Relentless Pursuit

by Bradley J. Edwards

  While periodically being whipped, she thought, This hurts. What am I doing? How do I get out of here? She opened her eyes and peered to her left to see Jeffrey smiling wryly while masturbating. As he held himself, Jeffrey spoke only and directly to the other girl. “Do you love this? Is this turning you on?”

  “Oh yeah,” she replied as she continued thrusting from behind Seloh.

  “Seloh, grab your clothes. You can go,” Jeffrey said with glee. Looking back just before she left the door, Seloh saw Jeffrey and his other girl go at it in the middle of the room. She thought, What just happened? How does everyone around me think this is normal? Is this what I have to do to get where I need to go? Do I have any choice? Calming her nerves, she realized that, at the moment, there was no choice. If she ultimately resisted, her career and life could be ruined. She convinced herself that this was normal and to just be happy and thankful.

  The next morning, she played volleyball on the beach with Jean-Luc. Ghislaine yelled for another girl who was on the island that day, Natalie, to follow her to Jeffrey. Seloh immediately had flashbacks to the night before, realizing in that moment that Ghislaine controlled the rotation of Jeffrey’s daily routine.

  On the last night, Seloh was sleeping peacefully in her bed, not having seen Jeffrey for the entire day. She woke up to feel an erect penis inside of her from behind and Jeffrey’s left index finger over her lips as if instructing her to shhhh. “I don’t want to do this,” said Seloh.

  “Yes, you do. It’s okay,” he said. “The only thing that I ask is that you don’t tell my girlfriend that I’m sleeping here.” While Nadia obviously knew Jeffrey was engaging in sex with every other female who was around, she had one rule, and that was that he did not sleep in the same bed as another woman. But that didn’t matter; once again, Seloh had no choice but to go along with it and ultimately to categorize it as her new normal.

  The next morning, everyone met for breakfast. Seloh found her seat at the table. Without turning around, Nadia, hearing him approach, said, “Where did you sleep last night?”

  Seloh, looking past her to Jeffrey, saw Jeffrey hold his index finger over his lips. He responded, “In the cabana—you were snoring.” Seloh immediately felt enormous guilt. But she knew what everyone else knew—Jeffrey was in control. The only way to survive was to live under Jeffrey’s rules, which were very clear.

  Among them, say nothing.

  TWENTY-TWO IT’S NEVER OVER

  IN LATE 2010 OR EARLY 2011, a reporter named Sharon Churcher from the Daily Mail called me saying that she wanted to meet with Virginia Roberts and asked if I could find her. I had figured out that Virginia was Jane Doe 102 because her name appeared repeatedly on various pieces of evidence that I had obtained. From questions her lawyers had asked during the Jane Doe 102 lawsuit, I also knew she had been lent out for sex to others. To me, she held the key to unlocking another level of Epstein’s depravity.

  I needed to speak with Virginia, so if some dogged reporter was willing to take a chance traveling across the world to knock on her door, I was happy to share what I knew. I passed along the few leads that I had to Sharon, who quickly tracked Virginia down in Australia. Sharon went to see Virginia and called me after interviewing her for two days. She told me Virginia wanted to be involved in the CVRA case. Finally, someone from Epstein’s inner circle wanted to talk, and wanted to help.

  After her interview with Churcher, Virginia called me herself. I explained the CVRA case, which was still in the discovery phase as we attempted to uncover documentation to prove that Epstein and the government actively concealed the NPA from the victims. We discussed how the goal of the case was in line with her own—to put Epstein in jail. She’d heard Epstein had attacked me personally with a bogus lawsuit. She knew he would attack anyone, which is why she had escaped from him the first chance she got, during a trip to Thailand nine years earlier.

  At Epstein’s direction, Virginia had been dispatched to Thailand to pick up a young girl, interview her, and let Epstein know if she was “qualified.” But after having been used as a sex slave for years, Virginia saw the trip to Thailand as a way to free herself from the invisible chains of sexual servitude.

  Epstein paid for Virginia’s coach ticket to Thailand and for her hotel in Chiang Mai during the trip. Rather than meet the little girl for Epstein, she recognized her chance to escape—she went into town and met a guy from Down Under who fell in love with her and promised to take care of her. She married him days later, hopped a plane with him to Australia, and never looked back. She hid in Australia for nearly ten years, during which she had three children. That she had left the United States—the only country that she had ever known—in order to escape Epstein gave further credence to her story.

  Virginia explained that she had been recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell had escaped being held responsible for any of Epstein’s transgressions in any way up until this point, but that could all change after Virginia. Virginia began traveling with Epstein and Maxwell and became part of what she called their “dysfunctional family.”

  If she wasn’t servicing Epstein, Virginia was being made to service one of his high-powered friends, and if she wasn’t servicing someone at Epstein’s direction, she was working for the organization, which meant hunting down girls to bring to Epstein. Maxwell was the one who knew what Jeffrey liked, which meant she was the one who taught Virginia the skills she needed in order to keep him happy. Those skills included how to act in front of important and powerful people, how to dress, how to hold her knife and fork, and, of course, how to please him sexually.

  Because of her upbringing, Virginia was a prime target. She had been abused at an early age, was a runaway many times over by thirteen, had multiple run-ins with the law, and was a school dropout. Not to mention, she was stunningly attractive.

  On Virginia’s initial call, I asked her to provide proof of some of her allegations, including her dramatic escape from Epstein into a new life in Australia. She scanned and sent me the envelope with Maxwell’s directions and cell phone number as well as the travel and hotel receipts from Thailand charged to Epstein’s card.

  Not long after, Virginia showed me a photograph of herself as a seventeen-year-old girl wedged in between Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew, a photo that she described as being taken by Jeffrey Epstein in Maxwell’s apartment in London. Of all the people she claimed to have been introduced to and made to have sex with, the Duke of York sounded the most preposterous. Yet here was a picture of the two of them arm in arm, smiling like a happy pair out for the night—though he’s twenty-three years her senior.

  I hung up the phone and thought about all the things Virginia had told me. None of it was surprising, but all of it was confirmation of an extraordinary sex abuse enterprise that went far beyond what was uncovered in Florida. We knew Epstein was addicted to sex with children and had assistants scheduling multiple appointments per day with different girls. He traveled all the time, all over the world, with the same assistants, some of whom were named co-conspirators and who clearly knew what he was up to. The “Holy Grail” from Alfredo Rodriguez listed female names and telephone numbers from numerous locations around the world under the heading of “massage” in the exact same way that it listed the names of many underage girls under the same title for Florida. It only made sense that his sex addiction was not confined to Florida.

  While there had not been any evidence of Prince Andrew spending time at the Palm Beach house while little girls were upstairs with Epstein, witnesses had confirmed that Epstein and the prince were close friends.

  I studied the evidence Virginia sent me, namely her photos and Thailand hotel information bearing Epstein’s name. Virginia took off from New York to Thailand on September 27, 2002, and arrived there with handwritten instructions to call Maxwell on her cell. According to Epstein’s personal flight logs, Epstein and Maxwell took off from JFK in New York on September 21, 2002, on his Boeing jet on an extended trip to Africa with numerous p
assengers, including Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, the actors Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey, six U.S. Secret Service agents, and the object of their attention, former president Bill Clinton. Yes, while Virginia Roberts was being flown to Thailand on Epstein’s dime, Epstein and Maxwell were traveling with Bill Clinton to various countries in Africa.

  Upon returning from Africa, President Clinton commented via a spokesperson to New York magazine reporter Landon Thomas Jr.: “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science.… I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” Years later, I learned more about the close bond President Clinton appeared to have with Jeffrey Epstein on that Africa trip. According to eyewitnesses, including my client Chauntae Davies, who was only twenty-three years old when she traveled to Africa with the duo, the men exchanged somewhat crass jokes about women more than they discussed the solutions to major world problems.

  In addition to Prince Andrew, Virginia told me the identities of other individuals whom she was lent out to, and who would have information that was valuable and relevant to both the CVRA case and in my personal litigation against Epstein.

  Because Epstein had based his malicious lawsuit against me on the allegation that I had attempted to take the depositions of powerful people who he claimed had no knowledge of any relevant information, such as Alan Dershowitz, David Copperfield, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, Virginia’s account of her experience was very important. Jack Scarola called her, and with her consent, tape-recorded a conversation. She explained that she was frightened for her safety and limited in what she would say on the recording, but she confirmed that these powerful and connected friends of Jeffrey’s would have very relevant information if they were under oath and told the truth.

  Getting them to tell the truth under oath would be difficult, which made Virginia, who was willing to share what she knew, even more important.

  TWENTY-THREE YOUR MOVE OR MINE?

  THINGS REALLY STARTED TO HEAT up between Jeffrey and me on a more personal level around this time, in early 2011. In response to the lawsuit that he had filed against me in December 2009, I had, of course, filed a counterclaim for malicious prosecution. My malicious prosecution case had been ongoing for more than a year, but the facts that we had uncovered had now changed the game. It was becoming obvious to anyone paying attention that his claims against me were both frivolous and calculated with a purpose of making me go away for good.

  I was getting closer to blowing up his whole organization when he sued me out of desperation. He had no facts on his side, but he did have unlimited resources. I had been closing in on him and he had used the legal system to knock me off. But now, I was back on offense and Virginia gave me more confidence. With few pieces left on his chessboard, Epstein’s lawsuit—and him with it—were finally in trouble.

  But Epstein wasn’t going to make it easy. He was determined to dispose of me. To carry that out, his main law firm continued to curry favor with their billionaire bully client. One of his lawyers demanded to meet in person, which I did. It was a short meeting with a clear message that Jeffrey Epstein was a powerful person who would financially destroy me and my family if I continued with my counterclaim. I quickly ended the meeting, telling him, “Tell Jeffrey these types of personal threats don’t make me want to back down, and I don’t forget any of them.”

  After the meeting with his lawyer, I was furious. All I could think about was how I was going to devote even more effort into putting Epstein in jail. This was now a war and I was preparing to ramp up the pressure. Almost sensing that the personal threat through his lawyer was going to elevate my attack, Jeffrey Epstein called me himself at my office the next morning. I was surprised by his call, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. He said he had heard I was mad at him, and that he didn’t blame me. He wanted to assure me that the message had not come from him, and that he was personally going to “take care of it.”

  From one day to the next, he went from threatening my livelihood and my family through a conduit acting on his behalf to personally conveying to me that his legal team had acted out of turn. I knew that no move was ever made by Epstein’s lawyers without his approval, but I also knew it could only help to play along. This was a typical mobster move where wise guys would shake down an adversary and then swoop in the next day and offer protection to that adversary for a fee.

  Still, once he thought I understood that he was really a good guy, he couldn’t help but deliver his message, his way. He said that while his lawyers had miscalculated their last move, it would be “best for everyone if we all just walked away from the situation.” In a flash, he reverted back to his threats. He then out of nowhere told me that he knew that one of my former law partners at RRA was “f***ing a prostitute.” So what? I thought. Why would I care about that? He went on to tell me that in addition to having sex with her, my former RRA law partner had police officers threaten that she needed to leave the state of Florida. His “people” were telling him that this RRA lawyer and the goon cops who were involved were going to be arrested for it and that his “people” were looking into the conduct of all the lawyers at RRA—not just those related to the Ponzi scheme.

  This time, he was sending a different message. He was saying that he would do whatever was necessary to shut down an embarrassing and problematic lawsuit against him, and that he was powerful enough to be provided highly confidential government information hot off the press. While he was apologetic for the actions of his lawyers as his agents, he verified that he was still in a position to have access to people and information that should make me nervous.

  After the call, I told my gumshoe investigator this story and asked what in the world Epstein was talking about. I was assured that there was no truth in it, and that, as my investigator put it, “He’s just talking shit.” Nobody I knew had ever heard this story about a prostitute or extortion by police, so he told me to write it off. But I didn’t. The eerie confidence of Epstein’s voice as he was telling me these details made my gut jump.

  Was it possible that Epstein was still so connected that he was given top secret information on the RRA federal criminal investigation? My investigator reminded me that Epstein was a child molester and the FBI did not filter their investigations to anyone, much less a criminal of Epstein’s caliber, but I stored the entire conversation away in a special file cabinet in my mind.

  Sure enough, two years later, in May 2014, Stuart Rosenfeldt, a former named partner at RRA, was arrested for doing basically what Epstein had described. So were the cops that helped him. What’s more, these investigative facts were highly confidential at the time he told me. They were investigated by the FBI and a tightly constructed U.S. Attorney’s Office, and yet Epstein knew virtually every important detail.

  I remember the day that Stuart Rosenfeldt was arrested. I was sitting with one of my partners, Steve Jaffe. We looked at each other and Steve said, “Holy shit.” Epstein knew this years ago and we thought he was just making it up. Who was his source inside the government? From that point forward, I was careful to keep my investigative materials to a trusted few people, restricting even what I provided to the government.

  After telling me he was firing his lawyers because they had threatened me, Epstein went back to the drawing board. This time, in April 2012, he hired lawyers from my own legal circle—Fred Haddad and Tonja Haddad Coleman, a father-daughter duo whom I had known for years. I had no doubt that our friendship and familiarity was precisely the reason Epstein had hired them. His goal was to send the message that he could infiltrate my personal connections whenever he wanted.

  This was not a new concept. During the federal criminal investigation of Epstein—the case that had ended with his cushy jail term—he had hired former U.S. attorney Guy Lewis and a former assistant
U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Lilly Ann Sanchez, who had continued relationships inside the office, in order to ensure that he had a direct line of communication with the supervisors in charge of prosecuting his case. He’d also hired Republican heavyweights Ken Starr and Jay Lefkowitz to make sure that he could get “off campus” meetings with the then sitting U.S. attorney Alex Acosta. Hiring friends of those who would be making decisions was the strategy. This time, it hit closer to home, though. He was hiring acquaintances of mine.

  This move sent a powerful, multilayered message to me. On the one hand, he was hiring someone who was friendly to me and who would therefore treat me fairly, the way he knew I prided myself on treating others. He wanted me to think that he wasn’t a bad guy. But it was also his reminder that he could use his money to turn friends against me.

  Tonja was, at the time, a local lawyer who had primarily practiced criminal defense law. Her husband, Tom, had been my supervisor when I was a young prosecutor at the state attorney’s office. Her father, Fred, was a respected trial lawyer who had for decades built a reputation for trying any case at any time, regardless of how badly the deck was stacked against him. The fact that his name was on the pleadings also made this hire more threatening to me.

  Epstein was stepping it up a level.

  (I would find out in early 2018 that Tonja and Fred had never even received the boxes of case files that Epstein’s old law firms had maintained over the years. The files remained in the possession of Epstein’s main law firm, Fowler White, until 2018, when they were obtained by Epstein’s trial counsel who had eventually replaced Tonja and Fred. This fact underlined beyond a doubt that the hiring of the Haddads was what it appeared to be: an intimidation ploy. It annoyed and disappointed me, but intimidate me it did not.)