A Washington journalist and friend of mine who isn’t as enmeshed in the Jeffrey Epstein story recently asked me where the idea came from that Epstein trafficked “more than a thousand” humans (girls, women, and sometimes, it’s been suggested, boys) during his sinister reign as brothelkeeper to the elites. He thought it seemed impossibly high.

The number comes directly from a July 7 Trump Justice Department press release stating that an internal review of more than 300 gigabytes of “data and physical evidence” suggested “Epstein harmed over one thousand victims.” Putting aside the problem that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are proven liars and Trump lackeys, we may take their assessment at face value, for inventing it would not seem to add a layer of protection to their Dear Leader.

The question remains, how was this feat accomplished by a single thug?

We know Epstein was a member of the borderless, nationless tribe of elites whose only allegiance is to the bankers. He had multiple passports (One Austrian with a Saudi address and two American). He was able to smirk past national customs officers without too much attention from nosy agents by flying in and out of airports – civilian and military – with luminaries like former President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on his jet.

There’s a lot in the public domain already, but as we wait for the DOJ to disgorge its rancid vault, Epstein’s known communications with pals, his flight logs, and scheduling emails with staff do suggest how he might have racked up a thousand and one victims.

Between 2013 and 2019, Epstein frequently flew unnamed women to and from East European airports – Kyiv, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Warsaw – as well as Stockholm and Helsinki commercially through Paris.

These trips almost always include [redacted] passengers – nameless individuals whose screening in the documents suggests they are trafficked victims whose names are purposely shielded.

We know that as a “model agent” Epstein was in cahoots with fellow trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel in transporting and rendering stateless women and girls who he then housed in his Upper East Side New York building– often with control of their passports, visas, and other documents in his own hands. His deep involvement in the community of Eastern European beauties is one reason why it’s not unfeasible, as I wrote recently in this space, to believe that he knew the former Melania Knavs as well.

A lawsuit filed by Gloria Allred and other attorneys on behalf of a Russian Jane Doe in 2021 against Epstein’s attorney Darren Indyke, executor of the estate, laid out how the Paris game played out.

In 2017, according to the documents, Jane was in her early 20s, living in Moscow and looking for work. She answered an ad for a financial company seeking a personal assistant who could speak multiple languages. She was soon meeting Epstein’s female representative in Russia, who said the job was to be a personal assistant to a man. She was not told the man’s name nor company. Epstein’s assistants in New York sent her tickets to Paris.

At Charles De Gaulle airport, Jane was picked up by a driver and taken to Epstein’s apartment on Avenue Foch. Epstein took Jane and three other young women out to dinner at a restaurant near the Louvre. “Jane understood this to be a job interview,” according to the suit. Epstein asked her interview-type questions and gave her 500 euros in cash. After dinner they returned to the apartment. The Russian assistant who had interviewed Jane in Moscow was present (her photograph was displayed at the apartment). The Russian assistant then took Jane to the bedroom and told her to change into pajamas. The other girls had changed into similar pajamas.

Jane wanted to sleep but was told to stay awake. Eventually, the Russian assistant brought Jane to the “massage room” where she endured the “massage” and sexual assault that countless girls and women have since described as Epstein’s M.O. According to the suit, Epstein repeatedly raped and trafficked her for his personal sexual use and abuse over a two-year period in Paris, New York, Florida, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Paris M.O. is hinted at in the scheduling emails: For one [redacted] they stopped and picked up “her friend” from Stockholm (this was a kind of pyramid scheme, paying girls to bring in others) . In another scheduling email, a [redacted] was put on a train from Paris to Geneva and “then car service on to Glion Hospitality School in Montreux” – very likely one of the actual carrots of job training that Epstein used to lure hapless young women into his project.

In September of this year another Paris-linked Jane Doe suit was filed against the estate, this by a woman from a “majority Muslim country in Central Asia,” alleging that Epstein got her a French student visa, then locked her in his Paris apartment and had his staff bring her food.

The scheduling emails are but a tiny keyhole glimpse into Epstein’s activities. As we previously reported, Epstein made 64 unexplained voyages through the Istanbul airport between 2010 and 2014, at a time when global watchdog groups were reporting a surge in human trafficking through that city in the wake of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis.

This new cache of scheduling emails suggests that he engaged in trafficking through Paris with [redacted] passengers right up until his arrest at Teterboro – on a return flight from France – in 2019.

They also show how the movements of presumably hapless, soon-to-be-trafficked voyagers through Paris were intermingled with Epstein’s social engagements with billionaire Eurotrash and European political dignitaries who, for some inexplicable reason, remained buddies with him throughout his post-jail years.

Epstein’s playmates in Paris included Fiat heir and mega-industrialist Eduardo Teodorani and Hermes billionaire Axel Dumas. Epstein dined with Norwegian diplomat and Oslo Accords hero Terje Rod-Larsen (who took Epstein money for a Greek island pad and visited his New York City mansion numerous times) and even hosted a three-day overnight stay at his Avenue Foch apartment for the Secretary General of the European Council, Norwegian politician Thorbjorn Jagland, during the 2015 Paris Fashion Week.

We know Epstein regarded Paris Fashion Week as deer hunters anticipate the shooting season in Pennsylvania. Witness this 2018 text exchange with Steve Bannon:

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Last week I got a call from a talk radio show in London that occasionally asks me to comment on the Epstein story. The host wanted to know if the release of tens of thousands of pages of Epstein communications was “the smoking gun.”

The question was meant to refer, I guess, to some explosive irrefutable piece of damning evidence – photos or video of a rape – that might tie Epstein’s running buddy Donald Trump to something more heinous than what is irrefutably known about a serial predator and future President of the United States hanging around with an industrial-scale sex trafficker for years.

The fact is we know a lot already. And the unknown unknowns are in fact very much known to many: Epstein lawyers, certainly; some FBI agents and current and former federal prosecutors; Epstein’s paid enablers; his pals and playmates in the nationless, borderless elite, and of course, the trafficked women. The scheduling emails now in public view are almost always sent by Epstein’s trusty blonde aide Lesley Groff, now a Connecticut housewife cloaked in WASPy New Canaan respectability, who has so far eluded charges. In one email during the period when she was also scheduling [redacteds], she mentions that she’s taking her own kids to Disneyland.

Whether or not Groff or the other enablers and male participant/witnesses are ever forced to talk, IMHO, that “smoking gun” is already right there on the proverbial floor for all the world to see.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow