American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  Ghislaine said as much to Christina Oxenberg during their meeting in 1997. “I could not believe whatever she was saying was real,” Christina told Sebastian Shakespeare in the Daily Mail. “Stuff like: ‘Jeffrey and I have everyone on videotape!’”

  Whatever Epstein’s sexual tastes, when it came to recruiting young girls for him, extraordinary youth was highly valued, and not just for whatever pleasure it may have afforded him. After all, if the girls were underage, that spoke to the question of what kind of kompromat was being harvested. Having photos of powerful men, the titans of Wall Street, committing adultery or having sex with escorts was one thing. But having videos of billionaires in the act of pedophilia, raping underage girls, committing crimes that could lead to hard time—that would give even the most powerful among them pause. Perhaps that was why, as Virginia Giuffre related, Ghislaine Maxwell told her, “Jeffrey was very particular in the kind of girls he wanted. First off, the younger the better.”42

  As to who actually engaged in such nefarious behavior, there were clues suggesting who was in the know. According to the Washington Post, Rodriguez had circled some of the names in the book in black and identified them as “witnesses.”43 (Rodriguez, who was jailed for eighteen months for attempting to sell the “black book,” died in 2015.44)

  Bill Clinton admitted to taking four trips* on the Lolita Express, but his name was not circled. On the other hand, Donald Trump’s name was also in the black book, along with no fewer than sixteen phone numbers—and his name was circled, as were those of Ehud Barak and Alan Dershowitz. There are still loads of unanswered questions.

  Having one’s name circled in the black book, of course, was not evidence of participation in or knowledge of any crime. Nevertheless, according to an affidavit filed in the Florida Southern District against him, Rodriguez described the information in the black book as the “Holy Grail” or “Golden Nugget” of the Epstein case.45

  One male passenger on the Lolita Express who asked not to be identified told me that what was taking place was unmistakable. There were two girls dressed as flight attendants who must have been eighteen to twenty years old—much younger than the average flight attendant. Where were these girls coming from?

  By this time, Ghislaine had gotten some of her earliest recruits, Virginia Roberts Giuffre among them, to bring in other young girls. The passenger told me that one of the attendants was former Epstein assistant Sarah Kellen, who has been accused in court papers of recruiting young girls and acting as a pimp for Epstein. Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, Lesley Groff, and Adriana Ross were later questioned by lawyers about whether Prince Andrew had any involvement in Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. Kellen and Marcinkova have since reinvented themselves as Sarah Kensington and Nadia Marcinko.46

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  Starting in the nineties, Ghislaine and her assistants had been trolling high schools, shopping malls, and trailer parks for strippers, runaways, or girls who were otherwise vulnerable and would serve Epstein’s needs. Court records show that it evolved into what was widely called a “pyramid abuse” scheme whereby Epstein and Ghislaine would train victims like Virginia Giuffre to be paid sex slaves and then pay them $200 to $300 for each underage girl they brought into Epstein’s lair.

  As the Epstein operation continued into the 2000s, things changed. For one thing, Ghislaine had finally given up on marrying Jeffrey and began to date Ted Waitt, the billionaire founder of the computer company Gateway. She was still somewhat in Jeffrey’s orbit, but kept a far greater distance.

  Meanwhile, Jeffrey began importing girls from the former Soviet Union. After the 1998 Miss Universe pageant, Anna Malova signed up with Karin Models, which had been founded by Epstein friend Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel, who also owned MC2, was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in which several young models accused him of groping them sexually, drugging their drinks, and rape.47

  The CBS reporter Craig Pyes told the Daily Beast that Brunel “ranks among the sleaziest people in the fashion industry. We’re talking about a conveyor belt, not a casting couch. Hundreds of girls were not only harassed but molested.”48

  Brunel had worked at a fairly high level in the world of Paris modeling. Claiming to have launched the careers of Sharon Stone, Christy Turlington, and Jerry Hall, he allied with Eileen Ford, the so-called godmother of the modeling industry in New York. “Eileen took Jean-Luc as her son,” said fashion photographer and artist Jacques Silberstein. “She let him become very powerful. Jean-Luc’s education impressed Eileen. He played the game well. He could be charming.”49

  “I really despise Jean-Luc. . . . This is a guy who should be behind bars,” John Casablancas, the late modeling agent, told journalist Michael Gross, whose book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women alleges that Brunel repeatedly drugged and raped models. According to Casablancas, Brunel and his pals “were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks.”50

  And Casablancas, who married a seventeen-year-old when he was fifty, would have known, having used his stature in the modeling business to indulge in similar activities with young girls at a “Look of the Year” modeling competition at the New York Plaza Hotel, with his friend Donald Trump, then the hotel’s owner. Trump was closely involved with the contest, in which the average age was fifteen, and, according to The Guardian, several of the models said that they were required by their agency to have dinner with Trump and Casablancas.

  Trump’s behavior at such events is unclear, but, according to The Guardian, “The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.”51

  Which is exactly the kind of thing Jean-Luc Brunel trafficked in. Indeed, according to a court filing by Giuffre, Brunel “would bring young girls (ranging from ages as young as twelve) to the United States for sexual purposes and farm them out to his friends, especially Epstein,” the filing states. “Brunel would offer the girls ‘modeling’ jobs. Many of the girls came from poor countries or impoverished backgrounds, and he lured them in with a promise of making good money.”

  In response, Brunel issued a statement denying the accusations: “I strongly deny having participated, neither directly nor indirectly, in the actions Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of. I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager.”

  But according to the Daily Beast, Brunel’s name appeared at least fifteen times on flight logs for Epstein’s private plane, and he visited Epstein nearly seventy times when Epstein was jailed in 2008 for procuring an underage girl for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute.52 As a result of this relationship with Epstein, Fortune reported, Brunel’s business partner said he was getting a tremendous amount of pushback from major clients, including Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus.53

  Brunel did not respond to multiple emails requesting an interview. According to news reports, he was spotted in an unspecified country in South America in the summer of 2019.54

  But according to court documents filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Brunel was a key part of Epstein’s network, which relied heavily on him and his MC2, a “modeling” agency whose younger models were allegedly part of the Epstein operation.

  In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have fostered, as a “model scout” he also allegedly hired “scouters” to identify, procure, and transport underage girls, many fifteen years of age and under, hire them to give “massages,” and train them to give sexual pleasure. Virginia Giuffre claimed she was forced to have sex with Brunel as well, and was forced
to watch him engage in “sexual acts with dozens of underage girls.”

  MC2 wasn’t the first company to do something like this, and when it came to determining how to structure such a company—what kind of contractual relationships MC2 would have with employees, and so forth—its management looked to someone who already had experience in the business. Though Brunel was its titular leader, Epstein was really funding the agency and took the initiative when it came to dealing with such issues.

  The way such agencies worked, it was normal business procedure to hire scouts to search for and recruit new talent. But how to compensate the scout was another question.

  According to a sworn deposition in 2010 by MC2 bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez, directives about those contracts came to her “from the office of Jeffrey Epstein” with instructions that they be forwarded to Brunel as models for MC2’s contracts.55

  Vasquez further testified that Epstein’s instruction package contained contracts from another modeling agency that had similar relationships with models, with directions that MC2 should base its contracts after another agency’s. Vasquez knew it was run by a famous man, but under oath some five years before he launched his presidential campaign, she momentarily forgot, then remembered, his name.

  “Jeffrey Epstein . . . was giving instructions to Jean-Luc [Brunel],” she testified, “saying that he wanted to have the same contracts as, uh—what’s his name, of Donald Trump [an apparent reference to Trump Model Management], and that he wanted to have the same kind of benefits for the scouters. So he was giving instructions to Jean-Luc on what to do.”56

  In other words, according to Vasquez, Epstein saw Trump Model Management as a prototype to emulate while working with Brunel to lure minor children in to participate in sexual activity for money. After all, if you were looking for success in the world of sex trafficking, what better role model than Donald Trump? Epstein wanted MC2 to use the same system of incentives that drove “model scouts” and models at the Trump agency. (Trump Model Management discontinued operations in 2017.)

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  As the Epstein operation chugged along, Donald Trump, who had married three models—Ivana, Marla, and Melania—and in 1999 started his own agency, Trump Model Management, was very much part of Epstein’s picture. According to court records, message pads confiscated from Epstein’s home showed that Trump often called Epstein’s West Palm Beach mansion. Asked under oath in a September 2016 deposition whether he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of females under the age of eighteen, Epstein punted. Rather than answer the questions, he took the Fifth.

  Trump Model Management allegedly indulged in many of the dubious practices that MC2 did, such as violating immigration laws and illegally employing young foreign girls. Three former Trump models, all foreigners, told Mother Jones that Trump Model Management profited by using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work here. And two former models said that Trump’s agency suggested they lie on customs forms about where they planned to live. All of which meant they were perpetually scared of getting caught and pretty much at the mercy of the agency. All of which was ironic indeed, given Trump’s hard-line immigration policies as president and his assertions that undocumented immigrants are taking American jobs.57

  Meanwhile, Trump himself became known for hosting parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time, where older rich men were introduced to young women and girls who assumed “they’d get somewhere” by joining the party, as one partygoer, a fashion photographer, told Michael Gross, writing in the Daily Beast. “Of course, it never happens.”58

  According to the photographer, the girls were as young as fifteen.

  “[They were] over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations,” the photographer added. “There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It’s based on power and dominating girls who can’t push back and can be discarded.”

  Trump has publicly talked about how attracted he is to his own daughter and has often made troubling remarks about being drawn to young girls. Once he pointed out a ten-year-old girl and joked about dating her in the future. He would “go from room to room,” said the photographer. “It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor.”

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  Meanwhile, in April 1999, Ghislaine and Jeffrey invited Trump to a party for Prince Andrew. “Recruiting Prince Andrew as a great friend was very strategic,” Christopher Mason, the journalist and TV host, told me. “He was an ideal target for manipulation.”59 And the presence of royalty, needless to say, gave a glamorous sheen to the man from Coney Island.

  In Palm Beach the following February, Trump staged a pro-am tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago and appeared with Jeffrey, Ghislaine, and his latest girlfriend, Melania Knauss, whom Epstein claimed to have introduced to Trump.60 Epstein’s claim was reported in the New York Times, which noted that “while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting.”61

  Jeffrey and Ghislaine knew Trump’s secrets, and he knew theirs. And secrets were the ultimate currency in the decadent and highly transactional world they lived in. As Michael Wolff reports in Siege, “Trump often saw the financier at Epstein’s current Palm Beach house, and Trump knew that Epstein was visited almost every day, and had been for many years, by girls he’d hired to give him massages that often had happy endings—girls recruited from local restaurants, strip clubs, and, also, Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago.”62

  Similarly, Epstein was privy to some of Trump’s unorthodox business customs, such as his practice of accepting fees to act as a front man in order to mask real beneficial ownership in a real estate transaction.

  But in 2004, after a friendship of roughly seventeen years, the two men had a serious falling-out when Epstein sought to buy a spectacular oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach called Maison de l’Amitié (House of Friendship) that was being sold out of a bankruptcy auction. The property, a nearly sixty-two-thousand-square-foot neoclassical palace, had once been owned by Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retailer who was so close to Epstein.63 Epstein had his heart set on the house, but he planned to make at least one major renovation project once he bought it: He wanted to relocate the swimming pool, and he brought Trump to the property to give him advice on how to do it.

  But before the sale was finalized, Epstein was horrified to see that Trump, who was still underwater financially from his Atlantic City bankruptcies, outbid him with an offer of more than $41 million for the property. The purchase was financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already holding dubious loans for Trump.64

  Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again. And from then on, whenever Epstein’s name was mentioned to Trump, the whole tenor of the conversation instantly changed.

  And that wasn’t the end of it. In 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein’s relationship to the young women around him. According to someone who knew him, Epstein believed Trump got the police to investigate him in retaliation for threatening to sue.

  Their friendship frayed beyond repair, Epstein became less discreet as the keeper of Trump secrets and was not averse to showing off potentially compromising photos of him and Trump. An associate of Epstein’s who asked not to be identified told me that Epstein showed him one photo of Trump with a topless young girl. In another, the source said, Trump is with two young girls who are said to be
laughing as they point out what appears to be a wet spot in an unfortunate location on his pants. The description of the photo suggested that it was a semen stain—but the photos have never been released.

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  Brunel, who had earlier signed Anna Malova to Karin Models, now began to bring in more models from the former Soviet Union, some of whom were as young as twelve. These were said to be girls who had no real chance of becoming big-time models in New York, and because they were so vulnerable financially, the risk of debt slavery made them easy prey for Epstein. According to the Daily Beast, Brunel received a $1 million wire transfer from Epstein in September 2004, which he used to set up a new venture with Elite Models.65 The listed address was 457 Madison Avenue—the same as Epstein’s investment firm, J. Epstein & Co. It is unclear whether the transfer represented a gift, a loan, or an investment in Brunel’s operation.66

  Nevertheless, Brunel’s girls became frequent guests on Epstein’s private jets. Flight manifests show that Brunel made dozens of trips to Epstein’s homes in New York, Palm Beach, and Little Saint James. According to a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Brunel began working with Epstein and Maxwell “in a pattern of racketeering that involved luring minor children through MC2, mostly girls under the age of 17, to engage in sexual play for money.”

  Epstein and Brunel obtained visas for the girls and charged them rent once they arrived. According to a 2010 deposition of MC2 bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez, Epstein “was the one who said who stays in what apartment.”

  With Ghislaine less of a presence, Epstein increasingly went to the Russians for young girls. Brunel was not alone in his endeavors and reportedly worked with Peter Listerman, the “roly-poly pimp” from Moscow, as author Peter Pomerantsev has called him, who is celebrated as a procurer, or “matchmaker,” as he prefers, for Russian oligarchs such as the late Boris Berezovsky.67