Madeleine Spence, Deputy Editor, News Review
Feb 7, 2026
Knowing exactly what to promise, the predator placed more than 1,000 victims in a cruel hierarchy that was often linked to their social class
It was the summer she turned 14 when Jane* met the friendly couple who would go on to abuse her for years. She was sitting at a picnic table in Michigan with her friends at summer camp eating an ice cream when Ghislaine Maxwell walked by with her Yorkshire terrier, Max, and stopped to introduce herself. They got chatting and soon a man joined them. His name was Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, then aged 41, had a lodge named after him on the grounds of the Interlochen Center for the Arts youth camp in Michigan, and funded academic scholarships there, he told her.
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Back home in Palm Beach, Florida, the billionaire charmed Jane’s mother, inviting them both to his mansion for tea. He saw promise in her daughter. Before long, Jane was trapped in his world: giving him “massages” for money and being sexually abused. She wouldn’t leave for three years.
Only a handful of Epstein’s victims have told their stories publicly, but in the 3.5 million pages of files released recently by the US Department of Justice (DoJ), heartbreaking testimonies such as Jane’s, police reports, emails and photographs all reveal the scale of his pyramid scheme of abuse.
The DoJ estimates the paedophile financier victimised more than 1,000 women. While the names and faces of celebrities, academics, financiers and politicians litter the files, those of the women remain unknown, hidden behind black redaction boxes.
What are the stories of the women behind the black boxes — and how did Epstein lure so many of them into his orbit?
Epstein deployed various strategies to source girls and young women over three decades of prolific abusing before he took his own life in a New York prison on August 10, 2019. In Florida he preyed on vulnerable girls from poor families, offering them cash to “massage” him at his mansion. In New York he promised aspiring women a bright future through educational scholarships, inviting them to parties in his Manhattan townhouse on the Upper East Side and then abusing them. In eastern Europe he used his links to modelling agencies to convince women he would make them famous and trafficked them to the US, farming them out to rich and powerful friends.
He also pushed his victims to recruit their friends and family members. They were flown all over America: abused at his properties in Palm Beach, in New York City, at a vast 8,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, and on his isolated private island in the US Virgin Islands, nicknamed Paedophile Island. The files also show women staying in townhouses in London, apartments in Paris, or visiting businessmen in the Middle East.
According to Marci Hamilton, a legal scholar who has been central to securing financial compensation for the victims, Epstein always sought to find the “unmet need” of a woman that made her vulnerable.
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“Epstein looked for girls that needed something, and promised to fill the need,” says Hamilton. “He was capable of promising anything.” Anywhere he and Maxwell went, she says, “where he saw a beautiful girl or young woman, or Maxwell did, they would approach them and promise them the world.”
Cruising for girls
In Florida, where Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor, and briefly imprisoned in 2008 after striking a deal with prosecutors, his victims mainly needed money. Just across the bridge from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion was the deprived neighbourhood of West Palm Beach. Here, Maxwell made her chauffeur cruise by local schools while she looked for teenage girls, according to testimony from Epstein’s former house manager, Juan Alessi, reported at Maxwell’s trial in 2021. She was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison for aiding Epstein’s abuse.
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Lucia Osborne-Crowley, an investigative journalist and author of The Lasting Harm, a book drawn from her weeks covering Maxwell’s trial and extensive interviews with survivors, says that if Maxwell saw an attractive girl, “she would say ‘stop’, and she’d get out of the car”.
One of the first things Maxwell would ask them, under the pretence of making conversation, was about their parents. “That sounds innocent, but it’s the opposite. It’s her trying to identify vulnerability,” Osborne-Crowley says. She uses the example of a girl who told Maxwell her father had just died and whose mother was unemployed: “From that moment onward she was targeted.”
• Files reveal scale of this sexual Ponzi scheme
The author also points out how useful Maxwell was as a way into girls’ lives: “There’s no way Jeffrey Epstein could have walked into a middle school [where pupils are in their early teens] as a middle-aged man and started talking to a 14-year-old.”
The pair would spend months, witness testimonies in the files show, grooming the girls with trips to the cinema or shopping and sending them gifts. Epstein paid $300 for a massage, during which he would sexually abuse them, and offered another $300 if they brought a friend.
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In New York, it wasn’t poor girls but aspiring ones Epstein targeted. Emails with personal staff show discussions of scholarships in his name or funds for students. He touted his connections to prestigious schools such as the New York Academy of Art, where he sat on the board from 1987 to 1994, and Harvard University, to which he donated millions of dollars and visited regularly until 2018.
A 2021 police report details how one victim was only 16 when her older sister, whom Epstein had already “befriended”, called her. The older sister told her younger sibling that he was interested in helping her with college applications. The younger sister was flown to New York where Epstein took her to the cinema and to the theatre, and abused her in his townhouse.
Epstein approached ballet and dance schools, promising to make women famous through his connections. Emails show him asking student dancers to recruit others for “private sessions” and discussing a yearly ballet fund with an accountant for tens of thousands of dollars. In one 2012 email, a contact asks Epstein if he will do “another $3,500 scholarship for the New York String Orchestra seminar”. In another, headed “kids tuition”, a man asks Epstein to approve a loan of $30,000 of fees for two teenage girls.
One discussion in the email trove is of the “Jeffrey Epstein” scholarship with the New York Academy of Art. Maria Farmer, a former student, has said she was first solicited by Epstein when he came to her show, before being taken to his New Mexico ranch and abused.
The scholarships were often offered to “a different ‘tier’ of girls”, says Rina Oh, who was a struggling 21-year-old art student when Epstein offered to fund her course at New York’s School of Visual Arts.
“One of the girls — [whom] he pursued for many years — [he] reached out to her after reading about her in a magazine.” They were usually of college age, although “he also had a penchant for soliciting minors who were artistically talented”, Oh says. Many of the older women were sent to friends of Epstein; his own preference was for minors.
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Money kept victims dependent on Epstein, who laundered his payments through gifts. The mother of one victim lived in a New York apartment funded by Epstein for an entire year. Hundreds of emails show requests for payments for rent, flights and hotels abroad. Epstein even agrees to pay for the acne medication of one girl and to put her up in a Paris apartment. “I spoke to the doctor, I’ll give you the money you need for the Ro accutane [sic] … and anything else,” writes Epstein. She replies that the doctor was “making fun of me and feel pity for me coz [sic] I can’t do oral sex.”
‘Human incubator’
What began as teenage girls recruiting schoolfriends morphed over time into a more formalised network of recruiters, says Osborne-Crowley. Numerous emails show Epstein discussing “finding friends for massage”. In one conversation, from 2015, a girl tells him: “She sounds like she liked you a lot … re: massage she hesitates but doesn’t say no. I think you need to build trust first and make her like you a lot. Then massage is also possible.”
In another, in 2017, he scolds someone for sending a “28 year old, when the requirment [sic] is dif=ferent [sic]”. The woman apologises, saying “her looks and brain correspond more for what you m=ight [sic] be looking for though”.
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Another simply sends emails on multiple occasions containing pictures of women posing in bikinis, with no text attached. One writes: “[redacted] is 23, a very hot blonde, we could set up a ‘casting’ of some sort”, and “I know 23 is on the old side for you”.
The email cache also reflects the growth of the abuse ring into a wider-scale trafficking operation.
Legislators in New Mexico have in recent days announced that they will open a “truth commission” to examine what happened at Epstein’s Zorro ranch, a vast isolated plot that Epstein purchased in the 1990s.
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Women were taken there and the files show he invited high-profile guests including academics, writers and financiers such as Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn, the Harvard mathematician Martin Nowak and the palaeontologist Jack Horner. There is no suggestion any were aware of any wrongdoing and none are accused of any wrongdoing.
The network also extended into eastern Europe, where Epstein solicited aspiring models, allegedly with the help of a close associate, Jean-Luc Brunel, the founder of the MC2 modelling agency. Brunel committed suicide while awaiting trial for rape.
For these women Epstein had an extra lever of power: their visas were in his hands. In one message to a woman in May 2019, months before his arrest, he writes: “I recall telling you that if you were not careful you would end up home in russia. you said never never … I would like for you to explain to me how given such a great opportunity you chose to ignore and abuse it.”
Osborne-Crowley believes that we are seeing “only a sliver” of the true extent of Epstein’s empire of abuse. The files are peppered with signs of a warped philosophy involving the purchase of manuals about sex slavery (one titled A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners), and an interest in transhumanism, the science of improving the human population through technologies such as genetic engineering, which critics have likened to a modern-day version of eugenics.
It has previously been reported that Epstein wanted to use his DNA to impregnate women at the Zorro ranch, although there is no evidence this occurred. In the pages of a diary of an unidentified minor, which appears in the files, the author says she was forced to carry a baby for Maxwell and Epstein, writing “… so many bonding moments with Jeffrey, Ghislaine, their baby inside me”. She goes on to write: “I only got ten minutes to hold and feed her before they took her away.” She describes herself as a human incubator and writes: “Superior gene pool?!?”. “Why me? Why my hair and eye colour?” Elsewhere in the journal she alludes to another two pregnancies, writing: “Tomorrow is the halfway ultrasound for Jeffrey … after they took the first baby who survived and the early miscarriage I think it was called I no longer feel like a person but a vessel.”
The diary was shared by the woman’s lawyers, the New York firm Wigdor LLP, with federal prosecutors investigating Epstein and Maxwell. In an email in May 2014 Epstein writes: “I need baby blankets for the plane, pink blue … make them yummy sweet.” There is no public record of Epstein having any children, nor are any mentioned in his will.
Quest for justice
Money may be the thread that runs through Epstein’s criminal enterprise, but it is also what connects his victims to some form of justice in its wake. A fund established in 2020 has accepted 150 successful claims and paid out $120 million from his estate in compensation to women. There have been other civil lawsuits resulting in financial settlements, but they often come attached with clauses that stop victims telling their stories. The only criminal charges that have been brought are those against Brunel, Epstein and Maxwell.
But money is poor justice for the women behind the black boxes, says Osborne-Crowley. It cannot undo the damage done. As one girl writes in a journal washed up among the three million documents: “It’s a horror story that I survived. I’m still so scared that Jeffrey is around every corner.”
Original story published by the Sunday Times: