- The first time I really heard about Jeffrey was when Ghislaine called me and told me that she was throwing a party in honour of her mother. She said it was at the house of the guy she was dating. I remember people talking about Ghislaine's boyfriend had suddenly struck it rich. As I recall, Jeffrey wasn't there, and there was this rumour going around that this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, he kind of likes... he likes dating, um, high school girls. That's kind of what he's into. And Ghislaine is introducing him to these young women. She's finding these girls that he's flirting with, spending time with. And there was, kind of, disbelief. I'm ashamed to say that I don't remember feeling in any way, at the time, that there was anything sinister about it, but it seemed deeply weird. If this was the guy that she was dating, why the hell would she be finding young girls for him? Captioned by Sally Harper and Alex Walker. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2021 - Yeah. OK. I've known Ghislaine Maxwell since 1999. I had no idea that she had any connection to Jeffrey Epstein until I investigated him in 2002. Any time I had seen her out at parties in New York, she was either by herself or she was with some random guy, but nobody ever mentioned the name Jeffrey Epstein. There is this very strange confusion as to nobody quite knowing for sure when she and Jeffrey actually met. We have one of Jeffrey's best friends, Stuart Pivar, one of the founders of the New York Academy of Art ` He says that they definitely knew each other before Robert Maxwell died because Jeffrey asked Stewart to watch Ghislaine, sort of 24/7, after her father died. He put Stuart on what he called suicide watch. - She was a terrible wreck and Jeffrey sort of put me in charge of her because he was afraid she would` she was so depressed that she would` wouldn't make it. - She was deeply upset about him dying and the circumstances of his death, because it had so completely... wrecked and changed her life. She wasn't expressing sympathy for the dead father. It was all about her plight in this staggering situation that was so public. - Ghislaine's friends told me that she was distraught. She told one person that I spoke to that she had basically become the equivalent of a leper. She described the two bedroom apartment that she lived in on the Upper East Side as being like a toilet. - When she meets Epstein, she probably sees, in Epstein, her father and thinks, 'Well, this is great, and he's going to provide me with all the things 'that my father would have given me, had he lived.' - The early 90s is a really interesting period to watch Jeffrey's transformation. He goes from living in a one bedroom apartment on the East 60s, to renting the former residence of the Iranian consul to the United Nations. And within a very short space of time after that, Jeffrey acquires a vast ranch in New Mexico called Zorro. He starts to acquire the house, the plane, the chef, the staff that Ghislaine grew up with, that she was used to. But there's a one sidedness to the Ghislaine-Jeffrey relationship. He definitely did see that Ghislaine could be very useful to him. She had this extraordinary Rolodex, and she knew rich, powerful people all around the world, and he didn't. - She had inroads into the kind of world that Epstein didn't have, and that was the political world. And I think that was very important for Epstein. If Ghislaine knew half of what her father knew, and what her father was doing, she would have been quite an asset to someone like Jeffrey Epstein. - I was being told that he was` Jeffrey was a social klutz, that he was kind of a diamond in the rough, had no interests or aptitude for having normal friends and having a kind of, you know, normal social life. - He wouldn't have known, for example, how to dress properly for the royal enclosure at Ascot in England. He wouldn't necessarily have known how to run all the staff that he acquired. Ghislaine knew how to do all of this. One person put it to me very simply ` she told him, you know, which was the salad fork. She was sort of like the chief administrator in his life. She organised his houses, his real estate. I asked Jeffrey about their relationship when I interviewed him in 2002. I preserved the transcripts of those conversations. One of the very few interviews ever done with him. - She's not really involved in the business. You know, I was trying to figure out how to best describe it. As I've said, what I've tried to do is search for the best and brightest - Right. - And that's how Ghislaine fits in. Ghislaine is the best at what I need. Ghislaine speaks five languages fluently. So, in Europe, you know, she'll come to a meeting and not only will she be able to translate what the person's saying, but she can also give me a sense of ` is the person telling the truth? I enjoy` I need... especially female input on that. - Ghislaine took her role extremely seriously, as I heard from one woman who was a local assistant for Jeffrey for a few years. She wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. - There was definitely this sense of I'm better than you and you're not at my level and you do as I say. She commanded a certain level of, not respect, but almost fear. So what was Ghislaine's job? - The way it was described to me was Jeffrey had all the money and none of the old money connections. Ghislaine had the name and none of the money. So it was a very symbiotic relationship. But it appeared to me, at least from the outside, that Ghislaine was at Jeffrey's beck and call It appeared she was very dependent on Jeffrey. She felt she needed him for, I think, more than just the money. - Ghislaine did continue her very gregarious, busy social life in New York. But what's really strange is that the richer Jeffrey Epstein became, the more reclusive he became. He retreated within the walls of his Shangri-La, while Ghislaine was the person out and about. At the same time, he was always in total control of her. - Ghislaine was one of the few people at that point in New York who had a cell phone when you had lunch with her. She would very ostentatiously put the phone on the table as a kind of show off thing. And the phone rang and Ghislaine got up and said, 'Oh my God, it's Jeffrey. 'He's got a cold and he wants me to find the best chicken soup in New York City. 'Oh, what do I do?' And she was dialling frantically and trying to figure out what was considered the best chicken soup in New York City. Isn't that weird? Couldn't you just call for delivery? Why is this suddenly the most important thing on Ghislaine's agenda, that must be accomplished immediately in order to satisfy and please Jeffrey Epstein. - Jeffrey seemed to embrace this power dynamic. - My association with drugs and drink is only negative. - Is that why Ghislaine doesn't drink? - She did before she met me. - That's what I mean. - Because I helped most of the people around me. - What he didn't tell me is that he was really unkind to her. Sources who knew them during this time told me that he insisted she lose weight, and that she did. That he could be incredibly abusive to her, in public, and she put up with it in silence. Somebody who worked very closely with Jeffrey in the 1980s and 1990s told me that Ghislaine was working in Jeffrey's offices and he happened to walk in there as well, along with a model who was from the South. He and the model bounced into his office and bounced out. My source says that he said to Ghislaine, 'You don't have to put up with this. 'You really don't have to do this.' And she replied, 'Yes, I do. 'My father taught me you do whatever it takes to keep your man.' - Ghislaine Maxwell was used in her life to being the subject and object of a rich tyrant and had been brought up to be totally obedient. So it was natural for her to slide into the centre of a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, she knew no different. - I turned to psychologist Laura Saunders, who specialises in family therapy. She has never interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, but she explained what effects childhood trauma could have on somebody in adulthood. - When you find that your life is full of control and power dynamics and chaos and things that would make it very emotionally unstable, that then becomes your internal expectation of the way life is. It would not be surprising that an adult female would then engage in that in their relationship with a male that recreated that` that father-daughter dynamic. That sense of control and power and absolute need for approval and going way outside your comfort level just to get that approval. - Journalist Ed Epstein remembers Ghislaine's outrageous conversation at a wedding at Mar-a-Lago. - She didn't show up during dinner. Just as we're finishing dessert, she showed up. And of course, she needed an excuse, and she said, 'You know, I was just having the greatest sex of my life 'and I've never had such great sex, so please forgive me,' and everyone laughed. But that was her excuse. - She talked about sex so much that people began to wonder if she was compensating for something. One person who worked for Jeffrey and knew Ghislaine did say that there was definitely some bond. This person called it a cosmic bond. But the more I have learnt in my reporting this year, the more it suggests that she was truly besotted and in love with him. But it's not at all clear to me or to any of my sources that he was ever in love with or besotted with Ghislaine. - He had these beautiful models and all of these young Eastern European women that were around him all the time. It seemed to me she played a background role. I remember that the one time` her and I discussing their relationship, actually, that led into her sharing with me that they had clearly an open relationship and that they enjoyed the company of other women. But she seemed almost sad. It wasn't what she wanted in the relationship. It appeared to me that she wanted more than he was willing to give. - Ed Epstein was friends with both Jeffrey and Ghislaine, but separately. He remembers a dinner with Ghislaine, where he saw firsthand her efforts to provide for Jeffrey. - At a certain point during dinner, she got up from the table and she walked to another table, and there was a very attractive girl, who I later learnt was a model from Denmark. And she struck up a conversation with her. And you know, again, I turned to someone else at the table. I said, 'What's she doing? 'Does she know`,' 'No, she's trying to get that, recruit that girl to go on with them to Palm Beach 'because Jeffrey likes models,' or something like that. And then I later found out that she succeeded and that girl did go to Palm Beach with them. - When your level of distortion is so great, you lose touch with what is real and what's not real. And so when you lose touch with reality, it makes it harder for you to do the things that you need to do to help yourself and you really continue to engage in behaviour, despite the fact that it will have long term negative effects for you. - What I would call the New York crowd of people who knew Ghislaine, they talked about something dark, something quite sick about the way Ghislaine worshipped this man, and it clearly wasn't reciprocated. Certainly, in all my conversations that I ever had with Jeffrey, even as he was praising Ghislaine, he was distancing himself from her. - You know, she's my best friend. - Right. Well, that is what I thought. - And she has been for a very long time. - Right. I mean, the picture that I have is of, you know, people have a very, very mutually dependent on each other. - Mutually dependent has sort of a syrupy connotation. - When you have your set up dinners for the scientists at your house, she's the one organising it? - That's correct. - She's involved in buying art sometimes or, you know, she gets very involved in a lot of administration. - She doesn't find girls for me, by the way. - I didn't ask you that. Back in 2002, I thought it was the strangest thing for him to say, and I thought he was making some really sick, terrible joke. At the time, I had no idea how revealing that admission was. He was someone who bragged. He boasted. Even the people who sort of thought they knew him really well ended up wondering what had he said that was the truth and what had he said that was a complete lie? In the 1990s, he moves to this enormous townhouse that's now the largest private townhouse in Manhattan. He acquires an island in the Caribbean. He acquires a private jet. This all happens within an astonishingly short time period. So Jeffrey told people who asked about his sudden wealth that he was this sort of money manager to billionaires only for a very, very exclusive club, and it was very hard to get on his list of clients. But what caused people to ask questions about what Jeffrey said was, if he's really such a good money manager, why is there absolutely no footprint, no trace of him in the market? The question that you and I posed to each other was, where did he get that money? - The first theory had to do with Robert Maxwell, who stole money from the pension funds of the newspapers he owned and died. So that theory goes that Maxwell tried to hide some of the money for his family, and that Jeffrey represented himself as someone who was expert in hiding money and that he gave him a sum. It could have been 50, 60 million or 100 million, and that Jeffrey and Ghislaine lived off his money. - Robert Maxwell's biographers tell me that they are sceptical of this theory. - After his death, the British government had an investigative unit looking for the Maxwell millions or billions. They never find the money. It had been very, very well hidden by Robert Maxwell. - There is a theory that one of the reasons Ghislaine was so loyal to Jeffrey Epstein was that he was` - Finding money for Robert Maxwell, her father. The father. - Hid it all` Hid all her money, somehow. - No, I don't. I don't think that's true. - Maxwell was not the sort of man in his life who ever entrusted his money to somebody else to look after. He wasn't a person who trusted anyone because as a crook, the last thing he would do is trust anybody else. Any money he had, he needed to keep his bankrupt global organisation afloat. - Tom Bower believes Maxwell had sorted away money over the years, but not enough to explain Epstein's new lifestyle. - Some of the money that Robert stole was in the bank accounts of Haiti and Liechtenstein, but more importantly, in the Cayman Islands and the Virgin Islands. But that was in 1991. The money would have run out by about 1992, 93, which was spending on a large scale. The second theory is the Hoffenberg theory, where basically Hoffenberg had reason to hide money because the government was going to seize all his assets. - Jeffrey had become a consultant to Steve Hoffenberg and Towers Financial in 1987 and had helped build the company into a colossus. But prosecutors began nosing around the firm. In 1997, Hoffenberg was convicted for running the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history at the time. Hoffenberg took money from new investors to pay off earlier investors, as well as lining his own pockets. Hoffenberg has since said that Jeffrey was the mastermind behind the fraud, and yet he, Hoffenberg, was the one who served 18 years in prison. Not only did Epstein escape prosecution, but Hoffenberg says Jeffrey stole money from his company. So how much money do you think Jeffrey Epstein siphoned out of Towers Financial? - I have calculated and added up some 100 million dollars that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in and looting from Towers Financial, with others. - Epstein denied any involvement in the Towers fraud, but he was certainly close to the company. So why wasn't he indicted with Hoffenberg? After November 93, Jeffrey Epstein's name disappears in all the court papers about Hoffenberg's crime. Jeffrey told me back in 2002 that he never answered any questions. He hadn't cooperated with the government. You would never aware, and no one ever asked you to give testimony. - I was never called. I wasn't involved in that whole trial or anything. - I know that` - Even as a witness, nobody. - That turns out, according to my reporting, to be complete rubbish. He was brought in for questioning at least three times. He did cooperate. - Over the last several years, I was able to understand and discover some of what Jeffrey Epstein did, which is shocking to me. - You mean you didn't know, all this time, that Jeffrey Epstein had cooperated against you? - No. I didn't know it earlier, that he destroyed me and blamed me for everything. I did not know that at that time, up until the last few years. If I didn't go near Jeffrey Epstein, I would have never faced the penalties that I suffered, that was so detrimental to my life, my family and Towers Financial. - I think Jeffrey made the decision to cooperate with the government to save himself. Jeffrey not only didn't want to pay a price for Towers Financial and the crimes connected with that, he had told Hoffenberg much too much about how he could steal from the people whose money he managed. Hoffenberg has always said that Jeffrey had a plan to rip off all these high net worth individuals, and Jeffrey would lay out in detail how he was going to do this. He called it 'playing the box'. Essentially, he was in control of every aspect of what he did for his clients, to the point that if they discovered that he had stolen from them, there was nothing they could do about it unless they wanted to risk embarrassment or exposure. So it's very convenient for Jeffrey Epstein that the witness to all his financial planning goes to jail for 20 years. Effectively, he silenced Steve Hoffenberg. He kept his connection to Steve Hoffenberg, completely hidden from the most important person in his life. It wasn't Ghislaine. It was Leslie Wexner. was the self-made multi-billionaire Les Wexner, a retailer who'd made a lot of money very quickly for a company. It was then called The Limited. It's now called L Brands. - You want to know Victoria's real Secret? It's the company's 77-year-old billionaire CEO. Wexner, worth more than seven and a half billion dollars, is the wealthiest guy in Ohio. - Jeffrey wasn't shy about talking about his friendship with Les Wexner. He told me that rich people were often not careful with numbers. The way Jeffrey explained it to me was that as people get wealthier and wealthier, their financial affairs need to be completely reorganised. - I always describe it, Vicky, as someone ` who started out in a small home ` as they become wealthier, had add-ons. They added on another edition, they built a room over the garage. It means you have a house that is usually a mess. So if you finally had to knock the house down and start again, that's what I really do. I knock their financial houses down to some extent because it was built over time and not really architected from the overall view. - Wexner was considered serious and reclusive, a man who didn't tolerate fools. In 1991, Jeffrey had been given power of attorney over all of Les Wexner's assets, except for his company. That was in a very unusual thing for anyone to have done, let alone a guy who's worth many billions of dollars. I want to know why he did it. Columbus, Ohio-based activist and reporter Bob Voortrekkers says that, at the time, nobody could figure out what was happening. - Epstein's name really started coming out around 1991, and the question is, you know, what's their relationship? You know, what the hell's going on? And to some extent, many people, you know, made fun of him and thought he was` was a joke. I mean, he was` he was called 'the valet'. He was called, you know, Wexner's Girl Friday. You know, I ask people that were very well connected in this town, and some of them worked at The Limited and many of them said, you know, he's this enigma. I mean, he's thought to have some ties, you know, to intelligence. He's thought to be an asset to very important people. People were afraid of Jeffrey Epstein. He was vindictive. He could do damage. And he had Wexner's ear. He was` he was the fixer. - When I spoke with Jeffrey in 2002, he was delighted with his reputation as Wexner's hatchet man. - The people hate me there. - They hate you? - Yes, if there's a decision made between the company and him, I negotiate. They only negotiate with me. Therefore, it avoids his conflict of interest. - Got it. - As you probably have heard, I am vicious in my representation of my clients. - I have heard. - And it's the same thing. I do it all. - Did people lose their jobs at The Limited because of you? - Hm. You should ask him. - I'll ask him. - Now, I don't` I can't fire anyone. - No, I'm not talking about that. - They want to commit suicide, it's not the same thing. - The power that Jeffrey wielded over Wexner was not lost on Wexner's closest business associates, including Alfred Taubman, a shopping mall developer and a crucial ally in Wexner's retail empire. Christopher Mason wrote a book that included Taubman. - Wexner revered Alfred Taubman and looked to him for advice on everything. But my source, very close to Taubman, was saying that, you know, Taubman just could not figure out what the hell this grip was that this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, had on his good friend Les Wexner. He just couldn't fathom it. - I think they had very similar beliefs in supporting Israel as a state. At one point, Mr Wexner was listed as one of the single largest private donors to the State of Israel. - So Wexner and Epstein shared close ties to Israel, the same strong ties Robert Maxwell had earlier in Jeffrey's career. Wexner had other ties that benefitted Jeffrey. Leslie Wexner had very deep reach into places like Harvard. So Jeffrey was very quick to use Wexner, to use his contacts at Harvard. He then expanded the network further, meeting people like then-law professor Alan Dershowitz. Jeffrey Epstein was very strategic about the people he collected around him. He wanted the legitimacy of Harvard. - There's no doubt about that. He got an office in Braddock Square, right in Harvard Square, where he would have these lunches and the lunches were amazing. I had been at Harvard at that point, what, 35 years? He introduced me to people at Harvard I didn't know. He boasted friendships with the president of Harvard. - This gave him access to some of the leading thinkers and academics in the country. It also set Jeffrey up on a sort of fake pedestal as somebody who was really trying to do good in the world. But basically, it gave him gravitas and credentials that he shouldn't have had. Using those credentials and touting wealthy clients like Wexner, Jeffrey could approach new potential clients. Through my recent reporting, I've realised that he invested their money through friendly bankers on Wall Street. That's why there was no trace of him in the market. He wasn't doing his own trading. Ed Epstein heard about one of Jeffrey's pitches to a potential client, who he declines to name. - Jeffrey had offered to save him something like $120 million in taxes by moving the money through charities offshore, and a person who's very smart listened and said, 'Well, I think this might be a violation of the law.' And Jeffrey said, 'No, no, it's a grey area.' But if you're worried, if you give me a power of attorney, you don't have to know anything about it. And that will be your alibi. - Once again, it was an example of Jeffrey's basic strategy ` charm, control and con. It seems he often made it work. - The one great similarity between Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein is they knew how to perform. They could convince a snowman to buy snow, and that is their genius. It's the art of the deal, the art of persuading people to trust them. That's the key thing, and that is an amazing quality to have and is vital for the deal maker, especially for the crook. - Very few of the people Epstein ripped off ever spoke up. Leslie Wexner, for instance, has said publicly that Jeffrey stole almost $47 million from him, but he didn't say anything until after Jeffrey died. Jeffrey understood the enormous power of social embarrassment. He understood that wealthy people don't like admitting publicly that they've been robbed. Jeffrey also boasted that he had so much stuff on people who have no idea what that leverage is, and Jeffrey could have been lying. But nonetheless, he boasted. In the 1990s, Leslie Wexner was Jeffrey Epstein's biggest patron by far. Ghislaine complained she felt like, quote unquote, 'the help' around Leslie Wexner. But at the same time, if she had interfered with that relationship, she would have directly been hurting herself. Christopher Mason saw the lengths Ghislaine went to keep the pair happy when she hired him to perform a bawdy comic song for Jeffrey's 40th birthday party. - Usually when I do one of those songs, I try to talk to as many people as possible. You know, the secretary, the wife, the mistress, you know, all the best friends that everyone is sworn to secrecy. What surprised me was that Ghislaine was very specific that she had to give me all the information. I was startled by some of the things that she insisted had to be in the song. I had to allude to when he was teaching at Dalton School and that he was the subject of many school girl crushes. And then she wanted me to include that 'Ghislaine claims he has 24 hour erections,' possibly an exaggeration. So when I got to the house that evening, Ghislaine asked me to change into Jeffrey's karate outfit. I had to climb the stairs, sit on the floor, cross-legged, in his karate outfit, sing the song. I remember it was` it was a very clubby atmosphere. Only about eight guys. - Christopher says that the group included Les Wexner, Henry Rosovsky, who was then a Dean at Harvard, and the violinist Itzhak Perlman. - These powerful guys all seemed to know Epstein very well, and they were kind of roaring with laughter at these lyrics, a bit of poking fun at him. - But the other interesting thing, right, was that Ghislaine was not at the dinner. - It was like Ghislaine was the, kind of, power geisha, orchestrating everything for Epstein's maximum delight. Ghislaine moved to her own townhouse, although it's unclear who paid for it. She continued to manage Jeffrey's properties and his social events and to introduce him to the rich and powerful. One of her most important introductions was to Prince Andrew, whom Ghislaine had known since she was in her early 20s. Investment banker Ewan Relly describes a dinner Ghislaine invited him to with Prince Andrew. - Ghislaine was there busily making sure everybody was getting along and being` She was quite flirtatious, quite charming. - What did it strike you, the relationship between Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein... was? - I think Epstein was showing off that Andrew was there, but it seemed like a bit of a... you know, frankly, a bit of a pissing contest between... between Andrew and Epstein. It was almost as if these two guys were competing about who could seem more bored or more, you know, just not interested in the evening at all. It was a very strange situation. - This may seem a strange question, but did you feel at all sorry for Ghislaine while... - No, actually, not really, because she was very good at... It felt like water off a duck's back. - Right. - And I think she enjoyed being... being the mother hen. - Andrew and Jeffrey became close associates. Former arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe is one of three people who says that Jeffrey used Prince Andrew as bait to attract new clients. - Prince Andrew is a very important, uh, character. He gave Jeffrey Epstein access to quite a number of very important people. 'See? I know the son of the Queen.' - Prince Andrew wasn't the only high-profile person that Epstein bragged about knowing. Ben-Menashe, a controversial character whose views can run towards conspiracy theories, claims that just like Robert Maxwell, Jeffrey was part of an influence campaign. - The Israelis had this thing about President Clinton. When he got elected as president,... the Israelis were genuinely worried that he'd force them into a deal with the Palestinians, just like President Carter forced them into a deal with the Egyptians. They tried to pressure Mr Clinton in different ways. - Are you suggesting that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in a sort of influence operation on President Clinton? - Yes, very much so. - So, the allegations, then, about Jeffrey are similar to what you've described with Robert Maxwell, very similar pattern ` that he was used by the Israelis. He was somebody who knew everybody. - Actually, there's a name for that. It's called mabua. - Mabua? - Mabua. Mabua means somebody who... is in between. 'I know somebody who is close to somebody else, 'and I'm gonna use him to... 'in the operation.' Whether Israel would have used him ` of course. They would've used anybody. They would use a reporter. They'd use you tomorrow if they could. - Right. I understand why... many people would be extremely sceptical of the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was part of some influence campaign trying to orchestrate US foreign policy under Bill Clinton. But we do know that Bill Clinton, in 1993, gave Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell a VIP tour of the White House because Jeffrey Epstein was one of the donors who paid for the Oval Office to be refurbished. Now, that is what you call influence. So, what was Jeffrey paid? - It wasn't a salary or something of that nature, but it was taken care of through different means. - Jeffrey's... lifestyle was extraordinary. You know, he had an island, a ranch, a plane, the biggest townhouse in New York` - And he needed to have that lifestyle to attract these people. - So who paid for it? - Friends of Israel. - Who are friends of Israel? Who do you mean by that? - I don't want to name names, but take your pick. Wealthy friends of Israel were actually helping him. (TENSE MUSIC) - If this is true, the question becomes ` did Israel, all these friends, know about the other ways that Jeffrey tried to influence people? - Epstein, from what I understand, was doing deals of influence for a lot of people. He introduced people on his private plane on his way to the private island, and just getting them all together to an island was creating what's called proximity. In the process that he did, he influenced a lot of them using means that were not proper. - Right. You mean the young girls? - Yeah, the girls and everything else. - Back in 2002, this was one thing that everybody did talk to me about. They all said that it was rumoured that he had a room full of camera equipment, and he could monitor what was going on in all the rooms of his houses. What was less open was what he was interested in filming. That's what he was doing, compromising people? - That's right. - I presume when you say 'embarrassed' and 'compromise', you mean that Jeffrey taped a lot of these sexual encounters, if not all of them. There are blackmail tapes. - He taped. He photographed. He did all that. - Steve Hoffenberg says that this is yet another element of his life that Jeffrey confided in him about. They were trying to... blackmail... powerful people. - That's what Jeffrey Epstein does. That's his MO ` compromising people and using them to the fullest extent that he can. Influence... trading. Information trading... - Right. - ...at the level we're discussing... is very serious. - You know, there are many stories from people I know and who I trust who said they saw photographs that Jeffrey had of powerful people with young women. I don't think anything... is beyond Jeffrey in terms of morality that he would say, 'I'm not gonna blackmail a friend.' I don't think that's the way Jeffrey thought. - Jeffrey's accusers say he taped them as well, and one has alleged in a lawsuit that he kept dossiers on them to keep them in line. He told me when I was reporting on him that he had collected a dossier on me and my husband, and he read aloud some bits of it in an attempt to try to threaten me. So it didn't remotely surprise me that other people told me he was well known for making dossiers on a lot of the people in his world. We now know that whether for blackmail or for his own pleasure, Jeffrey had teenage girls shuttling between his multiple homes. - Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sex trafficking of underage girls. He had a routine of sexual abuse in which he would... groom these underage victims for massages, and the massages were just sort of a code word for sexual abuse, and he would pay the victims afterwards. - Ghislaine stands accused of playing a key role in this scheme. - Ghislaine Maxwell is alleged to have been sort of a second-in-command of Jeffrey Epstein's operation. She is alleged to have been its chief recruiter. She was on the lookout for victims for Epstein. She allegedly sought new victims for him and then encouraged those victims to find new victims themselves. - Jennifer Araoz says that it was an unidentified young woman who approached her outside her high school in New York in 2001. You're 14 years old. You've just lost your father. He's just died. So what does she say to you that sort of... pushes you into the world of Jeffrey Epstein? - She was like, 'You know, I could really introduce you to somebody 'that's been so, like, impactful in my life.' You know, 'You're so lucky you met me.' - Can you remember your first meeting with Jeffrey Epstein? - It was kind of brief, but he was very just like, 'I heard so much about you, you know, 'I'm so happy to meet you, 'and I'm so sorry what happened to you and your father,' and basically just, you know, would kind of just... give me money without even doing anything at all, you know? So I was just like, 'Wow, this guy is incredibly kind and generous,' and, you know, he just seemed so powerful and larger than life. Cos he knew that I went to school for my talent school, so he's like, 'You're a beautiful girl. I could, you know, 'get you into modelling agencies. I have a lot of connections with modelling agencies.' - I mean, these visits... stop being just conversational. - Um, well, soon after, I guess, you know, he started promising me all those things, they went to slowly just, like, you know, 'I need to see your body. 'I need to see how you look without clothes on, you know, 'to really help you if you want to get into the modelling industry, 'if you want to get into any type of acting industry.' I really didn't know better, and I kind of felt like I owed him something, in a way, because he had paid me a lot even for not doing anything. So, yeah, I kind of just,... yeah, took off my` my clothes, my top. And then he asked me if I was good at massages, and it kind of just transitioned into that. I started not really wanting to go there any more, because I` at the time, I just felt like he was kind of full of it. He was kind of just... kind of sick. I think he felt that, and that's when he raped me. I was reporting on Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair. I, of course, had no idea about Jennifer Araoz or the other alleged victims at the time, but I was having my own troubles with Jeffrey. I asked Martha Little, who's editing my podcast at Audible, to help me talk about that experience. - So, you were reporting on Jeffrey in 2002, and you were speaking to him every day, and you were pregnant with twins. - The New York Post's gossip column, page six, had run an item mentioning that Jeffrey Epstein had flown Bill Clinton and various other celebrities to Africa on a philanthropic mission. This was what... sparked my boss to say, 'Go find out who he is and how he made his money.' It was meant to be an easy assignment. I had a complicated, high-risk pregnancy,... and, you know, I think my boss thought he was doing me a favour, because Jeffrey Epstein lived in New York. So did I. And it seemed like a straightforward assignment. - So you spoke to him every day, practically, for six months. What did you make of him? - He was... a master manipulator. He could go from being incredibly charming and ingratiating and sort of trying to be funny to a thug. And the reason I recorded him was that he... threatened me. - I don't know what you're writing, basically. You paraphrased some of it to me. If there's any implication of wrongdoing, I will take legal action against you personally. I'm telling you so you understand. I will be as harsh as I possibly can personally, not for the magazine, but you, because I had this discussion with you. This relationship is with you. - How did Jeffrey use your pregnancy against you while you were reporting the story? - They were the overt threats of, you know, 'I'm going to have a witch doctor place a hex on your unborn children.' To even come up with that idea... - Yeah. - ...speaks to a really sick... mind. But the other thing that Jeffrey did was... keep on talking about my pregnancy in a really invasive and creepy way. - You know what, when you give birth ` how many more months? - March. - When you give birth, as your vaginal canal opens, you have this chemical released into your system with oxytocin. It actually causes you to fall in love with the thing you see comin' out of it. - He was not afraid... to cross all boundaries, and that is what really spooked me out when he started asking me about which hospital I was giving birth in and what the exact date was and who my doctors were, because I was like, 'Whoa, OK. 'I don't know what you're capable of, but this is getting really frightening.' Around this time, I spoke to two sisters, Maria and Annie Farmer, who both said that they had been sexually assaulted by Jeffrey. Maria said Ghislaine was present when he groped her. Annie was only 16 when she said he assaulted her, which was truly shocking. Remember, at that time, no one had made this type of allegation. I wondered if he had done this to other girls, but I couldn't find any. When I told Jeffrey about the allegations, he called them 'nonsense'. And the pressure got worse. - I'm telling you, I want you to be clear ` my relationship with you is friendly. If you` - Jeffrey, I'm doing this as a job. This is not` - You shouldn't risk your future as a job. - I'm not risking anything. I'm doing my job to report. - You have to make the decision as a journalist what you think a reliable source is. - Yes. - If you think you have a reliable source and a reliable allegation, you make it. I will hold you personally responsible. - He took his offensive many steps further. He actually appeared in person at the Vanity Fair offices as we were trying to close out this piece. This was unprecedented. I don't think we've ever had the subject of a profile go to this much trouble to control what was written about him. - Mm-hm. - I think that there was mounting fear. - Yeah. - You know, it wasn't just me who was afraid. Generally, people wondered, 'Who is this guy?' I had not interviewed Ghislaine for the story, but I did have to ask her about the Farmers' accusations. It was a deeply unpleasant conversation, and she obviously denied everything. I really hoped I would not run... into Ghislaine ever again. I thought, based on... what I'd discovered, what the allegations had been, that she was weird... and that, clearly, Jeffrey Epstein was a terrible... influence on her. - Your babies were due in March. It was the end of 2002. What was happening at that time? - My doctor was getting more and more alarmed. He started to ask me, 'When are you going to be finished with this article?' He wanted me to go on bed rest. I was still getting emails from the research department and from the legal affairs editor. I thought... that I had won this battle, that the Farmers' allegations were going to make it into the article, because I got asked in mid-December to produce a photograph... of Maria Farmer. So I thought, 'Hallelujah,' you know, 'This is great news.' I had absolutely... no idea that their allegations would entirely be cut from the article until one of the fact checkers sent me an email saying, 'Have you seen the new version?' And I'm like, 'What new version?' That was a really bad moment. The magazine's editors have since said that we didn't have sufficient sourcing to run the allegations, but I had spoken to three corroborating sources. The story appeared in the March 2003 issue of Vanity Fair with no mention of Annie or Maria Farmer. I went into... a very dramatic emergency birth, and my boys were born,... you know, severely underweight. One had lungs that were whited out under the X-ray. I was convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was coming for them. If Jeffrey could put me on my back foot and make me so nervous, if he could end up winning the war with... with Vanity Fair and end up, um, controlling the article in the way that he did, what chance would... a 14-year-old... struggling girl have... against somebody like that? (TENSE MUSIC) The Farmers were incredibly unusual in having the courage to speak out about what they said had happened to them. (SIGHS) You know, the fact that we didn't publish what they said is, you know, I think... you know, a complete travesty. Just as Jeffrey had never paid a price for his frauds or for the Towers financial case, he and Ghislaine avoided exposure in the magazine. It would take another three years and more than 30 brave victims coming forward before anybody tried to stop what was happening to the girls behind these walls.