01x02 - Follow the Money

[bunniefuu]

[FEMALE ON POLICE RADIO]

3991 on the suspect.

[INDISTINCT TALK ON POLICE RADIO]

[MALE ON POLICE RADIO] Morning.

This is a complete description of

the residence desired to be searched

including the curtilage

attached thereof.

Being the premises occupied or

under the control of Jeffrey Epstein,

white male, date of birth 1/20/53.

This is your copy.

When we are concluded,

I will leave a list of

what items we're taking.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

Seven months into the case,

detectives ex*cuted the search warrant

at Mr. Epstein's residence.

[TIM MALLOY] They opened the doors

and went up the winding staircase

into his ornate and bizarre world.

Pictures of young kids half-naked.

Nudes everywhere.

One of the police officers who saw it

said that it was just really weird.

Detectives also discovered

a very bizarre steam room

and massage room setup.

They actually found some

computers and equipment

that remain in the house,

but police suspected

most of Epstein's computer hard drives,

and surveillance cameras, and videos

had already been taken out of the house.

[MICHAEL REITER] There was space

on a desk where wires were hanging,

but there was no computer.

At that point, it was fairly clear to us

that Mr. Epstein knew that

he was under investigation.

Epstein had been tipped off.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

[REITER] After the search warrant,

it was disappointing to realize

that Epstein's house

had been cleaned up.

There were a lot of things

that had been removed.

But there was still plenty

of evidence that was left.

I think the most useful

thing that we learned

was that the victims' accounts,

detailed descriptions

of Mr. Epstein's home,

where rooms were located,

the configuration of the home,

validated what they had told us.

There were memo pads of

phone calls that we seized

that included contact information

for some of the victims and

for some of the adult females

that had been used to identify

and recruit the victims,

so that was productive for us as well.

[WOMAN] The message pads that were taken

from the investigation that the

Palm Beach Police Department did,

they're very revealing.

Individuals who were being

called or calling back in

to come over for these sexual massages.

For example, one has a redaction on it,

meaning it was a minor who

was calling in, and it says,

"She is wondering if 2:30 is

okay. She needs to stay in school."

I think I took this case much

more seriously than other matters

that I've handled, in the

sense that it was very personal.

I do have a daughter. I have

children. I met with these victims.

It was very personal, the

abuse that they suffered.

I won't stop until the

people who victimized

these individuals are held accountable.

The age of consent in Florida is

18. It does vary state to state,

and in New York, for example, it's 17,

but this really isn't

a case about consent.

The point of these cases is

that there was no consent here.

[REITER] Seven months

into the investigation,

we were all extremely frustrated

at the difficulty of this case.

We applied whatever resources

were necessary to do the best job,

to quickly be able to reach the point

that we could apply for arrest warrants.

[MAN] Detectives that I talked

to said that they were tiptoeing,

they were acting a little cautiously

because they knew

there would be blowback.

But also they were

running into resistance

even among their own, among colleagues.

Uh, they knew that there

were people who would protect

any number of the

residents on the island.

And so, to go into a case like

this, you had to walk gingerly,

you had to make sure that you

held your information closely,

and you had to be absolutely

sure that you were right.

[REITER] We found that the

victims ran the entire gamut

from those that were thankful

that we contacted them,

others who said that they were

in love with Jeffrey Epstein,

and they were going to get

married to Jeffrey Epstein.

Some victims that we contacted

had gone on to college

who slammed the door in

the face of detectives.

We were very surprised to learn

these criminal activities had gone

on for a fairly long period of time,

many years prior to the investigation.

My name is Virginia Giuffre.

When I was 16, I got a summer

job at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago

in Palm Beach.

Uh, I was working there

as a locker room

attendant in the spa area.

At the time, I really wanted

to become a massage therapist.

And not very long into

working at Mar-a-Lago,

did an English lady come up to me.

She introduced herself

as Ghislaine Maxwell.

She was beautiful. She

looked educated. She was nice.

She said, "Oh, that's interesting.

You're reading a book

about massage therapy."

And she said, "You know,

I actually know this guy who's

looking for a traveling masseuse.

You know, if you want, you can

come by this afternoon after work,

and you can come meet him."

I'd finished work around 5:00,

and I pull up at this huge

house, this big mansion

and Ghislaine answers the door.

I walk through the door, and

she's leading me up the staircase,

and I'm looking around, you know.

There's photographs

everywhere of important people.

I could tell that, you know, like,

this guy has some

friends in high places.

And then we go into the massage room,

and there's this massage bed

with a naked man laying on top of it,

face down.

To me this is, I guess,

walking into a world I didn't

understand, but I guess I'm gonna learn.

Ghislaine shows me like, "Put

your lotion here on your hands."

And then we did his feet,

his calves

his back.

While the massage was going on,

they asked me questions about

my life. "So, who are you?"

"What school do you go to?"

Um "Tell me about yourself."

You know, and that's when I felt like

I should open up and tell them, like,

how much this opportunity means to me.

My home life started out very

hard from a very young age.

I'd been a runaway and

lived on the streets.

I've been abused.

I felt like it was okay

to tell them about my past.

And then he turned over.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

[VIRGINIA GIUFFRE] They asked

me to please take off my clothes.

Ghislaine started

taking off her clothes.

I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know what was gonna

happen if I said no, if I screamed.

I just I did what they said.

Ghislaine was behind and touching me.

It went from oral sex to get on top.

Still to this day, I don't know

how it went from something real

to something perverted

like that so quickly.

Afterwards,

they said, "The interview went great.

You're going to come back tomorrow."

And I did.

I was abused plenty of times before

Epstein had done what he did to me.

I had no self-esteem.

I was scared that my life

was going to be worthless.

I was the perfect victim for them.

One thing that Epstein loved me for

was that I never really

asked too many questions.

I escalated up the ladder

very quickly with Epstein.

I did whatever he needed,

you know, put his socks on

for him before bed, uh

make sure what he

needed sexually happened.

I had to serve him all the time.

They told me, "You're

going to do so well.

You're going to travel the world.

You're gonna meet people that

you'd never think you'd meet.

We're gonna put you in circles that

you would never even understand."

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine

Maxwell had a great way

of normalizing the

abuse that was going on.

They kind of made it feel like we

were in this really deranged family.

You know, we would sit back, and

we would watch movies together.

We would go diving together.

We would go hiking together.

We would go on 4Runners together.

We would do so many cool

activities like that together.

They kept saying, "We

will get you educated.

You will become a real

massage therapist one day."

But under the premise that

afterwards you're back to the abuse.

And, unfortunately

I didn't see my life getting any better.

So I stayed.

It was like I am now a

sl*ve to these people.

And then I was trafficked.

I was lent out to all of their friends.

They were politicians.

They were businessmen.

They were powerful people.

It made me think that if I

had run and caused a ruckus,

the police wouldn't have believed me,

they wouldn't have

done anything about it,

and Jeffrey and Ghislaine could

have hurt me really bad then.

He did say like, "People owe me favors.

I can get away with this.

I will never get caught.

I own the Palm Beach Police Department."

[JAMES PATTERSON] Jeffrey

Epstein fits into that pattern

of thinking that he's above the law,

that he can do what he feels like doing.

But the life of privilege

and power that Epstein lead

is a far, far cry from

the way he was brought up.

[CHILDREN SHOUTING, SCREAMING]

- [WAVES CRASHING]

- [SEAGULLS SQUAWKING]

[PATTERSON] Epstein was born and

raised in Coney Island, New York,

which is very middle

class, lower middle class.

Epstein was a very good student in

high school. He was a bright guy.

He skipped a couple of grades in

high school, graduated in 1969.

[LAWYER] What college did you attend?

Cooper Union.

[LAWYER] Did you get a

degree from Cooper Union?

No, sir.

[LAWYER] How many years

were you in college?

[TUTS] I believe two.

[LAWYER] What'd you study?

Physics.

[LAWYER] But isn't it true

that you were a teacher

at the Dalton School in New York

after college?

[PATTERSON] The first mystery is

how could Epstein get a job

teaching at Dalton

without a college degree?

This was probably the start

of Epstein's lifelong pattern

of getting away with things

that most people can't.

[MAN] In 1976, Ace Greenberg

was running Bear Stearns.

One day, I was sitting in my office,

and Ace Greenberg called me to say

that a trustee of the Dalton School

had a young professor,

Jeff Epstein, who wanted

to come to Wall Street,

and Ace asked if I would interview him.

Epstein was well-known as a good

teacher and somewhat of a ladies man,

which didn't resonate at the time.

After grilling Jeffrey a few times,

I hired him to develop and market

our quantitative analyses for options.

He was terrific at it.

Epstein was very quick-witted.

When, uh, something arose that he

might not have been able to predict,

he dealt with it in

an impressive fashion.

That's a trait of an

effective salesperson.

I was favorably impressed

that he could do the work.

But this, I think, was one of my

important mistakes in my career.

Epstein had been working

for me perhaps two months.

The head of personnel called me.

He said, "Are you sitting down?

Jeffrey Epstein lied on his

résumé about his education.

None of his colleges

have ever heard of him."

I was stunned.

I hired a liar.

Even worse, he was

dating Ace's daughter.

I went to Ace Greenberg.

I wasn't sure how he

would want me to proceed,

and Ace said, "Treat

him like anybody else."

I was prepared to fire him.

And this is where his sales

skills really resonated.

When I told him he'd lied,

he admitted it immediately.

He just said,

"I knew I couldn't get a job

teaching at a high-quality school

if I didn't have good

educational credentials,

so I wanted to get a chance."

I said, "Why didn't

you tell us the truth?"

He said, "Well, I was afraid the

Dalton School would hear about it

and there would be problems."

He said, "I wanted to."

And he did it in a way

that was very convincing.

He disarmed me.

And I thought, "Do I want to play

God and throw him in the street,

maybe destroy his potential?"

Today, I wish I had.

He had done well enough that

they made him a limited partner.

But then a few years after

that, I heard he'd been fired

for breaking some rules.

I deeply regret giving

Epstein a second chance.

That was my tragedy.

Most of the victims did

not want to prosecute

when we first contacted them.

So once we had four or five

victims who were cooperative,

we presented applications

for arrest warrants

to the state attorney's office.

From the time I first

became police chief,

I had an excellent relationship

with the state attorney,

Barry Krischer.

The first time that I talked about

the case against Epstein with him,

I explained that we had about 40-some

victims who were in their teens,

early teens in some cases,

who had sex with an

adult male in his 50s.

He said he didn't know Jeffrey

Epstein and he remarked,

"We'll put him away for the rest

of his life. It's an easy case."

[SINISTER MUSIC]

[MARC FISHER] Jeffrey

Epstein, both through his money

and his connections,

was able to assemble

an extraordinary dream team of

at least eight defense lawyers

who were known throughout the

country and throughout their industry

as the absolute best.

From Clinton impeachment

lawyer, Kenneth Starr,

the top defense lawyers of South

Florida, people like Roy Black,

New Yorkers like Jay

Lefkowitz and Gerald Lefcourt

to Harvard Law School

Professor Alan Dershowitz.

[ALAN DERSHOWITZ] I was born

to be a criminal defense lawyer.

If you want to be a defense attorney,

you can't be concerned about

what people think of you.

So, I did represent Claus von Bülow,

O.J. Simpson, and Mike Tyson, and

Leona Helmsley, and Patricia Hearst,

and so many other people.

My relationship with

Jeffrey Epstein was academic

and lawyer-client

but it was a close academic friendship.

For example, when I would write books,

I would only send them

to a handful of people.

He was one of them because he would

seriously read every word I wrote,

and he would have

comments and criticisms.

Jeffrey Epstein called me, I think,

the day he got the first indications,

and the first indications were merely

that one or two of the

women may have been 17,

and may have lied about their age,

had given him false documentation.

He asked me if I would

help represent him.

I said I couldn't represent him myself,

I'm not a member of the Florida bar,

but that I would help him put

together a legal team, and I did.

[FISHER] Detectives quickly learned

that Epstein was on to them and

that he was organizing a defense.

And, in fact, he was

organizing an offense.

Jeffrey Epstein's attorneys

were looking into what

the detectives were doing,

who they were, what their pasts were,

whether there were any peccadilloes

that would make them

vulnerable to attack.

[REITER] There was

surveillance of me for months,

round-the-clock surveillance

of Detective Recarey,

around-the clock picking up of

his trash at his home and my trash.

And the reason that it happened

to the degree that it did

is because Mr. Epstein had

the resources to do that.

In fact, we found private

investigators going through the trash

at the police station.

So we stopped putting the

reports in the computer

and actually had them kept separately.

[MALLOY] A few months after

Chief Michael Reiter hands over

the evidence to his close

friend Barry Krischer,

Reiter notes an alarming difference

in Krischer's attitude towards Epstein.

Krischer had all but said to

his friend Chief Michael Reiter,

"We're gonna string him up.

You had a really solid case."

And then suddenly, the teeth seems

to go out of the investigation,

at least on the side

of the state attorney

who was supposed to be prosecuting this.

[REITER] I had been speaking

with Mr. Krischer along the way,

and the state attorney's

office started saying,

"Look, these victims will

not make good witnesses.

Yes, these victims, most of them,

received financial compensation

for, uh, the sexual

contact with Mr. Epstein,

but no child can consent

to have sex with an adult."

But we were never able to

really convince the prosecutors

that that didn't matter.

[MALLOY] In a release,

a high-powered local attorney Jack

Goldberger, Epstein's attorney,

emphasized the grand jury

in this questioned the

credibility of the girls

and therefore limited their charges

simply to solicitation of prostitution.

Epstein is out on bond,

and he is not talking.

[WOMAN] I've been a reporter at The

Palm Beach Post for about 16 years.

I think nobody knew anything

until 2006, and then it just

[MAKES expl*si*n SOUND] It exploded.

Epstein's attorneys went

after the victims viciously.

I mean, their depositions that I've

read were just, I mean, hideous.

I remember one where he

asked one of the young girls,

"Is it true you've had three ab*rtion?"

And then they asked the

girl, "Well, what's worse,

having three ab*rtion or giving

sexual massages to Jeffrey Epstein?"

It was just brutal what

they did to these women.

[DERSHOWITZ] You must

bring out all the negatives.

You have to present the full picture.

Their credibility may

be subject to question

because of their backgrounds,

but it has nothing to

do with blaming them.

It's the role of the defense attorney

to raise questions about the

credibility of any witnesses.

We don't look at what's good for

victims. We don't look at anything

except what's good for our

client, ethically and legally.

[WOMAN] I've been with the TV

station in Palm Beach County

for almost 23 years now.

The Jeffrey Epstein story

is as big as it gets.

So when the story broke,

we started realizing the gravity

of a Palm Beach billionaire

and the accusations that

we were starting to hear,

we were quickly on the

air with this story,

but Epstein's team

wanted this to go away.

There were weekly

phone calls to reporters

with threats to make the story go away.

"You don't want to do this. You

shouldn't be looking into this."

And it was mystifying to the

Palm Beach Police Department

because they had all this evidence.

[REPORTER] Palm Beach Police think

prostitution charges brought against

billionaire socialite Jeffrey

Epstein don't go far enough.

Investigators think prosecutors

should have gone after Epstein

on charges of unlawful sex with a minor.

So why didn't they?

[REITER] We were all

extremely frustrated.

Once we knew

that the one charge was going to be

the extent of the state's prosecution,

I wrote the parents of all

the victims and told them that

I did not feel that justice

was sufficiently served,

and that I was referring

the case to the FBI.

[JANE MUSGRAVE] It's highly

unusual for a police chief

to sidestep the state attorney's office,

and go directly to the feds,

and demand an investigation.

I don't know that I

have ever heard of that,

and I think that's one of the many,

many odd things about this case.

[SHANNON CAKE] Any

investigator or investigation,

the first thing you're going to

do is look back in time and see:

Has this happened before?

Are there other claims?

Are there other victims?

The FBI actually found two women

who had accused Epstein

a decade earlier, in 1996.

Maria Farmer, an artist,

and her younger sister, Annie.

[MARIA FARMER] In 1996,

following the as*ault

by Jeffrey and Ghislaine,

I came back to New York

and then I found out that they knew

that I'd reported them to the FBI.

Ghislaine called and said she

was going to burn all my art,

and burn my career and destroy it,

she was entirely socially

connected, and that I was screwed.

She told me I needed to watch my back,

that, "I know you like to go

running on the West Side Highway,

and that's not going to be

a safe place for you anymore,

because there are a lot of ways

to die on the West Side Highway."

From that point on, over many years,

I would move, I would relocate,

and a couple of months would

go by, and I would be moving in,

and Ghislaine

Ghislaine would call me.

She would say she knew where I lived.

She would say that same kinds

of veiled threats like

"You're not safe where you are.

You might want to check

over your shoulder."

Finally, in 2006, I was living in

the mountains of North Carolina.

I was hiding.

I had changed my name. I had an alias

and I get a knock on the door,

and it's this man and this woman,

and they show me their

badge, they're FBI,

and this woman said,

"This is about your 1996 FBI report,

and we're following up

because we're going to get him.

We're going to get them."

[ANNIE FARMER] The FBI came,

and they interviewed me, and

they interviewed my sister,

and we told them our stories.

And so we just thought, "Oh,

my gosh! They're really

You know, they're doing a thorough job.

They're looking at

people in other places.

They're recognizing that

this is a more systemic issue,

and they are You know, he's

gonna be held accountable."

[SHAWNA RIVERA] I talked to

the FBI, and they're like,

"We're here to save you."

And they assured me

that they were going to protect me,

and that they needed me to tell

them everything that happened.

And they would help as

many victims as they can.

[SIGRID MCCAWLEY] I think

a lot of the families,

when they came to learn what

had happened to their daughters,

reached out to attorneys

to try to help them

navigate this circumstance,

because obviously there

was a criminal aspect to it,

there was a civil aspect to it,

and they were also facing somebody

who is incredibly powerful,

incredibly wealthy,

incredibly intimidating,

so they needed lawyers to

help them through that process.

[MAN] The first time I

heard Jeffrey Epstein's name

was when I had my own law firm

dedicated to representing

crime victims in civil cases.

A friend of mine from

Jacksonville, who was also a lawyer,

he called me and said that he

had received a call from a girl.

And that was Courtney Wild.

Courtney came to my office.

Then she told me how

she went into his house

and told me what happened there.

[WOMAN] I was 14 when I was

introduced to Jeffrey Epstein.

It was eighth grade summer, going

from eighth grade to high school.

From sixth, seventh and eighth

grade, I was a straight-A student.

I never even got a B.

I played the trumpet. I was

captain of the cheerleading squad

but then from eighth

grade to ninth grade,

things fell apart for me and my family.

Just from, um my mom's addiction.

She was sick, battling her own demons,

wasn't really able to care for me,

and I was basically homeless

and living at friends'

houses and stuff like that.

When I first went to Jeffrey's,

I really was expecting I

was going to make easy money

giving this guy a massage.

And that situation escalated

to him molesting me.

It happened so quick where

it's like, "What just happened?"

But being vulnerable at 14 years old,

and trying to handle life on my

own, it was just overwhelming, so

um, I did continue to

go back to Jeffrey's.

He made me feel like,

you know, basically, I was

lucky to be in his presence.

It was just a glorified

manipulation thing

he had going on and that worked.

It was maybe the second time

I went to him or the third.

He asked me, do I have any friends,

can I bring anybody?

And he would give me

$200 and the person $200.

In my time frame of going

for three to four years,

I at least brought him

about 40 to 60 girls.

I know that this is

wrong, this is crazy,

but I just became okay with that

because of what he offered me.

He offered me cash. He offered me a way

so I could eat and pay my bills,

and he offered me something

that nobody else did.

I felt like he was my lifeline.

[COURTNEY WILD] So, in the

beginning of the investigation

when the police were reaching out to me,

I was confused.

I felt like I had this

painting of Jeffrey

that he was this awesome man,

that he actually saved

my life in a sense,

that I was very lucky to

ever be introduced to him.

But then I see the

police reports of girls

that I had brought to Jeffrey's,

close friends,

and that made me have

the change of heart.

The emotions come over

of, like, guilt, and shame, and disgust.

It was traumatic.

That's when I started saying,

"Okay, this isn't right. Something

needs to happen about this."

So I find Brad Edwards, my attorney.

[BRAD EDWARDS] I told her, "You

don't really have much to worry about.

This is somebody who is not

ever going to be free again."

She said, "But I don't think you

understand the level of power he has."

It's just unheard of.

It's just an unbelievable

scheme to have kept going

for that long of a period of time.

I've never heard anything like this

where somebody was able to set

up basically a pyramid scheme,

a molestation pyramid scheme.

Hey, do you have the victim chart?

- The chart that we created?

- Yeah.

Well, this is when we were first

trying to map out the case.

We had to prove

that this pyramid of underage

girls in Palm Beach

was true.

It didn't start from just a random

underage girl walking into the house.

Ghislaine Maxwell was

one of the recruiters

of the underage girls

for Jeffrey Epstein.

The other recruiters

that were identified

were Sarah Kellen,

Nadia Marcinkova,

Adriana Mucinska,

and we just started tracking

if this person, which name

is not identified right now,

was an underage girl.

"Who did you bring?"

And then from that person

we would bridge down,

"How many did you bring?"

And she would name the

other five or six people.

This was something that we

assembled in about 30 days

and realized that this chart

could go off like a spider web

for, you know, five times

as big as this chart.

[MCCAWLEY] So at the top of the

pyramid scheme was Ghislaine Maxwell,

who was really Epstein's

right-hand person

with helping to recruit these

individuals for sexual abuse.

[VICKY WARD] Jeffrey and

Ghislaine met in New York.

Jeffrey Epstein's really an introvert.

Ghislaine is a much more

charming person than Jeffrey is.

She's an extrovert.

I think he revels in

being this man of mystery,

who almost can't be

bothered to dress properly.

He can't be bothered

to go to restaurants,

and he likes the sort of intrigue

that that creates about him.

Ghislaine is a very engaging person.

She's extremely charismatic and bubbly.

Her father, Robert Maxwell,

had been an incredibly

big figure in England.

He was a big newspaper publisher.

In fact, he'd been something

of a con man and a fraudster,

but he'd lived a huge life.

When Ghislaine came to New York,

her whole world had fallen apart.

Her father, who she was

incredibly attached to

had died in very murky circumstances,

and also his entire

reputation had been shattered.

Jeffrey, in a way, felt like a

safe haven for her. Here was

another very rich man to

sort of replace her father.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

[MAN] I've been covering Wall

Street since at least 1991.

You know, Jeffrey Epstein was

always someone whose name popped up,

but I couldn't really nail it down.

He was a cipher.

People I know on Wall

Street leave trails.

His trail was elusive.

So it was just sort of

odd that here was this guy

that people talked about a lot,

that didn't have much of a

footprint in the investment world.

That's the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein.

You know, how did he make money?

[MAN] I deeply regret

that I met Jeffrey Epstein,

who is somebody that has

haunted me for over 30 years.

Without me, he wouldn't be

the billionaire he is today,

and these poor girls would not be r*ped.

And I'm here for redemption and

to tell the story to the public.

[CAR HORN BEEPING]

[STEVEN HOFFENBERG] I met

Jeff Epstein in the '80s

after he was thrown out of Bear Stearns.

I was the CEO of Towers

Financial Corporation.

[WARD] Steve Hoffenberg and

Jeffrey were both self-made guys.

But when Jeffrey met him, Hoffenberg

was the sort of the mogul.

He was the one flying

around in private planes.

He was the one with the wealth.

[HOFFENBERG] The CEO

of a very large company

who had employed

Jeffrey Epstein in Europe

called me and said,

"This is a brilliant man

that we'd like you to

interview for North America

because he has credentials on Wall

Street, and he's loaded with energy,

but his moral compass is upside down."

Jeffrey Epstein had cheated and

stolen money on his expense account.

He definitely appealed to us,

because we were running

a Ponzi scheme. [CHUCKLES]

And he understood Wall Street,

and he could deliver substantial

results in this criminal enterprise.

So I interviewed Jeffrey Epstein,

and he took control of the interview.

He's got a gift that's extraordinary,

where he controls the people he meets

and manipulates them

totally with his charisma.

[HOFFENBERG] Jeffrey Epstein

became my partner in crime,

backing me up, leading the advance,

doing the crimes alongside me daily.

He took over the securities side,

the fake assets side.

He was manipulating stock price

and trading stock illegally.

[WARD] People involved

certainly remembered Jeffrey

as being incredibly

important in coming up

with how the scheme would work.

Then the law caught up

to this massive scam.

[HOFFENBERG] I stood up, plead guilty,

and accepted the responsibility.

My sentence was for 20

years in federal prison

and I didn't turn evidence against him

because Jeffrey Epstein told

me he was a cooperating witness

for the United States

Department of Justice in the past

and he had traction with them.

I believe that Jeffrey Epstein

would have been able to discredit me

and say he was the White

Knight and he was immaculate,

and I knew that was his plan.

You can't grasp the magnitude

of this man's controlling effect.

Jeffrey Epstein was able to

control and manipulate people

in an extreme method.

That was typical Jeffrey Epstein.

It's very clear that

that is Jeffrey's MO,

is to hold things over people,

hold their secrets

over people, I suspect.

Um, you know, there's a pattern here.

[HOFFENBERG] Jeffrey Epstein's

methods started with Leslie Wexner

when Jeffrey Epstein sold

his soul to Leslie Wexner

for several billion

dollars of investment.

[MAN] Jeff Epstein met Les

Wexner somewhere around 1986.

This is Mr. Wexner's gate house,

and beyond that gate

house is a massive compound

and the most expensive

house in central Ohio.

Les Wexner started out in 1963

opening the women's fashion

apparel shop, The Limited.

Les bought various other brands,

Abercrombie & Fitch

and Victoria's Secret.

Through all of that,

became a multi-billionaire.

At some point, Les Wexner

provided a power of attorney

to Jeffrey Epstein over

his financial affairs.

I was astonished because Les

Wexner is not the kind of guy

who gives up control over anything.

Epstein was this Svengali figure

that seems to have

some unexplainable grip,

uh, over this titan of industry.

There are people in the

late '80s, early '90s

that referred to Epstein

as "the boyfriend."

[HOFFENBERG] Jeffrey Epstein was working

with both of us at the same time.

He was going to Ohio regularly on a jet

that was provided to

Jeffrey by Leslie Wexner.

Epstein explained to me personally

that he could control the

emotions of Leslie Wexner easily

because Leslie Wexner was fascinated

and Wexner totally adored Epstein.

[EDWARDS] Do you consider

yourself to be bisexual?

- No.

- [EDWARDS] Okay.

In any even, you did

develop a sexual relationship

with Leslie Wexner at some

point in time, is that true?

No.

[HOFFENBERG] Epstein told me how

he planned to manipulate and control

Leslie Wexner's fortune

of billions of dollars

so that Jeffrey Epstein could invest

and make substantial income.

In 2019, Les Wexner revealed

that he had cut ties

with Epstein back in 2007.

He said he discovered Epstein had stolen

more than 46 million dollars from him.

He didn't explain why

he didn't press charges.

[LES WEXNER] Being taken advantage of

by someone who was, uh, so sick,

so cunning, uh, so depraved

uhm

is something that I'm embarrassed

that I was even close to.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

[WOMAN] I was, uh, a model and actress.

[MAN] Alicia! What's up?

[ALICIA ARDEN] When my friend said,

"This guy can get you in the

Victoria's Secret catalog,"

I jumped.

Jeffrey Epstein was staying

at Shutters hotel in

Santa Monica, California.

So I met him at his hotel room.

He said he knows the

owner of Victoria's Secret.

So he started opening my

portfolio of pictures

and then he said,

"Let me see you in

your bra and underwear."

Then he started putting his hands

on me and my hips and my butt.

I really felt at the time that I

was going to be r*ped or attacked.

I ran out of the room crying.

I drove to the Santa Monica Police

Department to file a police report.

I don't remember him

ever being investigated.

No one called me.

He didn't get in trouble over it.

It was like nothing

really ever happened.

[MAN] I've been a private

investigator now for about ten years,

but I'd say 80% of my job is

on the street finding information.

When I started working on

this case for Brad Edwards,

he told me that the FBI

is doing a parallel case,

but they really don't have much.

It was just really going along slow.

I'm a fan of the FBI. I

work very closely with them.

So I said, "Well, okay. Maybe

I can speed it up for them."

I had one daughter at the time

when I started working the case

who was 21,

and one daughter was 15.

It didn't only make me

think about my own daughters,

it made me think about all the

years I spent in law enforcement

that I had to interview abused girls

or girls that were

victims of a pedophile

and how broken these girls became.

These are the girls

that I have been able to

identify myself that were victims,

thirteen, and 14, and 15 years old.

As you can see, there's

a volume of them.

I started going to the depressed

areas of West Palm Beach,

to these neighborhoods,

and I would meet someone,

or one of the girls that Brad was

representing would know someone,

give me a lead,

and that's how I started finding

girl after girl after girl.

I think I must have found like 46

other girls that were assaulted.

Some of the victims were

very reluctant to talk to me,

but I was at least

able to get their names,

who they were and where they lived,

which I later gave to the FBI.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

Everybody feared him,

and fear was his greatest asset.

I mean, that's what gave him his power.

So I took it upon myself

as civil prosecutor,

and I served Jeffrey

Epstein for a deposition

and tried to achieve

justice for the victims.

[EDWARDS] Mr. Epstein,

how long have you been

sexually attracted to

underage minor females?

[LAWYER] Objection.

Harassing, argumentative.

Are you kidding?

[EDWARDS] No, I mean, I don't feel like

I'm divulging any secrets here, right?

[LAWYER] Move to strike.

I was starting to really get on

Jeffrey Epstein's nerves for sure.

There's no doubt. Was I trying to?

I guess so.

[EDWARDS] Mr. Epstein?

Yeah.

[EDWARDS] Were you

sexually abused as a minor?

Wait, say that again?

[EDWARDS] Were you

sexually abused as a minor?

[SIGHS] You know, I'd like to

Again, I'd like to

respond to all your

If any questions seem to be relevant,

but I would like to respond to

any relevant question at this time.

However, my attorneys have counseled

me that I cannot provide answers

to the questions relevant

to this lawsuit today.

I must accept their advice or risk

losing my Sixth Amendment right

to effective representation.

Accordingly then, I assert my Fifth,

Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights

in the United States Constitution.

[MIKE FISTEN] Pretty soon,

Epstein's investigators started

conducting surveillance on Brad.

They were trying to find out

if they can catch Brad doing

anything wrong after hours,

during hours, then try to blackmail him.

But then,

it became intimidation because they

started surveilling Brad's house,

where his wife and kids live.

[EDWARDS] When my wife noticed

that somebody was

following her, I thought,

"Okay, it's just getting out

of hand. Now that's my family."

He tried to intimidate me into

just abandoning my clients,

which I was never going to do.

That was never going to happen.

[REITER] They were investigating

the victims as well.

We had several victims report to us that

people posing as law

enforcement officers

were contacting the victims and

in some cases, intimidating them.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

[RIVERA] I started noticing

there were cars that would

sit at the end of my street.

I had these people

constantly watching me.

So I called my attorney, and

I told him what was going on.

Brad figured out

that most of these vehicles were

actually private investigators

that were following and watching me.

While she was sleeping in her bed,

Jeffrey Epstein's

investigators set their car up

across the street from her house,

and just shined their bright

lights through her window all night.

[RIVERA] So Brad sent Mike Fisten over.

They had this private investigator w*r,

cameras against one another,

recording each other.

[FISTEN] When I showed

up, he was still here.

I took pictures of his car,

and then I took pictures

of him in his car.

With me there looking at him,

he's still videotaping.

It was really It was kind of scary.

Mike puts me in his car and he says,

"We're going to get out of here."

[FISTEN] Don't follow her.

[RIVERA] And he drove

me like hours down south

and like put me in a hotel,

where I hid and was

basically just told like,

"Your family's going to

be safer if you're not home

because they're not

gonna harass you now."

Why do I have to make my family

safe from somebody who

should be sitting in jail?

[INSECTS BUZZING AND CHIRPING]

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

[REITER] This was a

cooperative investigation

between the FBI and the

US attorney's office.

Although we were not an official

partner to the investigation,

they kept us informed.

We cooperated, we introduced them

to the victims that we knew of,

we gave them all of the

background information,

and what's written between the lines

that doesn't appear in a report.

[FISTEN] The agent on the case,

Kuyrkendall, is a great agent.

And she put together this

case against this pedophile

that was going to put him in

prison the rest of his life

if he just gets convicted of one count.

The government had a plethora of

information at their fingertips.

They had 35 to 40 different victims

that were willing to give testimony.

They had information showing victims

being transported across state lines,

whether it be in private

planes or on commercial flights.

So, they had a 53-page

indictment prepared

because they had just an

immense amount of information

that they could charge Epstein with.

[REITER] I asked for an

appointment with Alex Acosta.

Alex Acosta at the time

was the US attorney.

I met with him and his

team in Mr. Acosta's office.

I told them that I would

like to know from them

that they were going

to prosecute this case,

and follow through with it, and,

uh, get justice for the victims.

I left my meeting with

Alex Acosta thinking

that Jeffrey Epstein would go

to jail for the rest of his life.

[SINISTER MUSIC]

The case had been turned

over to the federal government

for more than two years,

but I hadn't heard anything.

I just want to know what's going on,

so I call and speak with Marie Villafaña

of the US attorney's office,

and she confirmed that

this is a massive case.

I started asking when she thought a

trial was actually going to happen,

and I remember her telling me that,

"There's just a lot

that I want to tell you,

and I know that your heart's in

the right place, and mine is too.

There's a lot that I want to tell

you, Brad, that I can't tell you."

And that's when I started

thinking something was going on.

[REITER] Suddenly, when

we'd call the FBI agents,

they would tell us they

were forbidden to talk

with any representative of Palm Beach

Police Department about the case.

It's the only time that

ever happened in my 30 years

as a law enforcement officer.

[MALE REPORTER] Epstein's

personal 727 aircraft

arrived at PBIA from Newark at 5:00 p.m.

The investor, traveling

with a small entourage,

was met at the private Galaxy Aviation

by a black Escalade and a driver.

Sources tell News Channel

5 that Kenneth Starr,

now a top lawyer in Los Angeles,

will arrive here tomorrow morning.

[FISTEN] The US attorney Acosta

met with Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers.

The next thing, not only

was the indictment gone,

the FBI case was stopped.

So the FBI agents were shook up

very upset, and started

voicing their opposition

to what had occurred.

[MARIA FARMER] The FBI

agent, Nesbitt Kuyrkendall,

I was so impressed by her.

She was very dedicated

to the women in Florida.

She called me really upset

one day, and she said,

"Maria, I know you're hesitant about

testifying because you're afraid,

and I just want you to know I

don't know if it'll even matter

'cause things are really falling apart."

I contacted Kuyrkendall

myself, and she was in tears.

She was actually crying on the

phone, in tears, that this happened.

She felt so bad for these victims

because she told these victims

she's going to put this guy away.

Nobody knows why US Attorney

Acosta shut this case down.

To me, that's bullshit.