CHAPTER 30
Leslie Wexner: 1993
Leslie Wexner, the richest man in Ohio, is a proud midwesterner. Born into the rag trade (Wexner’s parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants), he grew up to be a straight shooter—taciturn and camera-shy.
For several years running, his 315-foot boat, the Limitless, was the largest yacht owned by an American.
Wexner’s employees loved him, and he was known to be fiercely loyal to them.
In time, he’d come to see the same qualities in Jeffrey Epstein.
“Everyone was mystified as to what [Epstein’s] appeal was,” says Robert Morosky, a former vice chairman of the clothing retailer the Limited, founded by Wexner.
“Almost everyone at the Limited wondered who he was,” another former employee of Wexner’s recalls. “He literally came out of nowhere.”
But it seems that Epstein did work hard to untangle Wexner’s finances. And it appears he succeeded. “Jeffrey cleaned that up right away,” a former associate of Epstein’s says.
The two men became all but inseparable.
“Very smart, with a combination of excellent judgment and unusually high standards,” Wexner said of Epstein at the time. “Also, he is always a most loyal friend.”
When Wexner wanted to break up with a woman he’d been dating for several years—a woman who moved to Ohio and converted to Judaism to make him happy—he dispatched Epstein to do the dirty work.
When Wexner hired a decorator for his Ohio mansion and wanted someone to verify the authenticity of several expensive antiques, Epstein flew in his friend Stuart Pivar, the renowned art collector and author. (According to Pivar, most of the antiques were cheap imitations.) When Wexner traveled abroad, he’d bring back trinkets and gifts for Epstein. When Wexner wanted to see Cats, Epstein arranged to have the cast perform in his mansion.
In Ohio, Wexner’s associates whispered about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. In New York, they wondered about Epstein’s role in Wexner’s 1993 marriage to Abigail Koppel.
At thirty-one, Koppel was twenty-four years Wexner’s junior. It was Epstein who negotiated the prenuptial agreement and orchestrated its very strange signing. Abigail signed the agreement in her law office. Wexner signed it in his office. According to an associate of Epstein’s who was present, Epstein brought a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model along to Wexner’s office, as if to make the point that there are other beautiful women in the world. As a joke, Epstein placed the agreement on the model’s belly and had Wexner sign it right there.
Epstein asked his friend: “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes, Jeffrey,” said Wexner. “Quite sure.”
“It was an uproarious scene,” Epstein’s associate recalls. “Just Jeffrey being Jeffrey. That was his gestalt.”
PART III
The Women
CHAPTER 31
Mc2 Model Management’s NYC branch is looking for “highly motivated and energetic” interns to assist their agents part-time or full-time. If you’re thinking to yourself, who?, it’s the agency founded by Jean-Luc Brunel, the guy who first signed Christy Turlington when she was just fourteen. Responsibilities include scanning pictures, answering phones, assisting with updating models’ portfolios, and working in Photoshop, Word and Excel (so you have to already know what you’re doing in those). You Must: Be interested in the fashion, modeling and photography industries, outgoing, well spoken, and able to keep cool while five different people demand Starbucks / copies / phone calls / etc. This is a great opportunity to get hands-on experience at a smaller agency, plus they can offer a stipend and a Metrocard as well as school credit if needed. Send your resume to
[email protected] Good luck!
—Julia Hermanns, Fashionista, January 30, 2009
Jean-Luc Brunel: 2005
For Jeffrey Epstein, Leslie Wexner is more than a mentor. More than the last in a line of older men—father figures—whom Epstein cultivated while making his way in the world.
Wexner is also a steady, if indirect, source of beautiful women.
After all, Wexner is the man in charge of Victoria’s Secret, part of the Limited family of companies and—better yet—in charge of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. What this means for Epstein is models galore. In fact, like a fox that’s gotten hold of the lease to a henhouse, Epstein, according to evidence collected in a later lawsuit brought by Epstein victims, eventually provided financial support for a modeling agency, and provided support for models employed by that agency, in New York City.
This story begins with a Frenchman—a playboy modeling agent named Jean-Luc Brunel—who was an owner of the Karin modeling agency.
Brunel had been working as a modeling agent since the seventies. He claimed to have launched the careers of Monica Bellucci, Estelle, Jerry Hall, Rachel Hunter, Milla Jovovich, Rebecca Romijn, Kristina Semenovskaya, Sharon Stone, and Estella Warren, as well as Christy Turlington and other well-known cover girls. Brunel had also been a subject of a 60 Minutes investigation, broadcast in 1988, into sexual exploitation in the modeling industry. That exposé had caused Eileen Ford of the elite Ford modeling agency to sever her ties with the playboy. (Brunel’s activities were also chronicled in a 1995 book about the fashion industry—Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, by Michael Gross.)
But Brunel’s reputation did not prevent Jeffrey Epstein from getting involved in his business.
According to a summary judgment court filing by Bradley Edwards, a victims’ lawyer defending against a lawsuit by Jeffrey Epstein alleging fabrication of sexual assault cases against him, Epstein had provided support for Brunel’s agency, which changed its name, in 2005, from Karin to MC2—as in E = mc².
As a scout for MC2, Brunel traveled the world in search of undiscovered talent, favoring Scandinavia, Israel, central Europe, the former Soviet republics, and South America, setting up modeling competitions and negotiating with other international modeling agents and agencies.
But according to the court filing, in which Edwards detailed the information he had gathered in support of victims, Epstein and Brunel had used the agency to bring underage girls from foreign countries into the United States by promising them modeling contracts. These girls were then housed in condominiums belonging to Epstein. “Epstein and Brunel would then obtain a visa for these girls,” the document states, “then charge the underage girls rent, presumably to live as underage prostitutes in the condos.”
“I strongly deny having participated, neither directly nor indirectly, in the actions Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of,” Brunel would say. “I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager. I have exercised with the utmost ethical standard for almost forty years.”
According to Brunel, his association with Jeffrey Epstein ended up having a strong negative impact on his reputation and business. Several photographers refused to work with him. Other agencies, such as Modilinos Model Management, curtailed their relationships with Brunel. And in 2015, Brunel filed his own civil lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein, denying that he had any role in Epstein’s illegal activities, alleging that Epstein had obstructed justice by telling him to avoid having his deposition taken in the criminal case the Palm Beach PD had built against Epstein, and claiming that false allegations of Brunel’s links to Epstein’s activities had harmed his reputation and cost him a great deal of business.
In his filing, Brunel included several e-mails from industry contacts who expressed their doubts about placing models with his agency. “Parents don’t want their daughters coming to us because [when] they google your name and the agency name the only things they see is ‘Sex Trafficking’!!!” one correspondent had written.
CHAPTER 32
Nadia Marcinkova: circa 2000
MC2 has offices in New York City. But Jeffrey’s always in motion—flying to his homes in New Mexico and the Virgin Islands. Often to Palm Beach. Sometimes to Paris. And when he comes ho
me to New York he hosts parties where important people—corporate titans, real estate tycoons, university presidents, Nobel Prize–winning scientists, princes, ex-presidents, and heads of state—mingle with beautiful women.
Some guests marvel in public: Who are these women? Where do they come from?
Nadia Marcinkova comes from Slovakia. She looks like a model. But Nadia’s done very little modeling, if any. Instead she’s become another of Epstein’s girlfriends.
According to statements given to the Palm Beach police, she’s also served as a willing accomplice in Epstein’s sexual assaults on underage females.
Epstein prefers diminutive women, but Nadia is tall. She’s rail-thin and blond like the sun, with glowing skin, a wide smile, and sky-high cheekbones.
On a good day, she could pass for a Bond girl—a woman caught up in a web of crime and intrigue. But of course, that’s exactly what she is.
In certain circles, the academics and the women in Epstein’s orbit are almost a joke. In a 2003 profile of him, New York magazine quotes Harvard professors (“He is amazing”), Princeton professors (“He changed my life”), MIT professors (“If I had acted upon the investment advice he has given me over the years, I’d be calling you from my Gulfstream right now”), and other luminaries, up to and including Bill Clinton.
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” says Donald Trump. “Terrific guy; he’s a lot of fun to be with.”
No one knew then that someday Trump would run for president. (When he does, he’ll attack Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton’s own entanglements with Epstein.) But Trump’s already ahead of the curve in that he ends up severing his ties to Epstein well before the police or the media get wind of Epstein’s penchant for underage girls.
He does this because he finds out that in their endless hunt for “masseuses,” Epstein’s procurers have been prowling around Trump’s estate in Palm Beach.
CHAPTER 33
Virginia Roberts: 1999
Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, had once belonged to the fabulously wealthy heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. It sits on twenty perfectly manicured acres less than two miles away from Jeffrey Epstein’s home on El Brillo Way. It’s home to the exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club, which has a spa, tennis courts, and a very posh restaurant.
Donald Trump had fought the town council for decades as they blocked all his efforts to turn the place into a private resort. Other clubs on the island—those with a history of excluding blacks and Jews—had never faced such restrictions, Trump had argued. At one point he sent copies of two movies to every member of the town council: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier confronts his girlfriend’s racist parents, and Gentleman’s Agreement, in which a journalist confronts anti-Semitism in Connecticut and New York City.
“Whether they love me or not, everyone agrees the greatest and most important place in Palm Beach is Mar-a-Lago,” Trump told the Washington Post after winning his battle. “I took this ultimate place and made it incredible and opened it, essentially, to the people of Palm Beach. The fact that I owned it made it a lot easier to get along with the Palm Beach establishment.”
The Breakers hotel, Trump explained, “gets the [island’s] leftovers.”
It cost $100,000 to join the club. Members paid $14,000 yearly in dues. And although Epstein had never properly joined the club, Trump’s friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell gave Epstein unlimited use of the facilities.
This arrangement ended when a member’s young daughter complained to her wealthy father: while relaxing at Mar-a-Lago, she’d been approached and invited out to Epstein’s house.
The girl said that she had gone and that Epstein had tried to get her to undress.
The girl’s father had gone directly to Trump, who—in no uncertain terms—told Epstein that he was barred from Mar-a-Lago.
Because no complaint was filed, the police had taken no action. But years later, a woman named Virginia Roberts would say that, as a young girl, she’d had an identical encounter at Mar-a-Lago.
According to a court document Virginia filed in her civil lawsuit against Epstein, she was a changing-room assistant at Mar-a-Lago, earning about nine dollars an hour, when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her. Maxwell asked Virginia if she was interested in learning to be a massage therapist—which, it turned out, she was. Like the other girl, Virginia told her father, who was also employed at Mar-a-Lago as a maintenance manager. But Virginia’s father saw nothing wrong with the offer, and he drove her, later that day, to Epstein’s house on El Brillo Way.
There, according to the document, Maxwell assured Virginia’s father that Ms. Maxwell would provide transportation home for his teenage daughter. Then she led Virginia upstairs, to a spa room equipped with a shower and a massage table. Jeffrey Epstein was lying, naked, on the table.
Virginia was shocked, she says in the filing, but, with no experience with massages, thought this could be massage therapy protocol. “Ms. Maxwell then took off her own shirt and left on her underwear and started rubbing her breasts across [Jeffrey’s] body, impliedly showing [Virginia] what she was expected to do,” the filing continues. “Ms. Maxwell then told [Virginia] to take off her clothes. The minor girl was apprehensive about doing this, but, in fear, proceeded to follow Ms. Maxwell by removing everything but her underwear. She was then ordered to remove her underwear and straddle [Epstein]. The encounter escalated, with [Jeffrey] and Ms. Maxwell sexually assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing [Virginia] in various ways and in various locations, including the steam room and the shower. At the end of this sexually exploitive abuse, [Epstein] and Ms. Maxwell giddily told [Virginia] to return the following day and told her she had ‘lots of potential.’ [Epstein] paid [Virginia] hundreds of dollars, told her it was for two hours of work, and directed one of her employees to drive her home.”
At the time, Virginia was fifteen years old.
CHAPTER 34
Declaration of Virginia Roberts Giuffre: January 19, 2015, filed on January 19, 2015 by attorneys representing Jeffrey Epstein’s victims
1. My name is Virginia Giuffre and I was born in August, 1983.
2. I am currently 31 years old.
3. I grew up in Palm Beach, Florida. When I was little, I loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. But my life took a very different turn when adults—including Jeffrey Epstein and his close friend Alan Dershowitz—began to be interested in having sex with me.
4. In approximately 1999, when I was 15 years old, I met Ghislaine Maxwell. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who had been a wealthy publisher in Britain. Maxwell asked that I come with her to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion for the purposes of teaching me how to perform “massages” and to train me personally in that area. Soon after that I went to Epstein’s home in Palm Beach on El Brillo Way.
5. From the first time I was taken to Epstein’s mansion that day, his motivations and actions were sexual, as were Maxwell’s. My father was not allowed inside. I was brought up some stairs. There was a naked guy, Epstein, on the table in the room. Epstein and Maxwell forced me into sexual activity with Epstein. I was 15 years old at the time. He seemed to be in his 40s or 50s. I was paid $200. I was driven home by one of Epstein’s employees.
6. I came back for several days following and did the same sorts of sexual things for Epstein.
7. After I did those things for Epstein, he and Maxwell said they were going to have me travel and were going to get an education for me. They were promising me the world, that I would travel with Epstein on his private jet and have a well-paid profession. Epstein said he would eventually match me up with a wealthy person so that I would be “set up” for life.
8. So I started “working” exclusively for Epstein. He took me to New York on his big, private jet. We went to his mansion in New York City. I was shown to my room, a very luxurious room. The mansion was huge. I was very young and I got scared because it was so big. Epstein brought me to a room with a massage parlor. Epstein made me engage [in] se
xual activities with him there.
9. You can see how young I looked in the photograph below [see insert page 3].
10. Epstein took me on a ferry boat on one of the trips to New York City and there he took the picture above. I was approximately 15 or 16 years old at the time.
11. Over the next few weeks, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell trained me to do what they wanted, including sexual activities. The training was in New York and Florida, at Epstein’s mansion. It was basically every day and it was like going to school. I also had to have sex with Epstein many times.
12. I was trained to be “everything a man wanted me to be.” It wasn’t just sexual training—they wanted me to be able to cater to all the needs of the men they were going to send me to. They said that they loved that I was very compliant and knew how to keep my mouth shut about what they expected me to do.
13. Epstein and Maxwell also told me that they wanted me to produce information for them in addition to performing sex on the men. They told me to pay attention to the details about what the men wanted, so I could report back to them.
14. While I had juvenile hopes of bettering my life, from very early on I was also afraid of Epstein. Epstein told me he was a billionaire. I told my mother that I was working for this rich guy, and she said “go, go far away.” Epstein had promised me a lot, and I knew if I left I would be in big trouble. I was witness to a lot of illegal and bad behavior by Epstein and his friends. If I left Epstein, he knew all kinds of powerful people. He could have had me killed or abducted, and I knew he was capable of that if I did not obey him. He let me know that he knew many people in high places. Speaking about himself, he said “I can get away” with things. Even as a teenager, I understood what this meant and it scared me, as I believe he intended.