Epstein Boasted of Blackmailing Friends

Jeffrey Epstein regularly boasted he could blackmail a powerful network of men using videos showing them abusing young women, according to Virginia Giuffre.

The bombshell claim is made in her posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. The Telegraph has obtained a copy of the 367-page book which will be published next week by Alfred A. Knopf.

It will reignite questions about whether the late paedophile maintained a “client list” after the federal authorities concluded in July that there was no blackmail operation.

Giuffre finished writing the book six months before she took her own life at the age of 41.

She describes learning about Epstein’s death in 2019 and suggests it was possible he could have been murdered in his jail cell.

“He’d always suggested to me that those videotapes he so meticulously collected in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his various houses gave him power over others,” she wrote.

“He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favours.

“Could it be that someone who feared exposure by Epstein had found a way to exterminate him?”

Elsewhere in the book, she questions why information about videos seized from Epstein’s Manhattan home were never made public.

Over 400 pages, Giuffre describes her first encounter with Ghislaine Maxwell at the age of 16, and how the British socialite recruited her as a masseuse for Epstein.

“‘He loves to help people,’” Giuffre remembers Maxwell saying.

The British socialite is currently serving a 20-year jail sentence for procuring underage girls for Epstein.

It was the start of a two-year ordeal that she says included being trafficked to a string of wealthy or influential men, including prominent scientists, a former prime minister, a politician who was about to be elected governor, and the Duke of York.

The Duke has denied all the allegations and a civil claim brought in the US was settled out of court with no admission of guilt.

Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with running a sex trafficking network involving dozens of underage girls at his homes in New York and Palm Beach, Florida.

Investigators seized a safe from his Manhattan town house containing video and audio tapes, CDs, and hard drives.

Giuffre had rebuilt her life in Australia by the time of his death on Aug 10 2019.

“The news hit me with an almost physical force,” she wrote. “I guess I didn’t believe someone who’d exerted so much power over me could ever die.”

She soon realised that she was grieving.

“Not because the world had lost a monster – that was a good thing,” she wrote. “No, like all of Epstein’s victims, I was grieving the death of my ability to hold him accountable for what he had done.”

The official explanation was that Epstein had taken his own life rather than face justice for his crimes.

But his sudden death under the nose of prison guards at New York’s main detention centre has spawned a string of alternative theories, centred on the idea that a powerful cabal of abusers feared being exposed in a court case.

“As the details came out, nearly everything about Epstein’s death seemed fishy,” wrote Giuffre, who concludes: “I can make a case for either suicide or murder.”

Being in jail, she explained, stripped him of his power over young girls and the chance to rub shoulders with the rich and influential.

“That certainly could have made him want to end it all.”

The question of Epstein’s death and his “client list” have roiled the Trump administration all year. Donald Trump and allies stoked suspicions of a cover-up during the 2024 election campaign.

In July, the justice department and the FBI said they found no evidence that the disgraced financier kept a client list or blackmailed prominent associates.

Rather than drawing a line under the case, it simply heightened accusations that the truth was being hidden.

At the end of her book, Giuffre makes an argument for full transparency as a way of ensuring justice for victims of abuse.

“Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s houses?” she asked.

“And why haven’t they led to prosecution of any more abusers?”

In their memo, the justice department and FBI said the videos contained “illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography” but did not justify investigating any third parties.