by Dylan Howard
Ghislaine then showed her the ropes, starting at the toes and working her way up Epstein’s body.
“They really had me convinced they were smart, intellectual people wanting to help me learn a trade,” Roberts explained.
Everything changed, however, when Epstein rolled over. First, Ghislaine took her own top off and briefly pressed her chest against Epstein, Roberts alleged. Next, Ghislaine started undressing the teen, who was too stunned to resist.
“I was asked to indulge Jeffrey in oral sex while Ghislaine caressed me from behind, cupping my small breasts and feeling me inside,” Roberts later described in one of her secret diaries.
“I was inclined to scream out of humiliation for being so damned naïve.”
She added:
Jeffrey moaned out of delight and pulled up my chin to look at me then guided my hips to sit on top of him. He next forcibly entered me and used his hips to gratify his sexual needs. As soon as it was over, I quickly got dressed, and not sure how to keep my composure, just kept quiet. They both thanked me for a job well done as I had passed my trial.
Epstein paid Virginia $200 for her two-hour session and had an employee drive her home.
“I was now a hired prostitute,” she later described.
Stuck in a “state of shock,” the embarrassed teenager didn’t dare tell her father. Her previous confession about the family friend, and her subsequent time with a sex trafficker, had torn her family apart. She had finally rebounded into something “normal.” So when the offer to return to the mansion came in, Epstein and Ghislaine seemed, at the time, the lesser of two evils.
For Roberts, escaping a life as the personal sex slave of the rich and powerful seemed inescapable.
Over the next few weeks, the pair thoroughly abused Roberts under the pretext of “domestic sex slave” training, she wrote.
“It was everything down to how to give a blowjob, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants,” she claimed. “A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself . . . and then there’s Jeffrey who’s telling you, ‘I want it this way, go slower.’”
(Ghislaine has strongly denied Roberts’s allegations, but she certainly did train staffers in some ways. This team obtained a phone message from inside Epstein’s home that recorded a call from Ghislaine. Epstein’s assistant wrote that the message was “would be helpful to have [redacted] come to Palm Beach today to stay here and help train new staff with Ghislaine.”)
As for Epstein, however, Roberts was hardly the first victim. She was, though, perhaps the pedophile’s pet project, and soon she became their most socially valuable asset.
According to Roberts’s recollections, the trio moved between Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions, where she was given her own luxurious rooms at each property. Their daily activities began to include the use of sex toys, Roberts claimed, which were kept piled in a laundry basket. Roberts said she also was initiated into sadism and masochism, otherwise known as S&M, the practice of taking or causing abuse during sex.
“It was basically every day and was like going to school,” she wrote in the diaries.
“You just become this numb figure who refuses to feel and refuses to speak. All you do is obey.”
Roberts was under the impression that her masters eventually planned to hook her up with one of their rich and powerful friends so she would be “set up for life.” She had no clue that she would be pimped out as the sexual plaything to many individuals in Epstein and Maxwell’s social circle.
Shortly before Roberts’s sixteenth birthday, she wrote in the diaries, Epstein and Ghislaine broke the news.
“They wanted me to be able to cater to all the needs of the men they were going to send me to,” Roberts claimed. “They wanted me to produce things for them in addition to performing sex on men. They told me to pay attention to the details about what the men wanted, so I could report back to them.”
When Roberts looked openly confused, Epstein explained to the child that he wanted to “have something on them.” More than just a sex slave, he was now making Roberts a cog in his personal spy wheel.
“Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would ‘owe him;’ they would ‘be in his pocket,’” Roberts alleged.
She supposed, “Epstein thought he could get leniency if he was ever caught doing anything illegal, or more so that he could escape trouble altogether.”
To get her started, Epstein and Ghislaine sent Roberts to Little St. James with “a professor” and told her to take care of him as she had Epstein, she wrote in the diary. After receiving a favorable report from the john, the diabolical pair then continued sending Roberts into the dens of predators around the world. She started making $400 an hour working for Epstein, she wrote, and moved in with him full-time.
“I mean, in some ways, we were a little fucked up family,” Virginia later told the Miami Herald. “It was, ‘Jeffrey needs to have sex at least seven times a day . . . but in the meantime, we’re gonna sit back and have some popcorn while you’re giving a blowjob and watching Sex and the City. It was just a really screwed up kind of little family unit.”
Epstein and Ghislaine took her on wild shopping sprees, had her meals prepared by a personal chef, and even celebrated her sweet sixteen on the orgy island.
They also offered to double her salary for recruiting more girls, she alleged.
“Jeffrey would send me out to go talk to pretty girls, the younger the better,” Roberts wrote. “I would offer them money to come meet my gentlemen friend and tell them I’d show them how to massage. . . . I never brought back a girl that ever said no, or didn’t want to participate in an erotic massage for money.”
Roberts’s diary corroborates the fact that documenting the underage exploits of the rich and powerful was a major component of Epstein’s master plan. He had installed security cameras in every room of his properties, and throughout his Caribbean island. Epstein also employed full-time AV techs to monitor dozens of video feeds.
“Kill two birds with one stone Jeffrey thought,” Roberts wrote. “Free porn to share with his pedophile friends and when the occasion called for it, a security system all at one expense.”
Meanwhile, Epstein continued to maximize his assets by sending his Boeing 727 into overdrive.
“It’s called Lolita Express for a reason,” Roberts wrote. “That was a vessel for him to be able to abuse girls and get away with it.”
Among the men who she claims violated her in Epstein’s mile-high club were The Simpsons creator Matt Groening (who gave her a personally inscribed sketch of Homer and Bart); model scout Jean-Luc Brunel (another reported sex trafficker who could secure passports for minors); cofounder of MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, Marvin Minsky; and former US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. (“I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre,” the Maine senator has denied. At the time of this writing, Groening has not issued a public denial. Brunel is missing. Minsky is dead.)
As for Epstein’s friend Donald Trump, Roberts wrote that he was a not-unfrequent presence in their twisted world, but she never saw him indulge: “I didn’t physically see him have sex with any of the girls. . . . I can’t say who he had sex with in his whole life or not, but I just know it wasn’t with me when I was with other girls.” In a later court deposition she even denied that he’d ever flirted with her.
By late 2001, Ghislaine began shuttling Roberts around in a privately-owned helicopter. Even more discreet than the Lolita Express, the helicopter created still more opportunities for abuse.
In court documents unsealed in July 2019, Roberts alleged that she was forced to give “massages” to then-twenty-five-year-old filmmaker and environmentalist Alexandra Cousteau, the granddaughter of famous French explorer Jacques Cousteau.
Roberts said that Epstein “instigated that she and I reenact as lovers in lesbian acts of foreplay and penetration” with a strap-on penis.
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�The allegations by Virginia Giuffre née Roberts regarding Ms. Cousteau are 100 percent false,” Cousteau’s lawyer wrote in an email statement soon after the court files were released. “Ms. Cousteau never had intimate relations with Giuffre, and does not even recall ever having met such a person.”
(Cousteau does have, however, links to one of Epstein’s closest business partners: Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Epstein had a framed photo of “MBS” in his Manhattan mansion and often claimed the controversial Saudi royal had visited his property there many times, these authors can reveal. In 2019, it was reported that MBS ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of Epstein’s infamous pal Adnan Khashoggi. In September 2019, Cousteau was named as one of the featured speakers at a conference sponsored by the United Nations and a foundation headed by MBS.)
Meanwhile, shortly before Roberts’s eighteenth birthday, it was time for her to meet Prince Andrew.
As Roberts tells it, it was the darkest time of her life. The young girl had been inhumanely used and abused, and had even suffered a miscarriage. She hadn’t known she was pregnant, she wrote, or who the dead baby’s father was. Epstein had promised to cut back her hours if she brought in more girls, she claimed, but the fresh faces only dragged the weary working girl into more threesomes.
Roberts would soon age out of Epstein’s preferred bracket—women fourteen to seventeen. According to Roberts, though, they still could make use of her.
“Ghislaine starts talking to me about how I would feel about having a child,” Virginia recently alleged, claiming that she was offered $200,000 a month and a house in exchange for the baby.
The idea terrified her. After years of being emotionally, physically, and mentally degraded, Roberts had reached rock bottom. She began plotting her escape.
Roberts managed to convince Epstein and Ghislaine to send her to Thailand in search of legitimate massage training. Epstein agreed under one condition: that she bring back “a Thai girl.”
In the summer of 2002, Roberts fled to Thailand, where she met and fell in love with martial artist Robert Giuffre. Newly empowered and determined to begin her own life on the other side of the world, the girl made one final call to her captors, Ghislaine and Epstein.
“He said, ‘Have a nice life,’ and hung up,” Virginia said of her brief goodbye phone call with Epstein. “I thought, ‘I’m off the hook, I’m off the chain, I can go, I can live free.’”
Roberts and her new man eloped, moved to Australia, and started a family.
Still, despite her wish for freedom, the nightmare wasn’t over.
In 2007, while pregnant with her second child, Virginia claimed she received a call from Ghislaine.
“I was like, ‘How the hell did she just find me?’” Roberts wondered. “‘I’ve been out of their lives for so long.’”
According to Roberts, by then going by the name Virginia Giuffre, Ghislaine wanted to know if she had “talked to anybody.” The former sex slave informed her that she hadn’t, she claimed. Seemingly satisfied with her answer, Ghislaine ordered her to “stay quiet.”
“The next day Jeffrey calls me, with his lawyer on the phone, and he asks me the same questions,” Giuffre recently alleged.
Concerned, the new mother wondered what was going on. The next day, the FBI called and asked about her sexual history with Epstein. She demanded the officer verify his employment.
“About six months later, I get a knock at the door and it’s the Australian Federal Police,” she said. (The Australian Federal Police is like the FBI, the national and principal federal law enforcement agency.)
Officials gave her a detailed document about what Jeffrey had done, and how she’d been identified as a victim: “Jane Doe #3.”
Remarkably, more than nine thousand miles from Epstein and Ghislaine, she was still so frightened by the long-arm of the lawless pedophile, she refused to assist the officers.
Little did she know that a massive investigation was unfolding across the world in her home state of Florida—one that could finally bring Epstein to justice.
CHAPTER 8
DONALD TRUMP AND THE PALM BEACH PEDOPHILE
Palm Beach in the late eighties and nineties was the perfect playground for a man like Jeffrey Epstein: decadent, debaucherous, and deeply corrupted.
“I spent a lot of time in Palm Beach at that time,” said Maxwell family friend Laura Goldman.
She continued:
Palm Beach is a live-and-let-live kind of place. Lots of rich libertarian types. I don’t think that they mixed with their neighbors, because they didn’t want their neighbors to know what they were doing. I think the police force down there is pretty ineffective. We’ve seen that they are. I think that people are there on vacation, they didn’t want to rock the boat.
I spent a lot of time in Palm Beach at that time. I’d been to their house on Brillo Way. It was kind of not my scene and there were lots of young ladies. Even though I was much younger then, they were even younger than me, and I really couldn’t compete in that scene.
Now I feel bad because I got a sense that something was off. I didn’t really pay attention to what was off. Now, when I see what’s happened to all these girls, I feel incredibly terrible that I didn’t ride by more often, like a bike crusader, and stop it.
Everybody knew that he was looking for young girls. But I didn’t realize, one, that they were young, that young, and I didn’t realize that he was trafficking them. But it doesn’t surprise me that the Palm Beach police looked away.
People don’t understand about Palm Beach in the nineties and at that time, there was no South Beach. So, Palm Beach was where all the decadent people went. The Palm Beach police kind of looked the other way.
I visited with other people Jeffrey Epstein’s house in the late nineties. I noticed that it wasn’t the grandest house on the block, but it was the most private.
Another visitor, Epstein’s former attorney Alan Dershowitz, told this investigation’s reporter, Jen Heger, that the home held many secrets.
Insisting he knew nothing of Epstein’s illegal escapades, Dershowitz described, “In his house in Palm Beach, there were two stairways. One of them, you were not allowed to go up.”
“He had locked doors,” Dershowitz continued. “I was never in that part of the house. The same thing is true in his house in New York.”
Those doors were finally opened, however, during a later police raid on the home. After years of relentlessly hounding the local authorities, these authors were able to obtain the official video. The following is a description of its content:
Many guests entered the home through the kitchen, a bright and airy space with a black and white checkered floor and cozy bar stools around the island. Heading through there to a back staircase, however, it got literally darker.
Carpeted in lilac and bound by white walls, the staircase spiraled up to the upper level, home to several bedrooms, bathrooms, and of course, the massage room.
It all begins innocently enough. At the top of the staircase is a landing with pink carpeting and a comfy pink couch. There’s a photograph of palm trees and the ocean.
Turning left, you enter a den of several tiny bedrooms—rooms scarcely big enough to hold both a bed and a dresser, but bright and bedecked with cheap art. In nearly every room, the only item of clothing to see was a white robe. In another bedroom, there was a teddy bear.
Moving back across the landing and to the right, the atmosphere changes. First, there is an antechamber of sorts, a dark room with chairs, similar to a waiting area. On the wall, a close-up photo shows hands tightly gripping someone’s leg, fingers digging into the flesh. On another wall hung a photo so graphic it was the only image blurred from the police video. [Attorney Spencer Kuvin would later tell our team that one of his clients, a victim of Epstein, remembered one photo “of a young girl who could have been no more than twelve or thirteen years old with her panties pulled down around her ankles bent over.”] Dominat
ing another wall was a 3-D rendering of a woman’s torso, seen from the back, and cut off just below and above the rear end. The curves protrude inches from the wall.
Moving deeper into the next room, that same rear view is re-created in a painting. Another painting shows a nude woman lying down with her legs spread, dark pubic hair at the center of the frame; her breasts, very small.
Moving deeper still: the massage room. Immediately upon entry, there is a large ink drawing of Ghislaine smiling softly and looking toward the massage table, as if she presides over what would happen there. Below her, a small model airplane calls to mind the Lolita Express. At the back of the room, the massage table.
There are oils, lotions, and a large vibrating “massager” (later described by multiple victims as an instrument of sexual assault). More stacked towels, more hanging robes. His bedroom is nearby.
In Epstein’s personal quarters, the “art” becomes even more disturbing. One photograph captures a wet woman in the shower, from behind. A line drawing depicts a naked woman’s torso from the side. Yet another, directly from the front. Yet another, a naked woman curled in the fetal position. Not far away, stacks of personal stationery bearing his name.
In a closet filled with men’s clothes, dozens of small, personal photographs are framed, collage-style on the walls. Most show young women. Most of them are topless. There’s also a picture of Epstein and a brunette standing in front of the United States Presidential Seal, in what appears to be the White House briefing room.
Still more candid photos of female companions bedeck the walls of his personal gym, downstairs and off the pool. One image shows a blonde toddler, missing teeth, grinning into the camera as she climbs out of a pool. Another, a blonde toddler in a dress. Still another, a young blonde girl with no pubic hair stretched out naked and apparently unconscious on a beach. An extremely tight closeup of a female rear end.