We’ll never know the truth about Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, he did his sex crimes in private and no one who associated with him – much less visited his properties, including his Little Saint James private island, need be investigated or charged. That’s the FBI’s latest version of events, announced this morning, after an apparently lengthy investigation of the dead financier’s belongings. 

“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the FBI statement said. 

It added, “Epstein harmed over one thousand victims” – presumably when not busy hosting the likes of Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner or President Donald Trump at lavish social events. If nothing else, his predation must have been immensely time-consuming. 

How does the FBI assertion that no client list exists square with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement in February that a list of Epstein clients “is sitting on my desk now to review?” She also told reporters, “there are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”

Perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know for certain is that Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell now resides in jail in Florida, having been sentenced to 20 years for crimes including trafficking. Are we expected to believe this Oxford-educated, society-heiress was trafficking underage victims solely for use by Epstein? If nothing else, the volume seems extraordinary.

Is it not just as plausible to believe – as many do – that both Epstein and Maxwell, whose father was widely suspected of being a senior Mossad agent, were employed by a foreign or domestic intelligence agency to obtain kompromat on powerful and influential people, for the purpose of blackmail? Honeytrap operations – recording people having illicit sex – are after all one of the oldest secret service tricks. 

Intriguingly, the first time Maxwell was pictured in public after Epstein’s death, at an In-N-Out Burger, she was conspicuously reading Ted Gup’s The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. According to its own blurb, the meticulously researched book affords “a surprising glimpse at the real lives of secret agents, and an unprecedented history of the most compelling – and controversial – department of the US government.”

The FBI’s statement has been met with widespread bewilderment; too much of the Epstein case seems utterly improbable. In 2019, Epstein supposedly committed suicide. Never mind that he was on suicide watch in a New York maximum security jail – his guards, apparently, were asleep. The cameras filming the door to his cell happened not to be working. And why, exactly, did the FBI take so long to release this morning’s statement?

How did this failed school-teacher afford his incredible lifestyle, including ownership of a $50 million Manhattan townhouse, a $20 million Palm Beach estate and a $20 million New Mexico ranch – not to mention the Caribbean islands – where he entertained his friends? Why in 2008 was he given a sweetheart 13-month work-release deal rather than a maximum 45-year jail sentence for the crime of raping girls as young as 14? And why did modeling agent and frequent Epstein companion Jean-Luc Brunel, who like Epstein stood accused of raping and trafficking children, also apparently commit suicide while in prison in Paris in 2022, by hanging? It’s all very odd. 

If only we could approach Epstein’s most high profile accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who alleged consistently that she was trafficked by Epstein to his friends, including Prince Andrew. Sadly – or perhaps conveniently – she died, apparently by suicide, in April. We also can’t ask Ruslana Korshunova, the young model who visited Epstein’s island twice before falling to her death from a ninth floor Manhattan balcony in 2008. 

I am sure that I digress. “After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019,” the FBI statement reads. And let that be an end to it.