New Epstein records cache offers names of VIP pals, victim’s efforts to get him arrested
MIAMI — She doesn’t remember exactly how she got to Jeffrey Epstein’s room or what she was told to lure her there.
“I was just there, and all of a sudden something horrible happened to me,” the girl recalled during a June 2016 deposition made public Thursday among a cache of 19 court documents related to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
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The victim, whose name is redacted and who was about 16 or 17 at the time, was vague on the details. But that was by design.
As she explained, “I worked very, very hard to not recall anything specific about my sexual encounters with this person as one of his victims.”
Sometimes she joined the scantily clad girls and young women who sat around Epstein’s swimming pool, but the victim makes clear that there was nothing social about the gathering.
“None of those girls were (my) friends. We were all there just through that mutual connection,” she said, referring to being with Epstein.
The victim’s deposition is part of a defamation suit filed by another Epstein accuser, Virginia Giuffre, against the financier’s longtime girlfriend, Maxwell. The court file relating to the settled lawsuit has long been sealed by the presiding judge, now deceased. The depo, and and scores of other related documents, are being released this week by the court in stages in response to a years-long court fight by the Miami Herald.
The documents are a stark reminder of what the lawsuit was about in the first place: the sexual assault of countless underage girls at Epstein’s Palm Beach estate and other homes he owned.
And of the many people who, according to Giuffre’s legal team, had “knowledge of” Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking crimes. The legal team submitted a list of such persons.
The suit was filed by Giuffre against Maxwell in federal court in New York in 2015 after Giuffre accused Maxwell and Epstein of abusing her and instructing her to have sex with their friends. Maxwell called Giuffre a liar.
Evidence gathered as part of the discovery process, now released, provides details about the couple’s association with powerful people, including men with whom Giuffre claimed she was forced to have sex as a teen.
Thursday’s documents show her lawyers’ first disclosures of witnesses who, they said, could potentially help Giuffre prove that Maxwell and Epstein sexually abused her and other underage girls. Such initial disclosures are used in civil litigation to identify individuals or witnesses who a party may use to support its claims or defenses. They include a brief description of what the witnesses were anticipated to testify about.
In this instance, the documents unsealed by the court do not explain how these individuals would have knowledge of Epstein and Maxwell’s trafficking of Giuffre — if in fact they did. Most of those identified have previously stated they did not witness or know anything about the couple’s crimes.
Among the potential witnesses who were listed: former president Bill Clinton; Clinton adviser Doug Band; lawyer Alan Dershowitz; Britain’s Prince Andrew; insurance mogul Robert Meister; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; hedge fund investor Glen Dubin and his wife, Eva; and millionaire businessman Ron Burkle, as well as about a dozen others, primarily former Epstein housekeepers, pilots, assistants and other staff.
