by Dylan Howard
What happened next shocked the journalist:
So what happened was, it was less than five minutes, and a couple of random scenes from the thing. It was obviously surveillance tape of a bedroom and there were a couple of younger, may even have been underage, I don’t know, they were very young.
It was far away and it looked like it was coming from a wall. The camera and all that. It looked like surveillance in a TV show. So I just assumed that it was coming from a camera probably facing, on a wall.”
And there was some older men and I didn’t look at them. It was very hard to see it from afar. I wanted to, but they were definitely dealing with some sex, you know? So that was it. Then he closed it up, and took it again and saved whatever he was doing. I didn’t want to know.
I didn’t want to have the responsibility of trying to identify people so I wasn’t really interested in trying to identify people. I just wanted to look at it and verify that it was what it looked like, surveillance tapes.
Pretty disgusting. Didn’t want to be a voyeur. I’m not into that sort of thing. That was it. That was it. It was verified, and that was it.
I guess he wanted to have somebody else say that he had them. We had developed a good working relationship and he trusted me. He just wanted to verify that, because I don’t think he ever looked at the tapes until that moment because he got them from this guy in law enforcement in Palm Beach. He never, what I can gather, really was interested in the contents.
He was a straight shooter, he gave his word that he would take care of them, and that’s what he did. But he wasn’t really interested in what was going on inside.
But he’s been forced to pay more attention to it because of what broke in England with the Prince Andrew connection.
That’s also the reason, Dougan says, that he fears for his life.
“Now I have the very peculiar problem of worrying about being hunted down by MI6,” he claimed.
Chepesiuk said that during his visit, there were indeed red flags.
“John said that he noticed a car following him,” he recalled.
“Here in Moscow there’s a lot of twists and turns so if you’re moving, twisting and turning and here’s a car that’s always on your, always in sight, you begin to wonder if that car is following you.”
“John said the car was behind him right back into the city. It’s about thirty or forty kilometers. It’s way out there that the alternative airport route in Moscow. So it was a long journey to have this car in the back of you all this way.”
Dougan says he’s right to be concerned. Recarey’s sudden death in 2018—at the age of fifty—shocked those who knew him, as well as those who have followed the Epstein case.
Few people have noted, however, that he was not the only mysterious death in the Palm Beach area during that period. In April 2018, almost exactly one month before Recarey’s death, attorney Alan Ross, who represented an Epstein victim in the early civil suits, died of a similarly fast-acting cancer at age sixty-eight.
Before that, the houseman who cleaned Epstein’s sex toys, Alfredo Rodriguez, died of a fast-acting, six-month cancer in 2015, almost exactly at the same time as Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s civil case brought the Epstein story—and Prince Andrew’s part in it—back into the open. He was only sixty.
“Of course, he knew all about Prince Andrew,” Rodriguez’s widow, Patricia Dunn said at the time.
Recarey’s Floridian wife told Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales that he passed from cancer, too.
Was it just a coincidence that these three men, all in Florida, died similar deaths that seemed timed to developments in the Epstein case? Poisoning by arsenic, heavy metals, and radioactive substances are all known to cause cancer in humans.
Dougan says he’s not taking any chances. His family left behind in the United States, he wonders if he’ll ever see them again.
“Look, somebody has to expose the evil people, I guess you would say. Somebody’s gotta do it, right? And somebody has to pay the price. Am I happy that I’ve done what I’ve done? Yeah. I’m very happy with what I’ve done so far.”
“But now you’re asking me, is it worth it for me to have lost my children? I don’t know, man. I mean, no.”
With the blackmail tapes now in the Kremlin’s grasp and with the potential to circulate worldwide, some now have a lot more to lose.
CHAPTER 16
THE COCONSPIRATORS
Less than six months before the 2016 election, reporters covering the presidential campaign trail were rocked by an incoming missile: An anonymous woman listed as “Katie Johnson” filed a lawsuit in California accusing Epstein of raping her at his Manhattan home back in 1994, when she was just thirteen.
The claims were similar to those in other lawsuits that had been filed against Epstein in the past, except for one thing: Donald Trump was listed as an alleged coconspirator and fellow rapist.
The moment the lawsuit came across our collective computer screens in the newsroom of employer American Media, Inc., our team sprang into action. Author Howard summoned reporters Melissa Cronin, Doug Montero, Sharon Churcher, Gina Bacchiocchi, and Robert Hartlein to investigate.
Court documents listed Johnson’s address in Twentynine Palms, California, not far from author Cronin’s Palm Springs home. Speeding out to knock on Johnson’s door, Cronin’s mind raced with questions: Who would she find there? After covering Epstein’s crimes for years, would this be the moment to crack it all open?
Flying through the desert in her car on speakerphone with the reporting team in New York, Cronin turned onto a dusty side street. She had beaten every other reporter there. But she didn’t find Johnson. Instead, at the lawsuit’s address was a boarded-up, abandoned home. Neighbors called it a “crack house,” and said it had most recently been occupied by squatters.
Canvassing businesses in the small, windswept town, Cronin found that no one had ever heard of a “Katie Johnson,” nor knew anything about the lawsuit, Epstein, or Trump. Indeed, a “neighbor,” Danny Mira, told us that no one had lived at the home since its owner, David Stacey, died in October the year prior.
Mira said he and other neighbors had kept a close watch on the home because it was overrun by drug addicts who squatted there while Stacey was hospitalized in the final days of his life.
The neighbors, with the help of police, managed to clean up the home several months before Stacey’s death. Sharon Rose, a local Realtor, told us the property went into default shortly after Stacey’s death and was officially taken over by the bank on April 11—fifteen days before the woman filed her suit.
What’s more, the phone number the woman listed on the court documents was not connected, and she also told the court she had less than $300 to her name in savings.
It was clear the lawsuit was some kind of a red herring. Speculation ran wild: Had the Clintons planted this to smear Trump and torpedo his campaign? Had Trump planted this in a canny bit of reverse psychology? (I.e. If the suit were dismissed for being fake, other claims against him would seem fake and illegitimate as well.)
The truth was even stranger. The man behind the Katie Johnson lawsuit was a former Jerry Springer producer who called himself “Al Taylor,” a.k.a. notorious gossip peddler Norm Lubow. (Lubow was also behind a 2011 story that claimed Justin Bieber had impregnated a fan, Mariah Yeater.)
Lubow’s wingman was a conservative antiabortion donor, Steve Baer, who also happened to be a “Never Trumper.” Taylor claimed to have met Johnson and heard her story at a party several years before.
Her attorney, Tom Meagher, said she was motivated to come forward at last, with Taylor’s backing, to ensure that her rapist would not become president.
Trump’s team told author Howard the accusations in the lawsuit were “unequivocally false” and “politically motivated.” Even for Trump skeptics, the entire lawsuit seemed fishy from the start.
First, why had she filed from a nonexistent address? Why had no one seemed to have ever met her?
An attorney that represented Johnson admitted even he had trouble tracking her down. For reporters, it was just as difficult.
Journalist Emily Shugerman said Johnson’s reps promised her a video interview with the plaintiff, only to cancel on her several times. Were we all being catfished?
Armed with this information, author Howard told attorney Lisa Bloom that our own investigation was turning up red flags, and warned Bloom of a lack of corroborating evidence. These types of conversations are routine in the world of journalism, and New York Times reporters have revealed that they also warned Bloom in this case.
Bloom waded in regardless, and announced that she would unveil Johnson at a press conference in November 2016, just days before the election.
When the hour came, Johnson was nowhere to be found.
“Jane Doe has received numerous threats today. . . . She has decided she is too afraid to show her face,” Bloom told the gathered reporters. “We’re going to have to reschedule.”
The case was soon dismissed in California for procedural issues, and “Johnson” refiled in New York, only to drop it again.
Today, many still believe that the Katie Johnson suit was another case of a victim silenced by the crushing jaws of the justice system, another clever escape for Epstein and Trump.
However, our team has been unable to confirm that “Katie Johnson” ever existed. For us, the whole caper is eerily reminiscent of the conspiracy trolls that surfaced after Epstein’s death. Plant one crazy fake lawsuit about an Epstein coconspirator, and all the other potential revelations seem just as insane by association.
When approached in an effort to learn the truth about Johnson, Taylor told Howard: “You know I have details about the Clintons’ involvement in the whole Katie Johnson affair.” He refused to go on further for fear of retribution from those involved in what he characterized as a fictitious scheme.
By the time “Katie” had first appeared in 2016, however, Epstein’s real coconspirators must have been getting nervous.
Depositions in the Jane Doe case and Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawsuit continued to reveal new allegations and names on an almost weekly basis. In 2015, Giuffre’s claims against Prince Andrew had dropped a bombshell on Buckingham Palace (claims he, of course, denied).
Ever since Epstein’s 2008 plea deal secured immunity for his “unnamed co-conspirators,” the world had wondered who those people were. With his death in August 2019, it seemed as if the world might never know.
For Epstein victim Michelle Licata, it was chilling:
He wouldn’t have been able to commit suicide. Would he have been able to be murdered? Sure.
I mean, there are a lot of people that are just walking around like, ‘You need to shut this down. . . . He is blowing my cover,’ is what it felt like.
It was like all these people’s dirty secret started coming out one after another after another. I can see those people that are the people that are paying to keep themselves out of jail and out of prison.
Those people are like, “Look I don’t care what it takes. You need to shut this up. You need to, I don’t know, make him disappear. Make the story disappear. Make these girls be quiet.” That’s what’s happening.
I mean, it seems like they are letting us talk, but that’s what’s happening.
Will those coconspirators let the victims keep talking forever? This investigation has learned of death threats to at least one victim who spoke out recently.
In addition, victim Alicia Arden told us that she fears she has been blacklisted from working in the entertainment world since filing her police report.
“I feel that I may have been blacklisted by Jeffrey Epstein’s network. I thought, did someone say something? ‘Oh we don’t want to work with Alicia, because if we do anything to her, she’ll go file a police report.’ So I thought that that could have blacklisted me a little,” she told author Cronin.
“Because the girls that you see now, that have other Hollywood predators in the news, I don’t see them working very much. They’ve brought up what happened to them, and they’ve talked about what happened to them, and they’ve been blacklisted. Why shouldn’t we be able to come out and talk about that?”
Meanwhile, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, at least, has vowed to continue the fight to bring coconspirators to justice.
On the day of Epstein’s death, Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman released a statement that said: “To those brave young women who have already come forward and to the many others who have yet to do so, let me reiterate that we remain committed to standing for you, and our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment—which included a conspiracy count—remains ongoing.”
Attorney Gloria Allred revealed to our team:
When I was in court while we were waiting for the court hearing to begin, I spoke with the United States Attorney, Mr. Berman, before the hearing began, and I introduced him to my client in the courtroom, and he did assure them in my presence and he assured me that they are continuing their investigation of any potential co-conspirators.
We should always keep in mind that when Mr. Epstein was indicted in this latest proceeding, there also in the indictment was not only the indictment of Mr. Epstein but the indictment also talked about unnamed co-conspirators. So even before his death, the Justice Department was interested in that.
And it maybe that now that he is deceased, more victims will be more willing to speak about who may have been in that chain to recruit them, to manage them, to pay them.
Allred also noted that as the search for evidence continues, it may turn up new names—and more proof.
“I understand there’s a grand jury that has been looking into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death,” she told us.
“There are many civil cases that are and will be ongoing, seeking discovery, seeking to find out the truth, and then there’s the criminal investigation, which is probably more powerful than anything else, because the United States government has more resources than anyone else has.
“So I don’t think any businessperson or celebrity or powerful man should rest easy and think, “Oh, well, there’s not enough evidence.”
“Well, maybe there is.”
Indeed, two weeks after Epstein’s death, authorities in France announced that they were launching their own investigation into sex crimes that might have occurred in Epstein’s Paris home. In September 2019, they raided the posh apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, as well as the home and offices of his associate, modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel was named as a coconspirator in the unsealed Virginia Roberts Giuffre documents. He founded the MC2 modeling agency in 2005, reportedly with $1 million in seed money from Epstein.
Phone messages to Epstein from Brunel, found in Epstein’s Palm Beach home and obtained by this team, suggest that Brunel may have connected Epstein with young models. The undated messages from Brunel to Epstein, as captured by Epstein’s assistants, read:
He just did a good one . . . She spoke to me and said, “I love Jeffrey.”
Jean-Luc “is in serious conversation about Alina’s butt and he needs your precision.”
“He has a teacher for you to teach you how to speak Russian. She is 2X8 years old not blonde. Lessons are free and you can have your 1st today if you call.”
“Jean Luc spoke to the doctor about your symptoms. It’s Bratislavian various. It can be cured but you have to move. It can cause atrophy of the muscle which can shorten your sex life.”
The day we submitted this manuscript to the publisher, Brunel announced that he was willing to work with French prosecutors. On that day, his location was still unknown.
Homayra Sellier, the president of sex-trafficking-prevention organization Innocence in Danger, was behind the push for the investigation in France.
She explained:
We had women who came forward and they wanted to have juridical help to see what could be done with their testimo
nies, with their stories in France,” she said, “in order to be a good citizen and to respect their duty as a mother, as a woman, as a citizen. So, they were guided to our juridical team, and they were forwarded at the discretion of the prosecutors and those who are doing the investigation.
In general terms, I believe that one of them concerns Mr. Epstein. Maybe also more, the other partners, or the other friends of his.
From my understanding, when he was operating in Paris, in France, it was very very very similar to the way he was operating in the rest of the world. He had friends who were recruiting young girls for modeling. Many of them were recruited to do those so-called massages, and they were going to his house. Then, once they were there . . . it was not a massage; at least, not for all of them.
I think his activity in France must have been quite big. I do think he had friends, maybe others who were putting him in touch with models.
Honestly, I think what happened in France is very, very, very similar to what happened in the US. You know this black book that was found or given or whatever? In that black book, there are apparently over sixty, seventy names of French people and there is a big number of women who are named as masseuses. But this is very similar to those who were going to his house in New York. So, it’s the same operating system because it worked for him there, why would he change it?
According to Selliers, coconspirators around the globe could be exposed.
“I am not sure that the investigations will stop with the US and France,” she said. “I had a call from some people who live in Belgium, and they were saying that people would like to expand the course of action in Belgium. Maybe then Germany. There were German models who were friends of Mr. Epstein, and who were going in his house, going to his parties. Even hosting parties with him.”
Criminal investigations are not the only hope for future justice, however.
Several victims have already filed civil lawsuits in the hopes of getting closure—or cash—from Epstein’s estate. Gloria Allred, Lisa Bloom, and Spencer Kuvin all represent victims continuing the fight, and each said that Epstein’s coconspirators should not think for a second that they’re off the hook.