LIE

The story Joi Ito told publicly has never changed. He sticks with it that he met Epstein at a conference. He did his research, he asked around! Whatever that even means. He knew Epstein had a conviction, but after talking to people he trusted, he came away thinking the situation was more complicated — more nuanced — than it looked.

But, the documents tell us a different timeline then he wants us to see.

Let’s start with the calendar. April 1, 2013. Epstein’s own records have a reminder:

“you want to take Woody to MIT and meet with Joicho (Joi) Ito this month.”
Source: EFTA02143028

Then May 22, 2013. Dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. Who was there? Joi Ito. Ed Boyden. Woody Allen. Soon-Yi Previn. Source: EFTA02138097

Epstein’s calendar alert reads: “JE to see Joicho (Joi) Ito TODAY.” - EFTA02138948

Here’s the thing — the April reminder comes 7 weeks before that May dinner. 7 weeks. Epstein was already planning to bring Ito into his circle, into his network, before the dinner Ito would later point to as their introduction. So it wasn’t just a fuzzy memory or a compressed timeline. The conference story? It’s a fabrication of the entry point. It is a lie.

Now fast forward 2 months. July 2013. Ito flies to Epstein’s private island — via St. Thomas. Epstein’s staff coordinated the trip. Business class tickets, arranged. This is the first documented island visit we have of Mr.Ito, and it happened weeks after Ito claimed he had only just met Epstein at a conference. I keep repeating it because these lies are insane!

Then there’s this message. July 21, 2013. Joi Ito to Jeffrey Epstein: “I talked to Reid about your jail thing. He doesn’t judge people.”

Source: EFTA01756112

Same summer as the island trip. Reid Hoffman — who would become the second point in the Ito-Epstein-Hoffman triangle — had already been briefed about the conviction. And Ito’s message to Epstein is clear: Hoffman doesn’t judge people. That was the framing. That’s how Ito brought Hoffman into the relationship. It’s all right there in the record. And do not fear, we will be coming for Mr. Hoffman in the future as well.

II. THE MACHINE

From 2013 through 2018, Joi Ito wasn’t just running the MIT Media Lab. He was using his position to systematically hand Jeffrey Epstein access to some of the most important institutions, scholars, and government officials in the world. The documents record this in granular, uncomfortable detail:

THE SLUSH FUND

May 2, 2014. An email from Joi Ito to Jeffrey Epstein. Read it carefully:

“The slush fund, if it’s at MIT is easy. Should I send you the instructions? Will it be coming from Leon Black? How much?”
Source: EFTA01927709

So Ito was setting up an off the books fund inside MIT — routed through Epstein — and he was asking whether Leon Black, the founder of Apollo Global Management, was the source. One of the most vile humans out there. (Search my archive for all we have put out on him so far.) This directly matches the reported $5 million that Black channeled to the Media Lab through Epstein. The question of how much and from whom? Ito was coordinating it, in his own words.

Then November 2015. Epstein’s day schedule shows a 9am breakfast with Joi Ito. Later that same afternoon? A 3:30pm tentative meeting with Leon Black at Apollo, followed by a confirmed 4pm appointment with Black. Ito and Black, back to back on Epstein’s calendar. More than once might I add. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the financial architecture of the machine — visible in a single document.

THE HOFFMAN TRIANGLE

Reid Hoffman — co-founder of LinkedIn — was introduced to Epstein by Ito directly. Here’s the message:

“Guys. You have to meet each other at some point. I spent several days with Jeffrey expanding my world view.”
Source: EFTA01758649

Then the 3 men started coordinating island visits together. February 2014 — Ito confirms he’s flying from Vancouver, Canada to Epstein’s island. March 2014 — a calendar document asks whether Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman need to be coordinated to Zorro Ranch. September 2013 — a reminder notes a possible Ito and Hoffman island visit after October 15th.

Fast forward to June 2016. Epstein — already convicted for years, already reported on for years — directs his staff to order custom sweatshirts. Here’s his list of gift recipients:

“lets make sweatshirts for valeria chomsky, joi, martin reid thiel ruemmler and rothschild”
Source: EFTA02301991

The staff noted that sweatshirts had already been made for Joi and Reid in the past. This wasn’t a first gesture. It was a repeat one. Jeffrey really liked to give his merch to the network.

THE PUTIN MEETING

July 2014. Ito writes to both Epstein and Reid Hoffman togerther about a planned meeting with Vladimir Putinhimself. Ito had tried to bring Hoffman along but couldn’t change his schedule. Here’s what he wrote:

“I wasn’t able to convince Reid to change his schedule to go meet Putin with you. ;-)”
Source: EFTA01914954

The meeting was canceled days later — after Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine. But let that land: Ito was the intermediary trying to arrange a meeting between a convicted sex offender paedophile and the president of Russia, with a Silicon Valley billionaire as the intended 3 attendee. That’s not interpretation. That’s what the document contains.

BANNON, GENSLER, AND MBS

March 2018. Ito texts Epstein that Mohammed bin Salman is coming to the MIT Media Lab. Adds to the message “Super secret.” Epstein responds that he’s with Steve Bannon.

Here’s the iMessage chain:

Ito: “MBS is coming to MIT media lab sat. (Super secret) are you meeting him in NYC?”
Epstein: “Here with Bannon.”
Source: EFTA01620984

Three days later, Epstein makes the introduction: “steve, joi joi, steve.” Ito later tells Epstein he “Connected SB with various folks” and suggests they discuss it.

Then May 2018. Ito brings Gary Gensler — then newly affiliated with MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, later Biden’s SEC Chair — to an Epstein meeting. Ito writes:

“Also maybe Gary Gensler who just joined me/Digital Currency Initiative depending on whether we can get the time to work.”
— EFTA02242963

THE FUND

February 2018. The financial relationship between Ito and Epstein reaches its most direct expression. Ito is structuring a new fund. Reid Hoffman has committed $15 million. Ito writes to Epstein:
“Reid said he will be OK with putting in 15M into the fund. Can you match with 15M? This would get me to the minimum 30M.”
Source: EFTA02521287

He keeps pursuing the co-investment through at least June 2018, asking Epstein to invest “at some level, even if not the entire 15M match with Reid.” By this point, the Miami Herald had been publishing its investigation for months! The story was broken, but I guess Joi really doesn’t judge people!

THE VISA ARRANGEMENT

April 2015. Ito’s MIT office arranges Japanese visas for Epstein and two assistants. Paperwork coordinated through MIT’s institutional channels — on behalf of a convicted sex offender — to help him travel internationally. That too, is on the record.

THE CYBER SECURITY THREAD & VINCENT IOZZO

July 2016. Joi Ito emails Jeffrey Epstein. He copies Reid Hoffman. The subject? Email and data security.

Ito mentions he’s been talking with someone named “Vincenzo.” He tells Epstein to get Vincenzo to “lock you down.” Then he adds something worth reading twice: hiring hackers to get dirt on political candidates was “a thing” right now.

That “Vincenzo” is consistent with Vincenzo Iozzo — a cybersecurity researcher whose extensive correspondence with Epstein’s office shows up across more than 2,300 documents in the DOJ Epstein Library. And here’s where it gets deeper: a redacted profile in a 2017 FBI counterintelligence file has been widely identified as matching his. That identification — and the full allegations tied to it — will be addressed in a future Last Page First intelligence series.

But even without that context, the email alone is striking. The director of the MIT Media Lab, in the summer of 2016, is advising a convicted sex offender on digital security — and casually noting that hacking political candidates is something people are doing right now.

III. THE INNER CIRCLE

The machine ran on institutional access, but the inner circle documents reveal something beneath all that — something personal. A relationship sustained over 6 years, close enough that Epstein was informed within hours of Ito’s daughter being born.

May 12, 2017. Ito’s daughter arrives. Epstein gets the news immediately. His text: “holy shit, it looks asian!” Ito fires back a racial joke about his own mother. Epstein forwards the birth announcement to his assistant, Karyna Shuliak. His first question to Ito after the birth? “when do i get the details.” He also joked about naming the baby Jeffrina.

This isn’t a donor talking to a university director. This is someone who believed he belonged inside Ito’s personal life — at the dinner table, in the delivery room, “naming” the child, joke or not.

The iMessage chain between Ito and Epstein runs from 2013 through 2019. It’s not formal. It’s not transactional. It’s a sustained personal correspondence between two people who considered themselves in each other’s lives. Midnight texts, pleanty of Island invitations. Baby announcements — strange birth details I just don’t think a normal person would tell a registered sex offender — Editorial notes on New York Times pieces.

November 2015: Epstein’s schedule shows a 9am breakfast with Ito. November 2014: Epstein’s staff arranges for Ito to be picked up at Fort Lauderdale and driven to Palm Beach. January 2016: Ito photoshops a picture of Epstein for an event. Lesley Groff’s response: “SOOOOOO Awesome!”

March 2016. Epstein meets a Buddhist ethics scholar at MIT. He texts Ito: “It was fun watching you talk to Tenzin. Next stop. The Dalai Lama.”

That’s the intimacy, dark twisted – and it’s why the betrayal lands the way it does.

IV. FINAL TEXT

On November 28, 2018, the Miami Herald published the first story in its Perversion of Justice series. It documented Epstein’s crimes with a level of detail and specificity that could no be minimized or explained away.

And in the days that followed, Joi Ito kept going.

December 5–6, 2018. An iMessage chain between Ito and Epstein—after the Herald stories dropped. Ito asks for funding for a researcher through MIT. Epstein replies:

“Cool. Let me figure out whether we can still do it through MIT considering all of the recent press stuff.”

Then: “Press brutality. Wow. Will need to cure cancer. To move this down the page.”

Ito’s response: “Yes... brutal.”

Brutal. That’s the word Joi Ito chose, and not for the victims, but for the press coverage.

And here’s what else was happening in those same weeks — November and December 2018, Epstein’s office arranged travel on his private plane for Ito’s wife Mizuka, their baby, and Joi himself. The car from Soho House to Teterboro Airport? Charged to Epstein’s card. The tail number: N212JE. One trip was canceled because Ito’s dog was sick, but the arrangements were still being made. The relationship was not over.

Let’s go back even further, shall we? April 2016. Epstein writes to Larry Summers: “reid hoffman danny hillis joi ito. all around?” He was still assembling the circle. February 2018 — the same period as the fund solicitation — the architecture was still being built.

Now to the end — the final documented contact in the released record is March 2019. Epstein forwards a New York Times editorial board piece to multiple people. Ito is among them.

“At the times?” Ito writes.

“Yup. Very very,” Epstein replies.

Ito’s response: *”:-/”*

That’s the last text in the record. March 2019. Epstein was arrested four months later. He died in federal custody four months after that.

Ito resigned from MIT on September 7, 2019. In his resignation statement, he said he had made a mistake in judgment. He said he was sorry, but he did not explain why the judgment continued for six long years. He did not explain why his family flew on the Lolita Express in December 2018. He did not explain the slush fund, or the Putin meeting, or the fund solicitation, or Steve Bannon, none of it has been explained!

MIT’s internal investigation concluded that Ito had driven the relationship. That post-conviction donations were driven by Ito specifically. That staff in his own office had given Epstein the nickname Voldemort — he who must not be named — because the concealment was so widely understood it had become a joke.

The institution trusted him with its name. The name became a door and Joi Ito kept that door open for six years, only closing it because the infamous JE was arrested.

The final text in the record is March 2019. ‘Brutal’ was the word he chose — not for the victims, but for the press coverage. The family flew on the plane anyway.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.

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Sources

EFTA02143026/28 — April 2013 calendar reminder. Dataset 10.

EFTA02138097/02138948 — May 22, 2013 dinner. Dataset 10.

EFTA01756112 — July 21, 2013, ‘doesn’t judge people.’ Dataset 10.

EFTA00388015 — July 2013 island trip. Dataset 9.

EFTA01620963–01621006 — Full iMessage chain 2013–2019.

EFTA01927709 — May 2, 2014. Slush fund email.

EFTA00329080 — Feb 12, 2016. Leon Black contact request.

EFTA02301991 — June 2016. Sweatshirts email.

EFTA01758649 — Ito introducing Hoffman to Epstein.

EFTA01789476 / EFTA01939975 — Island trip coordination.

EFTA01914954 — July 2014. Putin meeting email. Cc: Hoffman.

EFTA01620984 / EFTA00840183 — March 2018. MBS / Bannon texts.

EFTA02521287 — Feb 24, 2018. ‘$15M fund’ email.

EFTA02549789 — June 23, 2018. Fund follow-up.

EFTA02242963 — May 3, 2018. Gary Gensler meeting.

EFTA00691288 / EFTA01046291 — May 2017. Baby Kio / ‘Jeffrina.’

EFTA02265974 / EFTA00485716 — Nov–Dec 2018. Family plane arrangements.

EFTA01621002 — Dec 5–6, 2018. ‘Brutal.’ Post-Herald texts.

EFTA00334425 — Nov 18, 2015. Day schedule: Ito, Leon Black, same day.

EFTA00350044 — April 2015. Japanese visa arrangement through MIT.

EFTA01787553 — March 2016. ‘Next stop. The Dalai Lama.’

EFTA00784023–39 — March 4–5, 2019. Final contact.

MIT Fact-Finding Report — Goodwin Procter LLP, January 10, 2020.

This is a part of this 49 Zorro Ranch Road Series
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Victim Standalone

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If you have tips related to the Zorro Ranch and Epstein Investigation, contact:
https://nmdoj.gov/get-help/epstein-zorro-tips/

San Rafael Ranch, formerly Zorro Ranch, entrance sign and gate — property renamed by the Huffines family.
Source: Arol Barnes

Who Owns The Ranch Now

Epstein’s estate sold Zorro Ranch in 2023. The buyer was the family of Don Huffines — a Texas businessman, former state senator, and, at the time of publication, the Republican nominee for Texas state comptroller — endorsed by President Trump himself.

Huffines intends to convert the property of deceased registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, into a Christian retreat. You just can’t make this shit up. He renamed it Rancho de San Rafael — after the archangel Raphael — patron saint of healing. The sentiment is…nice? The 26 700 square ft mansion remains standing. The private airstrip remains also. The compound infrastructure Epstein built over nearly three decades and did who knows what at — remains.

Construction began under Huffines’s ownership. Santa Fe County officials ordered a stop — no permits had been obtained. A former FBI agent serving on the New Mexico Truth Commission raised concerns that ongoing renovation could compromise or destroy physical evidence. What a thought. Especially as the property had not ever been searched yet. Huffines has stated publicly that any law enforcement request for access would receive “immediate and full cooperation.” The March 9, 2026, search proceeded with the owners’ cooperation.

The Truth Commission

The New Mexico Epstein Truth Commission is a lonely 4 member bi-partisan panel created by unanimous House vote on February 16, 2026
Chair: Rep. Andrea Romero
Members: Rep. Marianna Anaya, former FBI agent Rep. William “Bill” Hall, and prosecutor Rep. Andrea Reeb.
Budget: $2 million, drawn from the 2022 Epstein bank settlement.
Initial report due: July 31, 2026
Final report due: December 31, 2026

The commission cannot bring criminal charges, but, it can issue subpoenas, compel testimony, and refer evidence to the NMDOJ for prosecution. It’s a long road ahead for answers. Its mandate: determine whether crimes occurred at Zorro Ranch, examine the sex offender registry exemption, establish whether state or local officials “looked the other way”, and produce a survivor centered accounting of 26 years of documented activity at the property.

The commission has named Karen and Brice Gordon as people of interest. Rep. Romero has stated she hopes those with information will come forward.

‘I hope that if there is a way to seek justice in New Mexico that is available to survivors... we’re willing to take responsibility for any inaction that happened and fix it. Our overall goal is to prevent these things from happening at all.’
— Rep. Andrea Romero, Truth Commission Chair

The New Zealand Couple That Ran The Ranch

Karen and Brice Gordon managed Zorro Ranch for the entirety of Epstein’s ownership. Their names appear throughout many of the Epstein Files. They can be proven to be co-ordinating guest logistics, managing staff, handling banking and purchasing, and corresponding directly with Epstein, Lesley Groff, and Darren Indyke.

Email From Redacted, to the Gordons, mentioning Barry Josephson visiting the Ranch. Source: DOJ Epstein Library — EFTA02073898

Brice Gordon was interviewed by the FBI at Zorro Ranch in August 2007, during the initial Florida investigation period. Those interview notes are not included in the publicly released Epstein Files — the record shows the interview occurred, but its content is not publicly available. Gordon told investigators that most masseuses used at the ranch were hired locally through Ten Thousand Waves, a Santa Fe spa. The spa’s spokesperson has denied providing or referring any masseuses to the ranch.

Please read our piece dedicated to the spa here, as it is a crucial component in the Zorro Ranch pipeline

Brice Gordon was named a $2 million beneficiary in Epstein’s trust. His PayPal account was examined by the FBI in August 2019. He was listed as a non testifying witness in materials related to United States v. Ghislaine Maxwell. No charges have been filed against either Karen or Brice Gordon. Their current whereabouts are not confirmed in open reporting and they have not spoken publicly. The Truth Commission has the authority to subpoena them.

Ten Thousand Waves spa, Santa Fe NM — identified in FBI records as primary source for ranch masseuses
Source: Ten Thousand Waves official photography

The Bodies Allegation*

The anonymous November 2019 email received by Eddy Aragon alleged that two foreign girls were buried on the property — on Epstein’s orders — after dying during rough sex. The sender claimed to possess videos of minors and offered them for one Bitcoin. Aragon forwarded the email to the FBI, and no investigative action was documented in response.

This allegation is unverified currently. No corroborating evidence has been made public. Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard has formally requested that investigators use LiDAR and LDAR forensic scanning to examine the state land surrounding the ranch and the K-9 units in the March 9, 2026 search were trained for evidence detection. Search results have not been publicly disclosed at this time.

The Evidence Trail So Fair

This series has been built from primary documents: the DOJ EFTA release, Giuffre v. Maxwell depositions, United States v. Ghislaine Maxwell trial testimony, Deutsche Bank due diligence records, and verified state law enforcement statements.

Here is what the evidence trail says, plainly stated: Jeffrey Epstein owned a 7600 acre compound in New Mexico for 26 years. Multiple women and girls have testified under oath that they were trafficked and sexually abused there. The FBI knew about the ranch during the 2006-2009 investigation period, interviewed at least one person associated with the property, and chose not to seek a search warrant for reasons unclear at this time. When Epstein was arrested in 2019, the ranch remained unsearched and the state investigation was halted at federal request. Two tips about physical evidence reached the FBI but neither was acted on. The property was sold in 2023 and major renovation work began to convert the property in a Christian retreat. Six years and seven months after Epstein’s death, the property was searched for the very first time.

Whether physical evidence survived two ownership transitions, active construction, and seven years of time is something only the Truth Commission’s investigators can determine. Attorney General Torrez has stated openly that physical evidence may no longer exist. Survivors deserve to hear it stated plainly.

The question is not just what happened at Zorro Ranch. It is who knew, who decided it didn’t matter, and who will be held responsible for the decision to look away.

The Truth Commission has until December 2026. The criminal investigation is ongoing currently. The Gordons have not spoken publicly to date and the search results have not been released publicly to date. The July report is still pending.

The paper trail that led here is documented. This is not a conspiracy although it should be one.
Where it goes next is not yet written. We at LPF just want accountability, transparency, and justice for all victims.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.

If this investigation has been useful to you — if it gave you something to think about, something to share, something to act on — consider supporting Last Page First. Independent investigative journalism doesn’t have institutional backing behind it. It has the readers ♥

Subscribe now

Have a tip? A lead you want to share?

Submit anonymously

This work is entirely reader supported. No grants, no advertisers, no editorial board — just primary documents and the time it takes to read them. If you want to keep this going, donating is the most direct way to help. Thank you.

Support LastPageFirst

Sources

New Mexico Department of Justice — investigation statement, February 19, 2026

New Mexico Department of Justice — search statement, March 9, 2026

Epstein Files, EFTA02089629 — Lesley Groff email to Karen and Brice Gordon (DOJ EFTA Dataset 10)

Epstein Files, EFTA01891133 — Karen Gordon as LSJ Island Manager (DOJ EFTA Dataset 10)

Epstein Files, EFTA00430016 — Limited Power of Attorney, Brice Gordon as Zorro Trust Manager (DOJ EFTA Dataset 9)

EFTA00095751 Epstein Files — Brice Gordon FBI interview reference August 2007 (DOJ EFTA release)

EFTA00067066 Epstein Files — Eddy Aragon anonymous tip email, November 2019 (DOJ EFTA release)

U.S. v. Ghislaine Maxwell — Annie Farmer trial testimony 2021

Christian Science Monitor: ‘What happened at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch?’ April 3, 2026

ABC News: ‘Why are authorities finally searching Epstein’s ranch?’ March 2026

NBC News: ‘How Epstein lured girls to his Zorro Ranch,’ March 2026

NBC News: ‘New Mexico approves comprehensive probe of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch,’ February 17, 2026

Colorado Politics: ‘New Mexico launches truth commission investigation,’ February 22, 2026

Al Jazeera: ‘US investigators begin search of Epstein’s former ranch,’ March 10, 2026

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The morning after Super Bowl Sunday, Aaron Spivack walked into the FBI’s New York Field Office and sat down at his computer. It had seemingly restarted overnight. He sat down, he noticed a text file had opened by itself — or rather, someone had left a message for him — ‘Your network has been compromised’
— EFTA00173598

The timeline begins: ‘7:30am - I arrived at the office and noticed my Talino computer had restarted.’ Written the same day as the breach discovery.
Source: EFTA00173598–99

By 7:40 am, Spivack was logged in. That’s when the text file opened itself — right from his startup folder. Someone had been inside his computer. The message was short but to the point — his network was compromised, they left an email address for him to contact.

He ran antivirus software. He called CART, the FBI’s computer analysis response team, and he called Synology, the server manufacturer. For hours, Spivack assumed it was a hardware failure. A glitch. Something routine. Right.

It wasn’t until 3:30 that afternoon when he and Christian Idsola from CART finally started combing through the log files that they saw it.

Strange IP activity, two addresses.

In his own words, written in his own timeline that morning: the activity included “combing through certain files pertaining to the Epstein investigation.” By 5:00 pm, Spivack wrote five words: “we realized we were hacked.”

But, there was something he didn’t write in that February 13 timeline, something nobody outside the FBI would know for three years — Aaron Spivack wasn’t just some agent whose server got breached — he was the agent who had arrested Jeffrey Epstein himself at Teterboro Airport. The agent who had searched Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, and the agent assigned to search Little St. James island. Aaron Spivack, the agent who had worked the Epstein case from arrest to death, to aftermath, was hacked?

Agent Aaron Spivack

Source: EFTA00147199–EFTA00147208 Primary document

The FBI doesn’t do anything small, as we know. The operations order for Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest — July 6, 2019 — runs 10 pages long.

It names the intercept point, Teterboro Airport, 111 Industrial Avenue, Bergen County, New Jersey. It also names the backup point, 9 East 71st Street — Epstein’s townhouse, the vehicle — a 2016 black Chevrolet Suburban, and the plan: CBP stops Epstein when his plane touches down at 5:20 pm, FBI and NYPD move in, then they search the Manhattan house. Page after page of procedure. And there, sixth on the personnel list, under “Arrest/Search/Interview,” is a name — SA Aaron Spivack.

Operations order for the island search. Spivack on the Night Tour (8pm–6am) search team. SDNY had been drafting the island search warrant as early as August 6, 2019 — four days before Epstein’s death.
Source: EFTA00148259–EFTA00148261

A month later Spivack got a new assignment: Little St. James, Epstein’s infamous private paedophile island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The operations order for that search warrant puts him on the Night Tour search team, the team that would comb through Epstein’s island after dark. But here’s the thing, the email organizing that search — EFTA00147883 dated August 6, 2019 — was sent by SSA Sean Watson to Spivack and the full C-20 team while Epstein was still alive.

Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10 2019, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan NY. The search went ahead anyway and Spivack was on the team that picked through Epstein’s island while Jeffrey Epstein’s body was still at the medical examiner’s office.

Watson writes: ‘SDNY is in the process of drafting a search warrant affidavit for Epstein’s island off St. Thomas. We are expecting the warrant to be sworn out on Friday in St. Thomas.’ Spivack is cc’d directly.
Source: EFTA00147883

Spivacks Career

Aaron Spivack joined the FBI in 2006 as an intelligence analyst. Two years later he became a Special Agent and by 2010 he was assigned to squad CY-3: the child exploitation and cyber unit. By 2017 he had taken over the squad’s Group I undercover operation and doubled its output. In his sworn statement he claimed to have personally rescued ‘hundreds of children from exploitation.’ The FBI certified him as an ‘expert witness in child exploitation’ — for the entire bureau. He received the FBI’s Medal of Excellence not once but twice.

By any institutional measure, Aaron Spivack was one of the bureau’s most effective child exploitation investigators and he was also the agent running a forensic lab with no dedicated IT support, no information security officer, disabled antivirus software, and a network he had configured himself by following instructions he found on Google. The math ain't mathing here folks once again in the Epstein saga that never ends.

The Door Was Wide Open

Statement runs EFTA00173481 through EFTA00173568 (clean version) and EFTA00173569 through EFTA00173632 (draft with attorney margin comments visible). Sworn September 2024. Attorney: Richard J. Roberson Jr.
Source: EFTA00173586–88

The C-20 computer lab sat on the 10th floor of the FBI’s New York Field Office. It wasn’t supposed to exist the way it did. It started as a single forensic workstation for child exploitation evidence. Offline, unconnected, and isolated. No FBI network, no internet, safe, how it should be. Over time, the job changed. Software required cloud licenses and evidence had to be uploaded to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children through an online portal. The lab needed internet. So they asked for help – but nobody at the FBI would help them.

Anthony Broderick, the NYFO CART networking person, told Spivack to ‘read the manuals’ and said he didn’t have the ‘bandwidth to help.’ So Spivack did what any agent with no training, no support and no budget would do — he Googled it. Meanwhile, the FBI told him to disable the antivirus on the lab computers. A new forensic cloud based program called Axiom kept getting flagged as a threat and instead of fixing the software itself they just killed the antivirus entirely and operated without any protection or firewalls.

Now for the computers. The NAS storage units, and the RAID tower — all of which contained CSAM from active investigations — were all connected to the internet when they had not been before. The antivirus was disabled, in a room without a keypad lock apparently, because the locksmith said there was no funding for one.

And here’s the real kicker, until approximately February 2023, just weeks before the breach, the New York Field Office didn’t even have a designated Information System Security Officer. The position was required and it had sat empty for years.

“Until approximately February 2023, the NYFO did not have a designated Information System Security Officer (ISSO). This is a required position, and I think it being left unfilled exacerbated many of the problems that are discussed herein.”
— Aaron Spivack EFTA00173582

The door wasn’t just open – it had been hanging off its hinges for years

In late 2022 or early 2023, Spivack tried to set up Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol on the lab computers. The idea made sense: forensic jobs that ran over weekends could be nudged along remotely. He wouldn’t have to drive into the NYFO every time anymore… convenient.

His supervisor’s supervisor, SSA Heath Graves — the DExT Program Manager at FBI headquarters — encouraged the idea. The Microsoft setup instructions, Graves said, were easy to follow. So, Spivack set it all up on his own. He thought the security was blocking his remote access attempts. He had just opened the lab’s RDP port to the outside world and didn’t know it.

Spivack: “I thought the C-20 system was secure. I attempted to access the C-20 computer lab through RDP. I believed the lab’s security prevented me from remoting in. I had no idea that in doing so I had opened the lab’s RDP port and that it had worked.”

— EFTA00173595–96

Later, someone would tell him the configuration was “mostly correct” and that he was just a step or two away from having set it up securely.

But, at that point, it was too late.

SUPER BOWL SUNDAY — THE BREACH

Source: EFTA00173598–EFTA00173602 — Timeline sent to SSA Seamus Clarke the day of discovery. Covers 7:30 AM through 5:30 PM. Ends: ‘5:30pm - I began calling my SSA, Bob Whelp in Security, Jessica Cardenas at CART, Amit Patel in Cyber.’

February 12, 2023. Super Bowl Sunday.

Millions of people were watching the game. But somewhere out there, someone was watching something else — a screen, a server, a literal unlocked door.

Using an IP address on TMobile’s network, they found an open RDP port on a server inside the FBI’s New York Field Office. They didn’t break in, they just walked through. Then, they started looking around.

The server held CSAM from active investigations and it also held files from the Epstein case. The intruder* began combing through them.

At some point, they realized what they were looking at — or thought they did. They believed they had hacked into a criminal’s server. Someone holding abuse material. Someone who should be reported to the FBI — someone who could be easily blackmailed for personal gain.

They did not realize they had actually just hacked the FBI itself.

Spivack’s timeline, written the next morning: “7:40am - I logged in to my Talino and a txt file popped up that said in part my network has been compromised and provided an email address to contact. This file was in the ‘startup’ folder so when logging in it opened automatically.”

— EFTA00173598

By 5:00 pm, Spivack and his colleague Christian Idsola had confirmed that they’d been hacked. By 5:15, they’d shut everything down, saved the logs, and killed the internet that should never have been connected in the first place. By 5:30, Spivack was on the phone — his SSA, Security, CART, Cyber.

Then they saw the damage… 500terabytes of data — gone and deleted. Spivack managed to recover about 400 of it (he was again told to Google how) he says. You just can’t make this stuff up.

“500 terabytes of data was gone as a result of the intrusion. I was able to recover about 400 terabytes of that data, however. I was told to Google how to recover the data. No one else tried to help us.”
— EFTA00173603–04

The OCIO Section Chief, Matt Smith, was apparently pissed. He found an email Spivack had sent before the intrusion — a request for help. No one had responded.

THE HACKER

The DOJ docs tell us that the breach happened and when it happened. The Epstein files were accessed by an unknown hacker, the massive amount of data loss. Spivack’s own account on the matters — but everything else? That comes from one anonymous source who spoke to Reuters.

According to that source, the intruder was likely a foreign cybercriminal acting alone — not a state sponsored spy. They didn’t realize they had hacked the FBI, they thought they’d stumbled into a criminal’s server, a cache of CSAM. And they were disgusted, just vigilante justice, right?

The same source told Reuters that FBI officials made contact with the hacker and convinced them to join a video call, where they then “flashed their credentials” on camera.

The hacker’s identity? Unknown. Country of origin? Unknown. Current status? Unknown. No arrests have been announced and the FBI called it an “isolated cyber incident.”

NOTE: The video call, the hacker’s disgust, the “lone foreign actor” characterization — all of it comes from a single anonymous source. LPF cannot independently verify these details. They are presented here as attributed to Reuters, not as primary document fact. What IS primary-documented: the breach happened. The date. The RDP vulnerability. The Epstein file access. The two IPs. The data loss. Spivack’s own account. That’s the foundation here.

SPIVACK’S DEFENSE

Source: EFTA00173618 / EFTA00173588 — The draft statement (EFTA00173569–EFTA00173632) contains visible tracked changes and comment bubbles from attorney Jim Roberson and a reviewer identified as ‘C20 TechTeam.’ Comments include: ‘OK. Just delete it.’ and ‘I’m not sure how to incorporate this.’ The editorial process is preserved in the document itself.

Over two different days, months apart — January 26, 2024 and August 8, 2024 — Spivack gave his sworn statement to the FBI’s Inspection Division. His attorney, Richard J. Roberson Jr, listened in by phone both times.

The statement runs dozens of pages, LPF has two versions: a clean signed copy and a draft. The draft is where it gets interesting.
In the margins, Roberson and a reviewer called “C20 TechTeam” are debating what to keep and what to cut out. Real time edit preserved in the document itself.

“OK. Just delete it.”
“I’m not sure how to incorporate this.”
“Excellent!”
“I modified this a little. Want to chat with you about it later.”

You can see the lawyers trying to shape the story while Spivack tells it.

His core argument is simple. He was never a system administrator, he was a child exploitation agent. He was told to build a network and given no help. Given no budget. He was told by headquarters to follow Microsoft’s instructions on Google. Then investigated when the network got hacked.

“Since the intrusion, my squad mates and I have been referenced as having been ‘System Administrators’, which we absolutely are not. The INSD report identifies me, and others on my squad, as having been System Administrators despite the fact we were not, have never been trained in system administration, and were never qualified to be system administrators.”
Spivack — EFTA00173629

And then there’s this:

“I understand I opened the C-20 lab’s RDP ports, but the FBI knew what I was doing. The FBI had told me to follow the instructions on Microsoft website on how to open the ports.”
— EFTA00173604

He’s not denying he opened the door but he is saying the FBI watched him do it.

More Institutional Failure

The most important detail in Spivack’s statement isn’t what he did, it’s what the FBI admitted afterward.

“FBI HQ Criminal Investigative Division (CID) DAD Jose Perez has since acknowledged the policy for the lab was vague or non-existent, which is something he advised me of in an email that I provided to the interviewing Agents. Additionally, a few weeks after the intrusion, DAD Perez, with others from FBI HQ, were visiting the NYFO on un-related matters, however there was a meeting to discuss the status of the intrusion which I was present for. Prior to the meeting, DAD Perez, whom I have known for years, approached me and informed me that he knew I was not responsible for the intrusion. DAD Perez further advised me that our lab was one of many across the FBI that had similar configurations.”
Spivack — EFTA00173538–39

Read that again. A Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI walked up to Spivack weeks after the breach and told him, face to face:

I know you’re not responsible. Your lab was one of many across the bureau with the same security holes.

If one server could be breached, others could have been too. And who knows what kind of secure data has already slipped into the hands of unknown forces around the world.

The FBI has never disclosed any additional breaches.

What Was On His Server

Now, the simplest question has no answer — what files did the hacker actually see?

Spivack’s statement confirms the server held evidence from his active cases, and those cases included the Epstein investigation.

An email from December 14, 2020. An agent writing to their supervisor about teleworking: “I’ll be working on a few research scrubs for 305 cases (spivack).” Two years before the breach. Long after Epstein was dead. Spivack’s case files were still active.
— EFTA01653690

The breached server sat in the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab, it held working copies of evidence from multiple child exploitation investigations, and it held files from the Epstein case. It had been connected to the internet, stripped of antivirus, and left accessible through an open RDP port.

Georgia Tech professor Jon Lindsay told Reuters:

“Who wouldn’t be going after the Epstein files if you’re the Russians or somebody interested in kompromat? If foreign intelligence agencies are not thinking seriously about the Epstein files as a target, then I would be shocked.”

Whether the hacker who found that open port on Super Bowl Sunday was a state actor, a hacktivist, or just a lone cybercriminal — they found what they were looking for. Or, they stumbled onto something nobody was ever supposed to find.

500TB of Epstein Library data deleted. 100TB of that never recovered. Epstein investigation files accessed by an unknown party, from an unknown country. The investigation remains open and no arrests have been made.

The Bottom Line

The FBI called it an isolated cyber incident, but DAD Perez told Spivack, face to face, that his lab was one of many with the same broken configuration. Both things cannot be entirely true.

The Epstein files remain the most politically sensitive law enforcement archive in the United States. A foreign hacker walked through an open door and spent a day inside them. And that door had been left open by the same agent who arrested the man the files were about.

That is not a conspiracy. That is a documented institutional failure — once again — preserved in the files themselves — signed and sworn by the man at the center of it.

“I love this job. I was not reckless. There was no self-interest involved. I was always trying to do the right thing.”
— Aaron Spivack, sworn statement, September 2024

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Sources

EFTA00173481–00173568 — Spivack sworn statement to FBI Inspection Division (clean version). Signed, sworn September 2024.

EFTA00173569–00173632 — Spivack sworn statement (draft with attorney margin comments from Richard J. Roberson Jr. and C20 TechTeam visible).

EFTA00147199–00147208 — FBI Operations Order for Epstein arrest, July 6, 2019. Spivack listed Arrest/Search/Interview.

EFTA00147883 — August 6, 2019 email: SSA Watson to C-20 team re Little St. James island search warrant. Spivack cc’d.

EFTA00148259–00148261 — Operations order for island search. Spivack on Night Tour search team.

EFTA01653690 — December 2020 telework email referencing ‘research scrubs for 305 cases (spivack).’

Reuters, March 11, 2026 — Foreign hacker in 2023 compromised Epstein files held by FBI. Primary source: anonymous source familiar with the breach.

The hacker’s identity, country of origin, the video call, the expressed disgust, and the lone/foreign characterization are ATTRIBUTED to Reuters’ anonymous source only. Not in any EFTA document reviewed by LPF.

This is a part of the 49 Zorro Ranch Road Series
Part One | Victim Standalone | Part Two | Part 4

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When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in July 2019, federal investigators moved fast. They swept across his Manhattan townhouse, the Palm Beach mansion, and Little Saint James — his infamous paedophile island. Hard drives, photographs, and evidence were recovered — enough to anchor the eventual case against Ghislaine Maxwell.

But, no federal warrant was ever sought for Zorro Ranch. Not then. Not ever.

A 2019 email from federal authorities to Epstein’s estate executors confirmed it plainly, agents had “not searched the New Mexico property.” Epstein died in his cell on August 10, 2019 and the ranch sat undisturbed — through the pandemic, through the trials, through all these long years.

Meanwhile, New Mexico wanted to act. Attorney General Hector Balderas launched a state investigation into alleged crimes at the ranch. That probe was shut down quickly — not because evidence was lacking, but because the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York asked New Mexico to halt, citing the risk of a “parallel investigation.” Balderas complied.

So, the FBI searched Epstein’s properties in New York, Florida, and the Virgin Islands. No search was ever conducted — by any agency, at any level — during the federal investigation or for the six years following Epstein’s death.

The ranch sat for six years and seven months.

It would not be searched for the first time until March 9, 2026.

Seven years of silence…finally broken.

But silence, it turns out, had a legal scaffolding.

A Santa Fe County Sheriff’s deputy talks with people at the Zorro Ranch near Stanley during a protest and memorial installation on Feb. 28. The New Mexico Department of Justice on Monday searched the ranch formerly owned by Jeffrey Epstein.
Eddie Moore/Journal

The Sex Offender Registry Exemption

Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. That plea required him to register as a sex offender. And in New Mexico, he registered for exactly 2 days. A loophole in state law — based on the victim’s age in the specific Florida charge being over sixteen — allowed him to avoid the registry entirely. State officials later acknowledged they had “virtually no access and little knowledge” of what was happening at the ranch.

The Truth Commission is now specifically tasked with examining this exemption — and whether officials “looked the other way”.

For seven long years, the ranch held harrowing secrets behind a pad locked gate and a legal dodge. No warrant — no search. No registry — No eyes.

Until March 9, 2026.

Hector Balderas
New Mexico Office of the Attorney General

The Grazing Leases

Through the shell entity Cypress Inc., Epstein held state grazing leases on approximately 1159 to 1200 additional acres of public land surrounding the ranch — paying roughly $87,222 annually. The legal basis was agricultural use, but Epstein was not using the land for agriculture. State land officials later acknowledged they had “virtually no access and little knowledge” of the activities occurring on land they were renting to him. New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard has described the state land as having functioned “almost as a buffer, a shield to hide what activity was occurring on the ranch.” The land grant gave the March 2026 search team a right of entry extending beyond the private property boundary.

Two Tips, No Action

In November 2019, an anonymous email arrived at Albuquerque radio host Eddy Aragon’s inbox. The sender claimed to be a former Zorro Ranch employee. The allegation: two foreign girls were buried somewhere in the hills outside the Zorro, on orders of Jeffrey and “Madam G” — widely interpreted as referring to Ghislaine Maxwell — after dying during rough sex. The sender claimed to possess seven videos from Epstein’s home, including material depicting minors, available for one Bitcoin (then approximately $8,000). Aragon says he knows the sender’s identity, shared it with the FBI, and personally visited the local FBI field office with the email.

A second communication — from a retired New Mexico State Police officer — flagged a suspicious barn on the property that appeared to contain a concealed incinerator. That report also reached the FBI. Both were filed but neither resulted in investigative action and neither prompted any search.

The FBI received two separate tips about potential physical evidence at Zorro Ranch in 2019 — one alleged buried bodies and one alleged a concealed incinerator. Neither prompted any investigative response. Again, the ranch was not searched.

Survivor memorial — flowers and candles at Zorro Ranch gate, International Women’s Day, March 8, 2026
Eddie Moore/Journal

February 2026: The Investiation Re-Opens

On February 16, 2026, the New Mexico House of Representatives unanimously passed House Resolution 1, creating the bipartisan Epstein Truth Commission. It is chaired by Rep. Andrea Romero and includes Rep. Marianna Anaya, former FBI agent Rep. William “Bill” Hall, and prosecutor Rep. Andrea Reeb. The commission has $2 million in funding — drawn from a 2022 settlement New Mexico reached with Epstein’s banks — and must file an initial report by July 31, 2026, and a final report by year’s end.

Three days later, on February 19, AG Raúl Torrez announced the NMDOJ was reopening its criminal investigation citing “revelations outlined in the previously sealed FBI files.” The NMDOJ launched a digital tip line for credible information about Epstein’s activities in New Mexico. You can view that here: https://nmdoj.gov/get-help/epstein-zorro-tips/

March 9, 2026: The First Search

On the morning of March 9, 2026 NMDOJ investigators, New Mexico State Police, and K9 units from the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office entered Zorro Ranch for the first time under any law enforcement authority. The property’s current owners — the Huffines family — cooperated.

Construction at the property, begun by new owner Don Huffines in connection with plans to convert the ranch to a Christian retreat, had been ordered to stop by Santa Fe County officials due to lack of permits. A former FBI agent on the Truth Commission had raised concerns that ongoing renovation could compromise physical evidence.

The property is now named Rancho de San Rafael. The search results have not been publicly disclosed. The commission’s July 2026 initial report is expected to address findings.

The Massacre Of The Innocence

Epstein surrounded himself with art. At Zorro Ranch, paintings and sculptures lined the main house, the guest quarters, and the long corridors connecting them. Former visitors described a private collection heavy with religious imagery, classical nudes, and darker themes — often hung without explanatory plaques or provenance.

Massacre of the Innocence - EFTA00553278

Among those works was a piece titled Massacre of the Innocence. A photograph of the artwork has since surfaced, though its creator and date remain unknown. According to sources familiar with the ranch’s layout — whose accounts remain unverified — the painting hung in Epstein’s private study, a room off the master suite that guests were rarely, if ever, allowed to enter. Others place it along the upstairs hallway leading to the bedrooms used by young visitors.

The title is not incidental. It echoes the biblical slaughter of children — and, more darkly, the core allegations that have followed Epstein’s New Mexico property for years. Whether Epstein chose the piece for its aesthetic, its irony, or its confession is unknown. But the Truth Commission has taken note of its presence.

The painting was not seized in March 2026. The ranch’s current owners — the Huffines family, who bought the property in 2023 and renamed it Rancho de San Rafael — have not commented on its current location.

‘Epstein has been dead for years. Zorro Ranch has changed ownership. Physical evidence may no longer exist, and the statute of limitations has likely run on many potential offenses. These are real obstacles, and survivors deserve to hear them stated plainly.’
— New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez

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Sources

New Mexico Department of Justice — investigation reopened statement, February 19, 2026

New Mexico Department of Justice — search statement, March 9, 2026

Epstein Files — email chain between SDNY and U.S. Attorney's Office — District of New Mexico, Sept. 4–9, 2019), confirming NM AG agreed to cease sex trafficking investigation at SDNY's request.

Epstein Files — Eddy Aragon anonymous tip email, November 2019 (DOJ EFTA release) EFTA01250229

Epstein Files — Massacre of the Innocence EFTA00553278

ABC News: ‘Why are authorities finally searching Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico?’ March 2026

CNN: ‘New Mexico authorities search Zorro Ranch,’ March 10, 2026

Time: ‘Epstein’s Zorro Ranch Searched in Criminal Investigation,’ March 10, 2026

Source New Mexico: ‘NM Department of Justice, police search former Zorro Ranch,’ March 10, 2026

Christian Science Monitor: ‘What happened at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch?’ April 3, 2026

NBC News: ‘New Mexico approves comprehensive probe of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch,’ February 17, 2026

New Republic: ‘Epstein’s New Mexico Horror House Will Finally Be Investigated,’ March 2026

2nd Life Media Alamogordo: ‘New Mexico Launches Two-Pronged Investigation,’ March 1, 2026

Daily Montanan: ‘New Mexico AG reopens criminal investigation into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch,’ March 12, 2026

WSWS: ‘New Mexico conducts first-ever search of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch,’ March 12, 2026

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The Document

There’s an FBI file buried in the Epstein release that most people have walked right past. It’s an FD-302 — that’s the form FBI agents fill out after an interview. This one is dated November 15, 2006. The interview took place in Austin, Texas. The victim who was being interviewed was just a teenage girl from Phoenix. She was a minor.

She describes something that happened to her at the infamous Zorro Ranch near Stanley, New Mexico — about 30 miles south of Santa Fe.

Here’s what stopped me when I read it — the document doesn’t place Ghislaine Maxwell on the sidelines, it places her smack dab in the center of the entire thing. The document is EFTA00162543 through EFTA00162546. It came out under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law November 19, 2025. You can click the link there and look yourself.

How She Got There

She was just a junior in high school when she met Jeffrey Epstein. Her older sister was already working for him in New York city. Over the Christmas break, Epstein flew her to New York. He showed her and her sister his Manhattan townhouse and he gave them champagne, she says. He took them to see Phantom of the Opera in a limousine and he asked about her college applications. He pushed UCLA to her, and he talked about a volunteer program in Thailand through something called Global Routes. He offered to pay for it for her. She left New York thinking he was going to sponsor her education and her future. Then, between that trip and the following spring, Ghislaine Maxwell called the girl’s mother directly. The purpose — arrange a separate trip to Zorro Ranch. Epstein and Maxwell wanted to meet the girl they said — talk about her summer in Thailand, catch up.

The victim’s sister was supposed to come but she cancelled at the last minute. Epstein or Maxwell made that happen she says.

So, she ended up fling alone from Phoenix, AZ to Santa Fe, NM. Again, she was a teenager, a child. A ranch manager picked her up at the airport — white male, 30s or 40s, dark hair, dressed like a cowboy. Other EFTA documents confirm his name: Brice Gordon. The New Zealand-born, former military ranch manager that ran the property for Epstein for years. He is thoroughly written about in our other series parts listed at the top of this post.

During this trip, she claims she was the only guest on the property besides staff.

What the FBI Filed

The FD-302 is detailed. It’s written in that flat, bureaucratic language the FBI uses — and the language doesn’t soften anything. Epstein and Maxwell took her shopping, ought food, hair products, random stuff — and a pair of cowboy boots that cost over a 100 dollars she says. They went horseback riding and Maxwell helped her with a term paper. The chef at the ranch made dinner for the three of them. Then, during the evening, Epstein asked if she would give him a foot massage — she was caught off guard, but Maxwell volunteered to demonstrate.

Here’s how the document puts it: Maxwell was rubbing one foot, then the other. Eventually Maxwell finished her demonstration and the girl was doing it alone. Small talk continued between the 3 of them and Epstein asked if she had ever had a massage herself. She replied no.

Maxwell stood up and said she would give her one.

Maxwell led her to a room with a massage table. There were oils set up already, and Maxwell told her to take her clothes off. The girl was uncomfortable but she undressed partway, leaving her underwear on, and wrapped herself in a sheet. She lay down on the table.

Maxwell began massaging the victim and then she told the girl to roll over. Maxwell pulled down the sheet, exposing her. Epstein was nearby. He kept talking to her the whole time and the document says she was very self conscious and uncomfortable with Epstein looking at her exposed body. Maxwell finished the massage by rubbing her upper body, including her chest.

No further sexual activity happened right then and she got dressed.

FBI Form FD-302, November 15, 2006. The agent wrote: “At this point... she became visibly disturbed and was unable to recall the remainder of events.” EFTA00162546

The Next Morning

The following morning Epstein came into the victims room. He got into bed with her — she was wearing pajamas and he was in sweatpants and a t-shirt. He got under the covers and told her he “felt like cuddling.” The document says he spent time hugging her, spooning her, and talking about what they were going to do that day. Maxwell walked in and saw Epstein in the bed, under the covers, with the girl. That night, Epstein came into her room again. He sat on the bed, stroked her hair and old her how “beautiful and pretty” she was.

Then the FBI transcript just stops.

“At this point in the interview, [she] became visibly disturbed and was unable to recall the remainder of events for that evening at the ranch.”

The document doesn’t guess what happened next — it just records that she couldn’t go on and that the FBI agents didn’t push her further.

That blank space — what she couldn’t say — is the last thing in the file about that night.

What This Document Proves

This FD-302 went into the FBI’s case file in November 2006 and he federal investigation into Epstein was already eight months old by then. Agents had interviewed victims across multiple states, they had flight logs and phone records.

Then came this line, from an internal FBI memo dated December 6, 2006:

“Due to the media coverage, unknown status of the state investigation, vulnerability of the young female victims, and political influences, the AUSAs and Case Agents have a target date of January 2007 for indictment.”

Read that again. “Political influences.” The FBI had a target date — January 2007.

The indictment never came.

Instead, in 2008, Alex Acosta — then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida — signed the Non-Prosecution Agreement. A DOJ watchdog later called it a product of poor judgment. Epstein pleaded guilty to two state charges and he registered as a sex offender in Florida but not in New Mexico. The state kept leasing him land after his conviction.

Zorro Ranch — the specific place described in this interview — was never searched by federal investigators. Not in 2007, not in 2008. Not after Epstein’s re-arrest in 2019. Not after he died that August either.

Two weeks after Epstein’s death, an internal FBI email said agents lacked probable cause to search the New Mexico property. They had interviewed, the email noted, “one victim who may have been raped at the NM residence.”

The FD-302 was in their file — the account of the massage, the exposure, the bed — all of it was in their file. The place where she stopped talking was in their file and the December 6 memo had a target date — Political influences.

The ranch wasn’t searched until recently, March 9, 2026. That was the New Mexico Department of Justice, not the FBI by the way. It happened because the Epstein files finally went public.

"Due to... political influences, the AUSAs and Case Agents have a target date of January 2007 for indictment." — FBI memo, December 6, 2006. The indictment never came. Source: EFTA00162551

Annie Farmer

The girl in the FD-302 is not Annie Farmer. But their stories are nearly identical.

Farmer was 16 in 1996 — ten years before this interview. She was also invited to Zorro Ranch after her older sister started working for Epstein and she was also told the trip was “educational.” Maxwell also gave her a massage and Maxwell also pulled down the sheet and exposed her breasts near Epstein, and he also got into her bed.
That’s sworn testimony from the Maxwell trial in 2021.

Farmer testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal sex trafficking trial and she used her real name. She’s kept speaking publicly — she described the massage, the exposure, the bed. She said she wanted the weekend to be over and she said she felt like they had “a very different interest” in her.

She reported what happened to the FBI in 1996 and her complaint is documented in the EFTA files. The FBI took no meaningful action and the ranch of horrors where it happened stayed untouched for thirty years.

The Ranch Manager

The FBI document describes the man who picked her up from the airport but doesn’t name him — other EFTA documents do. His name is Brice Gordon. New Zealand national and former military.

Gordon was formally interviewed by FBI agents at 49 Zorro Ranch Road on February 8, 2007. He told them Epstein flew in guests and masseuses and he said Epstein hired local massage therapists through Ten Thousand Waves, a spa in Santa Fe. That is our part 5 linked above.

Epstein’s will — signed two days before he died — left Gordon money, conditional on him staying on with the estate. After Epstein died, Gordon disappeared from public view. New Mexico state legislators have named him a person of interest but his whereabouts are not publicly confirmed.

What New Mexico Is Doing Now

On February 19, 2026, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened a criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch. He cited the newly released FBI files.

On February 16, 2026, the New Mexico House voted 62 to 0 — unanimous — to create a bipartisan Truth Commission. It has subpoena power and a $2 million budget. Its job is to investigate what happened at the ranch and issue a final report by the end of 2026. There’s also an anonymous email from 2019. An Albuquerque radio host named Eddy Aragon received it and forwarded it to the FBI. The sender claimed to be a former ranch employee and they claim two foreign girls were buried on the property on the orders of Epstein and “Madam G.” They said they had seven videos from Epstein’s home, including footage of sex with minors. The FBI received the email, filed it, and did nothing. It sat in the EFTA documents until the January 2026 release forced it into public view.

New Mexico investigators started the first physical search of the property on March 9, 2026. What they found hasn’t been made public yet. The investigation is active.

The FBI document doesn’t guess what happened after the girl stopped talking. It doesn’t have to.

What’s already there is enough — A teenage girl, alone on a private ranch in the desert. Two adults who spent a weekend systematically erasing every boundary she had. Maxwell wasn’t passive. She made the call to arrange the trip and she gave the massage to the minor. She pulled down the sheet, she walked into the room the next morning and saw Epstein under the covers with a teenager. The FBI wrote all of this down in 2006.

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021. She’s currently serving 20 years — she has never spoken publicly about Zorro Ranch.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.

If this investigation has been useful to you — if it gave you something to think about, something to share, something to act on — consider supporting Last Page First. Independent investigative journalism doesn’t have institutional backing behind it. It has the readers ♥

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This work is entirely reader supported. No grants, no advertisers, no editorial board — just primary documents and the time it takes to read them. If you want to keep this going, donating is the most direct way to help. Thank you.

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Sources

FBI FD-302 Interview, case 31E-MM-108062, November 15, 2006, Austin TX: EFTA00162543–EFTA00162546

FBI Case Opening Memo, July 24, 2006: EFTA00162520–EFTA00162521

FBI December 2006 Multi-Jurisdiction Lead Memo: EFTA00162551–EFTA00162555

FBI FD-302, Larry Visoski interview, November 27, 2006: EFTA00162547–EFTA00162550

FBI transmission memo confirming Brice Gordon interview, February 8, 2007: EFTA00269597

New Mexico AG Torrez reopens Zorro Ranch criminal investigation, February 19, 2026: Santa Fe New Mexican

New Mexico House votes 62–0 to establish Truth Commission, February 16, 2026: NBC News

New Mexico DOJ initiates first-ever Zorro Ranch search, March 9, 2026: PBS NewsHour

Annie Farmer testimony at Maxwell trial, December 10, 2021: CBS News

Annie Farmer interview — On Point with WBUR, November 6, 2025: WBUR OnPoint

Brice Gordon named person of interest by NM legislators, FBI interview confirmed: Centrist NZ

FBI declined to search ranch two weeks after Epstein’s death: Santa Fe New Mexican

New Mexico DOJ active investigation tip page: nmdoj.gov

Virginia Giuffre photographs at Zorro Ranch — court filing: TIME

NBC News — How Epstein lured girls to Zorro Ranch: NBC News

This is a part of the 49 Zorro Ranch Road Series
Part One | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Victim Standalone

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Aerial view of Zorro Ranch mansion in New Mexico EFTA00028566

Last time, we talked about how the ranch worked — the shell companies, the bank accounts, the Gordons — the couple running the day to day and recruiting girls for the ranch through Ten Thousand Waves spa. The fact that the federal government decided — for reasons nobody has fully explained — to never search the place, will never sit right.

But, this part is different. This part is about the people — who came to Zorro Ranch, what they did once they got there, and what the federal documents reveal about the political network that kept the whole thing spinning round and round. The paper trail is longer and more twisted than most people realize. We dived in.

The Sitting Governor sold a Convicted sex offender a Ranch

Here’s a fact that stops you cold:

Jeffrey Epstein bought Zorro Ranch in 1993 from Bruce King and at the time, King was the sitting governor of New Mexico.

Not a former governor, not someone who sold it years later. but the sitting governor sold a convicted sex offender a sprawling ranch that would become his most protected property. The transaction was a private sale through something called Zorro Trust — later renamed Cypress Inc — the same shell company Epstein used to hold grazing leases on state land surrounding the ranch. Bruce King died in 2009 and his son, Gary King, became New Mexico’s Attorney General in 2007 and stayed until 2014. That timeline is key: Gary King was the state’s top law enforcement officer during Epstein’s Florida conviction and the first federal investigation into his network.

To be clear — there is no public evidence connecting Gary King to anything that happened at Zorro Ranch. None. I want to say that plainly, because it’s not fair to imply something that isn’t there. The family name is tangled up in this story whether anyone likes it or not, and Epstein bought land from a governor. Facts are facts. That land became his fortress, hub of his network, and for years, the state’s top prosecutor was the governor’s son. That doesn’t prove anything — but it’s part of the origin story.

Governor. Diplomat. Epstein’s Repeat Guest

Bill Richardson had the kind of resume most politicians can only dream about. Congressman, UN Ambassador, Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton, and Two-term governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011 — but, he also kept showing up in Epstein’s orbit.

The Epstein Files have his name in contact records, flight logs, and meeting schedules spanning multiple years. At least 9 documented meetings with Epstein happened after the 2008 Florida conviction—the one that should have made any respectable politician run the other way.

One of those meetings was a visit to Little Saint James in 2010, that’s Epstein’s private island, and Richardson was still governor at the time.

The “Z” of Zorro Ranch. Epstein’s nod to the fictional vigilante.

Sworn Testimony, not Speculation

In a 2016 deposition, Giuffre testified that Ghislaine Maxwell directed her to give Richardson a “massage” at Zorro Ranch. In Giuffre’s world — and this is documented in multiple testimonies — ”massage” was code, it meant a sexual encounter.

Richardson denied everything of course, and a spokesperson called Giuffre’s claims “completely false”, saying Richardson had never met her and had never seen Epstein “in the presence of young or underage girls.”

Richardson died in August 2023. He was 75, and he died right as documentation of his post 2008 relationship with Epstein was starting to surface publicly. He was never charged with any crime related to the Epstein case.

The Trip Started and Ended in the Same Place

Here’s what Epstein’s own calendar shows: On August 2, 2015, he left Zorro Ranch and flew to San Jose, California. The calendar entry is EFTA00285038. Click to look.

Screenshot of Jeffrey Epstein’s internal calendar, August 2-3, 2015. EFTA00285038

He checked into the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park. That afternoon he met with Peter Thiel in Palo Alto and that evening JE had dinner at Baume Restaurant on California Avenue. The guest list: Mark Zuckerberg, Joi Ito, and Reid Hoffman. (Read Joi Expose here, others to come)

The next day, August 3, Epstein flew to Burbank where he went to look at a plane for sale in Los Angeles. He took Joi Ito with him for that little errand, and then he flew back.

Back to where exactly? Well, Zorro Ranch. That’s what his itinerary tells us.

This is the part I want you to sit with — Zorro Ranch wasn’t just a stopover and it wasn’t a vacation home he visited sometimes, it was his base of operations for the whole Silicon Valley trip. He left from there and he returned there. That’s just what the calendar shows.

There’s more — a second itinerary from the same period — EFTA00344593 — confirms the schedule. A third document, EFTA00848642, shows that Peter Thiel was specifically invited to Zorro Ranch itself. New Mexico is the key.

To be clear: none of these men have been accused of any crime connected to the ranch. I’m not saying they did anything wrong there but what the documents establish is proximity. Epstein used Zorro Ranch as his home base for meetings with some of the most powerful people in tech and venture capital. That’s a fact. The paper trail proves it.

Three Names, One set of Photographs

The Epstein Files include undated photos taken at Zorro Ranch — you see the mansion and the stables with young women on horses. You see young women practicing archery with their faces redacted, presumably to protect their identities.

But 3 men are left unblurred.

Jean-Luc Brunel. Noam Chomsky. Woody Allen.

Here’s what we know about each of them in relation to the ranch:

Brunel was a French modeling agent and he was arrested in France as part of the Epstein investigation. He died in custody in 2022 — the official cause was suicide also. Not everyone believes that.

Chomsky has admitted knowing Epstein and he’s confirmed they had a relationship. But he’s always denied knowing anything about Epstein’s crimes, whether that’s plausible is for readers to decide. I know what I think.

Woody Allen has never been publicly accused of anything connected to the ranch itself, and I want to be clear about that, but he is in the photos.

None of these 3 men have been charged with any crime related to activity at Zorro Ranch. The photographs document presence and that presence, that networking, it matters when you’re trying to understand who knew what, and when they knew it.

Zorro Ranch, New Mexico

The Survivors

At least ten women and girls have said it publicly that they were trafficked to Zorro Ranch, abused there, or groomed there. Their stories span decades and you can find them in court filings, sworn depositions, trial testimony, and published memoirs.

Here are some of their names:

Annie Farmer testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2021 federal trial. She was brought to the ranch at 16, Maxwell groped her during a massage. Epstein assaulted her and she told an FBI agent about what happened in New Mexico back in 2006.

“Jane” — a woman whose real name has never been made public — testified she was flown to the property at 14. She said she was forced to participate in orgies.

Chauntae Davies has stated she was raped at the ranch at least twice and had interactions with Bill Clinton.

Virginia Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025 and in her posthumously published memoir, she wrote that Zorro Ranch felt like “Disneyland” when she first arrived. She described manicured grounds, a tennis court, a grass airstrip, and what Epstein called his “castle.” Virginia writes that the property “had its own miniature town that housed his servants and groundskeepers.”

Rachel Benavidez was a massage therapist in Santa Fe, she was hired to work at the ranch starting in 2000. She has stated that Epstein sexually abused her — here are her words

“I ask the FBI and local law enforcement to continue uncovering the evil abuse and trafficking that took place on Zorro Ranch, and hold all those involved, who turned a blind eye, fully accountable.”

These accounts existed before Epstein died, they existed before he was arrested and they existed while the FBI was actively building its case.

The ranch was never searched and that was a choice — plain and simple.

Last Page First is an independent investigative publication. Paid subscribers make the deep dives possible—FOIA templates, citation indexes, Document Room access, and subscriber discussion threads. If this piece reached you, share it. If you want to help keep it going, subscribe.

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Sources

EFTA00285038 — August 2, 2015 itinerary: Zorro Ranch / Rosewood Sand Hill / Thiel / Zuckerberg / Ito / Hoffman / Baume Restaurant (DOJ EFTA Dataset 9)

EFTA00344593 — Corroborating August 2015 schedule (DOJ EFTA Dataset 9)

EFTA00848642 — Thiel invited to Zorro Ranch, New Mexico (DOJ EFTA Dataset 9)

Virginia Giuffre, 2016 deposition in Giuffre v. Maxwell — Richardson allegation

Virginia Giuffre, Nobody’s Girl (posthumous memoir, October 2025) — Zorro Ranch description

Santa Fe New Mexican: “Records show Gov. Richardson met with Epstein for years after conviction”
KRQE News: “Former Gov. Bill Richardson denies involvement in Epstein sex-trafficking ring” (Aug. 9, 2019)

Associated Press: “Bill Richardson, a former governor and UN ambassador who worked to free detained Americans, dies” (Sept. 2, 2023)

U.S. v. Ghislaine Maxwell — Annie Farmer trial testimony (2021)

• New York Times

• The Guardian

Santa Fe New Mexican: ‘Records show Gov. Richardson met with Epstein for years after conviction,’ February 3, 2026

The Telegraph: ‘Playboy ranch’: the Epstein home you didn’t know existed (Feb. 20, 2026)

NBC News: ‘How Epstein lured girls to his Zorro Ranch and kept authorities away,’ March 2026

Colorado Politics: ‘New Mexico launches truth commission investigation,’ February 22, 2026

Epstein Exposed — Bill Richardson profile (1,597 documents, 6 flights)

Anadolu Agency: ‘New Epstein files reveal abuse allegations at New Mexico ranch,’ February 9, 2026

Part 2 of ‘Blood on the Carpet’

* This piece contains detailed accounts of child sexual abuse, forced pregnancy, and pregnancy loss. Reader discretion is advised.

Note: The journals document repeated sexual abuse and forced pregnancy of a minor — a girl with Down syndrome and autism, trafficked through Epstein’s network from approximately age 13 to 17. The content is graphic. It is part of the official DOJ public record. We are publishing this analysis because making it legible is part of what accountability looks like. The victim’s name is redacted in all federal documents and is not published here. Subscriber revenue directly funds this reporting.

EFTA02731393

“To send you away and take away your life. Ticking time with shortened schedules and waving all my absent days to fit the scheduling of vile men. Was it worth it? No — don’t answer that. I know I never have been.”
Decoded journal entry, Year 18 — EFTA02731465

Before the Journals

Her identity is unknown to the public and her name remains redacted throughout the DOJ documents that were released in February of 2025. Attorney notes in the federal record indicate our victim had Mosaic down syndrome — a rare type of DS — and was autistic. She came from a home where, as she would eventually disclose to her attorney years later, her biological mother had been forcing her to perform sexual acts with adult men since she was a very young child. Her younger sister too — and her paternal grandfather was also involved. Her story is one of tragedy and horrors beyond imagination.

The journal begins by sharing that when she was around 13 or 14, her life converged with Epstein’s network through a woman that her mother knew. The victim’s mother had ‘lied to her about a man named Mr. Glickman’, about work trips, about Michigan, about Clearwater, she writes. When someone close to her family died she was sent to live with a friend of her mother’s named Mary.

Decoded by LPF:
Theres a reason…That my mom lied about Mr.Glickman all the time.
She lied about work trips. About Michigan and about clear water.
Now he is dead and and I am being sent to live with her friend.
Back and forth? For how long?” — EFTA02731435

During a party at a ‘large house’, the victim describes meeting a man she refers to as ‘Mr. Robert,’ along with his ‘pretty wife Jill’, described as British and previously present in Clearwater. The woman, Jill, spoke to her throughout the night and encouraged her to come to her home in Florida to ‘learn new things’. The victim writes that she wanted to get away from her.

A separate document within the DOJ release — an email from attorney Jeanne M Christensen (EFTA02731512) — provides additional context based on decoded journal material. In that communication, Christensen describes the victim being taken to a McLean Virginia property identified as owned by “Joe Roberts” (JER companies) — where both Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were present.

Our victim kept journals through all of the trauma, abuse, and coercion she describes.

— EFTA02731512 *Until we had this document, sent to us by another substack user, we were under the impression that Mr.Robert may have been JE himself, given the Fortelni passport, recovered from Epstein’s blue suitcase. — EFTA01648939. We no longer believe this to be the case. Joe Roberts is most likely Joseph E Robert Jr — a McLean Virginia based financier — who was married to a Jill Sorensen. This aligns in part with the document’s reference to a McLean property and the woman named Jill.
Joseph E. Robert Jr. — Washington Post obituary confirming identity, McLean residence, and professional background
Jill Sorensen — Georgia Today profile, confirming identity and public background
As new information comes to our attention it will be added where needed.

The Journals

The journals are scrapbooks — and they are written almost entirely in code. She kept them during the years she was trafficked — from approximately 2001 to 2004, spanning what the attorneys decoded translations identify as ‘Years 15 through 19’ of her life.

They are not traditional diaries. They are in a sense, works of art. Collages —magazine clippings cut and rearranged so that headlines and advertising say deep coded messages, handwritten entries in the margins, photographs, drawings, and page after page of dense encoded text — letters scrambled, words compressed, syllables split and rearranged so that the entries read as noise to anyone without the key. Attorneys at Wigdor LLP transcribed and decoded significant passages and submitted both the originals and their translations to federal prosecutors as well as to Judge Jed Rakoff as part of the JPMorgan Chase Epstein compensation claim. I decoded a lot myself as well.

Page 10 EFTA02731402

— EFTA02731443

Forensic examination ordered by Judge Rakoff found the journals were written in gel pen and results were inconclusive as to dating. No evidence of recent fabrication was found and the examiner did not address the clippings. More than 20 people wrote in the journals contemporaneously. What follows is drawn from the decoded translations and the legible handwritten sections of the journals, cross referenced with FBI 302 interview reports, attorney correspondence to federal prosecutors, and other documents in DOJ Dataset 12.

Excerpt from Victims Journal. Decoded:
So sorry Jeffrey these things happen when your body had never been given time to properly heal! So it came out in the toilet and I didnt know what to do so I just flushed the tiny little fetus.

You have made me numb and I hate you for this!

I hope I never have to see you again!

I am not your personal incubator!

where is the baby!

where is Ghislaine!!!

Source: DOJ Epstein Library EFTA02731393

What She Experienced: The Network

Across 3 journals spanning four to five years, our victim documented the men she was made to be with, the places she was taken, and the infrastructure that made it possible to happen to so many. The names appear in decoded translations, in legible handwritten entries and in the marginal annotations she made on magazine clippings.

Not all names are fully decoded and not all can be confirmed from available documents. But the list is long, and many of the names are not strangers.

Named or Identifiable in the Journals and Decoded Notes:

Jeffrey Epstein
Ghislaine Maxwell
Leon Black
Jes Staley — she calls him ‘the disgusting Mr. Staley,’ writes that he called her ‘Tinkerbell,’ that he left bloody marks on her arms from his belt, and that she should have called him ‘Dumbo’ in return because of his ears.
Larry Summers — ‘fucking disgusting.’
Alan Dershowitz — ‘disgusting pigs like Alan Derschowitz.’
Joe Gibbs — ‘so nice.’
Lawrence Krauss — calls him Mr. Sauerkraut Krauss
Dan Snyder — ‘a pig! A red skin hogette!’
George Mitchell — ‘people you expect to be good like even old senators like George Mitchell who you think would be like a grandpa are bad’
Jean-Luc Brunel — ‘a disgusting pig with bad breath’
Mr.Novak - Says she ‘feels sorry’ for him and he was as ‘uncomfortable as her’
Dana Chasin, identified in a March 2024 attorney letter to federal prosecutors as a Rockefeller connection with a small prop plane
A man referred to as Mr. Colgan
A man she calls ‘Andrew’ who she connects to royalty
Harvey Weinstein — ‘I hope you don’t ever meet fat pig Weinstein or the rest’

Additional names documented in the journals: Mr. Mody, Mr. Sant, Mr. Ludwig, Mr. Cecchi, Mr. Mora, Mr. Goodlatte, Mr. Atkins, Mr. Rails, Mr. Ein, Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Conway, Mr. Vradenberg, Mr. Kimsey, Mr. Case, the Gregorys, Martin Minsky, Mr. Caruthers, Mr. Islam, Bill S

She writes about a ‘good federal worker’ who she was ‘borrowed’ by and later ‘rented’ to. She writes about an ‘old president’ connected to a plane, a yacht, New York, DC, the vineyard, and the island — and writes that he ‘should have been thinking of Chelsea.’

— EFTA02731467

Decoded by LPF:
Flights and yachts of horror

The more you pay the more you get. Is this A) true B) false C) crazy
There are always flights of horror whether it’s with Jeffry, Mr.Leons Mr.Case Mr.Snyder the Gregorys, Mr.Colgan or one being borrowed by a seemingly “good” federal worker and even rented. It is all horror. And nothing is as it seems. I am so confused by everything and people you expected to be good like even old senators like George Mitchell who you think will be like a grandpa are bad! Mr. Kimsey is deranged. The answer is C. Crazy! It all is!
— Page 27 EFTA02731461

Summers is not a vague reference and he is named explicitly in a March 2024 letter from attorney Jeanne Christensen to federal prosecutors: the letter states that the first time the victim was flown to Epstein’s New York townhouse, she had sex with Larry Summers. The flight was arranged by Dana Chasin.

— EFTA02731721

Leon Black in the Journals

She writes about Leon Black by name not by code.

The decoded entry for what attorneys identify as Year 16, page 15, reads in full:

“My mother has lost her fucking mind. Even though Ghislaine said it was best to take me home because Mr. Black is so important for some reason over my health. There is going to be hell to pay. I ruined their trip and I am dramatic when that fat fuck bit me! He threw me on the floor and blood all over Jeffrey’s carpet and I am the issue? Who the fuck bites someone? Sick! No one is that important and Leon can go fuck himself. I hate New York!”
— Decoded journal entry, Year 16, page 15 EFTA02731427

In a separate entry from the same journal period, she annotates a page headed by a photograph of the New York City skyline with the caption ‘Who could have predicted this?’ Her handwritten response: ‘I should have! So sad this city could be beautiful if it weren’t filled with monsters. The blood from Leon is no longer there.’

EFTA02731404

Another journal page contains the poem ‘Stopped Dead,’ with specific phrases underlined by the victim. The decoded attorneys’ note connects this page directly to Leon Black. The underlined phrases include ‘fatso millionaire,’ ‘birth cry,’ ‘it’s violent,’ ‘goddamn baby screaming,’ ‘there’s always a bloody baby,’ and ‘your seven chins, still as a ham.’

EFTA02731453

She writes elsewhere about being told Black was a ‘VIP’ and a ‘special friend of Jeffrey’s’ — told this, attorneys concluded from her disclosures, to ensure her compliance. Her parents were told the same thing. In a March 2024 letter to federal prosecutors, attorney Christensen explained what had only emerged after months of trust-building with the client: the girl’s own parents drove her to New York. They dressed her up ‘special’ for Black, including ribbons in her hair to match her skirt. When she had a breakdown after the assault — bleeding, asking to see a doctor — Epstein, Maxwell, and her own parents were angry with her for ‘ruining their weekend.’ They drove her home to Virginia.

The journal entry ends: ‘I ruined their weekend.’

Jes Staley in the Journals

She doesn’t bury him in code.

On what attorneys have decoded as page 12 of the third journal, she writes about him by name — or close enough to it that the decoded translation leaves no ambiguity. She calls him “the disgusting Mr. Staley” and writes that he called her ‘Tinkerbell.’ She writes that he left’ bloody marks on her arms from his belt.’ And then, in the voice of a teenager who had nothing left but dark humor: she writes that she should have called him Dumbo in return, because of his ears.

Victim journal mentioning Staley and others — EFTA02731352

Decoded by FBI: — EFTA02731469

The Tinkerbell detail is not incidental. In July 2010 — during what the journal timeline identifies as the same trafficking period — Jes Staley emailed Jeffrey Epstein from his JPMorgan corporate account: “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.” Epstein asked what character he would like next. Staley replied: “Beauty and the Beast.” A separate email sent the same day, from an unnamed sender, stated that Snow White had been assaulted twice as soon as she put her costume on. USVI lawyers argued in court that Disney princess names were code for women and girls Epstein was procuring. Maria Farmer, the first victim to report Epstein in 1996, also included Staley in a lot of her art work, one includes him with a snow white figure, read our piece on that here.

Staley has consistently denied knowing about Epstein’s trafficking crimes. The UK Financial Conduct Authority found he misled regulators about the nature and duration of his relationship with Epstein and banned him from senior financial roles for life. He was named by Congressman Thomas Massie during a September 2025 House hearing as one of at least 20 men the FBI identified as having been trafficked women and girls by Epstein.

She wrote about him in a scrapbook she encoded so no one could read it. She encoded it because she was afraid — the FBI has the Snow White emails and the journals. They had them for decades and did nothing.

The Pregnancies

This is the section of the journals that is hardest to read. It is also the section that is most completely documented.

Across the journals, the victim records multiple pregnancies, multiple procedures, and multiple losses — some forced, some spontaneous, some delivered. The entries span literal years. They describe what was done to her body as a consequence of the abuse and what was done to the children she also carried.

‘I am not your personal incubator’ — EFTA02731394

At the top of this page, she addresses Epstein directly:

“So sorry Jeffrey these things happen when your body had never been given time to properly heal! So it came out in the toilet and I didn’t know what to do so I just flushed the tiny little fetus. You have made me numb and I hate you for this! I hope I never have to see you again! I am not your personal incubator! Where is the baby! Where is Ghislaine!!!”
— Journal entry, unknown victim

In another entry, written at a later point in the trafficking period, she writes about what appears to be a different, ongoing pregnancy — one that had reached the halfway mark:

“Tomorrow is the halfway ultrasound for Jeffrey. This one stuck. After they took the first baby who survived and the early miscarriage I think it was called I no longer feel like a person but a vessel. Will they take this one too? Who has the first one? Where did Ghislaine go. She is never around. I can’t let myself get attached. I am not old or mature enough or even in the place to have a baby that I would be responsible for. I am not even able to focus on anything other than hiding this again. I had to go to eating disorder treatment prior to being in this situation again and missed the entire fall semester of school. I am so very exhausted. My body feels so tired. Will I ever be free?”
Journal entry, unknown victim — EFTA02731405

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A separate entry, written about another pregnancy:

“I am such a monster. I DIDN’T CONSOLE HER! I CAN’T UNHEAR HER SCREAMS! THEY HAUNT ME! I couldn’t even bring myself to look at her. I am a monster. I deserve to be haunted by her screams. I AM SO SORRY. I AM SO BROKEN.”Journal entry, unknown victim
‘I am such a monster’ — EFTA02731406

In another entry she writes about a procedure performed by a doctor she believed was from Israel, who ‘had kind eyes but didn’t speak directly to me.’ She describes a shot, rod-like instruments with hooks, and ‘so much pain.’ Ghislaine told her to ‘push all the pain away.’ She writes: ‘I saw between her fingers a tiny head and had a tiny foot. I closed my eyes and no more.’

— EFTA02731361

In another she writes about a baby born alive, delivered by an elderly French woman near Epstein’s Palm Beach residence. 4lbs 10oz and 18.5 inches with beautiful long fingers. She was allowed to hold her and feed her for ten to fifteen minutes when a man came and took the baby. She was hysterical, she begged for more time. The old woman promised the baby would ‘be safe and that she had to let go.’

“I am dead inside. Life has no meaning. I don’t want to go.”
— Journal entry, unknown victim EFTA02731385

She references being sent back to the network as punishment for trying to run, and she references Ghislaine being absent a lot. She also writes about Epstein and Maxwell fighting over what to do about a pregnancy they ‘confirmed was his’ — he didn’t want a ‘procedure’, Maxwell did, and the victim writes: ‘I don’t want to be tied to Jeffrey for the rest of my life.’

— EFTA02731465

These entries are spread across multiple journals, multiple years. They document a special needs child whose body was treated as property by adults and whose trauma and grief was treated as an inconvenience.

Codes and Clippings

Throughout the journals she pastes clippings — magazine articles, advertisements, photographs — and annotates them. The annotations are often the most direct statements in the record.

One page uses a photograph of a courtroom as its background. Printed over it are the words: ‘You should never be here alone.’ Her handwritten annotation: ‘HE SHOULD!’

‘HE SHOULD!’ EFTA02731400

Another page uses a National Geographic photograph of New York City’s Central Park at night — skyscrapers lit up beyond the treeline. She writes: ‘BLEND IN! HATE THIS CITY!’ On a nearby page, against the same city imagery: ‘So sad this city could be beautiful if it weren’t filled with monsters. The blood from Leon is no longer there.

Cut out: “Who could have predicted this?” Below - in code “I should have!”
— EFTA02731404

The clipping annotated with the date National Geographic June 2004 establishes a timeline. She is referencing New York, Leon Black, and blood on a specific page that attorneys have decoded as Year 16 — the same year as the assault entry.

Another page contains the heading ‘Through a Child’s Eyes’ beside the quote: ‘What I wanted was a place where dreams did not stop at dawn.’ Her annotation: ‘I won’t let pain keep me from’ — the sentence trails off.

Judge Rakoff’s court found no evidence of fabrication and the forensic examination produced no evidence the documents were recently created. More than 20 contemporaneous witnesses wrote in them and they were submitted to federal prosecutors years before the JPMorgan compensation claim. The content is consistent with independent victim accounts that were developed without knowledge of the journals.

They are not proof of guilt in a criminal court, no criminal court has reviewed them and no criminal charges have been filed against any person named in them.

Leon Black’s attorney Susan Estrich challenged the journals in a letter to Judge Rakoff. Brad Edwards, representing the plaintiff class in the JPMC settlement, submitted a brief arguing there was insufficient corroboration. Judge Rakoff expressed reluctance in a conversation with the claims examiner — noting he could not understand why there was no corroboration and wanting to meet with the examiner. The court had not issued a final ruling as of the most recent documents in the public record.

Here are some other page examples from the victim journals:

Some pages, even have redactions on the journal pages. She writes that she is going to break. She asks why they would let Mr. Leonsis wait so long, and why he would bring a friend and ‘make a video.’ She writes that a procedure was so painful there was blood all over the sheets. She writes that she has to ask Ghislaine for help — that if anyone can make it stop, it would be her. She describes being so sick with fever that Ghislaine put her in a freezing cold shower. She lists the names of others she holds responsible — Mr. Rails, Mr. Ein, Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Conway, Mr. Vradenberg, and “Bills” — and writes that all of them don’t care if this happens.

The journal identifies this individual as “Mr. Leonsis” the record does not provide a confirmed first name or independently verified identity for this person.

FBI decoded — EFTA02731470

She had Down syndrome and autism — her own parents sold access to her body. She was moved through a trafficking network involving some of the most powerful men in the United States, and the world, operated in. She had no one to tell.

So, she built scrapbooks. She cut up magazines and scrambled the words and encoded everything so no one could read it. She kept them for years, because she needed her story to exist somewhere.

“She came in like a lamb and went out like a lioness.”

That line is from the final journal, and she wrote it about herself.

— EFTA02731391

Last Page First is an independent investigative publication. Paid subscribers make the deep dives possible—FOIA templates, citation indexes, Document Room access, and subscriber discussion threads. If this piece reached you, share it. If you want to help keep it going, subscribe.

Subscribe now

If you have documents, names, or anything relevant to an investigation, my inbox is open to everyone. Contact us here. Your name stays private unless you tell me otherwise.

Sources

Primary journal covering trafficking period, Years 15–16
EFTA02731433–64
Second journal, Year 17
EFTA02731341–60
Third journal, Years 18–19
EFTA02731361–92
Additional Year 18 journal pages
EFTA02731393–409
— Christensen letter: March 2024
EFTA02731721–23
— Victim correspondence
EFTA02731480–81
— Victim interviews
EFTA02731604–22
— SDNY follow up
EFTA02731648–54
— DANY / SDNY coordination
EFTA02731583–92
— DANY call notes — June 2023
EFTA02731662–65
Minor victim — ‘VIP special friend of Jeffrey’s’
— Brad Edwards / settlement notes
EFTA02731577
— Forensic call notes — Rakoff proceedings
EFTA02731724
— Bank records — wire transfers
EFTA02731526–75
Leon J. Black / J. Black Trust / E Trust
— FBI 302 referrals
EFTA02731485–89
—March 2024 Christensen letter to prosecutors
EFTA02731721–23
— CNBC / dropped claim
EFTA02731755–56

Joseph E. Robert Jr. — Washington Post obituary confirming identity, McLean residence, and professional background

Jill Sorensen — Georgia Today profile, confirming identity and public background

The Maria and Virginia Series
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part 4

Five days before Virginia Giuffre’s death, Maria Farmer submitted a 41-page federal dossier to the FBI naming figures in the independent media space she believed were coordinating a campaign to discredit Epstein survivors. The document is EFTA01652628. The parallel submission Virginia made the same day went to the British Metropolitan Police — EFTA01652467–72. The claims are theirs. This investigation reports what they said, what is independently verifiable, and where the line between documented fact and allegation runs.

The Maria Dossier investigation established what EFTA01652628 & EFTA01652016 contain and their full scope — this piece focuses specifically on 3 media figures that were named and focuses on one figure the documents place on the opposite side of that ledger entirely. All previous investigations are linked in the sources block and at the top of the page.

EFTA01652628 is Maria Farmer’s submission to the FBI, April 20, 2025. All material in the Tonks, Hervey, Ward, Vedmore, Webb, and Kraus sections derives from Maria’s dossier unless otherwise stated. EFTA01652467–72 is Virginia Giuffre’s parallel submission to the British Metropolitan Police CIT, same date. The Metropolitan Police thread section draws from Virginia’s submission. Where a document could be attributed to either, that uncertainty is stated explicitly. Neither submission has been independently adjudicated. All primary sources are publicly accessible in DOJ Epstein Library Dataset 10.

I became -CIA- to the conspiracy crowd thanks to a pair called WEBBMORE. They labeled me this be I was sodomized by STAN POTTINGER and prior to this Pottinger/Boise/BEDWARDS tormented me with SA abuse/misappropriated funds/lied about an appeal process. Sigrid McCawley and David BOIES lied to both me and my sister [redacted], claiming we couldn't appeal the decision to steal my compensation!!! IT WAS TO COVERUP THEIR BLACKMAIL BANK SCHEME ON BEHALF OF LIBG TERM ADULT SEX WORKERS! Who stays 6-13 years as an adult "employee", committing crimes...and is then paid wildly as I watch and beg for my share as the solo whistleblower! DO YOUR JOBS, everyone!!! Before I'm murdered by this gang. Please do your jobs!!!!
Maria Farmer April 20, 2025 — EFTA01652016

Maria Farmer was a woman in evident distress, her friend Virginia five days from death, filing what she believed was evidence of a coordinated harassment campaign. Her allegations deserve to be reported on. They do not deserve to be laundered into established fact. That distinction is applied rigorously throughout.

The Harassment Network: Tonks, Hervey, and the Maxwell Thread

Before the named journalists, there is a network: Maria documented it in her FBI dossier — not as isolated bad actors but as a functioning system of harassment directed towards Epstein survivors, she believed, to discredit them. All material in this section is from EFTA01652628 — Maria Farmer's submission — unless stated otherwise.

George B. Tonks —

Left: George B. Tonks posts publicly that there is “nothing wrong” with forgiving Les Wexner for what happened “over 40 years ago” — while simultaneously operating as a distributor of private survivor communications.
Right: Tonks promotes Lady Victoria Hervey on TikTok as “very honest & outspoken” and someone “not afraid to expose the truth about the lying fake so-called Epstein victims.” Tags visible: #LadyVictoriaHervey #FBI #MI6 #MI5. Hervey’s account responds: “Those arrests may be coming sooner than we thought.” Both screenshots filed by Maria Farmer with the FBI as evidence of coordinated harassment. EFTA01652018.

George B. Tonks is a convicted felon on federal probation.

That is the first thing to know. Not a commentator, not a critic — a man with a criminal record, under active federal supervision, publicly declaring that there is “nothing wrong” with forgiving Les Wexner — a man credibly connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s operation — for something that happened “over 40 years ago.”

The second thing to know is what he was doing at the same time he was posting that: He was distributing private survivor communications through a Dropbox link — EFTA01652019. He was tagging Lady Victoria Hervey — a woman who publicly calls Epstein survivors “lying” and “fake” — and amplifying her to his followers with hashtags including #FBI, #MI6, and #MI5. And Hervey was responding. “Those arrests may be coming sooner than we thought.” Arrests of whom, exactly, is left unstated. The implication is clear.

The third thing to know is that Maria Farmer filed both of these screenshots with the FBI as evidence. She was not being paranoid. She was documenting, methodically, a man on federal probation coordinating publicly with a Maxwell defender to discredit the women who survived what Wexner and Epstein built together.

Tonks says he has moved on from what happened to him. He has not extended that courtesy to the women still fighting for their lives — he forgives the powerful man and he calls the survivors liars.

That is not healing. That is a choice.

His public announcement upon release from federal supervision: “ENEMIES GET READY.” That is EFTA01652022:

Maria included this screenshot in her emails to the FBI

Maria’s dossier documents Tonks, Krauss and Johnny Vedmore appearing in the same screenshot — EFTA01652026 — establishing what Maria presented as network convergence between her named harassers.

The Exposing Maria Farmer piece: On September 10, 2023, Kraus published a Substack piece calling an Epstein survivor a fraudulent whistleblower. Filed as EFTA01652634. The piece did not originate with Kraus. Its primary source was George B Tonks. The dossier contains the annotation: “Times Three: WARD TONKS KRAUS” — EFTA01652638. Attribution of that specific annotation to Maria or Virginia is not established with certainty; it appears within Maria’s FBI submission.

— EFTA01652634

Lady Victoria Hervey —

Lady Victoria Hervey is a British socialite and longtime Ghislaine Maxwell defender. Maria filed two specific Hervey posts as federal evidence — EFTA01652017–18 — in which Hervey publicly called Epstein survivors “fake” and “paid escorts and rent boys extorting money.”

The document also contains a statement attributed to Tonks: “Lady Victoria communicates with Ghislaine.” That is EFTA01652023. It is a CHS-style allegation within Maria’s dossier — her stated belief, not an independently confirmed fact.

George B Tonks claiming Lady Victoria communicates with Ghislaine & I - documented in the federal record — EFTA01652024

Lady Hervey reply to Virginia Guiffre instagram post EFTA01652024

Maria presented Hervey and Tonks as operating together — Hervey providing the platform and the social legitimacy, Tonks providing the distribution of private communications. Whether that coordination was deliberate or incidental is not established by the documents alone.

Kim Iversen —

Kim Iversen is an independent media host with a large digital audience. She is not a participant in the direct exchanges documented in Maria Farmer’s FBI submission — but a figure who amplifies the voices within it.

Maria’s dossier does not present Iversen as a primary actor in the harrassment network, but places her adjacent to it — as part of the broader media environment in which those narratives were elevated and legitimized.

Content highlighted in the filing shows Iversen platforming figures such as Whitney Webb to tens of thousands of viewers, framing their work as authoritative and essential to understanding the Epstein case.

Maria did not file Iversen as someone distributing her private communications., or as someone directly calling survivors “fake.”

What she documented with Kim, is the ecosystem: The layer where claims become reach and where reach becomes credibility. Where credibility shapes public perception of the women at the center of the case.

Whether that amplification contributed to the harm Maria describes is not established by the documents alone.

What is established is that she believed it mattered enough to include it in a federal submission.

Vicky Ward —

Maria’s own annotation — EFTA01652638 — reads: “Times Three: WARD TONKS KRAUS.” Vicky Ward is an investigative journalist and former Vanity Fair writer. Maria filed her Substack post about Isaac Chotiner’s New Yorker piece alongside Ward defending herself against accusations of lying about the Epstein case. Maria experienced Ward’s reporting as part of the same phenomenon she was documenting, and the nature of that inclusion is Maria’s stated belief in the dossier; it has not been adjudicated.

“Times Three: WARD TONKS KRAUS.” — Maria Farmer, EFTA01652638, five days before her death.

J. Stanley Pottinger

The Pottinger allegation runs through both submissions — and it runs through them independently.

In her April 20, 2025 email to the FBI, Maria Farmer states she was sodomized by Stanley Pottinger — and that rather than this being addressed, it was used against her to apply the WEBBMORE/CIA plant label. That is EFTA01652016.

In her April 20, 2025 submission to the British Metropolitan Police, Virginia Giuffre makes her own independent allegation. She writes:

“Stan Pottinger openly hit on me repeatedly. He tried to kiss me in New York after the deposition I was blackmailed into doing for [redacted] against Ghislaine Maxwell. I was told I had to do the deposition and then they would only represent me in my own litigation. Stan actually had the cheek to hit on me in front of Peter Coulthard. Brad knew and so did you Sigrid and David.” — EFTA01652471

She is naming Brad Edwards, Sigrid McCawley, and David Boies as having direct knowledge, she is also stating she was blackmailed into providing a deposition as a condition of receiving legal representation. Peter Coulthard is named as a witness to Pottinger’s conduct.

Two women, the same attorney, same date. Filing with different authorities on two different continents. Independently from each other.

Pottinger died on November 27, 2024 — five months before either woman filed these documents. A dedicated Last Page First investigation into Pottinger, his background, and the full evidentiary record is forthcoming.

JOHNNY VEDMORE

Johnny Vedmore is an independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. Founder of NEWSPASTE.com. Former contributor and researcher at Whitney Webb’s Unlimited Hangout.
— @JohnnyVedmore

Johnny Vedmore is an independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. Founder of NEWSPASTE.com, former contributor and researcher at Whitney Webb’s Unlimited Hangout.

Maria’s dossier includes screenshots of Vedmore’s tweets — calling Maria Farmer a CIA plant, a compulsive liar, and someone whose testimony should be inadmissible — submitted to the FBI as harassment evidence. Those tweets are EFTA01652656–65. Maria compiled and filed them.

What this investigation adds is what Vedmore himself says those claims are based on: his Pottinger Ultimatum series. Across multiple articles published on newspaste.com, Vedmore argues that J. Stanley Pottinger — the attorney who represented Epstein victims — was part of a CIA managed controlled takedown of Epstein. In Vedmore’s telling, Maria Farmer was a knowing participant placed within the victim legal team to manage the narrative. To Johnny, this wasn’t a pure victim narrative — it was influenced or managed by intelligence-linked actors. His position is not that the record is incomplete. It is that it is compromised, he argues that a central Epstein victim was not only unreliable, but embedded — tied to a CIA adjacent legal framework from the beginning.

He presents this as sourced analysis and delivers it as certainty.

Maria Farmer filed it as harassment.

Maria’s own allegations against Pottinger appear elsewhere in the same 41-page filing. The two threads — Vedmore’s Pottinger research and Maria’s Pottinger allegations — run parallel through the dossier. Whether they connect is not established by the documents alone. What is established is that Maria experienced Vedmore’s public campaign as harassment and put it on the federal record.

Vedmore tweet, February 27, 2025: the redacted individual was “already a paid member of the CIA led legal team being formed” while giving her first interviews. Maria Farmer filed this tweet with the FBI as harassment evidence.
— EFTA01652648

Watch the pivot:
From Epstein — to the victims.
From documented abuse — to rumor, blame, and noise.
That’s not confusion, that’s redirection.

Vedmore frames it as reporting.
Others describe it as harassment.
Maria Farmer filed it as evidence.

WHITNEY WEBB

Whitney Webb is an investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail. She conducted a phone call with Maria Farmer that was released without Maria’s meaningful consent, according to Maria’s account. Maria Farmer filed Webb’s tweet re: release of private communications as federal evidence — EFTA01652644.
— @_whitneywebb

The Maria Dossier investigation documented that the victims filed two specific items against Webb: Maria Farmer’s direct confrontation and Webb’s tweet stating she held private communications with a survivor and that she would release them if necessary, to protect herself. Both are EFTA01652644 and EFTA01652661

— EFTA01652661

I was screamed at and pressured during brain trauma! You can make your little recordings and edit all you want. YOU TOOK ADVANTAGE OF A SICK WOMAN TO SELL HER LIKE A PROSTITUTE! WHY WOULD I EVER WILLINGLY GIVE PERMISSION. IN MY RIGHT MIND?! I HAD NOTHING TO GAIN AND I TRUSTED YOU BASED ON YOU KNOWING STUPID NICK AND NICK KNOWING BRAD! I AM THE OPPOSITE OF YOUR COLD, CRUEL USERY!

The place i saw the recording on YouTube was UNLIMITED HANGOUT. That is what it says. THANK TO YOU NOT HONORING WHAT I BEGGED OF YOU, it was widely sourced. YOU ARE NOT A REAL JOURNO. I know many at every real publication and made friends with them..THEY NEVER USE NOR ABUSE ANYONE! I cried to you and said my gallery was cancelled over what you did! A real journalist DOES NO HARM!! I KNOW!!
If you go to Vimeo and search, this is the only recoding of me to surface. My enemies remain in my prayers, I want no woman unsafe and abused by a man!

In April 2020, Webb conducted a 3 hour phone call with Maria Farmer, who was undergoing cancer treatment following brain radiation surgery. The call was published by The Last American Vagabond and later republished on Webb’s Unlimited Hangout. Maria has stated she did not meaningfully consent to its release, and as you can tell from her message above to Webb — she really did damage to her.

Two years later, on May 2, 2022, Webb removed the recording at Maria’s request. But the interview was already cited in One Nation Under Blackmail — Webb’s two volume investigation into the Epstein network, published the same year. Information Maria shared during a call she says was taken without meaningful consent became source material for one of the most cited independent works on the case.

The day after Virginia died, Maria wrote into an email chain that included David Boies, Sigrid McCawley, Ronan Farrow, and Emily Steel: “Whitney Webb was a nightmare for us all, the last few years. All bc I picked up my phone to a cold call the day following brain radiation surgery.” That email is EFTA01652464

Millions of views, mass reach.
The same voices — amplified, repeated, legitimized.

Whitney Webb on Glenn Beck right before Benjamin Netanyahu, interesting.

Maria Farmer, in her own words “….the couple who destroyed truth and reality in the Epstein case…”
— EFTA01652647

Ian Carrol mentioned above, showing how connected the ecosystem is.
— SOURCE

JESSICA REED KRAUS

From Substack to prime time platforms. — EFTA01652635

Jessica Reed Kraus runs the House Inhabit Substack. She received White House Press Pool access and an “Epstein Files Phase 1 binder” in February 2025. Maria compiled documentation of her public actions and submitted it to the FBI five days before her death.

The Maria Dossier investigation documented the public record she compiled: the Free Ghislaine shirt at the DNC, the White House Press Pool pass, the February 2025 Epstein binder from Pam Bondi, and the September 2023 Substack piece titled ‘Exposing Maria Farmer.’ The Sydney Morning Herald described her as “Mar a Lago’s favorite mummy” alongside a photograph of Kraus with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones — an image Maria also filed.

What happened after Virginia’s death is the record this section adds. In September 2025, Kraus published a series of Instagram Stories attacking Epstein survivors by name. She wrote:

“Participating in a sexual experience at 26 with two other adults is called a threesome, not rape.”

“Maybe stop boarding the flights that take you to the island.” The Daily Beast and HuffPost both covered the posts.

Kraus had already received White House press credentials and an Epstein binder from Pam Bondi’s DOJ before Virginia died. The September 2025 posts came after. They sit in direct continuation of the public record Maria had already filed as evidence five days before Virginia’s death

Left Panel: Jessica Reed Kraus’s White House Press Pool badge.
— EFTA01652632
Right Panel: Jessica Reed Kraus wearing a “Free Ghislaine” shirt, DNC Chicago 2024.
— EFTA01652637

Last Page First personally reached out to Jessica Reed Kraus for comment, to which she had a weird one.

RYLIBERTY — IN THE FEDERAL RECORD

An April 19, 2025 email sent to a network of attorneys, journalists, and Epstein linked figures, subject line: “EPSTEIN INJUSTICE – WE ARE ALL WATCHING YOU.” Among the recipients — many with direct or indirect ties to Epstein litigation — is independent researcher Ryan Dawson, who has been repeatedly de-platformed for his work examining financial and institutional connections in the Epstein case.

“EPSTEIN INJUSTICE – WE ARE ALL WATCHING YOU.” Among the recipients is independent researcher Ryan Dawson
—EFTA01651945

There is an irony embedded in these documents that has gone unreported. While journalists with mainstream platforms, podcast networks, and publishing deals built audiences covering the Epstein case, one of the earliest and most comprehensive independent researchers was being banned from every platform he tried to use to tell this story.

Ryan Dawson began documenting the Epstein network before most people had heard Jeffrey Epstein’s name. He was removed from Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, YouTube — multiple times — from crypto exchanges, and even from MySpace, way back when that was a thing, for publishing research on a case the mainstream press would not touch for years. He operated from the margins while others built careers in the center. He was restored to X only after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. He is recognized across the independent research community as among the earliest and most thorough chroniclers of the case.

The federal record places him in a specific and documented light. It is not the light his critics would choose.

Virginia Giuffre and Maria Farmer followed Ryan Dawson’s work. On April 19, 2025 — the day before Maria filed her 41 page evidentiary dossier with the FBI — Maria embedded his tweet and her painting titled Zelchuk’d into a mass email directed at David Boies, Sigrid McCawley, Brad Edwards, Simone Lelchuk, the FBI, and the Metropolitan Police. The people she believed had failed her and Virginia. The people she was building a case against.

— EFTA01652473

She was using his voice as evidence — aimed directly at her own legal team and at the federal agents who had given her zero protection as a federal witness. His tweet characterizing Epstein participants as willing actors was a weapon she chose to deploy against the lawyers and institutions she held responsible. Maria Farmer, five days before Virginia’s death, chose Ryan Dawson’s words to say what she could not say alone: EFTA01652473.

Virginia also copied Dawson on her April 19 federal submission — the same email that went to her attorneys, FBI agents, and Metropolitan Police contacts. He was part of the network of people that Maria and Virginia trusted with their documented communication to federal authorities.

— EFTA00154871

The day after Virginia died, Dawson wrote into the email chain started by Maria that included David Boies, Sigrid McCawley, Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, and Emily Steel of The New York Times. He did not write to promote himself. He wrote to defend her and Virginia — and to push back, on the record, against the conspiracy theories spreading about how she had died.

She is a huge reason why Epstein and Maxwell and Brunel all landed behind bars and why Prince Andrew lost 16 million. She did great damage to the pedophile network. But they also did great damage to her. Honor what she did. She took them down.
— Ryan Dawson — EFTA01652715, the day Virginia died.

His words continued:

“She was absolutely heart broken. Devastatingly hallowed… She wasn’t doing well, that’s all I will say. And it was not a surprise to me at all that she took her own life. She had a 5 year nightmare with serial rapists. She jailed 3 of them and sued others. She brought closure to hundreds of women. She took on a team of lawyers with nothing and won. Never forget her courage and sacrifice. RIP.”

Maria then responded directly to Dawson in the same chain — the chain that also included Boies, McCawley, Farrow, and Steel: “Thank you Ryan. You are a true soldier.”

— EFTA00154871

That exchange is in the federal record and it will remain there permanently.

Now consider what that same federal record shows about two people named here, who built platforms, audiences, and income from the Epstein research space during the same years Dawson was being banned from every platform he tried to use.

Whitney Webb — whose Unlimited Hangout and publishing deal made her one of the most recognized names in independent Epstein coverage — recorded a phone call with Maria Farmer during Maria’s cancer treatment and released it without Maria’s meaningful consent, according to Maria’s documented account in EFTA01652661. On the day Virginia died, Maria wrote: “Whitney Webb was a nightmare for us all, the last few years.”

— EFTA01652464.

Johnny Vedmore — a contributor and researcher at that same Unlimited Hangout — compiled a public record of tweets calling the same redacted survivor a CIA plant, a compulsive liar, and someone whose testimony should be inadmissible in every court. Maria compiled those tweets and filed them with the FBI as evidence of harassment. EFTA01652656 through EFTA01652665.

Vedmore and Webb had platforms, audiences. They had reach. Ryan Dawson had none of those things — because he had been removed from every platform that would have given them to him.

The federal record does not adjudicate who was right about the Epstein case. But it does record, permanently, who Virginia Giuffre and Maria Farmer trusted with her final submission to federal authorities — and who she held responsible for her suffering in the documents she filed five days before her death.

Maria Farmer did not file separate complaints about three unrelated individuals. She filed a single 41 page evidentiary dossier in which she presented Vedmore, Webb, Kraus and others as part of a connected phenomenon — the use of independent media to discredit, delegitimize, and isolate Epstein survivors.

Vedmore publicly calling Maria Farmer a CIA plant — based on his Pottinger Ultimatum research — in tweets he posted to thousands of his followers. Webb releasing an interview Maria says she did not meaningfully consent to, citing it in a book, then publicly stating she held private communications with a survivor she would release if necessary. Maria saying, in an email on the federal record that “Whitney Webb was a nightmare for us all, the last few years. All bc I picked up my phone to a cold call the day following brain radiation surgery.” Kraus calling an Epstein survivor a fraudulent whistleblower on her Substack, and receiving a White House Press Pool pass then being given the Epstein files binder by the same administration she covers favorably.

Maria presented these as connected — whether they are connected in any coordinated or organized sense — whether there is a network in the way Maria used that word — is not established by the documents alone. What the documents establish is that three figures operating in the independent media space covering Epstein produced content Maria Farmer experienced as targeting, as harmful, and as part of a campaign to destroy her and Virginia. She compiled documentation of that content and submitted it to federal agents five days before she died.

She put it on the record. So has Last Page First. People deserve to see the whole record.

Truth is, this work takes all of us.

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Sources

• EFTA01652628 — Virginia Giuffre 41‑page evidentiary dossier. Filed April 20, 2025. DOJ Epstein Library Dataset 10. Master document.

• EFTA01652656–01652665 — Johnny Vedmore tweets compiled by Virginia as federal evidence. CIA plant allegation. Lies compulsively. Inadmissible in court. FBI tagged directly. All visible and unredacted.

• EFTA01652644 — Whitney Webb tweet: private text communications, will release if necessary. Filed by Virginia as federal evidence.

• EFTA01652661 — Maria Farmer direct written confrontation with Webb over unauthorized recording.

• EFTA01652464 — Maria Farmer email, April 26, 2025 — day Virginia died. Names Webb directly.

• EFTA01652632 — White House Press Pool badge photograph — Jessica Reed Kraus.

• EFTA01652633/34 — Kraus Substack piece — Exposing Maria Farmer. September 10, 2023. George B. Tonks as primary source.

• EFTA01652635 — Sydney Morning Herald — “Mar-a-Lago’s favourite mummy.” Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones photograph.

• EFTA01652637 — Free Ghislaine shirt photograph. DNC Chicago, August 2024. Confirmed MeidasTouch.

• EFTA01652473 — Ryan Dawson tweet embedded by Virginia in April 19 submission, directed at legal team and federal contacts.

• EFTA01651945 — Virginia April 19 federal submission. Dawson copied as recipient alongside legal team and federal agents.

• EFTA01652715–01652718 — Ryan Dawson April 26, 2025 statement defending Virginia’s legacy. Fellow survivor response: “Thank you Ryan. You are a true soldier.” Chain includes David Boies, Sigrid McCawley, Ronan Farrow, Emily Steel.

• Johnny Vedmore —
  NEWSPASTE.com.
  The Pottinger Ultimatum (2023).
  The Pottinger Legacy (February 2026).
  LinkedIn.

• Whitney Webb —
  Unlimited Hangout.
  https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb/
  One Nation Under Blackmail (2022).
  The Last American Vagabond — Maria Farmer call published April 2020, removed May 2, 2022. Confirmed from TLAV archive.

• Michael Tracey — The Webb Whitney Weaves. August 10, 2025. mtracey.net. Confirmed: call date April 16, 2020; removal date May 2, 2022; citation in One Nation Under Blackmail.

• Jessica Reed Kraus — House Inhabit Substack.
  White House Inhabit (March 2025) — Kraus’s own account of White House visit and binder distribution.

• MeidasTouch — Free Ghislaine shirt confirmed August 2024 DNC Chicago. White House press pool access confirmed March 2025.

• Daily Beast — MAHA Mommy Blogger Who Got Epstein Binder Goes After His Victims. September 2025. Kraus Instagram Stories attacking survivors confirmed.

• HuffPost — Pro-Trump Influencer Attacks Epstein Victims. September 2025. Kraus quotes confirmed.

• Ryan Dawson —
  ANC Report
  @RyLiberty on X.
  Confirmed: banned from Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, YouTube (multiple times), crypto exchanges. Restored to X post-Musk acquisition. Source: ANC Report bio; The Martyr Made Podcast, Spotify, July 2025.

• https://substack.com/@ryandawson

Last Page First Articles

• Last Page First — Virginia Dossier: In Her Own Words. Previous investigation in this series.

• Last Page First — The Art the FBI Has. Previous investigation.

Reports circulating online — first published by The Mirror — claim that Pam Bondi was removed from her position ahead of a scheduled deposition tied to Epstein-related inquiries.
As of publication, these claims have not been independently confirmed by major U.S. outlets.

This is a developing story.

Read Pam Bondi Expose here
View The Document Room Here

UPDATE (Confirmed / Developing):

Multiple major outlets are now reporting that Pam Bondi has been removed from her role.

She had also been under increasing congressional pressure tied to Epstein-related document handling, including reported plans for sworn testimony.

What is still not confirmed is the connection between those two events.

The timing is no longer speculation. The reason still is.

This piece will be updated as more verified reporting comes in.

In Washington, power doesn’t just disappear.

Sometimes, it walks out before it has to answer questions.

Tonight, Pam Bondi — the woman at the center of one of the most explosive document controversies in modern U.S. politics — has reportedly been removed from her roles just days before she was set to testify under oath about the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Pam Bondi attends a swearing-in ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C., March 24, 2026.
Photo: Graeme Sloan

A chair was waiting for her.

A microphone.

A sworn oath.

And questions that weren’t going away.

She never got to sit down.

The Timing No One Can Ignore

Bondi had been subpoenaed to testify before the House Oversight Committee over her department’s handling of the Epstein investigation — including document releases, redactions, and whether powerful names were shielded while victims were exposed.

Her deposition was scheduled for mid-April.

Now she’s gone.

Fired.

Or, depending on which version of the truth survives the next 24 hours — pushed out before she could speak.

A Collapse Months in the Making

This didn’t happen overnight.

For months, pressure had been building:

• Botched Epstein file releases that exposed victims while concealing elite figures

• Claims of a “client list” that later did not exist

• Bipartisan outrage in Congress

• A subpoena forcing her to answer, under oath

Behind closed doors, frustration was growing too.

Reports say Donald Trump had been considering removing her for weeks — unhappy with her handling of the Epstein files and broader Justice Department performance.

Then today, it happened.

Subscribe to follow this as it develops.

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The Questions That Follow Her Out the Door

This is what makes it bigger than a firing:

Bondi wasn’t just another official.

She was the gatekeeper of one of the most sensitive document troves in modern U.S. history.

And now:

• She won’t testify

• She won’t be cross-examined

• She won’t be forced to clarify contradictions

• She won’t have to answer — at least not in that room

Instead, the narrative fractures.

And accountability slips further out of reach.

What Happens Now

There are already reports of a replacement being lined up — possibly someone more aligned, more aggressive, more willing to carry out the administration’s agenda.

But that’s not the real story.

The real story is the empty chair.

Because in Washington, the most important moments aren’t always what happens in public.

It’s what doesn’t happen.

The testimony that never comes.

The oath never taken.

The questions that never get asked — at least not where it counts.

Last Page First is an independent investigative publication. Paid subscribers make the deep dives possible—FOIA templates, citation indexes, Document Room access, and subscriber discussion threads. If this piece reached you, share it. If you want to help keep it going, subscribe.

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If you have documents, names, or anything relevant to an investigation, my inbox is open to everyone. Contact us here. Your name stays private unless you tell me otherwise.

Sources

• Reuters: Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general

• Reuters: Trump discussed firing Bondi amid Epstein pressure

• AP News: Trump frustration over Epstein files handling

• ABC News: Bondi removal discussions and internal pressure

• SAN/NYT reporting: Bondi deposition timeline and Epstein probe

• Congressional record: Subpoena and deposition requirement

• Vanity Fair: Fallout from Epstein file release failures

For the full investigation into Leon Black, the DOJ files, and the victim journals, read “Blood on the Carpet”

THE HEADLINE THAT SHOULD HAUNT WASHINGTON

Leon Black is not in prison nor under indictment. He has not been charged for any crimes related to the Epstein Network crimes.

By the way, his son — Benjamin Black — was sworn into the Trump administration by Vice President JD Vance in December 2025. He now runs the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC )— a federal agency whose investment cap has been raised up to $205 billion.

Ben Black — Photo Source

The same month Ben Black took the oath of office, the DOJ’s Epstein file release included a victim journal describing a 16-year-old girl with Mosaic Down syndrome and autism (read our anaylsis of the journals here) who was assaulted by Leon Black and left bleeding on Jeffrey Epstein’s carpet.

This is not a coincidence, but the system hard at work

WHAT JUST HAPPENED (THE LAST TWO WEEKS)

MARCH 11, 2026 – THE DELAY

Judge Jed Rakoff delayed Leon Black’s deposition, originally scheduled for March 26, after Black’s lawyers told the court the parties were “close to settling.”

MARCH 16, 2026 – THE SETTLEMENT

Bank of America reached a $72.5 million settlement with Epstein survivors. The March 26 deposition was canceled. The May 11 trial was canceled. Leon Black will never answer a single question under oath about his $170 million in payments to Epstein.

MARCH 23, 2026 – THE RECEIPTS

Four days after the settlement, Senator Ron Wyden released a letter to Leon Black summarizing a four-year investigation. The letter is based on DOJ files, bank records, and emails.

WHAT WYDEN FOUND

On March 23, 2026, Senator Ron Wyden released a letter to Leon Black summarizing a four year investigation. The letter is based on DOJ files, bank records, and emails. Here is exactly what it says:

30x Higher Rate

The rates Black paid Epstein were 30 times higher than he paid the elite tax and estate advisors he already employed.

Sham Charity

Ten million dollars Black paid to Epstein was papered over with a sham 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity. Epstein lawyer Richard Kahn wrote that routing the money through the charity would “avoid public disclosure” and “maximize deductions.”

Hush Money

Emails indicate Black paid millions of dollars to women using Epstein as a middleman.

Gift Tax Evasion

Millions of dollars Black paid to women were described as “gifts” in documents Epstein possessed.

Russia

Epstein provided the Russian government with the location of women who were on Black’s payroll for unknown reasons. Epstein met with Russian officials more than a dozen times between 2015 and 2017, many within hours of meetings with Black.

Surveillance

Public reporting has identified the Paul Weiss figure as chairman Brad Karp.

Trust Overpayment

Black was overpaid $141 million by a family trust. If the trust is ruled defective, it would result in billions of dollars being clawed back into his taxable estate.

Wyden’s letter directly quotes Epstein’s accountant Richard Kahn saying the sham charity structure would “avoid public disclosure.”

THE VICTIM JOURNAL

In the DOJ files released under court order from Judge Jed Rakoff, there are multiple journals.

They are written by an unknown minor — a girl with Mosaic Down syndrome and autism who was trafficked through Epstein’s network from approximately age 13 to 17, introduced into it by her mother. Her identity is redacted throughout. most of the journals are not.

She wrote in code — cut up magazines — pasted words together. Attorneys at Wigdor LLP decoded most of the entries and submitted them to federal prosecutors.

One entry, which appears in DOJ Dataset 12, says :

“He threw me on the floor and blood all over Jeffreys carpet and I am the issue? Who the fuck bites someone? Sick. No one is that important and Leon can go fuck himself.”

She was just 16 years old at this time.

The same journals document multiple pregnancies across the years of trafficking — at least one live birth, a miscarriage, and multiple ‘procedures.’ Forensic examination ordered by Judge Rakoff found the journals were written in ‘gel pen.’ No evidence of recent fabrication was found and more than 20 people wrote in them contemporaneously.

THE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION

Public reporting has identified the Paul Weiss figure as chairman Brad Karp. He had been chairman of the white-shoe law firm for 18 years.

The DOJ files contain emails between Karp and Epstein. Here is what they show :

July 29, 2015 – Epstein emails Karp about a woman who was an inconvenience to “Leon”:

“Is it possible for your contacts to get her current visa status? Is there a way for us to file something that would revoke a tourist visa?”

Karp responds: “Both good ideas; will work on this.”

August 16, 2015 – Epstein writes again:

“Can you tell me for certain that if Leon decides enough is enough... that you and Lorin can have her arrested.!! fed extortion, high bail. maybe deportation?”

Two minutes later, Karp responds: “I’ll check again with Lorin, but my strong belief is that the answer is yes.”

(”Lorin” refers to Lorin Reisner, a Paul Weiss partner who previously headed the criminal division at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office.)

August 23, 2015 – Karp confirms surveillance:

“She was snuck out through the garage, in a car with tinted windows, and we have license plate numbers.”

Later that month, Karp writes: “We stopped the surveillance on Friday.”

After a 2015 dinner at Epstein’s mansion – Karp emails Epstein:

“Thank you for an evening I’ll never forget... It was truly ‘once in a lifetime’ in every way... You are an extraordinary host—and your home...!!!”

Epstein replies: “You are always welcome. There are many, many nights of unique talents. You will be invited often.”

Karp also asked Epstein to help his son get a job working for Woody Allen. Epstein obliged.

On February 4, 2026 – Brad Karp resigned as chairman of Paul Weiss. His statement: “Recent reporting has created a distraction and has placed a focus on me that is not in the best interests of the firm.”

He remains employed at the firm. He has not been charged with any crime.

BEN BLACK — THE SON IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

Benjamin Black is the son of Leon Black. On October 7, 2025, he was confirmed by the Senate as CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). On December 12, 2025, Vice President JD Vance personally administered the ceremonial oath of office.

What Is the DFC?

The DFC is America’s development bank — it makes loans and investments in overseas projects: energy, infrastructure, technology, mining, etc

In December 2025, the DFC’s investment cap was raised from $60 billion to $205 billion as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. President Trump signed the bill into law and in February 2026, Ben Black met with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan. The Prime Minister invited DFC to expand its presence in the country. DFC’s existing portfolio in Pakistan already exceeds $1 billion.

Ben Black is now meeting with foreign heads of state, he is representing the United States on the world stage.

His father’s alleged victim — the girl with disabilities — is still waiting for justice.

THE POLITICAL COVER-UP

The Trump administration has been implicated in blocking Epstein-related transparency at multiple levels:

1. Todd Blanche’s Intervention

Senator Wyden said that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer—intervened to block the DEA from releasing an unredacted copy of a 69-page memorandum related to a separate Epstein investigation. The memo reportedly involved allegations of drug trafficking and money laundering connected to Epstein. Blanche has denied blocking the release, stating that the document is available to members of Congress in a secure reading room.

2. The Epstein Files Transparency Act Violation

Wyden has accused the Trump administration of “violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by withholding the vast majority of the Epstein files it is legally required to release publicly.”

3. Treasury Secretary Bessent’s Refusal

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to release Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) on Leon Black’s $170 million in payments to Epstein. When Wyden demanded answers, Bessent accused the senator of breaking the law by discussing Suspicious Activity Reports publicly. A Treasury spokesperson called Wyden's demands "political theater."

WHAT BLACK AVOIDED

Because Bank of America settled, Leon Black never had to:

• Sit for a deposition under oath

• Be cross-examined by victims’ attorneys

• Explain the journal entry about “blood on Jeffreys carpet”

• Describe the sham charity

• Answer questions about Russia

• Confirm or deny the surveillance operation

The settlement was announced as “one more step on the road to much-deserved justice” by victims’ lawyers. But for Black, it was a door slammed shut on public accountability .

WHAT CAME OUT ANYWAY

But documents don’t settle. Once they’re public, they’re public.

• The emails came out anyway

• The bank records came out anyway

• The FBI interview notes came out anyway

• The victim’s journal came out anyway

• The sham charity paperwork came out anyway

• The Wyden letter came out anyway

Black didn’t testify, but the receipts did

THE BLOOD ON THE CARPET

The victim wrote:

“He threw me on the floor and blood all over Jeffreys carpet and I am the issue? Who the fuck bites someone? Sick. No one is that important and Leon can go fuck himself.”

She was wrong about one thing: Leon Black’s family is that important. His son now controls $205 billion of American foreign investment and he meets with heads of state.

The Black family is still in power, the blood is still on the carpet — the journals are still in the federal record and the victims are still waiting for long over-due justice.

Leon Black has not been charged with any crime. He has denied the allegations in civil proceedings. Ben Black has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to his father’s conduct. The documents speak for themselves.

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SOURCES

• Bank of America settlement / deposition canceled: Reuters via U.S. News, March 16, 2026

• Wyden letter to Leon Black: Senate Finance Committee, March 23, 2026

• Brad Karp emails and resignation: The Guardian, February 10, 2026; Detroit Free Press, February 5, 2026

• Ben Black confirmation and DFC: Financial Post / Bloomberg, October 2025; Devex, June 2025

• Ben Black Pakistan meeting: Pakistan Today / Minute Mirror, February 19, 2026

• Victim journal quote: DOJ Dataset 12, EFTA02731427

PART OF A SERIES
This is the first investigation in Last Page First’s institutional money series. It establishes the financial architecture: who paid Epstein, how much, when, and what that money bought. The next piece follows where the money moved — through MIT, through Silicon Valley, through the institutions Epstein needed most.

Part 2 Victim Journal Analysis out now: Read Here

On December 12, 2025, Vice President JD Vance swore in Leon Black’s son, Benjamin Black, as CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) — a federal agency now controlling $205 billion in American foreign investment.

Read the full investigation into the Black family here:
“The Black Family Chronicles”

This article cites the Dechert report figure of $158 million. In March 2026, the Senate Finance Committee (Wyden) increased that total to $170 million based on additional bank records.

Leon Black is not in prison and he is not under indictment. He has not been criminally charged for any crimes relating to the Epstein scandal. He sits on boards, moves money, and collects Van Goghs. In early 2026 he agreed to testify under oath in a civil proceeding — deposed for eight hours, five of which were reserved for victims’ attorneys.

However as much as Mr.Black would like, none of that changes what is in the federal files.

In February 2025 the Department of Justice released thousands of pages of internal documents from the Epstein investigation under court order from Judge Jed Rakoff. Dataset 12 includes FBI 302 interview reports, internal prosecutor emails, forensic bank records, attorney correspondence, and the decoded scrapbook journals of an unknown minor — a girl with Mosaic down syndrome and autism — who was trafficked through Epstein’s network from approximately age 13 to 17. Her identity is redacted throughout but her journals are not. (LPF deep dive into that is linked at the top of the article.)

Leon Black’s name appears in the Epstein files repeatedly. Not as a footnote and not as a passing contact like some of the names we find through the thousands of pages of documents. Leon Black is a named subject of active federal and state criminal referrals, as the alleged perpetrator in victim accounts corroborated by independent witnesses, and — in the victim’s own handwriting — as someone whose blood was on Jeffrey Epstein’s carpet.

This is what the files say about Leon Black.

WHO IS LEON BLACK

Leon Black co founded Apollo Global Management — one of the largest private equity firms on Earth, managing hundreds of billions in assets. He stepped down as CEO in 2021 after an internal investigation was commissioned by Apollo’s own conflicts committee and conducted by Dechert LLP. it is confirmed he paid Jeffrey Epstein at least $158 million between 2013 and 2017. Senate Finance Committee findings released in March 2026 put the total at $170 million — $12 million more than previously reported. The Dechert report is filed publicly with the SEC.

Black is among the world’s most significant private collectors of van Gogh paintings. He acquired the photography companies Lifetouch and Shutterfly through Apollo and he has a longtime administrative assistant named Melanie Spinella, who appears in federal records communicating with at least one victim on his behalf, and often coordinating with Epstein’s assistant, Leslie Groff. Leon Black also was on of those who wrote a message in the infamous birthday book belonging to Jeffrey Epstein — the Leslie Wexner was asked about during his deposition.

The Dechert report confirmed Black knew of Epstein’s 2008 conviction — charges related to procuring a minor for prostitution — and continued to pay him afterward. It confirmed Black paid Epstein more than he paid any other professional advisor and it found no evidence of criminal conduct by Black. Here is the real kicker though: the Dechert report was an internal investigation commissioned by Black’s own company, did not include any testimony from victims, and was not a law enforcement investigation.

The federal documents are something else entirely.

THE VICTIMS IN THE FEDERAL RECORD

Beginning in April 2021, federal investigators at the Southern District of New York began receiving referrals from attorney Jeanne M. Christensen of Wigdor LLP regarding clients who alleged sexual violence by Leon Black at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street Photo Source: Jim Henderson

The first victim — a woman in her 30s at the time of the alleged assault in the early 2000s — had been giving massages at Epstein’s townhouse for several months when Epstein introduced her to Mr.Black, telling her he could help her to get a job. She describes a violent sexual assault during the massage. Afterwards, Black called her and met her — she believes at the St. Regis hotel — where he gave her an envelope with $5000 in cash.

A second victim independently contacted Christensen after hearing about the first case. According to FBI notes from August 2021, this woman told Christensen that Black had raped her violently in 2001 at Epstein’s townhouse. The FBI documented the details: the physical description of the assault — including a specific and unusual pattern of biting — matched the first victim’s account in details that had never been made public. The second victim did not know the first.

A third victim — an unknown minor with Mosaic Down syndrome and autism — was referred to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and then to SDNY beginning in 2023. Federal call notes document that she was driven from New Jersey to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and introduced to Black. She was told he was a “VIP” and a “special friend of Jeffrey’s.” The brutal assault that followed required medical attention. The girl write that she bled, and that she was not taken to get medical treatment. She was flown out of New York city the next day.

A March 2024 letter from attorney Christensen to federal prosecutors explains what had taken months to fully emerge, and it is horrendous — the girl’s biological mother had been forcing her to perform sexual acts with adult men since she was very young. When the assault by Black left her bleeding — Epstein, Maxwell, and her parents were angry at her, the victim, for disrupting their weekend. Her parents drove her home to Virginia. She kept journals — which as I wrote above — I have reported on seperately and they are linked at the top of the page.

“He threw me on the floor and blood all over Jeffrey’s carpet and I am the issue? Who the fuck bites someone? Sick. No one is that important and Leon can go fuck himself.”

— Decoded journal entry, unknown minor victim | EFTA02731427

THE BANK RECORDS

Federal documents include bank statements submitted by Wigdor LLP to prosecutors in May 2021, documenting wire transfers from accounts identified as “Leon J. Black,” “J. Black Trust,” and “E Trust” to a redacted victim’s account. The transfers range from $15000 to $167000 dollars. Transfers from the E Trust are documented from November 2015 through 2021.

In October 2019, the victim texted Black asking for a copy of the NDA — She retained the firm Liston Abramson to attempt to obtain it. Their March 2020 letter to Black stated the firm had been retained to investigate “certain matters related to your prior interactions” with their client and requested copies of all written agreements between them.

Victim requesting NDA from Leon Black — EFTA2731576

A text message from Leon Black to the victim, in DOJ Dataset 12. Black writes that statements made about him are "not true" and asks her to call him. The message is preserved in the same federal record as the journals.
— EFTA02731525

Black has not disputed the payments — his position has been that they represent a consensual adult arrangement. The victim’s position, and that of her attorneys, is that they were a function of the trafficking relationship.

THE MACHINE: WHAT THE MONEY BUILT

Black’s payments to Epstein were not made in isolation. They ran from 2013 to 2017 — the same years Epstein was actively using cash and institutional access to purchase legitimacy at Harvard, at MIT, and across Silicon Valley. The money Black paid did not stay in Epstein’s pocket. It funded a parallel infrastructure: introductions, access, and the credibility that came from being associated with figures like Black himself.

A day schedule released in the DOJ files — EFTA00334425 — documents a single day in November 2015 in which Epstein had breakfast at 9am with Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, and a 4pm meeting with Leon Black. Both men appear on the same day’s calendar. This is not coincidence of association, it is documentation of simultaneous operation: the money and the institutional access running on the same tracks, on the same day.

In June 2016, Epstein ordered custom sweatshirts for a list of associates documented in EFTA02301991. The list includes Leon Black, Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and members of the Rothschild family. These are not separate stories, they are the same story told from different institutional vantage points.

EFTA02301991

THE JOURNALS

The unknown minor kept scrapbook journals during the years she was trafficked — written almost entirely in code. Encoded passages with letters scrambled. Cut-up magazine clippings rearranged to carry new meanings. Handwritten annotations naming men by name. Attorneys at Wigdor LLP decoded significant passages and submitted both originals and translations to federal prosecutors and to Judge Jed Rakoff as part of the JPMorgan Chase Epstein compensation claim.

The journals name Leon Black directly. In one decoded entry she writes about walking down Madison Avenue after the assault, her mother furious, Ghislaine Maxwell having prioritized Black’s importance over her health. She writes that blood was on Epstein’s carpet and she was treated as the problem.

In another entry, against a National Geographic photograph of the New York City skyline dated June 2004, she annotates: “So sad this city could be beautiful if it weren’t filled with monsters. The blood from Leon is no longer there.” The date of the clipping is consistent with attorneys’ identification of the Leon Black assault as occurring in Year 16 of her life.

EFTA02731393

The journals also document multiple pregnancies across the years of trafficking — at least one live birth, a miscarriage, and multiple procedures. Black is named in the same journals that document what his access to Epstein’s network cost this girl across four years of her life. The two records — the institutional and the personal — are not parallel. They are the same document.

Forensic examination ordered by Judge Rakoff found the journals were written in gel pen. No evidence of recent fabrication was found. More than 20 people wrote in them contemporaneously. Their content is consistent with the independent accounts of the two adult victims.

Leon Black’s attorney Susan Estrich wrote a letter to Judge Rakoff in February 2024 objecting to the compensation claim. As of the most recent documents in the public record, the court had not issued a final ruling.

The full journal analysis — every named abuser, every documented pregnancy, the complete decoded record — is available to paid subscribers.

THE INVESTIGATION — AND WHERE IT STALLED

Between 2021 and 2024, prosecutors at SDNY and the Manhattan DA’s Office were in active coordination about potential criminal charges against Black. The SDNY Civil Rights Unit took over all trafficking matters by mid-2023. The Manhattan DA’s office communicated to SDNY in January 2022 that charges were “unlikely” while the investigation remained open.

In February 2024, CNBC reported that one claimant had dropped a rape allegation against Black connected to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. That development is reflected in federal correspondence now part of Dataset 12. Separately, documents reference a 2022 Jane Doe settlement in which Brad Edwards — who had represented Epstein victims — was involved in negotiating a resolution with Black. Internal federal prosecutor notes flag this arrangement and compare it to precedents in other cases.

In July 2023, after Black settled with the U.S. Virgin Islands for $62.5 million over the Epstein investigation, Christensen wrote directly to SDNY: “It’s outrageous that criminal charges have not been brought against him. I’ve heard one lawyer represents ten women that he sexually assaulted.” The Civil Rights Unit responded. They set up a call. As of October 2024 — the most recent documents in the public record — no charges had been filed.

In March 2026, Senate Finance Committee findings put Black’s total payments to Epstein at $170 million and identified major banking institutions that waited years to file required reports on the transactions. Black gave sworn testimony in a civil deposition in March 2026 in the Epstein victims’ lawsuit against Bank of America. Trial is scheduled for May 2026.

Black’s son, Ben Black, was sworn into the Trump administration by Vice President JD Vance and now serves as CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. No member of the Black family has been charged with any crime. The investigation into Leon Black remains, as of this publication, formally open and functionally stalled.

THE INTELLIGENCE CONTEXT

In October 2020 — fourteen months after Epstein’s death, while Ghislaine Maxwell’s prosecution was being built and the SDNY was still receiving active criminal referrals — a formally registered FBI informant filed an intelligence report that named Leon Black.

The document is an FD-1023, a Confidential Human Source reporting form. It is not a public tip submitted through a hotline. It is not an anonymous letter. An FD-1023 is produced by a vetted, handled source — someone assigned a formal source ID by the FBI, managed by a case agent, and whose reporting is reviewed and approved through a supervisory chain before it enters the investigative record. This one carries source ID S-00099701, was handled by the Los Angeles Field Office Squad 101, and was routed into two federal files: the primary Epstein investigation case number 50D-NY-3027571, and a companion file carrying the suffix INTELPRODS — a designation indicating the material was processed as intelligence product, not merely as a criminal lead.

FD-1023 CHS Reporting Document, Los Angeles Field Office. DOJ Epstein Library, Dataset 9, EFTA00090314. This document is a formal FBI confidential human source report, not a public tip. Source: Department of Justice Epstein Library

Among the matters the source reported, that attorney Alan Dershowitz — Epstein’s defense counsel during his 2007–2008 Florida prosecution — told then U.S Attorney Alex Acosta that Epstein “belonged to both U.S and allied intelligence services.” Acosta is the same prosecutor who authorized the non-prosecution agreement granting Epstein, and all unnamed coconspirators federal immunity. Acosta denied making this statement under oath in multiple proceedings. The claim has not been independently corroborated. It is documented here because it appears in a formal FBI intelligence file — and because Acosta has never adequately explained the immunity clause.

A confidential FBI source alleged Acosta was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence.' Acosta denied this under oath. Source: US Department of Labor

The same report names Black directly. The source cites investigative reporting by Jed Shugerman and Whitney Webb alleging that Black owns Constellis, the private military contractor formerly known as Blackwater, which has faced accusations of involvement in arms and human trafficking operations. The source notes that Black “inexplicably stood by Jeffrey Epstein, recently giving him $50 million” — a figure drawn from New York Times reporting available at the time of the filing. That figure has since been superseded: the Dechert report confirmed $158 million; Senate Finance Committee findings in March 2026 put the total at $170 million. The CHS report further notes that Apollo Global Management lent Jared Kushner $184 million during the 666 Fifth Avenue financial crisis — placing Black, Epstein, and Kushner in a single paragraph of a federal intelligence document.

Apollo Global Management, which Black co-founded and led until stepping down in 2021. Apollo’s own conflicts committee commissioned the Dechert investigation that confirmed the $158 million in Epstein payments. The firm’s investors were told they never had access to photographs of victims. That denial is in the record. Photo Source: Kevin Roche

What this all establishes is that Black’s name, his money, and his documented relationship with Epstein were significant enough to surface in FBI counterintelligence-adjacent reporting in October 2020 — filed by a vetted source, approved by a supervisory chain, and preserved in an active federal case file.

The $170 million is documented. The victims are documented. The non-indictment is documented. What the intelligence files suggest about why Epstein was protected, and by whom, remains as of this publication unanswered.

WHAT THE DOJ RELEASED

The documents in Dataset 12 are federal investigative records — FBI 302s, internal prosecutor emails, attorney correspondence, forensic bank records, decoded journal translations — released under a court order from Judge Rakoff in the JPMorgan Chase settlement as part of a broader effort toward transparency about Epstein’s network and the individuals connected to it.

Dataset 9, which contains the FD-1023 referenced above, was released as part of the same DOJ Epstein Library and is publicly accessible at justice.gov/epstein.

These are public records and hey name Leon Black. They name many others. The journal analysis piece coming 05/06/2025 covers the full scope of what the minor victim documented across four years and three journals. READ NOW

Editors Note: This article is based entirely on documents released by the Department of Justice and the publicly filed Dechert report. Every claim is traceable to a specific document in Dataset 12 or the SEC filing. Leon Black has not been charged with any crime. He has denied the allegations in civil proceedings and has given sworn testimony. His attorneys have challenged the credibility of victim accounts and the journals before Judge Rakoff.

None of that changes what the documents say. Power has a long history of outlasting accountability. The survivors named in these records existed first.

NEXT IN THE SERIES

The money Black paid Epstein did not stay in Epstein’s pocket. It moved far, through MIT, Silicon Valley and through the institutions that gave Epstein the credibility to keep operating. The next investigation follows where it went: Joi Ito, the MIT Media Lab, and the machine built with other people’s money and other people’s names.

Read Joi Ito expose now

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“She Came In Like a Lamb” — Decoding the Journals of an Unknown Victim

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SOURCE DOCUMENTS

DOJ Dataset 12

EFTA02731480–81 — Victim correspondence

EFTA02731485–89 — FBI 302 referrals

EFTA02731526–75 — Bank records — wire transfers, Leon J. Black / J. Black Trust / E Trust

EFTA02731604–22 — Victim interviews

EFTA02731583–92 — DANY / SDNY coordination

EFTA02731655–58 — Victim memo to file — first victim interview, biting detail, $5,000 envelope

EFTA02731662–65 — DANY call notes June 2023 — minor victim, “VIP special friend of Jeffrey’s”

EFTA02731648–54 — SDNY follow-up

EFTA02731721–23 — March 2024 Christensen letter to prosecutors

EFTA02731724 — JPMC / Rakoff proceedings

EFTA02731755–56 — CNBC / dropped claim

EFTA02731577 — Brad Edwards / settlement notes

EFTA02731393–409 — Journal pages

EFTA02731433–64 — Journal pages

EFTA02731341–60 — Journal pages

EFTA02731361–92 — Journal pages

EFTA00334425 — Day schedule: Ito 9am / Leon Black 4pm, same day

EFTA02301991 — Sweatshirt list: Black, Ito, Hoffman, Thiel, Rothschild

EFTA00090314–90316 — FD-1023 CHS Reporting Document, Los Angeles Field Office

Dechert LLP Report — Filed with the SEC

Apollo Global Management 8-K, January 22, 2021 — Dechert LLP Report, Exhibit 99.1 sec.gov — Dechert Report full text

Apollo Global Management Form 8-K filing page sec.gov — 8-K filing

Senate Finance Committee — Wyden Investigation

Wyden releases new information — $170 million total payment figure confirmed, March 12, 2025 finance.senate.gov

Wyden letter to Leon Black — new findings including surveillance of women, March 23, 2026 finance.senate.gov

Wyden letter to Black — full text PDF, March 20, 2026 finance.senate.gov — PDF

DOJ Dataset 12 — Index Page

justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures/data-set-12-files

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