New stash of Epstein papers details how teen girls were groomed for the rich

NEW YORK: A new batch of unsealed documents pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls was released Thursday, adding several hundred pages to a trove of information detailing how the financier leveraged connections to the rich, powerful and famous to recruit his victims and cover up his crimes. The 19 documents, or about 300 pages, were half as many as the over 40 released Wednesday.The documents so far – with more to come – were sprinkled with names of celebrities and politicians who socialised with Epstein or worked with him in the years before he was publicly accused two decades ago of paying underage girls for sex. They also contained the accounts of some of Epstein’s young victims, many of whom were high school students who took payments of $200 to give him illicit massages.
The records being unsealed were part of a lawsuit filed by one of those victims, Virginia Giuffre, against Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s former girlfriend and chief recruiter of young, vulnerable females. That lawsuit was settled in 2017. The roughly 250 documents being unsealed mostly rehash what has long been known. But they have included a few fresh details about a pyramid of abuse that grew over three decades. The documents unsealed Thursday included an excerpt from the deposition of one the victims, a girl who was in school when she went to his house, thinking she had been hired to give him a massage. “I don’t recall exactly how I was propositioned to get there. I was just there, and all of a sudden something horrible happened to me,” she said, adding, Epstein removed her clothes without her consent the first time she met him.
Among the famous people in Epstein’s orbit before he was exposed as a sexual predator were former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson and magician David Copperfield, according to the accounts of his victims and other witnesses quoted in newly released documents. None of those men were accused of wrongdoing. There were also repetitions of well-known stories about Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Clinton and Trump both factor in the court file, partly because Giuffre was questioned by Maxwell’s lawyers about inaccuracies in newspaper stories about her time with Epstein. One story quoted her as saying she had ridden in a helicopter with Clinton and flirted with Trump. Giuffre said neither of those things actually happened. Clinton previously said through a spokesman that although he travelled on Epstein’s jet several times, he never visited his homes, had no knowledge of his crimes. Trump has also said he once thought Epstein was a “terrific guy,” but that they later had a falling-out .
After the documents began emerging, social media users seized on names that appeared in passing, falsely suggesting it was proof of wrongdoing. For instance, some suggested that the papers included allegations about Stephen Hawking. In reality, the theoretical physicist’s name appears, misspelled, in a 2015 email Epstein sent proposing a reward be paid to anyone who could debunk a baseless claim that Hawking had participated in “an underage orgy”.