What Ghislaine Maxwell really knows and why she will never tell
The FBI’s Epstein files have enough information to fill 100,000 books, but the reason they haven’t been released could go beyond the powerful men named in them. Barry Levine and Julie Brown, who have investigated Jeffrey Epstein from the beginning, tell Alex Hannaford why so few have been brought to justice
The conspiracies began circulating before the proverbial ink was dry. Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier and convicted child sex offender, “dead after ‘apparent suicide’ in New York jail”, ran the headline in The Washington Post on 11 August 2019 (single quote marks theirs). The Boston Globe also described it as an “apparent suicide”. “Epstein’s jail death gets US scrutiny,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer.
When FBI agents arrested Epstein after his private jet landed in New Jersey a month earlier and charged him with sex-trafficking minors in Florida and New York, his victims waited to learn the truth. After his death, the voices clamouring for transparency got louder. As did those claiming conspiracy.
A year on, when his former girlfriend, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested by the FBI at a secluded property in New Hampshire, they didn’t stop. And they didn’t quieten when Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
Over the years, conspiracy theories have abounded of deep state cover-ups, speculation that rich and powerful men had been involved in an elite sex-trafficking ring, and that Epstein had been murdered so their identities would never be revealed.
Donald Trump, on the presidential campaign trail in 2024, fanned the flames further when he announced he’d seek to open the government’s “Epstein files” should he be elected.
When he did win the presidency, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke of an Epstein “client list” sitting on her desk. We knew that a cast of celebrities and politicians were in Epstein’s black book – names like Bill Clinton, Andrew Mounbatten Windsor, Tony Blair, Bill Cosby, and Woody Allen. But were these men just recipients of Epstein’s political donations, friends, acquaintances? Did any incriminating evidence lie within the thousands of documents the FBI had assembled in the course of its investigation? Being mentioned alone did not suggest any wrongdoing. Finally, it looked like we were about to find out.
Then, in the summer, Trump’s justice department and the FBI suddenly released a two-page unsigned memo concluding Epstein hadn’t maintained a client list after all – and what’s more, it wouldn’t be releasing any further files related to its sex-trafficking investigation, despite the promises by Trump and Bondi who had pledged to release a “truckload” of bombshell FBI documents.
Nobody could have foreseen a fissure in the Maga ranks to appear so quickly and prominently. Karl Rove, former White House deputy chief of staff under George Bush, said we were witnessing what happens when conspiracy collides with reality. “For years,” he said, “Trump raised questions about Epstein … After assuming the presidency a second time, Mr Trump was obligated to deliver.” When he didn’t, “many in Maga reacted with incredulity and anger”.
Tucker Carlson, once Trump’s most vocal cheerleader, turned on him, accusing the administration of betraying its base and of dismissing legitimate questions about Epstein.
Each day, the saga seems to unravel further. The Wall Street Journal published a story describing a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album given to Epstein for his 50th birthday. Trump vehemently denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory”. He then proceeded to sue the paper and its owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
While Trump announced he asked Bondi to release “pertinent” files on the criminal investigation of Epstein, “subject to court approval”, further intrigue was stirred when the WSJ reported that Bondi had informed Trump during a briefing back in May that his name appeared in justice department documents related to Epstein.
The White House pushed back, dismissing the WSJ story as “fake news”. But an unnamed White House official told Reuters they were not denying that Trump’s name appears in the documents. Then, on 20 August, a judge rejected the Trump administration’s request to unseal transcripts from grand jury documents relating to Epstein from 2005 and 2007 because they did not meet any of the extraordinary exceptions under federal law that could make them public.
In July 2025, an official from the US Department of Justice met with Ghislaine Maxwell inside an office at a Florida courthouse. Ahead of the meeting, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said: “If Ghislaine Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” Their first meeting was described as “very productive” by Maxwell’s lawyer, but for now, it remains unclear what she told investigators.
After the meetings, Maxwell was transferred from FCI Tallahassee, a low-security federal correctional institution in Florida, to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, where she is currently being held.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat and fierce Trump critic, took issue with the fact that Trump sent Blanche, his former personal lawyer turned federal prosecutor, to interview Maxwell ahead of her potential public testimony. “The conflict of interest is glaring. It stinks of high corruption,” he said on X (Twitter).
It’s important to understand what, exactly, the Epstein files are – and how they differ from the court documents Trump was asking to be released.
Barry Levine, author of The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, says that the grand jury testimony at issue is very limited and has little to do with the two-decades-long sex-trafficking operation that Epstein ran.
He says the US attorney at the time, Geoffrey Berman, went in front of a grand jury and presented just enough evidence to successfully bring an indictment. “And that indictment was very narrow in its content – for the sexual abuse of minors from 2002 to 2005 at Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach and New York,” Levine says. “If you look at the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, that prosecution was extremely narrow, also in terms of the specific allegations against her.” Maxwell was convicted on five sex-trafficking-related counts.
Levine said if these court documents are released, they’re going to tell us very little in addition to what we already know. “It’s basically a sliver of the information that’s contained in the actual FBI files.”
Those files – the “real” Epstein files, if you like – are, Levine says, incredibly detailed. The FBI files cover every aspect of Epstein’s crimes and his life over two decades, including extensive interviews with victims and information that goes all the way back to the original FBI investigation in 2006.
Yesterday, the House committee on oversight and government reform released never-before-seen emails from the latest production from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. In private correspondence with Maxwell, Epstein wrote in 2011 that Trump “spent hours at my house” with a victim of sex trafficking, referring to Trump as a “dog that hasn’t barked”.
In a separate email with author Michael Wolff in 2019, Epstein stated explicitly that Trump, “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”. In another email with Wolff in 2015, Epstein and Wolff discuss if they can “craft an answer” for Trump’s upcoming CNN interview, with Wolff characterising Epstein’s leverage over Trump, saying, “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency.”
“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover. These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” said ranking member Robert Garcia. “The Department of Justice must fully release the Epstein files to the public immediately. The oversight committee will continue pushing for answers and will not stop until we get justice for the victims.”
When asked about the latest release, the White House accused Democrats on the committee of releasing “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative” about President Trump, including one in which Epstein wrote that Trump “spent hours at my house” with someone the Democrats alleged was a victim.
“These emails prove absolutely nothing, other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
.jpeg)
Epstein was already a convicted child molester when he was arrested in 2019: in 2008, he pleaded guilty to a state charge in Florida of procuring a minor for prostitution. Back then, a federal investigation into his crimes resulted in a “non-prosecution agreement”. Alexander Acosta, who was then the US attorney responsible, said he offered a lenient plea deal because he was told Epstein was an intelligence asset.
As Levine said, “We don’t know if it was US intelligence or a foreign role as an intelligence asset.” If, indeed, Epstein was an intelligence asset at all. By all accounts, he had a grandiose image of himself as an “international man of mystery”.
The FBI file on Epstein, which dates back to that time, is 300GB. “That translates to enough information to fill perhaps 100,000 books by some estimates,” Levine says.
We don’t know if there has ever been any criminal investigation into Trump’s conduct as it relates to Epstein. “But,” Levine said, “that doesn’t necessarily mean that there [aren’t] details about Donald Trump in the file because they were friends for 15 years. He was Epstein’s wingman after [Trump’s] divorce from Ivana Trump; they hung out a great deal. They were still friends during his marriage to Marla Maples and even up to the time when Trump was courting Melania.”
Trump and Epstein were friends before; according to the president, they fell out in the early 2000s. By not allowing full disclosure of the Epstein files, Trump has ignited what Levine said is the most infighting within the Maga movement he’s ever seen. “There’s a raging inferno in the Maga ranks that Trump has been unable to put out, and we’re seeing individuals who have worshipped him like a god now speaking out against him. It really is fascinating.”
So what does Maxwell really know? According to journalist Julie Brown, whose investigation into Epstein for the Miami Herald in 2018 was credited with the FBI reopening the sexual abuse case against him: everything.
“I think [the DOJ] are trying to get her to say Trump wasn’t involved. I think that’s the aim of this,” Brown says. “They’re not aiming to expose anybody else who was involved. They’re just aiming to clear up any misconceptions around Trump … So far there’s been no evidence he was involved with Epstein’s crimes at all, but nevertheless, the idea that he shut the investigation down so solidly without even saying, ‘We’re going to look at this a little bit more,’ I think makes a lot of people wonder…”
Brown, whose 2021 book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story has recently seen a surge in demand, selling out both in shops and online, says it’s unfortunate the way the Trump administration has handled the Epstein files. “For a long time, they promised transparency with this case … And I think there was some hope on the part of both the public and the survivors that they would get some answers. Here was a man who abused hundreds of young girls and women over two decades. And he essentially got away with it.
“We don’t know why they’re not releasing it. It’s a little bit disturbing to be announcing all over television that you’re going to release these files and then all of a sudden on the Friday after the Fourth of July holiday, when nobody’s really paying attention to the news, to issue this statement that basically says there’s nothing to see here and we’re not going to open the files.”
Brown says there are likely a lot of other people involved in Epstein’s crimes that haven’t been brought to justice; so many, she says, who have avoided prosecution.
Epstein was trafficking underage girls for sex over the course of two decades. Because of that, his co-conspirators could number as many as 100, Brown believes. “He had so many different people work for him at different times – people who helped arrange his ‘schedule’ in quote marks, lawyers who helped arrange the visas for models that he would bring from overseas, pilots. He had a huge staff of people. The list goes on and on.”
As Barry Levine says, we know from the attorney general in the Virgin Islands who investigated Epstein’s operation there that “Epstein was using international fixers to bring women in from all different countries, like Russia and elsewhere.”
When Palm Beach police conducted a search of Epstein’s home there in 2005, they confiscated hundreds of notepads, the contents of some of which have been made public in civil lawsuits.
“On those, you’ll see messages from powerful men who called him,” Brown says. “They’ll have their name, and then it’ll say ‘I’m at this hotel’. Now, that’s not enough to say they were doing anything with underage girls.
“But I know from talking to some of the attorneys representing these survivors that there were powerful people who would come to Palm Beach and basically call to tell Epstein, ‘I’m here’. And the unspoken or unwritten message was: you can send somebody to me.”
Brown believes that it’s unlikely Maxwell will ever reveal what is in those files. At her trial, her main line of defence was that it didn’t happen – “that these girls were all making it up to get money out of a very wealthy man”.
The truth is, Brown said, Maxwell knows exactly what’s in the Epstein files. “She knows everything … And she used her motherly way, her nurturing way, to lure these women into this orbit.”