Investigations
Investigative Reporting
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Original investigations into the Epstein network. Every claim cites specific documents from our database of court filings, depositions, and government records.
In August 1994, Epstein and Maxwell stayed at a lodge they funded at Interlochen. During that stay, they approached a student between classes. She was 13 or 14. She later testified at the Maxwell trial.
Jeffrey Epstein created the Butterfly Trust one week after the FBI began interviewing witnesses. The co-trustees later added themselves as beneficiaries and moved $13 million into the trust nine months after his death.
A Deutsche Bank exhibit delivered to federal prosecutors in 2019 lists more than 30 schools across 10 countries that received payments from Jeffrey Epstein's financial network. The payments ran through shell LLCs and the Butterfly Trust, whose co-trustees later paid their own children's tuition from the same accounts and restructured the trust after Epstein's death to shield assets from victim claims.
After Jeffrey Epstein walked out of a Palm Beach jail in 2009, he needed someone who could restore his access to the world's most famous people. The Department of Justice's Epstein files show he found that person in Peggy Siegal, the Hollywood publicist whose 5,000-plus emails with Epstein document a decade of guest lists, paid services, image management, and social rehabilitation.
From Le Bourget to Sofia to Madrid, thousands of documents reveal how Jeffrey Epstein built recruitment pipelines, cultivated political allies, and moved money across three European countries.
The Epstein files identify at least six Russian-speaking women who functioned as recruiters within Epstein's operation. The documents show a pattern: modeling agencies in Moscow and Novosibirsk served as recruitment fronts, ages of recruits trended downward over time, and one woman brought her 18-year-old sister to Epstein one week before his arrest.
EFTA documents and investigative reports reveal that Israeli military and intelligence personnel maintained a sustained physical presence in Jeffrey Epstein's New York properties. Rafi Shlomo of the Israeli UN Mission controlled building access, while IDF intelligence officer Yoni Koren stayed at the townhouse on multiple occasions.
Leaked documents and EFTA releases show Jeffrey Epstein brokered secret merger discussions between Julius Baer CEO Boris Collardi and Ariane de Rothschild of Edmond de Rothschild Bank. A $25 million contract for "risk analysis and algorithms" connected the same entities to Epstein's Southern Trust Company, which also funded the Israeli surveillance startup Carbyne.
Documents trace Svetlana "Lana" Pozhidaeva from MGIMO, the Moscow university that trains Russian diplomats and intelligence operatives, through Jean-Luc Brunel's modeling agency and into Jeffrey Epstein's operation. Sergei Belyakov, a graduate of the FSB Academy, personally drafted her visa letter.
Emails in the EFTA releases confirm Dzhabrailov arranged a 2001 Moscow visit for Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell called him her "soulmate." He was found dead on March 2, 2026, weeks after his name surfaced in the released files.
Deutsche Bank's RiskConnect compliance system tagged Jeffrey Epstein with the code 'ORG: Organized Crime, Criminal Association, Racketeering' in 2008. The bank onboarded him as a client in 2013 and processed his transactions until 2018. The EFTA documents reveal the shell companies, the compliance overrides, and the $50 million in suspicious activity reports that no one acted on.
EFTA documents trace a direct line from the FSB Academy in Moscow to Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. At one end: Sergei Belyakov, an FSB-trained intelligence operative who became Epstein's fixer for Russian state access. At the other: Charles McGonigal, the FBI's top counterintelligence official in New York, convicted of secretly working for the same Russian oligarch Epstein was advising.