The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) pored over Jeffrey Epstein’s financial institution information and emails. It searched his houses. It spent years interviewing his victims and inspecting his connections to a number of the world’s most influential folks.
However whereas investigators collected ample proof that Epstein sexually abused underage women, they discovered scant proof the well-connected financier led a intercourse trafficking ring serving highly effective males, an Related Press assessment of inner Justice Division information exhibits.
Movies and images seized from Epstein’s houses in New York, Florida and the Virgin Islands didn’t depict victims being abused or implicate anybody else in his crimes, a prosecutor wrote in a single 2025 memo.
An examination of Epstein’s monetary information, together with funds he made to entities linked to influential figures in academia, finance and world diplomacy, discovered no connection to prison exercise, mentioned one other inner memo in 2019.
Whereas one Epstein sufferer made extremely public claims that he “lent her” to his wealthy buddies, brokers couldn’t affirm that and located no different victims telling the same story, the information mentioned.
Summarising the investigation in an electronic mail final July, brokers mentioned “4 or 5” Epstein accusers claimed different males or girls had sexually abused them. However, the brokers mentioned, there “was not sufficient proof to federally cost these people, so the circumstances had been referred to native regulation enforcement.”
The AP and different media organisations are nonetheless reviewing thousands and thousands of pages of paperwork, a lot of them beforehand confidential, that the Justice Division launched underneath the Epstein Recordsdata Transparency Act and it’s attainable these information comprise proof missed by investigators.
However the paperwork, which embrace police stories, FBI interview notes and prosecutor emails, present the clearest image to this point of the investigation — and why U.S. authorities in the end determined to shut it with out extra costs.
The Epstein investigation started in 2005, when the mother and father of a 14-year-old lady reported she had been molested on the millionaire’s dwelling in Palm Seaside, Florida.
Police would determine at the very least 35 women with related tales: Epstein was paying highschool age college students $200 or $300 to offer him sexualised massages.
After the FBI joined the probe, federal prosecutors drafted indictments to cost Epstein and a few private assistants who had organized the ladies’ visits and funds. However as an alternative, then-Miami U.S. legal professional Alexander Acosta struck a deal letting Epstein plead responsible to state costs of soliciting prostitution from an underage lady. Sentenced to 18 months in jail, Epstein was free by mid-2009.
In 2018, a collection of Miami Herald tales in regards to the plea deal prompted New York federal prosecutors to take a contemporary have a look at the accusations.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019. One month later, he killed himself in his jail cell.
A 12 months later, prosecutors charged Epstein’s long-time confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, saying she’d recruited a number of of his victims and generally joined the sexual abuse. Convicted in 2021, Maxwell is serving a 20-year jail time period.
Prosecution memos, case summaries and different paperwork made public within the division’s newest launch of Epstein-related information present that FBI brokers and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential co-conspirators. Even seemingly outlandish and incomprehensible claims, referred to as in to tip traces, had been examined.
Some allegations couldn’t be verified, investigators wrote.
In 2011 and once more in 2019, investigators interviewed Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who in lawsuits and information interviews had accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters with quite a few males, together with Britain’s former Prince Andrew.
Investigators mentioned they confirmed that Giuffre had been sexually abused by Epstein. However different components of her story had been problematic.
Two different Epstein victims who Giuffre had claimed had been additionally “lent out” to highly effective males instructed investigators that they had no such expertise, prosecutors wrote in a 2019 inner memo.
“No different sufferer has described being expressly directed by both Maxwell or Epstein to interact in sexual exercise with different males,” the memo mentioned.
Giuffre acknowledged writing a partly fictionalised memoir of her time with Epstein containing descriptions of issues that did not happen. She had additionally supplied shifting accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had “engaged in a steady stream of public interviews about her allegations, a lot of which have included sensationalised if not demonstrably inaccurate characterisations of her experiences.” These inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI, they mentioned.
Nonetheless, U.S. prosecutors tried to rearrange an interview with Andrew, now often called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He refused to make himself obtainable. Giuffre settled a lawsuit with Mountbatten-Windsor wherein she had accused him of sexual misconduct.
In a memoir revealed after she killed herself final 12 months, Giuffre wrote that prosecutors instructed her they did not embrace her within the case towards Maxwell as a result of they did not need her allegations to distract the jury. She insisted her accounts of being trafficked to elite males had been true.
Investigators seized a large number of movies and images from Epstein’s digital gadgets and houses in New York, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They discovered CDs, exhausting copy pictures and at the very least one videotape containing nude photos of females, a few of whom appeared as in the event that they is perhaps minors. One gadget contained 15 to twenty photos depicting industrial baby intercourse abuse materials — photos investigators mentioned Epstein obtained on the web.
No movies or images confirmed Epstein victims being sexually abused, none confirmed any males with any of the nude females, and none contained proof implicating anybody aside from Epstein and Maxwell, then-Assistant U.S. Legal professional Maurene Comey wrote in an electronic mail for FBI officers final 12 months.
Had they existed, the federal government “would have pursued any leads they generated,” Comey wrote. “We didn’t, nonetheless, find any such movies.”
Investigators who scoured Epstein’s financial institution information discovered funds to greater than 25 girls who gave the impression to be fashions — however no proof that he was engaged in prostituting girls to different males, prosecutors wrote.
In 2019, prosecutors weighed the potential of charging one among Epstein’s long-time assistants however determined towards it.
Prosecutors concluded that whereas the assistant was concerned in serving to Epstein pay women for intercourse and will have been conscious that some had been underage, she herself was a sufferer of his sexual abuse and manipulation.
Investigators examined Epstein’s relationship with the French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who as soon as was concerned in an company with Epstein within the U.S., and who was accused in a separate case of sexually assaulting girls in Europe. Brunel killed himself in jail whereas awaiting trial on a rape cost in France.
Prosecutors additionally weighed whether or not to cost one among Epstein’s girlfriends who had participated in sexual acts with a few of his victims. Investigators interviewed the girlfriend, who was 18 to twenty years outdated on the time, “but it surely was decided there was not sufficient proof,” in keeping with a abstract given to FBI Director Kash Patel final July.
Days earlier than Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, the FBI strategised about sending brokers to serve grand jury subpoenas on folks near Epstein, together with his pilots and long-time enterprise shopper, retail mogul Les Wexner.
Wexner’s attorneys instructed investigators that neither he nor his spouse had information of Epstein’s sexual misconduct. Epstein had managed Wexner’s funds, however the couple’s attorneys mentioned they minimize him off in 2007 after studying he’d stolen from them.
“There’s restricted proof relating to his involvement,” an FBI agent wrote of Wexner in an August 16, 2019, electronic mail.
In an announcement to the AP, a authorized consultant for Wexner mentioned prosecutors had knowledgeable him that he was “neither a co-conspirator nor a goal the least bit” and that Wexner had cooperated with investigators.
Prosecutors additionally examined accounts from girls who mentioned they’d given massages at Epstein’s dwelling to visitors who’d tried to make the encounters sexual. One girl accused non-public fairness investor Leon Black of initiating sexual contact throughout a therapeutic massage in 2011 or 2012, inflicting her to flee the room.
The Manhattan district legal professional’s workplace subsequently investigated, however no costs had been filed.
Black’s lawyer, Susan Estrich, mentioned he had paid Epstein for property planning and tax recommendation. She mentioned in an announcement that Black did not have interaction in misconduct and had no consciousness of Epstein’s prison actions. Lawsuits by two girls who accused Black of sexual misconduct had been dismissed or withdrawn. One is pending.
Legal professional Normal Pam Bondi instructed Fox Information in February 2025 that Epstein’s never-before-seen “shopper checklist” was “sitting on my desk proper now.” Just a few months later, she claimed the FBI was reviewing “tens of 1000’s of movies” of Epstein “with youngsters or baby porn”.
However FBI brokers wrote to superiors saying the shopper checklist didn’t exist.
On December 30, 2024, about three weeks earlier than President Joe Biden left workplace, then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate reached out via subordinates to ask “whether or not our investigation to this point signifies the ‘shopper checklist’, usually referred to within the media, does or doesn’t exist,” in keeping with an electronic mail summarising his question.
A day later, an FBI official replied that the case agent had confirmed no shopper checklist existed.
On February 19, 2025, two days earlier than Bondi’s Fox Information look, an FBI supervisory particular agent wrote, “Whereas media protection of the Jeffrey Epstein case references a ’shopper checklist’, investigators didn’t find such an inventory throughout the course of the investigation.”
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