Confidential Jeffery Epstein documents: What the list does and does not reveal

Jeffrey Epstein in March 2017. The latest documents contain no new Epstein client list. (File image from the New York State Sex Offender Registry - Jeffrey Epstein via PTI)

For long Jeffrey Epstein was a high-society ‘it’ boy and the darling of the elite. Till he was taken into custody, he was a high-profile mover and shaker. His death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on July 23, 2019, was said to be suicide, but widely believed to be murder, with too many people set to lose face if Epstein opened his mouth. Now a new and second set of 300 pages has been released.

When Epstein burst on the social scene, he already had the air of a billionaire. Rumours about sex-trafficking underage girls that began to swirl in his wake were soon muted because of his high connections. Though he came under the police lens for sexual offences as early as 2005, it was not until 2006 that he was arrested. He was incarcerated again in 2019. In between he allegedly continued with his romps and kinks, cocky in the face of mounting testimonies against him. In the interim, Jean-Luc Brunel, a Parisienne modelling agent accused of procuring minors for Epstein, killed himself.

Virginia Giuffre, one of the victims, had filed a lawsuit in 2015 against her molesters, including Epstein’s supposed girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre, who had accused Andrew, a British prince, of molesting her, later settled out of court with him for a sum rumoured to be around $16.3 million. Andrew dismissed the viral photo of him with his arm around a young Giuffre as a doctored one, and gave an interview saying, among other things, that he suffered from a medical condition that made it impossible for him to sweat. This was to combat her claim that he perspired on the dance floor ‘like it was raining basically everywhere’.

Epstein’s death led to the dismissal of all criminal cases against him on August 29, 2019. His associate Maxwell, the daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell who died by drowning in 1991, is in jail. If the conspiracy theorists are right and he was ‘eased out’, it could only be because all the bigwigs who ran around with him are shaking in their boots, and Epstein had a hold over them. The only safety he could perceivably procure for himself would have been to film them on his infamous island and hold the proof for ransom.

Epstein’s brother Mark has previously said to a journalist, while talking about the possibility of sex tapes secretly recorded for blackmailing purposes: ‘Jeffrey was buying islands in the Virgin Islands. He had his own private 727 (jet). Do you think he needed to make money by extortion?’

After a New York judge recently ruled that the names mentioned in Giuffre’s lawsuit can be made public, some more Jane and John Does were expected to be outed. He did hang out with the big boys, after all. Whether the blackmail theory is true or not, the files have not brought any closure to the conundrum that is Epstein. This is going to be a long-term mystery that will go on season after season, with no real ending.