January 4, 2019 • 60 mins
Jeffrey Epstein made a name for himself as a mysterious money manager with friends in very high places, from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, British royalty and more. His firm refused to do business with anyone worth less than one billion dollars, and Epstein traveled the globe, often throwing exclusive parties on his own private island. Yet this jet-setting money whiz was also dogged by rumors -- rumors of ongoing sexual abuse with multiple victims. At least some of these rumors turned out to be true. Any other person would have spent years in jail ...so why is Jeffrey Epstein walking free today? Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and you can turn back now
or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
M Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
(00:26):
my name isn't they called me Ben. We're joined with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you
are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Before we get started,
we have a very important message regarding today's episode. Today's
episode discusses very frankly, some horrific sexual crimes against underaged victims,
(00:53):
and it's quite disturbing, but I think it's an important
discussion to have, and we try as always to be
as respectful and thoughtful about it as possible. Let's let's
cut straight to the heart of the matter. In an
earlier episode, we mentioned the ongoing legal battles of one
Jeffrey Epstein. Today we are diving into a sordid tale
(01:16):
that will take us from the posh tony area of
Palm Beach Island, Florida, to New York, to New Mexico,
to Paris to a private island in the Virgin Islands
and a particularly strange series of private plane flights. But
first things first, who is Jeffrey Epstein? Oh, the man
(01:36):
of the hour? Jeffrey Epstein was born in nineteen fifty
three on Coney Island. He went to Lafayette High School.
He also attended Cooper Union. Uh. He dropped out of
Cooper Union by the way. Uh. He also went to
UH New York University's current Institute, which he also left
without a degree, surprisingly, especially as we continue to learn
(01:59):
a little more about this gentleman. Yeah yeah. For two years,
from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy five, Epstein taught
at a very upscale Ivy League prep school called Dalton
School in Manhattan. You'll read accounts that say he taught
calculus and physics, and then you'll read accounts that say
(02:19):
he taught physics and math. But it was definitely the quantitative,
the quantitative disciplines. New York Magazine initially likened his time
at Dalton School to the teacher that Robin Williams plays
in Dead Poets Society. You guys remember that film Captain
MC captain? Yeah, man, the first really really sad movie
(02:43):
I ever saw, Right, poetry was made for one reason,
boys to woo women and also carpet dum right. So,
one parent of a student worked on Wall Street and
this guy was so inspired by Epstein's methods and the
math rants that he was known for that he approached
(03:04):
Jeffrey Epstein and said, essentially, what the hell are you
doing here, buddy? Why are you a teacher? You should
be on Wall Street, which lets you know what Wall
Street thinks about teachers. Yeah, why why would you be
inspiring the young people? Just make more money? And so
this this guy, this parent doubled out on this and said, no, really,
(03:25):
I'm serious, jeff Let me introduce you to my buddy. A. S. Greenberg.
You've got to call him. A Screenberg is a senior
partner at the time at bear Stearns. Greenberg really Doug
Epstein because this guy Greenberg definitely played favorites. And one
thing that he was known for was he had a
(03:46):
certain type of young employee he liked or new hire.
He didn't want people who were, you know, just fattened
off inherited money on third generation bankers. He wanted brilliant
poor people and pours anything beneath a millionaire to him
who were very, very hungry, and at the time Epstein
(04:07):
ticked all these boxes. So six he says, all right,
screw teaching, I'm going to work at bear Sterns under
a screenberg. He started from the bottom kind of the
way Drake wants you to believe his career began. Uh,
it's untrue. But in the Epstein's case, it is. He
started as a junior assistant to a floor trader at
the American Stock Exchange, and it quickly became apparent that
(04:32):
Jeff had a gift for this sort of work. So
Epstein was, to be fair either a complete genius or
very very close to that. Um. He had a specialty UM,
which was in options. Uh. And that was at the
time something that wasn't particularly well understood. UM. And he
amassed a group of clients, really really quite wealthy clients
(04:55):
who thought that his ability to assess the tax implication
on large portfolios and then to recommend kind of tax loopholes,
I guess advantages you could say, um, for some of
these transactions. Yeah. Absolutely, this At this level of finance,
(05:17):
the way in which you move money and the order
of operations can make a huge difference. And you know,
how much of a cut Uncle Sam gets or the
state of New York or whatever. And it's really crazy
that it only took him four years to go from
assistant to a floor trader all the way up to
a full partner. Yeah, he beat the game, he became
(05:37):
a partner, and then what do you do after you
beat a game? You stopped playing. So he left the
firm in n one and set up his own shop.
This is really this is really strange and sketchy. Okay,
So the premise behind his shop, j Epstein and Co.
Is that he would manage the individual and family fortunes
of clients with a minimum of one billion dollars in
(06:01):
their portfolio un animum. Yeah, and according to the scuttle
butt about this guy in nineteen two, he immediately began
collecting clients. And he didn't go out and have some
sort of Ted talk or some sort of Steve Jobs
big Apple reveal speech. People just started coming to him
(06:21):
because they knew he was open for business, and he
was also very controlling. He had these specific conditions. If
you made one billion or more, you could talk, but
you also had to accept this. He would not just
offer investment advice. He was going to become your financial architect,
from soup to nuts, stem to stern, from investments to philanthropy,
(06:44):
to tax planning to security to a swatching. The guilt
and burdens that people felt because they had, you know,
inherited wealth that they clearly did not earn, he said
to one of his friends at the time, I want
people to understand the power, the response, and the burden
of their money. He would take total control of the
(07:05):
billion dollars. He would charge a flat fee, and you
would also get power of attorney to do whatever he
deemed necessary to advance his his client's financial goals. And uh,
he was really strict about all these conditions. And there's
this whole thing where he really did stick to this whole.
(07:25):
If you're a billionaire, were cool. If you're not, get
the hell out. I mean as I mean, as crazy
as that sounds like. People would come to him with
seven hundred million dollars, put it on the table essentially
and say, Jeff, I need your help, buddy. I've got
seven million dollars and I need you to work this
through three and He's like, no, get out. Basically, not
(07:48):
so kind, thank no, no, thank you basically because they
were just a little short of that billion. It's like,
I don't run a business for hoboes. Yeah, and that's okay.
So this is a quick pause here because that's a
question I have. How many billionaires were there in We
know there are more now, you know, partially due to inflation,
(08:10):
partially due to rise of business in other countries. But
were there that many billionaires? I don't know. I would
think not. I would imagine it was a very very
rarefied field, right there were They couldn't have been that many.
I mean that inherited wealth, there's there are at least
several hundred families that have You know that's true because
(08:32):
I was thinking of individuals. So it might be like
a dynasty that collects all of their ill gotten gains
or or happy gotten gains. You know, some billionaires are
really sweet and do nice things for the earth and
for its inhabitants. Right, sure, maybe maybe I I don't
(08:54):
personally know everybody on the planet, so I want to
be fair. Well, there's also probably some that you know
do it with great humility and don't brag about it, right, right,
I would, I would, I would hope. But then you
give it to Jeffrey Epstein who says I'll hand it
you all, and that's you know, that's the smart thing
to do. It just makes me think of that um
(09:16):
balls at quote. Behind every great fortune, there's a crime,
you know. But yeah, you guys are absolutely right. There
are clearly people who you know, if you're born into
wealth and you don't have control over your circumstances, then
of course there are people who want to do great
acts to make the world a better place. Bill Gates
(09:39):
took himself down several notches financially to help combat disease.
That's that's that's a stand up thing. I still hate Clippy,
but fighting disease is a noble thing, you know. Wait,
when Josh and Chuck interviewed Bill Gates, I actually got
to go with them and meet him in a hotel room,
and Josh brought up Clippy, and apparently O Gates is
(10:00):
still quite fond of Clippy. Bill gets loves Clippy. He
has like a relationship with it. He's the only one.
So when I was a kid, I liked it, but
it just slowed down the word processor. So, speaking of billionaires,
who are Jeffrey's clients Aside from one client, a billionaire
(10:22):
named Leslie Wexler. Epstein keeps his list a closely guarded secret,
and he's also sort of evasive about his process and
what he does. You could call it wealth management, but
that's sort of like calling something a structure. A shot
can be a structure, so can a skyscraper or a
pyramid or a nuclear bunker. There are a lot of
(10:44):
things that could be considered that wealth management. So he's
firm employees as many or employed as many as a
hundred and fifty people, but their task were overwhelmingly day
to day bureaucracy and admin stuff like countants to make
sure the internal finances of the company running. All the
actual decisions investment in management decisions were made by Epstein himself,
(11:08):
and he's sort of computer phobic, not a big fan
of emails and so on, so he's always talking on
the phone, which will be important later. So how much
money is he making? Some estimates will say he is
or was raking in around seventy five million a year,
but that's a guestimate, and that's why in a lot
(11:30):
of stories about the guy, there weren't many until fairly recently,
you'll hear him described as either a multimillionaire or a billionaire.
People don't really know. Yeah, you have to imagine if
he's bringing in even somewhere around seventy five million dollars
a year, with his acumen, his understanding of investment, he's probably,
you know, gotten well, well upwards of a billion I'm assuming. Well,
(11:53):
it's like the Putin question. How much money does Vladimir
Putin have? Not? I mean, which palace are you're gonna search? Right?
How long do you want to live? Jeez? Okay, Well,
here's the big question. With however much money he's acquired.
What does a guy like Jeffrey Epstein do with all
(12:15):
of those piles of cash? Beanie babies? He sets them
on fire? Oh man, see by a bunch of beanie babies,
buy them a bunch of magic cards, then set the
whole thing on fire. Where did a cape? What's his
monocle top hat position? I don't know. Well, I'll tell
you for real. What he does is and what anyone
(12:35):
should probably do. Was a cape so bad? I'm sorry.
Buy a cape first, then just start purchasing real estate,
purchasing land, purchasing stuff that goes on land, different structures.
Put them on land. That you own, that's what you do. Yeah,
so he owns that private island in the US Virgin Islands.
(12:56):
We didn't mention what the nickname for this thing is.
It's Little Saint Jeffrey, Little St. Jeffrey literal Saint's Jeffrey
chand Islets. Yeah, but seriously, he owns an island. He
owns island. It's uh, it's who was asking Oh, Jonathan
Strickland was asking me about this earlier. And it is,
(13:16):
in fact not shaped like a skull, which I know
is a huge downer for everyone. Do you think he
still has a layer though, yes, it does have He
does have a layer. He also has a Japanese bathhouse
on this island. Yeah, we're gonna learn more about that
in just a little bit. But here's the other thing, Noll.
He owns on the island of Manhattan, the what is
considered the largest private residence nine stories tall. Yeah, he
(13:41):
owns that and an island. He also funds extensive, legitimate
scientific research through something humbly named the Jeffrey Epstein the
sixth Foundation. And it's cool. It is genuinely cool. It's
it's genuinely good. Since two thousand, the Foundation is given
around two in a million a year per year to
(14:03):
people like Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Eric Lander, George Church,
Ben Gertzl other like numerous Nobel laureates Lawrence Lawrence Crouse
as well. And over the years, the foundation has brought
a lot of these scientists together and these sort of
brainstorming conference situations to get on the same page about
(14:25):
fundamental topics like gravity, global threats to Earth, the evolution
of language. So you can see some of the implications here.
Usually when billionaires and philanthropists are saying, let's understand gravity,
they're they're asking, how can we use it somehow? Right?
Global threats to Earth? I mean, this all goes back
(14:47):
to making smart investment choices to I think the language
thing is really interesting. I'm sure there's a lot of
group think theory because that would be valuable in the
stock market. So this is, in my opinion, one of
those things that you do see every once in a
while when a certain individual or a group acquires enough
wealth that philanthropy is able to kick in at this point,
(15:10):
at least to this level where a big a new
creation occurs that is helping that truly is helping humanity
in some way, in some small way. In this case,
just bringing scientists to a consensus could be massively important
to get everyone on the same page, to actually get
the Earth to start making some big changes, right, rather
than just a country or one small group. Um, it's
(15:36):
it's tough for me to know this and then also
know what we're going to talk about in just a
few minutes. Right, Let's let's stick with the good stuff
while while we can. You can see the official about
page for the Epstein Foundation when talks about how it
is funded. In two thousand how it in two thousand
(15:57):
three established a program for Revolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University
with thirty a thirty five million dollars seed money gift.
The program studies the evolution of microbiology through the lens
of mathematics. Uh then, since its establishment, it's made advances
in the treatment of cancer, HIV, infectious diseases. He's also
(16:18):
get this well known for his work funding early education
for youth in the Virgin Islands to other places other
areas of the world. So far, so good, right, these
are genuinely good things. Jeffrey Epstein is self made financial giant.
Isn't just killing it. In the world of finance, a
lot of finance guys defined success by violent terms, crushing it,
(16:43):
killing it, nailed it, so smashing and smashing it. Yeah,
he did all of that stuff. He's also putting a
significant amount of capital into globally important issues. Those motivations
are not clearly, not entirely true, altruistic. You can make
some money off that. Yet, while Epstein remained for many
years an international man of intrigue and mystery, tantalizing, bits
(17:06):
of information about his private life gradually emerged. And that's
when things got ugly. And we'll learn about those things
right after a quick word from our sponsor. Here's where
it gets crazy. Rumors were true. Yea, even more so
(17:31):
than we thought. The guys, Yes, she was well open secrets. Uh,
people called nieces. That's a gross that's a gross detail. First,
let's get let's get the one almost side note rumor
out of the way. He's a member of a lot
of clubs. Yeah, like the Trilateral Commission that you may
(17:55):
remember from an episode that we've done. We have done
an audio episode on Trilateral right, I don't remember, man,
it's in a video. Go check out our YouTube channel
and watch the Trilateral Commission if you don't know much
about it. Also the Council on Foreign Relations also a
video also maybe not a audio topic yet. Honestly, don't know.
(18:16):
A ton of people are in the Council on Foreign Relations.
And yeah, you know, the Trilateral Commission has movers and
shakers that kind of come and go over time. But
you can imagine how upsetting these two things are for
certain a certain number of us within the conspiracy minded world, like,
being being a part of both of those organizations is
(18:37):
pretty bad, because just being part of one is potentially bad.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing overall, but for people
who believe this, yes it is. Do you think they
have capes? Not like in public but when they're in
the meetings. I think it's more of like crowns and
different masks that they wear. I'm assuming, Okay, I mean
(19:02):
I feel like that's a big compromise. Okay, maybe you
have to be in this straight up illuminati to earn
a cape, so that you know, that's one of those
things that makes you go, oh interesting, I wanted to
know more about this guy, if you're of a certain mind.
But there's another thing, and this is we're being relatively
(19:26):
lighthearted about the inequality of wealth in the globe and
some of the ridiculous things that could happen when you're
a billionaire, because those are the lighthearted things in a multimillionaire. Yeah,
but those are the lighthearted things. This is where this
is where the disclaimer, the warning we had at the
beginning really comes into effect. From here on out, things
(19:47):
are going to be pretty pretty dark. So Secondly, and
apparently for decades, Jeffrey Epstein had been routinely seducing, assault,
and in some cases violently assaulting underage girls. And it
(20:08):
goes even further than that. Um, the really upsetting thing
is that this, this whole deal that he had going
on seemed to be pretty much an open, open secret
in certain parts of both Wall Street as well as Washington. Yeah.
We have a quote from current president as we record this,
(20:29):
Donald Trump in two thousand two, talking about his relationship
with Jeffrey Epstein. He said, I've known Jeff for fifteen years.
Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with.
It's even said that he likes beautiful women as much
as I do, and many of them are on the
younger side. No doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life. Well,
(20:50):
that was hard to get there right now. You know
that guy's the president. Yeah, that guys the president. In
a two thousand seven New York Magazine article, Vanity Fair
column list Michael Wolfe described flying on Epstein's private plane
in the nineties, saying Epstein was followed onto the plane
by how shall I say this, by three teenage girls,
(21:12):
not his daughters, who were eighteen nineteen twenty. Who knows
they were model like. He's never been secretive about the girls.
Wolf said. At one point when his troubles began, he
was talking to me and said, Hey, what can I say?
I like young girls? I said, maybe you should say
I like young women. A lot of smoke. A lot
(21:35):
of smoke here, A lot of smoke, A lot of smoke.
The mainstream public learned of this semi open secret in
the early two thousands, thinks, in large part to some
groundbreaking work by the Miami Herald. These encounters with underage
underage victims um the ones that were the subject of
the investigation in Florida. They took place from two thousand
(22:00):
five in Mr Epstein's mansions. The one in Palm Beach Island,
New York and the US Virgin Islands. Many of the
girls were runaways or foster children, people from broken homes,
people of vulnerable situations. And it's important to note Epstein
did not work alone, like we remember when Matt earlier
(22:21):
said this is just the beginning. His His operation functioned
like a pyramid scheme. A girl would be approached by
one of Epstein's assistants or often a previous victim, and told, hey,
you can make pretty good money by giving this middle
(22:42):
aged rich guy a massage. Already creepy, right, So once
the once the victim arrives at the mansion, and this
is in the Palm Beach operation at least not far
from Marl Marl Lardo, not very far, she would be
escorted to a particular room and then that person would leave,
and you can find descriptions of the room in in
(23:04):
the Miami Herald's piece. Epstein would come in wearing only
a towel on the phone, this robe, lay down naked
uh bell uh, belly down, belly first, and he would
tell the victim to massage his legs. And then you
(23:27):
would start escalating this stuff and offering more money. Also,
there were sex toys around. And again I cannot emphasize
this enough. When we say under age, we're talking about
kids who are fourteen and fifteen years old. Uh. I
can't even say words. I just I'm going to be
(23:48):
making guttural noises. And I know it doesn't make me
like specially sensitive, but it does a little just having
a daughter that's entering into kind of the teenage pre
teenage phase. Just I mean, I can't even imagine it's
in sayings. A lot of these kids are coming from
terrible home lives anyway, you know, because they're even like
thinking they might get a opportunity or something that might
(24:11):
help them out, and they're just totally abused and used.
The rage, the rage really just immediately sets in. We
haven't even gotten like all the way into this. So
he would attempt to entice entice some victims to disrobe
and do increasingly intimate physical things. He would intimidate others.
(24:35):
In at least one case that made it to the
public sphere, he did forcibly assault somewhat, and afterwards the
girls would be paid two d three hundred dollars so
on to pay on what they did. The person that
he forced himself on says she gave him a thousand
(24:56):
bucks and asked her to be quiet, yeah, and apologize,
so they would get paid and they would be informed
that if they'd like to make more money, they could
recruit their friends to come visit Epstein, so long as
they were around the same age. And some of the handlers,
they're very careful about this. Some of the handlers told
the girls the victims when they first came to Epstein,
(25:20):
to say that they were eighteen to him, the idea
being that this will provide, yeah, some kind of legal defense,
but that doesn't fly in Florida. Florida specifically has laws
to say ignorance of that age is not not an excuse. Jeez, man,
you can already see in my mind, I'm picturing something
(25:41):
like Nexium that we covered not long ago, that kind
of extremely wealthy person somehow just with the enticement of money,
and in Jeffrey's case, I guess in some way not
necessarily for the younger girls, but this um aura of
(26:02):
a wealthy man that knows what he's doing and is
going to make more money and like has this special
place in in Palm Beach. But then also knowing that
perhaps he has an island it's and then getting your friends,
like everything just feels so disgusting and icky about this
and calculated, that's the thing. It's very calculated. This is
(26:22):
not an impulse decision, you know what I mean? And
not that not that an impulse decisions in any way.
Uh better, It's just that this calculated, organizational, systematic approach,
it is insidious. That's the spider thing in the web.
And so let's let's look at some of the characters
(26:45):
that become involved in this ongoing story. First is Epstein's
associates and staff. So one of his assistants was a
person named Sarah Helen and Kellen was accused by lawyers
in legal file Leans of bringing girls to Epstein's mansion
to be abused. Yeah, according to the police files, there
(27:07):
was this whole series of alleged victims um that told
investigators that they were led like this is the person,
Sarah Kellen led the these girls to the massage room
in the mansion where all this other stuff with the
disrobing occurred. And this was in the Palm Beach mansion.
I mean, this literally is a conspiracy. There are other
(27:30):
players involved that are being used as pieces in this
like elaborate ploy I mean, and it's so scary because
who knows, who knows how much of a victim somebody
like Sarah Kelln is of of him right early on
in some other way, like she's in his pocket in
some way or something. Well, I mean, who knows. That's
(27:51):
not just excusing her of what her actions and what
she did, but still like you don't, we don't know
the circumstances, how deep this guy's kind of tendrils go,
you know, absolutely, and the speaking of that, there's another character,
Nada marsten Kova marchan Kova. She we first learned about
(28:12):
her through statements of some alleged victims who won't claim
to police that Epstein told her that he had purchased
Nada from her parents in Eastern Europe when she was fifteen,
and they were described as Yugoslavian or Slovakian um. Another
(28:34):
victim alleged that she was forced to have sex with
Nada marsten Kova and then watch her have sexual interactions
with Epstein. According to the Miami Herald, sometimes Jeffrey would
instruct a young woman he described as his quote Yugoslavian
sex slave Nadia Marsenkova, who was over eighteen to join in,
(28:56):
and he took photographs and he displayed these photograph surround
the house. The guy's um. There's there's a phrase knowal
that you in your roommate used, I think applies here.
The guy's proclivities were wide, rife, wide rife throughout his house.
This was not a secret because also Gislaine Maxwell, the
(29:16):
socialite and heiress who was occasionally referred to as Epstein's Madam,
was asked to turnover records. And then there's Alan Dershowitz,
Alan Freakin Dershowitz like like an enormously prestigious lawyer. He
worked with Epstein on the business side. Derschwitz told outfit
called Axios that Epstein and lent his family the Palm Beach,
(29:38):
Florida house, and that he received a therapeutic massage with
an old Russian there, but that he'd had no idea
anything improper at even taking place in that house. In
eighteen he said that Epstein after this stuff became public,
he said, Epstein's called me a couple of times about
legal issues because I'm still technically his lawyer, but I
(29:59):
haven't had any so shoulder any other kind of contact
with him. But you never stopped being someone's lawyer. And
then there's a guy we got to mention just casually,
he'll come back, trust us. Guy named alex Acosta. He
was formerly the U S attorney in South Florida. He's
currently the U S Secretary of Labor. We'll get to
him in a bit, but just remember the name alex Acosta.
(30:20):
We shall remember you. So let's talk about the victims. Here,
the authority is identified more than thirty victims of epstein UM.
And then if you look at the Miami Herald in
their latest report, they identified eighty victims and they located
sixty and spoke to four of them officially on the record.
So again, trying to track down all of these people
(30:43):
who are alleged victims, and you know, you can only
get a certain percentage of those people to even talk
because this kind of thing is it's so insidious. Even
being able to speak about something like this, especially on
the record, is difficult. So let's go through a few
of these um. The first one is Virginia You Free
(31:05):
gu free g I U F f r E. She
claimed in court papers that she was recruited into this
whatever you want to call child sex ring that this
billionaire was running. When she was only fifteen years old.
She was working as a towel girl at maral Lago
(31:25):
and that's how she got wrapped up in it. And
she also claims that Dershwitz as well as Prince Andrew
participated in her sexual abuse. What is a towel girl
a towel girl, I'm assuming at marl Lago because there's
a vast outdoor area at Mar Lago with a pool
and everything like that, as well as there are shower
or what do you call him, mom who all of
(31:46):
the other things you'd find out a spa bathhouse kind
of thing. I can only imagine that a towel girl
handles of the towel to bring towels. It's like a
like a caddy, but with towels instead of clubs. And
in this case, she's fifteen, which is fifteen, and sixteen
is a very common age for these private clubs to hire.
When I was fifteen, that's no. Yeah, when I was fifteen,
(32:09):
I started working at one of these places, not as
a towel girl. I was in I was a pool boy,
So I mean, and it's a great insults. So that's
a great summer job for kids. Yeah, you know what
I mean. You make a little scratch kid and save
up for Nintendo Switch or whatever. Especially out in that area,
some of these private clubs provide some of the best
money for your work. And then there's Courtney Wilde, who
(32:32):
was a victim beginning at the age of fourteen. Uh.
Wild says, by the time I was sixteen, I had
probably brought him seventy to eighty girls who are all fourteen.
When fifteen years old, he was involved in my life
for years. Uh. And do you we just not skip
over the fact that this one person Virginia claimed that
(32:55):
both Derschwitz the lawyer and Prince Andrew Royalty were involved.
How intense is that and especially occurring at marl Ago
where all of these highly important people are just kind
of coming through and I never whenever, Um, And now
we have somebody who's claiming to have brought him seventy
to eighty girls. I'm sorry, And we just had to
(33:18):
pause for a moment, and now let's continue with the disgustingness.
So there's Jenna Lisa Jones who said that she was
also um. She she was also assaulted by Epstein when
she was fourteen, and she has a chilling and haunting
quote here um I was. I was somewhat divided over
(33:40):
whether we should read it allowed, but here it is.
You can't ever stop your thoughts. A word can trigger something.
For me. It is the word pure, because he called
me pure in that room, and then I remember what
he did to me in that room. Just I don't know.
There's Hayley Robinson. Virginia Robinson was working at mar Lago
(34:02):
when she was recruited to be a masseust to Palm
Beach hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein. There are tons of
Jane does. We don't know how many there are. We
know what the Harold found, right The Harold says they
found eighty. They located sixty. They talked to eight, but
only four would go on the record with their names.
(34:25):
And you can understand that too, because a lot of
these people have been quashed by settlements and non disclosure agreements.
A settlement with a India or nondisclosure agreement means that
if someone if someone alleges a crime and you want
to keep it out of court, regardless of what it is,
you can have a legal team drop a contract that says,
(34:47):
without admitting guilt, here's x amount of dollars and in return,
you can't talk about it. You agree to never talk
about this. The problem is that a lot of those things,
as we see, don't really hold up in were if
you're asking someone not to confess a crime, you know
what I mean. Yeah, So those are those are victims,
(35:09):
those are collaborators or as you said, an old conspirators.
But there are some uh, people fighting the good fight
on this side as well. So there were several investigators
involved in the case. We have Joseph for Carey, who
was the lead detective for the case, and in his
first interview UM, he said the evidence the department collected
(35:30):
to support the girls stories was overwhelming, um and included
all kinds of stuff, all kinds of damning evidence. Phone
call records, copies, have written phone messages from the girls
found in Epstein's trash uh, and Epstein's flight logs that
showed his private plane and Palm Beach on the days
the girls were scheduled to give massages. Uh. Pretty damning stuff. Yeah.
(35:51):
The police report also showed how eerily consistent the girls
stories were. UM. Just down to the t right down
to their detailed descriptions of Epstein's Janitalia. And then there's
Michael Writer, who is the former chief of police and
Palm Beach. He was the chief during this investigation, and
(36:13):
he said detectives were astonished by the sheer volume of
victims coming and going from the house, the frequency sometimes
several in the same day, and the universally young ages
of these girls. Michael Writer says it started out to
give a man backrupt but in many cases turned some
(36:35):
far worse than that, elevated to a serious crime, in
some cases sexual batteries. And then there's a another good
I mean, this is almost true detective level, you know
what I mean, as far as the web that is
unearthed here. Uh, there's the attorney for the victims scut
named Brad Edwards. He's representing several of the young women
who were abused as miners by Epstein. His law off
(37:00):
us is packed with files from the case and he's
been fighting the power at every turn, often outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned.
Because you see, that true detective thing is not just
a pop culture reference for us. Here there are multiple
very powerful people that have been implicated in one way
(37:22):
or another with Epstein, and to be fair, a lot
of it is not proven other than the fact that
we know they hung out. They maybe took his plane
place as the plane which was also um informally known
as the Lolita Express. That's true, it was aformally known
as that. But who are some of these implicated uh
(37:42):
implicated celebrities. Well, let's jump in first with Bill Clinton,
because he was known to have taken the Lolita Express
to the Virgin Islands, to that island that Epstein owns
on numerous occasions, as well as hanging out at the
Palm Beach and he went to Africa. Yeah, using that plane.
(38:03):
I think Chris Tucker was on the plane too. There's
this huge list of celebrities that have been on there,
you know. Um, but Bill Clinton was definitely one of
the ones that popped out in my mind around the time.
This is awful to say, but it was around the
time that Pizza Gate was kind of coming out. That's
when I started to really learn about Bill Clinton's involvement
with Epstein and that connection was one of those things
(38:27):
that freaked me out a little bit and made me
start to think there was more to the whole pizza
gate thing, which I don't necessarily believe, but it's definitely
one of those things that creeped me out. And then
Donald Trump has come up several times here, current president
Donald Trump, he had this association he made that really creepy.
(38:48):
They made that quotation. He made that quote in two
thousand two that certainly didn't age well. And uh, there's
one thing we do have to say in Donald Trump's
defense when and Trump was when Trump learned that Epstein
may have been romantically entertaining or attempting to recruit underage
(39:10):
girls at Mara a Lago or bringing these young women
with him, these young girls, these children with him and
calling them his nieces, which is so creepy. Uh, Donald
Trump said, Okay, look, this can't happen here. You gotta go.
So Trump asked him to leave. Trump kicked him out.
(39:30):
That's good, I guess. I feel like that's the bare
minimum of decent. No, it's not. The bare minimum of
decency is calling the police. Yeah. His his whole thing
is just don't do it where I can also be implicated.
And you think that's what it was. I mean, in
my opinion, I don't know I mean, I don't want
to throw around implications like that. It sure feels like
it based on what we know about. Yeah, the act
(39:54):
of kicking someone out or not allowing someone to do
something illegal in your place of business, but aud alerting
the authorities that someone is doing something illegal in your
place of business, that's that's that's very damning. Yeah, I
see what you're saying. Yeah, that makes sense. And then
we mentioned Prince Andrew, the Prince Andrew, uh, the allegations
that Epstein forced uh his teenage victims to become physically
(40:19):
involved with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions. And the
you know, the UK Press is having a field day
with like tabloids like The Sun or whatever. Um, well
it's blowing up right now. A lot of I mean
also a lot of royalty are untouchable, you know what
I mean? When when's when is the next time? When's
(40:43):
the last time a royal family member went to jail?
Prince Charles spent a lot of time in the the
old Slammer. No, I'm just kidding, the Old Slammer, that's
what they call it. They're right, so so okay, As
as we said, the alleged abuse is pretty well documented
(41:04):
by numerous sources going back to at least the nine nineties,
and if you want to be less than optimistic, then
you can reasonably say that as possible, it went or
went back earlier than that. So how did this go
from rumors, scuttle button secrecy to an actual, UH legal matter.
(41:27):
How did the cops get involved? Well we'll get to
that right after a quick break. So let's start in
March of two thousand and five, when a woman called
the police in Palm Beach, and after first refusing to
give her name, she said that she believed her fourteen
(41:49):
year old stepdaughter had in some way been molested by
a wealthy man, just a wealthy man. So at the time,
the victim in this case lived at this UH involuntary
admitted juvenile education facility, which I'm assuming is some kind
of juvie what you would call a juvie or I guess,
(42:10):
and something to that effect, because she was she was
having behavioral problems, right, So apparently she shows up at
this school with three hundred dollars cash in her purse
and it became basically the talk of the class. Everybody's saying,
oh my god, you see that she's got three hundred cash.
You get that, dude, that's crazy. And then the friend
(42:30):
called the girl a terrible name. Yes, um, we'll say it,
a horror. Another friend put a fist through the wall
in anger, apparently like punched the wall. And then the
girl left school. And then the stepmother gets this call
from another student's mother. So this just this act of
bringing three hundred dollars into this school was enough to
(42:52):
get basically the entire school talking. Uh. Then a policewoman
was talking to the girl with a therapist. They are
so they're just having a conversation about what's going on.
That's when this victim she begins crying and breaking down,
and she dug her finger into her thigh and she
just began telling out, telling this entire story about how
(43:16):
she was She was taken to this big house on
the Atlantic on the Intracoastal Waterway, which is where Epstein's
mansion was located. She remembers climbing this spiral staircase to
the master bedroom where this woman, a blond woman who
you know, she's probably twenty in her twenties, twenty five
(43:37):
or something, likely Sarah Kellen. It's probably yes, exactly, probably
Sarah Kelln. She wasn't very friendly. She laid out sheets
and she put lotions on a massage table, and then
she leaves. That's when Jeffrey Epstein comes in. This is
the story, this similar story that we've already talked about.
He's naked except for a towel. He sternly orders the
(43:58):
girl to take off her clothes and then the rest
of the details are pretty much what you've heard before
and stuff that I honestly don't want to say here.
But the police at this point were very much convinced
that this was at least worth looking into. And then
this girl says that she had been brought there by
(44:20):
two other girls, but he spoke to those two girls.
Those two girls pointed to two more girls who had
also been there and also recruited them. By the time
detectives tracked down one victim, there were two or three
more to find, and very very soon there were dozens.
So also in two thousand five, the Palm Beach p
D obtains a search warrant and they visit Epstein's mansion.
(44:44):
They cart off massage tables, photos of naked girls, soaps
shaped like Genitalia. Epstein sent an urgent message to the
detectives through his attorney. It said, the shadiest thing Mr
Epstein is this is laughable. I'm sorry, this is just
Mr Epstein is very passionate about massages. The massages are
(45:06):
therapeutic and spiritually sound for him. That is why he
has had many massages. I mean really, I'm sorry, I'm laughing.
It's just come on, it's laughable. It's like it's it's
such a bad attempt at an excuse that it sounds
(45:27):
like it was poorly translated from a different language. Well,
the craziest thing here is that if you're a wealthy
individual and you really are passionate about massages, it makes
sense that you have massage therapy equipment in your home.
You can afford that, even rooms dedicated just to getting
(45:48):
therapeutic massages, and you can also hire a massius, a
professional masseus, which he did have. She he paid her
a hundred dollars an hour. There you go, so he
had a seal masseus. There. There are your massages that
you're passionate about. Enjoy them. So we should also note
that computers in hardware we're missing in the mansion. In
(46:12):
two the Palm Beach investigators were taken out pretty quickly.
So that's two thousand five. They're fighting this in court.
As as we said earlier, the head detective on the
cases like, we have this, this is five by five,
this is buttoned up, this is game over, you know
what I mean. But then quickly what he sees is
(46:34):
that there are there's a network of things, institutions and
people stymying the investigation. And this is where our previous
cast member, Acosta makes a return. Go to all alex Acosta,
(46:54):
remember we said he was a state attorney there for Florida.
He started eating with Epstein's team, who had such legal
luminaries Zalen, der Schwitz, Kenneth Star from the Clinton investigation.
Where these guys are in terms of the of their
legal reputation, these are very, very influential and prominent lawyers
(47:19):
and legal minds. So Acosta and his team eventually in
two thousand eight, they strike a secret deal with Epstein
to shield him from federal investigation and prosecution. The victims
were not made aware of this agreement. It was called
a quote non prosecution deal. Acosta and his team at
(47:40):
the time, we're in possession of a fifty three page
draft indictment charging Epstein with serial child abuse child molestation. Instead,
he took instead Acosta, acting on behalf of the US government.
Keep in mind, gave Epstein this this deal instead of
(48:05):
instead of court. Essentially immunity pretty much and worse than immunity.
So Epstein pled guilty to to state level prostitution charges,
so not sex trafficking prostitution charges. They essentially made him
a john. And what did he get in exchange for that?
And man, I mean talk about a sweetheart deal. This
(48:28):
is a lot um immunity from all related federal criminal charges,
not only for himself, but also for any quote, any
potential co conspirators. Yeah yeah, oh my god, the President,
anyone who might have been involved in these alleged federal crimes. Uh.
(48:50):
This provision would effectively completely shut down any FBI investigation,
any further investigation into the evidence, the overwhelming evidence piles
of evidence of international sex trafficking, and essentially make it
retroactively legal for anyone to have conspired with him to
(49:13):
rape any of the alleged victims. Good god, he did
get jail time, He got a thirteen months sentence. Uh,
he served it in a private wing of the county
jail uh and he was there except for the six
days a week when he was on work release. He
(49:34):
would he went to he commuted to his private office
for twelve hours um. And his sentence was eighteen months,
but he just served thirteen. There was also we mentioned
this earlier, but there was also this important, this important
legal snag. There was a commitment verify through email chain
(49:55):
that this agreement would be kept secret from the people
I entifying as victims, so that they would not have
the opportunity to protest this extraordinary agreement in court. And
that's despite the fact that keeping a plea agreement secret
from victims is a violation of the law and it
(50:16):
should go without saying, this is not the typical plea deal.
For his part, Acosta and his team would later say,
all right, we we caved on this agreement, but we
did it because we were being harassed by Epstein's high
powered legal team. They hired private investigators to defame witnesses,
(50:40):
to dive into personal lives. They said they felt physically threatened. However,
emails and documents show the lie. Here. The relationship between
federal prosecutors and Epstein's team was more collaborative than adversarial.
They they spent a lot of time figure how to
(51:00):
settle the case with the smallest amount of scandal. They
even decided not to charge with the sex offense. They
considered witness tampering and obstruction charges and misdemeanors. And they
wanted to allow Epstein to secretly plead guilty of Miami
instead of Palm Beach County, where the victims lived, because
that would limit media exposure and it would make it
(51:21):
less likely for the victims to appear at sentencing. And
they also in these emails, again leaked by The Herald,
they also referenced discussions they wanted to have by phone
or in person, so there wasn't a paper trail. And
this agreement, this non prosecution agreement, sealed until after it
(51:43):
was approved by a judge, made it virtually impossible for
anyone to interfere, including Edwards, the attorney. This all came
to public attention with the Miami Herald released a comprehensive, damning,
groundbreaking investigation of Epstein's activities and the plea deal and
the corruption and long term damage to the underage victims.
(52:03):
Yet at this point there's very little indication that that
deal will be thrown out or reneged upon, because he
already fulfilled his part of the agreement. And I guess
we just have to emphasize how extraordinary it is that
there's a federal agreement that says, not only do you
(52:26):
have to do this, not only we are suddenly now
calling abused children prostitutes, which itself is an offensive term, right,
because that's they're trying to be defamatory. I believe the
correct term is sex worker. Right. So not only are
they doing that, but they're also saying, if any potential
(52:47):
co conspirator worked with you, then they're scott free, Scott
free just by association, like even if they weren't named,
like they were discovered later. Those are the those are
the real people. This is my This is my take.
It's not about Jeffrey Epstein, and it's not about the
billions and billions of dollars that he manages. It's about
(53:08):
the high powered people. In my opinion, this is not proven.
The high powered people that took trips with him on
that Lolita Express, the high powered people. They got massages
other than Jeffrey Epstein. That's why he got that deal. No,
I think you're right. I mean, because it's just it
makes no sense. And I believe the lawyer that got
him that deal is now a member of Trump's cabinet,
(53:32):
Alex Cossa's secretary of Labor. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, once
you start getting into those circles, those those power circles,
there is just so much insulation that can happen, favors owed,
you know, from high up politicians or law enforcement or whatever.
And people call that stuff in it's it's it's real.
This is not tinfoil hat stuff. This is not imaginary.
(53:54):
These people have immunity to future international sex trafficking. They
have immunity to anything that would they would catch them
up in that. And it's like it's it's ten years
since two thousand eight he spent his time in prison.
Do you guys really think all of this, any of
(54:14):
this has stopped. I mean, the guy is probably under
surveillance of some sort, even though well would he be,
because why would you spend your money if you're even
the FBI or even the CIA looking at international stuff
going on? Um, which I guess I don't know how
that works with the Virgin Islands because technically aren't they
part of the United States, the US Virgin Islands? Okay, yeah, Um,
(54:39):
it's just it's so infuriating to think that this kind
of terrible abuse is occurring and is allowed to occur,
and it's simply because people have money and tremendous power.
So maybe an act of Congress could change it, could
trigger it, you know, maybe just legally speaking. Legally speaking,
(55:05):
it's it's it's tough to get this. I mean, the
d o J is in this, you know. Um. I
hesitate so often to to accuse people of operating in
large groups and locks step because, as we know, groups
(55:25):
of people stink at cooperation after a certain threshold is reached.
But while we were working on this, and while we're
looking into it, I honestly started to wonder, you know,
what will there be consequences for us for making this
(55:46):
episode interesting, which I rarely think about. And you know,
I don't think anybody cares what what we have to
say about this, but we do want to get this
out in the public sphere because regard or listen would
have actually happened. Even if you want to take this
entities side and say that this was some sort of
(56:09):
hit piece or something like that. Since two thousand five
and before that, since the eighties, something happened, Something happened.
There wouldn't be a deal like that if there wasn't
um pernicious, horrific stuff. They're that powerful people needed to
be powerful. People are conspiring right and closing ranks. This
(56:34):
is infuriating. This is infuriating. We want to hear what
you think. Thank you for listening. We want to know
what what you believe would be the next step for
a legitimate investigation which did not occur right at least
(56:56):
on Uncle Sam's part. We want to know how far
you think this goes. We want to know who else
you think is involved, who are those unnamed potential co conspirators,
And most importantly, I want you to know that, as
we say in any episode of the Deals with the
Horror of Abuse, that if you are if you have
(57:20):
found yourself in that situation, or if you know someone
that is in a situation like that, you are not alone.
You're not powerless. There are people who are there to
help and support you. You can call one eight hundred
six five six four six seven three. That's one six
(57:40):
five six hope and contact people at the National Sexual
assault telephone hotline. I don't know what else to say here. Um,
that's thank you Ben for that. If you're if you
want to learn more, literally just do some Google searches.
The Guardian is a good play us to start. Um,
(58:03):
Like we said, New York, Meg, Miami, Harold, there there
are a bunch of places where you if you want
to continue to follow this story you can, And we
will say that there's some hope here because we're obviously
in a time where powerful manner getting taken to task
more so than we've seen in the past, certainly, but
it still feels like once you get when when you're
at a certain level, it's very hard, you know what
(58:25):
I mean, It's very hard to actually make people answer
for their crimes, even if it's all laid out on
the table like this, which is the which is the
most gut wrenching part of this story. That it's like
there's no doubt in anyone's mind and this stuff happened.
And like you said, Matt, when you know back in
the circulation, aside from maybe keeping his nose clean to
appease his handlers for a little while, you know, this
is a man that has a mission he's driven to
(58:48):
behave this way and the fact that he's allowed to
be out and it just makes me sick. All right,
So what do you think? Write to us? Find us
on on social media where conspiracy stuff in most places,
conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. Join us on Facebook and
(59:08):
our group Here's where it gets crazy. If you want
to get into a discussion about this um, it'll be
a difficult one for our mods. Um. Sorry everyone, but
let's just you know, let's try and have a conversation
about this um that isn't that it doesn't turn into
(59:29):
a flame war because nothing nothing. We don't have to
turn discussions about something as horrid as this into just
being angry at each other. Let's try and figure out something.
So let's let's go have a discussion on Here's where
it gets crazy on Facebook. If you don't want to
do that, you can give us a call, leave us
a message you might get on the air. We are
one eight three three st d w y t K.
(59:50):
If you don't want to do that, just send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at how
stuff where it's dot com m
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and you can turn back now
or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
M Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
(00:26):
my name isn't they called me Ben. We're joined with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you
are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Before we get started,
we have a very important message regarding today's episode. Today's
episode discusses very frankly, some horrific sexual crimes against underaged victims,
(00:53):
and it's quite disturbing, but I think it's an important
discussion to have, and we try as always to be
as respectful and thoughtful about it as possible. Let's let's
cut straight to the heart of the matter. In an
earlier episode, we mentioned the ongoing legal battles of one
Jeffrey Epstein. Today we are diving into a sordid tale
(01:16):
that will take us from the posh tony area of
Palm Beach Island, Florida, to New York, to New Mexico,
to Paris to a private island in the Virgin Islands
and a particularly strange series of private plane flights. But
first things first, who is Jeffrey Epstein? Oh, the man
(01:36):
of the hour? Jeffrey Epstein was born in nineteen fifty
three on Coney Island. He went to Lafayette High School.
He also attended Cooper Union. Uh. He dropped out of
Cooper Union by the way. Uh. He also went to
UH New York University's current Institute, which he also left
without a degree, surprisingly, especially as we continue to learn
(01:59):
a little more about this gentleman. Yeah yeah. For two years,
from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy five, Epstein taught
at a very upscale Ivy League prep school called Dalton
School in Manhattan. You'll read accounts that say he taught
calculus and physics, and then you'll read accounts that say
(02:19):
he taught physics and math. But it was definitely the quantitative,
the quantitative disciplines. New York Magazine initially likened his time
at Dalton School to the teacher that Robin Williams plays
in Dead Poets Society. You guys remember that film Captain
MC captain? Yeah, man, the first really really sad movie
(02:43):
I ever saw, Right, poetry was made for one reason,
boys to woo women and also carpet dum right. So,
one parent of a student worked on Wall Street and
this guy was so inspired by Epstein's methods and the
math rants that he was known for that he approached
(03:04):
Jeffrey Epstein and said, essentially, what the hell are you
doing here, buddy? Why are you a teacher? You should
be on Wall Street, which lets you know what Wall
Street thinks about teachers. Yeah, why why would you be
inspiring the young people? Just make more money? And so
this this guy, this parent doubled out on this and said, no, really,
(03:25):
I'm serious, jeff Let me introduce you to my buddy. A. S. Greenberg.
You've got to call him. A Screenberg is a senior
partner at the time at bear Stearns. Greenberg really Doug
Epstein because this guy Greenberg definitely played favorites. And one
thing that he was known for was he had a
(03:46):
certain type of young employee he liked or new hire.
He didn't want people who were, you know, just fattened
off inherited money on third generation bankers. He wanted brilliant
poor people and pours anything beneath a millionaire to him
who were very, very hungry, and at the time Epstein
(04:07):
ticked all these boxes. So six he says, all right,
screw teaching, I'm going to work at bear Sterns under
a screenberg. He started from the bottom kind of the
way Drake wants you to believe his career began. Uh,
it's untrue. But in the Epstein's case, it is. He
started as a junior assistant to a floor trader at
the American Stock Exchange, and it quickly became apparent that
(04:32):
Jeff had a gift for this sort of work. So
Epstein was, to be fair either a complete genius or
very very close to that. Um. He had a specialty UM,
which was in options. Uh. And that was at the
time something that wasn't particularly well understood. UM. And he
amassed a group of clients, really really quite wealthy clients
(04:55):
who thought that his ability to assess the tax implication
on large portfolios and then to recommend kind of tax loopholes,
I guess advantages you could say, um, for some of
these transactions. Yeah. Absolutely, this At this level of finance,
(05:17):
the way in which you move money and the order
of operations can make a huge difference. And you know,
how much of a cut Uncle Sam gets or the
state of New York or whatever. And it's really crazy
that it only took him four years to go from
assistant to a floor trader all the way up to
a full partner. Yeah, he beat the game, he became
(05:37):
a partner, and then what do you do after you
beat a game? You stopped playing. So he left the
firm in n one and set up his own shop.
This is really this is really strange and sketchy. Okay,
So the premise behind his shop, j Epstein and Co.
Is that he would manage the individual and family fortunes
of clients with a minimum of one billion dollars in
(06:01):
their portfolio un animum. Yeah, and according to the scuttle
butt about this guy in nineteen two, he immediately began
collecting clients. And he didn't go out and have some
sort of Ted talk or some sort of Steve Jobs
big Apple reveal speech. People just started coming to him
(06:21):
because they knew he was open for business, and he
was also very controlling. He had these specific conditions. If
you made one billion or more, you could talk, but
you also had to accept this. He would not just
offer investment advice. He was going to become your financial architect,
from soup to nuts, stem to stern, from investments to philanthropy,
(06:44):
to tax planning to security to a swatching. The guilt
and burdens that people felt because they had, you know,
inherited wealth that they clearly did not earn, he said
to one of his friends at the time, I want
people to understand the power, the response, and the burden
of their money. He would take total control of the
(07:05):
billion dollars. He would charge a flat fee, and you
would also get power of attorney to do whatever he
deemed necessary to advance his his client's financial goals. And uh,
he was really strict about all these conditions. And there's
this whole thing where he really did stick to this whole.
(07:25):
If you're a billionaire, were cool. If you're not, get
the hell out. I mean as I mean, as crazy
as that sounds like. People would come to him with
seven hundred million dollars, put it on the table essentially
and say, Jeff, I need your help, buddy. I've got
seven million dollars and I need you to work this
through three and He's like, no, get out. Basically, not
(07:48):
so kind, thank no, no, thank you basically because they
were just a little short of that billion. It's like,
I don't run a business for hoboes. Yeah, and that's okay.
So this is a quick pause here because that's a
question I have. How many billionaires were there in We
know there are more now, you know, partially due to inflation,
(08:10):
partially due to rise of business in other countries. But
were there that many billionaires? I don't know. I would
think not. I would imagine it was a very very
rarefied field, right there were They couldn't have been that many.
I mean that inherited wealth, there's there are at least
several hundred families that have You know that's true because
(08:32):
I was thinking of individuals. So it might be like
a dynasty that collects all of their ill gotten gains
or or happy gotten gains. You know, some billionaires are
really sweet and do nice things for the earth and
for its inhabitants. Right, sure, maybe maybe I I don't
(08:54):
personally know everybody on the planet, so I want to
be fair. Well, there's also probably some that you know
do it with great humility and don't brag about it, right, right,
I would, I would, I would hope. But then you
give it to Jeffrey Epstein who says I'll hand it
you all, and that's you know, that's the smart thing
to do. It just makes me think of that um
(09:16):
balls at quote. Behind every great fortune, there's a crime,
you know. But yeah, you guys are absolutely right. There
are clearly people who you know, if you're born into
wealth and you don't have control over your circumstances, then
of course there are people who want to do great
acts to make the world a better place. Bill Gates
(09:39):
took himself down several notches financially to help combat disease.
That's that's that's a stand up thing. I still hate Clippy,
but fighting disease is a noble thing, you know. Wait,
when Josh and Chuck interviewed Bill Gates, I actually got
to go with them and meet him in a hotel room,
and Josh brought up Clippy, and apparently O Gates is
(10:00):
still quite fond of Clippy. Bill gets loves Clippy. He
has like a relationship with it. He's the only one.
So when I was a kid, I liked it, but
it just slowed down the word processor. So, speaking of billionaires,
who are Jeffrey's clients Aside from one client, a billionaire
(10:22):
named Leslie Wexler. Epstein keeps his list a closely guarded secret,
and he's also sort of evasive about his process and
what he does. You could call it wealth management, but
that's sort of like calling something a structure. A shot
can be a structure, so can a skyscraper or a
pyramid or a nuclear bunker. There are a lot of
(10:44):
things that could be considered that wealth management. So he's
firm employees as many or employed as many as a
hundred and fifty people, but their task were overwhelmingly day
to day bureaucracy and admin stuff like countants to make
sure the internal finances of the company running. All the
actual decisions investment in management decisions were made by Epstein himself,
(11:08):
and he's sort of computer phobic, not a big fan
of emails and so on, so he's always talking on
the phone, which will be important later. So how much
money is he making? Some estimates will say he is
or was raking in around seventy five million a year,
but that's a guestimate, and that's why in a lot
(11:30):
of stories about the guy, there weren't many until fairly recently,
you'll hear him described as either a multimillionaire or a billionaire.
People don't really know. Yeah, you have to imagine if
he's bringing in even somewhere around seventy five million dollars
a year, with his acumen, his understanding of investment, he's probably,
you know, gotten well, well upwards of a billion I'm assuming. Well,
(11:53):
it's like the Putin question. How much money does Vladimir
Putin have? Not? I mean, which palace are you're gonna search? Right?
How long do you want to live? Jeez? Okay, Well,
here's the big question. With however much money he's acquired.
What does a guy like Jeffrey Epstein do with all
(12:15):
of those piles of cash? Beanie babies? He sets them
on fire? Oh man, see by a bunch of beanie babies,
buy them a bunch of magic cards, then set the
whole thing on fire. Where did a cape? What's his
monocle top hat position? I don't know. Well, I'll tell
you for real. What he does is and what anyone
(12:35):
should probably do. Was a cape so bad? I'm sorry.
Buy a cape first, then just start purchasing real estate,
purchasing land, purchasing stuff that goes on land, different structures.
Put them on land. That you own, that's what you do. Yeah,
so he owns that private island in the US Virgin Islands.
(12:56):
We didn't mention what the nickname for this thing is.
It's Little Saint Jeffrey, Little St. Jeffrey literal Saint's Jeffrey
chand Islets. Yeah, but seriously, he owns an island. He
owns island. It's uh, it's who was asking Oh, Jonathan
Strickland was asking me about this earlier. And it is,
(13:16):
in fact not shaped like a skull, which I know
is a huge downer for everyone. Do you think he
still has a layer though, yes, it does have He
does have a layer. He also has a Japanese bathhouse
on this island. Yeah, we're gonna learn more about that
in just a little bit. But here's the other thing, Noll.
He owns on the island of Manhattan, the what is
considered the largest private residence nine stories tall. Yeah, he
(13:41):
owns that and an island. He also funds extensive, legitimate
scientific research through something humbly named the Jeffrey Epstein the
sixth Foundation. And it's cool. It is genuinely cool. It's
it's genuinely good. Since two thousand, the Foundation is given
around two in a million a year per year to
(14:03):
people like Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Eric Lander, George Church,
Ben Gertzl other like numerous Nobel laureates Lawrence Lawrence Crouse
as well. And over the years, the foundation has brought
a lot of these scientists together and these sort of
brainstorming conference situations to get on the same page about
(14:25):
fundamental topics like gravity, global threats to Earth, the evolution
of language. So you can see some of the implications here.
Usually when billionaires and philanthropists are saying, let's understand gravity,
they're they're asking, how can we use it somehow? Right?
Global threats to Earth? I mean, this all goes back
(14:47):
to making smart investment choices to I think the language
thing is really interesting. I'm sure there's a lot of
group think theory because that would be valuable in the
stock market. So this is, in my opinion, one of
those things that you do see every once in a
while when a certain individual or a group acquires enough
wealth that philanthropy is able to kick in at this point,
(15:10):
at least to this level where a big a new
creation occurs that is helping that truly is helping humanity
in some way, in some small way. In this case,
just bringing scientists to a consensus could be massively important
to get everyone on the same page, to actually get
the Earth to start making some big changes, right, rather
than just a country or one small group. Um, it's
(15:36):
it's tough for me to know this and then also
know what we're going to talk about in just a
few minutes. Right, Let's let's stick with the good stuff
while while we can. You can see the official about
page for the Epstein Foundation when talks about how it
is funded. In two thousand how it in two thousand
(15:57):
three established a program for Revolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University
with thirty a thirty five million dollars seed money gift.
The program studies the evolution of microbiology through the lens
of mathematics. Uh then, since its establishment, it's made advances
in the treatment of cancer, HIV, infectious diseases. He's also
(16:18):
get this well known for his work funding early education
for youth in the Virgin Islands to other places other
areas of the world. So far, so good, right, these
are genuinely good things. Jeffrey Epstein is self made financial giant.
Isn't just killing it. In the world of finance, a
lot of finance guys defined success by violent terms, crushing it,
(16:43):
killing it, nailed it, so smashing and smashing it. Yeah,
he did all of that stuff. He's also putting a
significant amount of capital into globally important issues. Those motivations
are not clearly, not entirely true, altruistic. You can make
some money off that. Yet, while Epstein remained for many
years an international man of intrigue and mystery, tantalizing, bits
(17:06):
of information about his private life gradually emerged. And that's
when things got ugly. And we'll learn about those things
right after a quick word from our sponsor. Here's where
it gets crazy. Rumors were true. Yea, even more so
(17:31):
than we thought. The guys, Yes, she was well open secrets. Uh,
people called nieces. That's a gross that's a gross detail. First,
let's get let's get the one almost side note rumor
out of the way. He's a member of a lot
of clubs. Yeah, like the Trilateral Commission that you may
(17:55):
remember from an episode that we've done. We have done
an audio episode on Trilateral right, I don't remember, man,
it's in a video. Go check out our YouTube channel
and watch the Trilateral Commission if you don't know much
about it. Also the Council on Foreign Relations also a
video also maybe not a audio topic yet. Honestly, don't know.
(18:16):
A ton of people are in the Council on Foreign Relations.
And yeah, you know, the Trilateral Commission has movers and
shakers that kind of come and go over time. But
you can imagine how upsetting these two things are for
certain a certain number of us within the conspiracy minded world, like,
being being a part of both of those organizations is
(18:37):
pretty bad, because just being part of one is potentially bad.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing overall, but for people
who believe this, yes it is. Do you think they
have capes? Not like in public but when they're in
the meetings. I think it's more of like crowns and
different masks that they wear. I'm assuming, Okay, I mean
(19:02):
I feel like that's a big compromise. Okay, maybe you
have to be in this straight up illuminati to earn
a cape, so that you know, that's one of those
things that makes you go, oh interesting, I wanted to
know more about this guy, if you're of a certain mind.
But there's another thing, and this is we're being relatively
(19:26):
lighthearted about the inequality of wealth in the globe and
some of the ridiculous things that could happen when you're
a billionaire, because those are the lighthearted things in a multimillionaire. Yeah,
but those are the lighthearted things. This is where this
is where the disclaimer, the warning we had at the
beginning really comes into effect. From here on out, things
(19:47):
are going to be pretty pretty dark. So Secondly, and
apparently for decades, Jeffrey Epstein had been routinely seducing, assault,
and in some cases violently assaulting underage girls. And it
(20:08):
goes even further than that. Um, the really upsetting thing
is that this, this whole deal that he had going
on seemed to be pretty much an open, open secret
in certain parts of both Wall Street as well as Washington. Yeah.
We have a quote from current president as we record this,
(20:29):
Donald Trump in two thousand two, talking about his relationship
with Jeffrey Epstein. He said, I've known Jeff for fifteen years.
Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with.
It's even said that he likes beautiful women as much
as I do, and many of them are on the
younger side. No doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life. Well,
(20:50):
that was hard to get there right now. You know
that guy's the president. Yeah, that guys the president. In
a two thousand seven New York Magazine article, Vanity Fair
column list Michael Wolfe described flying on Epstein's private plane
in the nineties, saying Epstein was followed onto the plane
by how shall I say this, by three teenage girls,
(21:12):
not his daughters, who were eighteen nineteen twenty. Who knows
they were model like. He's never been secretive about the girls.
Wolf said. At one point when his troubles began, he
was talking to me and said, Hey, what can I say?
I like young girls? I said, maybe you should say
I like young women. A lot of smoke. A lot
(21:35):
of smoke here, A lot of smoke, A lot of smoke.
The mainstream public learned of this semi open secret in
the early two thousands, thinks, in large part to some
groundbreaking work by the Miami Herald. These encounters with underage
underage victims um the ones that were the subject of
the investigation in Florida. They took place from two thousand
(22:00):
five in Mr Epstein's mansions. The one in Palm Beach Island,
New York and the US Virgin Islands. Many of the
girls were runaways or foster children, people from broken homes,
people of vulnerable situations. And it's important to note Epstein
did not work alone, like we remember when Matt earlier
(22:21):
said this is just the beginning. His His operation functioned
like a pyramid scheme. A girl would be approached by
one of Epstein's assistants or often a previous victim, and told, hey,
you can make pretty good money by giving this middle
(22:42):
aged rich guy a massage. Already creepy, right, So once
the once the victim arrives at the mansion, and this
is in the Palm Beach operation at least not far
from Marl Marl Lardo, not very far, she would be
escorted to a particular room and then that person would leave,
and you can find descriptions of the room in in
(23:04):
the Miami Herald's piece. Epstein would come in wearing only
a towel on the phone, this robe, lay down naked
uh bell uh, belly down, belly first, and he would
tell the victim to massage his legs. And then you
(23:27):
would start escalating this stuff and offering more money. Also,
there were sex toys around. And again I cannot emphasize
this enough. When we say under age, we're talking about
kids who are fourteen and fifteen years old. Uh. I
can't even say words. I just I'm going to be
(23:48):
making guttural noises. And I know it doesn't make me
like specially sensitive, but it does a little just having
a daughter that's entering into kind of the teenage pre
teenage phase. Just I mean, I can't even imagine it's
in sayings. A lot of these kids are coming from
terrible home lives anyway, you know, because they're even like
thinking they might get a opportunity or something that might
(24:11):
help them out, and they're just totally abused and used.
The rage, the rage really just immediately sets in. We
haven't even gotten like all the way into this. So
he would attempt to entice entice some victims to disrobe
and do increasingly intimate physical things. He would intimidate others.
(24:35):
In at least one case that made it to the
public sphere, he did forcibly assault somewhat, and afterwards the
girls would be paid two d three hundred dollars so
on to pay on what they did. The person that
he forced himself on says she gave him a thousand
(24:56):
bucks and asked her to be quiet, yeah, and apologize,
so they would get paid and they would be informed
that if they'd like to make more money, they could
recruit their friends to come visit Epstein, so long as
they were around the same age. And some of the handlers,
they're very careful about this. Some of the handlers told
the girls the victims when they first came to Epstein,
(25:20):
to say that they were eighteen to him, the idea
being that this will provide, yeah, some kind of legal defense,
but that doesn't fly in Florida. Florida specifically has laws
to say ignorance of that age is not not an excuse. Jeez, man,
you can already see in my mind, I'm picturing something
(25:41):
like Nexium that we covered not long ago, that kind
of extremely wealthy person somehow just with the enticement of money,
and in Jeffrey's case, I guess in some way not
necessarily for the younger girls, but this um aura of
(26:02):
a wealthy man that knows what he's doing and is
going to make more money and like has this special
place in in Palm Beach. But then also knowing that
perhaps he has an island it's and then getting your friends,
like everything just feels so disgusting and icky about this
and calculated, that's the thing. It's very calculated. This is
(26:22):
not an impulse decision, you know what I mean? And
not that not that an impulse decisions in any way.
Uh better, It's just that this calculated, organizational, systematic approach,
it is insidious. That's the spider thing in the web.
And so let's let's look at some of the characters
(26:45):
that become involved in this ongoing story. First is Epstein's
associates and staff. So one of his assistants was a
person named Sarah Helen and Kellen was accused by lawyers
in legal file Leans of bringing girls to Epstein's mansion
to be abused. Yeah, according to the police files, there
(27:07):
was this whole series of alleged victims um that told
investigators that they were led like this is the person,
Sarah Kellen led the these girls to the massage room
in the mansion where all this other stuff with the
disrobing occurred. And this was in the Palm Beach mansion.
I mean, this literally is a conspiracy. There are other
(27:30):
players involved that are being used as pieces in this
like elaborate ploy I mean, and it's so scary because
who knows, who knows how much of a victim somebody
like Sarah Kelln is of of him right early on
in some other way, like she's in his pocket in
some way or something. Well, I mean, who knows. That's
(27:51):
not just excusing her of what her actions and what
she did, but still like you don't, we don't know
the circumstances, how deep this guy's kind of tendrils go,
you know, absolutely, and the speaking of that, there's another character,
Nada marsten Kova marchan Kova. She we first learned about
(28:12):
her through statements of some alleged victims who won't claim
to police that Epstein told her that he had purchased
Nada from her parents in Eastern Europe when she was fifteen,
and they were described as Yugoslavian or Slovakian um. Another
(28:34):
victim alleged that she was forced to have sex with
Nada marsten Kova and then watch her have sexual interactions
with Epstein. According to the Miami Herald, sometimes Jeffrey would
instruct a young woman he described as his quote Yugoslavian
sex slave Nadia Marsenkova, who was over eighteen to join in,
(28:56):
and he took photographs and he displayed these photograph surround
the house. The guy's um. There's there's a phrase knowal
that you in your roommate used, I think applies here.
The guy's proclivities were wide, rife, wide rife throughout his house.
This was not a secret because also Gislaine Maxwell, the
(29:16):
socialite and heiress who was occasionally referred to as Epstein's Madam,
was asked to turnover records. And then there's Alan Dershowitz,
Alan Freakin Dershowitz like like an enormously prestigious lawyer. He
worked with Epstein on the business side. Derschwitz told outfit
called Axios that Epstein and lent his family the Palm Beach,
(29:38):
Florida house, and that he received a therapeutic massage with
an old Russian there, but that he'd had no idea
anything improper at even taking place in that house. In
eighteen he said that Epstein after this stuff became public,
he said, Epstein's called me a couple of times about
legal issues because I'm still technically his lawyer, but I
(29:59):
haven't had any so shoulder any other kind of contact
with him. But you never stopped being someone's lawyer. And
then there's a guy we got to mention just casually,
he'll come back, trust us. Guy named alex Acosta. He
was formerly the U S attorney in South Florida. He's
currently the U S Secretary of Labor. We'll get to
him in a bit, but just remember the name alex Acosta.
(30:20):
We shall remember you. So let's talk about the victims. Here,
the authority is identified more than thirty victims of epstein UM.
And then if you look at the Miami Herald in
their latest report, they identified eighty victims and they located
sixty and spoke to four of them officially on the record.
So again, trying to track down all of these people
(30:43):
who are alleged victims, and you know, you can only
get a certain percentage of those people to even talk
because this kind of thing is it's so insidious. Even
being able to speak about something like this, especially on
the record, is difficult. So let's go through a few
of these um. The first one is Virginia You Free
(31:05):
gu free g I U F f r E. She
claimed in court papers that she was recruited into this
whatever you want to call child sex ring that this
billionaire was running. When she was only fifteen years old.
She was working as a towel girl at maral Lago
(31:25):
and that's how she got wrapped up in it. And
she also claims that Dershwitz as well as Prince Andrew
participated in her sexual abuse. What is a towel girl
a towel girl, I'm assuming at marl Lago because there's
a vast outdoor area at Mar Lago with a pool
and everything like that, as well as there are shower
or what do you call him, mom who all of
(31:46):
the other things you'd find out a spa bathhouse kind
of thing. I can only imagine that a towel girl
handles of the towel to bring towels. It's like a
like a caddy, but with towels instead of clubs. And
in this case, she's fifteen, which is fifteen, and sixteen
is a very common age for these private clubs to hire.
When I was fifteen, that's no. Yeah, when I was fifteen,
(32:09):
I started working at one of these places, not as
a towel girl. I was in I was a pool boy,
So I mean, and it's a great insults. So that's
a great summer job for kids. Yeah, you know what
I mean. You make a little scratch kid and save
up for Nintendo Switch or whatever. Especially out in that area,
some of these private clubs provide some of the best
money for your work. And then there's Courtney Wilde, who
(32:32):
was a victim beginning at the age of fourteen. Uh.
Wild says, by the time I was sixteen, I had
probably brought him seventy to eighty girls who are all fourteen.
When fifteen years old, he was involved in my life
for years. Uh. And do you we just not skip
over the fact that this one person Virginia claimed that
(32:55):
both Derschwitz the lawyer and Prince Andrew Royalty were involved.
How intense is that and especially occurring at marl Ago
where all of these highly important people are just kind
of coming through and I never whenever, Um, And now
we have somebody who's claiming to have brought him seventy
to eighty girls. I'm sorry, And we just had to
(33:18):
pause for a moment, and now let's continue with the disgustingness.
So there's Jenna Lisa Jones who said that she was
also um. She she was also assaulted by Epstein when
she was fourteen, and she has a chilling and haunting
quote here um I was. I was somewhat divided over
(33:40):
whether we should read it allowed, but here it is.
You can't ever stop your thoughts. A word can trigger something.
For me. It is the word pure, because he called
me pure in that room, and then I remember what
he did to me in that room. Just I don't know.
There's Hayley Robinson. Virginia Robinson was working at mar Lago
(34:02):
when she was recruited to be a masseust to Palm
Beach hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein. There are tons of
Jane does. We don't know how many there are. We
know what the Harold found, right The Harold says they
found eighty. They located sixty. They talked to eight, but
only four would go on the record with their names.
(34:25):
And you can understand that too, because a lot of
these people have been quashed by settlements and non disclosure agreements.
A settlement with a India or nondisclosure agreement means that
if someone if someone alleges a crime and you want
to keep it out of court, regardless of what it is,
you can have a legal team drop a contract that says,
(34:47):
without admitting guilt, here's x amount of dollars and in return,
you can't talk about it. You agree to never talk
about this. The problem is that a lot of those things,
as we see, don't really hold up in were if
you're asking someone not to confess a crime, you know
what I mean. Yeah, So those are those are victims,
(35:09):
those are collaborators or as you said, an old conspirators.
But there are some uh, people fighting the good fight
on this side as well. So there were several investigators
involved in the case. We have Joseph for Carey, who
was the lead detective for the case, and in his
first interview UM, he said the evidence the department collected
(35:30):
to support the girls stories was overwhelming, um and included
all kinds of stuff, all kinds of damning evidence. Phone
call records, copies, have written phone messages from the girls
found in Epstein's trash uh, and Epstein's flight logs that
showed his private plane and Palm Beach on the days
the girls were scheduled to give massages. Uh. Pretty damning stuff. Yeah.
(35:51):
The police report also showed how eerily consistent the girls
stories were. UM. Just down to the t right down
to their detailed descriptions of Epstein's Janitalia. And then there's
Michael Writer, who is the former chief of police and
Palm Beach. He was the chief during this investigation, and
(36:13):
he said detectives were astonished by the sheer volume of
victims coming and going from the house, the frequency sometimes
several in the same day, and the universally young ages
of these girls. Michael Writer says it started out to
give a man backrupt but in many cases turned some
(36:35):
far worse than that, elevated to a serious crime, in
some cases sexual batteries. And then there's a another good
I mean, this is almost true detective level, you know
what I mean, as far as the web that is
unearthed here. Uh, there's the attorney for the victims scut
named Brad Edwards. He's representing several of the young women
who were abused as miners by Epstein. His law off
(37:00):
us is packed with files from the case and he's
been fighting the power at every turn, often outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned.
Because you see, that true detective thing is not just
a pop culture reference for us. Here there are multiple
very powerful people that have been implicated in one way
(37:22):
or another with Epstein, and to be fair, a lot
of it is not proven other than the fact that
we know they hung out. They maybe took his plane
place as the plane which was also um informally known
as the Lolita Express. That's true, it was aformally known
as that. But who are some of these implicated uh
(37:42):
implicated celebrities. Well, let's jump in first with Bill Clinton,
because he was known to have taken the Lolita Express
to the Virgin Islands, to that island that Epstein owns
on numerous occasions, as well as hanging out at the
Palm Beach and he went to Africa. Yeah, using that plane.
(38:03):
I think Chris Tucker was on the plane too. There's
this huge list of celebrities that have been on there,
you know. Um, but Bill Clinton was definitely one of
the ones that popped out in my mind around the time.
This is awful to say, but it was around the
time that Pizza Gate was kind of coming out. That's
when I started to really learn about Bill Clinton's involvement
with Epstein and that connection was one of those things
(38:27):
that freaked me out a little bit and made me
start to think there was more to the whole pizza
gate thing, which I don't necessarily believe, but it's definitely
one of those things that creeped me out. And then
Donald Trump has come up several times here, current president
Donald Trump, he had this association he made that really creepy.
(38:48):
They made that quotation. He made that quote in two
thousand two that certainly didn't age well. And uh, there's
one thing we do have to say in Donald Trump's
defense when and Trump was when Trump learned that Epstein
may have been romantically entertaining or attempting to recruit underage
(39:10):
girls at Mara a Lago or bringing these young women
with him, these young girls, these children with him and
calling them his nieces, which is so creepy. Uh, Donald
Trump said, Okay, look, this can't happen here. You gotta go.
So Trump asked him to leave. Trump kicked him out.
(39:30):
That's good, I guess. I feel like that's the bare
minimum of decent. No, it's not. The bare minimum of
decency is calling the police. Yeah. His his whole thing
is just don't do it where I can also be implicated.
And you think that's what it was. I mean, in
my opinion, I don't know I mean, I don't want
to throw around implications like that. It sure feels like
it based on what we know about. Yeah, the act
(39:54):
of kicking someone out or not allowing someone to do
something illegal in your place of business, but aud alerting
the authorities that someone is doing something illegal in your
place of business, that's that's that's very damning. Yeah, I
see what you're saying. Yeah, that makes sense. And then
we mentioned Prince Andrew, the Prince Andrew, uh, the allegations
that Epstein forced uh his teenage victims to become physically
(40:19):
involved with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions. And the
you know, the UK Press is having a field day
with like tabloids like The Sun or whatever. Um, well
it's blowing up right now. A lot of I mean
also a lot of royalty are untouchable, you know what
I mean? When when's when is the next time? When's
(40:43):
the last time a royal family member went to jail?
Prince Charles spent a lot of time in the the
old Slammer. No, I'm just kidding, the Old Slammer, that's
what they call it. They're right, so so okay, As
as we said, the alleged abuse is pretty well documented
(41:04):
by numerous sources going back to at least the nine nineties,
and if you want to be less than optimistic, then
you can reasonably say that as possible, it went or
went back earlier than that. So how did this go
from rumors, scuttle button secrecy to an actual, UH legal matter.
(41:27):
How did the cops get involved? Well we'll get to
that right after a quick break. So let's start in
March of two thousand and five, when a woman called
the police in Palm Beach, and after first refusing to
give her name, she said that she believed her fourteen
(41:49):
year old stepdaughter had in some way been molested by
a wealthy man, just a wealthy man. So at the time,
the victim in this case lived at this UH involuntary
admitted juvenile education facility, which I'm assuming is some kind
of juvie what you would call a juvie or I guess,
(42:10):
and something to that effect, because she was she was
having behavioral problems, right, So apparently she shows up at
this school with three hundred dollars cash in her purse
and it became basically the talk of the class. Everybody's saying,
oh my god, you see that she's got three hundred cash.
You get that, dude, that's crazy. And then the friend
(42:30):
called the girl a terrible name. Yes, um, we'll say it,
a horror. Another friend put a fist through the wall
in anger, apparently like punched the wall. And then the
girl left school. And then the stepmother gets this call
from another student's mother. So this just this act of
bringing three hundred dollars into this school was enough to
(42:52):
get basically the entire school talking. Uh. Then a policewoman
was talking to the girl with a therapist. They are
so they're just having a conversation about what's going on.
That's when this victim she begins crying and breaking down,
and she dug her finger into her thigh and she
just began telling out, telling this entire story about how
(43:16):
she was She was taken to this big house on
the Atlantic on the Intracoastal Waterway, which is where Epstein's
mansion was located. She remembers climbing this spiral staircase to
the master bedroom where this woman, a blond woman who
you know, she's probably twenty in her twenties, twenty five
(43:37):
or something, likely Sarah Kellen. It's probably yes, exactly, probably
Sarah Kelln. She wasn't very friendly. She laid out sheets
and she put lotions on a massage table, and then
she leaves. That's when Jeffrey Epstein comes in. This is
the story, this similar story that we've already talked about.
He's naked except for a towel. He sternly orders the
(43:58):
girl to take off her clothes and then the rest
of the details are pretty much what you've heard before
and stuff that I honestly don't want to say here.
But the police at this point were very much convinced
that this was at least worth looking into. And then
this girl says that she had been brought there by
(44:20):
two other girls, but he spoke to those two girls.
Those two girls pointed to two more girls who had
also been there and also recruited them. By the time
detectives tracked down one victim, there were two or three
more to find, and very very soon there were dozens.
So also in two thousand five, the Palm Beach p
D obtains a search warrant and they visit Epstein's mansion.
(44:44):
They cart off massage tables, photos of naked girls, soaps
shaped like Genitalia. Epstein sent an urgent message to the
detectives through his attorney. It said, the shadiest thing Mr
Epstein is this is laughable. I'm sorry, this is just
Mr Epstein is very passionate about massages. The massages are
(45:06):
therapeutic and spiritually sound for him. That is why he
has had many massages. I mean really, I'm sorry, I'm laughing.
It's just come on, it's laughable. It's like it's it's
such a bad attempt at an excuse that it sounds
(45:27):
like it was poorly translated from a different language. Well,
the craziest thing here is that if you're a wealthy
individual and you really are passionate about massages, it makes
sense that you have massage therapy equipment in your home.
You can afford that, even rooms dedicated just to getting
(45:48):
therapeutic massages, and you can also hire a massius, a
professional masseus, which he did have. She he paid her
a hundred dollars an hour. There you go, so he
had a seal masseus. There. There are your massages that
you're passionate about. Enjoy them. So we should also note
that computers in hardware we're missing in the mansion. In
(46:12):
two the Palm Beach investigators were taken out pretty quickly.
So that's two thousand five. They're fighting this in court.
As as we said earlier, the head detective on the
cases like, we have this, this is five by five,
this is buttoned up, this is game over, you know
what I mean. But then quickly what he sees is
(46:34):
that there are there's a network of things, institutions and
people stymying the investigation. And this is where our previous
cast member, Acosta makes a return. Go to all alex Acosta,
(46:54):
remember we said he was a state attorney there for Florida.
He started eating with Epstein's team, who had such legal
luminaries Zalen, der Schwitz, Kenneth Star from the Clinton investigation.
Where these guys are in terms of the of their
legal reputation, these are very, very influential and prominent lawyers
(47:19):
and legal minds. So Acosta and his team eventually in
two thousand eight, they strike a secret deal with Epstein
to shield him from federal investigation and prosecution. The victims
were not made aware of this agreement. It was called
a quote non prosecution deal. Acosta and his team at
(47:40):
the time, we're in possession of a fifty three page
draft indictment charging Epstein with serial child abuse child molestation. Instead,
he took instead Acosta, acting on behalf of the US government.
Keep in mind, gave Epstein this this deal instead of
(48:05):
instead of court. Essentially immunity pretty much and worse than immunity.
So Epstein pled guilty to to state level prostitution charges,
so not sex trafficking prostitution charges. They essentially made him
a john. And what did he get in exchange for that?
And man, I mean talk about a sweetheart deal. This
(48:28):
is a lot um immunity from all related federal criminal charges,
not only for himself, but also for any quote, any
potential co conspirators. Yeah yeah, oh my god, the President,
anyone who might have been involved in these alleged federal crimes. Uh.
(48:50):
This provision would effectively completely shut down any FBI investigation,
any further investigation into the evidence, the overwhelming evidence piles
of evidence of international sex trafficking, and essentially make it
retroactively legal for anyone to have conspired with him to
(49:13):
rape any of the alleged victims. Good god, he did
get jail time, He got a thirteen months sentence. Uh,
he served it in a private wing of the county
jail uh and he was there except for the six
days a week when he was on work release. He
(49:34):
would he went to he commuted to his private office
for twelve hours um. And his sentence was eighteen months,
but he just served thirteen. There was also we mentioned
this earlier, but there was also this important, this important
legal snag. There was a commitment verify through email chain
(49:55):
that this agreement would be kept secret from the people
I entifying as victims, so that they would not have
the opportunity to protest this extraordinary agreement in court. And
that's despite the fact that keeping a plea agreement secret
from victims is a violation of the law and it
(50:16):
should go without saying, this is not the typical plea deal.
For his part, Acosta and his team would later say,
all right, we we caved on this agreement, but we
did it because we were being harassed by Epstein's high
powered legal team. They hired private investigators to defame witnesses,
(50:40):
to dive into personal lives. They said they felt physically threatened. However,
emails and documents show the lie. Here. The relationship between
federal prosecutors and Epstein's team was more collaborative than adversarial.
They they spent a lot of time figure how to
(51:00):
settle the case with the smallest amount of scandal. They
even decided not to charge with the sex offense. They
considered witness tampering and obstruction charges and misdemeanors. And they
wanted to allow Epstein to secretly plead guilty of Miami
instead of Palm Beach County, where the victims lived, because
that would limit media exposure and it would make it
(51:21):
less likely for the victims to appear at sentencing. And
they also in these emails, again leaked by The Herald,
they also referenced discussions they wanted to have by phone
or in person, so there wasn't a paper trail. And
this agreement, this non prosecution agreement, sealed until after it
(51:43):
was approved by a judge, made it virtually impossible for
anyone to interfere, including Edwards, the attorney. This all came
to public attention with the Miami Herald released a comprehensive, damning,
groundbreaking investigation of Epstein's activities and the plea deal and
the corruption and long term damage to the underage victims.
(52:03):
Yet at this point there's very little indication that that
deal will be thrown out or reneged upon, because he
already fulfilled his part of the agreement. And I guess
we just have to emphasize how extraordinary it is that
there's a federal agreement that says, not only do you
(52:26):
have to do this, not only we are suddenly now
calling abused children prostitutes, which itself is an offensive term, right,
because that's they're trying to be defamatory. I believe the
correct term is sex worker. Right. So not only are
they doing that, but they're also saying, if any potential
(52:47):
co conspirator worked with you, then they're scott free, Scott
free just by association, like even if they weren't named,
like they were discovered later. Those are the those are
the real people. This is my This is my take.
It's not about Jeffrey Epstein, and it's not about the
billions and billions of dollars that he manages. It's about
(53:08):
the high powered people. In my opinion, this is not proven.
The high powered people that took trips with him on
that Lolita Express, the high powered people. They got massages
other than Jeffrey Epstein. That's why he got that deal. No,
I think you're right. I mean, because it's just it
makes no sense. And I believe the lawyer that got
him that deal is now a member of Trump's cabinet,
(53:32):
Alex Cossa's secretary of Labor. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, once
you start getting into those circles, those those power circles,
there is just so much insulation that can happen, favors owed,
you know, from high up politicians or law enforcement or whatever.
And people call that stuff in it's it's it's real.
This is not tinfoil hat stuff. This is not imaginary.
(53:54):
These people have immunity to future international sex trafficking. They
have immunity to anything that would they would catch them
up in that. And it's like it's it's ten years
since two thousand eight he spent his time in prison.
Do you guys really think all of this, any of
(54:14):
this has stopped. I mean, the guy is probably under
surveillance of some sort, even though well would he be,
because why would you spend your money if you're even
the FBI or even the CIA looking at international stuff
going on? Um, which I guess I don't know how
that works with the Virgin Islands because technically aren't they
part of the United States, the US Virgin Islands? Okay, yeah, Um,
(54:39):
it's just it's so infuriating to think that this kind
of terrible abuse is occurring and is allowed to occur,
and it's simply because people have money and tremendous power.
So maybe an act of Congress could change it, could
trigger it, you know, maybe just legally speaking. Legally speaking,
(55:05):
it's it's it's tough to get this. I mean, the
d o J is in this, you know. Um. I
hesitate so often to to accuse people of operating in
large groups and locks step because, as we know, groups
(55:25):
of people stink at cooperation after a certain threshold is reached.
But while we were working on this, and while we're
looking into it, I honestly started to wonder, you know,
what will there be consequences for us for making this
(55:46):
episode interesting, which I rarely think about. And you know,
I don't think anybody cares what what we have to
say about this, but we do want to get this
out in the public sphere because regard or listen would
have actually happened. Even if you want to take this
entities side and say that this was some sort of
(56:09):
hit piece or something like that. Since two thousand five
and before that, since the eighties, something happened, Something happened.
There wouldn't be a deal like that if there wasn't
um pernicious, horrific stuff. They're that powerful people needed to
be powerful. People are conspiring right and closing ranks. This
(56:34):
is infuriating. This is infuriating. We want to hear what
you think. Thank you for listening. We want to know
what what you believe would be the next step for
a legitimate investigation which did not occur right at least
(56:56):
on Uncle Sam's part. We want to know how far
you think this goes. We want to know who else
you think is involved, who are those unnamed potential co conspirators,
And most importantly, I want you to know that, as
we say in any episode of the Deals with the
Horror of Abuse, that if you are if you have
(57:20):
found yourself in that situation, or if you know someone
that is in a situation like that, you are not alone.
You're not powerless. There are people who are there to
help and support you. You can call one eight hundred
six five six four six seven three. That's one six
(57:40):
five six hope and contact people at the National Sexual
assault telephone hotline. I don't know what else to say here. Um,
that's thank you Ben for that. If you're if you
want to learn more, literally just do some Google searches.
The Guardian is a good play us to start. Um,
(58:03):
Like we said, New York, Meg, Miami, Harold, there there
are a bunch of places where you if you want
to continue to follow this story you can, And we
will say that there's some hope here because we're obviously
in a time where powerful manner getting taken to task
more so than we've seen in the past, certainly, but
it still feels like once you get when when you're
at a certain level, it's very hard, you know what
(58:25):
I mean, It's very hard to actually make people answer
for their crimes, even if it's all laid out on
the table like this, which is the which is the
most gut wrenching part of this story. That it's like
there's no doubt in anyone's mind and this stuff happened.
And like you said, Matt, when you know back in
the circulation, aside from maybe keeping his nose clean to
appease his handlers for a little while, you know, this
is a man that has a mission he's driven to
(58:48):
behave this way and the fact that he's allowed to
be out and it just makes me sick. All right,
So what do you think? Write to us? Find us
on on social media where conspiracy stuff in most places,
conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. Join us on Facebook and
(59:08):
our group Here's where it gets crazy. If you want
to get into a discussion about this um, it'll be
a difficult one for our mods. Um. Sorry everyone, but
let's just you know, let's try and have a conversation
about this um that isn't that it doesn't turn into
(59:29):
a flame war because nothing nothing. We don't have to
turn discussions about something as horrid as this into just
being angry at each other. Let's try and figure out something.
So let's let's go have a discussion on Here's where
it gets crazy on Facebook. If you don't want to
do that, you can give us a call, leave us
a message you might get on the air. We are
one eight three three st d w y t K.
(59:50):
If you don't want to do that, just send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at how
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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