Jeffrey Epstein, a financia who moved in the highest circles, a convicted sex offender who maintained connections with powerful people, and a man whose death ignited a wildfire of conspiracies that reshaped American politics and internet culture. This is the story of Epstein's rise, his crimes, the elite networks around him, and how his downfall fueled a new era of conspiracy. This is hidden in plain sight. The Epstein files. Jeffrey Epstein cultivated an image of a financial genius, but much of his fortune and influence came from relationships rather than documented investment success. >> Yeah. I mean, it's a really fascinating story because uh you know, he came from a working-class Jewish family. Um his parents were I think his father was a gardener in parks. I mean he was very humble but very solid background. Uh one brother went uh to um public uh in American terms public school uh and um did very well. He uh skipped two grades and graduated early. Went to university but interestingly dropped out early. Didn't get a get a degree. didn't qualify because he had found an opportunity in the Dalton school which is a very she-shi up market highly competitive private school for uh the rich and powerful in New York and um while he was there at the Dalton school I mean he was there for 5 years he built up a lot of connections with parents uh including um the uh CEO of Bear Sterns who was a parent of one of the pupils. And when he left the Dalton school in somewhat murky circumstances, no one quite knows how, there were >> hints of uh perhaps um inappropriate behavior. um one of the parents, the CEO of Bear Sterns, you know, then a big brokerage, um gave him a job and and he was then there for 5 years uh and also became friends with the next CEO as well. And really if you look at his career it was all making contacts with the rich and powerful particularly in the finance world in Wall Street uh in in in New York and providing services to them. So if you look at his his business career there are whole succession of jobs. He was actually investigated for money laundering at one stage although that that prosecution was dropped but the suggestion was that he did business with highend individuals. >> It's a very bizarre progression of career because as you said he drops out he drops out of university. He becomes a high school teacher at a very prestigious private school but doesn't have the credentials to even be a teacher. And then there's, you know, recounts of him being inappropriate with some of the young women, even, you know, rocking up to one of the high school parties where they're all drinking. Very bizarre set of circumstances. But then, as you say, he meets these rich, you know, parents and then one of them takes him under these wing once he's let go. And it kind of begs the question, Adam, was he always an opportunist in the sense that he was always chasing after these rich and powerful people? Everyone says, you know, frankly, he came across as a nice guy. Um, you know, not particularly aggressive or obviously on the make, someone who uh had good empathy and and and personal skills uh with people. And certainly everything about his career shows that he was a brilliant networker who knew how to milk and use all the content contacts he made. And I think, you know, If you look at his career from the ' 90s on, it's quite clear that he was also documenting gathering evidence on the behavior of other people, sometimes even sort of luring them in in into compromising situations, which certainly I think meant that they certainly stayed loyal to him because of the potential. If you if you look at the >> list of people he came into contact with, you know, from >> Presidents uh uh Trump and Clinton down, you know, to the top lawyers of the time. I mean, in his career, he hired something like 75 of America's top lawyers at one stage or another um to um you know, titans of uh of of of Silicon Valley like Peter Teal. I mean, he knew everybody. And yeah, >> if you listen to, >> for example, Prince Andrew talking about him in that that famous news interview. I mean, what he says is he was a great person to know because he introduced me to people and things, legitimate things that that I wouldn't have known otherwise. >> Throughout the 1990s and early naughties, Epstein embedded himself among the global elite, from business mogul to academics and politicians. Gla Maxwell soon emerged as one of the most significant figures in Jeffrey Epstein's world. A British socialite with deep connections in politics, finance, and high society. Maxwell became Epstein's close associate for decades. And did that become more prominent as as he grew more financially successful? He was swimming in even bigger circles of you know the likes of Donald Trump and Prince Andrew Mount Batten Windsor as you mentioned. It was kind of what he wanted to do. And you and you said it was the whole thing with the way he operated was that he recorded everything. Is there a reason behind that that he wanted to lure in these successful people and always have some sort of ammunition if that makes sense? >> Well, my suspicion is that those people who were wary knew that there were good reasons to stay on good terms with him because, you know, there there was potential embarrassment. And I would go so far as to say you can certainly see credible reasons why when at the end of his life, you know, he died in prison, you can see very good reasons why a lot of people might not want him around uh when he was uh being cornered like that. But that in a sense is is to jump forward. I mean what he was doing all the time and you know to be fair to him as Prince Andrew said he was clearly intellectually curious. He was clearly very good as you say a mathematician very good at managing people's tax affairs. That that that's what he he was saying and you know he was given power to run people's bank accounts for them you know without having to refer back to them really the really rich people >> is he also was offering them excitements on the side. uh quite early on he moved his business for tax reasons to um the US Virgins Island Virgin Islands to St. Thomas in in the USVI and that of course was where he ended up buying his island um >> so-called Pedo Island little little little St. Thomas's uh and you know it's known that he took people there you know for rest and recreation and and you know doubtless other activities. >> Was Jeffrey Epstein shy do you think and Glay Maxwell was kind of his voice does that make sense? >> Yes he he does seem to have been been very shy. I mean he's he's basically a mathematician when you think about that. a bit of almost a nerd in that way. But um yes, yes, she she was very much the the one who who um escorted him around the social circus of Manhattan. >> Behind the facade of wealth and charm was a darker reality. Epstein with the help of accompllices including Glain Maxwell abused miners for years. A central figure in the allegations was Virginia Du Frey who reported meeting Maxwell and Epstein at the age of 16 while working at Donald Trump's Mara Lago resort. >> You know at the age of 16 years old uh she meets Galen Maxwell who's um Epstein's sort of right-hand woman. >> So she meets Gain Maxwell before she meets Jeffrey Epstein. >> Yes. >> And how did she meet her? By all accounts, um Jeffrey Epstein and Galen Maxwell were members of Trump's Mara Lago Spa Club and Resort. Um as a lot of you know, many wealthy uh figures in that area, businessman um were at that time. And so Virginia gets a job working with her dad. So her dad's a kind of maintenance man or jobs man at Mara Lago and and somehow knows Trump on more than an acquaintance level. So Virginia talks in her book about seeing pictures of the two of them together and you know they're smiling and shaking hands and and he gets her Virginia a job at the age of I think she's she's just turning 16. Um and she talks about getting a job as a $9 an hour kind of locker room assistant. So, she's um I mean, at this point, she's kind of living in a in a trailer in her parents' backyard. She's just kind of escaped the clutches of this this pedophile pimp. Um she's trying to make something of her life. She needs to earn money her, you know, that this is a great opportunity for her. and she starts working in Mara Lago and she talks about, you know, putting on this crisp uniform, this po white polo shirt with her name, which at the time she called herself Jenna um on this polo shirt and she's kind of sitting and reading a book about massage therapy. um because she has these ambitions to maybe, you know, get a job above above attendant level and maybe even start learning about the human body and massage and and she talks about this um woman walking in this kind of manicured wellspoken woman in a clipped British accent asking her some questions like, "Oh, are you interested in massage?" And you know, I know a wealthy man, a ma, you know, gifted mathematician who um who needs to be massaged and we're, you know, we're always looking for for people who are keen. And I think she was a bit confused cuz it was, you know, her second week on the job or something and she has no massage experience. Um so she goes back to her dad and says you know this opportunity's come up and he that night I mean she passes on her details and tells her the address Epstein's address um and that night she goes to Epstein's house um which she kind of describes as a sort of pink painted pepto-Bismol colored mansion at the end of a dead end road. Um, so I mean it all happened really fairly quickly after that first initial meeting. >> What happened after that meeting was she trafficked from there. >> Yeah. So she um she gets invited in for a massage and to to give a massage to Epstein. So she's kind of led through the house and she sort of marvels at the the maids and the gardeners and the um butlers and I mean she's never really seen this kind of wealth before and she's thinking, "Oh, I need to really impress these people." Um, so she gives Epstein, who is lying prone and naked on the massage table, she's sort of being instructed and guided through it by by Gen Maxwell. Um, and then at some point, according to, you know, her own account in the book. Um, Gen takes off Virginia's clothes, takes off her own clothes, instructs Virginia what to do. Um, and then Epstein proceeds to have sex with her. Virginia was so prominent because unlike other victims, she didn't sign NDAs. So there was a kind of slightly unscrupulous practice that some of these victims lawyers were doing, which was they were they were settling with the accusers um the accusers and and the accused were settling um privately without it going public. And so a lot of these women who say, you know, we're going to release names, they can't. They've signed NDAs. they cannot unless they risk being set sued for millions if not billions of dollars. Um so there's that. Um and also you know what we have to understand is something like 150 people claimed from the Epstein compensation fund and part of the clause of claiming from the compensation fund was not suing anyone to do with the trafficking ring. So you have these kind of two elements that are working against um the exposure of some of these names. >> Out of those 11 victims that that you have and are representing, uh have the stories and the allegations been quite similar? >> Absolutely. Um the experiences of all of the survivors are pretty similar. There's obviously a little bit of nuance and differences between them, but it's more or less the same pattern of abuse. Um, it's the same memo that the public has been aware of in that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked young women to his home, usually under the pretense of performing some sort of massage or something involved with massages. Um, and essentially exploited the women and abused them as they came home. Um, some of our victims as well were recruited and we know that Jeffrey Epste had a vast network of recruiters. um some of them even by Gileain Maxwell herself. So um it's very you know what we know in the public information tracks with what our victims experienced and um a lot of them had very similar experiences um and suffered very similar abuse by Epstein. So Virginia Du Fray who of course passed earlier in this year she's the most well-known victim of Jeffrey Epstein and her her allegations uh before she died and after her do after she died are the most well documented. So when you're looking at those allegations Mary are they similar to I just you mentioned the massage aspect are they similar to your victims as well? I will say Virginia um Guay has a has similar but also unique experience. I think she was exposed to a lot of high-profile clientele as she alleges um or high-profile individuals that she was abused by. Um certainly, you know, there's our victims were abused by Jeffrey Epstein. um and they were exposed to other individuals as well. But I think Virginia Guay is very similar to Our Victims, but kind of um distinguished in that I think she really um based on her memoir and the experiences that she's publicly talked about, I think she's really suffered a lot of intense abuse at the hands of Epstein that seems to be unique to potentially their relationship or or what he wanted to uh subject her to. When we talk about these victims, do you find that there were commonalities between each woman? >> Of course, I think Epstein was very um calculated in that he knew exactly the kind of woman he wanted to abuse. He wanted to find somebody who was um you know, vulnerable in the sense of maybe they were financially vulnerable. Uh maybe their life circumstances rendered them vulnerable in some way. Uh I think he definitely sought out very specifically women who he thought in his mind would be easy to take advantage of and abuse. So there is commonalities between the women. A lot of them were aspiring models or aspiring actresses. So something that he could, you know, take advantage of, make lots of promises about, especially given that he had high-profile connections and he could, you know, flaunt that to people. Um and of course that's helpful if you're someone who's aspiring to be a model or an actress. So if you meet somebody who has connections, um that could very well be helpful for you. >> How did um Epstein and Maxwell target Virginia Grey's character afterwards? >> So what we now know is there was a kind of an incredible smear campaign going on during this time. So what we what we what we do know um from some of the emails leaked to Bloomberg is that Galen Maxwell and Epstein um you know after she began going public and making these allegations, they panicked and they got incredibly worried and um we see them talking about obtaining these sealed juvenile records for Virginia from Florida and leaking them to New York papers and then kind of seeing the resulting headlines in some of these some of these papers in New York um talking about how she might not be trustworthy and it kind of sewed this seed of of distrust in her story. And then at the same time um we now we now know from some reporting in the last few weeks that Prince Andrew was apparently sharing Virginia's social security number. Um it's sort of like the British American equivalent of the national insurance number. I mean, like I have to stress how it's it's illegal to obtain and share someone's social security number in America. Um, and he's apparently sharing this with his kind of metropolitan police liaison officer to, you know, directing him to look into her records and um, you know, some of the times his own reporting. We see we see Prince Andrew his team of PR people being paid sums of money to kind of um, look into Virginia. And there was another interesting story about Brian Basham, who's this kind of well-known London PR man and Maxwell family friend who's paying um a journalist who's quite prominent on Twitter tens of thousands of pounds to speak to various people who might be able to undermine Virginia's stories. >> As we know, in the late '9s and early 2000s, uh he was investigated for his his behavior, particularly in Florida and in in Palm Beach. uh this this was the period when uh he knew Donald Trump most of all and and there was a criminal investigation of him by uh the Florida authorities by the the Florida US attorney Alexander Aosta and he was brought to justice but um first of all uh the sentence he got was on one charge charge of soliciting with one girl whereas in the evidence that was looked into I mean there were literally dozens of underage girls and this was the time that >> um his friend uh Gileain Maxwell was supposedly hanging outside high schools and and bringing people in and when apparently he had an argument with um uh Donald Trump which partly involved him poaching to work for him uh Geoffrey who of course subsequently became one of the girls at the center center of the case and and was underage. But when it came to the prosecution, it is clear that there was >> intervention higher up. >> I think he spent around 13 months behind bars. But just for our audience to kind of understand how much of a sweetheart deal this is, he got a work release. So he was able to leave to his office 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. He was released on probation after 13 months. He was basically allowed to he was told he was only in jail pretty much every night. And what he said was the official I guess the 2019 Palm Beach County Internal Review conducted the sheriff's office gave Epstein privileges that no other inmate had ever received. He was there only at night and in a segregated area. So his claim about what what work he had to do was conduct business meetings, manage his finances and charitable uh projects. So there was never even ev any any evidence that that was he was conducting that at the time. But I mean Adam, have you ever seen a situation like this? >> Well, we do have open prisons for for kind of white collar offenders in this country. But generally speaking, I don't think sex offenders are treated like that and it was a sex offense right from the start. But I think you know the most significant thing at that stage was that um you know people were warned off taking further legal action or or legal investigation and and you know one of the sort of bizarre uh things about about Epstein is is that you know he kept on walking away from trouble. So you know when he was working as a debt collector at TA's finance with Stanley Hoffenberg I mean subsequently uh that was judged to be one of the worst Ponzi schemes that had ever been. Uh there were uh criminal prosecutions but Epstein had left the business. He got away with that. Uh and you know there was speculation that maybe he was uh dealing with some of the stolen funds but never proved. No one took it up and and you know during this period he was uh meeting people like Adnan Kashogi the you know well-known weapons dealer but actually it emerged that he was using a false passport. He had an Austrian passport uh with his photograph in it under a different name. uh he he used that to go into a number of countries and it was said that he was an intelligence agent and interestingly quite possibly an intelligent agent working for the British. So he managed to get his finger into all sorts >> of pies, but they, you know, were all or tended to be all involving very very rich people and primarily very very much rich men. >> Even after Epstein's 2008 conviction, he retained connections with influential individuals, raising questions about how power protects itself. But in 2019, following renewed scrutiny, Epstein was arrested once again. This time facing federal charges for sex trafficking minors. But just one month after his arrest on August 10th, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his New York jail cell. The official ruling, suicide. >> He was arrested when he flew in from another one of his houses in Paris, actually. And no one's particularly >> looked into quite what went on in in in Paris. But he was was being detained um subject to to prosecution and he was being detained as a result of a joint uh action by the FBI uh and um the New York Police Department. Uh and he was being detained, I believe, on Riker's Island, the the famous New York City prison. Now, supposedly he hung himself in his cell with a towel. That is what the US coroners have ruled. And there was an investigation called which determined uh that he died by suicide. >> Jeffrey Epstein, he died in prison in 2019. Do you know what the reaction was for victims saying that? >> I think it's kind of across the board. Um, some people couldn't believe it. Some people felt relieved. Some people kind of felt almost nothing in the sense of, you know, he didn't he actually didn't um be he wasn't held accountable for what he did. Um, he, you know, death is the ultimate way out. It's a it's it's final. It's done. So, um, it was kind of all across the board. >> Epstein's 2019 arrest and subsequent death didn't just shock the public. It accelerated a new wave of online conspiracies. >> I think hardcore conspiracy theorists will always be looking for more answers. And I think the Epstein case is so rich a field for conspiracy theorists because there are there's a lot of weird stuff. I mean, I think you can be a totally normal sane person and say there are a lot of unanswered questions here. How is this guy getting money? How is his money being allowed to go through banks so easily? Uh I mean, just to choose one example. Uh on the other hand, I do think there are a lot of reasonable people who have questions. Uh, and you know, there are a whole lot of files out there that the Trump administration is refusing to release. And I I I think those files could go a long way towards answering some of those questions. You know, there have already been so many questions about how did the government even before Trump intervene to protect Epste? Why did he get such a sweet plea deal? Why um, you know, what other evidence do we not know about that has disappeared? Uh, and and maybe maybe it's none of it, right? Um, but but but I think that that complicates the search. And now we have a situation where the most powerful man in the world who we know is friends with Epstein and is very concerned about these files coming out that I mean he's in control of the Justice Department which by the way is more political than ever. Typically you have kind of a hands-off relationship between the president and the Justice Department. They've made very clear that they're willing to do his bidding in other cases prosecuting his enemies. And so why wouldn't they? Let's say there was a really incriminating piece of evidence. Not saying it exists, but let's say it came up and it, you know, would have forced Donald Trump to resign from office. something really really incendiary, you know, why wouldn't they just feed that through a shredder? >> I think there is, you know, more than usual circumstantial evidence to justify an alternative theory that he might have been um killed uh because he his prosecution was extremely inconvenient. And and the things I would point to is that uh the guards who were supposed to be looking for him unexpectedly at the time he died took an unexpected or unauthorized break. So they weren't there. >> Secondly, there was meant to be a security camera tape and there is several minutes missing on that security camera tape around the time that he killed himself. though we do not see on that tape um Epstein killing himself. So, you know, people have certainly been murdered in prison before. Although, as I say, the authorities in the United States and in in in New York City and the state of New York have, they say, looked into this and have ruled that it was suicide. >> Epstein's story didn't end with his death. And in the next episode, we dive deeper into the networks that enabled him and who may have known what.