American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  And of course, there was Donald Trump, who had no fewer than sixteen phone numbers beside his name in Epstein’s black book. Within the context of their highly transactional relationships, Trump’s friendship with Epstein struck onlookers as a significant mutually beneficial connection. In the nineties, Trump needed friends. He had just gone belly-up in Atlantic City. With personal liabilities exceeding $800 million, he had just been forced to sell off his three Atlantic City casinos and the Plaza Hotel, along with his yacht, the Trump Princess.

  In addition to helping Trump get back on his feet, Epstein seemed to be the apotheosis of a latter-day version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy ideal—surrounded by gorgeous young women, bespoke private planes, and spectacular residences, all while Ghislaine orchestrated a never-ending series of movable feasts—on the Upper East Side, at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, in the Caribbean—at which Epstein would entertain and play courtier to presidents, movie stars, brutal dictators, world-class scientists, Wall Street billionaires, and the like. And he’d have sex with two, three, or more young girls almost every day.

  Trump fit right in. Jeffrey and Ghislaine invited him everywhere—and Trump reciprocated. At one highly selective party in 1992 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, the New York Times reported, no fewer than twenty-eight attractive young women were flown in to participate in a calendar-girl competition as entertainment. The organizer, George Houraney, who ran American Dream Enterprise, a small Florida company that staged a calendar-girl contest and other events, was appalled to learn that there were only two male guests—Trump and Epstein.16

  “Donald, this is supposed to be a party with V.I.P.s,” Houraney told Trump, according to the Times. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein? . . . I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.”

  But Trump ignored Houraney’s warning and plowed ahead anyway. Houraney’s longtime girlfriend Jill Harth later told the New York Times that Trump groped her nonstop at a business meeting around the same time. “He was relentless,” Harth said, describing how Trump took the couple to dinner, sat beside Harth, and put his hands up her skirt all the way to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”17

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  Trump was often the center of Ghislaine’s attention, and women who entered Trump’s orbit sometimes ended up being associated with both Trump and Epstein, spending part of their time living in a Trump Tower condo and part in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago or one of Epstein’s homes.

  Among them was Russian model and beauty pageant contestant Anna Malova,18 whose journey from the world of beauty pageants and modeling to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and Epstein’s island retreat is highly suggestive in terms of how Epstein and his associates began manipulating young women.

  In the early nineties, before coming to the United States, Malova had placed well in several beauty pageants—coming in second in Miss Russia 1993 and winning the 1994 Miss Baltic Sea title later that year.19 Then in 1995 she left Moscow, spent six weeks learning English in St. Petersburg, Florida (not Russia), and was profiled in the Tampa Tribune as “reigning Miss Russia.”20 And before long, she met Donald Trump.

  Notwithstanding the fact that Trump was still married to his second wife, Marla Maples, Anna moved into a thirtieth-floor condo in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.21 There, according to an item in the New York Post, her lavish accommodations were taken care of “courtesy of an unidentified sugar daddy.”

  Not long afterward, in October 1996, Trump bought three beauty pageants from ITT Corp.: Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA.22

  A little more than a year later, in 1998, Malova competed in the Miss Universe pageant representing Russia. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Malova faltered badly when she was asked to compare Russia’s television and culture with Ghana’s—and couldn’t come up with an answer.

  Malova was stumped. “She pulled a Chernobyl,” said one observer. “She’s history.”23

  Malova made the finals anyway, but, as New York magazine noticed, there was an anomaly in the very fact she had even entered the pageant. “Oddly, Anna Malova was allowed to compete in this year’s contest (1998) even though she was Miss Russia in 1995,” the magazine reported. “According to beauty-world sources, it’s not a coincidence that the stunning Slav, who wound up a finalist in last month’s event, is a friend of Donald Trump, co-owner of the event.

  “Did the Donald pull a few strings on his old friend’s behalf? . . . While the Miss Universe camp insists that Malova won the Russian event honestly, Malova’s agent said, ‘I don’t think she was Miss Russia this year. She was Miss Russia several years ago.’”24

  When the magazine asked for documentation that Malova had won the title a second time, the Miss Universe Pageant headquarters declined to furnish it. Trump could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson said, “I haven’t heard about Trump giving any preferential treatment to Malova.”

  In the meantime, however, she spent time with both Trump and Epstein. According to documents submitted to a Florida court, flight logs showed that in February 1999, Malova, then twenty-seven, flew on board Jeffrey Epstein’s black Gulfstream “Lolita Express” with Ghislaine and Prince Andrew from Epstein’s Little Saint James (a.k.a. “Pedophile Island”) back to Florida.

  Over the next two decades, Malova cut an erratic figure. Arrested repeatedly on drug-related charges—including in 2010, criminal possession of narcotics, forgery, and criminal impersonation of a physician—she also appeared in gossip columns as the love interest of men ranging from comedian Garry Shandling to hedge fund billionaire George Soros, some forty-two years her senior.

  Anna Malova wasn’t the only woman who spent time with both Trump and Epstein. In 1997, Trump, who had just separated from Marla Maples, was photographed with Ghislaine at Ford Models’ fiftieth-anniversary party, where he ogled models throughout the evening.25

  At another event that year, according to the New Yorker, Trump, then fifty, seemed to fall for a friend of Ghislaine’s, twenty-year-old London model Anouska De Georgiou, and flew her and Ghislaine to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, after which he installed Anouska in an apartment in Trump Tower.26

  But before long, Anouska told NBC News, she was being flown to Epstein’s homes all over the world. More than twenty years later, in 2019, Anouska’s court testimony was cited in British tabloid The Sun, which alleged that she had been abused by Epstein when she was “young and idealistic.”27

  “Jeffrey Epstein manipulated me, corrupted me and sexually assaulted me,” she said, adding that the abuse was “devaluing beyond measure” and “lasted several years.”

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  Not everyone was terribly fond of Ghislaine. Christina Oxenberg had met her at a wedding years earlier and instantly found her distasteful. “I didn’t like her [Ghislaine] when I met her and I liked her less each subsequent time,” Oxenberg wrote in an email to me.

  The daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia (and sister of Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg), Christina grew up in a royal family—albeit royalty for a country that no longer exists. Nonetheless, that meant she was related to royalty the world over—including the Windsors—in convoluted ways. And when she lived in New York, Town & Country reported, her life was “an uptown-downtown cross section of New York society from Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd to the Kennedys.”28 (Speaking of which, Christina says her mother had an affair with John F. Kennedy in 1962, nine months before she was born—suggesting, as she intimated at times and as her father told her, that she was President Kennedy’s love child.)29

  Christina had been introduced to Ghislaine through her then husband, a painter named Damian Elwes, who had been friends with Ghislaine years earlier. Christina and she were known to each other and traveled in different social circles that sometimes ov
erlapped. But that didn’t mean they were friends.

  In Ghislaine, Oxenberg saw the scion of a disgraced family who was desperately trying to hang on to what was left of her dissipated wealth and her position in society, and was doing so by grasping tightly to an extraordinary con man—a man who hoodwinked Nobel laureates, Harvard professors, Clinton, Trump, half a dozen heads of states, and titans of Silicon Valley. She saw Ghislaine as an “ambitious” anomaly in an upper-crust world where she was transforming herself from “her father’s snooty sassy daughter” to Epstein’s fixer, as she put it in Secrets, her online memoir on Patreon, which includes her account of her meeting with Ghislaine. That meant she had begun trafficking in underage girls for him.

  At the time, in 1997, Christina had just written Royal Blue, a dishy, thinly disguised roman à clef about her own royal heritage, and Ghislaine was desperate to have Oxenberg ghostwrite a similar book for her. Christina told me she wasn’t interested in the slightest, but she took the meeting anyway.

  After complimenting Christina on her new book, Ghislaine cut to the chase. “I want my ROYAL BLUE! With my name on it,” she told Christina.30 “You will ghost it. I am going to pay you a lot of money. I am going to change your life.”

  From the start, Christina did not believe a fundamental part of Ghislaine’s story. Ghislaine talked and acted as if she and Epstein were lovers, but Christina didn’t buy it. Whatever the truth about their relationship, the problem, as Oxenberg saw it, was simple: Ghislaine very much wanted to marry Epstein, but Jeffrey had no interest. “There was no romance and there was no sexual relationship,” Christina told me. “Ghislaine was his employee. But she wanted to get married, to be a real power couple.”

  According to Christina, Jeffrey’s disinterest notwithstanding, Ghislaine thought she could win him over by making him part of this upper-crust world. “What you do in London if you’re upper class is you give dinner parties,” Christina said.31 “That’s what they do. So Ghislaine would have brought her knowledge of that to New York, and she does these dinner parties.

  “Generally, the point is just to get drunk and have really good plonk. That’s the point of dinner parties. But hers were transactional. She had an agenda. She was creating a life for Jeffrey, trying to present him as, ‘Hey, he’s got money. He’s James Bond. He’s someone you should know. He’s cool.’

  “She’s branding him, probably showing him not to wear white sneakers and maybe go with the Oxford low scissor with the tassels. He is a Pretty Woman. He doesn’t know shit. She believes that she can make herself indispensable to the point where he will marry her.”

  Or as Ghislaine also told Christina, “The reason Jeffrey keeps me around is because I don’t make mistakes.”

  She could get it all done. On the one hand, she could knit together a social network that brought Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew into Jeffrey’s orbit. On the other, she could also administer to his rather unusual needs. Ghislaine told Christina that his sexual appetite was such that she had to make sure that he had a constantly changing supply of young women and girls to make sure he got his three needed orgasms per day.

  She could do only so much. “She said, ‘I can’t keep up with him. I bring in other women and they help pick up the slack.’ Those were not exactly her words, but it was definitely the gist of what she was saying.”

  Then Ghislaine explained how she didn’t mind sharing Epstein with other women. She said she personally selected three young girls, but she did not say how young.

  Christina was paying rapt attention. “Who are these females?” she asked.

  “They’re nothing,” Ghislaine told her. “They’re trash.”32

  “She went into detail, how she drove to the trailer parks of West Palm Beach, how she cruised until she saw what she knew Jeffrey liked. Oxenberg wrote in Secrets, “He liked young pretty blondes. Everything Ghislaine was not.”33

  “I found her repellent, and I wanted to get the fuck away,” Christina told me. “She cannot talk about human beings like that.”

  But Ghislaine plowed ahead, making sure Jeffrey was taken care of. In the summer of 2000, she discovered Virginia Roberts Giuffre, then seventeen-year-old Virginia Roberts, working as a nine-dollar-an-hour spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago while her father worked there as a maintenance manager. According to Giuffre, almost as soon as Ghislaine introduced her to Epstein, who was a member at Mar-a-Lago until 2007,34 they began training her to provide sexual services under the guise of being a professional massage therapist.

  According to the Daily Mail, Giuffre characterized Ghislaine as “the undisputed leader of the girls in Epstein’s entourage.”35

  And indeed, to her young recruits, Ghislaine seemed dazzlingly sophisticated. “She’s got the whole equestrian attire. She’s so elegant,” Maria Farmer, who was twenty-six when she met Ghislaine, told The Guardian.36 Farmer added that Ghislaine had the aura of the most popular girl in school who would bestow her favors only upon the anointed.

  “Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t have done what he did for as long as he did it without the services of somebody like Ghislaine Maxwell,” Dan Kaiser, an attorney for alleged Epstein victim Jennifer Araoz, told The Guardian. “She is as culpable, in my judgment, as Jeffrey Epstein himself.”

  “I was scared of ever saying no to her,” Giuffre told the Daily Mail. “I was always compliant. I knew if I said no to anything, I would be on the street.”37

  Not lacking when it came to derring-do, according to the Daily Mail, Ghislaine, as a newly licensed helicopter pilot in 2007, reportedly boasted that she took the controls and flew former president Bill Clinton on Epstein’s chopper during a visit to his island.38 (Later, in a 2016 deposition, Ghislaine denied the report.)

  She taunted men with her sexuality. Jesse Kornbluth had met Ghislaine with Epstein and had become friends “in that transactional Manhattan way,” as he wrote on Salon. Kornbluth recalls then running into Ghislaine at an event one evening, with his wife at his side.

  “If you lose 10 pounds, I’ll fuck you,” Ghislaine told him.39 That was Ghislaine.

  Ghislaine was known for creating a world in which billionaires and royalty could cavort. She was the woman behind the world’s greatest Rolodex, an unequaled network of powerful and beautiful people, and she put her talents to work right away. She was all about power and money.

  Ghislaine’s great contribution to the business of human trafficking was to do it in plain sight, camouflaging it with a guest list that included the great and the near great, thereby making status-seeking journalists, Wall Street financiers, academics, and intellectuals feel like VIP guests who had been admitted to the inner sanctum of Epstein’s secretive and elite world of glamour, sex, and power.

  No one was more dazzled by the glamour of the Trump-Maxwell-Epstein axis than former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who was so hypnotized by its opulence that he professed not to see anything wrong with it. In fact, it was something you aspired to. “In those days, if you didn’t know Trump and you didn’t know Epstein, you were a nobody,” Dershowitz, who later served on Epstein’s defense team, told the New York Times.40

  Another key factor in getting away with it was knowing how to cultivate key journalists. When it came to courting the media, Epstein and Ghislaine didn’t miss a beat, whether it was gossip columnists who wrote about them in the New York tabloids, highly paid talent on network TV, or the moguls who owned everything. That was Ghislaine embracing Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter at a society benefit in New York in 2007, with Charlie Rose at the 2009 Earth Awards gala at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, and with Elon Musk in 2014 at Vanity Fair’s famous Oscar party.

  As reported by Julie K. Brown in a groundbreaking series in the Miami Herald, after Giuffre came forward, the FBI found more than three dozen girls who had been underage, some just thirteen years old, whom Epstein had molested in Palm Beach between 2001 and 2005. On a video
interview she gave to the Miami Herald, Giuffre explained Ghislaine’s training. “It was everything down to how to give a blow job, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants,” she said. “A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself, and . . . then there’s Jeffrey, who’s telling you I want it this way, now go slower, and don’t do that and do this.

  “You’re just thrown into a world that you don’t understand, and you don’t know how to—you’re screaming on the inside and you don’t know how to let it come out. And you just become this numb figure who refuses to feel and refuses to speak and refuses—all you do is obey. That’s it. And eventually it led to, well, now we’re gonna experiment and we’re gonna try you with another guy and see how you go. So they sent me to an island with a professor, and I basically had to do what I did for Jeffrey for him. So it’s very private. It’s the perfect world for a billionaire getting away with what he was doing. He could hold big parties there and have huge orgies there, and nobody would have any idea what was going on.”41

  And who was going to those parties? At one time or another, dozens of names in Epstein’s black book had hitched a ride on his private Boeing 727, the Lolita Express, to his Little Saint James in the Caribbean. But in the end, being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.

  Nevertheless, the presence of so many rich and powerful people in Epstein’s world is of special interest, because when FBI agents raided his homes, they found video recording equipment, hard disks, and the like that Ghislaine and Jeffrey had been stashing away as documentary evidence that could be redeemed at an appropriate time. Compromising material. Kompromat.