The names of associates and acquaintances of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein were released on Thursday (NZ time), with a US federal court unsealing hundreds of pages of documents from a lawsuit related to the financier.
According to the 2019 case against him, the convicted sex offender would pay young girls - some aged just 14 - to give him massages that would "become increasingly sexual in nature". The girls were also paid to provide sexual services to him and his friends, as well as to recruit others into his network of victims.
Epstein died by suicide in jail on August 10, 2019, before he could face trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. He was 66.
The documents stem from a 2015 civil suit brought by Virginia Giuffre, who says she was one of the many young girls trafficked by Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was found guilty of sex trafficking in 2021 and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.
Giuffre's defamation suit against Maxwell was settled in 2017, and most of the documents from that case were unsealed two years later - a day before Epstein died.
Media outlets have now reviewed the latest documents to be unsealed, which included names - previously redacted to protect the individuals' privacy - of Epstein's associates, accusers and others with links to a civil case brought by one of the victims.
Most of the high-profile names that became public in the documents were already known to have links to Epstein: for example, former US presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, and British royal Prince Andrew, were expected to be named.
In the documents, Andrew was accused by a witness of groping her breast, and was previously accused of raping Giuffre when she was a teenager.
However, new names have also been unveiled, including several very famous Hollywood stars alleged to have links with Epstein.
Appearing in the unsealed documents does not mean the people named have been accused of or committed any wrongdoing.
Celebrities including Bruce Willis, Cameron Diaz, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Spacey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jackson, Naomi Campbell and celebrated English physicist Stephen Hawking are all mentioned in the records, but none have been accused of aiding Epstein in any capacity.
In the unveiled 2016 deposition of Johanna Sjoberg, another victim of Epstein who had already gone public with her story, she revealed the financier would boast about the high-profile individuals he knew and was supposedly in communication with.
In her testimony, Sjoberg said Epstein would brag about phone calls with Hollywood actors, including Willis, DiCaprio and Blanchett. However, the documents provided no evidence the actors knew him.
"I saw one press report that said you had met Cate Blanchett or Leonardo DiCaprio?" Maxwell's lawyer asked Sjoberg, to which she responded: "I did not meet them, no… When I spoke about them, it was when I was massaging [Epstein], and he would get off - he would be on the phone a lot at that time, and one time he said, 'Oh, that was Leonardo', or, 'That was Cate Blanchett' or Bruce Willis. That kind of thing."
Maxwell's lawyer also asked if Sjoberg had met Diaz, to which she replied "no."
Also named in the documents was famous magician David Copperfield. Sjoberg, in her deposition, said she saw the illusionist at dinner with Epstein and that he performed "some magic tricks".
"He questioned me if I was aware that girls were getting paid to find other girls," Sjoberg said in her testimony.
Also named in the documents was Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modelling agent suspected of finding girls for Epstein. He died by suicide in a Paris jail in 2022 while awaiting trial for rape accusations.
In her deposition, Giuffre said she was sent by Maxwell to have sex with Brunel "at many places". The documents also said Brunel would bring girls as young as 12 "to the United States for sexual purposes and farm them out to his friends, especially Epstein".
In the documents released on Thursday (NZ time), former president Clinton was also mentioned in Sjoberg's deposition. In her testimony, Sjoberg said Epstein had told her, "Clinton likes them young". She also said she knew Epstein had "dealings" with Clinton. Giuffre, the plaintiff in the suit against Maxwell, did not accuse the former president of any wrongdoing.
Former president Trump was also named. When asked if she had given Trump a massage, Sjoberg said no. However, the mogul allegedly took multiple trips on Epstein's jet: Sjoberg's testimony also claimed Epstein once visited Trump's casino. The two businessmen had a reported "falling out".
Sjoberg also recalled meeting late musician Michael Jackson at Epstein's house in Palm Beach, but said no when she was asked if she had massaged him.
Further documents were released on Friday (NZ time), with more expected in the coming weeks.
