Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein, Part Two: Commodity Flow Information
The second installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, featuring Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell, Semion Mogilevich, Bill Barr, Donald Barr, Les Wexner, Melania Trump, Jean-Luc Brunel, and much more.
“…dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.”
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Maybe we should resume by reviewing the last question-and-answer from Part One? Like prestige TV has those “previously on…” segments at the top?
Good idea.
Previously on Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein…
For a long time, Epstein maintained “normal” romantic relationships. He dated Eva Anderson, the Swedish model, off and on for 11 years in the 1980s—and he was friends with her for years after they broke up, even after she married his pal Glenn Dubin.
With that said, he was always a creep, always had a perverted attraction to girls, and was allegedly abusing women as early as 1985. He was accused of sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl in 1990.
But the child sex trafficking? That didn’t begin until Ghislaine Maxwell came along.
There were other changes, too, as the private investigator Thomas Hampson lays out:
When Ghislaine became involved with Epstein, there was a dramatic shift in Epstein’s method of operation. He changed:
from attending parties to hosting them
from being exclusively involved in relationships with adult women to recruiting young girls for sexual purposes
from having no training for any of his staff to becoming a facilitator orchestrating the grooming and training of underage girls, and girls barely of age, to become sexual companions of powerful men, similar to the training described in the Kama Sutra
from having no surveillance cameras on his properties to having multiple hidden cameras, including in bedrooms and bathrooms
But the big one—let me reiterate—is this: there’s no evidence of Epstein engaging in child sex trafficking before he teamed up with Ghislaine.
Are we sure Epstein was a creep before Ghislaine came along?
Here is an anecdote related by the late Jesse Kornbluth, the prolific Vanity Fair writer and author, that speaks to Epstein’s personality:
When we met in 1986, Epstein’s double identity intrigued me — he said he didn’t just manage money for clients with mega-fortunes, he was also a high-level bounty hunter. Sometimes, he told me, he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money. . . .
My wife-to-be was then a military historian, with a book about to be published. Interview Magazine photographed her in a buttoned-up military shirt, with a taut khaki tie. A witty photo of an attractive woman. But not a sexy look. Jeffrey Epstein had chatted her up at a few parties. The military look fooled him not at all.
The night before our marriage, Epstein called. “It’s your last free night,” he told my wife-to-be. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”
That was how, in June of 1987, Jeffrey Epstein became dead to me.
Unseemly. Disrespectful. Creepy. But par for the course, for the predatory rich guy set. And: does not involve raping children.
What about Ghislaine?
Well, Virginia Guiffre said Ghislaine—or “GMax,” as she calls herself—was a bigger monster than Epstein. Have you read her book? Or the indictment?
What was Ghislaine…sorry, GMax…like before she met Epstein?
For some insight into Ghislaine’s non-child-sex-trafficking behavior, here is another anecdote from Jesse Kornbluth:
In the early ‘90s, at a Joan Rivers dinner party, my wife and I encountered Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced British publishing mogul Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s girlfriend for a brief period in the ’90s….I’d met her several times with Epstein; we were also “friends,” in that transactional Manhattan way. And might now become better friends. “If you lose 10 pounds, I’ll fuck you,” she said, with my wife standing next to me. And she too became dead to me.
I also have it on good authority that, like Epstein, Ghislaine was a big starfucker. She was constantly bragging about her father—objectively, a massive piece of shit—and namedropping all the famous people she knew. Even to the trafficked girls, she bragged. She once told Virginia Guiffre that at some random party, she gave George Clooney a blowjob.
Is that true?
Clooney vehemently denies it, Ghislaine is a fabulist and a perjurer, and it’s not like she ever anticipated Virginia would grow up to publicly call bullshit on her claim. So: probably not.
I mention it not to sully poor George, but to give an example of her shameless namedropping.
[beat]
What is it? What’s on your mind?
Just that, after all this time, I still don’t really understand the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey and Ghislaine.
No one really does. It just brings up more questions.
Was she the Radar to his Major Burns, or was it the other way around? Did they really both get off on what they were doing? Were they ever actually in love? Were either of them capable of love?
In many ways, the pair of predators seemed like an old married couple. Organizing the “birthday book” for his fiftieth, for example, is the sort of thoughtful thing a wife does for a husband (or vice versa). But Epstein had other girlfriends subsequently, which didn’t seem to faze her in the slightest—and at the time of her arrest, Ghislaine was married to, or at least nuptially involved with, a fellow named Scott Borgerson.
Who?
Scott Borgerson. I wrote about him five and a half years ago—before a lot of the legacy media:1
Married or not, Borgerson and Maxwell
did have some kind of relationship—a romantic one, if the tabloids can be trusted. The Daily Mail reported that “Borgerson, 43, the CEO of a tech company, left his wife, Rebecca, for the 57-year-old five years ago, a source close to the family said,” and that “Maxwell had been living with Borgerson at his $3m oceanfront mansion in Manchester-by-the-Sea for the past three years.” Manchester-by-the-Sea is in Massachusetts, north of Boston—less than two hours away from Tuckedaway, the New Hampshire redoubt where Maxwell was busted by the FBI.
The Daily Mail presents a less-than-flattering portrait of Scott Borgerson: he left his wife and kids to be with Ghislaine, but before he left, there was a history of (alleged) heavy drinking and (alleged) domestic abuse. According to the divorce papers, he once threatened his wife: “Don’t make me beat you in front of the kids.”
So Ghislaine’s knight in shining armor is not exactly Tom Hanks. But then, this is not the romance of the century. There are compelling reasons why Borgerson would be attracted to Maxwell, and vice versa—and none of them have anything to do with love.
A former Coast Guard officer, Borgerson was the CEO of CargoMetrics, a tech company that “applies big data to the shipping lines,” as I wrote. His enterprise was
billed as a “maritime innovation company,” and it is. As I understand it, the company’s proprietary software aims to monitor not just where the ships all are—via their AIS, or automatic identification system—but where they’ve been, and, ultimately, what they’re carrying. This would make it possible to have a granular overview of the entire world’s ocean transport system.
Yeah, but, as you said, that was five and a half years ago. Where’s Borgerson now?
He stepped down as CEO of CargoMetrics a few weeks after Ghislaine’s July 2020 indictment, and he very gallantly dumped her for a younger woman as soon as she went to prison—or so I have read.
As for the financials, that is more interesting. Felix Yim writes at BBN Times:
Scott Borgerson’s net worth is estimated to be around $20 million to $25 million as of 2025, primarily derived from his role as the co-founder and former CEO of CargoMetrics, a Boston-based data analytics company focused on maritime trade and shipping. Founded in 2010, CargoMetrics was valued at approximately $100 million in 2020, reflecting its innovative approach to leveraging big data for global shipping insights. Borgerson’s wealth was bolstered by his leadership in securing high-profile investors, including Google’s Eric Schmidt and billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, connections reportedly facilitated through Maxwell’s elite social network. His financial portfolio also includes significant real estate holdings, such as a $2.4 million oceanfront mansion in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, and a $1 million property in Bradford, New Hampshire, purchased in 2019 under a shell company, where Maxwell was later arrested.
Borgerson’s financial dealings with Maxwell further complicate his net worth. In 2016, Maxwell reportedly transferred the majority of her estimated $20.2 million fortune into a trust controlled by Borgerson, a move that surfaced during her 2020 bail application. This trust, combined with their joint assets, was cited in a $22.5 million bail package, including $8 million in property and $500,000 in cash, underscoring their intertwined finances.
Yim also notes, “His denial of a romantic relationship with Maxwell, despite evidence of cohabitation and shared assets, has fueled speculation about his motives and credibility.”
Not exactly the romance of the century. If anything, it reads more like an arranged marriage from the Middle Ages.
Paul Tudor Jones? That sounds like a lost member of Spinal Tap. Who’s he?
Yet another billionaire hedge fund guy. Made his fortune predicting the Black Monday market crash of 1987—the original Big Short. (He was in his 30s at the time, and, per Institutional Investor, “develop[ed] a reputation for courting models and partying long into the night.”) Was buddies with [checks notes] Harvey Weinstein. Now lives in Palm Beach. Started the Robin Hood Foundation, a poverty-fighting charity, with Epstein buddy Glenn Dubin. One of his daughters is a country singer who plays in the Zac Brown Band.
Important to stress that he’s never been accused of anything untoward, and there’s no reason to think he ever will be.
There seems to be no shortage of hedge fund guys.
Well, you know, we don’t want to have an Oligarch Gap. Otherwise the Rooskies will win!
How has CargoMetrics fared since GMax went to Supermax?
From what I can tell, the company is doing well. It rebranded, invented some stuff, took on partnerships with big multinationals. I’d invest in it, if I were a billionaire; unlike a lot of AI, it actually does something useful.
The first patent it filed after Borgerson stepped down involves a “system and method for generating commodity flow information.” It looks pretty cool:
Patent number: 12001992
Abstract: Disclosed is method including receiving digital vehicle data for a fleet of vehicles like trucks, trains, planes, drones, etc., the digital vehicle data being one or more of GPS/location-based data, image data or radar data and combining one or more of pieces of data. The method includes inferring, based on the first combined data or based on incomplete data, a loaded/empty status of a vehicle. The method includes combining other data to yield second combined data, receiving data regarding one or more of supply, demand, and amount of available cargo to yield third combined data, generating information relating to a supply of vehicles available to load at a specified dock and/or deliver a cargo to a specified dock, in each case within a specified period of time and generating suggestions for one or more vehicles regarding future routes based on the data.
Type: Grant
Filed: March 22, 2021
Date of Patent: June 4, 2024
Assignee: CARGOMETRICS TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
Inventors: Scott G. Borgerson, James E. Scully, Ethan E. Rowe, Robert A. Weisenseel, Ronnie Hoogerwerf
Make of that what you will.
Why would Ghislaine Maxwell be interested in maritime trade routes?
As I speculated in the piece,
Per CargoMetrics, seaborne cargo transports some $9 trillion of goods per year—90 percent of all the things that go from Point A to Point B. Of all of that, Customs inspects a vanishingly small percentage. Most stuff gets where it’s going, no matter what it might contain. The software Borgerson’s developing could help crack down on smugglers and criminals—or it might do the opposite. If I’m a big fish in a global crime syndicate, I’d love to have a clearer understanding of global shipping. That would make it easier for me to move my banknotes, my arms, my drugs, my gems, my sex slaves, to avoid detection by authorities. To be clear: there’s no indication Borgerson has this in mind—other than the fact that he courted “oligarchs” as investors.
Also, GMax has a submarine pilot license. And apparently she enjoys the sea. Maybe it makes her feel closer to her dad?
Ouch!
Speaking of Robert Maxwell—if Ghislaine has some financial stake in CargoMetrics, it would not be the first time that a Maxwell family member made money from cutting-edge computer software that would be of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, and terrorist groups.
Oh?
As Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon extensively cover in Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy, her father, Robert Maxwell, was the exclusive salesman for PROMIS, a cutting-edge spy software.2 This represented a sizable chunk of his income during the 1980s, the authors suggest.
Originally developed in the 70s for the Justice Department to integrate cases in the byzantine U.S. legal system, the software was purloined by Mossad, souped up, repurposed, fitted with a “backdoor,” and made available to Maxwell’s various and sundry contacts in the foreign intelligence services. In time, all of those spy networks ran PROMIS. (Mustn’t have a Cutting-Edge Spy Software Gap!)
But Robert Maxwell didn’t limit himself to spooks. As Thomas and Dillon explain,
In October 2001, a month after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the attack on the Pentagon in Washington by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, it emerged that the man who controlled them, Osama bin Laden, had acquired a copy of the still highly secret PROMIS software.
The version of PROMIS provided to bin Laden came from a former FBI agent, Robert Hanssen. For years he had been a Russian spy inside the FBI. He had passed over the latest version of PROMIS to his handlers in Moscow. They had sold on a copy to Simeon Mogilevich for a reputed sum of $3 million. He had sold it on to bin Laden for an undisclosed price.
Who is Semion Mogilevich?
He is—or perhaps was; he’s long in the tooth now, assuming he’s still alive—the head of the Russian mob, with deep ties to the KGB and, more recently, to Vladimir Putin. My friends Stephanie Koff and Lou Neu found footage of him at a Putin campaign event in 2000. (“You will see Don Semyon looking back to the camera at 1:15”):
Get right out of town!
That’s apparently how the U.S. tracked down Bin Laden: via Felix Sater, the former Trump business associate who apparently leveraged his contacts in the Russian underworld to locate the al-Qaeda leader. He claims to have been a Confidential Informant, and the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch not only confirmed this, but credited Sater with being instrumental in finding UBL.
But Robert Maxwell died in 1991; Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011. Why would Russian mobsters know his whereabouts, two full decades later?
Maybe Osama and Semion were in the same “FBI Most Wanted” fantasy football league? I don’t know, and I’d rather not speculate.
Wasn’t Robert Hanssen Opus Dei?
I’m reluctant to claim that anyone “is” Opus Dei. What we can say is that Hanssen was part of a small circle of D.C. insiders under the sway of the Rev. C. John McCloskey III, an Opus Dei priest who ran the Catholic Information Center.
Who else was in that small circle?
Sam Alito; Clarence and Ginni Thomas; dark money maestro Leonard Leo; the late columnist Robert Novak, who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative; Louis Freeh, the former FBI Director who later, as a private attorney, took on Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia as a client for legal proceedings involving the Al-Yamamah arms deal we discussed in Part One; and, oh yeah, Bill Barr.
Bill Barr Bill Barr?
The same.
[pause]
I can see that look in your eye. Settle down, Alex Jones. Please, I implore you: don’t jump to any conclusions here.
D.C. is a small city. People know each other. Just because people encounter each other socially, or go to the same church, or follow the teachings of the same radical Catholic priest who was accused by a parishioner of sexual improprieties, doesn’t necessarily have any larger significance. Certainly it doesn’t prove the existence of a secret cabal hellbent on world domination.
You’re no fun.
It’s like when random people turn up in pictures with Maria Butina or Ghislaine Maxwell—those two actively collected photos of themselves with important people. All it means is that they were once in the same place at the same time.
At Little St. James, Epstein displayed a framed photo of him and GMax meeting the Pope. That doesn’t mean the Pope was involved in child sex trafficking.
Okay, bad example. Moving on…
Speaking of people appearing in photos with Ghislaine—why is no one talking about how Melania Trump fits into all this Epstein stuff?
Because she sues anyone who brings it up.
Back in August, in a piece about the once and current First Lady, I wrote about the myriad unanswered questions about Melania Trump vis à vis Epstein:
What was her relationship like with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? Melania has been with Donald since 1998; Trump didn’t break with Epstein until late 2004. She’s front and center in the most widely circulated photo of Donald, Jeffrey, and Ghislaine. Epstein told the journalist Michael Wolff that he was Trump’s closest friend for ten years and that “the first time [Donald] slept with [Melania] was on my plane.” If true—and I’m not inclined to believe a word that came out of that self-aggrandizing monster’s mouth, but he did make the claim—that suggests a level of comfort between Melania and Epstein. How well did she know him? When did they meet? Why would Epstein have claimed that he introduced Donald to Melania, if the couple met via Paolo Zampolli? Did she spend time at his house in Palm Beach or his mansion in New York? Was she ever with Epstein and/or Maxwell without her husband? Was she asked to do stuff? Did she have any interaction at all with the girls on Epstein’s properties? Was she aware of Epstein’s pedophiliac predilections? Was it possible for her not to be aware, given Donald’s 2002 “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” quote in New York magazine? If so, why didn’t she do anything about it? Virginia Guiffre was working at the spa at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell “recruited” her in 2000, shortly after Melania was photographed at a tennis-tournament party there with Trump, Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew; was Melania aware of that? Did she know Virginia in 2000? Did she encounter Virginia subsequent to her leaving Mar-a-Lago?
Is she in the Epstein files?
These questions, alas, remain unanswered.
Why don’t more journalists dig into this?
Like I said, fear of litigation. Remember, Melania threatened to sue Hunter Biden for quoting Epstein talking about her. Legacy media has legal departments begging them to steer clear.
But also, it’s hard work. Mary Jordan, author of the Melania biography The Art of Her Deal, wrote about the challenges she encountered while researching her subject:
Finding out more about Melania—her past, her motivations, her daily life—has been an unprecedented challenge. In three decades as a correspondent working all over the world, I have often written about the reluctant and the reclusive, including the head of a Mexican drug cartel and a Japanese princess, but nothing compared to trying to understand Melania. Most people I spoke to would not speak on the record. Many in the Trump world are governed by NDAs (nondisclosure agreements). Some had been warned by lawyers, family members, and others close to Melania not to speak publicly about her, and many would talk only on the same encrypted phone apps used by spies and others in the intelligence community. Old photos that were once an easy Google search away no longer pop up online.
My friend Nina Burleigh had a similar experience doing interviews for her book on the Trump women, writing, “Anyone who has tried to learn what Melania Knauss was up to in the years between leaving Slovenia around 1990 and washing up in New York City a few years before she says she met Trump in 1998, finds a lacuna, a blank slate on which there is almost no record.”
This sort of opacity is what we might expect from, say, an arms dealer like Douglas Leese. But a FLOTUS? We know more about Lucretia Garfield than we know about Melania Trump.
So you’re saying this is unusual?
That is my opinion, yes.
At the time, Melania was a recent arrival from Eastern Europe.
She was. She came here, she says, in 1996, and according to MAGA lore and her own autobiography/coffee table book, first met Trump in 1998.
And Melania wasn’t alone. Lots of women were arriving in the U.S. and Western Europe in the mid 90s from the newly-ex-Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain.
“Arriving?”
I didn’t want to write “being trafficked” and “Melania” in the same sentence, because I don’t want to imply or suggest or insinuate anything that might rouse her attorneys.
Let me be clear: Melania came to New York with Paolo Zampolli on August 27, 1996! Of her own volition! There are documents to prove this! For a few years in the mid 90s, she even lived within walking distance of my Manhattan apartment!
But girls were being trafficked from Eastern Europe in the early 90s.
Sadly, yes.
As Gail Kligman, a professor of Sociology and Director Designate of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies at UCLA, noted in a talk in 2005:
The collapse of communism that began in 1989 provided new resources—geographical and human—for the sex trade, increasingly incorporating women from Eastern Europe. One of the most striking images of the changes soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that of women lining the highways offering sex for sale. Political and economic liberalization as well as internal and international militarism created new opportunity structures and daunting economic uncertainties that produced both a demand for and a supply of sex workers in and from Eastern Europe. Most of these sex workers have been and are women and girls.
Robert Maxwell was, per Superspy, an avid customer in the Bulgarian sex trade on his frequent visits to Sofia. As I mentioned, one of his business partners in the years before his death in 1991 was Semion Mogilevich—who, as the FBI explains (boldface mine),
has been a transnational organized crime boss active for many years operating from Russia and various other countries. In 1995, the Russian Ministry of the Interior (MVD) identified Mogilevich as the boss of more than 300 criminal associates operating in more than thirty countries in Europe, Asia, and North America. Mogilevich’s criminal organization engaged in a wide variety of criminal activity, included murder, extortion, trafficking in women for prostitution, weapons trafficking, money laundering, bank and securities fraud, and, in numerous countries, the corruption of public officials.
Was Robert Maxwell’s involvement with Eastern European prostitutes not confined to his own personal pleasure? Was he also part of the Mogilevich sex trafficking operation? And if so, was his (hypothetical) stake in that sex trafficking operation Ghislaine’s real inheritance?
In other words, was the Epstein/GMax sex trafficking operation just an extension of a potential Mogilevich/RMax sex trafficking operation? And if so, might that have been a major source of Epstein’s income?
Because, again: there’s no evidence of Epstein engaging in child sex trafficking before he teamed up with Ghislaine.
I thought most of the Epstein survivors were girls he and Ghislaine recruited from the Palm Beach area.
That’s true. But we have to keep one thing in mind: JPMorgan Chase reported—belatedly—over a billion dollars in suspicious transactions across Epstein’s accounts. Many of these were cash withdrawals, believed to be used to pay off the girls he trafficked and to otherwise finance that operation.
That’s significantly more cash than necessary to fund his own illicit activities with the victims whom he and Ghislaine recruited locally; heck, it’s enough to give a thousand bucks to every resident of Palm Beach County! The staggering amount of money suggests that the sex trafficking was on a much larger scale than, and was not limited to, the girls he and GMax abused personally.
Furthermore, JPMorgan Chase was just one of the four big banks he regularly used. The real sum total of those suspicious transactions might approach two billion dollars.
That’s a lot of money.
It’s more than the national debt of Afghanistan.
As Nina Burleigh points out over at the indispensable American Freakshow, there’s enough about “Epstein’s known communications with pals, his flight logs, and scheduling emails with staff” in the public domain to get a sense of the scale of his trafficking operation:
Between 2013 and 2019, Epstein frequently flew unnamed women to and from East European airports—Kyiv, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Warsaw—as well as Stockholm and Helsinki commercially through Paris.
These trips almost always include [redacted] passengers—nameless individuals whose screening in the documents suggests they are trafficked victims whose names are purposely shielded.
Burleigh continues:
The scheduling emails are but a tiny keyhole glimpse into Epstein’s activities. As we previously reported, Epstein made 64 unexplained voyages through the Istanbul airport between 2010 and 2014, at a time when global watchdog groups were reporting a surge in human trafficking through that city in the wake of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis.
This new cache of scheduling emails suggests that he engaged in trafficking through Paris with [redacted] passengers right up until his arrest at Teterboro—on a return flight from France—in 2019.
For all we know, Epstein was headed to France to bring back another bevy of [redacted] passengers on the day of his arrest.
Why Paris? You don’t hear that much about his residence there.
For one thing, Epstein used it as his European hub. Burleigh explains:
Epstein’s playmates in Paris included Fiat heir and mega-industrialist Eduardo Teodorani and Hermes billionaire Axel Dumas. Epstein dined with Norwegian diplomat and Oslo Accords hero Terje Rod-Larsen (who took Epstein money for a Greek island pad and visited his NYC mansion numerous times) and even hosted a three-day overnight stay at his Avenue Foch apartment for the Secretary General of the European Council, Norwegian politician Thorbjorn Jagland, during the 2015 Paris Fashion Week.
More importantly, Paris is one of the modeling capitals of the world. And the promise of a modeling career was one of the ways he lured unsuspecting girls into his dastardly clutches.
Remember, Epstein bankrolled the 2004 creation of MC2 Model Management, the agency run by the French national and notorious sex creep Jean-Luc Brunel—who, incidentally, was also found dead in his prison cell of apparent suicide.
Brunel met Epstein through Ghislaine, whom he’d known since the 1980s—another indication that she was the prime mover of the sex trafficking.
Was it Brunel’s modeling agency that repped Ivanka Trump, during her days as a teenage model?
No—but I understand your confusion. That was another pedophile modeling agent Trump was pals with: John Casablancas.
His reputation as a creeper was well known long before Donald allowed his fifteen-year-old daughter to work with Casablancas’s Elite Modeling Agency in the mid-90s. In the mid-80s, Casablancas got divorced for the second time after having a public affair with the model Stephanie Seymour, whom he started “dating” when she was 14.
Oh dear God.
Well put.
Wasn’t Elite was the premier modeling agency at the time?
It was. In fact, Casablancas played a big part in making “supermodels” a thing. Elite’s clients included Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell.
Naomi Campbell—she was close with Epstein, right?
She’s certainly in a lot of photos with him—candid photos, not the kind Maria Butina took. And her entry in the “black book” contains several addresses and a dozen phone numbers.
Did they meet through Casablancas?
I don’t know. More likely, they met through Les Wexner, the head of Victoria’s Secret and Epstein’s client.
(Although she was never an “Angel,” Naomi Campbell walked the second Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and was associated with the brand.)
Brunel was also arrested on sex trafficking charges, and also “committed suicide” while in custody.
Yes.
He also hanged himself in his prison cell.
That’s what the coroner’s report says.
Come on, dude.
What?
Two pedos, both part of the same sex trafficking network, both arrested around the same time, both committing suicide in their prison cell, both dying the same way.
Yes, and?
You don’t think that’s fishy?
It’s certainly a remarkable coincidence.
For real? You really think Epstein offed himself? You’re really buying that? Really?
I find it perfectly feasible that he would do that, yes. But honestly, I don’t care. I’m just glad he’s dead.
But Donald Barr, Bill’s old man who used to work for the OSS, hired Epstein when he was headmaster at Dalton! And he wrote that creepy sci-fi book about teenage sex slaves! And Bill Barr, who used to work for the CIA, personally visited the prison right before he died!
Stop. Just stop.
Donald Barr and Bill Barr were both involved with U.S. intelligence at some point in their careers, sure, but what does that prove?
The former headmaster may have hired Jeffrey originally—no one can say for sure—but he retired the semester before Epstein started teaching there. There’s no evidence they even spoke after that one interview.
Don Barr writing some lousy sci-fi novel that might have appealed to Epstein—Was Epstein a reader? Was there even a single book at any of his residences?—means nothing beyond the fact that two men who worked at a fancy coed prep school were eying little girls with bad intent.
As for the rumor that Barr visited Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, that has been debunked. The newspaper that originally published the claim retracted the story. The only source was some second-rate mobster, a convicted perjurer who wasn’t even in New York when Epstein was in jail.
But Bill Barr was in New York when Epstein was in jail!
That’s true. Per Factcheck.org:
Barr did happen to be in New York City on July 23, speaking at a cyber security conference, the day after Epstein reportedly was found injured in his cell and put on suicide watch. But there is no evidence that Barr paid a visit to the Manhattan prison.
It proves zilch. Bill Barr is from NYC. He grew up there, went to high school there, and then went to Columbia. It’s not like he randomly flew to OKC or Florence, South Carolina. It isn’t at all unusual that he would make a trip to his hometown—especially when his hometown is New York Fucking City.
Barr was recently deposed about Epstein’s death. I read that transcript, hoping for some clues. But, while I don’t exactly trust him, nothing he said about the death rang false to me.
But there are so many irregularities around Epstein’s death!
There are also indications that he killed himself, such as him changing his will right before he died.
He might have done that because he knew the kidon was coming to get him!
All the conspiracy theory fodder—the video not working, the guards not checking in, him not being on suicide watch, etc.—could much more easily have been arranged by Epstein himself than some covert Mossad kill team. I mean, he was there.
And so many people had a motive! Trump, the Clintons, the British royal family, the Israelis, the Russians, Harvard, any number of tech bros…
Someone call Benoit Blanc! This could be a Knives Out movie!
With that said…there is one little detail I noticed that caught my attention.
Oh?
After Epstein’s July 2019 indictment and arrest, Les Wexner came under a lot of scrutiny. He was, for a long time, Epstein’s only known client, and there was the unusual arrangement about the power of attorney that we already talked about—“inexplicable” was the word the papers usually used to describe it. I’m sure Wexner was sick of people asking about it. Probably he was embarrassed; nobody likes to be made a fool of.
On July 16, 2019, Wexner put out a statement about Epstein via the Wexner Foundation:
I would never have guessed that a person I employed more than a decade ago could have caused such pain to so many people. My heart goes out to each and every person who has been hurt. I severed all ties with Mr. Epstein nearly 12 years ago. I would not have continued to work with any individual capable of such egregious, sickening behavior as has been reported about him. As you can imagine, this past week I have searched my soul … reflected … and regretted that my path ever crossed his.
When Mr. Epstein was my personal money manager, he was involved in many aspects of my financial life. But let me assure you that I was NEVER aware of the illegal activity charged in the indictment.
We all know that what is being reported about Mr. Epstein will receive significant news coverage. I fully expect that this will remain in the news for some time to come. And we don’t know what twists and turns these events will take … but I can assure you that I will continue to act in the company’s best interest as this unfolds, and I ask you to do the same. I am proud that our company has long-held core values—those values have never been more important than today, and I ask that we all wave them higher now than ever before.
A few weeks later, after mostly staying out of the spotlight, Wexner issued another, longer statement. This was after he’d accused Epstein of “misappropriating” tens of millions of dollars:
In recent weeks, there has been considerable media attention on my past connection to Jeffrey Epstein. To be clear, I never would have imagined that a person I employed more than a decade ago could have caused so much pain. I condemn his abhorrent behavior in the strongest possible terms and am sickened by the revelations I have read over the past weeks. I sincerely value your trust, and that is why it is important you hear details and context from me directly.
I first met Mr. Epstein in the mid-1980s, through friends who vouched for and recommended him as a knowledgeable financial professional. Mr. Epstein represented that he had various well-known and respected individuals both as his financial clients and in his inner circle. Based on positive reports from several friends, and on my initial dealings with him, I believed I could trust him.
Eventually, he took over managing my personal finances. He was given power of attorney as is common in that context, and he had wide latitude to act on my behalf with respect to my personal finances while I focused on building my company and undertaking philanthropic efforts.
In the early 1990s Mr. Epstein became a trustee of The Wexner Foundation, but he had no executive responsibilities in the running of the Foundation. He did not work directly with Foundation staff, and he did not engage with leadership initiatives in any way.
As the allegations against Mr. Epstein in Florida were emerging, he vehemently denied them. But by early fall 2007, it was agreed that he should step back from the management of our personal finances. In that process, we discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family. This was, frankly, a tremendous shock, even though it clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now.
With his credibility and our trust in him destroyed, we immediately severed ties with him. We were able to recover some of the funds. The widely reported payments Mr. Epstein made to the charitable fund represented a portion of the returned monies. All of that money—every dollar of it—was originally Wexner family money.
I am embarrassed that, like so many others, I was deceived by Mr. Epstein. I know now that my trust in him was grossly misplaced and I deeply regret having ever crossed his path.
As the story has unfolded further, and the extent of the pain caused by Mr. Epstein continues to grow, I have spent time reflecting and searching for answers as to how this could have happened. My heart goes out to each person who has suffered unthinkable pain and I pray for their healing.
That’s a thoughtful, honest, and compassionate statement.
Yes. Nice work by Mr. Wexner.
Why are you bringing it up?
Because it was sent to the press on Wednesday, August 7, 2019, and posted to the Wexner Foundation website on Thursday, August 8, 2019.
So?
Epstein was found dead first thing in the morning on Saturday, August 10, 2019. Which means he probably died the night of Friday, August 9.
Which means…
Wexner releases that statement on a Wednesday; Epstein’s dead in time for Saturday brunch.
Are you saying…?
No! No, no, no, no, no!
Let me be very clear: I’m not accusing Wexner of anything. There wasn’t even that much time between the two statements—roughly the amount of time it might take to get together with a crisis PR team and craft a longer statement. It’s not like he had Epstein’s date of death circled on his calendar as some sort of deadline (no pun intended). And it was a few days later, not the same day.
Plus, who would Les Wexner dispatch to MCC to do the hit—lingerie models with angel wings? Please. I’m quite sure it was a coincidence.
Then why bring it up at all?
Because the timing struck me as odd. Compiling my notes, I went back and checked the dates. I assumed that the Wexner statement would have come right after Epstein’s death. Instead it was exactly the opposite. So I wanted to flag it.
Again—I am making no accusations, and I don’t want to suggest or even imply that Wexner did anything wrong or was involved in any way. I am quite sure he was not.
But if this were a Benoit Blanc movie, I mean, that would be a wild plot twist, right?
Knives Out: Victoria’s Secret would be the working title.
Brilliant! Have Rian Johnson give me a call.
We’re getting off track again.
It comes with the territory.
Do we know where Epstein’s head was at before he got arrested?
On June 1, 2019—about six weeks before his arrest—a few people sent Epstein the link to a short news story in The Hill about the attorney Emmet Flood leaving the White House.
Michael Wolff quipped: “Now look what you’ve done.”
Nicholas Ribis, who was once CEO of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, was more serious: “They r all jumping ship - its totally crazy - it’s time to worry.”
“Time to worry?” Worry about what?
I don’t know. But Flood’s departure was clearly of interest to Epstein—or so his friends thought.
Flood was Trump’s attorney when the Mueller Report dropped. Donald tweeted: “[Flood] has done an outstanding job – NO COLLUSION – NO OBSTRUCTION! Case Closed! Emmet is my friend, and I thank him for the GREAT JOB he has done.”
The New York Times wrote this:
The arrival of Mr. Flood, who previously worked at the firm Williams & Connolly and last worked in the White House Counsel’s Office under George W. Bush, signaled a more emboldened front as the investigation dragged on. As Mr. Mueller’s office weighed the possibility of issuing a subpoena against Mr. Trump, Mr. Flood was among several lawyers who quietly worked to curtail access to the president. In the end, Mr. Trump never sat for an interview with Mr. Mueller.
It just struck me as strange that, of all the things happening at that time, Flood leaving a job everyone expected him to leave was given so much attention.
Anything else of note about the Epstein emails?
Epstein seemed to have had an inordinate amount of engagement with Steve Bannon. He was supposed to have breakfast with Bannon the day after his arrest, according to the emails.
What was Bannon up to?
He was making a documentary about Epstein. There’s a trailer for it:
The objective, ostensibly, was to help Epstein rehabilitate his image.
Why would Bannon do such a thing?
As a challenge? To see if he could?
I haven’t a clue. Of all the characters in this ten-year Trump saga, Steve Bannon is the most inscrutable to me. I can’t figure him out. Although, to be fair, I don’t have any desire to.
Didn’t Epstein make him a list or something?
Yes. In one of the last dispatches before his arrest, Epstein writes himself a note, subject heading “list for bannon steve,” that reads like a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses:
mandelson, barnaby summers watson, axel bottstein. karim terje, pritzker edelman. set lloyd, martin novak minsky, tata susskind, strominger krauss, hopkins. randall, kosslyn, gardner gates, thiel. hoffman, hoie sinofsky, sheldrake, suzlberger. jes staley, joscha bach, joi ito. HBJ berge, miro, anas raafat, sultan, nathan feigenbaum, ramashandran, goelberg. demasio, shristakas brockman hillis, kaufman, seligman. gould, saks, john kery, george mitchell, mandelbbrot. chomsky, barrack barak, zagat, nathan, brian greene, yau, eo wilson, prince andrews, jagland, clinton pastrana, richardson, leahy, jarecki, schumer, ranieri, waheed, mongolia, gambat ehud, jacque lang woody, churkin, sergey, ruemmler, weingarten, amabani, rochsild, dersh, ken starrk karp,, dubai castro, pople queen, pres king pm, mandelson balir, , mette, , midlefafrt; gergen,. melusine margarita ovitz. barrak, mabuto, kashoogi, rockefeller,
What the fuck does that mean?
Frankly, I’m more qualified to analyze the Joyce. But let’s examine the text, shall we?
It looks like it was typed out manually—probably dictated to someone who couldn’t type fast enough to keep up and/or was unfamiliar with the names. One of his Russian admins, perhaps?3 Voice-to-text wouldn’t screw up the spellings that badly, and I doubt that Epstein would himself type out “rochsild” for Rothschild.
We see a lot of familiar names (Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Bill Richardson, George Mitchell, Woody Allen) on the list; a lot of lawyers (Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr, Reed Weingarten, Kathryn Ruemmler, whose surname is spelled correctly); a lot of billionaires, including ones from the Middle East (HBJ is Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former Prime Minister of Qatar; “Waheed” is presumably Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, the wealthy Saudi royal who was arrested during MBS’s Kushner-assisted purge in 2017); bankers (Jes Staley), academics (Noam Chomsky), AI gurus (Marvin Minsky, Stephen Kosslyn), titans of Silicon Valley (Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Alex Karp), and assorted Norwegians (Terje Rød-Larsen, Thorbjørn Jagland, possibly Celina Midelfart); and, towards the end, a series of titles: pope, queen, president, king, prime minister. Ehud Barak and Peter Mandelson are listed more than once.
It can’t be a guest list, because there are people mentioned who are no longer alive (Mobutu Sese Seko, Fidel Castro, Vitaly Churkin, Minsky, Richardson, both of the famous Khashoggis). It can’t be a kompromat roster, because his attorneys wouldn’t be on a list like that—and neither would the Pope. “Dubai” and “Mongolia” are names of places, not people.
Why this list for Steve Bannon? Was it part of the documentary project? A money map, as my friend and co-host Stephanie Koff theorized on The Five 8? Or is it something completely innocuous—all the people he has pictures of him shaking hands with, say?
Like the Nighttown section of Ulysses, I don’t know what it means.
Hang on—why is Schumer’s name on the list?
You tell me. I’m also curious why “suzlberger” appears. Sulzberger is the name of the family that publishes the New York Times, the paper of record that has routinely crapped the bed these last nine years.
What’s more notable, however, is the obvious omission.
Donald Trump?
Bingo.
How does Donald Trump fit into all this?
That’s the million-dollar question—the answer to which Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal.
Something I have observed: No one’s talking about the nature of the relationship between Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump. We hear about Ghislaine and Jeffrey, we hear about Jeffrey and Donald, but we never hear about Donald and Ghislaine.
Trump hates women and is routinely nasty to women he doesn’t like, as the White House press corps can confirm. But he’s always been deferential to GMax. The only other person he treats like that is Putin. He’s just itching to commute her sentence, you can tell.
Why would he do that?
To buy her silence.
Her silence about what?
[sighs]
We already know Trump is a serial sexual assailant. We know he’s an adjudicated rapist. We know he’s a felon, convicted on 34 counts. We know he’s a Kremlin stooge. We know he launders money for the Russian mob. We know he comes from the world of organized crime. We know he’s a rat.
We know he was best buddies with Epstein for at least a decade and a half—that he partied with him and shared an interest in underaged girls. We know he allowed Epstein and GMax to “steal”—his word—girls from Mar-a-Lago for them to traffic and rape.
We know all of that already. None of it has moved the needle. Part of the White House has fallen, but Trump remains.
We also know that whatever’s in the Epstein files is very very very bad—worse than any of the stuff we already know. That’s been trickling out in reporting by David Shuster and Allison Gill, among others.
We know there’s a push within the Bureau to disclose what’s in those files. We know this because Jason Leopold’s FOIA request about the FBI’s review and redaction of the Epstein files was cranked out in record time; it can take many months, and sometimes years, to get replies to FOIA requests, and many of them bring back little of value. Leopold got this one back in a matter of weeks, and it was enlightening.
Finally, we know that Donald Trump never wants the Epstein files to see the light of day. He’s genuinely terrified that what’s contained there will end his presidency. Why else would his lickspittle Kash Patel authorize $851,344 in overtime for FBI agents to redact Donald’s name from the documents?
So the question we have to ask ourselves is, hypothetically speaking, what could possibly be worse—I mean, like, orders of magnitude more damning—than what we already know? Because what we already know is awful.
I’ll bite. What could possibly be worse—hypothetically speaking—than all of that?
Your guess is as good as mine. I do have some thoughts on what would be worse. Hypothetically speaking. What would make even the staunchest MAGA turn on him. Stuff that would make a videotape of some Muscovite hookers tinkling on a mattress while he and Melania watched seem quaint.
But we’ve blown right past 8,000 words. So I leave you to consider these thoughts, which I will address in Part Three…
Shout out to the great Rachel Slade!
The history of PROMIS is long and shrouded in secrecy and way too long to get into here.
A lot of his staff were women from Russia and other former Soviet countries.
Could it be that the icy “I really don’t care…” broad is the watch dog put in place by a foreign puppeteer? Could the bannon association be the key to understanding this entire pandora’s box? It’s clear the PedoPig is desperate to stop the public disclosure of the epstein files. Greg, impressive research and excellent writing to make this convoluted saga clear and relatively concise! Looking forward to part 3…
It’s TUESDAY🎉 Don’t ya wonder whatever happened to good old Willlburrr Ross?