Filthy Rich

CHAPTER 56

Jeffrey Epstein: July 2009

Jeffrey Epstein walks out of the Stockade on July 21, 2009, having served less than thirteen months of his eighteen-month sentence. One of the concessions his lawyers have gotten while working out his plea-deal guarantees is that the media not be alerted to the time and day of his departure.

But from now on, Epstein, who is fifty-six, will carry the mark of a level 3 sex offender-level 1 being the lowest, and level 3 indicating the highest possible risk of a future criminal act of a sexual nature. Wherever he goes, he will be forced to register as such.

Every ninety days, Epstein will have to check in with the authorities. Every year, the New York City Police Department will take his mug shot. And for a full year, Epstein will be under house arrest in Palm Beach.

This last prohibition doesn’t stop him from flying, with court approval, on his own planes to New York and to Little Saint Jeff’s, where the locals have taken to referring to Epstein’s 727 as the Lolita Express.

There are other restrictions, of course, that Epstein is supposed to abide by. He has to provide the state of Florida with a list of all the motor vehicles, boats, and airplanes he owns. The full list includes two Escalades, six Suburbans, two Ford F-150s, two Harley-Davidsons, a Land Rover, a Hummer H2, a thirty-four-foot JVC boat, and a thirty-five-foot Donzi powerboat.

Three of his five planes turn out to be registered to a company called Air Ghislaine, Inc.

As a registered sex offender, Epstein is legally obliged to undergo psychiatric treatment. This is a restriction he’ll get around by having his own psychologist submit a report to law enforcement officers.

Epstein is also prohibited from accessing pornography on the Internet and using social networking for sexual purposes.

For Jeffrey Epstein, there will be no Bangbros, Tinder, or Swingles.com.

There will be lawsuits.

Six weeks before probation ends, he settles with seven women who sue him in civil court. But Epstein can easily afford the settlement payments. He won’t be going back to jail, and in regard to further prosecution for any criminal actions, his troubles are behind him.

Not everyone who’s spent time in his company will be so lucky.

CHAPTER 57

Alfredo Rodriguez: August 2009

Epstein’s houseman, Alfredo Rodriguez, also ends up with a prison sentence.

In a sworn statement, Rodriguez talks about Epstein’s maid, Lupita, who had complained to him about having to clean up after Epstein’s “massages.” Lupita, who was a devout Catholic, had cried as she described the stained towel and sex toys.

Rodriguez was fired by Epstein, he says, when he called 911 after seeing a strange car-a “beater”-in Epstein’s driveway.

As it turned out, the car had belonged to one of Epstein’s masseuses.

On his way out of the house on El Brillo Way, he took some of Epstein’s papers, which he failed to produce when questioned by Chief Reiter’s investigators.

For years, Rodriguez tried and failed to find work as a house manager. No one wanted to hire someone who’d worked for Jeffrey Epstein. Finally, desperately, he tried to sell the information he’d stolen.

The papers named underage girls and the places where Epstein had taken them. The list included locations in California, Paris, New Mexico, New York, and Michigan. The papers also included the names, addresses, and phone numbers of famous individuals-Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, Dustin Hoffman, Ralph Fiennes, David Koch, Ted Kennedy, Donald Trump, Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak among them.

This was intriguing, if not at all damning. Epstein made a habit of collecting such information for future use. But information pertaining to the girls would have bolstered the state’s case against Jeffrey Epstein, and by withholding it from the Palm Beach PD and the FBI, Rodriguez had committed a crime.

In his defense, Rodriguez would say that the papers were an “insurance policy.” Without them, he believed, Epstein would have made him “disappear.”

But now Rodriguez needed the money. And so a few weeks after Epstein’s release from the Stockade, he approached a lawyer who was representing some of Epstein’s masseuses. He had the “holy grail,” he insisted. A “golden nugget.” The names of hundreds of girls, he said, who had been abused by Epstein.

The lawyer told Rodriguez in no uncertain terms that he was obliged to turn whatever he had over to the authorities. By demanding money for the information, Rodriguez was committing another crime.

According to a sworn statement by Christina Pryor, a special agent with the FBI, Rodriguez “persisted that he would only turn over the information in his possession in exchange for $50,000.”

Two months later, on October 28, the lawyer called Rodriguez, who insisted once more on being paid for the information. The lawyer told him that an associate would be in touch.

What the lawyer knew and Rodriguez did not know was that the associate in question was an undercover employee (UCE) of the FBI. A few days later, on November 2, the UCE calls Rodriguez and sets up a meeting, which takes place the following day.

“During the meeting, Rodriguez produced a small bound book and several sheets of legal pad paper containing handwritten notes,” Special Agent Pryor would say in her statement. She continues:

Rodriguez explained that he had taken the bound book from his former employer’s residence while employed there in 2004 to 2005 and that the book had been created by persons working for his former employer. Rodriguez discussed in detail the information within the book and identified important information to the UCE. In addition, Rodriguez admitted he had previously lied to the FBI. Rodriguez asked the UCE about the $50,000, took possession of the money, and began counting it.

Rodriguez was then detained for Obstruction of Official Proceedings, Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 1512(c), and questioned. After Miranda warnings were administered by agents, Rodriguez waived his rights and signed a written waiver of those rights. Rodriguez admitted that he had the documents and book in his possession and had never turned them over to local law enforcement or the FBI. In addition, Rodriguez advised he had witnessed nude girls whom he believed were underage at the pool area of his former employer’s home, knew that his former employer was engaging in sexual contact with underage girls, and had viewed pornographic images of underage girls on computers in his employer’s home. Rodriguez was then released from custody for further investigation.

The items that Rodriguez had attempted to sell to the UCE for $50,000.00 were reviewed by an agent familiar with the underlying criminal investigation. As Rodriguez had described, the items contained information material to the underlying investigation that would have been extremely useful in investigati[ng] and prosecuting the case, including the names and contact information of material witnesses and additional victims. Had those items been produced in response to the inquiries of the state law enforcement officers or the FBI Special Agents, their contents would have been presented to the federal grand jury.

Following his release, Alfredo Rodriguez was arrested again. He appeared in court on June 18, 2010, facing charges of corruptly concealing records and documents. Dressed in a blue jumpsuit and shackles, he apologized for his crimes and asked the court to be merciful.

He received a sentence of eighteen months.

It was the same punishment that Jeffrey Epstein had gotten for his crimes. But unlike Epstein, Alfredo Rodriguez served his time in a federal prison and did not ask for, or receive, permission to go on work release.

CHAPTER 58

Prince Andrew: 2011

Prince Andrew also fares poorly in the wake of Epstein’s imprisonment.

The two men are old friends. They have been ever since Ghislaine Maxwell introduced the prince to her then-beau, sometime in the 1990s. In 2000, Epstein had been invited to Windsor Castle to celebrate the queen’s birthday. Six months later, Epstein flew to Sandringham, the queen’s estate in Norfolk, England, for a party Prince Andrew threw for Ghislaine’s thirty-ninth birthday.

The prince had also visited Epstein on several occasions, in Palm Beach as well as in New York. And if allegations Virginia Roberts made in her 2015 declaration are to be believed, Epstein asked her to give the prince whatever he required, then report back with the details.

According to the Guardian, Epstein and the prince had partied together at Windsor Castle, in Saint-Tropez, and in Thailand, where “Andrew was pictured on a yacht surrounded by topless women.”

According to Roberts’s lawsuit, Epstein had forced her into the prince’s bed on Little Saint Jeff’s.

After Epstein’s conviction, the British press were using another name for Little Saint Jeff’s: Sex Island. The Guardian reported that the manager of two Virgin Islands-based corporations owned by Epstein happened to be the wife of the governor of the Virgin Islands. There were allegations involving a million-dollar donation that Epstein had made to the governor’s reelection campaign. And then there was Roberts’s claim that she had been forced to have sex with the prince on the island as well as in New York and in London.

Invariably, the photograph of Prince Andrew with his arm around the bare midriff of a very young-looking Virginia Roberts ran with stories that appeared in the tabloids.

“It is emphatically denied that the Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship” with Roberts, Buckingham Palace spokespersons would say. “The allegations made are false and without any foundation.”

The prince’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, while on a skiing trip with the prince and their daughter Eugenie in Switzerland, told reporters, “He is the greatest man there is. It was the finest moment of my life in 1986 when I married him. He is a great man, the best in the world.”

“I won’t stand by-because I know what it feels like to have salacious lies made up about you-and not support him so publicly because they are just shockingly accusatory allegations, which I don’t think is right,” she said a few days later when interviewed by Today host Matt Lauer. “It’s a defamation of character, and as a great father and a humongously good man and all the work he does for Britain I won’t stand by and let him have his character defamed to this level.”

But at the same time, a certain schadenfreude attended the good man’s fall from grace, and former associates kept coming out of the woodwork to dish to the press.

“I’ve seen him treat his staff in a shocking, appalling way,” said a former aide to the prince. “He’s been incredibly rude to his personal protection officers, literally throwing things on the ground and demanding they ‘fucking pick them up.’ No social graces at all. Sure, if you’re a lady with blond hair and big boobs, then I bet he’s utterly charming.”

Despite all this, the prince had stuck by Epstein. There was even a photo, frequently trotted out by the tabloids, of the two of them strolling in Central Park.

Some few months before it was taken, a reporter posing as a businessman had secretly taped Sarah Ferguson’s demand for five hundred thousand pounds in return for access to the prince.

“If you want to meet him in your business,” she’d said then, “look after me, and he’ll look after you. You’ll get it back tenfold.”

“Once again,” she said afterward, “my errors have compounded and rebounded and also impacted on the man I admire most in the world: the Duke.”

Prince Andrew had had his troubles already-with shady real estate deals, sticky romances, highly embarrassing document dumps (courtesy of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks), and questionable ties to Tunisian oligarchs, corrupt presidents of former Soviet republics, and Mu’ammar Gadhafi, among other entanglements, many of which were explored in a Vanity Fair article headlined THE TROUBLE WITH ANDREW.

“The duke has a record of being loyal to his friends,” a “royal source” told Vanity Fair’s Edward Klein. “Take his feelings for Sarah Ferguson. If you are a prince and you bring a woman into the royal life and, for whatever reasons, she’s spit out, you might have feelings of debt toward her. The duke feels that she’s been spattered and rejected. His close relationship with the Duchess of York is problematic, and there have been many problems over the last 5 to 10 years, all of which stem from the duchess. Some of the behavior of the duchess is inconsistent with being married to, or an ex-wife of, the duke. There’s no question but that Sarah’s been a financially self-destructive element in the duke’s life.”

“The same kind of loyalty manifested itself last December, when the duke visited Epstein at his home in New York,” said a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace. “Epstein was a friend of the duke’s for the best part of 20 years. It was the first time in four years that he’d seen Epstein. He now recognizes that the meeting in December was unwise.”

“Don’t expect to see a photo of the two of them together,” another “royal source” would say.

But one more story about the prince’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein had already emerged.

At a dinner party at Epstein’s town house, the prince dished about the wedding of his nephew Prince William to Kate Middleton.

“He was amused that his dinner companions were so interested in every detail,” a guest in attendance told a New York Post gossip columnist. “What would Kate wear, what would the Queen wear, would his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson be invited?”

Other guests in attendance that night included Chelsea Handler, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, Katie Couric, and Woody Allen.

At around the same time, Jeffrey Epstein told the New York Post, “I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender.’ It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”

Was it so remarkable that Prince Andrew would have been seen in Epstein’s company? Andrew’s philandering had been tabloid fodder for years. Randy Andy, they called him in the UK. And in the circles that Jeffrey Epstein moved in, philandering wasn’t seen as a vice. Epstein came of age just as industrywide deregulation took hold on Wall Street. Junk bonds were king. Call girls were charging ten thousand dollars a night. And in the shadows, you’d see things that would have made Caligula blush. Sights that would make Nero himself reach for the nearest fire extinguisher. When the urge presented itself, the new super rich didn’t have to swap wives.

They could simply swap harems.

By the same token, was it so very strange to think that a man like the prince would have grown so detached from reality-insofar as reality is even a word that applies to a prince? Was it odd that he thought it was absolutely fine to be seen by photographers strolling through Central Park with a registered sex offender-when at the time large swaths of the financial, banking, and trading industries were characterized by their very detachment from day-to-day concerns such as morality, ethics, and appearances?

As for Jeffrey Epstein, one question that might be worth asking is, if he’s in fact a narcissist and megalomaniac, could he actually believe that he’s innocent? Then again, that might be the wrong question. Epstein did plead guilty, after all. But what if he simply doesn’t see what he pleaded to as a crime? What if he’s proud of his lifestyle? And if that’s the case, why wouldn’t Prince Andrew be proud to be seen in public with his dear friend Jeffrey Epstein?

What if, for people like Epstein and the prince, it’s just servants and masters, the way of the world? They’re natural winners-aristocrats, after all-and if life were fair, well, how would we know who the real winners are?

CHAPTER 59

Anna Salter: November 2015

Why do powerful men do the things that Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew have been accused of doing?

Dr. Anna Salter studies child sex offenders professionally. Educated at Harvard, with a graduate degree in clinical psychology, she spoke, with the benefit of hindsight, about Jeffrey Epstein and others like him from her office in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Consider a car,” says Dr. Salter. “There’s a motor, and there are brakes. We all have sexual impulses we don’t think it would be a good idea to act on. Most of us have good control over our behavior. We have good brakes.

“Sexual offenses and inappropriate sexual behavior are sometimes the result of a bad motor-for example, an attraction to prepubescent children or eleven-to-fourteen-year-old pubescent children as opposed to postpubescent individuals. But they are always the result of bad brakes.

“Antisocial psychopaths don’t have brakes at all.”

Dr. Salter has never met Epstein, but she’s followed his case closely and finds him a familiar type. She’s especially struck by the singular nature of the relationship between powerful, wealthy men and vulnerable, underage women.

“[The men] are more impressive to a fourteen-year-old [girl] than to, say, an adult young woman who is self-supporting and feels more sure of herself,” she explains.

“They are attracted to what they call freshness-barely budding sexuality and lack of sexual experience. The difference between them and their victims feeds their ego.

“Great wealth and access are generally factors that make men feel they are entitled to whomever and whatever they want. Some have narcissistic personalities with inflated self-images. And of course, great wealth and status make such men think they can get away with it. Too often, they’re right.”

On the other hand, Dr. Salter believes that certain conditions, such as the ones exhibited by Jeffrey Epstein, might be an inborn character trait.

Personality can be influenced, sometimes quite heavily, by genetics.

“Virtually no one believes anymore that humans are born a totally blank slate,” she explains.

“We arrive with temperamental and personality variations that, of course, the environment can often, but not always, influence. We arrive with baggage.”

Is Epstein a born psychopath, then?

“Psychopathy is the umbrella term for individuals who do not have a conscience. Pyschopaths are often narcissistic, but narcissists are often not psychopathic. Some individuals who prey on young girls delude themselves into thinking that the abuse will not harm the child. They have a conscience, but they have medicated it with thinking errors. Others are flat-out psychopathic and simply don’t care if it hurts the young girl or not. I can’t say anything about Epstein, as I have not evaluated him, but narcissism and psychopathy are concepts an evaluator would look at concerning anyone who was sexually attracted to postpubescent individuals but who then began to focus on younger teens.

“Psychopaths are often superficially charming, high-stimulus seekers who are bored if not doing something. They lie, con, and manipulate. They do not establish deep affective ties.

“They are callous and remorseless individuals who simply don’t feel bad about harming someone.

“Rules don’t apply to them because they are exceptional. They are sure they won’t get caught.”

CHAPTER 60

Jeffrey Epstein: July 2010

Jeffrey Epstein was done with jail, but he wasn’t done settling suits brought by his victims. Under the conditions of his non-prosecution agreement, he’s even paid for the victims’ lawyers. Still, Epstein’s NPA seemed to ensure that he would not be prosecuted again for his crimes. Double jeopardy was working in Epstein’s favor. But in July of 2010, reports began to appear in the press: federal investigators were following other leads-leads that could result in child-trafficking charges and a twenty-year sentence.

The Florida attorney general’s office refused to comment. It was against policy to confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation. One of Epstein’s lawyers told the Daily Beast that he had no knowledge of such an investigation. “Jeffrey Epstein has fully complied with all state and federal requirements that arise from the prior proceedings in Palm Beach,” Jack Goldberger said. “There are no pending civil lawsuits. There are not and should not be any pending investigations, given Mr. Epstein’s complete fulfillment of all the terms of his non-prosecution agreement with the federal government.”

If there was an investigation, nothing had come of it yet. For the moment, Epstein was free-free to turn his attention, again, to intellectual pursuits. He launched a website, JeffreyEpsteinScience.com, that featured blog posts such as “Conversations with Jeffrey Epstein,” “The Value of Quantum Computation to Jeffrey Epstein,” “Why Evolutionary Biology Intrigues Jeffrey Epstein,” and “An Understanding of Theoretical Physics from Jeffrey Epstein.” The latter post began: “This is where Jeffrey Epstein takes you to the very cutting edge of the frontiers of knowledge to explore and discuss our basic understanding of the subtle, simple, and hidden [qualities] that lie beneath…our universe.”

“Jeffrey doesn’t know shit about science,” says Stuart Pivar, the art collector who has known Epstein for more than three decades. “Does he like to act like he does? Yes. But he doesn’t. But as far as these academic scientists-without people like him they wouldn’t have any money.”

Other friends of Epstein’s say that he truly did have a brilliant mind for science. And in any case, Epstein had done more than sponsor individual scientists. He’d also sponsored conferences on Little Saint Jeff’s. On his website, he announced a conference called Mindshift at which Nobel laureates, such as the theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, would mix with surgeons, engineers, and futurists and where professors would discuss cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, systems of encryption and decryption, and other topics.

Epstein had been hosting get-togethers like this for years. Toward the end of Chief Reiter’s investigation, in March of 2006, Epstein had hosted twenty top physicists-including three Nobel Prize winners as well as the celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking-at a Saint Thomas symposium called “Confronting Gravity,” which was advertised as “a workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmology.”

“This is a remarkable group,” one of the Nobel Prize winners told a reporter for the St. Thomas Source.

“There is no agenda except fun and physics, and that’s fun with a capital F,” Epstein said.

Epstein had been especially interested in Stephen Hawking. Someday, Hawking had theorized, the universe would stop expanding and collapse, at which point time would begin to run backwards. Hawking believed that computer viruses were living things. He thought that given the size of the universe, alien life forms existed. He did not believe in God. But he had a vast appreciation for the inner workings of the universe, and this is why Epstein gave Hawking a tremendous gift. He paid to have a submarine modified so that it could fit Hawking and his wheelchair and give the scientist his first glimpse of an actual alien world-the one that lies under the waves of the ocean.

It was one of the most romantic, generous gestures that Jeffrey Epstein had ever made.

CHAPTER 61

Al Seckel: January 2012

Epstein’s partner in the Mindshift conference, a man named Al Seckel, was known for throwing fabulous parties that were said to have included the actor Dudley Moore, magician James “the Amazing” Randi, and future Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as well as many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein would court in the course of his own climb up the social ladder.

In certain Los Angeles circles, Al Seckel was a very good man to know. But, like Jeffrey Epstein, Seckel was a sort of illusionist. According to Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who knew Seckel and followed his career for fifteen years, Seckel made his money by selling rare books and papers, often through his social and academic connections.

“A number of these transactions resulted in accusations and lawsuits,” Oppenheimer would write. “In speaking to former Seckel acquaintances, I kept hearing variations on a scheme Mrs. Pearce Williams believed he perpetrated against her late husband, the man Seckel said was his mentor. Seckel took books and promised money, or he took money and promised a book; but somehow, the promised party lost money.”

“He was charming, erudite, humorous,” one of Seckel’s marks told the reporter. “I lent him $75,000. When the time came to pay it back he didn’t want to do it.”

Oppenheimer found several people whom Seckel had stiffed and uncovered dozens of lawsuits he’d been involved in. In 2007, Seckel settled a libel lawsuit against a man who’d edited his Wikipedia page. Years later, Oppenheimer spoke with Seckel’s lawyer, Nicholas Hornberger.

“Hornberger confirmed that he’d reached a settlement for the case, a favorable one,” the journalist wrote. “Hornberger added that Seckel has still not paid him for his services.”

He also interviewed Seckel’s wife, Isabel Maxwell.

Al and Isabel met on a blind date and married in Malibu in or “around” 2007 (“I don’t keep the dates in my head,” Seckel explained). A few years later, they moved to the South of France, where Seckel continued to trade in rare books and papers. While living in France, he was sued by a Virgin Islands company that accused him and Isabel of fraudulently attempting to sell rare books and a seventeenth-century portrait of Isaac Newton.

Seckel had also been trying to sell papers belonging to Isabel’s father.

Isabel is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister and the daughter of Robert Maxwell.

It was an odd thing, Epstein’s association with this self-professed PhD who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a bit of a grifter. But the Mindshift conference that Epstein and Seckel hosted in the Virgin Islands did take place, in 2010. Murray Gell-Mann was there, along with Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist who coauthored books with Stephen Hawking. Gerald Sussman, an expert on artificial intelligence who taught at MIT and also attended the conference, said that he didn’t remember too much about it.

“We had scientific discussions, talked about various things,” he said vaguely.

When Mark Oppenheimer asked him if he’d given money to Seckel, Sussman “got testy” with the reporter.

“I have had some dealings with him,” Sussman said. “I don’t want to say what it’s about, because I don’t feel good about it, okay?”

Today, Epstein’s websites-JeffreyEpsteinFoundation.com and JeffreyEpsteinScience.com-are down. Their domain names have long since expired. Several recipients of Epstein’s charitable contributions, including New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and Ballet Palm Beach, announced that they would not be accepting new gifts.

“The further I can keep myself from anything like that the better,” said Ballet Palm Beach founder Colleen Smith.

But in 2012, Epstein held one more conference on Little Saint Jeff’s. Once again, three Nobel Prize winners were in attendance. Stephen Hawking was also there. All in all, Epstein had gathered twenty-one physicists-from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research)-to “determine what the consensus is, if any, for defining gravity.”

According to a press release issued by Epstein’s foundation, the consensus that did emerge was that space is “not quite empty.”

CHAPTER 62

Jeffrey Epstein: February 2, 2011

It’s Groundhog Day, and once-reclusive Jeffrey Epstein is hitting the peak of his fame in a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law & Order: SVU that tracks, eerily well, with his own legal history.

The setup for this episode is the rape of a very young French girl. One who’s been flown to New York on a very rich man’s private jet, then flown back-coach class-to Paris.

On the plane, she has a freak-out. She thinks the middle-aged guy sitting next to her is trying to rape her. In Paris, the local police get involved.

“It was just a birthday party,” the tearful girl tells the SVU cops via videoconference from France. “We were his present.”

The cops ask: Whose present?

“The billionaire. The one who owns the jet.”

Does the French girl know his name?

“Jordan. He wanted a massage. But I had to take off my clothes. He climbed on top of me. It hurt. I started to bleed, and it wouldn’t stop. The doctor came.”

“Dominique,” the cops say. “We’re going to arrest this man. But we need you to return to New York so you can testify.”

“Non,” says the girl. “Non! Jamais! Jamais!”

For Epstein, there are other embarrassments, many of which have to do with his royal friends. The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is approaching, and the ongoing troubles of Prince William’s uncle Prince Andrew keep threatening to derail the festivities. On March 6, a spokesperson for Sarah Ferguson confirms that Epstein paid off part of the seventy-eight thousand pounds that the duchess borrowed from a man who was once her personal assistant.

The next day, headlines appear in the Telegraph and other British papers: DUKE OF YORK “APPEALED TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN TO HELP DUCHESS PAY DEBT.”

“I personally, on behalf of myself, deeply regret that Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me,” Prince Andrew’s ex-wife tells journalists. “I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf.

“I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again.”

That week, as part of the ongoing civil lawsuits against Epstein, Sarah Kellen and Nadia Marcinkova are both asked about Prince Andrew’s relations with Epstein.

“Would you agree with me that Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein used to share underaged girls for sexual relations?” Kellen is asked.

“On the instructions of my lawyer,” Kellen replies, “I must invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege.”

“Have you ever been made to perform sexually on Prince Andrew?” lawyers ask Marcinkova.

“Fifth” is Nadia’s simple, succinct reply.

That same week, the government downgrades Prince Andrew’s role as Great Britain’s royal trade envoy. But the British press is tenacious, and in the Telegraph, the Guardian, and elsewhere, stories appear on a daily basis:

•The Duke, His Paedophile Guest, and the Most Unusual Use of an RAF Base

•Andrew’s Secret Love Life Revealed

•Royal Connections: Prince Andrew and the Paedophile Are Suddenly the Talk of New York

•Time to Show This Right Royal Clown the Door

•An Odd Trio: The Royal Trade Envoy, the Teenage Masseuse and the Fixer

•No. 10 Struggles to Contain Row Over Prince

•From Royal Asset to National Liability

•Royal Blush

•Duke Could Be Called to Two Epstein Trials

•It’s the Company You Keep…The Duke’s Dangerous Liaisons

•Nothing Grand About This Old Duke of York

•The Royal Family Has Feared a Blow-Up Over Duke’s Choice of Friends For Years

•Our Less-Than-Grand Old Duke of York

On March 11, a devastating undersea earthquake and tsunami move Japan’s main island by several feet, shifting the earth on its axis. The destruction is horrific and unprecedented. But on March 13, the Daily Mail devotes four pages and seven separate articles to Prince Andrew. That same day, the Telegraph runs three pieces, and the Sunday Times runs a two-page spread headlined GUN SMUGGLER BOASTS OF SWAY OVER ANDREW.

On March 14, the Guardian runs one more piece about Andrew’s troubles.

PRINCE ANDREW DOMINATES HEADLINES DESPITE THE EARTHQUAKE, the headline reads.

CHAPTER 63

Alan Dershowitz: September 2014

If the ongoing lawsuits are costing Epstein millions, he has millions left to spare. Meanwhile, the FBI’s investigation into whether Epstein trafficked underage women across state lines seems to be going nowhere. As 2014 draws to a close, it’s beginning to look as if Epstein is finally free and clear of the case.

But for Epstein’s friend and sometime lawyer Alan Dershowitz, things are about to get very unpleasant.

At the start of 2008, Bradley Edwards, the Fort Lauderdale lawyer, had filed a motion in a West Palm Beach court on behalf of two unnamed women accusing Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz of participating directly in Epstein’s illegal activities.

Prince Andrew had had no comment to make, and Dershowitz had objected to the accusations in the strongest possible terms.

“There’s absolutely no kernel of truth to this story,” he’d said. “I don’t know this woman. I’ve never been in the same place with her. She’s made the whole story up out of whole cloth.”

Bradley Edwards had already become involved in lawsuits against Epstein. In 2007, working with a former federal judge and University of Utah law professor named Paul Cassell, he had filed a lawsuit on behalf of another unnamed woman. Six years later, that case is still pending, and now, Edwards and Cassell petition to have the two suits combined.

All in all, four Jane Does take part in the lawsuit.

Jane Doe 3 is Virginia Roberts, the girl who says that Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her for Epstein at Trump’s resort, Mar-a-Lago.

Epstein had “lent” her and other young girls to prominent businessmen, important politicians, world leaders, and other powerful men in order “to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain blackmail information,” Roberts claims.

She says that Epstein forced her and other underage girls to take part in an orgy in the Virgin Islands.

She names Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz as two of the men she’d been forced to have sex with and claims that Dershowitz had been “an eyewitness to the sexual abuse of many other minors by Epstein and several of Epstein’s co-conspirators.”

This time, Prince Andrew does respond to the allegations.

“This relates to longstanding and ongoing civil proceedings in the United States, to which the Duke of York is not a party,” Buckingham Palace says in a short statement. “As such we would not comment on the detail. However, for the avoidance of doubt, any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”

Alan Dershowitz also goes on the attack. Virginia’s claims are part of a plot to extort him, he claims. The motion that Edwards and Cassell have filed is “the sleaziest legal document” he’s ever seen.

“They manipulated a young, suggestible woman who was interested in money,” Dershowitz says. “This is a disbarrable offense, and they will be disbarred. They will rue the day they ever made this false charge against me.” It’s a vehement denial. But then, the allegations made by Virginia Roberts, on January 15, 2015, in a declaration filed against the government in an attempt to overturn Jeffrey Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, are highly disturbing.

CHAPTER 64

Declaration of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, filed on January 19, 2015 by attorneys representing Jeffrey Epstein’s victims (continued)

20. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was around Epstein frequently. Dershowitz was so comfortable with the sex [that] was going on that on one occasion he observed me in sexual activity with Epstein.

21. I had sexual intercourse with Dershowitz at least six times. The first time was when I was about 16, early on in my servitude to Epstein, and it continued until I was 19.

22. The first time we had sex took place in New York in Epstein’s home. It was in Epstein’s room (not the massage room). I was approximately sixteen years old at the time. I called Dershowitz “Alan.” I knew he was a famous professor.

23. The second time that I had sex with Dershowitz was at Epstein’s house in Palm Beach.

24. I also had sex with Dershowitz at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico in the massage room off of the indoor pool area, which was still being painted.

25. We also had sex at Little Saint James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

26. Another sexual encounter between me and Dershowitz happened on Epstein’s airplane. Another girl was present on the plane with us.

27. I have recently seen Alan Dershowitz on television calling me a “liar.” He is lying by denying that he had sex with me. The man I’ve seen on television, described as a former law professor, is the same man that I had sex with at least six times. Dershowitz also knows that Epstein had sex with other underage girls and lent me out to other people, but he is lying and denying that…

28. After years of abuse and being lent out, I began to look for a way to escape. I had first gone into Epstein’s household because I wanted to be a massage therapist. Epstein had taken me into his clutches through promises and talk and for some time I believed him. But once he had me under his control, regardless of my doubts and fears, I felt trapped.

29. I kept asking Epstein for my promised training and education. Epstein finally got me a plane ticket to Thailand to go to Chiang Mai to learn Thai massage. This sounded like my chance to escape. In September 2002, I packed my bags for good. I knew this would be my only opportunity to break away.

30. On September 27, 2002, I flew from JFK in New York to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I arrived around September 29 for my training. But Epstein was going to get something out of this trip as well. I was supposed to interview a girl and bring her back to the United States for Epstein.

31. [Left blank in the original]

32. I did the massage training in Chiang Mai. While I was there, I met a great and special guy and told him honestly what I was being forced to do. He told me I should get out of it. I told him that the people I was working for were very powerful and that I could not walk away or disobey them without risking serious punishment, including my life. He told me he would protect me. I had confidence [in] him and I saw his love and help as my opportunity to escape and to be with someone who truly loved me and would protect me. I married him and flew to Australia.

33. I called Epstein and told him I was not coming back. He asked why? I said “I’ve fallen in love.” Epstein basically said “good luck and have a good life.” I could tell he was not happy. I was afraid of what he was going to do to me. I thought he or one of his powerful friends might send someone to hurt me or have me killed.

34. From that point onward, out of concern for my safety and general well-being, I stayed in Australia with my husband. I was in Australia from late 2002 to October 2013. To be clear, I was never in the United States during these years, not even for a short trip to visit my mother. And my absence from the United States was not voluntary-I was hiding from Epstein out of fear of what he would do to me if I returned to the United States.

35. In around 2007, after not hearing from anyone for years, out of the blue I was contacted by someone who identified himself with a plain sounding name and claimed he was with the FBI. It seemed very odd for someone doing an official criminal investigation to just call up on the phone like that. I hadn’t heard Epstein’s name for years. I didn’t know who this person was and what it was really about. I couldn’t tell what was going on.

36. This man said he was looking into Jeffrey Epstein. The man asked if I had been involved with Epstein. My first instinct was to say nothing because I wasn’t sure he was really with the FBI or any authorities. I answered a few basic questions, telling him that I knew Jeffrey Epstein and had met him at a young age. But the conversation didn’t feel right. This man never offered to come and meet with me in person. Instead, he asked me right off the bat about Epstein’s sexual practices. I thought it would be strange for a true law enforcement officer to behave that way, so I became increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious about who was actually calling me.

37. I told the man nothing more about Epstein. The conversation probably didn’t even last three minutes, but it immediately triggered all of the fears of Epstein and his powerful friends that had caused me to escape in the first place. If the call accomplished anything, it only put me back in a state of fear and told me that I could be found quite easily and had nobody officially protecting me.

38. I suspected that the man who called me was working for Epstein or one of Epstein’s powerful friends. I believed that if this was really an agent who was investigating Epstein, he would have known who I was and how I fit into Epstein’s sexual crimes in many different places. He would have interviewed me in a way that would have established his credentials and would have shown how he could provide potential protection from Epstein. That never happened.

39. Getting a call from this supposed FBI agent made me scared all over again. I had left the old life of sexual slavery behind me and started a new life in a new country in hopes that the powerful people whose illegal activities I knew all about would never find me.

40. Shortly after this purported FBI call, I was contacted by telephone by someone who appeared clearly to be working for Epstein. The caller told me about an investigation into Epstein and said that some of the girls being questioned were saying that Epstein had had sexual contact with them. After they made these allegations, the man said they were being discredited as drug addicts and prostitutes, but in my case, if I were to keep quiet, I would “be looked after.” The fact that this call was made shortly after the supposed FBI call reinfor[c]ed my concern that the man I had talked to earlier was not really working for the FBI but for Epstein. I didn’t think that the FBI and Epstein would both be working together and would both get my phone number at almost exactly the same time. I played along and told this person that I had gotten a call from the “FBI” but that I didn’t tell him anything. The person on the phone was pleased to hear [that].

41. A short time later, one of Epstein’s lawyers (not Alan Dershowitz) called me, and then got Epstein on the line at the same time. Epstein and his lawyer basically asked again if I was going to say anything. The clear implication was that I should not. The way they were talking to me, I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t keep quiet. My thought was that if I didn’t say what they wanted me to say, or not to say, I might get hurt.

42. I promised Epstein and his lawyer that I would keep quiet. They seemed happy with that and that seemed to me to [be the] way to keep me and my family safe. And I did what Epstein and his lawyer told me. I kept quiet.

This declaration, stricken from the record by the judge in the victims’ lawsuit against the government, also set in motion events that led to Dershowitz’s and Roberts’s lawyers becoming involved in spectacular lawsuits, which included a complaint by Dershowitz that these allegations were false and had defamed him, and a complaint by Edwards that Dershowitz’s accusations against him were false and defamatory.

CHAPTER 65

Alan Dershowitz: October 2015

About fifteen minutes into the ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law & Order: SVU that was inspired by the Jeffrey Epstein saga, the plot takes an interesting turn: before officers have a chance to arrest him, Jordan, the character modeled on Epstein, shows up at SVU headquarters.

The twelve-year-old French girl raped him, Jordan says.

Wearing a monogrammed fleece pullover like the ones favored by Jeffrey Epstein, he describes an evening at home.

“The party was in full swing,” he explains. “A friend said she wanted to give me a special present. Told me to wait in my massage room-”

An SVU guy interrupts: “Guy has a massage room?”

“I suffer from chronic back pain,” Jordan says.

“While I was waiting, I fell asleep. Now, at first I thought I must be dreaming. I was aroused. I felt myself being manually manipulated. Then I remembered it was my present. I started to enjoy myself. But then it got rough, and that’s when I opened my eyes.”

“What did you see?”

“A woman. A woman I’d never seen before.”

“A woman? Dominique Moreau was twelve!”

“It was dark. I just wanted her off of me. I tried to stop her.”

“But the twelve-year-old overpowered you?”

“No. She threatened me. She said if I didn’t let her…continue, she was going to scream ‘Rape.’”

“And there was nothing that you could do? You’ve got forty years and a hundred pounds on the girl.”

“The party was going on right outside the door. I knew how this was going to look. I was naked. She was naked. What could I do?”

It was a brilliant plot twist-one that ultimately allowed Jordan to get off scot-free.

But the plot twist that Epstein’s own story ended up taking on the day of Alan Dershowitz’s deposition at a Broward County, Florida, courthouse was even more surprising.

“There was a criminal extortion plot,” Alan Dershowitz told Brad Edwards and Paul Cassell’s lawyer, Jack Scarola, on October 15, 2015.

“Your clients were involved.”

Bradley and Cassell had sued Dershowitz in Broward County for defamation-payback for extremely negative comments the law professor had made in the media.

Dershowitz had countersued. His reputation was on the line, and he had come armed for battle.

“I’m thrilled they sued me,” he’d told reporters. “In the end, someone will be disbarred. Either it will be me or the two lawyers.”

But if Dershowitz was swinging for the fences in his struggle to keep his hard-earned reputation afloat, he still had a bombshell to drop. When deposed by Scarola, he proposed his own theory about why Virginia Roberts had named him, along with Prince Andrew, as one of the men who had sexually abused her at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, in New York City, and in Palm Beach.

A theory that implicated the lawyers who were suing him in a much larger conspiracy.

According to Dershowitz, Brad Edwards pressured Virginia Roberts into identifying Dershowitz as one her assailants.

Dershowitz said that Edwards did this so that they could blackmail Jeffrey Epstein’s patron Leslie Wexner for one billion dollars.

Roberts lied about him, Dershowitz maintained, to give Wexner an idea of what would happen to him if Edwards’s demands weren’t met.

Furthermore, Dershowitz said, he had proof.

CHAPTER 66

Excerpts from the Deposition of Alan Dershowitz: October 15, 2015

9:46 a.m.

Q:In an interview with Hala Gorani on January 5 of this year, broadcast on CNN Live, you said, “I have a superb memory.” Do you acknowledge having made that statement?

A:I have a superb memory, so I must have made that statement. My mother had an extraordinary memory, and when I was in college and I was on the debate team, my mother allowed me to debate on the Sabbath, which was Jewish rest day, only on the condition that I not take notes or write. And at that point I discovered that I have a very good memory and don’t have to-generally didn’t have to take notes. My memory, obviously, at the age of seventy-seven has slipped a bit; but do I have a very good memory, yes.

10:18 a.m.

Q:Which of my clients are you swearing under oath encouraged Virginia Roberts to include allegations of an encounter with you at the New Mexico ranch?

A:Both of them-both of your clients, both Judge Cassell and Mr. Edwards-were both involved in encouraging [their] client to file a perjurious affidavit that they knew or should have known was perjurious recently when they sought to file another defamatory allegation in the federal proceeding.

Q:Was the arrangement such that what you are charging Bradley Edwards and Professor Paul Cassell with doing was suborning perjury?

A:Absolutely. If you ask me the question, I am directly charging Judge Cassell and Bradley Edwards with suborning perjury. I have been advised that Virginia Roberts did not want to mention me, told her friends that she did not want to mention me. And was, quote, pressured by her lawyers into including these totally false allegations against me. Yes, your clients are guilty of suborning perjury.

Q:Who told you that Bradley Edwards pressured Virginia Roberts into falsely identifying you?

A:A friend of Virginia Roberts who called me out of the blue and told me that she was horrified by what was happening to me and that she recently had meetings with Virginia Roberts and Virginia Roberts had told her that she never mentioned me previously. That the lawyers pressured her into mentioning me. And mentioning me over her desire not to mention me, yes.

10:20 a.m.

Q:What was the name of the person?

A:Her name is-her first name is Rebecca.

Q:Yes.

A:I don’t know the last name.

Q:Did you attempt to find out her last name?

A:I have her last name written down, but-

Q:Where?

A:It’s in my-in my notes. And I could get it for you…

Q:When did you write Rebecca’s name down?

A:When she-when she first called me-let me be very clear, since you’ve asked me the question.

At first her husband and she called me on the phone. They would not give me their names. But they told me [the] story. We had a series of phone conversations in which I asked them, please, to tell me their names. And after a period of time, after they told me the story in great detail, she was willing to give me her name. She asked me to promise that I would not disclose her identity without her permission. I have been trying to call her. Called her as recently as this morning and last night.

I want to recall-I don’t think I called her this morning. I called her twice last night to try to get her permission to reveal her complete name and identity. But I have the name, and I will be happy to give it to you. I just don’t have it off the top of my head.

10:23 a.m.

Q:Would you tell us how many phone conversations [you had] with this person Rebecca?

A:More than six. Probably between six and ten, maybe closer to ten. The first few [times] she called me, and after I got their number I called her a number of times.

Q:What is her husband’s name?

A:Michael. Different last name from hers, but again.

Q:Where do they live?

A:Palm Beach. Or West Palm Beach, in the Palm Beach area. They have been friends of Virginia Roberts since she was a young child.

Q:Were there any witnesses to any of these phone conversations other than Rebecca, Michael, and you?

A:Yes.

Q:Who?

A:My wife.

Q:When did the first conversation occur?

A:I can probably get you specific information about that. But it was months ago. When the story was in the newspapers, she called and related the entire story to me and related to me that it was part of a massive extortion plot.

10:25 a.m.

Q:Did you take contemporaneous notes of those phone conversations?

A:No. I took note of names, but not really notes of the substance, no.

Q:Have you ever made notes with regard to the substance of any communications that you allegedly had with Rebecca and/or Michael?

A:I didn’t “allegedly” have these conversations. I had these conversations. And I don’t recall taking notes of those conversations.

10:44 a.m.

Q:How many phone calls did you have with this person Rebecca before she informed you as to the reason why she was calling you?

A:She informed me the first time.

Q:The very first conversation.

A:Yes.

Q:How many phone calls was it before she asked you for money?

A:She never asked me for money.

Q:How many phone calls was it before her husband asked you for money?

A:I was never asked for money, ever.

Q:Do you know how it is that these people knew how to contact you?

A:They told me they went to my website and got my number and left a message for me to call. Yeah, that’s what happened. Oh, no; they sent me-they went on my website and sent me an e-mail and asked me-and the e-mail had a blank name but a way to respond. And so I responded with my phone number and they called, is my recollection. That’s my best recollection.

10:45 a.m.

Q:So from the very first conversation that you had with this person, you had information indicating that this person was informing you that Bradley Edwards had engaged in unethical conduct, correct?

A:Let me just be very clear what she said to me. She said to me that she had been told directly by her friend Virginia Roberts, who stayed with her overnight for a period of time, that she never wanted to mention me in any of the pleadings. And that her two lawyers in the pleadings, or her lawyers who filed the pleadings, pressured her into including my name and details.

Q:Did Rebecca ever suggest to you that the details sworn to by Virginia Roberts were false?

A:She certainly suggested that, yes. She mentioned to me that Virginia Roberts had never, ever mentioned [me to her], among any of the people that she had had any contact with, until she-until she was pressured into doing so by her lawyers, yes.

Q:So from the very first conversation, the impression you had was that this was a witness who could provide information that Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell had acted unethically and dishonestly, correct?

A:I wasn’t sure she could provide the information because she was very reluctant to come forward. She didn’t want to be involved. But I knew she had provided me with information, yes, but I didn’t know, and I still don’t know, whether she is prepared to be a witness. I don’t know the answer to that question.

11:08 a.m.

Q:Was any request made by you for a meeting?

A:Yes.

Q:Let me back up then, if I could, please. Because what I want you to do, based upon your superb memory, is to tell us in as much detail as you possibly can recall everything that was said…

A:I’m not sure the request for the meeting came in the first call or the second call…The first call was basically, I’d really like to talk to your wife [Rebecca] about this. I’m happy to fly down. I’m happy to talk to you on the phone. And we left it that they would think-that she would-that he would ask her to think about it. And that I could call back in a-in a few days and find out what her-what her current feelings were.

Q:Where were you when you received this phone call-or when you made this phone call? Sorry.

A:I think I was in New York.

Q:Do you know whether that phone call was made on a cell phone or a landline?

A:I don’t remember.

Q:Have you attempted to gather your telephone records for purposes of responding to discovery requests in this case?

A:I left that to my lawyers. I know that we did produce telephone records during the relevant periods of time when Virginia Roberts knew Jeffrey Epstein, and those telephone records established that I could not have been at the locations and at the times that Virginia Roberts claimed to have had-falsely claimed to have [had] sexual contact with me.

Q:I promise you we’re going to get to those.

A:Good.

Q:Promise you. Along with all the flight logs that you claim exonerate you.

11:11 a.m.

Q:Let’s go to the very second contact that you had with either Michael or Rebecca. Who initiated the second contact?

A:I think I did. I called and got Michael on the phone.

Q:Where did you call from?

A:I think New York.

Q:Tell me in as much detail as your superb memory allows you to recall everything that was said during the course of that phone conversation.

[Dershowitz’s lawyer]: Let’s object to the form and the continued use of the word superb. He’s described his memory. That’s your characterization. Go ahead.

Q:No, I think that that was Mr. Dershowitz’s characterization, which I have adopted.

[Lawyer]: Okay. Go ahead.

A:I called, spoke to Michael. I asked Michael if he had spoken to his wife. She said yes, and she was still reluctant to talk to me.

Q:I’m sorry-she said yes when you asked Michael if he had spoken to his wife?

A:He said yes. And that she was still reluctant to talk to me. I suggested to him that perhaps she could talk to me briefly just so that she hears what I have to say. And he could listen and remain on the phone, and she could stop at any time she wanted. And there came a time during that conversation when she did get on the phone, and here’s what she told me. She said she had grown up with Virginia Roberts. That they were very, very close friends as young people. That Virginia Roberts came to stay with her for a number of days, I think it was over Halloween, and they had gone out and had dinner, just the two of them. And that she confided in her; Virginia Roberts confided in Rebecca that she had never wanted to mention me in any of the pleadings, but she was pressured by her lawyer into doing so. Rebecca then said that I was not the object of this effort. The object of the effort was a billionaire who lives in Columbus, Ohio, and who owns Victoria’s Secret and Limited Too. Rebecca told me she did not know the name of that billionaire, but that Virginia and her lawyers hoped to get one billion dollars, b-i-l-l-i-o-n, one billion dollars, or half of his net worth, from him by alleging that he had improperly engaged in sexual misconduct with Virginia Roberts. That money would be divided three ways: a third of it to Virginia Roberts, a third of it to a charity that she and her lawyers were setting up for battered women, and a third of it to the lawyers.

She then told me that they were trying to get ABC News to interview Virginia Roberts so as to give her credibility in order to pressure the billionaire from Columbus, Ohio, into paying a large sum of money. And that I was named as an effort to try to show the billionaire what could happen to somebody if they were accused of sexual misconduct. And that would encourage him to settle a lawsuit or pay money in exchange for his name not being mentioned or revealed. I had no idea about this. And I didn’t-I didn’t ask about this. She just stated this. And I then corroborated the fact that she was absolutely correct in everything she had said to me.

Q:You corroborated the fact that she was absolutely correct in everything that she had said to you?

A:That’s right.

Q:How?

A:Okay. Let me answer that question. I was very-I wasn’t sure, so I called Leslie Wexner. I got his wife on the phone, Abigail Wexner. Obviously I knew that the only billionaire in Columbus, Ohio, who owned Limited Too and who owned Victoria’s Secret was Leslie Wexner. I had met Leslie Wexner on two occasions, I think, and his wife. I called Abigail on the phone and I said, “I think you ought to know that there is an extortion plot being directed against your husband by unscrupulous lawyers in-in Florida.” And she said, “Oh, we’re aware of that; they’ve already been in contact with us,” which surprised me. But [her statement] was confirmation of that. I then also-I can’t give you the chronology of that. I then was in touch with ABC and found out she was absolutely correct about her efforts to try to get interviewed on ABC television. In fact, I learned that your client, Brad Edwards, had sent a communication to people in the area urging them to watch her interview that was scheduled to be on three television programs. If I’m not mistaken, it was [the] Good Day Show, the evening news, and the show Nightline…I then was in communication with ABC and helped to persuade them that they would be putting false information on the air if they allowed Virginia Roberts to tell her false story. So I was able to corroborate that. I then also corroborated the fact that she had never mentioned me when her boyfriend appeared on television and publicly stated that she had never mentioned me in any of her description[s] of people who she had sexual contact with. So I was then completely satisfied that Rebecca was telling me the complete truth. And that in my view, there was an extortion plot directed against Leslie Wexner, a criminal extortion plot directed against Leslie Wexner, and that your clients were involved in that extortion plot.

11:30 a.m.

Q:Let’s see if we can make sure that we’re understanding one another, sir. Do you recognize that there’s a distinction between Virginia Roberts having met you, having been sexually abused by you on multiple occasions, but not wanting to name you as opposed to Virginia Roberts never having met you and never having been sexually abused by you…? Are those two things different in your mind?

A:Not in the context of this case. Because Virginia Roberts said that she was going to seek justice from everybody that had abused her. And if she didn’t want to name me, I think the inference is inescapable that I was not among those people that she had had any sexual contact with. So that was certainly the inference I drew…

11:35 a.m.

Q:Who are the people that Rebecca says Virginia had previously told her that Virginia was abused by?

A:I never asked her that question.

Q:Did you ask her was Les Wexner one of the people that abused Virginia?

A:I told you I never asked her the question.

Q:Are you aware that years before December of 2014, when the CVRA pleading was filed, that your name had come up repeatedly in connection with Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minors, correct?

A:I am aware that never before 2014, end of December, was it ever, ever alleged that I had acted in any way inappropriately with regard to Virginia Roberts, that I ever touched her, that I ever met her, that I had ever been with her. I was completely aware of that. There had never been any allegation. She claims under oath that she told you that secretly in 2011, but you have produced no notes of any such conversation. You, of course, are a witness to this allegation and will be deposed as a witness to this allegation. I believe it is an entirely false allegation that she told you in 2011 that she had had any sexual contact with me. I think she’s lying through her teeth when she says that. And I doubt that your notes will reveal any such information. But if she did tell you that, she would be absolutely, categorically lying. So I am completely aware that never-until the lies were put in a legal pleading at the end of December 2014, it was never alleged that I had any sexual contact with Virginia Roberts. I know that it was alleged that I was a witness to Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged abuse, and that was false. I was never a witness to any of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse. And I wrote that to you, something that you have falsely denied. And I stand on the record. The record is clear that I have categorically denied I was ever a witness to any abuse, that I ever saw Jeffrey Epstein abusing anybody. And-and the very idea that I would stand and talk to Jeffrey Epstein while he was receiving oral sex from Virginia Roberts, which she swore to under oath, is so outrageous, so preposterous, that even David Boies [a prominent lawyer associated with the firm representing Virginia Roberts] said he couldn’t believe it was true.

12:24 p.m.

Q:You engaged in a mass-media campaign to convince the world that Bradley Edwards and Professor Paul Cassell were unethical lawyers who had fabricated false charges against you, correct?

A:No, that’s not correct. I responded to press inquiries by telling the truth. My goal was to let the world know that Virginia Roberts’s allegations against me were totally false. These two stories appeared, as far as I can tell, in every single newspaper in the world and on every media, which was part of their plot and the plan of your clients, which is why they absurdly mentioned Prince Andrew, claiming in the most absurd way-that they mentioned him because he was trying to lobby prosecutors to get a reduced sentence for Jeffrey Epstein; they obviously put Prince Andrew in there in order to get massive publicity around the world. And every media in the world, practically, called me, from the BBC to CBS to ABC to CNN, and I responded to lies with the truth.

Q:And the truth that you attempted to convey was that Bradley Edwards and Professor Paul Cassell were unethical lawyers who fabricated false charges against you, right?

A:The truth that I intended to convey was that the charges against me were false and fabricated, that I never had any sexual contact-

Q:Fabricated by whom, sir?

A:Please don’t interrupt me…that I never had any sexual contact with Virginia Roberts. Because Professor Cassell insisted on conveying to the public that he was a former judge and that he was a professor and that he was using-improperly, in my view-the stationery and name of his university to add credibility to his claims, I felt that it was imperative for me to indicate that he was engaging in improper and unethical conduct. It would have been improper for me to have allowed his use of his credibility as a former federal judge, as a professor who uses, misuses, his university imprimatur-it was very important for me to attack the credibility of the messengers of the false information. And it was important for me to also remind the public that Bradley Edwards was a partner of [Scott] Rothstein, a man who is spending fifty years in jail for fraudulently creating a Ponzi scheme to sell Jeffrey Epstein cases that didn’t exist.

CHAPTER 67

Scott Rothstein: 2009

Scott Rothstein was a flashy Fort Lauderdale ex-lawyer who parked his collection of cars in an air-conditioned warehouse, kept a copy of the Torah on his desk, and hung a portrait of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone outside his office. One of his nicknames was TPOFD, short for “the Prince of Fucking Darkness,” and in private, he’d say things like: “Understand that the repercussions of engaging me could open the gates of hell. Understand that I am capable of evil far beyond anything your imagination could ever conjure up.”

Rothstein hosted receptions for prominent politicians-John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Arnold Schwarzenegger-and handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time in campaign contributions. He gave millions more to charitable institutions: the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital; the American Heart Association. By all outward appearances, he could afford it: seventy lawyers worked in his firm, which had offices in Florida, New York, and Venezuela. But Rothstein’s millions actually came from a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme he’d been running since 2005.

In April of 2009, Bradley Edwards joined Rothstein’s firm. The lawyer brought his papers along, and Rothstein showed those pertaining to Epstein to potential investors. In exchange for a lump sum up front, Rothstein said, investors would receive a far larger chunk of money later, which Epstein would pay in future settlements.

Edwards and Rothstein both say that Edwards had no knowledge whatsoever of the Ponzi scheme. (Prosecutors, and the Florida Bar, agree.) Edwards left as soon as he caught wind of the scheme, in November of 2009. But the few months he spent in Rothstein’s company gave Dershowitz the opening he needed to pry open Virginia Roberts’s accusations.

It was at Edwards’s insistence, Dershowitz would say, as well as Paul Cassell’s, that Virginia Roberts added Dershowitz’s name to the list of men she claimed had abused her.

According to Dershowitz, he’d been pulled into a billion-dollar extortion plot Edwards had hatched. And for Edwards and Cassell, there had been a secondary benefit: Dershowitz had helped to work out Epstein’s confidential non-prosecution agreement with the government. By implicating him directly in Epstein’s abuse of underage women, Dershowitz claimed, Edwards and Cassell were trying to “open up” that agreement.

It might have been a Hail Mary pass on the part of Alan Dershowitz.

But the argument had its own internal logic.

The idea that Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell were trying to blackmail Leslie Wexner-blackmail him for one billion dollars, no less-sounds highly improbable. But we do know for a fact that Edwards had worked with Rothstein-a man who’d been running his own billion-dollar con.

Edwards may not have known that Rothstein was taking his files on Jeffrey Epstein and showing them to investors. But Edwards’s proximity to Rothstein didn’t look good. It may not have been as damaging as Dershowitz’s close friendship with Epstein, but it was damaging nonetheless. It gave Dershowitz the opening he needed to make his argument. And the genius of Dershowitz’s argument was that it wasn’t necessarily predicated on an actual plot to blackmail Wexner. Maybe the thing Edwards was really after was the idea that a lawyer who helped work out Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement was also having sex with Virginia Roberts. That would give Edwards leverage in trying to crack the agreement open. And in that case, was it so hard to imagine him pressuring Virginia Roberts to add Dershowitz’s name to the list?

Perhaps it wasn’t, in this scenario. Virginia would have still felt reluctant to mention Dershowitz. If she was, there was the matter of the three hundred million dollars, and then some, that she would stand to gain. And the three hundred million or so that goes to set up a charity for battered women? If the scenario Dershowitz had thrown out was true, that would have been a genius move on Edwards’s part-the sort of detail that helps the whole psychological picture fall into place. If Virginia felt guilty for lying about Dershowitz, she could think of the thousands of battered women she’d end up helping.

All these possibilities seemed bizarre. And yet everything connected with Epstein’s story seemed to be bizarre.

Bill Clinton got the use of a jet out of Epstein-a trip to Africa. But he and Epstein weren’t bosom buddies.

As for Prince Andrew, we already know how he feels about women.

But what did Dershowitz get out of Epstein, aside from Epstein’s wise counsel on all the books he’d written?

One advantage Dershowitz had, as he laid out his argument, was that when it came to Jeffrey Epstein, all bets were off. He didn’t have to establish his innocence. All he had to do was make sure that the waters stayed muddy. The more complicated things seemed to be, the better they were for Dershowitz.

Thanks to Jeffrey Epstein’s actions, and the endlessly complicated cycle of suits and countersuits those actions inspired, those waters were very muddy indeed.