At other points, when Dershowitz was faced with questions that he could not credibly deny, he found a way to evade answering the question altogether. For instance, was Virginia recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell when she was a minor? Was she molested by Jeffrey Epstein? Did she board and travel on Epstein’s airplane while she was underage? Was she identified by the FBI as a victim of sex trafficking? Clearly the answer to all of these questions was yes. But to admit it would be to admit what we all knew—Virginia had not made up everything from “beginning to end” or “out of whole cloth” as Dershowitz had claimed.
Dershowitz refused to answer any of these questions on the basis that doing so would infringe upon his attorney-client privilege with Jeffrey Epstein. He claimed multiple privileges during his deposition—the attorney-client privilege, work product privilege, and even some joint defense privilege that he claimed to have along with Maxwell or Epstein or both. This was not helping his extreme position, but it didn’t hurt as much as it would if he answered by admitting to Virginia’s credible account on those points.
In this credibility contest on the subject of Jeffrey Epstein, where Dershowitz expected the world to believe he was absolutely truthful and Virginia was a bald-faced liar, we had to assess the veracity not only of the statements Virginia had made regarding Jeffrey Epstein but also of the statements Alan Dershowitz had made. I pulled out an article citing a time when Dershowitz spoke to the press on behalf of Epstein. “Did you publicly make the statement that we have now put on the record, which is that Jeffrey Epstein did not have sexual-erotic massages or sex with any minors, and that the girl that accused him of forcible rape was lying—had a long record of lying—of theft and blaming others for her crimes?” I knew that he had made the statement because I was holding the article directly quoting him in my hands as I was asking the question. He paused before answering, “I have no recollection of making those statements. I was his defense attorney. I may have made statements in court that were quoted by the newspapers. But I have no distinct recollection of making that statement.”
Dershowitz wasted no time calling the victims liars, including, if not especially, Virginia, but he was indignant if anyone questioned the truthfulness of anything he said. During the deposition, I reminded him that Virginia was not the only person who had questioned Dershowitz’s loose affiliation with the truth at times. There was also Noam Chomsky, renowned “father of modern linguistics,” who had publicly labeled Dershowitz “a dedicated liar.” Dershowitz did not like this at all and went on another rant, this time about Chomsky.
Dershowitz took a play out of Epstein’s book to make sure I didn’t get out of the deposition with a clean record. Any chance he got to take shots at me personally, he did. His go-to was to adopt Epstein’s claim that I had helped Scott Rothstein run the Ponzi scheme, even though by this point even Epstein’s attempt at this claim had been disproven and dismissed. That didn’t dissuade Dershowitz. In fact, he doubled down.
He claimed in his deposition that Scott Rothstein and I were “joined at the hip” and Rothstein didn’t do anything without conferring with me. He went so far as to say that I was the “brains of the operation.” I don’t think he knew it at the time, but our special master, Ed Pozzuoli, had been heavily involved in the RRA litigation over the Ponzi scheme, so watching Dershowitz chase imaginary rabbits and explain how I was the real Ponzi wizard had to be particularly tough for him to bear.
We moved on to discussing topics on which Dershowitz had taken a public view that might be relevant to someone weighing the character qualities of the two participants in the “he said, she said.” In fairness, I wanted to give Dershowitz a chance to respond substantively on some of the positions he had taken that were troubling to us. When I questioned him about a 2002 article that he wrote in which he suggested that viewing child pornography should not be a crime, he got angry and started attacking me. He said my question was putting his ideas on trial and thereby was putting the First Amendment on trial. He finished by threatening to have the ACLU intervene in the case and closed by calling me “un-American.”
Before we concluded, I had to know whether the information I had heard about him skinny-dipping on Martha’s Vineyard was true. Of course, public nudity does not mean he did what Virginia said he did, but it was a rumor that seemed inconsistent with his holier-than-thou front. If false, it was a rumor he should be given the opportunity to denounce as such. After some back-and-forth, he reluctantly admitted to skinny-dipping on Martha’s Vineyard but was quick to make sure I knew that Eleanor Roosevelt had also done so (not with him, I don’t think). I didn’t leave without asking him about the lady from his condo building. He admitted to being accused of being a pervert peeking at topless girls on the beach near his Miami home, but insisted that she was a “complete nutcase.”
We left the deposition feeling confident. Virginia’s deposition was three days later. The substance is sealed, but the theatrics were undeniable. Virginia was who she has always been from day one—confident and firm. I didn’t watch her much; I was sitting across from Alan, watching his reactions to her responses. Those were the last depositions taken in the case.
In March 2016, the case was settled.*
* * *
Although the court had ultimately stricken the allegations and denied our motion to join Virginia in the CVRA, the order made it clear that the rights of Virginia and all other similarly situated victims would be afforded and protected without the need for formal intervention in the case. While the defamation lawsuit was nothing more than a time-consuming distraction, something positive did come of our tactical decision to file the motion. We were able to move forward in the CVRA action knowing that we were not only representing Courtney and Jane Doe 2, but that we stood with our clients in fighting on behalf of all victims of Jeffrey Epstein who were deprived of their rights in Florida during the negotiation of the 2007 NPA.
* * *
Virginia was now ramping up her defamation case against Maxwell, filed in New York’s federal district court. Maxwell’s deposition was set for April 22, 2016, in New York. She was represented by Jeff Pagliuca and Laura Menninger of Denver, Colorado. For a variety of complicated legal reasons, I was not able to take Maxwell’s deposition. Sigrid McCawley took the deposition and did a great job. To this day the deposition remains under seal.
* * *
After Maxwell’s deposition, Jean-Luc Brunel was becoming increasingly important. His lawyer Joe Titone was still claiming to be having trouble serving Epstein and wanting our help. I told him that we had been hearing this for over a year but had yet to see Jean-Luc, and he had never produced those explosive photos he claimed to have.
By May 2016, we were well into the litigation against Ghislaine Maxwell and knew that Jean-Luc had important information about the role Maxwell had played in the scheme to recruit girls for Epstein. Joe Titone had carried several messages to Jean-Luc, letting him know we wanted to speak with him. Finally, Jean-Luc agreed to talk with us.
Preliminarily, Titone and I discussed some of the information that Jean-Luc was going to be able to provide, including events that occurred in New York that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York was sure to be interested in. After receiving this information, as well as other witness accounts regarding illegal New York activity occurring at the mansion and at the apartments, we set up an appointment for a presentation to be made to the sex crimes division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Three of us—Pete Skinner, a Boies Schiller Flexner lawyer and former Southern District of New York AUSA; Stan; and I—went to the meeting. The AUSA acted confident that a case would be brought against Epstein for crimes committed against Virginia and others in New York. Of course, first she had to have facts, witnesses, evidence, and victims of a New York crime. We assured the prosecutor that the number of victims in New York far exceeded those discovered in Florida. The group walked out excited that New York was finally going to bring a case against Eps
tein. I said to David and Pete, “Don’t hold your breath, the Southern District obviously doesn’t know who they’re dealing with yet.”
On May 2, 2016, true to his word, Jean-Luc Brunel showed up to the Boies Schiller Flexner office in New York. He did so on one condition—that I would not be there. He explained before he arrived that he did not like me. He somehow blamed me for the fact that he had skipped out on his original deposition. His reason for disliking me wasn’t very logical, but this was his condition, so I lived with it.
I still believed that Jean-Luc was pretending to cooperate with us while really being there as a Jeffrey Epstein spy and told Stan, who would be meeting with Jean-Luc without me, as much. Jean-Luc was claiming, after all, that he now hated Epstein because his association with Epstein had ruined the reputation of the modeling agency. It was hard for me to imagine a decades-long friendship between the two of them having gone sideways because of the exact conduct that had brought these two men together in the first place. So, what was Jean-Luc’s game? Was this voluntary interview being offered in hopes of getting our help to serve his bogus lawsuit on Jeffrey Epstein, or did he have other motives in mind?
Stan and Jean-Luc talked for hours. Jean-Luc put up a good front. He seemed to have several objectives. One was to convince Stan that he, Jean-Luc, was not the person he was accused of being. He explained how he had known Ghislaine since the 1980s and how she had introduced him to Jeffrey in the 1990s. He didn’t speak well of Jeffrey or Ghislaine—these were once two of his best friends, but now he was willing to spill the beans on both of them.
Jean-Luc spun a story that even he was a victim of Epstein’s operation. He was vulnerable when he met Jeffrey Epstein, he said, and yes, it was true that Epstein had gotten him back on his feet in the modeling industry and he was indebted to Jeffrey. But it irritated Jean-Luc because he would talk about models and Jeffrey would pretend that he had his own eye for modeling, while really, he was just trying to sleep with them. Epstein would put these girls in his apartments and say they were “models,” but they never modeled. Maxwell basically did whatever Epstein wanted her to do. Brunel talked angrily about how his reputation had been ruined by Epstein, who took the modeling concept and turned it into trash.
Jean-Luc did seem to remember having met Virginia. And, certainly, he knew the names of many of the people whom Epstein lent his girls to for sex. Still, he identified only a few, and when pressed for names, focused only on one—Harvey Weinstein. Remember, this interview was happening in May 2016, more than one year before the world would learn about Harvey’s unwanted sexual advances and attacks on women.
In later discussions, Jean-Luc described one incident in greater detail, which he said culminated in a heated argument between Epstein and Weinstein that terminated their relationship. Weinstein was at Epstein’s apartment in France receiving a massage from one of Epstein’s girls when he attempted to aggressively convert the massage into something sexual. The girl rejected his advances. As the story goes, Harvey then verbally abused her for rejecting him. Little did Harvey know, this was one of Epstein’s favorite girls at the time and Jeffrey viewed the aggressive mistreatment as disrespectful to him. Jeffrey then came into the room, got in Harvey’s face, and kicked him out of his house, delivering the message that he was never to come back.
Following the interview of Jean-Luc, I heard various versions of this story from others, including years later from Epstein himself, who referred to Harvey as a pig. Imagine that.
Even more interesting was Jean-Luc’s knowledge and description of the current state of Epstein’s operation. Epstein’s new chief recruiter was a Russian-born twenty-something-year-old woman named Svetlana. According to Brunel, she was using her connections to import young girls into the United States under the pretense that they were models.
While many media accounts have hinted that a primary purpose of Epstein’s enterprise was to attract young females and lend them out to powerful people in order for him to hold these sexual encounters over their heads as blackmail, that was not really the case. The primary, if not exclusive, purpose of the operation was Epstein’s personal sexual gratification. If some of his friends liked what they saw and wanted to partake, Epstein would share with a select few. For those who participated, it incidentally provided ammunition for Epstein to hold over their heads if he ever wanted to, but despite all the speculation, there has been no recovered evidence that he actually used any of this sexual information against anyone in order to get something out of them. Maybe the knowledge that he could have done that was enough. Maybe it was also enough to influence his pals without his having to threaten them explicitly.
Either way, Jean-Luc verified what we thought was true: Epstein’s so-called jailing in Florida had not changed the essence of who he was, only the way he operated. Jail had had no effect on the number of cult followers. The devotion of his past and current female followers was reminiscent of the Manson family at its peak.
Very seldom were we able to infiltrate Epstein’s cult or “turn” anyone for even a period of time against the operation to reveal its hidden secrets and inner workings. Even those who had freed themselves and were no longer disciples were hypnotized by the power of their leader and reluctant to cooperate. For some, the resistance was driven purely by fear. For others, despite being severely damaged, their resistance came from their having felt indebted to Epstein as well as their unspoken oath to never betray him.
Here we were at this pivotal time when Jean-Luc, a long-standing, high-ranking member of the Epstein team, was divulging incriminating information about the leader and the “family.” Why was he doing this? Before this in-person meeting, I believed he was really a planted infiltrator working for Epstein to learn what he could about our investigation.
After the meeting, I felt differently. If he was an Epstein spy, he had crossed the line in the amount of information that he had shared with us, including firsthand accounts of Epstein engaging in sex with minors both inside and outside of the U.S.—describing nothing less than an international sex scheme. At some point, Jeffrey had miscalculated something. Either he misapprehended his friend’s allegiance, or if Jean-Luc was meeting with us at Epstein’s direction, then Epstein had performed a poor cost-benefit analysis.
The ultimate test of which side of the fence Jean-Luc was on was to see where he wanted to go from here. Was he cooperating with our investigation or did he have other motives? Jean-Luc made it clear that his ultimate objective was to clear his name. We told him the best way to do that was to meet with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and tell them what he knew. He agreed. Stan called that office that night and explained to the prosecutor that Jean-Luc was ready to meet the next day. The interview was set up for the following morning.
No surprise, Brunel “had an emergency come up” that night and had to fly out of the country with no immediate plans to return. Sound familiar? Needless to say, he did not meet with the U.S. attorney.
* Dershowitz has consistently maintained that he is innocent of the allegations Virginia made against him. Among other things, he has pointed to records he relies on to establish he could not have been present when the events occurred, and he has suggested that Virginia may have mistaken him for someone else. Despite Dershowitz’s strong denials, Virginia remained sure of herself. This dispute has still not died. In fact, in 2019 Virginia and Dershowitz sued each other for defamation.
THIRTY-SEVEN WITNESS AFTER WITNESS
AFTER MEETING BRUNEL AND FINALLY confirming how expansive Epstein’s operation had become, we hired a team of investigators and sent them after very specifically targeted individuals whom we had identified as former victims of, recruiters for, or close friends of Jeffrey Epstein. Some of these people fell into more than one of those categories. Our goal in this part of the investigation was to find victims who were now more mature and more likely to cooperate. We had a long list of people who fit the description, but many slammed doors in our faces. With persistence, though, som
e talked. Over time, some who originally refused to speak to us began to call. Those who cooperated filled in many gaps for us. Each piece of information led to another witness with more information. The multidimensional puzzle was coming together, one piece at a time.
We also began tracking down former employees including butlers, drivers, and housekeepers. Most expressed a desire to help but would not do so out of fear. Each cited a nondisclosure agreement they had signed while under Epstein’s employ as preventing them from talking. One couple in California cried when our investigators were asking about things they had witnessed while working for Epstein. Still, they would not share details until they called the person they were designated to call in the NDA if ever approached by anyone. We were told by others that the NDA indicated that if anyone was approached by law enforcement, private investigators, or anyone, for that matter, they were to say nothing and call one of Epstein’s trusted advisors immediately. Whatever clauses it contained, they are evidently draconian enough to make the signers think twice about telling their stories. The nice California couple called the lawyer listed in the NDA, which resulted in Epstein’s lawyer calling the next day telling us they were now representing the couple and demanding that we never call them again.
Still, from Brunel, we knew that nearly everyone in Epstein’s crew had been recruited by someone else to give a “massage” and had been elevated to some higher position. With each person who cooperated, we got the names of all those before and after who had any association with Epstein, some with years of involvement in, and thus knowledge of, the Epstein organization. During the next six months we were interviewing victims from Florida, as well as from New York, California, New Mexico, and many other places.
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