Epstein

by Dylan Howard

  This is not a case of guilt by association. All of those men insist they had no idea what Epstein was doing. But ultimately, there were people who knew what was going on and could have had stopped Epstein’s exploitation . . . and no one did.

  “They either indulge in these behaviors, or they like that someone does,” Goldman said of the uber-rich. “Why hasn’t been Bill Gates been forced to answer why he was on the Lolita Express? Why is Leslie Wexner still CEO of The Limited? Anyone that allegedly facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes should serve a minimum of twenty years in jail. I do not think those people are redeemable. There’s no way to rehabilitate them.”

  Epstein’s former friend Kornbluth, meanwhile, suggests that powerful men are conditioned to believe that presumption of guilt “does not apply” to them.

  No one says “no” to them. No one. The idea that these men would have sex with an underage girl, and that that would cause them any trouble, any blowback, it doesn’t occur.”

  Worst of all, Goldman said, are the British aristocracy.

  “I think that the French and the English and the aristocracy of Europe are deviants,” she told Marc Lupo.

  At least one is.

  CHAPTER 6

  RANDY ANDY

  Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were playing a dangerous game, cultivating famous friends in the name of an international blackmail and intelligence scheme. The Duke of York—also known as Prince Andrew, eighth in line to the British throne—was their ultimate trophy.

  According to Maxwell family friend Laura Goldman, Epstein came into Prince Andrew’s life because Ghislaine Maxwell “became friendly” with his scandal-scarred ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.

  “Fergie introduced Ghislaine to Prince Andrew and then Ghislaine introduced Prince Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein,” she said.

  Prince Andrew had divorced Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson in 1996, and was living it up as one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Fergie was front-page tabloid fodder herself, photographed having her toes sucked by a Texan millionaire in what was the royal family’s biggest scandal ever—at least, at the time.

  Fergie stayed in touch with Epstein well after the divorce. In 2005, she left a phone message for Epstein at his Palm Beach home, obtained by this team, that notes she was “expecting” his call. In 2014, she admitted she’d taken cash from Epstein to help settle her postdivorce debt.

  Meanwhile, Andrew was working as a British trade envoy, tasked with using his position to promote British business and drive investment around the world. It was a role he relished, because it also catered to the fast-paced lifestyle to which he had always been accustomed. He even earned the nickname “Air Miles Andy” because of his jet-setting. As he traveled the world, little did he know, he would soon overtake his ex as the most scandalous royal ever.

  Andy also earned another nickname because of his bad boy behavior: “Randy Andy, or “Handy Andy.” In Epstein, the raucous royal found a kindred spirit.

  Their bond became so tight, Epstein and Ghislaine were invited as guests of honor to a June 2000 party at Windsor Castle, the Queen’s weekend home.

  Called “Dance of the Decades,” the party was the most exclusive royal event in years, celebrating the birthdays of Andrew, who was turning forty, Prince Charles, who was fifty, Princess Margaret’s seventieth, and Prince William’s eighteenth. Obviously, the Queen and Prince Phillip were on hand to celebrate.

  A few months later, Andrew was again partying with Epstein, this time at Heidi Klum’s Halloween party in New York, with Ghislaine as his date. The costume she chose for accompanying one of Britain’s highest royals? A prostitute.

  In December, Andrew and Epstein returned to England for a weekend at the royal Sandringham estate—the Queen’s country home. After Christmas, the pair was then photographed together in Phuket, Thailand, relaxing on a luxury yacht and surrounded by topless girls. Queen Elizabeth was not amused.

  Still, the scandal didn’t end Epstein and Andrew’s friendship.

  A few months later, Andrew made the long trip out to Epstein’s New Mexico Zorro Ranch. Deidre Stratton personally waited on his every need during that visit, and spoke publicly for the first time to reporter Katy Forrester, one of the collaborators on this book.

  I had to serve him. I’m guessing 2001. Three days, maybe.

  There were pictures of him with Ghislaine and him and Jeffrey in the house. I had been told that Jeffrey and Andrew went way back.

  You know, at that time he was very, very pleasant. You could understand his lifestyle. We put him in a three bedroom, it’s called the Lodge. It’s really very nice and the setting of it was gorgeous. There was this beautiful deck that overlooked this great kind of valley that was really stunning, and it was nice enough that they sat outside. So that would indicate late summer, early fall.

  But that’s where he stayed and his bodyguard stayed down at what we called Ranch Central. For him to just be out on his own, I’m sure was very different for him.

  And of course, we all felt like, “What do we do? We’re like fish out of water. Do we curtsy to this man?” And we were told no, because we’re not British subjects. So we didn’t have to show any particular, you know, whatever to him.

  He wasn’t married at the time, and I thought he was very gracious. He was so gracious. He didn’t act appalled at all that here he was put up in this remote manufactured home out in the sticks and given someone like me to serve him. Which, I’m no footman. I guarantee that. And so I just thought he kind of thought it was novel.

  I offered to come up there and fix his breakfast. So he goes, “No, I want to try.” So when I got up there later to tidy up, you could smell burnt bacon. And he’s like, “I didn’t do so well.”

  He had a croissant with cream cheese or something. But I remember him trying to cook his own breakfast. Isn’t that cute? And he couldn’t even fry bacon.

  I do recall one other thing. I had to serve him some kind of food and I used garlic in it. Later, he told me that as a child he ate a whole bulb of garlic, and since that time garlic just turns him nauseated. I do recall that, and he was very good natured about that. I bet he was hungry, but he was good-natured.

  I don’t know what he did. I don’t recall him being very sporty.

  Still, Andrew found other means of entertainment.

  “At the time, Jeffrey had this, supposedly she was a neurosurgeon, quite young. Not young, young, young, but beautiful, young and brilliant,” Stratton remembered.

  “She stayed in the home with Andrew and at one point we had all these different teas that you could pick the tea that you wanted. She asked me to find one that would make him more horny, that he hadn’t been interested in her. I’m guessing because she understood her job was to entertain him.

  “Jeffrey probably had her on retainer and she knew what her job would be. Should be, you know, to make these people happy. That’s what I thought. I do recall them sharing at least one dinner.”

  Why would Epstein have invited a British royal out to the middle of nowhere, and set him up with a strange woman?

  Stratton supposed, “I have read where the island was set up with cameras where Jeffrey could tape these men with their underage people and use it as blackmail. I mean that’s the oldest game in the book, isn’t it?”

  Around the same time, a few months before or after Prince Andrew’s New Mexico stay, Ghislaine and Epstein flew to London to meet up with their favorite British party pal. Along for the ride, according to allegations, was seventeen-year-old Virginia Roberts.

  “That first time in London I was so young,” Roberts would later tell a reporter for the National Enquirer. “Ghislaine woke me up in the morning and said, ‘You’re going to meet a prince today.’ I didn’t know at that point that I was going to be trafficked to that prince.”

  According to Roberts, Ghislaine stated something to the effect of, “He’s coming back to the house and I want you to do for him what you do for Epstein.” Late
r, Roberts would claim that she had been Epstein’s personal sex slave for months at the time.

  Roberts alleged the encounter with Prince Andrew took place at Ghislaine’s London home.

  A photo taken at the same location would later emerge, showing Prince Andrew with his arm around Virginia’s bare midriff, and a grinning Ghislaine in the background.

  Roberts continued:

  She asked Andrew how old he thought I was. He guessed 17. They all kind of laughed about it, and Ghislaine made a joke that I was getting “too old” for Jeffrey.

  He was groping me. He touched my breasts. He touched my ass. He was not my type, but I’d been trained not only to not show my emotions, but to do what [was] wanted.

  He started licking my toes, between my toes, the arches of my feet.

  He proceeded to make love to me. . . . He wasn’t rude. It wasn’t like rape, but it wasn’t like love, either. It was more like, “I’m getting my business done.”

  Andrew didn’t use a condom during their encounter, she claimed: “Jeffrey knew I was on the pill.”

  To wrap up the night, Roberts alleged that she and Andrew took a bath together, and that Epstein paid her $10,000 the following day.

  There was more horror to come.

  According to Roberts, there was another, equally terrifying encounter, one that began with the prince arriving “smiling ear-to-ear.”

  He looked like a kid whose parents were taking him to Disney World. I took him upstairs to the “dungeon.”

  He was fondling me and we undressed and he lay on the table facedown. I did my normal routine, which was to start with the feet, up the calves, tickling the thighs, up the buttocks, up the back. On this occasion I don’t think I made it up to his shins when he flipped over.

  I was just another person he was bedding. He couldn’t have cared less about me as a young woman. . . . He was being treated to sex for which someone else was paying.

  From the snickering noises he was making, he was really enjoying the whole thing, but I felt like a total prostitute. He never even said, ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I was there for just one purpose.

  Another young girl under Epstein’s control, Johanna Sjoberg, claimed to have been present during that encounter as well, and recounted a grotesque scene: Prince Andrew using a puppet of himself to grope the young girls’ breasts.

  “He thought it was funny because it was him,” Sjoberg stated in a 2016 deposition, obtained in our investigation.

  During another trip, at Epstein’s private island, Roberts’s description of a third encounter with Prince Andrew was even more debauched.

  She claimed:

  A group of Russian girls who didn’t speak a word of English turned up with a modeling agent who was a friend of Jeffrey’s. That night there was a dinner and Andrew was there. He said ‘hi’ to me.

  Jeffrey directed us with hand gestures because the Russian girls didn’t speak English. We were told to start kissing and touching and to use sex toys on each other. The girls obviously had been trained. Jeffrey and the prince were laughing . . . and then they undressed and then I performed a sex act on them—Jeffrey first and then Andrew. It was disgusting. There was no pleasure in it.

  Prince Andrew left the following night.

  Buckingham Palace strongly disputes Roberts’s claims, as does Prince Andrew. In 2015, a judge ordered them to be struck from the court record in a legal case that she had filed.

  “I just wish to reiterate and to reaffirm the statements which have already been made on my behalf by Buckingham Palace,” the prince stated at the time, denying her allegations. “My focus is on my work.”

  However, certified voice stress expert Michael Sylvestre, who analyzed audio of Andrew’s statement, concluded the prince showed “extreme” tension while making the statement.

  “He’s lying. Andrew knows the statement made by Buckingham Palace was not true,” Sylvestre claimed.

  Sylvestre ran the clip through the DecepTech Voice Stress Analysis Machine, a computerized version of the Psychological Stress Evaluation, which is used by more than fifty law enforcement agencies in the United States. The test is said to be superior to a conventional polygraph. The machine senses stress levels in the voice; frequent “peaks” on the readout indicate that the speaker is being dishonest.

  The DecepTech Voice Stress Analysis Machine prints out elevated lines on a chart when it detects deception. The readout of Andrew’s evaluation, Sylvester says, is clear: “The deception started pretty much from the beginning. The chart shows he was definitely not reiterating or reaffirming what was said by the palace.”

  Sharing the same conclusion is body language and speech expert Susan Constantine, who noted that Andrew failed to mention what he was “reiterating or reaffirming”—a sign that he’s trying to deceive.

  “A deceptive person naturally leaves out incriminating information and won’t speak of it or put himself into the event. He also refused to describe the sexual allegations,” she said.

  “Historically, with people who are trying to be deceptive, especially when it comes to sexual offenses, they won’t name the crime.

  “A truthful person would say, ‘I did not have sex with the person,’ because they know they are innocent.”

  It wouldn’t be the last statement of denial that Prince Andrew would make in regard to Epstein.

  CHAPTER 7

  DIARY OF A SEX SLAVE

  Prince Andrew wasn’t the only associate of Jeffrey Epstein to cruelly take advantage of one of the financier’s teens. By this time, Epstein had developed an entire roster of young, vulnerable, women that he pimped out to his powerful contacts as a means of gaining influence and leverage.

  One of these sex slaves was Virginia Roberts.

  Like many of the girls targeted by Epstein, Roberts had experienced a rough childhood: When she was twelve, a close family friend sexually abused her. She developed an eating disorder and ran away from home and started living on the streets at age thirteen.

  Virginia told the story of her dark early years in a secret handwritten diary obtained by this investigation.

  “I was on the streets,” Roberts began.

  There, she wrote: “I was picked up by a 67-year-old man who did exactly what Jeffrey did with me, abuse and violate my youthfulness.”

  That man—a far cry from the hero he initially seemed to be—was Ron Eppinger, boss of the modeling agency Perfect 10. His business was actually a front for international sex trafficking, and he soon made Roberts his personal “employee.”

  Roberts claimed Eppinger got her hooked on opioids, the highly addictive class of drugs that include heroin, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and pain relievers such as oxycodone, Vicodin, codeine, and morphine. Under his drug-fueled spell, according to Roberts, Eppinger committed “outrageous acts of hedonism.”

  Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Roberts described, Eppinger “gifted” her to a wealthy client named Charlie, who continued the abuse and degradation.

  The FBI eventually raided his home, and Roberts’s father arrived to save her. Eppinger later pleaded guilty to charges of alien smuggling for prostitution, interstate travel for prostitution, and money laundering.

  Reeling from the nightmare, Roberts checked into the Growing Together substance abuse treatment facility in Lake Worth, Florida.

  There, the horror continued. Growing Together was “the most controversial drug-treatment program in Palm Beach County,” Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper wrote in a 1990 investigative report. Former patients claimed they experienced “torture” and “brainwashing,” and left with “PTSD like a Vietnam War veteran.” A later New York Times investigation found “physical and sexual abuse appears to be common there.”

  “I still can’t get the screams out of my head from hearing kids dragged down the hall by the hair on their heads,” a former graduate of the program told the Broward Palm Beach New Times in 2004. “The crimes that were committed there have never been told in public.
Nobody has ever put these people on trial.”

  “Could things like this happen in an institutional setting? Yes,” Growing Together Executive Director Pat Allard told the paper, while denying the charges. “Would it blemish the institution? Yes, it would. Would anyone condone it? Absolutely not.”

  The facility later closed.

  Roberts wrote that she was locked in a “white room” during her stay and that fights with orderlies were a regular occurrence.

  With the help of her father and brother, though, she managed to escape. Roberts slowly got back on track and decided to pursue a career in massage therapy. In the summer of 1998, she landed a job in the spa at the newly anointed Mar-a-Lago Club—owned by Donald Trump. She was optimistic about the future.

  While studying at work one day, Roberts was approached by a “striking beautiful woman” who lived a mile down the street. It was Ghislaine, and she offered the fifteen-year-old a job with “a very wealthy gentleman who was always on the lookout for a new masseuse.”

  “I agreed,” Roberts remembered, confessing that it sounded like “the legit break I had been wanting.”

  The excited young girl told her father about the encounter. Admittedly, he was skeptical, and a little confused.

  “I thought it was a job where she was just going to learn massage therapy,” he later said. “That is what she told me. I did not know it was going to be all this other stuff.”

  To make sure everything was kosher, Roberts personally brought his daughter over to Epstein’s mansion for the first visit. He discussed the situation with Ghislaine, who introduced him to Epstein.

  “He came across as a nice guy,” her father would claim. “I had no idea what he would end up doing. If I had known differently, I would never have let her work there.”

  Satisfied, the hoodwinked father left Roberts in the hands of the sex predators. Wasting no time, Ghislaine brought the aspiring masseuse to Epstein’s master bathroom.

  “Bedazzled by the décor, I shook out of my entranced state and tried not to gawk at the naked man that lay atop a massage table,” Roberts wrote. “I acted calm and cool. [Ghislaine] introduced Jeffrey Epstein as a multi-­billion-dollar banker and stock broker that took delight in a massage at least once a day.”