Jeffrey Epstein Had 1,000+ Victims

Industrial scale abuse enterprise far larger than previously believed is revealed in new document

Twenty years after Jeffrey Epstein was exposed for his child sex abuse enterprise, the Justice Department this week made a startling revelation. Rather than the “dozens” of victims previously alleged by the government and media, Justice now says that there were “over one thousand” victims.

Everyone is talking about Epstein again, from MAGA types furious that the Trump administration is not producing a supposed client list, to the mainstream media, which is giddily mocking just about anyone critical of the Justice Department here as conspiracy theorists.

One person who doesn’t want to talk about it is Donald Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his buddy Epstein was a “fun” guy who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Seldom one to shy away from blurting out whatever, when asked this week about the Epstein memo, Trump uncharacteristically changed the subject. He admonished the reporter, telling him that the question was a “desecration” to the lives lost in the Texas flood.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. We have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things — and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time? I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”  

Trump, of course, hung out with Epstein and feasted on his legendary get togethers in New York and West Palm Beach, so he probably isn’t keen on there being too much transparency here. But before this becomes a conspiracy theory itself, I note that former President Bill Clinton was also a frequent flier, especially on the Lolita Express which took prominent guests to Epstein’s private island. Those guests included financiers, billionaires, lawyers, and even a British prince.

The names of the hundreds (and now indeed possibly thousands) of johns involved — Jeffrey Epstein’s clients — have never been revealed by the government. Pam Bondi’s Justice Department evidently doesn’t have the stomach or the inclination to delve much deeper into the matter.

The new figure of over one thousand victims appears in a Trump administration’s review of FBI holdings concerning Epstein, a summary of which was released in the form of a two-page memo earlier this week.

“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the undated and unsigned memo says.

Justice says it reviewed “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence,” including “over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material.” 

There is no client list, Justice says in its memo; this despite Bondi herself implying in February that such a list was on her desk. (She now says she was referring to files more generally.)

There are so many explanations and unanswered questions raised by the release, which also says that there is “no credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” That means that the theories alleging Epstein was operating some kind of operation to collect incriminating information for a foreign government (most notably the Israelis) has also been dismissed by the U.S. government.

Oh, and the memo says that because of this “exhaustive” search, there’s no need for Justice or the FBI to disclose anything further. This is a reversal of Trump’s promise to his voters that he would “take a look at” the Epstein case as president.

When the Justice Department indicted Epstein in 2019, it repeatedly referred to “dozens of minor girls” that he had abused. Federal prosecutors reportedly identified 36 underage victims in Florida, in line with the “dozens” described in the original federal indictment.

“Consistent with prior disclosures,” the Justice Department memo said this week, “this review confirmed that Epstein harmed over one thousand victims.” 

There was no such prior disclosure that Epstein’s victims were so numerous.

When I read the “over one thousand” phrase, I was genuinely shocked by the number, and then even more so when no one in the major media reported it. So I reached out to the FBI to ask about the discrepancy.

“The FBI declines to comment,” an unnamed Bureau official responded in email. (The Justice Department has not even responded to my request for clarification.)

There are some bizarre theories about Epstein out there, my personal favorite being the notion that Epstein never actually died in prison and that the man who did was a body double.

But you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see there’s more here than we were told before. You just have to read the Justice Department’s review carefully — which the media evidently did not.

It’s as if no one in power wants to deal with the substance of this scandal: that an industrial scale child abuse operation was taking place right under the noses of the countless household names with whom Epstein socialized. Now those same household names are ever so happy to cast the battle as a war between conspiracy nuts and the sober-minded adults, completely gliding over the obvious indictment here of the very high society of which they are a part.

What the Epstein case shows is that powerful men preying on the very young is condoned by high society, whether they’re a Republican or Democrat, an American or an Afghan warlord. And that’s why prominent people, from the government to the news media, seem to want this to go away.

As for Trump’s law enforcers and self-styled truth tellers who claim to be ending an era of politicization of the FBI and intelligence? It is entirely possible that in all the material they possess, there is no information about the johns. That’s because decades ago, they weren’t told to go after the men, or they decided not to. Either way, that’s the true cover-up, that no one was predisposed to investigate the perpetrators beyond Epstein and his staff, not in the Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden or Trump administrations.

— Edited by William M. Arkin