Virginia Giuffre, a prime accuser of Jeffrey Epstein and partner Ghislaine Maxwell, testified four years ago that she had kept a detailed journal of her forced role in the two’s global sex trafficking, but then she burned it in a backyard bonfire.
Ms. Giuffre said Ms. Maxwell recruited her in the late 1990s when she was 16 and introduced her to Epstein at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida. She said Epstein and Ms. Maxwell groomed her for a life of global-trotting sexual encounters.
In recent years, Ms. Giuffre, now 36, made sensational allegations about her encounters. She said they included Britain’s Prince Andrew, former Epstein counsel Alan Dershowitz, former Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson and former Sen. George Mitchell of Maine. She also said she saw former President Bill Clinton at Epstein’s private Caribbean island where underage girls frolicked.
Mr. Dershowitz adamantly denies the claim and has sued Ms. Giuffre. He told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Friday night that Ms. Giuffre is making up stories in an attempt to get money.
Mr. Clinton, who took nearly 30 flights in Epstein’s private jet, repeatedly has denied visiting the compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A Netflix special on Epstein quoted a worker as saying he saw Mr. Clinton with Ms. Giuffre there. Mr. Dershowitz said after the series aired that Ms. Giuffre by that time had broken off her ties to Epstein and moved to Australia.
Prince Andrew acknowledged he had a friendship with Epstein, even after the wealthy financier pleaded guilty in Florida to prostitution involving underage girls, but he told BBC that he had no memory of meeting Ms. Giuffre. Mr. Richardson and Mr. Mitchell also deny Ms. Giuffre’s claims.
Ms. Giuffre filed a lawsuit in 2015 claiming Ms. Maxwell sexually trafficked her to politicians and corporate magnates as a teenager under the name Virginia Lee Roberts. The judge in that case, since settled, unsealed a number of documents in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, including Ms. Giuffre’s 2016, 347-page deposition.
Interest in Ms. Giuffre’s civil case heightened dramatically with the suicidal hanging of Epstein in a New York City lockup and subsequent federal charges brought against Ms. Maxwell last month. The British socialite and millionaire remains jailed without bail.
Ms. Giuffre’s private journal could have added weight to her allegations, but it no longer existed, she testified.
“Where are your notes?” a Maxwell attorney asked.
“I burned them,” Ms. Giuffre said. “In a bonfire when I lived in Titusville [Florida]. … This wasn’t anything that was a public document. This was my own private journal, and I didn’t want it anymore. So we burned it.” She said her Australian husband helped.
She testified that she began writing notes in a green spiral notebook in 2012, more than a decade after she met Ms. Maxwell and Epstein.
“Bad memories,” she said. “Things that I’ve gone through, lots of things, you know. I can’t tell you. There was a lot of pages. It was over 300 pages in that book.”
She also was questioned about the infamous photograph of herself, Prince Andrew with his arm around her waist, and Ms. Maxwell in London. The photographer: Epstein, using her “little yellow Kodak camera.”
“Where is the original of the photograph? … I want to know where the photograph is,” a Maxwell attorney says, according to the deposition transcript.
“I probably still have it,” Ms. Giuffre answered. She said the photo was likely among storage boxes in a home in Sydney, Australia, owned by her in-laws.
She said she had the film developed and the photo printed upon returning to Palm Beach in 2001.
Ms. Giuffre testified that Epstein facilitated a passport application, her first, through an office in New York City in January 2001. She filled out the application and put down her occupation as “masseuse.”
The application is listed as court evidence. Her original passport is not.
Ms. Giuffre said she lived in a Palm Beach-area apartment that Epstein rented for her from January 2001 to fall 2002.
“You have to understand that Jeffrey and Ghislaine are joined hip by hip, OK?” Ms. Giuffre testified. “So they both trafficked me. Ghislaine brought me in for the purpose of being trafficked. Jeffrey was just as a part of it as she was. She was just as a part of it as he was. They trafficked me to many people. And to be honest, there is people I could name and then there’s people that are just a blur. There was so much happening.”
She added, “It was part of my training. They both told me, ’You’ve got tickets to go here. This is who you’re meeting, and this is what you’re doing’. … The first time I was with Alan Dershowitz was in New York, so I wasn’t actually sent to him. It actually happened at one of Jeffrey’s residences.”
Again, Mr. Dershowitz acknowledged having a friendship with Epstein but asserted that he had no such encounter with Ms. Giuffre.
“I am telling me the truth … and I have the evidence to prove it,” Mr. Dershowitz told Mr. Carlson. “And she has not a scintilla of evidence beyond her own word, which is worthless because she has such a long history of lying. She was a serial liar who does it for money, and she’s continuing to do it, and the media has been taken in by her. But the time has come to investigate me and her. I call to the FBI to do that.”
Mr. Trump’s name doesn’t come up during the deposition.
• Rowan Scarborough can be reached at rscarborough@washingtontimes.com.
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