MIAMI _ A chilling picture of how hundreds of girls and young women from around the world were trafficked for sex by Jeffrey Epstein, his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a number of other powerful business and world leaders emerged Friday in court documents unsealed in New York.
The documents, a portion of thousands of pages in a 2015 federal defamation case, offer brutal details about Epstein's trafficking of teenage girls from across the United States, Russia and Sweden _ and Maxwell's compulsive and often abusive quest to provide him with new girls over a span of years in the early to mid 2000s.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who brought the lawsuit against Maxwell and settled it for an undisclosed sum in 2017, is central to the case, providing evidence to substantiate her exploitation at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell through photographs, plane logs and even a medical record from Presbyterian Hospital in New York where she was taken by Epstein after a particularly abusive sex episode.
The legal case had previously been sealed by a federal court judge. The Miami Herald, which published a detailed investigation of the Epstein case last November, "Perversion of Justice," petitioned the court to lift the seal, joined by blogger Mike Cernovich, Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and an assortment of news media outlets.. A three-judge panel agreed to release the documents. More are expected in the future.
Some of the testimony is difficult to read, as when one 15-year-old Swedish girl, shaking and crying in despair, tells a butler who worked for one of Epstein's closest friends that she had been taken to Epstein's island in the Caribbean and forced to have sex with him and others. The butler relates the story under oath. The girl, visibly traumatized, told the houseman who worked for Eva Dubin, a former Miss Sweden and founder of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai, and her husband, prominent hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, that Epstein and Maxwell had physically threatened to harm her and seized her passport to keep her on the island, according to the butler's statement. She was so distraught she couldn't recall how she got back to the U.S. mainland, but the butler testified that Maxwell brought her to the Dubin residence.
The cache of court documents, part of the case's motion for summary judgment, also shows in 2006, when the Palm Beach police were first investigating Epstein, he was being assisted by Maxwell as part of a pyramid-like scheme the pair operated to lure young girls from around Palm Beach, focusing on schools, colleges and spas.
Palm Beach Detective Joe Recarey testified in the case that he was never able to question Maxwell, but the fact that the police had evidence of Maxwell's involvement raises new questions about why the FBI and U.S. attorney's office in South Florida failed to pursue sex trafficking charges against Epstein, Maxwell and others.
Giuffre, as part of her sworn testimony, also states that she met both former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and President Donald Trump, and that Epstein once held a dinner for Clinton on his island, Little St. James, off the coast of St. Thomas.
She said in a 2016 deposition she met Trump through her father, who worked as a maintenance man at Trump's Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago, and that to her knowledge, neither Trump nor Clinton had any intimate contact with "us" _ referring to the girls Epstein kept as sex slaves.
Giuffre's attorney, David Boies, said that there is nothing in the Maxwell case that showed any wrongdoing by Clinton, Gore or Trump.
"We know both Trump and Clinton were associated with Epstein at various times in various ways, but in terms of what we have there's no indication that any of three of them did anything improper.''
But the powerhouse lawyer said there were a lot of people who knew what Epstein and Maxwell were doing.
"I think one of the general points worth making is how many people knew about this and did nothing, and how long it went on right in plain sight, hiding in plain sight,'' Boies said.
Clinton has denied that he ever was on Epstein's island.
Maxwell's lawyers were "on sabbatical" and unavailable for comment, the assistants in their office said.
The Miami Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Eva and Glenn Dubin for comment.
