This week, it has been almost a full year since I published my first investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and it’s also when I found Virginia Giuffre again, this time in a place I had never expected to find her.
I had spent most of the year following Epstein’s money because I wanted to understand something that had bothered me from the beginning. Federal prosecutors had interviewed victims, prepared a draft indictment containing dozens of charges and subpoenaed records from Epstein’s companies, yet the case they were building never reached a courtroom.
His lawyers negotiated with prosecutors over charges, language and what the public would be allowed to see, and the agreement they eventually reached protected Epstein from the federal prosecution while extending protection to potential coconspirators.
I wanted to know how a person reaches the point where something like that becomes possible. I had to understand where Epstein’s money came from, who trusted him with theirs, what authority other people gave him, what he was actually doing for them and how the businesses attached to his name worked.
That sent me even further back than the strange sci-fi novel Donald Barr had written shortly after we believe he hired Epstein, the reason I started digging to begin with.
I ended up reading about Epstein as a mathematically gifted child in the 1960s, then trying to figure out how a man without a college degree ended up at Dalton in 1974 and, two years later, at Bear Stearns. That led me into the a financial world I knew nothing about at the time, but it also pulled me toward Robert Maxwell, Adnan Khashoggi, BCCI, the Church Committee and government investigations that had already shown us something important about the period Epstein came of age in: governments, intelligence agencies, banks and private businessmen often worked through relationships and institutions the public could barely see while they were operating.
I was trying to understand the world Epstein came from vs. where he ended up when Leslie Wexner appeared in my research again.
This time, I wanted to understand the money itself. Wexner had given Epstein power of attorney, meaning Epstein could legally act for him, sign for him and make decisions involving his property and finances. Then I started finding deals where it became surprisingly hard to separate what belonged to Wexner from what later became associated with Epstein.
Take the Manhattan townhouse. In 1998, Epstein agreed to buy it from Wexner for $20 million, except Epstein did not simply hand Wexner $20 million and walk away with the house. The agreement required $10 million at closing, while Wexner agreed to let Epstein owe him the other $10 million until the following year, with interest.
Then I found New York Strategy Group, the company that handled Epstein’s finances. Darren Indyke bought the controlling share of that company from Jeffrey Schantz, and the money for that purchase came from Wexner Children’s Trust II. Nearly a decade later, in November 2007, while federal prosecutors were investigating Epstein, Epstein’s Financial Trust Company paid $3,458,416.55 to finish paying off that obligation. JPMorgan records also document another $2.25 million moving from the New Albany property business to New York Strategy Group between January 2007 and April 2008.
So I had started out asking where Epstein got his money, and now I was looking at Wexner financing half of the townhouse Epstein would later be known for, Wexner’s family trust financing the purchase of the company managing Epstein’s money, and millions more moving between the New Albany business and that same financial office years later.
That changed the question for me. How much of what we have spent decades describing as Epstein’s wealth had actually been created through financial arrangements with other people?
Once I started asking that, the companies became impossible to ignore. Southern Trust had originally been called Financial Infomatics.
From what I understood, it described working with roughly 200 million personal profiles and combining information that could identify a person with biomedical information, genetic information, financial information and other records so the data could be analyzed together.
Then I found Southern Trust paying Novamente, the artificial intelligence company run by Ben Goertzel, for software. One $30,000 invoice from 2015 was for technology, installation and training to analyze gene expression and genetic variation. So Epstein’s company that had already described a business built around combining enormous amounts of information about people was now paying an AI company for software designed to analyze genetic and medical data. In 2015, over a decade ago.
Then there was China Medical Data Services. The contracts I found there were talking about government medical and social insurance information in China and, very specifically, who would have the right to commercially use some of that information outside the country.
At that point I was no longer reading about a rich man moving money between investment accounts. I was reading about companies interested in knowing who people were, combining information about them and making that information commercially useful.
That made the technology investments much easier for me to understand when they started appearing.
I found Epstein’s money in Peter Thiel’s Valar funds. Then I followed money that went through Ehud Barak into Carbyne, the emergency communications company whose technology can receive things like a caller’s location and live video when they contact emergency services. It currently manages millions of American 911 calls.
Then I found something that had turned up a few times but finally made more sense, Adfin.
Epstein’s Southern Trust and a Cantor Fitzgerald investment company had both put money into the same business, and I found the paperwork where Jeffrey Epstein signed for Southern Trust and Howard Lutnick signed for the Cantor company.
Cantor kept putting money into Adfin and eventually became its majority owner.
Howard Lutnick is now the United States Secretary of Commerce.
By then, this had become a recurring experience for me. I would open a document because I was trying to understand something Epstein was doing ten or fifteen years ago, and then I would look up the person or company involved and realize I was reading about something happening in the federal government right now.
The money was only part of it.
Epstein was also talking about digital currency long before most people were having conversations about stablecoins and digital wallets. In 2014, Vincenzo Iozzo sent him a proposal involving a digital currency where a wallet would be connected to a person’s real identity and their transactions could be permanently recorded. Iozzo explicitly pointed out what that would mean for privacy because advertisers could potentially know what people were buying.
Then, in February 2018, Steve Bannon asked Epstein how a $100 million bitcoin project could be announced. Epstein responded with ideas involving a new coin, a donor advised fund, local exchanges and research into campaign finance law.
This is where the year I spent reading old Epstein documents started colliding with 2026.
Donald Trump’s family is involved with World Liberty Financial, which created its own digital dollar and sought federal banking authority around that business. Cantor provides financial services to Tether, one of the largest stablecoin companies in the world. Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners joined Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Silver Lake in the acquisition of Electronic Arts, a company that collects information about what millions of people buy, what they play, what devices they use and how they interact with its products.
I had started this investigation trying to understand why prosecutors did not bring the federal case they had spent years preparing against Epstein.
Somehow, that question had taken me from Leslie Wexner financing Epstein’s townhouse and family trust money helping purchase the office managing Epstein’s finances, to companies dealing with genetic information and hundreds of millions of personal profiles, to technology companies, digital currency, Howard Lutnick, Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner and businesses now affected by decisions being made by the federal government.
Then I found Virginia again.
A year later, I think I finally understand what I have been finding. Epstein spent decades helping billionaires, politicians and foreign governments do things most of us assume governments control. Things like moving enormous amounts of money, gathering information, making introductions between world leaders, advising countries, collecting data on people, funding artificial intelligence and working on new forms of private money.
Then I followed what happened to the people and businesses around him, and somehow I ended up here, with Howard Lutnick running the Commerce Department after Cantor invested with Epstein, Jared Kushner managing billions of dollars from foreign governments while also participating in American diplomacy, Trump’s family owning a digital currency company that now has approval for its own national trust bank, and Todd Blanche controlling the Justice Department and the Epstein files after representing Trump.
I think Congress needs to find out whether Epstein’s death actually ended what he was building, or whether his money, investments, contracts, technology, data and relationships simply went to other people who are now far more powerful than they were when he was alive.
I never imagined any of this when I hit publish a year ago. I never imagined Lev Parnas would send my work to the Oversight Committee and tell Congress I was someone they should be reading, or that this thing I started doing because I could not leave an unanswered question alone would become my way of taking part in the resistance.
This work is lonely sometimes, and it is hard, but there is something almost painfully meaningful about realizing that so much of what I had to learn just to survive is what taught me to do it. I know what it feels like to be told something is normal when you know in your gut that it is wrong, and I know how long it can take to trust yourself enough to keep asking anyway.
Maybe this is what all of that gave me. I know how to keep asking. And right now, I feel called to use that. Thank you for being here, truly.
--- By Kait Justice, see comments for sources and to support.
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