DOJ Epstein Archives

Ghislaine Maxwell put a lot of sweat into representing herself in her quest to throw out her 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking.

It’s telling she didn’t hire a lawyer for this last-ditch, desperate quasi-appeal — maybe because she arrogantly believed that she could do a better job of winning her case than an experienced lawyer who has done these types of habeas corpus petitions their entire careers.

Her arguments, however, were dismissed by the judge almost as efficiently as Maxwell employed the pedophile puppy trick to lure girls into having sex with Epstein. (More on this later).

U.S. District Judge Paul Englemayer’s rejection of her petition was brutal. He took it apart — and then stuck a pin in it. He didn’t just deny it, he called it “rambling,” “frivolous” and filled with “falsehoods.”

Read the Miami Herald story here

Then, he said what I’ve been saying for months — that the Epstein Files actually incriminate Maxwell even more than what federal prosecutors did in 2021. In other words, there is additional evidence against her in the files that were released starting in December 2025.

Which brings me to the pedophile puppy trick, which is an actual tactic, called a “pet lure” that pedophiles use to trap children by exploiting their natural love of animals to approach and engage them in conversation with the goal of isolating them.

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Success, finally.

Last week, a federal court in Manhattan ordered the release of the voluminous case files from Virginia’s Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.

The release of these files was in part the result of eight years of litigation by the Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, which have been fighting for the material since I published my series “Perversion of Justice,” in 2018.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Judge Loretta Preska rejected Maxwell’s final arguments to keep the files sealed, noting that the passage last year of the Epstein Files Transparency Act superseded any earlier grand jury arguments that Maxwell was using to keep the records from the public.

What does this mean, and what new information will we learn?

First some history. Virginia brought this defamation lawsuit against Maxwell back in 2015, after Maxwell publicly proclaimed that Virginia was a liar who had made up her allegations of being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell and other powerful men (including Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the former Prince Andrew.)

Giuffre, represented by the Boies-Schiller firm, sued Maxwell for defamation, asserting that she faced "public ridicule, contempt, and disgrace" when Maxwell went public with her statements. As part of the lawsuit, the lawyers gathered tens of thousands of pages of discovery, including depositions by Giuffre, Maxwell and dozens of other people. Part of the effort also involved Dershowitz, who together with social media influencer Michael Chernovich, tried unsuccessfully to unseal portions of the Giuffre-Maxwell case while it was still being litigated.

The lawsuit was settled in early 2017. I had been told the discovery contained damning evidence against Epstein, Maxwell and other men, and that it was worth trying to get the courts to unseal the documents on the grounds that they were never properly sealed in the first place.

Judicial records by law are supposed to be open to the public. In this case, the former judge (Robert Sweet, now deceased) issued a blanket sealing on all the documents because they contained “sensitive” and “private” information. Sweet placed a protective order on massive amounts of material, including hearings and judicial decisions made in the case — and voluminous evidence that Virginia presented to show that Epstein and Maxwell were operating an underage sex trafficking operation.

This is not the way sealing is supposed to happen, however. Each document that the lawyers want sealed has to be examined, and those requesting it be sealed must provide legal justification to the judge for doing so. This wasn’t done in this case.

Nearly all the evidence that Virginia’s lawyers uncovered about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking that came out during this civil case was kept secret.

Maxwell settled the case before it could go to trial, however — and paid Virginia somewhere in the neighborhood of $3-5 million. By settling it, she thought that all the evidence about her involvement would remain under seal.

But I convinced my editors to ask our lawyers to file a motion to intervene in the case in order to unseal the files.

An appeals court eventually ruled in our favor, and on August 9, 2019, thousands of pages were made public, including sworn statements by Virginia in which she alleged she was trafficked to Dershowitz, who represented Epstein; former Prince Andrew; former Maine Sen. George Mitchell; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin; hotel magnate Tom Pritzker; the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky. All of the men denied that they were involved with Giuffre.

Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell the following morning.

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“The American people trust the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice to protect them. That trust is all the more critical — and justified — when the FBI and the Department o Justice receive tips that women and children are being sexually abused, trafficked or are the subjects of child pornography.” —Jane Does v. the United States of America

For decades, Epstein raped and trafficked young women and children. As early as 1996, victim Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein, told the FBI that Epstein was abusing children and had child pornography. FBI reports made public earlier this year show that Ms. Farmer filed complaints against him and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell — and that the FBI not only failed to investigate, but for years, failed to acknowledge or act upon Ms. Farmer’s complaint.

Now, we learn that another woman, a former Playboy Playmate, Audra Christensen, also alleges she was raped by Epstein and other men associated with him.

It was reported, according to a federal lawsuit, by none other than Hugh Hefner, the late founder and editor of Playboy magazine.

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A letter to Bari Weiss, editor in chief of CBS News

Dear Bari,

I’m writing this letter to apply for the job of your new 60 Minutes correspondent. Like a lot of journalists around the world, I too would like to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who has been unfairly persecuted simply for helping her ex-boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, hire young women (and a few girls) to give him massages.

I heard that you are trying to hire some new “talent” for this legendary news magazine and, as part of that quest, you’re giving prospective applicants screen tests. One of those mock screen tests, I’m told, is an interview with someone who pretends to be this lovely Maxwell lady who has been wrongly convicted of terrible things. (All I can say is thank goodness they transferred her out of that miserable Florida prison to that nicer camp in Texas so that she gets to have unlimited toilet paper and play with puppies.)

I’ve never had a “screen test” in the news business before, but this concept makes perfect sense. After all, the days of investigative reporters being hired because they can expose corruption and injustice are pretty much going the way of my grandma’s Lenox. (I have a complete service for 12, in mint condition, and I can’t even give that stuff away!)

So I agree that “good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting” is out — and screen tests are in. I mean, if you can interview a sex trafficker as good as deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche did, you should be rewarded with a plum journalism job at 60 Minutes. He asked all the right questions.

Now, I know you’ve gone on record as saying you want to land a real interview with the real Ghislaine Maxwell, and I’m probably the last person in the world who Maxwell would agree to sit down with.

Because I suppose a point could be made that I am the reason she is in prison to begin with.

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Photo credit: Tristan (left) and Andrew Tate. (AP)

U.S. attorney general wannabe Todd Blanche finally sat down with Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors on July 16. He didn’t do this because he wanted to lay the groundwork to re-open an investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking network — or to even acknowledge that the victims deserved to be heard.

He only met with them because he was forced to by a Republican senator who told Blanche he wouldn’t approve his appointment as U.S. attorney general unless he did so.

A year ago, Blanche, one of our nation’s top federal prosecutors who also worked as a personal attorney for President Donald Trump, met for nine hours with Epstein’s lieutenant, Ghislaine Maxwell, chatting with her as if they were longtime friends. Blanche then promptly transferred the convicted child sex trafficker from a maximum-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a much more comfy prison camp in Texas where she gets such niceties as puppy play dates and private meetings with her family.

Yet neither he, nor his predecessor, former attorney general Pam Bondi, would give Maxwell and Epstein’s victims the time of day.

Survivors were irate — and blunt — in their assessment of Blanche’s qualifications for the cabinet post after meeting with him two weeks ago.

“I found him abrasive, condescending and intentionally noncommittal to survivors, a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing,” said survivor Annie Farmer.

President Trump has repeatedly called the Epstein scandal a “hoax,” but the fallout has been serious enough that his top aides held secret meetings to discuss the Epstein case in the White House “Situation Room” — a place generally reserved for national security matters.

The White House Epstein Cover-up

His aides seem to recognize something that the President does not: that his failure to acknowledge the survivors of sexual assault makes it appear that he condones these crimes — even when they involve children.

Several of the Jan. 6 rioters whom he pardoned have subsequently been charged with sexually abusing children or possessing voluminous amounts of child pornography. In one case, the FBI discovered the child pornography while serving warrants in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

This brings me to Andrew and Tristan Tate — brothers criminally charged with sex trafficking who have proudly proclaimed their hatred of women and their love of Trump to millions of right-wing followers in the so-called social media manosphere.

Despite facing sex crime charges in two countries, they were welcomed back into this country last year, and as if that wasn’t maddening enough, one of Trump’s top aides threw a party for them right before their recent arrest in Miami on child pornography charges in the UK.

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A Swedish-French modeling scout who recruited women for sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — and was tied to a German woman who disappeared 11 years ago — has been found dead in France.

Daniel Siad – who was listed thousands of times in the Department of Justice’s Epstein files – was found dead in his home in Colombes, west of Paris, on Monday, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

His cause of death is under investigation.

"He is dead and he was innocent," Siad’s lawyer, Menya Arab-Tigrine, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). "If he died of a heart attack, the unbearable waiting, the pressure and the anxiety he suffered every day will have had something to do with it.”

Siad, 69, is just the latest death connected to Epstein, the New York moneyman who died under suspicious circumstances in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019. The Manhattan medical examiner ruled Epstein’s Aug. 10, 2019 death a suicide by hanging, but a forensic pathologist hired by his brother who attended the autopsy believes his death was a possible homicide. Epstein, 66, had been awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges.

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Seven years ago today, Jeffrey Edward Epstein was charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with operating a vast sex trafficking network to sexually exploit and abuse underage girls and young women between 2002 and 2005 at his mansions in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida.

(Photo Credit: AP)

Epstein’s arrest came some seven months after the Miami Herald published an investigation, “Perversion of Justice,” which detailed how federal prosecutors in South Florida gave Epstein federal immunity from sex trafficking crimes even though they had evidence he had sexually abused dozens of underage girls.

Perversion of Justice Part 1

His arrest reverberated from New York to Washington, D.C., where President Donald Trump — a former friend of Epstein’s — noted that he “wasn’t a fan” of the notorious sex predator. Yet the President stood by his labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, despite increasing pressure for Acosta to step down because of his role in approving a 2007 non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to avoid life in prison.

But before the week was out, Acosta had resigned, reigniting scrutiny over how the criminal allegations against him — which had been known for at least a decade — had previously been handled by the Justice Department.

Perversion of Justice Part 2

Today, the Epstein case has become one of the most closely watched and analyzed criminal cases in the country’s history. It continues to raise important questions about the ethical, moral and corrupt failures of government institutions that, even today, continue to protect wealthy and powerful people — at the expense of those whose lives have been destroyed by Epstein and others who helped him.

Perversion of Justice Part 3

The story has ebbed and flowed over the past seven years. My series, published in November 2018, was only the beginning of my work to expose how Epstein got away with his crimes — and more importantly, to hold Epstein and his accomplices accountable.

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The House Oversight Committee took the unusual step yesterday of issuing subpoenas mid-hearing to force an uncooperative witness — Jeffrey Epstein’s former client Leon Black — to answer questions about secret out-of-court legal settlements he may have made with young women.

Black, who has denied any wrongdoing and insists he didn’t know about Epstein’s crimes, abruptly left the hearing after the Committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer, issued the subpoenas during the closed-door meeting on Friday.

Black’s quick exit has to make one wonder just how many young women he made settlements with, especially since he also paid Epstein over $170 million for what his lawyer called “tax and estate planning services” — and in 2023, he also paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands over his ties to Epstein, who owned an island where Epstein sexually abused an untold number of victims.

Black did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the USVI settlement, but it raises questions about why he would pay such a sum if he had nothing to hide.

The sad part is Black is not the only one who has used his wealth to shield himself from scrutiny over his association with the notorious sex trafficker.

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When Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced to serve his sentence in a Palm Beach County jail in 2008, he received extraordinary special treatment, including work release and home arrest that allowed the convicted sex offender to sexually abuse young women while still under supervision of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Several women subsequently sued Epstein and his estate, one of them even claiming that she was forced to have sex with him in Epstein’s West Palm Beach office while sheriff’s deputies were literally sitting right outside the door.

This is an outrage that has never been adequately investigated. It’s time that the state of Florida and federal authorities finally examine how and why this happened.

New information has come to light as a result of testimony before the House Oversight Committee, as well as evidence presented by survivors last month in a hearing in Palm Beach that point to possible bribes being paid by Epstein to at least one sheriff’s deputy.

Sarah Kellen, one of Epstein’s longest-serving assistants, told members of Congress last month that she not only stripped naked for Epstein via Skype for him while he was in jail, but she also said that Epstein paid cash and Disney tickets to one deputy who worked his jail detail.

Read the story here

Epstein hired a slew of Palm Beach sheriff’s deputies, paying the sheriff’s office more than $100,000 in overtime to use plain-clothed sheriff’s deputies to supervise him during the 10-12-hour shifts he was away from the jail.

Now, it seems that PBSO deputies may have not just been paid through the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office — they may have also received payoffs under the table from Epstein for other perks, possible sexual ones.

During work release, Epstein was picked up daily by his valet and driven to a downtown West Palm Beach high-rise office building, where he was allowed to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week. Records show he also spent an unusual number of hours in Home Depot and was also spotted walking along the road in Palm Beach where he was not authorized to be, although authorities decided not to yank his privileges.

Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost, in questioning Kellen before the Committee last month, asked her about the special treatment Epstein received in the Palm Beach County jail.

Kellen’s Oversight Committee transcript

The paralegal whom she mentioned was Story Cowles, who visited Epstein in jail more than 100 times and is mentioned even more times in the Epstein files. It’s clear that Epstein was using Cowles as an emissary to help him continue to conduct his business affairs while he was in jail.

The files also indicate that Cowles helped grease the wheels when it came to Epstein’s probation officer, who also gave Epstein free reign to leave his home while he was on house arrest in 2009.

Maybe the Oversight Committee should question Cowles about any other transactions he made on behalf of Esptein.

All these people enabled Epstein to sexually abuse and exploit more victims throughout his incarceration.

THE SECRET SIGN-IN BOOK

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Earlier today, I posted a CNN interview with David Siad, an Epstein recruiter who is mentioned in the Justice Department files more than 1,000 times.His emails with Epstein show he was recruiting young women, not just as models, but also as prospective “assistants” for Epstein, a role that many victims say was a ruse to entrap them into sex trafficking.

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Usually when a controversial figure wants to “tell my side of the story,” it is the role of journalists to put that story into context — in other words, to balance the subject’s desire to rewrite history or present themselves in a positive light by presenting facts and context so that the reader can decide whether the figure is being genuine and truthful.

In this case, Kathy Ruemmler, the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, was given a wide birth in the New York Times Thursday to explain her role in associating with Jeffrey Epstein and advising him how to handle the public fallout of his sex trafficking scandal.

There is nothing illegal in what Ruemmler did, and she is not accused of participating in any crime.

The NYT opinion piece indeed raises valid questions about how much she should be punished for being part a legal culture that encourages lawyers to wine and dine and accept lavish gifts from wealthy prospective clients knowing that it means holding your nose when a client’s history is legally, morally or ethically corrupt.

But the piece doesn’t offer important context into Epstein’s crimes — or even make an attempt to ask Epstein’s survivors what they think about Ruemmler’s various justifications for overlooking his criminal conduct with underage girls and taking part in a PR campaign to help him continue to escape public scrutiny.

To Epstein’s victims it was powerful and politically connected people like Ruemmler who enabled Epstein over the years, thereby allowing him to continue to prey on more victims.

But many of her justifications deserve more scrutiny.

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Vicky Ward Investigates

The Missing Piece in the Gates-Epstein Puzzle

Hey Everyone…

Listen now

3 months ago · 125 likes · 4 comments · Vicky Ward Investigates and Julie k Brown

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The piece published by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann yesterday about the White House “Freak-out” over the Epstein scandal only confirmed what we already knew — that there has been a coordinated cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Worse yet, it demonstrated what little regard Trump and all the other empty souls in Trump’s administration have for the hundreds of girls and young women abused by Epstein.

The Times’ report, adapted from an upcoming book called “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” revealed the White House’s bumbling effort to assuage the public fallout that erupted last summer around Trump’s association with Epstein.

That crisis started with then-attorney general Pam Bondi’s now infamous “the list is on my desk,” and continues now with questions about the real purpose of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s jailhouse interview with Epstein’s convicted sex-trafficking accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Times’ story detailed how last summer, in a room usually reserved for making decisions of national security, Trump’s advisors hunkered down to discuss the Epstein files and, among other things, Trump’s alleged fetish for women’s nipples.

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“He was just a police chief of a small town up against a powerful man. Had the system listened to him, Epstein would have been cut off a long time earlier.” — former Palm Beach mayor Jack McDonald.

When I began investigating the Jeffrey Epstein case in 2016, among the most important people I wanted to interview were the lead detective who investigated th…

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My interview with Pablo Torre. (Click on link).

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Pam Bondi has a lot of explaining to do.

In July 2025, she and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the Epstein case was closed, and there was no evidence of additional crimes committed by Epstein or others associated with him.

Case closed.

Let me say this in another way: One of the most prolific sex offenders in history — someone who made millions and perhaps even billions of dollars — without any real investigation into his finances or his businesses and associates — basically committed all this crimes all by himself.

He created a worldwide criminal syndicate in which no one was involved except for two people: him and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Even Bondi isn’t stupid enough to believe this. She knows that, over the decades since Epstein served jail time in his nice office in Florida that he was still manipulating the levers of power.

There is plenty of evidence that the FBI knew that Epstein was involved in a myriad of crimes over the years. In the years after his arrest in Florida — when Bondi was attorney general — more victims were coming forward, alleging for example, that other men were involved. Lawsuits were filed. Depositions were taken.

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Sarah Kellen once told New York federal prosecutors that she thought of Jeffrey Epstein as “God-like” because he effectively dominated her existence, not only financially, but also mentally and emotionally.

He was a father figure, a provider, and a man she once loved, documents show.

As one of Epstein’s recruiters of underage girls in South Florida, Kellen admitted in interviews with the FBI and prosecutors that she blindly followed his instructions and gave little thought to anything else, including how old the girls were.

In a heavily redacted memo from 2020, prosecutors outlined the evidence they had against Kellen, and it appears they ruled out charging her with Epstein-related crimes, even though she admitted she recruited countless underage girls to give him massages at his Palm Beach mansion, and at his residences in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New Mexico.

Kellen, now 46, is scheduled to testify today before the House Oversight Committee about her 15-year association Epstein.

Next to Ghislaine Maxwell or possibly Lesley Groff, no one knows more about Jeffrey Epstein’s daily schedule more than Kellen, who acted as Epstein’s personal assistant and traveling companion from 2001 until 2015, when she met and married NASCAR driver Brian Vickers. (The two divorced last year).

Kellen was about 21 when she met Epstein through an acquaintance she had met in Hawaii, where she ended up after she was excommunicated from her religious family at the age of 17.

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Nicholas Tartaglione was 49 years old, a corrupt ex-cop who in 2016 ordered the gangland-style slayings of four men whose bodies were later found buried in a mass grave on a 178-acre property he owned in Otisville, New York.

After retiring in 2008, Tartaglione, a former cop in Briarcliff Manor, Westchester County, operated a puppy rescue while selling cocaine and steroids. He had once bragged he had ties to organized crime, and the story of how he killed one of his associates sounds like a page torn from a Sopranos episode: a drug deal gone bad, a tortured execution, witnesses whacked because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bodies dumped in a shallow grave on a rural farm, their remains unearthed in a snowy forest that neighbors later recalled “smelled of death.”

Why Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Part 1

According to prosecutors, in April 2016, Tartaglione suspected one of his bagmen was skimming his drug money, so he lured him to the Bronx, to a club his brother owned, called the Likquid Lounge. (Yes, that’s how it’s spelled).

The associate brought three friends with him for protection. But Tartaglione enlisted two fellow bodybuilders to strangle him with a zip tie at the club while the others were forced to watch, according to court records.

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Yesterday, survivors of Jeffrey Epstein took their fight for justice back to where it all began: Palm Beach.

At a Congressional hearing held in Palm Beach, survivors, attorneys and advocates called for accountability for Epstein’s sex crimes and urged changes to federal victims’ rights laws.

I could not attend today’s hearing (my daughter is graduating this week from college, and I’ve taken some time off) but I did watch it from afar.

The testimony was bittersweet. As most people know, I've spent years writing stories about this case. Even after my first investigation was published in 2018, and the media attention subsided, I continued to chip away at the case, exposing among other things, how Epstein was able to repeatedly manipulate the guardians of justice in Florida, in the U.S. Virgin Islands and around the world.

Read the Miami Herald Story here.

The most powerful words were spoken yesterday — not by the politicians — but by Epstein’s victims, many of whom were high schoolers when they were abused and exploited at his Palm Beach mansion.

Among them was a victim named Rosa who described how she was raped during the time that Epstein was under community control, or house arrest, in Palm Beach. Other women have also alleged that Epstein had sex with them while he was on work release. In other words, he was raping them when he was still serving his sentence and was supposed to be behind bars.

How did this happen? Who protected Epstein in Palm Beach and why?

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I’ve been on Twitter since 2018, when I launched my Miami Herald series “Perversion of Justice” — which exposed the scope of Epstein’s crimes, the cover-up of his sweetheart deal, and gave voice to his survivors, some of whom had never spoken publicly about the injustices they suffered at the hands of our Government.

That series, which was awarded a Pul…

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