More than a decade had passed since Epstein’s case first landed on the state attorney’s desk.
“The New York Times has called me,” said Krischer. “The British papers. I’m not interested in being pulled into that conversation. I know that the police chief didn’t think the case was handled right, but that’s why he’s a cop and I’m a prosecutor.”
Krischer, who left the state attorney’s office in 2009, is still a member of the Criminal Justice Commission in Palm Beach County. Since his retirement, he’s volunteered one morning a week at the office of the state attorney and two mornings a week at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
He still remains active in child welfare issues, working with the Florida Department of Children and Families.
Despite his continued involvement with local law enforcement, he hasn’t spoken to Michael Reiter in years.
Bradley Edwards
In December of 2009, Jeffrey Epstein filed suit, under Florida’s RICO act, against Scott Rothstein, the jailed Ponzi king; Bradley Edwards, the lawyer who’d worked, briefly, in Rothstein’s law firm, RRA, and represented several of Epstein’s victims; and one of those victims, an individual referred to in the lawsuit as “L.M.”
“Upon information and belief,” the suit stated, “EDWARDS knew or should have known that ROTHSTEIN was utilizing RRA as a front for the massive Ponzi scheme and/or were selling an alleged interest or investment in the Civil Actions (and other claims) involving Epstein.” The suit also claimed that, “By using Civil Actions against EPSTEIN as ‘bait’ and fabricating settlements regarding same, ROTHSTEIN and others were able to lure investors into ROTHSTEIN’S lair and bilked them of millions of dollars which, in turn, was used to fund the litigation against EPSTEIN for the sole purpose of continuing the massive Ponzi scheme.”
Moreover, the suit claimed, L.M. had “testified she never had sex with Epstein; worked at numerous strip clubs; is an admitted prostitute and call girl; has a history of illegal drug use (pot, painkillers, Xanax, Ecstasy); and continually asserted the 5th Amendment during her depositions in order to avoid answering relevant but problem questions for her.” (The suit made similar claims about two other victims.) According to the suit, L.M. had said only good things about Epstein when interviewed by the FBI in 2007, while being represented by another lawyer. Her story “changed dramatically,” the suit claimed, once she was “in the hands of EDWARDS and RRA.”
In a motion for summary judgment filed by Bradley Edwards, Edwards denied all of these allegations, calling Epstein’s claims frivolous for two separate reasons: On the one hand, Edwards claimed, Epstein was seeking damages from Edwards while asserting his own Fifth Amendment privilege to block the discovery of relevant facts. (And, in fact, Epstein did plead the Fifth, dozens of times, when deposed by the lawyers of his victims.) On the other hand, Epstein’s claims were “directly contradicted by all of the record evidence.
“The truth in the record is entirely devoid of any evidence to support Epstein’s claims and is completely and consistently corroborative of Edwards’s sworn assertion of innocence,” the motion stated.
Put simply, Epstein has made allegations that have no basis in fact. To the contrary, his lawsuit was merely a desperate measure by a serial pedophile to prevent being held accountable for repeatedly sexually abusing minor females. Epstein’s ulterior motives in filing and prosecuting this lawsuit are blatantly obvious. Epstein’s behavior is another clear demonstration that he feels he lives above the law and that because of his wealth he can manipulate the system and pay for lawyers to do his dirty work—even to the extent of having them assert baseless claims against other members of the Florida Bar. Epstein’s Complaint against Edwards and LM is nothing short of a far-fetched fictional fairy-tale with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support his preposterous claims. It was his last ditch effort to escape the public disclosure by Edwards and his clients of the nature, extent, and sordid details of his life as a serial child molester. Edwards’s Motion for Summary Judgment should be granted without equivocation.
Edwards filed a counterclaim for malicious prosecution. “He sued me with knowingly made up, falsified facts,’ Edwards says.
And his sole motivation was to extort me into abandoning the legitimate cases I was pursuing against him on behalf of the victims, including the CVRA suit. He ultimately had to dismiss that case, literally on the morning our Summary Judgment was to be heard. I then sued him. We were set for trial. The judge granted me punitive damages in my claim. And then, in a separate case in Florida, one of the appellate courts basically abolished the tort of malicious prosecution in Florida. My case was dismissed. I then appealed that. And our district ruled that my malicious prosecution claim can stand and the tort is not abolished in Florida. They sent it back to the trial court and Jeffrey Epstein appealed that to the State Supreme Court, and that’s where that stands.
Sarah Kellen
“She said her name was Clara something on the rental application,” says a real estate agent in Palm Beach. “It wasn’t until much later that I realized she was associated with Epstein.”
In April of 2009, that agent rented Clara a bungalow in Palm Beach. For Clara, that little home was a step down from Jeffrey Epstein’s big house on El Brillo Way and from the life she’d known as Sarah Kellen. But not such a step down. “She signed a lease to pay four thousand dollars a month from April 18 through July 18, 2009,” says a Palm Beach resident familiar with the local housing market. “But she stayed a lot longer. And by the way, she went on a round-the-world trip for at least a month while she had the lease.”
Kellen had been a prime suspect in Chief Reiter’s investigation. Prosecutors had considered charging her, Wendy Dobbs, and Nadia Marcinkova as potential coconspirators. They’d avoided those charges as part of the plea deal that Epstein had struck—a deal in the course of which it was suggested that if Epstein had to have pleaded to something, he could have pleaded to striking Kellen—or slapping her, once, on his jet. Assault, they’d have called it.
Kellen might have gone along with that. But in the end she didn’t need to. Sources say she found another rich man as Epstein whiled away his hours in and out of the Palm Beach Stockade. She reinvented herself, and when her relationship with the wealthy man fell apart, she played the field until she met and married a race-car driver named Brian Vickers. Along the way she reinvented herself yet again, changing her name to Sarah Kensington.
Nadia Marcinkova
Nadia Marcinkova changed her surname to Marcinko and, after training at a Palm Beach flight school, became a commercial pilot and certified flight instructor. Calling herself Gulfstream Girl on Facebook, she cultivated her social media presence until 2013, when the Gulfstream company filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against her. When the suit was settled out of court, in 2014, Marcinko changed “Gulfstream” to “Global.”
“As a child,” she wrote for the “About Me” page on her website, “Nadia channeled her entrepreneurial spirit by selling invisible pets to neighboring kids. She continued on to manage a successful family marketing business and soon she was discovered by a modeling agency and immersed into the marketing and advertising world as a spokesperson and international fashion model.”
There is no mention of Jeffrey Epstein. But on her YouTube channel, Marcinko appears in the cockpit of a Gulfstream II that looks very much like Epstein’s Gulfstream, sitting beside a man who looks much like Larry Visoski, a pilot for Epstein.
Marcinko’s Manhattan address belongs to a building where Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark, owns the majority of apartments.
Sarah Kensington uses the same address in New York.
The Girls
One of the girls who gave Jeffrey Epstein massages moved to Los Angeles and became an actress, starring for a time in a soap opera and appearing in several films. She is now pursuing a career in country music.
Several girls have been arrested for drugs, prostitution, and other nonviolent crimes.
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One girl is dead—murdered by her boyfriend for reasons that had nothing to do with Epstein.
One of the girls who claimed to have been raped by Epstein is now a successful real estate broker in South Florida.
Mary moved back in with her parents, finished high school, and attended college for a while. She had her ups and downs along the way. In 2010, she was arrested for shoplifting. But Mary, who was born in 1990, is still in her midtwenties—still young for a man of Jeffrey Epstein’s age—with many good years ahead of her.
Wendy Dobbs studied nursing in college and became a bartender and waitress. “I want to fill a position in which I can [utilize] my communication and customer service skills to help others,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I feel I am at my best when I can make a difference in someone’s life. My goal is to inspire and encourage others to make positive changes daily. If you are not reaching for the stars then your dreams are not big enough.”
The Cops
Michele Pagan is now a sergeant for the Palm Beach Police Department.
In early 2012, at a reception at Mar-a-Lago, Detective Joe Recarey received the first Palm Beach Police Foundation Police Officer of the Year award—one of several honors he received in the course of his twenty-three-year career in Palm Beach. Two years later, he left the department and took a job as director of loss prevention for the Gold Coast Beverage company.
“I’ve been [at the Palm Beach Police Department] longer than my children have been alive,” he told a reporter for the Palm Beach Daily News when he left. “I’m going to miss a majority of the people I’ve worked with, and, obviously, I’m going to miss the work. This is my extended family. Like many families, you have disagreements with some family members. But you overlook that, and you work together and you’re a team. I’m going to look back and miss a lot of the people I’ve worked with.”
Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter left the department in 2008 after twenty-eight years on the job. He now runs his own security company in Palm Beach.
Jean-Luc Brunel
In January of 2015, Jean-Luc Brunel sued his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that Epstein’s fall from grace had cost him millions of dollars in business and caused him “severe emotional stress.”
The lawsuit claimed, “Plaintiff Brunel is emotionally destroyed as a result of Epstein’s actions and the resulting effects on his business. He has been on medications to deal with the effects of this.”
It continues: “Defendant Epstein recklessly inflicted emotional distress on Plaintiff Brunel by engaging in illegal conduct with under-aged girls, which was falsely linked to Plaintiff….This illegal conduct was extreme and outrageous by any standard.”
The suit went on to quote Brunel’s doctor, who said that the modeling scout had gone into psychotherapy “due to a subjective sense of depression related to what he believes is a loss of business in his modeling agency as a result of slander published against his business.” Brunel had gone on prescription drugs—Prozac, Rivotril—as a result.
The fashion world had frozen him out, he said, after his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had become public. It had become impossible for him to find the “fresh faces” he needed for his agency, MC2.
Brunel acknowledged Epstein’s alleged crimes but denied his own involvement. “Epstein’s illegal activities were outrageous and extreme; they involved receiving massages from the under-aged girls while the girls were nude or nearly nude; penetration of the girls with a finger or object; or full intercourse.”
When the Daily Beast reported the story and reached out to Brunel for a comment, the website’s reporter was told, “Jean-Luc is not in town; he’s in South America.”
Brunel’s agency, MC2, is still in business.
Jeffrey Epstein
As of this writing, Jeffrey Epstein continues to entertain young women at his Manhattan town house.
EPILOGUE
When John Connolly, Tim Malloy, and I began work on this book, I had hoped to interview Jeffrey Epstein myself: to look directly into the eyes of the man we’d be writing about. Epstein declined to sit for an interview. Many of his friends and associates did speak with us on the condition that they not be quoted. Several of them still liked Epstein and made a point of telling us what a loyal friend he was—although, like Icarus, he seemed to have a fatal flaw.
If Epstein had agreed to an interview, these are the questions I would have asked him:
•You pleaded guilty to a single felony count of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Do you believe in your heart that you were guilty?
•In 2011 you told the New York Post, “I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender.’ It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.” Do you stand by that statement today?
•Do you feel you were treated fairly by the criminal justice system?
•What effect did your conviction have on your business?
•Do you believe that you’ve done psychological harm to the women—especially the underage girls—you’ve been involved with?
•Are you still in touch with Ghislaine Maxwell?
•Are you in touch with Prince Andrew?
•You’ve spent time with Bill Clinton as well as Donald Trump. How would you characterize the two men?
•Several people have described you as a very loyal friend. Is that a fair characterization?
•I’ve heard that Leslie Wexner removed all photographs of you from his home. Given how close you once were, have you reconciled or tried to repair the relationship?
•Did the thirteen months you spent in jail change you in any way?
•After your stay in prison, have you continued to seek the company of very underage women?
•You were ordered to undergo psychological treatment as part of your sentence. Are you under treatment today?
•Do you regard yourself as having a sex addiction, and, if so, have you been treated for it?
•What is your greatest regret?
•What do you look for in a woman?
•Last question. How well do you sleep at night?
Epstein’s Palm Beach property, 358 El Brillo Way (© Chris Bott / Splash News / Corbis)
One of the photographs captured on video during the Palm Beach Police Department search warrant walk-through of Epstein’s El Brillo Way residence (Palm Beach Police Department)
Jeffrey Epstein’s 1969 high school yearbook photo (Lafayette High School, Brooklyn, New York, 1969)
Jeffrey Epstein, Coney Island, circa 1969 (Anonymous)
Leslie Wexner, photographed at his home in New York City, 1989 (© Lynn Goldsmith)
(L to R) Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Tony Randall, who presided over a November 1991 YIVO Institute event at the Plaza Hotel to honor the late Robert Maxwell (Marina Garnier)
(L to R) Deborah Blohm, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Gwendolyn Beck attend a reception at Mar-a-Lago, 1995. (Davidoff Studios)
Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, and (newly signed Trump Model) Ingrid Seynhaeve, attending the Victoria’s Secret Angels party at Laura Belle club in New York City on April 8, 1997 (Marina Garnier)
Virginia Roberts, age fifteen; photo reportedly taken by Jeffrey Epstein in New York City (Virginia Roberts Affidavit, US District Southern Court of Florida)
(L to R) Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, and Ghislaine Maxwell; photo reportedly taken by Epstein with Roberts’s camera in Maxwell’s London town house. Roberts was seventeen years old at this time. (Virginia Roberts Affidavit, US District Southern Court of Florida)
Virginia Roberts, age seventeen; photo reportedly taken by Jeffrey Epstein at Zorro Ranch, his New Mexico property, in winter (Virginia Roberts Affidavit, US District Southern Court of Florida)
Jeffrey Epstein with Professor Alan Dershowitz in Cambridge, MA, September 8, 2004 (© Rick Friedman / Corbis)
On the day the police investigation began, Epstein was photographed with Ghislaine Maxwell in New York City at the 2
005 Wall Street concert series benefiting Wall Street Rising, at Cipriani in New York City, March 15, 2005. (Joe Shildhorn / Patrick McMullen)
Jeffrey Epstein, photographed with Adrianna Ross, attending the launch of Radar magazine held at the Hotel QT in New York City, May 2005 (Neil Rasmus / Patrick-McMullan.com / Sipa Press)
2008 Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office booking photo of Jeffrey Epstein (Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office)
The Stockade, where Epstein served his sentence, photographed here in 2006, was located at 673 Fairgrounds Road in West Palm Beach, Florida. At the time, it was used as a minimum- and medium-security facility housing women and juveniles, as well as male inmates on a work-release program. (Smith Aerial Photos)
Epstein pleaded guilty to state solicitation charges and served thirteen months of an eighteen-month sentence, with liberal work-release privileges, in a solitary cell at the Palm Beach County Stockade similar to the one pictured here. (Courtesy CDC Special Management, Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office)
Epstein and lawyer at the West Palm Beach courthouse in June 2008 to enter a plea nearly two years after being charged (Uma Sanghvi / The Palm Beach Post / ZUMAPRESS.com)