To:​ Vicky Ward​

Fri 11/22/2019 1:08 PM

I met Mr. Epstein in 2008 not long before he was sentenced to  jail and since I personally can name businessmen  in Russia who were having sex with 14-15 year-old girls and doing it on a regular basis, I didn’t understand why he was charged and sentenced to jail. 

I received this email (spelling and grammar have been corrected for clarity) in 2019. It came from one of the Russian models referenced in the sobering article in last night’s Wall Street Journal describing how Jeffrey Epstein continued to manipulate vulnerable women long after his jail-time in 2009.

This is something that the numerous plutocrats of Epstein’s acquaintance preferred to either not know or not mention, as is referenced in the article. This suggests many in his influential circle abetted what amounted to a continuation of the sex-trafficking ring he’d begun in the 1990s. The difference in his post-jail life was that he sought out mostly Eastern European immigrants, many of them models.

Reading the article, I was reminded of what the Russian model had said to me in 2019, soon after Epstein’s death. And what she’d written to me in that startling email above — The sexual abuse she’d suffered at just 14 in her native Russia was commonplace. In many Eastern European countries the age of consent is 14.

This meant that at the time she told me she didn’t comprehend the scale of Epstein’s evilness. I recall that at one point she told me with, I hate to say, almost pride that “not one of the women suing Epstein is from Eastern Europe.” Her implication was that they weren’t going to complain publicly about Epstein’s insidious crimes because that sort of behavior was normalized culturally back home.

Well, per the Journal, that has changed.

The article by Khadeeja Safdar is a piece of terrific reportage, piecing together conversations, emails, and discovery from the recent litigation involving Epstein victims and Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan. (The banks settled.)

The statistics she reports are shocking. Two lawyers involved in the class action suits against the banks told Safdar that they’ve interviewed 130 Epstein accusers. Fifty-five of the women said they only met him after his conviction in 2008. Forty-five of the fifty-five are from Eastern Europe. One lawyer said that the women have identified twenty men to whom Epstein allegedly sent them for sex. The names of the men are not publicized in the piece.

Here’s the clever thing: in his last decade Epstein flaunted what he was doing in public. And that cover was remarkably effective.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates