Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (2020) s01e02 Episode Script

1
[FEMALE ON POLICE RADIO]
3991 on the suspect.
[INDISTINCT TALK ON POLICE RADIO]
[MALE ON POLICE RADIO] Morning.
This is a complete description of
the residence desired to be searched
including the curtilage
attached thereof.
Being the premises occupied or
under the control of Jeffrey Epstein,
white male, date of birth 1/20/53.
This is your copy.
When we are concluded,
I will leave a list of
what items we're taking.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC]
Seven months into the case,
detectives executed the search warrant
at Mr. Epstein's residence.
[TIM MALLOY] They opened the doors
and went up the winding staircase
into his ornate and bizarre world.
Pictures of young kids half-naked.
Nudes everywhere.
One of the police officers who saw it
said that it was just really weird.
Detectives also discovered
a very bizarre steam room
and massage room setup.
They actually found some
computers and equipment
that remain in the house,
but police suspected
most of Epstein's computer hard drives,
and surveillance cameras, and videos
had already been taken out of the house.
[MICHAEL REITER] There was space
on a desk where wires were hanging,
but there was no computer.
At that point, it was fairly clear to us
that Mr. Epstein knew that
he was under investigation.
Epstein had been tipped off.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
[REITER] After the search warrant,
it was disappointing to realize
that Epstein's house
had been cleaned up.
There were a lot of things
that had been removed.
But there was still plenty
of evidence that was left.
I think the most useful
thing that we learned
was that the victims' accounts,
detailed descriptions
of Mr. Epstein's home,
where rooms were located,
the configuration of the home,
validated what they had told us.
There were memo pads of
phone calls that we seized
that included contact information
for some of the victims and
for some of the adult females
that had been used to identify
and recruit the victims,
so that was productive for us as well.
[WOMAN] The message pads that were taken
from the investigation that the
Palm Beach Police Department did,
they're very revealing.
Individuals who were being
called or calling back in
to come over for these sexual massages.
For example, one has a redaction on it,
meaning it was a minor who
was calling in, and it says,
"She is wondering if 2:30 is
okay. She needs to stay in school."
I think I took this case much
more seriously than other matters
that I've handled, in the
sense that it was very personal.
I do have a daughter. I have
children. I met with these victims.
It was very personal, the
abuse that they suffered.
I won't stop until the
people who victimized
these individuals are held accountable.
The age of consent in Florida is
18. It does vary state to state,
and in New York, for example, it's 17,
but this really isn't
a case about consent.
The point of these cases is
that there was no consent here.
[REITER] Seven months
into the investigation,
we were all extremely frustrated
at the difficulty of this case.
We applied whatever resources
were necessary to do the best job,
to quickly be able to reach the point
that we could apply for arrest warrants.
[MAN] Detectives that I talked
to said that they were tiptoeing,
they were acting a little cautiously
because they knew
there would be blowback.
But also they were
running into resistance
even among their own, among colleagues.
Uh, they knew that there
were people who would protect
any number of the
residents on the island.
And so, to go into a case like
this, you had to walk gingerly,
you had to make sure that you
held your information closely,
and you had to be absolutely
sure that you were right.
[REITER] We found that the
victims ran the entire gamut
from those that were thankful
that we contacted them,
others who said that they were
in love with Jeffrey Epstein,
and they were going to get
married to Jeffrey Epstein.
Some victims that we contacted
had gone on to college
who slammed the door in
the face of detectives.
We were very surprised to learn
these criminal activities had gone
on for a fairly long period of time,
many years prior to the investigation.
My name is Virginia Giuffre.
When I was 16, I got a summer
job at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago
in Palm Beach.
Uh, I was working there
as a locker room
attendant in the spa area.
At the time, I really wanted
to become a massage therapist.
And not very long into
working at Mar-a-Lago,
did an English lady come up to me.
She introduced herself
as Ghislaine Maxwell.
She was beautiful. She
looked educated. She was nice.
She said, "Oh, that's interesting.
You're reading a book
about massage therapy."
And she said, "You know,
I actually know this guy who's
looking for a traveling masseuse.
You know, if you want, you can
come by this afternoon after work,
and you can come meet him."
I'd finished work around 5:00,
and I pull up at this huge
house, this big mansion
and Ghislaine answers the door.
I walk through the door, and
she's leading me up the staircase,
and I'm looking around, you know.
There's photographs
everywhere of important people.
I could tell that, you know, like,
this guy has some
friends in high places.
And then we go into the massage room,
and there's this massage bed
with a naked man laying on top of it,
face down.
To me this is, I guess,
walking into a world I didn't
understand, but I guess I'm gonna learn.
Ghislaine shows me like, "Put
your lotion here on your hands."
And then we did his feet,
his calves
his back.
While the massage was going on,
they asked me questions about
my life. "So, who are you?"
"What school do you go to?"
Um "Tell me about yourself."
You know, and that's when I felt like
I should open up and tell them, like,
how much this opportunity means to me.
My home life started out very
hard from a very young age.
I'd been a runaway and
lived on the streets.
I've been abused.
I felt like it was okay
to tell them about my past.
And then he turned over.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
[VIRGINIA GIUFFRE] They asked
me to please take off my clothes.
Ghislaine started
taking off her clothes.
I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know what was gonna
happen if I said no, if I screamed.
I just I did what they said.
Ghislaine was behind and touching me.
It went from oral sex to get on top.
Still to this day, I don't know
how it went from something real
to something perverted
like that so quickly.
Afterwards,
they said, "The interview went great.
You're going to come back tomorrow."
And I did.
I was abused plenty of times before
Epstein had done what he did to me.
I had no self-esteem.
I was scared that my life
was going to be worthless.
I was the perfect victim for them.
One thing that Epstein loved me for
was that I never really
asked too many questions.
I escalated up the ladder
very quickly with Epstein.
I did whatever he needed,
you know, put his socks on
for him before bed, uh
make sure what he
needed sexually happened.
I had to serve him all the time.
They told me, "You're
going to do so well.
You're going to travel the world.
You're gonna meet people that
you'd never think you'd meet.
We're gonna put you in circles that
you would never even understand."
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine
Maxwell had a great way
of normalizing the
abuse that was going on.
They kind of made it feel like we
were in this really deranged family.
You know, we would sit back, and
we would watch movies together.
We would go diving together.
We would go hiking together.
We would go on 4Runners together.
We would do so many cool
activities like that together.
They kept saying, "We
will get you educated.
You will become a real
massage therapist one day."
But under the premise that
afterwards you're back to the abuse.
And, unfortunately
I didn't see my life getting any better.
So I stayed.
It was like I am now a
slave to these people.
And then I was trafficked.
I was lent out to all of their friends.
They were politicians.
They were businessmen.
They were powerful people.
It made me think that if I
had run and caused a ruckus,
the police wouldn't have believed me,
they wouldn't have
done anything about it,
and Jeffrey and Ghislaine could
have hurt me really bad then.
He did say like, "People owe me favors.
I can get away with this.
I will never get caught.
I own the Palm Beach Police Department."
[JAMES PATTERSON] Jeffrey
Epstein fits into that pattern
of thinking that he's above the law,
that he can do what he feels like doing.
But the life of privilege
and power that Epstein lead
is a far, far cry from
the way he was brought up.
[CHILDREN SHOUTING, SCREAMING]
- [WAVES CRASHING]
- [SEAGULLS SQUAWKING]
[PATTERSON] Epstein was born and
raised in Coney Island, New York,
which is very middle
class, lower middle class.
Epstein was a very good student in
high school. He was a bright guy.
He skipped a couple of grades in
high school, graduated in 1969.
[LAWYER] What college did you attend?
Cooper Union.
[LAWYER] Did you get a
degree from Cooper Union?
No, sir.
[LAWYER] How many years
were you in college?
[TUTS] I believe two.
[LAWYER] What'd you study?
Physics.
[LAWYER] But isn't it true
that you were a teacher
at the Dalton School in New York
after college?
[PATTERSON] The first mystery is
how could Epstein get a job
teaching at Dalton
without a college degree?
This was probably the start
of Epstein's lifelong pattern
of getting away with things
that most people can't.
[MAN] In 1976, Ace Greenberg
was running Bear Stearns.
One day, I was sitting in my office,
and Ace Greenberg called me to say
that a trustee of the Dalton School
had a young professor,
Jeff Epstein, who wanted
to come to Wall Street,
and Ace asked if I would interview him.
Epstein was well-known as a good
teacher and somewhat of a ladies man,
which didn't resonate at the time.
After grilling Jeffrey a few times,
I hired him to develop and market
our quantitative analyses for options.
He was terrific at it.
Epstein was very quick-witted.
When, uh, something arose that he
might not have been able to predict,
he dealt with it in
an impressive fashion.
That's a trait of an
effective salesperson.
I was favorably impressed
that he could do the work.
But this, I think, was one of my
important mistakes in my career.
Epstein had been working
for me perhaps two months.
The head of personnel called me.
He said, "Are you sitting down?
Jeffrey Epstein lied on his
résumé about his education.
None of his colleges
have ever heard of him."
I was stunned.
I hired a liar.
Even worse, he was
dating Ace's daughter.
I went to Ace Greenberg.
I wasn't sure how he
would want me to proceed,
and Ace said, "Treat
him like anybody else."
I was prepared to fire him.
And this is where his sales
skills really resonated.
When I told him he'd lied,
he admitted it immediately.
He just said,
"I knew I couldn't get a job
teaching at a high-quality school
if I didn't have good
educational credentials,
so I wanted to get a chance."
I said, "Why didn't
you tell us the truth?"
He said, "Well, I was afraid the
Dalton School would hear about it
and there would be problems."
He said, "I wanted to."
And he did it in a way
that was very convincing.
He disarmed me.
And I thought, "Do I want to play
God and throw him in the street,
maybe destroy his potential?"
Today, I wish I had.
He had done well enough that
they made him a limited partner.
But then a few years after
that, I heard he'd been fired
for breaking some rules.
I deeply regret giving
Epstein a second chance.
That was my tragedy.
Most of the victims did
not want to prosecute
when we first contacted them.
So once we had four or five
victims who were cooperative,
we presented applications
for arrest warrants
to the state attorney's office.
From the time I first
became police chief,
I had an excellent relationship
with the state attorney,
Barry Krischer.
The first time that I talked about
the case against Epstein with him,
I explained that we had about 40-some
victims who were in their teens,
early teens in some cases,
who had sex with an
adult male in his 50s.
He said he didn't know Jeffrey
Epstein and he remarked,
"We'll put him away for the rest
of his life. It's an easy case."
[SINISTER MUSIC]
[MARC FISHER] Jeffrey
Epstein, both through his money
and his connections,
was able to assemble
an extraordinary dream team of
at least eight defense lawyers
who were known throughout the
country and throughout their industry
as the absolute best.
From Clinton impeachment
lawyer, Kenneth Starr,
the top defense lawyers of South
Florida, people like Roy Black,
New Yorkers like Jay
Lefkowitz and Gerald Lefcourt
to Harvard Law School
Professor Alan Dershowitz.
[ALAN DERSHOWITZ] I was born
to be a criminal defense lawyer.
If you want to be a defense attorney,
you can't be concerned about
what people think of you.
So, I did represent Claus von Bülow,
O.J. Simpson, and Mike Tyson, and
Leona Helmsley, and Patricia Hearst,
and so many other people.
My relationship with
Jeffrey Epstein was academic
and lawyer-client
but it was a close academic friendship.
For example, when I would write books,
I would only send them
to a handful of people.
He was one of them because he would
seriously read every word I wrote,
and he would have
comments and criticisms.
Jeffrey Epstein called me, I think,
the day he got the first indications,
and the first indications were merely
that one or two of the
women may have been 17,
and may have lied about their age,
had given him false documentation.
He asked me if I would
help represent him.
I said I couldn't represent him myself,
I'm not a member of the Florida bar,
but that I would help him put
together a legal team, and I did.
[FISHER] Detectives quickly learned
that Epstein was on to them and
that he was organizing a defense.
And, in fact, he was
organizing an offense.
Jeffrey Epstein's attorneys
were looking into what
the detectives were doing,
who they were, what their pasts were,
whether there were any peccadilloes
that would make them
vulnerable to attack.
[REITER] There was
surveillance of me for months,
round-the-clock surveillance
of Detective Recarey,
around-the clock picking up of
his trash at his home and my trash.
And the reason that it happened
to the degree that it did
is because Mr. Epstein had
the resources to do that.
In fact, we found private
investigators going through the trash
at the police station.
So we stopped putting the
reports in the computer
and actually had them kept separately.
[MALLOY] A few months after
Chief Michael Reiter hands over
the evidence to his close
friend Barry Krischer,
Reiter notes an alarming difference
in Krischer's attitude towards Epstein.
Krischer had all but said to
his friend Chief Michael Reiter,
"We're gonna string him up.
You had a really solid case."
And then suddenly, the teeth seems
to go out of the investigation,
at least on the side
of the state attorney
who was supposed to be prosecuting this.
[REITER] I had been speaking
with Mr. Krischer along the way,
and the state attorney's
office started saying,
"Look, these victims will
not make good witnesses.
Yes, these victims, most of them,
received financial compensation
for, uh, the sexual
contact with Mr. Epstein,
but no child can consent
to have sex with an adult."
But we were never able to
really convince the prosecutors
that that didn't matter.
[MALLOY] In a release,
a high-powered local attorney Jack
Goldberger, Epstein's attorney,
emphasized the grand jury
in this questioned the
credibility of the girls
and therefore limited their charges
simply to solicitation of prostitution.
Epstein is out on bond,
and he is not talking.
[WOMAN] I've been a reporter at The
Palm Beach Post for about 16 years.
I think nobody knew anything
until 2006, and then it just
[MAKES EXPLOSION SOUND] It exploded.
Epstein's attorneys went
after the victims viciously.
I mean, their depositions that I've
read were just, I mean, hideous.
I remember one where he
asked one of the young girls,
"Is it true you've had three abortions?"
And then they asked the
girl, "Well, what's worse,
having three abortions or giving
sexual massages to Jeffrey Epstein?"
It was just brutal what
they did to these women.
[DERSHOWITZ] You must
bring out all the negatives.
You have to present the full picture.
Their credibility may
be subject to question
because of their backgrounds,
but it has nothing to
do with blaming them.
It's the role of the defense attorney
to raise questions about the
credibility of any witnesses.
We don't look at what's good for
victims. We don't look at anything
except what's good for our
client, ethically and legally.
[WOMAN] I've been with the TV
station in Palm Beach County
for almost 23 years now.
The Jeffrey Epstein story
is as big as it gets.
So when the story broke,
we started realizing the gravity
of a Palm Beach billionaire
and the accusations that
we were starting to hear,
we were quickly on the
air with this story,
but Epstein's team
wanted this to go away.
There were weekly
phone calls to reporters
with threats to make the story go away.
"You don't want to do this. You
shouldn't be looking into this."
And it was mystifying to the
Palm Beach Police Department
because they had all this evidence.
[REPORTER] Palm Beach Police think
prostitution charges brought against
billionaire socialite Jeffrey
Epstein don't go far enough.
Investigators think prosecutors
should have gone after Epstein
on charges of unlawful sex with a minor.
So why didn't they?
[REITER] We were all
extremely frustrated.
Once we knew
that the one charge was going to be
the extent of the state's prosecution,
I wrote the parents of all
the victims and told them that
I did not feel that justice
was sufficiently served,
and that I was referring
the case to the FBI.
[JANE MUSGRAVE] It's highly
unusual for a police chief
to sidestep the state attorney's office,
and go directly to the feds,
and demand an investigation.
I don't know that I
have ever heard of that,
and I think that's one of the many,
many odd things about this case.
[SHANNON CAKE] Any
investigator or investigation,
the first thing you're going to
do is look back in time and see:
Has this happened before?
Are there other claims?
Are there other victims?
The FBI actually found two women
who had accused Epstein
a decade earlier, in 1996.
Maria Farmer, an artist,
and her younger sister, Annie.
[MARIA FARMER] In 1996,
following the assault
by Jeffrey and Ghislaine,
I came back to New York
and then I found out that they knew
that I'd reported them to the FBI.
Ghislaine called and said she
was going to burn all my art,
and burn my career and destroy it,
she was entirely socially
connected, and that I was screwed.
She told me I needed to watch my back,
that, "I know you like to go
running on the West Side Highway,
and that's not going to be
a safe place for you anymore,
because there are a lot of ways
to die on the West Side Highway."
From that point on, over many years,
I would move, I would relocate,
and a couple of months would
go by, and I would be moving in,
and Ghislaine
Ghislaine would call me.
She would say she knew where I lived.
She would say that same kinds
of veiled threats like
"You're not safe where you are.
You might want to check
over your shoulder."
Finally, in 2006, I was living in
the mountains of North Carolina.
I was hiding.
I had changed my name. I had an alias
and I get a knock on the door,
and it's this man and this woman,
and they show me their
badge, they're FBI,
and this woman said,
"This is about your 1996 FBI report,
and we're following up
because we're going to get him.
We're going to get them."
[ANNIE FARMER] The FBI came,
and they interviewed me, and
they interviewed my sister,
and we told them our stories.
And so we just thought, "Oh,
my gosh! They're really
You know, they're doing a thorough job.
They're looking at
people in other places.
They're recognizing that
this is a more systemic issue,
and they are You know, he's
gonna be held accountable."
[SHAWNA RIVERA] I talked to
the FBI, and they're like,
"We're here to save you."
And they assured me
that they were going to protect me,
and that they needed me to tell
them everything that happened.
And they would help as
many victims as they can.
[SIGRID MCCAWLEY] I think
a lot of the families,
when they came to learn what
had happened to their daughters,
reached out to attorneys
to try to help them
navigate this circumstance,
because obviously there
was a criminal aspect to it,
there was a civil aspect to it,
and they were also facing somebody
who is incredibly powerful,
incredibly wealthy,
incredibly intimidating,
so they needed lawyers to
help them through that process.
[MAN] The first time I
heard Jeffrey Epstein's name
was when I had my own law firm
dedicated to representing
crime victims in civil cases.
A friend of mine from
Jacksonville, who was also a lawyer,
he called me and said that he
had received a call from a girl.
And that was Courtney Wild.
Courtney came to my office.
Then she told me how
she went into his house
and told me what happened there.
[WOMAN] I was 14 when I was
introduced to Jeffrey Epstein.
It was eighth grade summer, going
from eighth grade to high school.
From sixth, seventh and eighth
grade, I was a straight-A student.
I never even got a B.
I played the trumpet. I was
captain of the cheerleading squad
but then from eighth
grade to ninth grade,
things fell apart for me and my family.
Just from, um my mom's addiction.
She was sick, battling her own demons,
wasn't really able to care for me,
and I was basically homeless
and living at friends'
houses and stuff like that.
When I first went to Jeffrey's,
I really was expecting I
was going to make easy money
giving this guy a massage.
And that situation escalated
to him molesting me.
It happened so quick where
it's like, "What just happened?"
But being vulnerable at 14 years old,
and trying to handle life on my
own, it was just overwhelming, so
um, I did continue to
go back to Jeffrey's.
He made me feel like,
you know, basically, I was
lucky to be in his presence.
It was just a glorified
manipulation thing
he had going on and that worked.
It was maybe the second time
I went to him or the third.
He asked me, do I have any friends,
can I bring anybody?
And he would give me
$200 and the person $200.
In my time frame of going
for three to four years,
I at least brought him
about 40 to 60 girls.
I know that this is
wrong, this is crazy,
but I just became okay with that
because of what he offered me.
He offered me cash. He offered me a way
so I could eat and pay my bills,
and he offered me something
that nobody else did.
I felt like he was my lifeline.
[COURTNEY WILD] So, in the
beginning of the investigation
when the police were reaching out to me,
I was confused.
I felt like I had this
painting of Jeffrey
that he was this awesome man,
that he actually saved
my life in a sense,
that I was very lucky to
ever be introduced to him.
But then I see the
police reports of girls
that I had brought to Jeffrey's,
close friends,
and that made me have
the change of heart.
The emotions come over
of, like, guilt, and shame, and disgust.
It was traumatic.
That's when I started saying,
"Okay, this isn't right. Something
needs to happen about this."
So I find Brad Edwards, my attorney.
[BRAD EDWARDS] I told her, "You
don't really have much to worry about.
This is somebody who is not
ever going to be free again."
She said, "But I don't think you
understand the level of power he has."
It's just unheard of.
It's just an unbelievable
scheme to have kept going
for that long of a period of time.
I've never heard anything like this
where somebody was able to set
up basically a pyramid scheme,
a molestation pyramid scheme.
Hey, do you have the victim chart?
- The chart that we created?
- Yeah.
Well, this is when we were first
trying to map out the case.
We had to prove
that this pyramid of underage
girls in Palm Beach
was true.
It didn't start from just a random
underage girl walking into the house.
Ghislaine Maxwell was
one of the recruiters
of the underage girls
for Jeffrey Epstein.
The other recruiters
that were identified
were Sarah Kellen,
Nadia Marcinkova,
Adriana Mucinska,
and we just started tracking
if this person, which name
is not identified right now,
was an underage girl.
"Who did you bring?"
And then from that person
we would bridge down,
"How many did you bring?"
And she would name the
other five or six people.
This was something that we
assembled in about 30 days
and realized that this chart
could go off like a spider web
for, you know, five times
as big as this chart.
[MCCAWLEY] So at the top of the
pyramid scheme was Ghislaine Maxwell,
who was really Epstein's
right-hand person
with helping to recruit these
individuals for sexual abuse.
[VICKY WARD] Jeffrey and
Ghislaine met in New York.
Jeffrey Epstein's really an introvert.
Ghislaine is a much more
charming person than Jeffrey is.
She's an extrovert.
I think he revels in
being this man of mystery,
who almost can't be
bothered to dress properly.
He can't be bothered
to go to restaurants,
and he likes the sort of intrigue
that that creates about him.
Ghislaine is a very engaging person.
She's extremely charismatic and bubbly.
Her father, Robert Maxwell,
had been an incredibly
big figure in England.
He was a big newspaper publisher.
In fact, he'd been something
of a con man and a fraudster,
but he'd lived a huge life.
When Ghislaine came to New York,
her whole world had fallen apart.
Her father, who she was
incredibly attached to
had died in very murky circumstances,
and also his entire
reputation had been shattered.
Jeffrey, in a way, felt like a
safe haven for her. Here was
another very rich man to
sort of replace her father.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
[MAN] I've been covering Wall
Street since at least 1991.
You know, Jeffrey Epstein was
always someone whose name popped up,
but I couldn't really nail it down.
He was a cipher.
People I know on Wall
Street leave trails.
His trail was elusive.
So it was just sort of
odd that here was this guy
that people talked about a lot,
that didn't have much of a
footprint in the investment world.
That's the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein.
You know, how did he make money?
[MAN] I deeply regret
that I met Jeffrey Epstein,
who is somebody that has
haunted me for over 30 years.
Without me, he wouldn't be
the billionaire he is today,
and these poor girls would not be raped.
And I'm here for redemption and
to tell the story to the public.
[CAR HORN BEEPING]
[STEVEN HOFFENBERG] I met
Jeff Epstein in the '80s
after he was thrown out of Bear Stearns.
I was the CEO of Towers
Financial Corporation.
[WARD] Steve Hoffenberg and
Jeffrey were both self-made guys.
But when Jeffrey met him, Hoffenberg
was the sort of the mogul.
He was the one flying
around in private planes.
He was the one with the wealth.
[HOFFENBERG] The CEO
of a very large company
who had employed
Jeffrey Epstein in Europe
called me and said,
"This is a brilliant man
that we'd like you to
interview for North America
because he has credentials on Wall
Street, and he's loaded with energy,
but his moral compass is upside down."
Jeffrey Epstein had cheated and
stolen money on his expense account.
He definitely appealed to us,
because we were running
a Ponzi scheme. [CHUCKLES]
And he understood Wall Street,
and he could deliver substantial
results in this criminal enterprise.
So I interviewed Jeffrey Epstein,
and he took control of the interview.
He's got a gift that's extraordinary,
where he controls the people he meets
and manipulates them
totally with his charisma.
[HOFFENBERG] Jeffrey Epstein
became my partner in crime,
backing me up, leading the advance,
doing the crimes alongside me daily.
He took over the securities side,
the fake assets side.
He was manipulating stock price
and trading stock illegally.
[WARD] People involved
certainly remembered Jeffrey
as being incredibly
important in coming up
with how the scheme would work.
Then the law caught up
to this massive scam.
[HOFFENBERG] I stood up, plead guilty,
and accepted the responsibility.
My sentence was for 20
years in federal prison
and I didn't turn evidence against him
because Jeffrey Epstein told
me he was a cooperating witness
for the United States
Department of Justice in the past
and he had traction with them.
I believe that Jeffrey Epstein
would have been able to discredit me
and say he was the White
Knight and he was immaculate,
and I knew that was his plan.
You can't grasp the magnitude
of this man's controlling effect.
Jeffrey Epstein was able to
control and manipulate people
in an extreme method.
That was typical Jeffrey Epstein.
It's very clear that
that is Jeffrey's MO,
is to hold things over people,
hold their secrets
over people, I suspect.
Um, you know, there's a pattern here.
[HOFFENBERG] Jeffrey Epstein's
methods started with Leslie Wexner
when Jeffrey Epstein sold
his soul to Leslie Wexner
for several billion
dollars of investment.
[MAN] Jeff Epstein met Les
Wexner somewhere around 1986.
This is Mr. Wexner's gate house,
and beyond that gate
house is a massive compound
and the most expensive
house in central Ohio.
Les Wexner started out in 1963
opening the women's fashion
apparel shop, The Limited.
Les bought various other brands,
Abercrombie & Fitch
and Victoria's Secret.
Through all of that,
became a multi-billionaire.
At some point, Les Wexner
provided a power of attorney
to Jeffrey Epstein over
his financial affairs.
I was astonished because Les
Wexner is not the kind of guy
who gives up control over anything.
Epstein was this Svengali figure
that seems to have
some unexplainable grip,
uh, over this titan of industry.
There are people in the
late '80s, early '90s
that referred to Epstein
as "the boyfriend."
[HOFFENBERG] Jeffrey Epstein was working
with both of us at the same time.
He was going to Ohio regularly on a jet
that was provided to
Jeffrey by Leslie Wexner.
Epstein explained to me personally
that he could control the
emotions of Leslie Wexner easily
because Leslie Wexner was fascinated
and Wexner totally adored Epstein.
[EDWARDS] Do you consider
yourself to be bisexual?
- No.
- [EDWARDS] Okay.
In any even, you did
develop a sexual relationship
with Leslie Wexner at some
point in time, is that true?
No.
[HOFFENBERG] Epstein told me how
he planned to manipulate and control
Leslie Wexner's fortune
of billions of dollars
so that Jeffrey Epstein could invest
and make substantial income.
In 2019, Les Wexner revealed
that he had cut ties
with Epstein back in 2007.
He said he discovered Epstein had stolen
more than 46 million dollars from him.
He didn't explain why
he didn't press charges.
[LES WEXNER] Being taken advantage of
by someone who was, uh, so sick,
so cunning, uh, so depraved
uhm
is something that I'm embarrassed
that I was even close to.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
[WOMAN] I was, uh, a model and actress.
[MAN] Alicia! What's up?
[ALICIA ARDEN] When my friend said,
"This guy can get you in the
Victoria's Secret catalog,"
I jumped.
Jeffrey Epstein was staying
at Shutters hotel in
Santa Monica, California.
So I met him at his hotel room.
He said he knows the
owner of Victoria's Secret.
So he started opening my
portfolio of pictures
and then he said,
"Let me see you in
your bra and underwear."
Then he started putting his hands
on me and my hips and my butt.
I really felt at the time that I
was going to be raped or attacked.
I ran out of the room crying.
I drove to the Santa Monica Police
Department to file a police report.
I don't remember him
ever being investigated.
No one called me.
He didn't get in trouble over it.
It was like nothing
really ever happened.
[MAN] I've been a private
investigator now for about ten years,
but I'd say 80% of my job is
on the street finding information.
When I started working on
this case for Brad Edwards,
he told me that the FBI
is doing a parallel case,
but they really don't have much.
It was just really going along slow.
I'm a fan of the FBI. I
work very closely with them.
So I said, "Well, okay. Maybe
I can speed it up for them."
I had one daughter at the time
when I started working the case
who was 21,
and one daughter was 15.
It didn't only make me
think about my own daughters,
it made me think about all the
years I spent in law enforcement
that I had to interview abused girls
or girls that were
victims of a pedophile
and how broken these girls became.
These are the girls
that I have been able to
identify myself that were victims,
thirteen, and 14, and 15 years old.
As you can see, there's
a volume of them.
I started going to the depressed
areas of West Palm Beach,
to these neighborhoods,
and I would meet someone,
or one of the girls that Brad was
representing would know someone,
give me a lead,
and that's how I started finding
girl after girl after girl.
I think I must have found like 46
other girls that were assaulted.
Some of the victims were
very reluctant to talk to me,
but I was at least
able to get their names,
who they were and where they lived,
which I later gave to the FBI.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
Everybody feared him,
and fear was his greatest asset.
I mean, that's what gave him his power.
So I took it upon myself
as civil prosecutor,
and I served Jeffrey
Epstein for a deposition
and tried to achieve
justice for the victims.
[EDWARDS] Mr. Epstein,
how long have you been
sexually attracted to
underage minor females?
[LAWYER] Objection.
Harassing, argumentative.
Are you kidding?
[EDWARDS] No, I mean, I don't feel like
I'm divulging any secrets here, right?
[LAWYER] Move to strike.
I was starting to really get on
Jeffrey Epstein's nerves for sure.
There's no doubt. Was I trying to?
I guess so.
[EDWARDS] Mr. Epstein?
Yeah.
[EDWARDS] Were you
sexually abused as a minor?
Wait, say that again?
[EDWARDS] Were you
sexually abused as a minor?
[SIGHS] You know, I'd like to
Again, I'd like to
respond to all your
If any questions seem to be relevant,
but I would like to respond to
any relevant question at this time.
However, my attorneys have counseled
me that I cannot provide answers
to the questions relevant
to this lawsuit today.
I must accept their advice or risk
losing my Sixth Amendment right
to effective representation.
Accordingly then, I assert my Fifth,
Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights
in the United States Constitution.
[MIKE FISTEN] Pretty soon,
Epstein's investigators started
conducting surveillance on Brad.
They were trying to find out
if they can catch Brad doing
anything wrong after hours,
during hours, then try to blackmail him.
But then,
it became intimidation because they
started surveilling Brad's house,
where his wife and kids live.
[EDWARDS] When my wife noticed
that somebody was
following her, I thought,
"Okay, it's just getting out
of hand. Now that's my family."
He tried to intimidate me into
just abandoning my clients,
which I was never going to do.
That was never going to happen.
[REITER] They were investigating
the victims as well.
We had several victims report to us that
people posing as law
enforcement officers
were contacting the victims and
in some cases, intimidating them.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
[RIVERA] I started noticing
there were cars that would
sit at the end of my street.
I had these people
constantly watching me.
So I called my attorney, and
I told him what was going on.
Brad figured out
that most of these vehicles were
actually private investigators
that were following and watching me.
While she was sleeping in her bed,
Jeffrey Epstein's
investigators set their car up
across the street from her house,
and just shined their bright
lights through her window all night.
[RIVERA] So Brad sent Mike Fisten over.
They had this private investigator war,
cameras against one another,
recording each other.
[FISTEN] When I showed
up, he was still here.
I took pictures of his car,
and then I took pictures
of him in his car.
With me there looking at him,
he's still videotaping.
It was really It was kind of scary.
Mike puts me in his car and he says,
"We're going to get out of here."
[FISTEN] Don't follow her.
[RIVERA] And he drove
me like hours down south
and like put me in a hotel,
where I hid and was
basically just told like,
"Your family's going to
be safer if you're not home
because they're not
gonna harass you now."
Why do I have to make my family
safe from somebody who
should be sitting in jail?
[INSECTS BUZZING AND CHIRPING]
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
[REITER] This was a
cooperative investigation
between the FBI and the
US attorney's office.
Although we were not an official
partner to the investigation,
they kept us informed.
We cooperated, we introduced them
to the victims that we knew of,
we gave them all of the
background information,
and what's written between the lines
that doesn't appear in a report.
[FISTEN] The agent on the case,
Kuyrkendall, is a great agent.
And she put together this
case against this pedophile
that was going to put him in
prison the rest of his life
if he just gets convicted of one count.
The government had a plethora of
information at their fingertips.
They had 35 to 40 different victims
that were willing to give testimony.
They had information showing victims
being transported across state lines,
whether it be in private
planes or on commercial flights.
So, they had a 53-page
indictment prepared
because they had just an
immense amount of information
that they could charge Epstein with.
[REITER] I asked for an
appointment with Alex Acosta.
Alex Acosta at the time
was the US attorney.
I met with him and his
team in Mr. Acosta's office.
I told them that I would
like to know from them
that they were going
to prosecute this case,
and follow through with it, and,
uh, get justice for the victims.
I left my meeting with
Alex Acosta thinking
that Jeffrey Epstein would go
to jail for the rest of his life.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
The case had been turned
over to the federal government
for more than two years,
but I hadn't heard anything.
I just want to know what's going on,
so I call and speak with Marie Villafaña
of the US attorney's office,
and she confirmed that
this is a massive case.
I started asking when she thought a
trial was actually going to happen,
and I remember her telling me that,
"There's just a lot
that I want to tell you,
and I know that your heart's in
the right place, and mine is too.
There's a lot that I want to tell
you, Brad, that I can't tell you."
And that's when I started
thinking something was going on.
[REITER] Suddenly, when
we'd call the FBI agents,
they would tell us they
were forbidden to talk
with any representative of Palm Beach
Police Department about the case.
It's the only time that
ever happened in my 30 years
as a law enforcement officer.
[MALE REPORTER] Epstein's
personal 727 aircraft
arrived at PBIA from Newark at 5:00 p.m.
The investor, traveling
with a small entourage,
was met at the private Galaxy Aviation
by a black Escalade and a driver.
Sources tell News Channel
5 that Kenneth Starr,
now a top lawyer in Los Angeles,
will arrive here tomorrow morning.
[FISTEN] The US attorney Acosta
met with Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers.
The next thing, not only
was the indictment gone,
the FBI case was stopped.
So the FBI agents were shook up
very upset, and started
voicing their opposition
to what had occurred.
[MARIA FARMER] The FBI
agent, Nesbitt Kuyrkendall,
I was so impressed by her.
She was very dedicated
to the women in Florida.
She called me really upset
one day, and she said,
"Maria, I know you're hesitant about
testifying because you're afraid,
and I just want you to know I
don't know if it'll even matter
'cause things are really falling apart."
I contacted Kuyrkendall
myself, and she was in tears.
She was actually crying on the
phone, in tears, that this happened.
She felt so bad for these victims
because she told these victims
she's going to put this guy away.
Nobody knows why US Attorney
Acosta shut this case down.
To me, that's bullshit.