Epstein with Ghislaine Maxwell.keeping herself rail-thin because
Epstein liked thin girls. “She said, ‘I do
it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,
the Auschwitz diet. I just don’t eat.’”
On the weekends in the 1990s,
Maxwell would have her Rollerblades
FedExed to Jeffrey’s island in the
Caribbean, and she said that she got
her helicopter pilot’s license so
she could transport anyone she liked
on her rig, Air Ghislaine 2, without
pilots knowing who they were. Maxwell
also said the island had been wired
for video; the friend thought that she
and Epstein were videotaping
everyone on the island as an insurance
policy, as blackmail. A source close
to Maxwell says she spoke glibly and
confidently about getting girls to
sexually service Epstein, saying this
was simply what he wanted, and
describing the way she’d drive around
to spas in Florida to recruit them.
She would claim she had a phone job
for them, “and you’ll make lots of
money, meet everyone, and I’ll change
your life.” The source continues,
“Ghislaine was in love with Jeffrey the
way she was in love with her father.
She always thought if she just did one
more thing for him, to please him,
he would marry her.” Maxwell also
told this woman about the young
girls in Epstein’s life: “She said, ‘They’re
nothing, these girls. They are trash.’”Epstein’s perversions have revealed
much more than one man’s sinister
nature: He had a sprawling network
of friends and acquaintances who
may have participated in or simply
overlooked his crimes. These women,
however, say he saw himself as a
savior of women, including Maxwell,
and initiating them into his alternative
lifestyle as a path forward in their
lives. “One night after we were dating
for six or seven months, he sat me
down and presented what he wanted
for a formal relationship going
forward,” says one woman. He told
her he had a very high sex drive,
and like many rich men, dated several
women at a time—this was the way
of kings and queens. “It was all about
how if I was less conventional and
pedestrian, I could have this relationship
with him. It was a whole spiel aboutlooking me in the eye in a creepy
way and quoting something I’d said
about him earlier on the phone to a
girlfriend,” she says. “I threw the phone
out and cut off all contact with him.”
These women weren’t as powerless
as the teenagers in Palm Beach,
Florida, whom Epstein was paying
a couple hundred dollars for massages
that turned into sex. Nor were they
sex slaves. And they largely weren’t
afraid of Epstein back then. But his
death has freaked them out. Before he
hanged himself, one of them told me,
“I think Jeffrey will either get
sentenced to prison for life, or if he’s
in prison, with all the people who
don’t want him to reveal his secrets,
he’s dead anyway.”This article incorporates materials
from web posts published on July 18
and August 12.polyamory, and it made me really
insecure—I wasn’t a girl who had high
self-esteem or self-worth at that
time. I didn’t think I could do an open
relationship, and I also thought if
I said I wouldn’t do it, he would still
go out with me, but he didn’t.”
Soon she started to receive strange
messages nearly every week. They
had pictures of her in them, as she
was going about her life. “I didn’t think
that meant Jeffrey was pining for me
and his life was ruined,” she says.
“I just knew he had legions of people
around him to do things like that.”
Another woman who dated Epstein
says he slept with a gun in a holster
on the side of the bed and was
always playing “spy games,” as she
calls it. She thinks he tapped her
phone after they broke up. She came
home to her doorman saying he’d let a
repairman in to fix her cable, even
though she hadn’t requested service.
“Then I had a weird sensation
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE SCHILDHORN/PATRICK M when I was talking to Jeffrey—he kept
CMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES
OCTOBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 45