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