Epstein: After nearly 3,000 pages of documents, there are still unanswered questions

For almost two decades, journalists, police investigators, agents of the FBI, Lawyers and amateur detectives have delved into the depraved world of Jeffrey Epstein.

However, even after the release of thousands of pages of court records in recent days, there are still some unanswered questions about the millionaire pedophile. The documents have received much attention, but yield little new information about the financier’s routine sexual abuse of underage girls.

More than anything, the public remains fascinated by the possibility that some of the rich and powerful men in Epstein’s social circle were also involved in the abuse.

Here’s a look at what we know—and what we don’t—about Epstein and his crimes:

From high society to prison

Epstein began attracting media attention in 2002, after news agencies including The Associated Press covered a trip to Africa by former President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey and comedian Chris Tucker. The five-day tour of Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa was aimed at drawing attention to the fight against AIDS.

After the visit, New York Magazine published a profile on the man who provided the private jet for the trip: Jeffrey Epstein. The article described it as a “mysterious international money man”which cultivated relationships with Nobel Prize-winning scientists and diplomats, but baffled Wall Street insiders who couldn’t understand how a college dropout had gotten so rich.

“A great guy”Epstein’s neighbor in both Florida and New York, Donald Trump, told the publication. “He is very fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are quite young.”

Those celebrity contacts made headlines when Epstein was arrested in 2006 over accusations that he had hired several teenage girls to give him sexualized massages at his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

Two years later, prosecutors allowed Epstein to plead guilty to a charge related to a single victim. He served 13 months in a semi-work release program and then began quietly rebuilding his network of influential friends, with the help of his ex-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Following a series of Miami Herald articles about the plea deal that deprived Epstein’s victims of justice, federal prosecutors in New York revived the investigation and charged him with sex trafficking in 2019.

When Epstein took his own life in prison, prosecutors accused Maxwell of facilitating his illicit sexual encounters and participating in some of the abuse. She was convicted and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Was anyone else involved?

In 2009, one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, filed a lawsuit alleging that Epstein had her travel around the world to have sexual encounters with billionaires, politicians, royalty and heads of state.

At first, he kept the names of these men a secret, but later began to provide them: Prince Andrew of Great Britain, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former US Senator George Mitchell, French talent scout Jean Luc Brunel, billionaire Glenn Dubin and law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had represented Epstein.

Some details of Giuffre’s allegations have changed over time. He initially said he was 15 when Epstein began abusing her, but later acknowledged that he met him the summer he turned 17.

In 2022, he withdrew his accusations against Dershowitz, stating that “I might have made a mistake” by identifying him as one of her abusers. He said “I was very young at the time.”” and “It was a very stressful and traumatic environment.”

In a newspaper interview, for which Giuffre was paid $160,000, she described dancing with Prince Andrew at a club, but said there was no sexual contact. Later, she said they had three sexual encounters. According to Giuffre, the newspaper refused to publish those statements.

In another interview, she described getting on a helicopter with Bill Clinton and flirting with Donald Trump, but later said in a statement that those things had not happened and were the journalist’s mistakes.

The FBI has investigated Giuffre’s allegations. No charges have been filed based on his claims, but because of the attention they have generated, Brunel was under investigation in France and accused of raping other underage girls. He took his own life while awaiting trial.

Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor in 2020, Geoffrey Berman, attempted to speak to Prince Andrew about matters related to Epstein, but the royal declined to be interviewed. Berman lashed out at Andrés at the time for falsely presenting himself to the public as someone eager to cooperate, when in reality he was dodging questions.

Andrés has repeatedly denied having sexual relations with Giuffre and said he did not remember meeting her, although a photograph appears to show them together, and a member of Epstein’s household staff also testified to seeing the two at Epstein’s New York home.

Many of the documents unsealed in recent days concern attempts by Maxwell’s lawyers to discredit Giuffre, and attempts by Giuffre’s lawyers to gather evidence to support her statements.

The records released in the case have contained little evidence of wrongdoing by famous people, but testimony from multiple witnesses confirmed Giuffre’s accounts of Epstein’s sexual misconduct.

Death behind bars

Any chance that Epstein himself could have answered questions about his famous friends died with him in a Manhattan federal detention center in August 2019.

The death, a month after being arrested, has fueled conspiracy theories. But multiple investigations, including an autopsy and an FBI investigation, have concluded that Epstein took his own life.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a report released in June that Epstein was able to take his own life because of “negligence, misconduct, and abject failures to perform work” inside the jail.

The Metropolitan Correctional Center was closed in 2021 amid concerns about its disrepair, the COVID-19 pandemic, a crumbling infrastructure and lingering questions about Epstein’s death.

The overworked police officers assigned to guard Epstein did not realize that he had accumulated an excess of bedding. After an alleged first suicide attempt, prison officials left him alone and never assigned him a new cellmate.

The night Epstein died, officers were sitting at desks just 15 feet (4.6 meters) from his cell, shopping online and dozing instead of making mandatory rounds every 30 minutes, according to prosecutors.

The day before Epstein killed himself, a federal court unsealed about 2,000 pages of records about Giuffre’s lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, the same case as the records released in recent days.

That, coupled with a lack of meaningful interpersonal contact and “the thought of possibly spending the rest of his life in prison were likely contributing factors to Mr. Epstein’s suicide,” prison officials wrote in documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Whether Epstein would have been willing to answer questions to clarify some of the mysteries surrounding his life is another story. In a 2016 deposition in Giuffre’s lawsuit, the financier repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

What’s next

The document disclosure is not over yet. So far, 191 of the approximately 250 files authorized for release by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska have been made public. The lawyers participating in the case publish them continuously, following the judge’s instructions.

Another batch is expected on Monday, although there is little indication that they will provide more than what has already been seen in the nearly 3,000 pages of deposition transcripts, legal memos, emails and other records made public since Wednesday.

Versions of many of those documents had already been made public in previous years, although with some sections redacted for privacy reasons or to protect the identity of Epstein’s victims.