Investigative journalist Vicky Ward spent decades reporting on the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his rich and powerful associates, and the impact of his crimes.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We’re continuing now with Part 2 of our conversation with the investigative journalist Vicky Ward as we look at Trump’s attempt to quell his MAGA base uproar over the Trump administration’s refusal to release the files of dead serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. President Donald Trump’s deputy attorney general, who is Trump’s former private lawyer, just finished two days of meetings with the convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse young girls. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Maxwell met for nine hours at the courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.

Now, I want to go back to April, when Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an outspoken survivor of sex trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein, died, apparently by suicide, in Australia at the age of 41. She was the first survivor to come out publicly against Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Ghislaine Maxwell. Virginia also sued Prince Andrew for sexually assaulting her when she was 17. The disgraced prince was forced to step away from his royal duties and settled with Giuffre in 2022. In a statement, Giuffre’s family said, quote, “Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking. She was the light that lifted so many survivors,” unquote. Back in 2019, Virginia Giuffre spoke to the BBC.

VIRGINIA GIUFFRE: It was a wicked time in my life. It was a really scary time in my life. I had just been abused by a member of a royal family. So when you talk about these chains, you know, yeah, I wasn’t chained to a sink, but these powerful people were my chains. I didn’t know what could happen. And I just — I didn’t — I couldn’t comprehend how the highest levels of the government and powerful people were allowing this to happen, not only allowing it to happen, but participating in it.

AMY GOODMAN: “But by participating in it,” as well. That was Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2019.

We’re now continuing our conversation with Vicky Ward, the longtime investigative journalist, who wrote for Vanity Fair, now host and co-producer of the podcast series and TV series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow.

If you can give us some background on Giuffre? This was back in 2019. That’s when Jeffrey Epstein was charged in a much more comprehensive and serious way, to be followed a few years later by Ghislaine Maxwell, after he supposedly committed suicide. And she was found guilty. Give us the history of this story and what Virginia is alleging.

VICKY WARD: Well, so, Virginia Roberts Giuffre plays a really, really important role in all of it, because after Jeffrey Epstein avoids federal charges the first time round, when the feds come for him in 2000, investigate him in 2006 for the next couple of years, that is when there is this sweetheart — he has a huge team of hugely influential and high-powered lawyers, and he is able — we don’t yet know all the details as to quite why, but he is able to —

AMY GOODMAN: And these lawyers, just to say —

VICKY WARD: — through Alex Acosta —

AMY GOODMAN: — from Ken Starr to Alan Dershowitz, a battery of lawyers.

VICKY WARD: Right. There were nine of them, I believe. And they managed to convince Alex Acosta, then-attorney general in Florida —

AMY GOODMAN: U.S. attorney.

VICKY WARD: — to drop the federal — sorry, yes, to then drop the federal charges, and instead he gets this slap on the wrist. He pleads guilty to the state charges, which is one count of prostitution and one count of soliciting a minor. And as you outlined, Amy, he has this really cushy 13-month sentence where he’s, you know, half in the jail, half not. He goes to work, you know, and he comes out basically unscathed and carries on.

Virginia surfaced, but what had happened that was illegal was that this plea deal had been done without notifying any of the women, any of the victims who had come forward. Virginia, who was not part of that case, joined what was a class-action lawsuit of all the victims coming together. And because she had a rather infamous photograph of herself with Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew with his arm around her waist, her allegations immediately hit the headlines. And she went public, accusing, as you said, not just Jeffrey Epstein, but also Prince Andrew, and also she named other men who she claimed Jeffrey Epstein had pimped her out to.

Ghislaine Maxwell — and Virginia Roberts did all this publicly — and Ghislaine Maxwell then, in public, called her a liar, at which point Virginia Roberts sued Ghislaine Maxwell civilly. And ultimately, although this case was settled, it was the — it was all the depositions and the discovery in that civil litigation that really then became the backbone of the government’s charges that they finally brought against Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. As you say, he then dies in strange circumstances without facing the music. But the stuff that was in the civil litigation with Virginia Roberts is also what formed the backbone of the government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell during her trial. Virginia Roberts was not called as a witness in her trial, and that, you know, largely was to do with the fact that when there is so much — when there has been a big civil case, prosecutors prefer not to go down that discovery, and so they found four other victims to actually appear in court to testify against Ghislaine Maxwell. But a lot of what Virginia Roberts had said about Ghislaine Maxwell came up in that courtroom.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, one of the things you point out in your series is this deal that the U.S. attorney at the time, then chosen as labor secretary by Trump in his first term, then forced to resign immediately because all of the scandal came up as a result of Julie Brown’s reporting in the Miami Herald — like, why did he make this sweetheart deal? In the actual deal, it says, “In consideration of Epstein’s agreement to plead guilty and to provide compensation in the manner described above, if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to” — and the names are blocked out, but something like four names. Now, this could be the basis — right? — of Ghislaine Maxwell getting off. It says not only if he does this 13-month sweetheart deal, but anyone who was involved with sexually abusing or raping girls or women will be protected from prosecution? Is this possible?

VICKY WARD: Yes. I mean, the whole — the whole nonprosecution agreement was something that, you know, his attorneys believed would have actually protected him, too. I mean, his own attorney, Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, told me that one of the reasons he found it very difficult to believe, initially, that Jeffrey Epstein had committed suicide was that they’d had a whole conversation the day before, in which his attorney said, “You know, I don’t think the government will be able to keep going with the charges against you because of this nonprosecution agreement muddying the waters.”

Amy, I will tell you, you know, the four names that are redacted in the nonprosecution agreement, I mean, you know, I know who they are. And again, it speaks to, you know, the sickness of this web. You know, these are all women who were victims at one point of Jeffrey Epstein, who then — victims who then turned around and brought in, helped bring in other women. But, yeah, unquestionably, Ghislaine Maxwell believed she was, and still believes she is, protected by the nonprosecution agreement, 100%.

AMY GOODMAN: And then Alex Acosta said something very unusual when he was really pressed about why he would do this, when, in fact, the investigations that were going on in Florida brought up dozens and dozens of women who, in many cases, were girls when Epstein raped or assaulted them, in some cases with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell. He talked — he mentioned something about “I thought he was involved with intelligence”?

VICKY WARD: Well, so, that, that is my reporting, and I 100% stand by it. He said that when the issue of Jeffrey Epstein came up in — during the transition. And he was asked, you know, by the committee during the Trump transition. You know, they get a sheet of background, because he’s going to have to be confirmed by the Senate. And it’s like, “Oh yeah, you were the guy who gave Jeffrey Epstein his plea deal. Is there going to be — is there any problem with that?” And that is when he said — you know, it was a very quick conversation — “No, I was told he belonged to intelligence.”

And this, you know, this comes back to, I think, Amy, the heart of the questions swirling around Jeffrey Epstein and why it is that the MAGA base want answers, because people want to understand the network of men who enabled Jeffrey Epstein, the system of soft power around him that enabled him to wield so much influence in the face of such horrendous criminal charges. So, you know, why did so many prominent men gather around Epstein? Many of them, you know, finance him. I mean, there’s no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein abused or trafficked underage women, until he quite mysteriously — this is a man who’s not a college graduate. He was a high school math teacher. He suddenly, in the 1990s, explodes with all this money, you know, vast, vast, vast wealth, and builds the — you know, he’s in this enormous private townhouse in Manhattan. He’s got an island. And it’s almost like the walls go up, behind which he starts to do these — perform these terrible sex crimes. But why did — why and how did he make all this money? Why and how were all these boldface names frequently in his company, on his planes, going to his island with him? You know, why did he carry on almost in plain sight with impunity? And that’s the question that people want answered.

AMY GOODMAN: And who were some of these people? I mean, they are well known now.

VICKY WARD: Well, they’re extremely well known. You had — yes, you have Donald Trump. You also have Bill Clinton. You had the president of Harvard. You had Leslie Wexner, the billionaire. More recently, you’ve had another billionaire, Leon Black. You’ve had Bill Gates. We’ve had, you know, the lawyer — one of his lawyers, as you mentioned earlier, you know, Alan Dershowitz, former Senator George Mitchell, Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, a huge assortment, former — Henry Rosovsky, a huge assortment of academics, Prince Andrew. We know the now current crown prince of Saudi Arabia was a guest in his house, Mohammed bin Salman. He was friends with the Gaddafi family, the rulers of Africa, the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak. I mean, you could go on and on and on.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the last months of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, it’s clear he was completely shocked when he flew in from Paris on his jet, and, you know, the authorities had moved in on him and picked him up at Teterboro Airport. He had, you describe it as, a kind of kitchen cabinet of advisers, everyone from — even if they’re informal, everyone from Steve Bannon to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — something he denied. Talk about that group that was advising him, because he thought maybe something was going to happen to him.

VICKY WARD: Well, I think he did and he didn’t, right? I mean, this is a man who has always used his money and his connections to basically outwit law enforcement. I mean, you know, my understanding, in the last months before his arrest, he was sort of undergoing some sort of media training, bizarrely. I mean, he thought — he thought he could massage his image one more time and again, I’m sure, throw money at a situation. I’m not — which is why I don’t think he for a second thought he was going to be arrested at Teterboro Airport. This is a man who’s never been held to account in his life.

AMY GOODMAN: And when they broke down the doors of his apartment — right? — they found in a safe other passports, as well as diamonds. Talk about the significance of that.

VICKY WARD: Well, you know, he had talked — I do remember this — even years before, of going, moving and living in Saudi Arabia. There was one point in time when he talked about, you know, also going, possibly living in Israel. I mean, this was a man — you know, there are still questions as to, you know, when Alex Acosta mentioned in the transition, “I thought he belonged to intelligence,” I mean, that’s not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds, because, you know, Jeffrey Epstein was unusual at a moment in time, given the influence that he did have in both Israel and in the Gulf states and frankly, in the Clinton White House at one point. I mean, he was in and out of there over 20 times. And when you are able, just through people you know, to walk to sort of have dialogues with that many leaders, it does mean that you are in a position. You don’t have to be a spy. You don’t have to be on a government’s payroll. But it does mean that you are a useful asset. In Chasing Ghislaine, the term that the intelligence community uses for someone like that is a “hyper-fixer,” someone who can move easily between the leaders of countries, that may not have official or friendly relations at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what’s happening now, what it meant that Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, now deputy attorney general, meets with Ghislaine Maxwell for two days? They’re talking about coming up with a list of a hundred people. Interestingly, apparently —

VICKY WARD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — former President Bill Clinton has called for the release of the documents. But what does this all mean? And President Trump himself? What was it? Senator Dick Durbin was the one who said that he had a thousand FBI agents going through all the files to tag every time he’s mentioned, and he’s been told he’s been mentioned a number of times in these documents. Where is this all headed?

VICKY WARD: Well, so, one of the tantalizing and sort of frustrating things about sitting through Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial was that the scope of it was very narrow. It was about the sex crimes, you know, understandably so, and that, you know, the government tends to only bring cases it thinks it can win. So it was confined to that. But there were these sort of frustrating cameo brief mentions of all these names of all these men who appeared on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs or who had been, you know, invited to stay on the island, but you never got, you know, as someone sitting in that courtroom, to piece it all together. You never got to understand the other side of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, which was the power and the money and what the heck all these guys were doing there.

And so, I’m sure that what Ghislaine Maxwell has been doing with the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, is filling him in on that, all the pieces of that side of Epstein’s life, which she had, you know, a front-row — not just a front-row seat to, actually, she was part of it. I mean, let’s not forget that, you know, part of Jeffrey Epstein’s rise to power was Ghislaine Maxwell. She was the one who arrived in New York right around the time of her father’s mysterious death. She was the one with the Rolodex of Prince Andrew and the heads of state, because that’s who her father had known and done business with and traded information with. So, that is the part of this puzzle that Ghislaine Maxwell can answer. And I’m sure that there are at least a hundred names. This was a woman who knew hundreds and hundreds of powerful people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what’s being said now. You have Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin saying on CNN, quote, in “2009, there was a [sweetheart plea deal that] was made under the Obama administration with Epstein.” He was corrected by Jake Tapper, “No, that’s not right. It was 2008. The U.S. attorney at the time was Alex Acosta. He was a Bush appointee. He went on to become President Trump’s secretary of labor.” And this from MSNBC: “But what made Mullin’s error even more notable was the fact that it offered a fresh opportunity to remind the public that it was Trump who rewarded Alex Acosta — the guy who helped orchestrate Epstein’s deal — with a Cabinet position in the president’s first term” — though, ultimately, he didn’t get away with it. Your response to that, Vicky Ward?

VICKY WARD: Well, I have always really, really wanted to understand what really went on behind the scenes regarding Alex Acosta and that plea deal. What was the leverage that was used? And I think that is a key question that actually Trump’s base wants answered. And Ghislaine Maxwell, I think, probably has a pretty good idea. She had — by 2008, she had sort of left Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit. She had got a boyfriend, a guy called Ted Waitt. But she would have a pretty good idea of what went on behind the scenes there. And that’s exactly the kind of the use of soft power that I’m talking about. That’s what people want to understand.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why has the MAGA base pushed so hard? Why has this been a tenet of what binds people together, of Trump supporters, to release the Epstein files? He so clearly has been a part of Epstein’s life. He was for years. We all saw the pictures. We know his famous quote, you know, “We both like women. He just likes them a little younger,” Trump said. Why would they be pushing for this from the beginning?

VICKY WARD: Well, because among the MAGA base — right? — you have this fundamental mistrust, which Trump has leaned into, of the — you know, this mistrust of the, quote-unquote, “deep state” and, you know, mistrust of invisible systems of power. And, you know, I think that Trump has happily leaned into this for his political purposes. And this is a case of being hoist by your own petard, Amy. It’s as simple as that. And so, you know, but it is — we are now in this very tricky situation, because any deal that is done, if a deal does get done with Ghislaine Maxwell, you are quite understandably going to have victims of both — her victims and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims up in arms, and rightly so. So, this is a — this is a real political nightmare for Donald Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have people like Maria Farmer, one of the first people —

VICKY WARD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — to speak out, that you dealt with — right? — who said not only was she sexually abused by both of them, and then they abused her little sister Annie, which she felt so horribly guilty about, but when she went to the —

VICKY WARD: And Annie was underage, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: When she went to the FBI in New York, and then they didn’t investigate this, she said for years she would get a phone call, and she would pick up her cellphone, and it would be Ghislaine saying something like, “I know where you live.” She moved like 30 times, Maria said. But she would call up, “We know where you live. We know what time you run every day” — this constant threat. And then, of course, we didn’t even talk about, with Graydon Carter, who spiked your story, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, the part of it that talked about the girls and women who were sexually abused, he found a bullet? A cat’s head was left at his house? Is that right?

VICKY WARD: Yes, I’m told, you know, that was — that, I believe, was after the piece. But Jeffrey Epstein — it was a very frightening time, that whole period reporting that piece. But, you know, that’s not a reason to then go and cut out the on-record allegations of two sisters. You know, all the more reason to go ahead and print them. And, you know, Graydon Carter has since said, you know, that I’m a terrible journalist and that I didn’t have the reporting. I did. I absolutely did. Because, you know, I mean, this is years before the #MeToo era, but even then, you know, I went out, and I spoke to their mother and to the artist Eric Fischl and to another businessman whom they knew, all of whom they had gone to contemporaneously. So, it was complete garbage.

But, you know, and Ghislaine Maxwell, I had known her, not well, but socially. I mean, we’re both originally — we grew up in England. She’s a few years ahead of me, and I would run into her from time to time at, you know, things in New York. And, you know, she seemed to have an extraordinary life. She talked about flying helicopters and flying around with Bill Clinton. And, you know, one didn’t have really a clear view of what she was really doing, but she was indignant when I put the Farmer sisters’ allegations, to me, absolutely indignant, and sort of said: How could I possibly believe two women who I didn’t know over her? And she was a journalist, but, you know, she wasn’t. I mean, you know, she and Jeffrey Epstein were — you know, I mean, they knew how to go about killing these stories and these allegations, and, you know, in hindsight, you can see exactly why they were so powerful and why they got away with this for so long.

AMY GOODMAN: And interestingly, though she has French citizenship, she has British citizenship, she did not leave the United States after Jeffrey Epstein died, for any extended period. And ultimately, while she was being sought after, when they were wanting to serve her when she was being charged, she was found at her — a house she had bought for a million dollars in cold cash, right in New Hampshire.

VICKY WARD: I know. You know, who knows? I mean, you know, one has to believe that at the — you know, she thought that she could outrun this, in a way, in a way just like Jeffrey Epstein had. But, you know, now she’s got an opportunity, or her lawyer does, to — you know, she’s got some leverage to negotiate with a president, you know, his lawyers, a president who likes to negotiate. So, you know, it’s a very, very precarious situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think part of these discussions were what she knew about Donald Trump?

VICKY WARD: I’m — listen, she is going to be sitting there discussing everything. I mean, this is a woman who knew Donald Trump — we know this — pretty well. But, you know, a few years ago, I believe Trump said, on record, you know, “I wish her well.” So —

AMY GOODMAN: That’s something that her brother, Ian Maxwell —

VICKY WARD: — anything — you have to believe that anything is on the table.

AMY GOODMAN: Her brother, Ian Maxwell, who’s fighting for her freedom, her two brothers — Ian Maxwell said they very much appreciated what Trump had to say. And Trump has so much at stake here.

VICKY WARD: Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, I found it hard to believe that at the end of these two days of conversations and, you know, the reporting that there’s a hundred names, that the needle isn’t going to move one way or the other. I mean, Trump’s going to have to give his base something, and she’s going to get something in return. It’s very, very troubling, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Vicky Ward, we want to thank you so much for being with us, longtime investigative journalist, host and co-producer of the podcast series and the TV series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow. To see Part 1 of our conversation, you can go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

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