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NEW YORK (AP) – New unsealed documents about Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls were released Thursday, revealing the financier’s connections to the rich, powerful and famous. Hundreds of pages have been added to the trove of information detailing how the suspects were used to recruit Mr. Epstein. Create victims and cover up crimes.
The 19 documents, about 300 pages, were half of the more than 40 documents released Wednesday. Documents so far, with more to come, include individuals who interacted with or collaborated with Epstein in the years before he was publicly accused of paying underage girls for sex nearly 20 years ago. It was studded with the names of famous people and politicians who had done the same thing.
These included the accounts of some of Epstein’s younger victims, many of whom were high school students who were paid $200 to give illegal massages to Epstein.
The unsealed records show that one of the victims, Virginia Giuffre, was Epstein’s ex-girlfriend, head of the household and chief recruiter of young and vulnerable women, Ghislaine. -It was part of a lawsuit filed against Mr. Maxwell. The lawsuit was settled in 2017, but documents from the case are still publicly available years later.
Most of the names in these records are familiar to anyone following this scandal closely.
During Maxwell’s criminal trial two years ago, some of Epstein’s victims were aspiring models and artists. He spoke as if it was the ticket to his dream. Maxwell, 62, was convicted of sex trafficking and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Epstein committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Most of the approximately 250 documents to be unsealed this week rehash what has long been known about the man who was active in elite circles until his arrest.
But they included some new details about a pyramid of abuse that grew over three decades and victimized dozens of teenage girls and young women.
The documents unsealed Thursday included excerpts from a deposition from one of the victims, a girl who was in high school when she went to his house thinking she had been hired to give him a massage.
“I don’t remember exactly how I was offered to get there. I was just there and suddenly something terrible happened to me,” she said. She added that the first time she met Epstein, he removed her clothes without her consent.
She said she had tried “very, very hard” for years to forget the details of the sexual encounter.
The victim, whose name has been withheld, said he was recommended the job by a high school classmate. Later, she learned that girls who introduced other girls to Epstein were paid kickbacks.
She herself brought other girls from her high school to Epstein’s house. No one was her friend, she said.
“Sometimes I would go there and get paid to just swim, get paid to take a nap, get paid to just hang out,” she said. “It wasn’t my assumption that they would come over to do anything. I didn’t know when the door closed or when they went to another part of the house. While I was there, I often just went and did my thing. It didn’t matter to me.”
Other documents released Thursday mainly concern legal disputes over Ms. Giuffre’s case and her relationship with a British tabloid reporter, whom Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers have accused of having her fabricate some of the allegations. was focused on.
According to testimony from Epstein’s victims and other witnesses cited in newly released documents, some of the celebrities who were around Epstein before he was exposed as a sex offender include former President Donald Trump. and former President Bill Clinton, singer Michael Jackson, and magician David Copperfield. None of these men were accused of wrongdoing.
A famous story about Britain’s Prince Andrew was also repeated. He was sued by Giuffre, who claimed he had a sexual relationship with the royal family when he was 17, but the prince denied the charges and settled the lawsuit in 2022.
Thousands of documents from Giuffre’s lawsuit against Maxwell have been made public, but some parts were blacked out due to privacy concerns. U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska last month ordered those redactions removed, primarily because the names in the documents had already been made public through press reports and other court proceedings.
Clinton has previously said through her press secretary that although she has flown on Epstein’s jets many times, she has never visited Epstein’s home, knows nothing about his crimes and has not spoken to him since his conviction. said. Trump also said he once thought Epstein was a “great guy” but that they had since fallen out with him.
Many of the people named in court records have not been accused of doing anything wrong, but there are also numerous references to Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model agent who was close to Epstein and committed suicide in a Paris prison. . In 2022, while awaiting trial on charges of raping an underage girl. Giuffre was one of the women who accused Brunel of sexual abuse.
Separately, Brunel’s estate was sued this week by a woman who claims Brunel and others sexually assaulted her while she was working as a model in New York. She said she was once driven to a house in Canada and held there for several days while the men abused her. The lawsuit, filed in California state court, does not mention Epstein or Maxwell.
More documents are expected to be released on Friday and Monday.
Associated Press writers David B. Caruso and Jim Mustian contributed to this article.
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