In the week that Surrey police announced a new investigation was underway following information released in the Epstein files,Alex Hannafordtalks to campaigners in the US about the mystery over the delay across the pond – and what could make it change
Removed from bookmarks
Awoman with large-rimmed glasses and long brown hair stands behind a wooden podium. Behind her, running the entire length of the room in downtown Manhattan, is a bookcase, full of identical white-bound files.
“In 2019, theFBIput out a tip line for victims and anyone that had information aboutJeffrey Epsteinand Ghislaine Maxwell,” she said. “I called that tip line in September of 2019, and I told them not only the story of what happened to me back in July of 1991, but also about the woman that brought me to Jeffrey.”
Epstein survivor Jess Michaelsgoes on to read excerpts from the Epstein files aloud – dispassionately; verbatim. It’s the morning of Tuesday 19 May. For 24 hours straight, beginning the previous day at noon, survivors like Michaels, together with lawyers, politicians, actors, and advocates, take turns reading aloud excerpts from the 3,747 bound volumes of the publicly released Epstein files.
Meanwhile, over in the UK,Surrey Police announced that it was investigatingtwo allegations of historic child sexual abuse following information released in the Epstein files – one relating to locations in Surrey and Berkshire in the mid-1990s to 2000, and another concerning west Surrey in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Then on Friday,policeurged a woman who claims to have been sent to theUKby Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with the then-PrinceAndrewto come forward and speak to investigators. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested in February on suspicion ofmisconductin public office, but it is understood that allegations of sexual misconduct arepart of the investigation.
Officers have made an appeal to the woman and said their “door is open” after it was claimed thatshe had been brought to the UK for a sexual encounterwith the then-prince at his residence at the time, Royal Lodge, in 2010. Police are said to have contacted the woman’s lawyers, as well as the US Department of Justice, to obtain original documents released as part of the Epstein files, as part of their wider investigation.
“In terms of Epstein victims and survivors, we hope that anyone with relevant information will come forward, and I really want to stress that our door is open,” said Oliver Wright, the assistant chief constable for crime and criminal justice atThames Valley Police.
So in the UK, powerful men are feeling the fallout – directly or indirectly – from the release of the Epstein files. In the US, it couldn’t be more different. While the tentacles of the abuse allegations have touched the highest political offices, boardrooms and celebrity powerhouses – no arrests have been made following the release of the latest shocking Epstein files. Nor is anyone under active investigation. Investigatorsmay be digging up Epstein’s Zorro ranch, but those who may know where the “bodies are buried” metaphorically, could literally be getting away with, if not “murder”, then serious crime.
The recital event – the Epstein filibuster – was the brainchild of attorney and reality TV star Eliza Orlins, together with the Save America Movement, the anti-Maga organisation co-founded by former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, and the nonprofit Institute for Primary Facts, whose temporary pop-up exhibit in New York City is showcasing the bound Epstein files. It provocatively titled the exhibit “The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room”.
Thousands are watching online and Michaels looks towards her audience and says, “That felt like a pretty hot tip to give the FBI. But no one followed up with me. I kept continually calling the FBI, Southern District of New York, and the detective Walter Harkins, who was with the NYPD sex trafficking force that was calling back people that had given tips.”
Even though she kept calling, it was a year and a half until an FBI agent even took her statement. That agent “sat on the phone with me for over an hour … said that somebody should have followed up with me. And then I never heard from that FBI agent again,” she says.
Mary Corcoran, the co-founder and executive director of Save America Movement, toldThe Independentthat the filibuster was a direct response to a shadow hearing by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee in Florida. That hearing, in mid-May, took place a few miles from Epstein’s former mansion, and was designed to hear direct testimony from Epstein survivors as the Republican majority refused to hold official proceedings.
“We were all watching and I flipped over to CNN andThe New York Times, and other mainstream media, and no one was streaming it,” Corcoran said. “I thought, oh my God, every single word that these women are saying, every single thing that their lawyers are saying, should be required viewing.”
