Former attorney general Pam Bondi refused to appear at a congressional hearing about the Epstein Files. First Lady Melania Trump gave a press conference to deny that she knew about Epstein’s abuse. What we’re learning about Epstein’s connections to powerful people.

Guest

Vicky Ward, she writes the Substack Vicky Ward Investigates. Former Senior Reporter at CNN. She co-produced the docu-series “Chasing Ghislaine.” She published the article “The Talented Mr. Epstein” in Vanity Fair in 2003.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Transcript

Part I 

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: First Lady Melania Trump almost never speaks to the press, but late last week, she surprised everyone with a hastily announced press conference where she dredged up the last story that her husband’s administration wants back in the limelight.

MELANIA TRUMP: I never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach. To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Maxwell.

CHAKRABARTI: The first lady’s denial of any kind of relationship with human trafficker and serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein is contradicted by emails between her and Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. But that’s actually been known for some time. The first lady instead pointed to legal documents as proof of her distance from Maxwell and Epstein.

MELANIA TRUMP: I’m not a witness or a name witness in connection with any of Epstein’s crimes. My name has never appeared in court documents, depositions, victim statements, or FBI in interviews surrounding the Epstein matter. I have never had any knowledge of Epstein abuse of his victims. I was never involved in any capacity. I was not a participant, was never on Epstein’s plane and never visited his private island.

CHAKRABARTI: And then in that same press conference, the First Lady shifted focus.

MELANIA TRUMP: Now is the time for Congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course, this doesn’t amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to uncover the truth.

I call on Congress to provide the women who have been victimized by Epstein with a public hearing, specifically centered around the survivors. Give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath, in front of Congress, with the power of sworn testimony.

CHAKRABARTI: Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, of course, have been lobbying publicly and hard for some time.

They say they’ve done their work and it’s Congress’s turn to ask the big questions. Now, of course, the really big question raised by last week’s press conference is why First Lady Melania Trump stepped in front of a microphone at all out of the blue. President Donald Trump later told the New York Times that he knew the statement was coming and, quote, it doesn’t bother me.

Now, there are a couple of basic truths about politics in Washington, D.C. The first is follow the money, and the second is when a political leader insists. And very vociferously insists out of the blue that, quote, there’s nothing to see here. There may actually be something rather significant to see, or at least to investigate.

So what is going on right now with the Epstein files? Veteran investigative reporter, Vicky Ward, joins us. She’s a former senior reporter with CNN. She currently writes the Substack Vicky Ward Investigates. And back in 2003, she wrote the groundbreaking profile, headlined the Talented Mr. Epstein for Vanity Fair, and she’s been following the Epstein story and the survivor’s continuous search for justice ever since.

Vicky Ward, welcome back to On Point.

VICKY WARD: Thank you for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So your first take on this really sudden press conference given by the First Lady last week.

WARD: So I thought it was completely bizarre. I think like everybody else if she had come out with this press conference a year ago, I think we would’ve all applauded.

But to come out with it now after we have seen this incredibly incompetent, botched rollout of the Epstein files in which many of the survivors were triggered and wounded, frankly, by many of their details being put out there. And the files being put out so piecemeal and haphazardly.

And now the final sort of insult to injury, Pam Bondi, the woman who was responsible for the incompetent rollout suddenly fired and now no longer giving testimony about her management of the rollout to Congress. I think in the context of all of that, for Melania Trump to suddenly come out with this was a total head scratcher.

Having said that, Meghna, there were two things going on last week that most people would not have been aware of, because they weren’t headline news and one of them wasn’t even a story in this country. But was in fact a story in my native country, the UK. Where a book was published actually about the former Prince Andrew by a guy called Andrew Lownie, and there were some allegations in it that were at the very last minute scrubbed from the hard cover that came out in the UK.

And you have to remember in the UK, they’re very different libel laws from the ones that exist in this country. And there were some allegations in there about Melania Trump’s life before she married Donald Trump. And we do know that Melania Trump is not dissimilar from her husband in that she keeps a very firm hand on the narrative of her life story.

And it’s not the first time that serializations in England of books written Melania or that include Melania and include chapters about her life as a model and when she first came to New York.

CHAKRABARTI: Vicky, may I just quickly ask? So your point is well taken about the difference between libel laws between the U.S. and the UK, but do you have, do you know, and I’m not sure if you do.

But in terms of what was scrubbed from the book, was it actually well reported? Was it supported by evidence? Do we know?

WARD: I think we don’t know. And I think that’s the questions. I think that is the question. But we know that, what I really want to say is, Melania Trump is very sensitive to stories that are out there about her life as a single model out on the scene.

And of course, that is the world that Jeffrey Epstein. Back in those days, knew very well, just as Donald Trump knew very well. But there’s another story, Meghna, that is, that has been doing the rounds in the American media, but on the fringes. That has to do with the man who did introduce Melania to Donald Trump.

And that is a guy called Paolo Zampolli who is now in the Trump administration. He was in the first Trump administration as an ambassador to the UN, and he’s now got some sort of nebulous title, but it’s a diplomatic title and he was even in Hungary last week with the vice president, JD Vance, when JD Vance went to try and shore up support in vain, as it turned out, for Viktor Orbán in the Hungary elections.

But Paolo Zampolli is somebody that Melania and her husband clearly like to keep close. They’ve kept, they’ve given him positions in the administration and they have known for many years a woman called Amanda Ungaro. Who was a Brazilian model, who it turns out was flown to the United States from Paris by Jeffrey Epstein when she was either 16 or 17 years old.

CHAKRABARTI: Vicky, can I just interject here quickly because if you didn’t mention it or I didn’t hear it, forgive me, but Paolo Zampolli, as you said, he ran a modeling agency, correct? A long time ago.

WARD: Yes, he did. He ran a modeling agency and he was. And I know this, I spoke to Paolo Zampolli back in 2002 when I wrote my original profile of Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair. And so he was totally open about the fact that, of course, he knew Jeffrey Epstein. His biggest client, he ran a modeling agency called ID Models, was in fact, Les Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein’s chief benefactor. And of course, he knew Donald Trump very well.

Donald Trump in the 1980s, 1990s was hugely on that sort of modeling scene in New York. And, but it turns out that Amanda Ungaro, Brazilian model flown here by Jeffrey Epstein, part of that scene. Fell into a relationship with Paolo Zampolli and they had a child together. And they were very cozy.

There are numerous photographs of them with the Trumps, including at Mar-a-Largo recently, New Year’s Eve parties. And Amanda Ungaro, she never married Paolo Zampolli. She’s now said he did that by design as a sort of way to keep leverage over her, but she was even given a diplomatic position in the first Trump administration.

She was appointed ambassador to the UN for the island of Grenada.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) And I’m sorry, I did not mean to laugh, but it’s the absurdity of it does seize me every once in a while. But continue, right?

WARD: No, it’s extraordinary and you can see that she’s a very beautiful woman as you’d expect. There are many photographs of her and her son Giovanni, and they’re all together at the White House. There are these, they clearly socialized a lot. Fast forward, however, it turns out that about 18 months, two years ago, she and Paolo Zampolli split up. There was a nasty custody battle over this son who is now 15, 16 years old, and she moved to Miami, married a plastic surgeon who had a green card, but wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

Suddenly, they were both arrested on fraud charges, and then she has claimed that Paolo used his connections to get ICE involved so that she was then detained for three months behind bars by ICE and then deported from the country.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Vicky, just to recap where you took us in the first segment, Paolo Zampolli, he used to run a modeling agency in the eighties and nineties. Jeffrey Epstein recruited one young Amanda Ungaro, who was 17 at the time to come over to the United States. Zampolli has a relationship with Ungaro. They later get married. They are frequently photographed with the Trumps.

They know each other very well. Zampolli then divorces Ungaro, horrible custody battle. And you are just getting to the point where it has been reported that Zampolli used his connections within the Trump administration to get his ex-wife transferred to ICE custody after she had been arrested in Florida on fraud charges. Yes?

WARD: Correct. And so just to be clear, I’m not sure she was recruited by Epstein. Okay. I believe Jean-Luc Brunel, a known Epstein accomplice who also died in prison apparently by suicide in Paris. He recruited her and Epstein, but it was Epstein, along with Ghislaine Maxwell who flew her to this country. And she, and importantly, she never married Paolo Zampolli because which is why she doesn’t have U.S. citizenship.

CHAKRABARTI: So it was a custody battle exclusively over their son. It was custody battle for the son. But despite not having U.S. citizen, she was still a member of the Trump administration and being made ambassador to UN for Grenada.

… It’s a mess. And yes. Amanda has claimed that Paolo Zamboni had her put in detention for over three months by ICE and then deported back to Brazil. She surfaced last week right before Melania Trump gave that extraordinary press conferences and on her social media, and she basically went public with her story, which is a shocking story. And she made, I would say, veiled threats, not even veiled threats. Threats on her Instagram. Directly to the First Lady saying, I’ve got nothing to lose at this point. I’ve lost my son; I’ve been treated this way. And you sat there. You watched all this firsthand and I’m now going to talk about everything that I know.

And so I think that and there were some other things she said. I’m paraphrasing that were, I’m going to read one thing. She said, I’d known you for 20 years. You knew I was detained in ICE. You were present in my life every year on my son’s birthday. Even sending Secret Service and being the first to congratulate him back in 2016, something was clearly wrong, but I’m not part of any evil mission involving children.

So what did you do, Melania? You tried to involve me, but you failed because I have character. Who knows? All we do know is that on the back of this, Melania Trump gave that absolutely extraordinary press conference.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes, Vicky, I have another one of Amanda Ungaro’s social media posts here.

This one’s on X and it was from just, yeah, as you said, April 9th. So just last week.

Hello Melania. I was around you for 20 years. You knew I was inside ICE, and you know what hurts. After all this time, I stayed close to your family, your mother and your father. Not because of you, but because of them, at events and everything else.

So shut your mouth when speaking about me, because I will expose everything I know.

CHAKRABARTI: Beyond these social media posts, is there any, do we know anything about what she claims to know or whether or not it’s true or not?

WARD: Yes. Actually, I have corroborated all this, I have reached out to Amanda Ungaro and also to her husband and I have a source who is close to both of them, who says that absolutely every word of her story is correct. So what we don’t know is what she could tell us about Melania Trump and Paolo Zamboni, and the connection to Jeffrey Epstein. I do know from my own separate reporting that Paolo Zamboni loomed very large in the eyes of a lot of the models who were caught up in the world of Jeffrey Epstein and that he was somebody who was on the phone to a large number of them when Jeffrey Epstein died. And I always thought it was very curious that Trump gave him a minor position in his administrations. And I always wondered, frankly, was it because Paolo Zamboni knew things about the Trump, Donald Trump, and perhaps now Melania Trump, that they do not want out there?

And maybe this is what this all goes to. I’m speculating, obviously.

CHAKRABARTI: And by the way, that position that he has, that Zamboni has is United States a special representative for global partnerships.

WARD: Okay. Really very must be very 24/7 and pressing business. So yeah, so I think it is extraordinary.

Having said all of that, Meghna, some of the survivors, I know Lisa Phillips, one of them has set out, has said, she’s grateful for sort of any help they can get. But at this point. As you yourself said at the opening of the program. The survivors have come a very long way with no thanks to Donald Trump. But they have, their voices have been heard. And it was an extraordinary to think that Congress responded to them and with the exception of one person voted to pass the Epstein Transparency Act, which is why we now have bit by bit piecemeal and much slower than I would like, many people around Epstein are being put on the record and giving their stories to Congress. Maybe she didn’t offer this, but actually maybe it’s time that Melania Trump came in. So she’s got nothing to say. She’s got, so there’s nothing incriminating.

There was nothing remotely incriminating with Hillary Clinton either, but she testified. So maybe Melania could testify on record to Congress and tell us what she does know.

CHAKRABARTI: So we’re going to talk about Hillary Clinton in a moment. But going back to the things that the First Lady actually insisted upon  in that press conference.

We all heard her say that she had no relationship whatsoever with or no friendship with Jeffrey Epstein or Maxwell as she called her. And yet, as you’ve mentioned already, Vicky, there are a lot of photographs of them over a period of many years. And then there’s also what had fairly recently surfaced is a 2002 email from Melania Trump to Ghislaine Maxwell, and I have it here in front of me.

It’s from October of 2002, and it says:

Dear G — How are you? Nice story about J.E., meaning Epstein, in NY Mag, New York magazine. You look great on the picture. I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in New York. Have a great time. Love, Melania.

So there’s clearly evidence of contact at the very least, between.

WARD: And also, the thing that’s interesting about that email is it was completely unnecessary. I know this, 2002, the fall of 2002, which is when she wrote that email, is when I was researching and reporting my profile of Jeffrey Epstein.

And Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated that New York Magazine story as an effort to try to kill My Vanity Fair piece, he thought if he could get a puff piece in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair would decide he was no longer somebody we were interested in profiling and so that’s why the story that ran in New York Magazine, which was at the time, it was a weekly or a biweekly, whereas we were a monthly magazine. So they were able to come out much more quickly than we were. And that was the famous piece, which had, it wasn’t a famous piece, but it had the famous Donald Trump quote in it about Epstein being a great guy and liking women on the younger side.

And so I think what’s interesting about Melania Trump’s email, is she didn’t need to write it. It was a completely unctuous flattery. And you have to remember; Melania Trump was not married to Donald Trump at the time. And was she trying to, thought by sucking up to Ghislaine and sucking up to Jeffrey Epstein, that would be helpful to her and her relation to Donald Trump?

Again, who knows? But that is not an email that’s in response to anything from Ghislaine Maxwell. It’s purely an unctuous sycophantic email.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay. So well then, to be, just to scrutinize things fairly, does that mean that when the First Lady last week insisted, here’s the quote from her.

To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Maxwell, that it could be true if she’s just writing in 2002, the suck up email, as you said, and they didn’t really have a friendship.

WARD: They clearly had a social New York chit chat, you can see that and the likelihood of her as Donald Trump’s girlfriend, which she was at that, point not knowing Epstein and Maxwell would be very slim. Because in 2002, Trump and Epstein were good friends. It’s only in 2004 that they had their falling out. This is just a case where, to me, I never thought for a second that Melania and Ghislaine Maxwell were best friends.

Or, like anything like that. But did they know each other? Were they cordial? Yes, of course. So now the question is why is Melania Trump protesting so strongly about the definition of that relationship.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I go back to something you said earlier that Amanda Ungaro is alleging or insinuating?

Because I want to be sure I heard you correctly, that in her social media posts, she was telling Melania that she wouldn’t. That Amanda didn’t participate in some of the things, implying that Melania, can you explain that a little bit?

WARD: I can’t. This is something that I read and was shocked by the innuendo here. I’m not part of any evil mission involving children. It’s a loaded sentence. It is a loaded sentence, and I think we wait to see how this story unfolds. I do know again, through my source that Amanda Ungaro is in Brazil, is feeling the pressure of all of this and has taken down some of these.

I think she’s turned off actually, she’s taken down her Instagram I think right now.

CHAKRABARTI: Is she concerned for her safety?

WARD: I think she’s pretty frightened, is my understanding.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I would imagine.

WARD: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so I don’t know if we can, because this story is, there are so many avenues and tunnels, but can you put in context the significance, if any of this latest sort of volcanic episode involving the First Lady and overall what we are learning or have continued to learn and understand about the truth of what Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have done. Is there a way to situate this in that bigger story?

WARD: I think not yet. Only because I think a large number of journalists and other people who followed this for a long time frustrated at the piecemeal process of all of this.

But I think that we are all hoping that as each person comes forward to Congress and has to go on the record and testifies, even though after each one, particularly, certain of the people who’ve come forward and testified, I’ve been left feeling frustrated, feeling fairly sure that Congress hasn’t pushed them.

Closely enough or the phrase I can’t remember or that’s privileged have been used in an annoyingly large number of instances. But nonetheless, I think what we’re all hoping is that when you’ve got everybody on the record you are then able to line up all these different pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and hopefully you begin to see the whole, that you have to wait until all the different people in the different facets and walks of life around Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell give their story to Congress on the record.

And that hopefully from that and hopefully the survivors who are more familiar with what happened to them than obviously anybody else, they’re listening very closely to each of these accounts. And that they’re taking notes and looking for inconsistencies or looking for when what one person says doesn’t gel, not just with their memories, but with what somebody else says.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder if we will ever be able to get that full and complete picture. Because I note now that the current acting attorney general for the United States, Todd Blanche, who was once President Trump’s lawyer, is also the same person who had that infamous sort of private conversation with an imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell. Whereafter, she was transferred to more cushy surroundings, let me put it that way. And now I think he has been saying that no more files are going to be released.

WARD: Yes, he has. And most importantly, the woman who could explain all this, the attorney, who was Attorney General until 10 seconds ago, Pam Bondi, has weaseled out of explaining to Congress why that is. So I just I hope that Congress will not let either Bondi or Todd Blanche weasel out of this.

And they will say to him okay, your turn. You tell us why. Why are you not releasing anymore? Explain. Explain this botched rollout to us.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Not only do we value top-notch investigative reporting here at On Point, we deeply value local journalists. Because they are doing very important work. And here’s why. Just last month, the Department of Justice released a batch of previously unreleased documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.

And in those documents there were notes from multiple FBI interviews with a South Carolina woman who said she was sexually assaulted not only by Epstein, but by President Donald Trump when she was a minor. Now, the FBI took her allegations seriously enough to interview her several times, and they talked with her back in 2019 when she called the FBI following Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in July of that year.

This month, the South Carolina Post and Courier dug into local records to investigate the woman’s claims. Mitchell Black followed the story alongside Pulitzer Prize winner Marilyn Thompson. And Black told us about the account that the woman gives of the interactions she had with Epstein in Hilton Head, South Carolina, beginning in the 1980s.

BLACK: She described to agents an encounter she said she had with Epstein.

She said that her mother was a local realtor who worked on Hilton Head at the time, and that Epstein had rented a home through the real estate firm. Like the mother did for all renters, this woman said that she offered babysitting services to Epstein and that Epstein called in and that the daughter showed up at the villa and did not find any other kids there. That Epstein ended up applying her with drugs, beginning a series of encounters and a pattern of abuse that would last over between six and 20 encounters.

CHAKRABARTI: Black and Thompson wanted to do the reporting to see if they could identify the woman, and more importantly, fact check several of her claims. So there was a document dump that included details of her life, and the reporters were able to corroborate those details.

BLACK: We wanted to see, well, was this woman really living on the island as a teenager at the time and we’re able to find her picture in a high school yearbook.

She gave a description in a later interview that Epstein blackmailed her mother using nude photos of her, in that the blackmail scheme caused her mother to embezzle money from her real estate company and ended up in prison. We were able to find the identity of the mother and go through court records and see that she indeed went to prison for the embezzlement charges that the woman described to FBI agents.

CHAKRABARTI: Although Black and Thompson weren’t able to fully conclude that the woman who made these allegations was indeed assaulted by Epstein, documents pertaining to her case actually parallel Epstein’s proven behaviors in other assault and abuse cases. Now additionally, they were able to identify that documents related to the South Carolina woman’s case.

Some of them weren’t included in the original three and a half million document dump from the DOJ. Now, those were eventually released, as I said earlier, just last month, and those documents include references to President Donald Trump, including allegations that the White House currently and very clearly denies.

BLACK: Those records show further detail also about the woman’s encounters with Epstein, as well as a hazy description of an encounter she said she had with Trump saying that she traveled with Epstein to the New York area where Trump forced her to perform a sex act, and it’s important to note here.

The allegations against Trump remain unproven, that the White House has vehemently denied the woman’s accusations saying that there’s zero credible evidence that her account is true. At the same time, still, not all of the records from her case were uploaded to the Department of Justice’s database.

CHAKRABARTI: Black still holds out hope that all of those records may eventually come out to light and some more crucial information will be made public. He looks forward to future testimony of other powerful figures connected with Epstein, and hopes congressional leaders will be able to find answers, especially when it relates to still missing documents in the case of the woman from South Carolina.

BLACK: Why were those three interviews originally withheld from the DOJs database? Was it a clerical error? As the Justice Department has said, will the former Attorney General affirm that under oath? Why were there large portions of redactions in the documents that are public facing, including the names of potential corroborating witnesses?

Why was the identity of a friend who also called the FBI tip line about the woman’s claims, why was her identity or identifying information about her left exposed for anyone to see?

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Mitchell Black, a reporter with the Post and Courier in South Carolina. He’s been following the Epstein story as it played out in South Carolina, along with Marilyn Thompson.

Okay. Vicky Ward, there’s something specific that Black and Thompson uncovered that I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. They didn’t find any hard evidence that corroborates the abuse allegations. But when this young woman spoke to the FBI, she talked about that Epstein had blackmailed her and her mother using nude photos, and that forced her mother to embezzle money from her real estate business in order to satisfy the terms of the blackmail.

And they found evidence that indeed her mother had been actually, had ended up in prison on embezzlement charges. For you as an investigative reporter, does that circle awfully close to corroborating other things that the woman would’ve said?

WARD: I tell you what’s so immediately leaps out at me about that, is that obviously the two women that I spoke to back in 2002 for my Vanity Fair profile, whose stories were cut from the final published article were the two sisters, Maria and Annie Farmer. And what’s striking about the parallels of their story with what you just described is that Maria Farmer was an artist and the reason she went to the FBI in 1996 and the FBI did nothing about it, was that she had nude photographs of her sisters in a lockbox stolen by Jeffrey Epstein.

And this was after both she and her younger sister, who was underage at the time, had separately been sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The night she stormed out, and she realized that Epstein had taken these nude photographs from her and very much, I think she told me at the time, that she felt he held that over her.

If she ever spoke about what had happened to her, he would somehow use those photographs. And she was really terrified about that. And of course, the tragedy in her case was that she told, she went to the police and the police said, we can’t do anything about it. You need to go to the FBI. She did go to the FBI.

We now know it’s been absolutely confirmed in the Epstein files. In 1996, Maria Farmer went to the FBI specifically about the fact that Epstein had stolen these nude photographs of her sisters and the FBI did nothing. So it does sound eerily familiar.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s talk about what you mentioned a bit earlier about Congress and its rule here. Now, right after the First Lady gave that surprise press conference, Jouse oversight and government reform committee chair Republican James Comer said that his committee will hold hearings to give Epstein’s survivors a chance to speak. Now, as we mentioned before, they have been speaking in any way they can for a couple of decades now.

What we really want to hear is from people under oath who were in Epstein’s orbit. Now I understand that actually may happen, Vicky?

WARD: Yes. On the calendar, there is actually a lineup of people I definitely have questions for. And wanna hear from, we have Leon Black coming in May.

Now Leon Black is a billionaire who paid Jeffrey Epstein we know $170 million thereabouts for what he claims was tax advice. Now this is in the years after Jeffrey Epstein got out of jail as a convicted sex offender. And I think, you know, many people, including Senator Ron Wyden, who is not on the oversight committee, but who has spent four years digging into Leon Black’s finances, has, I think Wyden and a lot of people have just found Leon Black’s story incredible.

Just simply unbelievable. Why would you go to Jeffrey Epstein, a man who didn’t graduate from college rather than an accountant or a tax attorney for tax advice and why on earth and why would you pay him $170 million? It doesn’t add up. And as I have reported again and again, the reason the money is so important is without the money, there’s no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein really committed sex crimes.

The reason the money is so important is without the money, there’s no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein really committed sex crimes.

Vicky Ward

It was the money that enabled him to pull off their secret pyramid scheme. And so Leon Black has, I think, a tremendous amount to explain, and he is being put before Congress in May. We also have on the calendar Lesley Groff, woman that I certainly spoke to back in 2002. She was Jeffrey Epstein’s gatekeeper, and I’ve never really understood why she hasn’t been asked to speak until now.

I believe she was one of the four names, the four women that Epstein covered in his non-prosecution agreement. Remember the sweetheart plea deal he suddenly copped in Florida rather than facing federal charges. He agreed to plead guilty to two minor state charges. And he asked as part of that, that four women to be part of named women to be part of a non-prosecution agreement.

In other words, they wouldn’t be prosecuted. Lesley Groff was one of them. I think we see in the Epstein files very clearly that not much happened in Jeffrey Epstein’s life that Lesley Groff didn’t know about. There were no guests coming and going, housekeepers coming and going, staff, she was in charge of all of it, and so I think we are very anxious to hear what, you know, what she will say? I’m sure she will say she didn’t had no idea about the girls. But again, I hope Congress has really read these files thoroughly and pushes back on that. Because it seems astonishing to me that anybody that close to Jeffrey Epstein in the day to day of his life could have no idea of what was going on.

And then we also have Ted Waitt. Now Ted Waitt is another billionaire who Ghislaine Maxwell dated. He actually was, Ghislaine Maxwell tried to get away from Jeffrey Epstein in from about 2004, ’05 onwards. And I think she wanted to put all of it behind her. And she saw Ted Waitt, this billionaire from the West Coast, as her escape.

But the problem with all of that was she couldn’t outrun her past. And I think Ted Waitt began to get an inkling of what had been going on in her previous life with Jeffrey Epstein and soon after that, split up. But he would be interesting because there’s no suggestion that he had any involvement with the sex crimes.

And so he is a sort of honest outsider on the fringes of this, who has nothing to lose in his testimony, we just want to know what it all looked like from his viewpoint, what Maxwell may have said to him in private. And so I think his testimony could actually be very valuable because he’s not, he has no reason to spin anything.

Nobody’s remotely suggesting he knows, he was involved in anything untoward. We also have the prison guard when Jeffrey Epstein supposedly hung himself, I think she’s got, one of them, she has a lot of questions. Again, to answer because it has emerged recently that she was Googling who Jeffrey Epstein was. Googling all sorts of suspicious things right before he suddenly wound up dying.

Again, extraordinary circumstances inside that prison at the time.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s even been recent reporting that witnesses in the prison noticed corrections officers shredding masses amounts of paper after Epstein’s death.

WARD: Yes. So I think she, very important testimony there. And then Bill Gates and again, I wonder just because Bill Gates, unlike many, most, in fact, of the rich and powerful people around Jeffrey Epstein who’ve been reluctant to speak about their relationship with Epstein. And actually, Bill Gates unprompted did a town hall about how Epstein conned him. And has actually, I think, tried to be more forthcoming than most and apologized for what happened. Again, I would be curious if Bill Gates will now try to give an explanation of why Epstein was so alluring and why Bill Gates even crossed the threshold.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.