The US Department of Justice has released more than 180,000 pictures and 2,000 videos as part of its tranche of Jeffrey Epstein files, with 14 hours of footage reportedly providing harrowing insight into the late financier's sex trafficking network. The release was marred by the publication of unredacted images of naked or partially clothed women, which were later removed.
Among the videos, seen by the Mirror, are clips of young women performing sex acts while a teddy bear is visible in the frame. One video shows Epstein forcibly exposing a woman's breasts to the camera while she attempts to stop him. Other clips show him dancing alongside women and enjoying private "entertainment" by unclothed young females in a red-panelled study in his Paris home.
The files also include emails in which Epstein demands nude images and videos. In one exchange from June 2015, he writes: "Where are my new photos?" and later "Take some nudes sexy if you are comfortable." In a Skype conversation from 2012, he instructs a woman on posing nude, telling her: "Try different pose experiment full frontal."
Other videos are explicitly pornographic, including one filmed at a beach with the camera zooming in on a woman in a state of undress. Epstein also made young girls take part in semi-clothed catwalk auditions, supporting claims he posed as a talent scout for Victoria's Secret to lure victims. Some video clips show women dancing at his French home, including one to Amy Winehouse's Back To Black while wearing black stockings and tinsel.
Epstein recruited victims by offering them work as masseuses, with sexual abuse beginning once they were lured in. He served 13 months in a Florida jail for procuring a minor for prostitution, and was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019 before dying by suicide in his New York jail cell on August 10, 2019.
