Filthy Rich Read online

  15. I visited and traveled with Jeffrey Epstein from 1999 through the summer of 2002, and during that time I stayed with him for sexual activities at each of his houses (or mansions) in locations including New York City, New York; the area of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Palm Beach, Florida; an island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and Paris, France. I had sex with him often in these places and also with the various people he demanded that I have sex with. Epstein paid me for many of these sexual encounters. Looking back, I realize that my only purposes for Epstein, Maxwell, and their friends was to be used for sex.

  16. To illustrate my connection to these places, I include four photographs taken of me in New Mexico [see insert page 3 for one of the photographs mentioned]. The first one is a museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We had gone sightseeing for the day. Epstein took this picture of me. I was approximately 17 at the time, judging from the looks of it. At the end of the day we returned to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. The second picture is me on one of Epstein’s horses on the ranch in New Mexico. The following two are from wintertime in New Mexico.

  17. When I was with him, Epstein had sex with underage girls on a daily basis. His interest in this kind of sex was obvious to the people around him. The activities were so obvious and bold that anyone spending any significant time at one of Epstein’s residences would have clearly been aware of what was going on.

  18. Epstein’s code word for sexual encounters was that it was a “massage.” At times the interaction between Epstein and the girls would start in the massage room setting, but it was always a sexual encounter and never just a massage.

  19. In addition to constantly finding underage girls to satisfy their personal desires, Epstein and Maxwell also got girls for Epstein’s friends and acquaintances. Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would “owe him,” they would “be in his pocket,” and he would “have something on them.” I understood that Epstein thought he could get leniency if he was ever caught doing anything illegal, or that he could escape trouble altogether.

  Roberts submitted her declaration in support of a motion to be added as a plaintiff in a suit (ongoing, as of this writing) that sought to overturn a non-prosecution agreement that Jeffrey Epstein would reach with the government. Roberts was seeking to join a case brought against the government by two other victims, but a judge denied her motion in April of 2015, explaining that the case had already been pending for several years, and it was unneccesary to add an additional plaintiff.

  Roberts’s declaration, which goes on for another eight pages, and makes twenty-four additional points, was stricken from the record—the judge explained that the “lurid” and “unnecessary details” involving “non-parties” to the lawsuit against the government, were “immaterial and impertinent” to the proceedings.

  Through a representative, Ghislaine Maxwell called the allegations against her “obvious lies,” after which Roberts filed a defamation suit against Maxwell. In an answer filed in the suit, Maxwell elaborated that Roberts’s “story of abuse at the hands of Ms. Maxwell” was “fabricated” for financial gain.

  CHAPTER 35

  Alicia: May 20, 1997

  Donald Trump’s instincts regarding Jeffrey Epstein were solid. But if the reporters who were beginning to look into Epstein’s mysterious background had dug a bit further, there’s a chance they would have hit pay dirt as well—and not just in Palm Beach.

  In California, for instance, a paper trail already stretched from the Santa Monica Police Department to Epstein’s front door.

  In the spring—almost the summer—of 1997, a call came in to the police. The young woman who placed it—a young actress who’d appeared on Baywatch and General Hospital—said she’d been sexually assaulted at a trendy hotel called Shutters on the Beach.

  The officer who took the call knew the woman’s name—Alicia*—and her voice. A week earlier, she’d told him about an encounter with Epstein. The woman had not wanted to make a formal complaint at the time. But she had taken the cop’s card, and now he was happy to hear that she’d changed her mind.

  In a shaky voice, Alicia described Epstein as a tallish man—five feet eleven or six feet in height was her guess—with gray hair and brown eyes. He was the owner of a large black four-door Mercedes and was a regular at Shutters on the Beach, which was the kind of place that cost one thousand dollars a night and was frequented by actors, agents, and other Hollywood types.

  Alicia told the cop that she was a model and actress herself. She’d known Epstein for about a month. They had a friend in common, and she’d sent him her head shots.

  Then, through an assistant, Epstein had invited her to meet in his room at the hotel.

  Alicia said she was having reservations, the officer wrote in his report, because generally interviews are not conducted in hotel rooms.

  According to her, things turned frightening quickly.

  She was unsure she was safe because although she wanted to land the job as a ‘Victoria’s Secret’ catalog model she felt as though Epstein was attempting to get her to act in an unprofessional manner for a model.

  Epstein wore navy blue sweatpants and a white T-shirt, she recalled. The T-shirt had the letters USA printed on it in patriotic red, white, and blue.

  Epstein told her to undress and actually assisted her to do so while saying ‘let me manhandle you for a second.’

  Then, Alicia told the cop, Epstein groped her buttocks against her will while acting as though he was evaluating her body. Alicia had stopped Epstein, and left the room, but couldn’t get over the incident.

  At the top of his crime report, the officer wrote “Sexual Battery.” But Epstein was never charged in the incident. “The Santa Monica Police Department discounted every one of [Alicia’s] allegations of improper conduct by Jeffrey Epstein and they took no action on this 1997 complaint,” Epstein’s West Palm Beach attorney, Jack Goldberger, told the Palm Beach Post in 2010.

  “The cops said it’d be my word against his,” Alicia told the paper. “And since he had a lot of money, I let it go. I hadn’t thought much about it since, until I saw his picture online. And now, I want everybody to know how much of a creep he’s always been.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Graydon Carter: December 2002

  Graydon Carter, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair, likes to get to his office early, well before the rest of his staff files in.

  Most monthly magazines operate at a leisurely pace—three weeks of coming up with ideas, assigning articles, and shooting the shit in the corporate kitchen followed by one frantic week when all the actual editing gets done. But this isn’t the case at Vanity Fair, which runs hard-hitting investigative pieces alongside its glitzy celebrity profiles. There are also parties to plan and host—incredibly glamorous parties, including the annual Oscar-night bash, which is more fun and far more exclusive than the Academy Awards ceremony itself. Vanity Fair is an old, famous brand. But Carter is its public face, just as Anna Wintour is the face of Condé Nast’s iconic fashion magazine, Vogue.

  One cover of Vanity Fair can turn a minor celebrity into a superstar. And a single thoroughly researched story can bring down a corporate overlord.

  Carter’s easy to recognize: the pompadour of white hair, like a lion’s mane. The Santa Claus body stuffed into an impeccably tailored bespoke suit. He wears his fame lightly. But he could not be more serious about his responsibilities, which are weighing heavily on him this month. Months earlier, he’d assigned a piece to Vicky Ward, an Englishwoman who wrote frequently for Vanity Fair. He’d meant for it to be an easy assignment: Ward was pregnant with twins. She wasn’t allowed to fly. But here was a story right on her doorstep. A nice, easy profile of Jeffrey Epstein. Who was he, really? Carter knew he threw fabulous parties attended by academics, billionaires, and beautiful women. Recently he’d flown Bill Clinton to Africa. But no one seemed to know how he had made his fortune. Epstein’s story reminded the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.


  Carter himself could have stepped out of a novel—though in his case, the author would be Horatio Alger. A Canadian college dropout who’d worked as a railroad lineman, he arrived in New York in his late twenties and commenced an astonishingly quick rise up the social and media ladders. But where Carter was open and outgoing, Epstein really was Gatsby-like—very little about him was known. Maybe, Carter thought, Ward could find out. What did Epstein do, exactly, for money? Why was he so secretive? Why were so many brilliant and powerful men drawn to him? And where did those beautiful women come from?

  Almost immediately, Epstein began a campaign to discredit Ward. He prevailed upon Conrad Black, the press baron and Epstein’s Palm Beach neighbor—who was also a step-uncle of Vicky Ward’s husband—to ask Ward to drop the story. But Ward was tenacious, and what she came back with was dynamite. More interesting and much more salacious than anything Carter had imagined.

  Now Carter’s staff was putting in the hours it would take to confirm all the things she’d uncovered, picking the ones they could publish and laying them all out in a narrative that would be no less explosive than the facts it contained.

  CHAPTER 37

  Vicky Ward: October 2002

  Epstein went out of his way to spin the Vanity Fair story to his own ends, and soon after she got the assignment, Vicky Ward’s phone began to ring off the hook: calls from Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, the current head of Bear Stearns; from Les Wexner; from academics, scientists, and movers and shakers who counted Epstein among their friends.

  Then there were the calls from Epstein himself. He wouldn’t go on the record, but despite the rumors he’d spread behind Ward’s back, he was happy to talk informally, even give her a tour of his Manhattan mansion and trot out stories that he had dined out on for years. By most accounts, Epstein could be extremely charming—even if it had taken Ghislaine to teach him which forks to use when—and he did his best to charm Vicky Ward. But she was not easily seduced, and she turned out to have a keen eye for Epstein’s missteps.

  Over tea in his town house, she noticed, Epstein ate all the finger food that had been put out for both of them. She found it odd that the only book this supposedly brilliant man had left for her to see was a paperback by the Marquis de Sade. And then there was the call afterward from one of Epstein’s assistants—a woman Ward did not know—who told her, “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty.”

  Ward is pretty, with fine English features and flowing blond hair. She was also very pregnant then, with a bad case of morning sickness. She threw up often, sometimes in public, and these clumsy advances on Epstein’s part only added to her ever-present nausea. For a man who was supposedly brilliant, he’d struck her, oddly, as not very smart.

  “Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes,” she wrote. “They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. ‘Let’s play chess,’ he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. ‘You be white. You get the first move.’ It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.”

  The testimonials Epstein’s friends gave were glowing: “I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” Les Wexner told her. “Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are not in investment strategy, and, as everyone who knows Jeffrey knows, his are not in fashion and design. We frequently discuss world trends as each of us sees them.”

  “I’m on my 20th book,” said Alan Dershowitz, who’d met Epstein in 1997. “The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey.”

  But Ward also talked to other sources, who had their own questions and qualms about Jeffrey Epstein. Some were involved in lawsuits against him. Others had served on prestigious boards with him. One who had witnessed Epstein’s aborted stint on the board of Rockefeller University called him arrogant.

  One powerful investment manager wondered about Epstein’s conspicuous absence from New York’s trading floors. “The trading desks don’t seem to know him,” he says. “It’s unusual for animals that big to not leave any footprints in the snow.”

  Ward uncovered legal documents, including Epstein’s interview with the SEC, given in the wake of his departure from Bear Stearns. She visited a federal prison in Massachusetts and spoke at length with Steven Hoffenberg, who told her that Epstein had made a major mistake in taking Bill Clinton to Africa. “I always told him to stay below the radar,” Hoffenberg said. He made other accusations, about Epstein’s financial practices, which Epstein denied—and Ward knew that Hoffenberg, the Ponzi-scheme mastermind, was not to be trusted. But she did find it strange that throughout the reporting process Epstein was much less openly concerned with what she’d found out about his finances than with what she’d uncovered about his dealings with women.

  Time and again, he would call and ask her: “What do you have on the girls?”

  One young woman Ward talked to had been invited by Ghislaine Maxwell to attend a party at Epstein’s town house. There, the woman had noticed, female guests far outnumbered the male guests. “These were not women you’d see at Upper East Side dinners,” the woman had said. “Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.”

  “This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models,” Ward wrote. “‘Some of the guests were horrified,’ the woman says.”

  Another source, one who had worked with Epstein, said, “He’s reckless, and he’s gotten more so. Money does that to you. He’s breaking the oath he made to himself—that he would never do anything that would expose him in the media. Right now, in the wake of the publicity following his trip with Clinton, he must be in a very difficult place.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Vicky Ward: November 2002

  What I had ‘on the girls,’” Ward explained in a Daily Beast article published after Epstein’s arrest, “were some remarkably brave first-person accounts. Three on-the-record stories from a family: a mother and her daughters who came from Phoenix. The oldest daughter, an artist whose character was vouchsafed to me by several sources, including the artist Eric Fischl, had told me, weeping as she sat in my living room, of how Epstein had attempted to seduce both her and, separately, her younger sister, then only 16.”

  Ward had written it all down in her notes. She had crossed the t’s, dotted the i’s.

  But when she called Epstein to get his response, he denied the allegations completely.

  “Just the mention of a 16-year-old girl,” Epstein told her, “carries the wrong impression. I don’t see what it adds to the piece. And that makes me unhappy.”

  If some sort of criminal investigation had taken place, that would have been one thing. But, at that time, no criminal investigation into Epstein’s affairs had been launched. And in the absence of an investigation, the rumors of Epstein’s dealings with very young women seemed to be just that—rumors.

  Graydon Carter consulted his lawyers, his editors, and his fact-checkers. And then something odd and disturbing happened at the Condé Nast building, then in Times Square.

  As usual, Carter had come into the office early. He swiped his key card in the lobby, pressed the elevator button, and arrived in the hallway outside the reception area on the twenty-first floor.

  It would have been a perfect time to review Ward’s story.

  Her description of Epstein’s town house—which is said to have been the largest private residence in New York City at the time—was priceless: “Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired
in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu,” she’d written. “This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet…but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior.”

  The journalist had confirmed that several prominent names—Mort Zuckerman, the famous real estate mogul and publisher; Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold; and Donald Trump among them—had dined at the residence. She’d interviewed several of Epstein’s friends and ex-friends: Nobel Prize–winning scientists, financiers who worked with Epstein at Bear Stearns. She’d handled Steven Hoffenberg with aplomb. And, working with Vanity Fair’s editors, she’d figured out ways to slip even more information between the lines, in ways that would allow readers to form their own questions about Epstein’s finances.

  In that respect, she’d fulfilled her original assignment perfectly.

  What Carter needed to figure out was what to do with the artist, her sister, and their mother’s story. But before he could swipe his key card to let himself into the magazine’s offices, Carter saw a man standing in the reception area.

  The man was motionless. He’d been waiting for Carter.

  It was Jeffrey Epstein. Nonplussed, Carter invited him into his office.

  Epstein denied the claims involving underage women. No criminal charges had been filed. And so Vanity Fair decided not to include the claims in Ward’s article. But, according to Ward, when her editor Doug Stumpf called her, she cried.