I think the world knows what a monster he was, and that story is out there. I think that the story of the men is not known, really, at all. I'm trying to put the dots together through my reporting to show that whatever happens to Ghislaine Maxwell in her trial, that the network of guys who lifted up Jeffrey Epstein and enabled these alleged sex crimes ` that endures. (PENSIVE MUSIC) Captions by Lillie Balfour. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2021 In the three years after my Vanity Fair article about Jeffrey Epstein ran, no one publicly talked about the sexual assault allegations against him. I stayed away from him. And, as it turned out, so did Ghislaine, who began to move in her own circles. And then in the summer of 2006, everything changed for Jeffrey. - Jeffrey Epstein was investigated by the Palm Beach police for months. The police conclusion ` Epstein's Palm Beach mansion was a revolving door for women, and in some cases, girls as young as 16. - Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in Palm Beach, but on state charges ` solicitation of a prostitute, but also a solicitation of a minor. What the world at large had no idea of was that there was a federal investigation involving dozens of underage girls, and that the FBI was investigating what was a massive sex trafficking operation. The FBI would speak to between 30 and 40 victims. And federal prosecutors assembled a 53 page indictment. - Jeffrey hired me, along with a group of other very prominent lawyers, to help negotiate a deal with the U.S. attorney's office. - In addition to Alan Dershowitz, the team of, quote, 'super lawyers' included former ambassador Jay Lefkowitz and Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor in Bill Clinton's impeachment. They ended up making a deal with Alexander Acosta who was then the U.S. attorney down in Florida. - We took the position that they did not have a strong federal case because, for a federal case, you need to transport young women interstate. They just didn't really have that case and, therefore, the best resolution would be to have him plead to what they had a strong case on ` a state case. - He pleaded guilty in open court. He agreed to serve a total of 18 months in the Palm Beach detention facility. The guilty plea and deal end a years-long process that could have sent Epstein to jail for 15 years. - It was shocking. Epstein didn't just get a short sentence, his lawyers negotiated a non-prosecution agreement for him and for four women who worked at his Palm Beach compound. This meant that none of them could be charged for these crimes involving Epstein in the future. One Epstein associate was not on the list ` Ghislaine Maxwell. Well, why do you think Jeffrey Epstein didn't have her name in the non-prosecution agreement? - She was not directly involved, insofar as we are aware, in the sex trafficking at the time he was arrested. - I was reading about it in the New York Post, and I just thought, 'Wow. 'That creep.' That's the guy I met through, um, Ghislaine. But it was so clear by that point that she had moved on. - Even after Epstein, you know, spectacularly fell from grace and went to jail in the beginning, I still didn't think Ghislaine was a terrible person. I think she was clearly tarnished and implicated by her relationship with Epstein. But I just remember thinking, 'Well, I would give Ghislaine the benefit of the doubt.' - In Palm Beach, Jeffrey would end up serving only 13 months in a local jail, and he was released six days a week to go to his office. Was it just his high-priced lawyers who made all of this possible, or did he use other types of influence? I spoke with a new source about this, Felix Sater, a real estate developer who's perhaps best known for his ties to the Trump Organisation and his attempt to broker a deal for a Trump tower in Moscow. Sater cooperated with the government for more than a decade after he was caught in the late 1990s on a racketeering charge. He is somebody who I thought might be able to make sense of this sort of underworld. - Recording started. From everything that I see, it is my belief that he was probably a very long term co-operator of the US government. - In Felix's opinion, this arrangement could go back as far as the Towers financial case in the early 1990s. You're saying that his work as a co-operator was so important to the government that they gave him a lenient sentence. - He could have maintained that relationship with the government for decades. And, yes, if things` push comes to shove and he was involved in something, they may... they may go easier on him because of the greater good. - Well, it's hard to argue there's a greater good, Felix, when you've got underage women in astonishingly large numbers being sexually assaulted. - We don't know what information he was providing. It doesn't take away from the fact that he was just a complete piece of scum. - Well, obviously` - That said, the government does not get their best information from honest dentists in Manhattan. - Right. - They get their information about bad guys from bad guys. While Jeffrey navigated the lows of plea deals and jail time, Ghislaine was riding high. - I remember being at a cocktail party and running into Ghislaine and her hugging me. I hadn't seen her for a while. And trailing behind her- She was like, 'I want you to meet Ted.' - Ted Waitt is self-made billionaire. He was the CEO and founder of a technology company, Gateway. They met on a trip with Bill Clinton to Beijing. - She managed to slip into the conversation that he had the most incredible yacht, (CHUCKLES) which is the kind of detail that Ghislaine never failed to telegraph ` - Yes. - ...just so you'd know that she wasn't wasting her time. It was the first inkling I got that 'Oh, Ghislaine's clearly moved on. She's found some guy 'she's crazy about, and she's having a very exciting life with this guy.' Epstein seemed to be totally out of the picture. - I ran into Ghislaine, which was not something I had been wanting to do or seeking out, but I did bump into her. Ted Waitt's presence actually made this meeting between Ghislaine and I probably far less awkward than it otherwise would have been. It was almost like 'Jeffrey, who?' I mean, just` It just seemed different worlds away. That period of her life, both she and Ted Waitt were very involved with Bill Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, CGI ` Clinton Global Initiative. - Yeah. - I mean, do you remember her talking a lot about Bill Clinton? - Yes, um, cleverly, She managed to slip the name Bill Clinton into most conversations. So, (CHUCKLES) it was a kind of reminder, as ever, of Ghislaine that she's hanging out with world leaders and captains of industry. And this was kind of` For her, this was kind of normal. - I had not appreciated just how important, sort of, Clinton world was in raising Ghislaine up, but it was hugely important. Because Ghislaine originally had been known as the access to Jeffrey's money, she was courted in her own right. Ghislaine even snagged a prime aisle seat at Chelsea Clinton's wedding. You can see her in one of the official photos. This did put Ghislaine into the sort of world that, you know, if you go way, way back, she aspired to be in her 20s. You know, she was sought after in her own right as a person of substance and a person of importance. - So, she invited me over to her house, and whoa! Whoa, this is a gigantic house, and it was clearly hers. Didn't seem to be anything to do with her boyfriend. It was Ghislaine's house. And Ghislaine was talking with great passion about the thing that really motivated her, and it was saving the world's oceans. - On one of my first dives, when I went down, I switched on the lights at the bottom of the ocean and saw a plastic hanger. It was in that moment, actually, that I decided that I` I really wanted to focus my attention on the ocean. - So you thought it was authentic? - I did. And I just` I mean, at the time, I did. She was so passionate about it. And I remember thinking, 'Well, this is a whole lot more interesting than being the gal Friday 'of a creepy guy.' - 'But Ghislaine would never be able to fully shake the stigma of her connection to Jeffrey Epstein.' - The black sedan sped away from the county jail. Its occupant ` registered sex offender and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. - He's very happy that his jail sentence is over and he can begin a new chapter in his life. - You'd think that when he emerged from jail, Jeffrey would have been a social pariah, but it seems that money talks. While Ghislaine travelled the world on high profile missions, Jeffrey found a different way to peddle his influence. Once Jeffrey got out of jail, he turned his homes into salons for the rich and powerful and famous, all in the guise of Jeffrey the great philanthropist. This was his new image, and it worked. He really did have the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and Bill Gates. And according to Kira Dikhtyar, the Russian model who was friendly with him, he went out with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Did these powerful men seem to really like him? - Yeah. - Kira was a friend of Jeffrey's, but she also says that he paid her and other women $1000 each to sit around his house to impress clients. - Journalist Ed Epstein hadn't seen Jeffrey since the late 1980s, but he was curious when Jeffrey invited him over in 2013. - We had tea. Someone knocked on the door and said, 'Leon's here.' And he said, 'He can wait.' And when I left, Jeffrey walked me to the door and said, 'You know Leon, don't you?' Well, I didn't know Leon Black. I'd heard of him. I mean, Leon Black was one of the most famous and wealthiest and powerful financiers with his Apollo Group. I thought, 'Well, if he's there, 'well, maybe Jeffrey has redeemed himself in some way or changed his behaviour, or something like that.' I mean, you know... - It's really quite remarkable. I spoke to one source who said, 'You know, this was all a very brazen effort to erase his track record' ` the fact that he was now a convicted sex offender. - A large part of his efforts were spent to try to create a new reputation for himself, not by rehabilitating himself, like doing charity work or anything, but he wanted people to somehow think that his conviction was false. - To be clear, none of the people who spent time with Jeffrey have been accused of any wrongdoing. It seems he used these high powered individuals to attract others. - Someone described it pretty well that he came to Jeffrey's house and he saw all these famous people there like Bill Clinton or Larry Summers, who was the secretary of Treasury, and then he thinks, 'Well, my God. All these people. It's a salon. 'They all hang out here. Somehow they must have all vetted Jeffrey Epstein.' And if they all found that Jeffrey Epstein was respectable, who was he to...? - What, to quibble? Jeffrey understood how power really works. He understood that power is ten people` men in a room making decisions that nobody else can see. He understood how to use money to influence people, but he also understood how to read people so that he could manipulate his way into their orbit and he could use them to his own advantage. Bill Gates began attending these salons in 2011. A spokesperson for the Gates Foundation says that many people told Gates Jeffrey was somebody who could help the foundation, but there are questions about the depth of their friendship. Sources say that Gates flew on Jeffrey's plane at least once and visited his home many times, and there are rumours that Gates' divorced from his wife, Melinda, is in some part connected to these visits. - According to documents obtained by the Journal, Melinda and her advisers held a number of calls with divorce lawyers in October 2019, the same month the New York Times first reported that Bill met with Epstein on numerous occasions. - In 2019, Gates was quoted as saying, 'I thought those discussions would lead, literally, 'to billions of dollars going to global health. Turned out that was a bad judgement.' He also admits ` While Jeffrey was attracting new associates, some of his longer relationships had ended. His patron, Leslie Wexner, severed ties while Jeffrey was in jail. - Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved... is something that I'm embarrassed that I was even close to. - The most public break came in 2011. - Prince Andrew went out to stay with Jeffrey Epstein in New York City. They went for a walk together. They went to Central Park. And pictures taken of the two of them were then published in February 2011. And that was the first point that Prince Andrew was really drawn heavily into the Jeffrey Epstein story. He was obviously criticised for maintaining this friendship with a man who was, at that point, a convicted paedophile. - It then came out that Epstein had recently paid a $24,000 debt for Andrew's ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. The public uproar about that meant that the Duke of York and his ex-wife absolutely distanced themselves from Jeffrey. But other friends, like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, were still around. In 2015, Barak and Epstein formed an investment group together registered in the Virgin Islands. That's where Jeffrey established his holding company and his foundations after 2012. National security analyst Vanessa Neumann tells me that perhaps it should have set off alarm bells with the clients he was courting. - What they're selling is banking secrecy ` shell companies, you know, trusts that can't be tracked, and that would make perfect sense for someone like him. - In other words, it's a good place to engineer the invisible deals that Jeffrey specialised in. And according to my sources, he was offering his services to new networks. Jeffrey told Ed Epstein that he was investing for certain African dictators and that he was also working with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, and Mohammed bin Zayed, the controller of Abu Dhabi. And he said that he had a lot of influence with the person who controlled the Port of Djibouti, a very important strategic port. What's interesting is this puts you right back into the world that Jeffrey was immersed in in the 1980s. It's the world of bounty hunting, of moving money into offshore accounts. It's the world of doing international transactions in the shadows. That's what Jeffrey knew how to do. In national security circles, there's a name for somebody like Jeffrey. - He is what we would call a hyper connector. - Yes. - Because he is not only very deeply connected in one network, right? He connects different networks. It's not just like he was the American Jewish Business Network. He also had the Middle East, and he could link banking to royalty, etc. And he could move back and forth through those groups. - Neumann says that those connections could have benefited Jeffrey. - When you have that kind of reach and that kind of connectivity, you have a lot of people who have a vested interest in protecting you. - According to Kira Dikhtya, Jeffrey also took action to protect himself. It is your distinct impression that after Jeffrey got out of jail, he made very sure that no` none of the women around him were under-age. - How do you know that? - Really? - Given that he did seem to spend the 10 years after he got out of jail intent on rehabilitating his image, it seems highly likely that he did have somebody checking IDs at the door. Now, whether or not this was yet another great Jeffrey Epstein facade that completely belied reality, your guess is as good as mine. a lurid tale of his sex trafficking hit the news when a never-before-seen photograph was published. It would be the beginning of the end for both him and Ghislaine. The photograph of Virginia Roberts with Prince Andrew ` Prince Andrew's arm around her midriff, Ghislaine Maxwell smiling sort of smugly in the background ` put the story of their past right front and centre in the public's consciousness around the world. - It's a sordid business, and no small embarrassment for the British royal family. - Prince Andrew is responding to claims made by Virginia Roberts... - As the media uproar played out, I decided to write a blog about Jeffrey and Ghislaine for Vanity Fair. I included the fact that I knew about the Farmers' sexual assault allegations in 2002, but we hadn't published them. Somebody changed it quite dramatically so that it ended up reading like a puff piece. My lines about the Farmers were taken out and the language was changed. (OMINOUS MUSIC) It read that I hadn't believed the Farmers, which was absolutely not true, and it got posted without me seeing the changes, which was incredibly upsetting. I thought 'I'm never going to be able to get the Farmers and their allegations 'into Vanity Fair magazine', and I just gave up. The Virginia Roberts photograph put a swift end to Ghislaine's new life away from Jeffrey. The team around Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative decided that Ghislaine was no longer to be invited to Clinton events. She and Ted Waitt broke up that same year. Several months later, I ran into Ghislaine, and she invited me to lunch. I think she wanted to sell me on a story about saving the oceans. I also think she was lonely. She talked about how sad she was that she had broken up with Ted Waitt. It was almost like she'd been left behind. - Good afternoon. - After that loss, she once again tried to separate herself from Jeffrey, starting her own non-profit called Terramar. - I bumped into her occasionally, and she'd always be talking about a new charitable endeavour. It was like she was on a PR` a personal PR` - The ocean, the Terramar. - Yeah. - And you felt that that wasn't authentic? - Um, I thought it was odd and felt a bit forced. I didn't think she was faking it, but I thought it was a PR campaign. - Tell everybody how much you love the ocean. Love your planet for generations to come. - For a while, the diversion seemed to work. She developed a TED talk and spoke at the UN about the plight of the oceans. - I'm here representing civil society. - And then the other shoe dropped at the end of 2014. Virginia Roberts Giuffre joined a group of women suing Jeffrey in Florida. - We need to get to the bottom of everybody who was involved with that, starting with Ghislaine Maxwell. - And that's when she's talking about being forced to have sex with Prince Andrew in the bathroom of Ghislaine Maxwell's London townhouse. Anything that might have been implicit before was now written large, in huge typeface on the front pages of national newspapers. - In the filing, Roberts now claiming Epstein made her available for sex to politically connected and financially powerful people. One of them the Prince. The other, the Prof ` Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. - The story is completely and totally made up. And believe me, I remember everybody I have ever had sex with. - Alan Dershowitz tells me that Jeffrey pressured him to settle with Giuffre instead of fighting publicly. - Jeffrey called me and said, 'Don't litigate this thing, just deny it. Be quiet. We don't want lawsuits. 'We don't want testimony.' He put enormous pressure on me to settle my cases, going so far as to offer to contribute to the settlement. - How much of a potential settlement did Jeffrey say he would pay for you? - We never got into numbers because I refused to even talk about it. - If what Alan says is true, are there other men walking around who have made these kind of settlements who were in Jeffrey's network that we do not yet know about? Dershowitz sued not only Giuffre, but her lawyers, including the well-known litigator, David Boies. It's become a major battle between two high profile attorneys ` a fight for their professional futures. - I want Virginia Giuffre to go to jail for perjury. She has victimised many, many people by her perjury. I want her lawyers to be investigated and disbarred if the evidence shows that they suborned her perjury. - Alan Dershowitz's wild claims are designed to serve one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to try to distract attention from his own misconduct ` the attacks he has made on the integrity, the character, the honesty of the young survivors of the Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking enterprise. They would be pathetic if they weren't so outrageous. That has been the way he defended Epstein. That is the way he's attempting to defend himself. - David Boies and other accusers' attorneys have played a key role in not only the civil suits, but the criminal cases. In 2015, after Virginia Giuffre filed her allegations, Ghislaine issued a statement calling her a liar, and Boies then filed a defamation suit against Ghislaine on Virginia's behalf. That defamation suit where David Boies ended up taking two of Ghislaine's depositions is hugely important in what happened subsequently ` both to Jeffrey and then to Ghislaine. - The depositions were very extensive. When she refused to answer questions in the first deposition, we went to the judge and got an order requiring her to answer questions again in the second deposition. So, we have a very extensive record. - Ghislaine is now charged with perjuring herself in those depositions. According to the indictment, Ghislaine claimed that she hadn't known that there were underage girls in Epstein's house at any time, that, to her knowledge, he didn't have sex with anybody other than her, and that she had never given anyone a massage. The defamation case had another side effect. It drove Ghislaine back into Jeffrey's orbit. - Remember, her defence of Epstein was a defence of herself, and she and Epstein were cooperating in defending themselves, plural. - Right. - I mean, Epstein and she were working very closely together in terms of, for example, defending against the claims, bringing matters to the press ` all of the kind of PR stuff. - Did you get the impression that he and Ghislaine were back in touch? - Yes, definitely. The lawsuit against her by Virginia Roberts threatened Jeffrey. They wound up in the same boat, metaphorically speaking. - In 2016, the defamation case was settled when Ghislaine paid Virginia an undisclosed sum. At that point, Ghislaine sold her townhouse and left New York. The Jeffrey Epstein story died down once again. Even the publication of the bestseller 'Filthy Rich;, exposing many of his crimes down in Palm Beach didn't keep it in the headlines. David Boies kept trying to get a criminal case reopened against Jeffrey. - In 2016 and 2017, we were going to prosecutors, we were going to the media. We were going to anybody who would listen and trying to talk to them... - Right. - ...about the evidence. - He thinks Ghislaine should have taken that opportunity to turn against Jeffrey. - If I'd been representing her, I would have told her to run` not walk, run to the U.S. attorney's office and come clean. She could have given the prosecutors Epstein on a platter, and that would have been valuable. It's even conceivable to me that if she had acted promptly, she could have done a deal that would not have involved jail time. - David Boies has his own theory as to why that didn't happen. - If you're going to cooperate, the prosecution is going to require you to tell the complete truth. And if you leave anything out, it will void the plea deal. So she would have had to really come clean about everything that she'd done. She still had social pretensions. She still, as they say, portrayed herself as an environmentalist. She still spoke at programmes. That all would have come to a screeching halt if she had admitted her role in the sex trafficking. though one possibility is that she simply didn't know what Epstein was doing and therefore could not have turned him in. What we do know is that four years after David Boies began representing Virginia Giuffre, he still hadn't convinced the FBI to take up Jeffrey's case again. Instead, one of the other plaintiff's attorneys found somebody who would listen. In November 2018, the Miami Herald published an expose by reporter Julie Brown. She had spoken to more than 60 women whose stories had never been told publicly, even though many had told them to federal investigators more than a decade before. - The case has gained renewed interest after the Miami Herald reported that federal prosecutors entered into a secret deal with Epstein. - The stories exposed the fact that the federal investigation was effectively shut down by the Justice Department, shut down by Alexander Acosta, who was then the US attorney. - I think there was a feeling, at that point, for a lot of people that Acosta had basically let Jeffrey Epstein off the hook with a very light charge when, in reality, what he was accused of was basically industrial-scale child abuse. - Alexander Acosta had become secretary of labour in President Trump's cabinet, and the backlash eventually forced him out of office. - Acosta's sudden departure comes less than 48 hours after the labour secretary defended his role as a U.S. attorney. - The stories also put a target on Jeffrey Epstein's back. - The FBI of New York says it opened up the Epstein case in response to the Miami Herald's reporting on Jeffrey Epstein. - You said he had a sort of kitchen cabinet who met at least three times, that you were aware of, in the last six months before he was arrested. - They brainstormed what he can do about his deteriorating and impossible situation. It included Bannon. - Included Steve Bannon. - And, yes, he had become a close friend and had become an adviser to him in terms of public relations. - Ed Epstein says the planning sessions also included Jeffrey's business partner, Ehud Barak. Barak denies that, saying that he was never a legal or informal adviser to Epstein. The meetings continued into 2019, but Jeffrey doesn't seem to have believed he was in danger. - But on July 6th, 2019, it all came crashing down. - Billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested. He was taken into custody overnight at a New Jersey airport. - Today we announce the unsealing of sex trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein. - His mansion on East 71st Street was raided early Sunday morning as agents hauled out multiple bags of evidence. - It looked as if Jeffrey would finally face justice. And Epstein watchers wondered if authorities would find the blackmail material he was rumoured to have taped over the years. - There are Epstein victims who say that they saw a room in his Upper East Side mansion, and it was filled with screens, screens with live feeds from the bathrooms in his mansion, from the bedrooms in his mansion. What happened to that video footage? If it ever existed, it's one of the great mysteries of this whole thing. - We heard that there were passports, there were diamonds ` you know, all sorts of things found in that house, but no tapes. And that remains the big question. Who has them and where are they? At the time of the arrest, Jennifer Araoz, who says she was raped by Jeffrey Epstein when she was 15, was getting ready to sue him for damages. She quickly filed the suit and went public with an interview on The Today Show. - He` He hurt me badly. Um, I'd prefer not to go through this. TEARFULLY: So, you know, this is one way for me to get justice. - Then in August, five weeks after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, came more shocking news. - Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein has taken his own life while he was behind bars here in New York City. - The idea that he had killed himself was shocking to me because this was not a guy who thought that anyone or anything could defeat him. Somebody who knew Jeffrey very well said to me, 'Well, this is his way of winning. 'This is his way of having the last laugh.' That was before we knew about all the very strange circumstances. - It's an almost incomprehensible series of coincidences, if you will. - Take him off suicide watch, remove his cell mate, not have the guards look on him. Somehow the cameras are turned off. - These things can happen, right? - These things can happen, but they all shouldn't happen in one place. - All these peculiar things that I know have caused even members of his own defence team to question if he really killed himself, despite that being the coroner's finding. Former arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe, whose controversial theories often tend towards conspiracy, was held at the same jail when he was awaiting trial in 1989, and he also thinks the official account is unlikely. - In the cell itself, almost impossible to commit suicide ` in the cell. - Almost impossible. - Well, I'm sure... If you had a gun smuggled in, you could commit suicide. - Right. - But how they described it ` that's impossible. - So you're suggesting that he was he was murdered? - I'm suggesting that Epstein needed to be gotten rid of somehow, one way or another. - In your narrative, the stories of Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell are actually very, very similar. - That's right. Very similar. Very, very similar. - Both men whose fortunes were based on mirages. - Correct. - And both men who, according to you, died because it was too dangerous for them to reveal the secrets that they had. - Correct. Correct. These guys thought they were protected with the knowledge they had. Actually, the knowledge they had was what had them killed. - Of course, neither death was officially ruled murder, but questions have lingered. And just as Robert Maxwell's victims felt cheated when he died in 1991, so too did Epstein's 30 years later. - I wanted my day in court. I wanted to tell him, you know, exactly what I felt about him. I just felt just really... I don't know. Alone. - Jennifer Araoz and her attorney, Eric Lerner, wanted to get answers from Ghislaine and sue her for damages. - Jennifer was a child. She was 14 years old, and she was exploited and recruited from a high school. And based on the allegations in the indictment, this couldn't have happened without Ghislaine Maxwell. - We hired an investigative team to look for her, and they had some sightings of her in California and In-N-Out. And we had people out there. - We pretty much searched the country for her, physically going to locations and trying to find her and looking for leads. - But Ghislaine had gone underground. - Rumours eventually start to surface that she was hiding out in a chateau in France, that she was staying on a yacht in New Zealand. They led nowhere. - As it would turn out, Ghislaine hadn't left the United States at all. She was in New England, living with her new husband, a tech entrepreneur named Scott Borgerson. The marriage was a secret. - Last time I saw her, she came to my terrace very briefly, and that was about the Terramar thing. She was living in New Hampshire or Boston or somewhere. - She didn't mention she was married? - No. No, that was a total surprise. - She's a citizen of the world. She's got a French passport. Why would she have stayed in the US? - This is one of the great mysteries. There are two reasons I could only imagine. Either she was deeply in love with somebody who actually wanted to live in America, or she was promised by the FBI that they weren't coming after her. - In December 2019, Ghislaine bought a house in Bradford, New Hampshire, for $1 million in cash. - It was even called Tucked Away. That was how secluded it was. And the neighbours had no idea she was living there. You know, people` journalists went to try to speak to them, and they didn't have the faintest idea Ghislaine Maxwell was living next to them. She kept her head down. She had large financial resources with which to do that. - But the hideout only stayed secret for a few months. - They knew she was in a small town in New Hampshire, but they didn't know exactly where. So they had to get a warrant to use a sophisticated piece of technology ` a stingray is what it's called. They can essentially ping a cell phone, and then zero in on it and determine a precise location of that cell phone. The FBI moves in. Ghislaine Maxwell disobeyed an order for her to open the door. Instead, she moved further into her mansion. They get inside, and they arrest her. - Federal agents found her cell phone wrapped in tin foil in what prosecutors describe as a seemingly misguided effort to evade detection by law enforcement. - Maxwell is scheduled to go before a judge today to find out if she will be granted release on bond. - Bail denied. Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend will remain behind bars on charges that she recruited young girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. - She asked for more than $28 million bail. She was going to pay for former special forces soldiers to keep her under armed guard. She offered to give up her passports. Come the third bail application, she offered to give up her British and French citizenship. - We've heard from Ian Maxwell, who's given TV interviews, and he's firmly of the view that the only reason she's there is because Jeffrey Epstein is dead. - Why is Ghislaine Maxwell being treated differently? She's a patsy for Epstein, is the answer ` who they lost on their watch, and they're taking it out on my sister. Damn it, that's wrong. - David Boies says that Ghislaine is just one of the people who should be held responsible. Do you think we are likely to see any more arrests or indictments? - I hope we do. I think that Epstein and Maxwell were the two central players, but there are a number of other people who contributed in important ways to the continuation of their sex trafficking enterprise. And I think those people need to be held to account. - One of the four minor victims who are part of the indictment against Ghislaine is Annie Farmer who first spoke to me back in 2002. I finally had the chance to meet her in person when she spoke in court in 2019. Annie Farmer did stand out, even then, as somebody of remarkable composure and calm. To meet her in the courthouse, you know, she was exactly what I'd pictured. She strikes me as a very dignified, extraordinarily brave person. My dealings with Annie's sister, Maria, have been much more difficult. I heard from Maria around this time. I can't tell you what she said because it was off the record. She claimed to have had a very harrowing life in the aftermath of the non-publication of her allegations against Jeffrey. We did manage to get the allegations out in 2015, but I know that Maria, in the last two years, is very angry at me, and, um, I get it. You know what? I failed her, and, um, I feel, uh, awful about it. And, you know, if I had the opportunity, I would say to her that I am so, so sorry. It doesn't seem like that's going to disappear, even if Ghislaine Maxwell is found guilty and goes to prison. - Yeah, it doesn't end with her. There are a lot of people to blame in this. - I think one of the reasons the focus is on Ghislaine is because she has knowledge of that web, or at least that's what we originally thought. But it seems like there's a lot of powerful men around Jeffrey Epstein who are part of this web and don't appear to be part of any investigation right now. - Whilst Ghislaine stands accused of terrible, terrible, terrible crimes, there are other people who might be culpable in all of this who just got off scot-free, and those are what I call the invisible men. And they are men who surrounded Jeffrey all this time, enabled his awful crimes, looked the other way, whether out of self-protection, self-interest, greed. There have been repercussions for some of the men who were friendly with Jeffrey ` Prince Andrew, for example. Amid public pressure, he agreed to speak to the BBC after Jeffrey died. - It would be (STAMMERS) a considerable stretch to say that he was a very, very close friend. Do I regret the fact that (STAMMERS) he has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming? Yes. - Unbecoming? He was a sex offender. - Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm being polite. - I think what the British public were probably expecting from Prince Andrew was an apology. They were probably expecting him to show empathy and sympathy. - I don't remember that photograph ever being taken. - But it's possible that it was you with your arm around` - That's me, but whether that's my hand or whether that's the position, I` I... - Do you regret the whole friendship with Epstein? - (STAMMERS) Now, still not. - He said that he valued the connections that he made, which is fascinating that even after everything that happened, obviously the power of Epstein's political connections was still having sway over Prince Andrew, even in that moment. - The Monday morning headlines say it all. Prince Andrew's attempt to explain his friendship with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein backfiring. - The furore over it does not seem to be settling down today. - Prince Andrew was forced to step back from public life. What is important for Americans to understand is that royals don't get cancelled. You know, that's not a thing that happens. You don't lose your job as a member of the royal family. - Another man who's been affected is Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management, who admitted paying Jeffrey $158 million over five years. My friend William D. Cohan, who covers Wall Street for Vanity Fair and others, broke that one down for me. - This idea that Leon Black, surely one of the smartest guys on Wall Street, would turn to Jeffrey Epstein for bespoke financial tax advice absolutely makes no sense whatsoever. - Bill says that the men who have the most connection to Epstein are known on Wall Street as the Big Three ` Black, Leslie Wexner and former hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, who married Jeffrey's former girlfriend Eva Andersson. Dubin left his fund after Jeffrey died and has been subpoenaed by an investigator in the US Virgin Islands. Black was forced out of his role as board chair of Apollo, and Wexner and his wife have also left the board of L Brands. The Big Three ` the ones that I think everybody knew Jeffrey had a relationship with, as well as Bill Gates and Prince Andrew ` have paid a reputational price. But who are the others? Ghislaine really could be the gateway, the key to this shadowy web of invisible men. The big question is what information does she have? - I mean, Ghislaine was the key to the cabinet, right? And in that cabinet, there's a lot of information. She was around Jeffrey Epstein's life. She's around his life when he was with a lot of very, very powerful people ` talking to them, entertaining them, dining with them She holds a lot. - What about the tapes Epstein allegedly made to blackmail people? Does she know about those? - I think there is no doubt that there were tapes. Now, where those tapes are? Indeed, even whether those tapes continue to exist is something that we've not been able to prove, one way or the other. - Ghislaine Maxwell is being pressured now about the tapes. Does she know where they are? Does she have them? - She might have bits of them, but the Israelis definitely have them, yes. - You know that? - Yes. - I think this whole extraordinary tale of influence, campaigns, of arms dealing, of compromising people shows that he may well have been propped up by an international network, that he could have had much more leverage over people, over countries, than perhaps any of us knew. It is absolutely remarkable, the reach that he had. - That's absolutely right. There's still an enormous amount ` even those of us who have been working on this for six or seven years ` don't yet know the contacts he had, the powerful people who had one connection with him or another. His legion. (OMINOUS MUSIC) - Even two years after his death, Jeffrey Epstein still has the power to pull down the rich and famous. The question is whether Ghislaine could do the same. - I think there are powerful people out there who want to keep concealed facts that Ms Maxwell knows, just as I think there were powerful people who wanted to keep concealed facts that Jeffrey Epstein knew. - He was a dangerous person for a lot of people. If he went down and he was attacked, he would take everybody down with him. - Well, how dangerous is Ghislaine Maxwell then? - Question is what does she know, and who doesn't want that coming out? And how long is that valuable? Information loses its strength after time. - Ghislaine Maxwell may be the last person on Earth who can be squeezed to say what actually happened here, because I'm afraid that people will never spill their guts. - It's very, very hard to get people to spill the beans. - Especially when they've been paid a lot of money, probably, and they've signed agreements that they won't. And I really think that that's what's gone on here. And not just, like, back in the day. I think these people have been paid and are continuing to be paid and may even be paid more. - Really, this is a story about guys, very, very rich guys covering for each other. - Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. And who knows what they're covering for. Their lives, their reputations depend on the truth never getting out, and so I suspect that the truth will never come out. - As she faces trial, Ghislaine has maintained her innocence, and it's possible that that is true. Her father's biographer, Tom Bower, who remains in contact with the family, says it's also possible that she's following the Maxwell tradition. - The Maxwell psyche is always to fight for survival and to win, and that's, I'm sure, what she's aiming for now. She imagines that she can, in her day in court, be able to persuade the jury that she's innocent, and that's what she'll be fighting for. - Her legal team, according to sources, believe that she's going to win. - If they are really telling her that, I think that is a grave disservice to their client. I think that she is not going to win this trial. - Ghislaine may be taking her example from her brothers, who were found not guilty in their fraud trial 25 years ago. - Kevin, now, is helping Ghislaine daily with her defence. - Do you know that for sure? I mean, the rest of us don't know Kevin Maxwell in the way that you do. - Yes, that's for sure, he's helping her. Do not underestimate Kevin's determination to ensure that his sister is acquitted. I think you can anticipate that Kevin's defence strategy will be to destroy the credibility of the women. - And there is one more defence that Ghislaine could attempt. She could claim that she, too, was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. - Ghislaine could easily plea that she's a victim of a tyrannous boyfriend ` Epstein. And there be women on that jury who will sympathise with the idea that Ghislaine has been victim of a monster. - For those of us who knew her over the years, it's almost impossible to comprehend where Ghislaine's road has taken her. It's very sobering ` the idea that someone you knew could have been doing this kind of stuff. What are your feelings about it all? - Total disgust, horror and a kind of feeling of some guilt, and just turns my stomach. It's one thing when you're... You must rush out and get some` get Epstein the best chicken soup in New York City. It's a whole different story if it's feeding his depraved appetite for defenceless young girls. It's just utterly disgusting. And you kind of don't want to believe that a friend of yours is capable of anything that is just... - That monstrous. - It's monstrous. - In the end, Ghislaine Maxwell's story returns to her father and his own sordid past. One of the great takeaways from doing all this reporting is in the extraordinary parallels between Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell. In some ways, it's where Ghislaine is now has something to do with the way she was raised by her father and then the way she was controlled willingly by Jeffrey Epstein. Two very similar men. The ordinary expectation for somebody like Ghislaine would be what she told friends she wanted to be ` to become somebody, somebody of great importance in the world. I think the whole question of Chasing Ghislaine is how and where did she allegedly make a wrong turn so that instead of becoming this glorious, relevant influencer in the world, she's now sitting in jail facing unspeakable charges of helping Jeffrey Epstein with his sexual crimes? To be honest, it's still something of a mystery.