Karyna Shuliak was Epstein’s last known girlfriend who was named in his will – did she also have his baby?

Jeffrey Epstein’s trust agreement has shed light on his relationship with a Belarusian woman almost 40 years his junior. As messages emerge from Sarah Ferguson congratulating him on the birth of a son, Katie Rosseinsky examines what we know about the woman who stood to inherit a fortune

A ranch in New Mexico. A flat in Paris. The infamous island of Little St James. The similarly notorious townhouse in New York. $50m. And a 33-carat diamond ring. This is just some of what the convicted paedophile and multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein wanted to leave behind for his last known girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak.

The details of Epstein’s will, signed just two days before he died by suicide in jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges, have remained highly opaque – until now. Over the weekend, the US Department of Justice released millions of new files and documents relating to Epstein, including insight into the trust agreement that he planned to use to dole out his rumoured $577m estate.

This has put Shuliak firmly in the spotlight, although it’s still not clear exactly how wealthy the Belarus native, who is now in her mid-thirties, may or may not end up. Much of the money from Epstein’s estate has been paid out in settlements to his victims; it’s thought that the remaining assets are still tied up in the court system in the US Virgin Islands, where he was based.

What is also putting the pair’s relationship under further scrutiny, though, is the revelation that Epstein may have had a secret son, born in 2011. In a message allegedly sent by Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York and ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, appears to congratulate him on the birth. “Don’t know if you are still on this bbm but heard from The Duke that you have had a baby boy,” she wrote. “Even though you never kept in touch, I still am here with love, friendship and congratulations on your baby boy. Sarah xx.”

Karyna Shuliak and Jeffrey Epstein were thought to have been in a relationship for around a decade (Billy Farrell/BFA/Shutterstock)

Epstein is not known to have fathered any children, but if Ferguson’s claims were true, the child would be in his mid-teens. The identity of the alleged mother is not referred to in the messages, and Shuliak is not named in relation to the child. Indeed, elsewhere Ferguson appears to be more concerned simply with being left out of the loop. “I did not even know you were having a baby,” she wrote.

The allegations, however, potentially add another strange layer to the already odd relationship between one-time dental student Shuliak, and the financier, almost four decades her senior.

Shuliak came to the United States in 2009 when she was 20, and is thought to have entered Epstein’s orbit soon after, possibly not long after his first jail stint. The financier had already pled guilty to a state charge of procuring a girl under the age of 18 for prostitution the previous year, and served around 13 months in a minimum security prison (during which time he was allowed out of his cell for 12 hours a day, six days a week, to work at his office, thanks to a staggeringly lenient day release scheme). After that, he spent a year of probation under house arrest in Palm Beach, until August 2010.

A source has claimed that her willingness to stand by the financier after his initial disgrace solidified their connection. “Everyone turned their backs on him after prison and denounced him as an anti-Christ, even his closest friends,” the source told the Daily Mail. “No one stayed with him except Karyna who was there until the very last moment.”

Accounts of her personality seem to vary, too. One insider claimed to the Mail that Shuliak earned the nickname “the inspector”, because “she was madly jealous over Epstein and always investigating who he was in contact with”. Others, though, paint her as shy to the point of silence in company. In a podcast interview with the Daily Beast, the author Michael Wolff claimed that Shuliak was “absolutely silent” when he visited Epstein’s home.

Even the millions of documents in the Epstein Files don’t shine a huge amount of light upon the pair. In one email, sent earlier on in their relationship in 2012, Shuliak appears to tell Epstein: “I love you very much, you will always have me, no matter what, as long as it makes you happy.” Other missives, though, are less hopeful. “You have absolutely ruined me today, each minute I am struggling to not cry,” a 2013 email reads.

Later, her messages tend towards more domestic concerns. In one, sent a few years later, she seems to bemoan that it would be “inhumane” to fly her pet cats to “the island” on a commercial flight. “I just can’t torture them [like] that, it breaks my heart,” she writes. Other emails see her ordering furniture and apparently doing other admin.

For much of this rumoured decade-long relationship, though, Shuliak was in fact married to Jennifer Kalin, another woman in Epstein’s orbit; their wedding took place in 2013. It has been alleged that Epstein’s trafficking ring used “sham same-sex marriages” to “get citizenship for girls that he wanted to keep in this country without facing a high level of scrutiny in the citizenship process”, as Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer representing Epstein victims, put it when discussing the case generally.

An alleged email from Sarah Ferguson seems to claim that Epstein had a son (US Department of Justice)

In 2021, Kalin, who has not spoken publicly about her experiences, attended court in Manhattan during the sex trafficking trial of Epstein’s longtime associate and ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. “She realises people are sticking their necks out and testifying and wants them to know they’re not alone,” Kalin’s attorney Bradley Edwards told the Daily Beast. Shuliak and Kalin are thought to have divorced in 2019, not long after Epstein’s arrest.

Epstein reportedly helped his girlfriend pay her way through dental school at the prestigious Columbia University, and she was eventually registered as a dentist in Florida and California; she was also linked to an office in St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands that shared an address with Epstein’s shell company. This apparently wasn’t the only financial assistance that Shuliak may have received from her boyfriend: other reports claim that Epstein helped fund her mother’s medical treatment, too.

And at one point, it seems that Epstein was considering a more formal commitment. Among the jewels that he had planned to bequeath to Shuliak, according to the will, was a near 33-carat diamond ring, given to her “in contemplation of marriage”, according to handwritten notes in the document’s margins. It is described in near-forensic detail there, as “set with a regular cut diamond, weighing approximately 32.73 carats, flanked by baguette cut diamonds mounted in platinum”.

Epstein’s suicide in his jail cell has been the subject of conspiracy theories, including claims that he was murdered to stop him blowing the whistle on his rich and powerful associates (comprehensive investigations have concluded that there was no criminality involved in his death). Remaining loyal to him until the grim end, Shuliak is thought to have been the last person Epstein called on the phone before his death.

Shuliak has, true to Wolff’s memory of the quiet girl at dinner, remained completely silent. But as yet more revelations emerge from the millions of documents in the Epstein files, will she speak out?