Tag: jeffrey epstein

Leon Black Sues Congress To Avoid Epstein Testimony

Between 2012 and 2017 – after Jeffrey Epstein got out of prison – billionaire Leon Black paid him roughly $170 million. Black has not provided a credible explanation as to why he paid Epstein amounts vastly exceeding those paid to other professional advisors – and instead of sitting down to explain it to Congress on Thursday, he sued the House Oversight Committee.

Recall, Black:

  • Paid Epstein $158 million per Dechert, the law firm Apollo hired, or $170 million per Sen. Ron Wyden’s investigation.
  • Stepped down as Apollo CEO in 2021 after a Dechert review “cleared” him, which we called bullshit at the time.
  • Wrote the 2003 birthday book poem about “Blond, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically,” signed “Love and Kisses.”
  • Paid roughly $20 million to a dozen women, some via Epstein; at least three have accused him of assault.
  • Says he signed Guzel Ganieva’s 2015 NDA because she was extorting him; her rape suit was dismissed.
  • Paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2023 to settle Epstein-related claims before any were made public.
  • Used Epstein to help structure his $106 million Picasso purchase through Narrows Holdings, as we reported in February.
  • Told Congress in June “I knew Jekyll. I didn’t know Hyde,” then walked out rather than discuss his NDAs.

The committee went ahead with a closed-door session anyway, with ranking Democrat Robert Garcia demanding an ‘immediate’ contempt vote against Black. Chairman James Comer (R) said that if it were up to him, “I would hold him in contempt right now,” but he wanted to discuss Black’s lawsuit with the committee’s lawyers first so as not to jeopardize the thing the committee actually wants: non-disclosure agreements that Black allegedly signed with several women. 

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington against the committee and Comer, argues that the two subpoenas issued June 26 (one for Black’s sworn testimony, one for “all the NDAs” he is party to) are “invalid to the extent they exceed” the committee’s “delegated authority in seeking private information that bears no legitimate connection” to its legislative purpose. Producing the agreements, the suit says, “would also expose women who value their privacy, who have no known or public connection to Epstein.” Black’s lawyer Susan Estrich called the probe “a fishing expedition” and said, “This is no longer about finding the truth about Epstein. It is about trying to destroy Mr. Black.”

Comer hit back – saying that Black is “hiding behind litigation rather than provide answers to the American people.”

Black is the first Epstein witness to sue the committee rather than show up. Jes Staley and Kathy Ruemmler both sat for questions this summer. Which makes the timing of Thursday’s other Leon Black story hard to improve on.

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“You hired me to produce a work of art”

A few hours before the empty chair, Bloomberg Law published a piece about a May 2016 email in which Epstein described the tax plan he sold Black as, literally, art.

“Leon, you hired me to produce a work of art. it was not inexpensive. the value far exceeds any other piece in your collection.- by FAR . It took me 30 years to be able to craft such a work. I understand your desire to modifiy my work, in doing so you have brad telling me , just a bit more red., here let me show you, you yourself pick up a brush a add some strokes… however Im aware that you own the work and you have the right to paint over it. tear it up , put it in the closet in the basement . its yours.”

And on the price:

“Unfortunatley for us both, the price for my works has not changed since day one. 40m per year, I m willing to discount it to 35 as I did give you a bad number when asked and should pay an embarassment fine.”

And a weird line:

“you recently seemed shy to discuss certain things. , please be assured I make no judgement on any of your activities , whether or not i agree with them . not my role I am always on your side on the table. I hope your personal life quiets. you’ve had a rough 15 months.”

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Playboy’s Hugh Hefner Reported Jeffrey Epstein to the FBI After Playmate Claimed She Was Raped and Trafficked by Him

Audra Lynn Christiansen said she was an Epstein survivor.

A lawsuit filed against the FBI for failing to act in response to multiple reports against late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is digging up some unexpected stories.

In one of them, the late Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner allegedly called the Bureau to report Epstein – already a convicted sex offender – after a ‘Playmate’ model told him that she’d been raped and trafficked by him.

Daily Mail reported:

“Audra Lynn Christiansen, a 2003 Playmate, was living with Hefner at the Playboy Mansion when she turned to him for help, claiming that she had been raped by Epstein and trafficked to his wealthy friends.  

She claims that in 2005 she asked Hefner to call the authorities on her behalf due to his celebrity status and connections, hoping that his clout would help her allegations to be taken more seriously.

The allegations are detailed in an amended complaint filed in May in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.”

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Influential Wife Of Anthropic CEO Pitched Post-Conviction Epstein On ‘Luxury Porn’ Company, And Claude Has No Idea

Anthropic has filed confidentially for what could be the largest public offering in history. Yet, one of the most influential voices shaping its chief executive holds no official position at the company, appears in no regulatory filings, and has been quietly scrubbed from the internet. She also pitched a porn company to Jeffrey Epstein – less than two years after he got out of prison for sex trafficking minors.

Her name is Cami Clark, wife of CEO Dario Amodei. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Thursday, she has spent five years operating as a strategic adviser to the head of a company now seeking public capital at a valuation north of $2 trillion – all without a title, a salary, or formal disclosure.

Her marriage to Amodei has been scrubbed from Claude too… Ask Anthropic’s own chatbot about Amodei’s marital status, and Claude replies that it “doesn’t seem to be clearly confirmed.”

Someone actively worked to keep it that way. Amodei’s Wikipedia page did not mention his marriage until this summer, and it still omits his wife’s name. Google searches for his wife instead return photographs of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who co-runs the company. Citing its own analysis and a person familiar with the matter, the Journal reports that targeted efforts have been made to erase references to Clark online.

In 1999, at the age of 20, she married 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, who had designed buildings including the city’s Atlantis Casino Resort. They divorced three years later. On a now-defunct personal website, Clark said she dropped out of architecture school in 1999. 

…

Around 2010, she and Michelle Capocefalo started Eddice, which described itself as a “revolutionary porn company.” Named for Eddice Munson, Clark’s maternal grandmother, it aimed to emphasize sex positivity in a male-oriented porn industry, and carried the tagline: “intellectually promiscuous.”  -WSJ

And she would pitch that company to Epstein… 

The emails

What was scrubbed from the web is now partly a matter of federal record. Clark appears in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department.

On March 3, 2011, literary agent John Brockman – the man who spent years introducing Jeffrey Epstein to scientists and Silicon Valley executives – emailed Epstein from a Wired party where he was the guest of honor.

“You should connect for dinner with my girls – Cami and Michele – who I met last month in Munich,” Brockman wrote. “They’re in LA raising money for porn movie aimed at women’s market.” He included a link to their site, eddice.com.

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What’s The DOJ HIDING At Epstein’s Zorro Ranch?

New Mexico has had enough of the federal runaround on Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets. On Wednesday the state’s attorney general hauled the Justice Department and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche into federal court, demanding the full, unredacted files that could finally expose what really happened at the predator’s sprawling Zorro Ranch.

Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed the 40-page complaint in Washington, accusing the DOJ of “stonewalling” a legitimate state criminal investigation into trafficking, abuse, and worse on New Mexico soil.

Publicly released Epstein material already contains more than 13,000 references to Zorro Ranch and roughly 5,000 to the state itself. Torrez says the redactions are blocking the identification of victims, witnesses, staff, and members of Epstein’s inner circle who may still face state charges.

“New Mexico has a duty to protect survivors and investigate crimes committed in our state so that perpetrators can be held accountable,” Torrez said.

He continued, “We asked the Department of Justice to cooperate by providing access to records that may be critical to identifying victims, witnesses, and additional criminal conduct at Zorro Ranch. Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve.”

The lawsuit claims New Mexico is one of the few jurisdictions still positioned to deliver any justice. Federal prosecutors never even searched the ranch. Now the state is trying to finish the job and is being blocked at every turn.

Torrez told reporters his office has made at least ten formal requests since reopening the probe in February. Informal outreach was met with promises of cooperation, then instructions to file Touhy requests—only for those to be rejected. A July 14 letter warned that legal action would follow if the materials were not produced by July 31. They were not.

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CBS News Not Airing ‘60 Minutes’ Jeffrey Epstein Story Under Scrutiny

Senator Ron Wyden has questioned why a 60 Minutes interview with now-former correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi on Jeffrey Epstein’s banking practices never aired, adding it had been “suppressed.”

The Oregon Democrat raised the issue in a new Senate Finance Committee report, published on August 4, alleging Deutsche Bank failed to promptly disclose more than $250 million in suspicious Epstein-related transactions.

“It is disappointing that, instead of advancing new facts that would help bring accountability to the men who participated in Epstein’s trafficking operation, the report largely recycles allegations that have already been exhaustively examined by courts and the government,” a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase told Newsweek.

Asked for comment, Wyden’s office pointed Newsweek to page 61 of the report, where it says his taped interview with Alfonsi was intended for a broader 60 Minutes segment on banks and Epstein, adding that it is unclear whether CBS News leadership will allow the broader segment to air following Alfonsi’s departure from the network.

CBS News says the segment simply was not ready before the show’s season ended.

Pushing back against any suggestion that the interview was buried, a spokesperson for the network said in a statement shared with Newsweek via email: “We air pieces when they are ready, and suggesting that an interview is being ‘suppressed’ for any reason is categorically false.”

According to Wyden’s report, “the investigation found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner.”

A spokesperson for Bank of America told Newsweek: “We take our legal and regulatory obligations seriously and, as we have previously said, the bank did not facilitate wrongdoing.”

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Bill Gates IGNORED Repeated Warnings And Met Epstein THIRTY Times

An independent review has confirmed what many long suspected: Bill Gates and senior figures at his foundation met with Jeffrey Epstein roughly 30 times between 2011 and 2014, brushing aside repeated internal warnings about the reputational and ethical risks of associating with a man already convicted of sex crimes involving a minor.

The findings, released by the Gates Foundation after a months-long external examination by the law firm WilmerHale, show that foundation staff “raised on multiple occasions the risks of associating with Epstein because of his prior conviction,” and that those concerns reached senior leadership, including Gates himself. 

Gates was aware of the reputational issues tied to Epstein’s 2008 conviction and sentencing when the conversations began in 2011. Meetings took place on the foundation’s campus and at Epstein’s Manhattan residence. Interactions centered on potential philanthropy ideas that never materialized and ended by December 2014.

The review found no evidence that the foundation paid Epstein, no evidence of knowledge or participation in his sex-trafficking operations, and no evidence the meetings involved illegal conduct. 

Yet the sheer volume of contact, combined with documented staff alarms that went unheeded, underscores a pattern of elite indifference that has defined the Epstein saga from the start.

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Epstein Model Recruiter Daniel Siad Found Dead in Home – He was NEVER Questioned by Investigators

Another key figure in the Jeffrey Epstein saga is dead.

Daniel Siad, the model recruiter accused of procuring young girls for convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his home in Colombes, France, earlier this week.

Marie-Céline Lawrysz, deputy public prosecutor at the Nanterre Judicial Court, confirmed the death in public statements on Wednesday. An autopsy will now be conducted to determine the cause of death.

The Nanterre prosecutor’s office said, via Mediaite:

“An investigation to determine the cause of death was opened on Monday evening following the discovery.”

Siad’s name appears thousands of times in Department of Justice files related to the Epstein case.

He continued working with Epstein even AFTER the billionaire was first convicted in Florida and forced to register as a sex offender.

According to the report, Siad’s exchanges with Epstein often consisted of Siad sending Epstein photos and details about young girls he had met and recruited as potential assistants or other workers. In one 2015 email, Siad sent Epstein a photo of a 16-year-old girl and her friend — and Epstein replied that the girls were “too old.”

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Former New Mexico AG Drop Epstein BOMBSHELL

New Mexico’s former Attorney General is calling out the Justice Department for systematically undermining the state’s long-running effort to probe Jeffrey Epstein’s isolated Zorro Ranch, revealing a pattern of interference that began in 2019 and continues to this day. 

Hector Balderas says federal prosecutors struck an informal deal, took the state’s evidence, then ghosted New Mexico while the elite predator’s desert compound remained largely untouched.

In an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Balderas detailed how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York persuaded his office to halt interviews of witnesses and persons of interest in exchange for a promise to return any state-related materials once the federal case wrapped. That promise, he says, was never kept.

A newly surfaced handwritten note from July 23, 2019, captures the arrangement: “Agreed NMDOJ will stop interviews + refer all matters to SDNY. SDNY will refer any state-related matters to NMAG @ [the] conclusion of SDNY case.” 

An email from then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey days later confirmed the conversation, stating New Mexico had agreed to “cease any investigation into sex trafficking and share whatever they had gathered to date” while the federal side pledged to pass along state crime information later. 

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Former Obama White House Counsel – and Goldman Sachs’s Former Top Lawyer – Kathryn Ruemmler Testifies Before Congress, Says She Was ‘Used’ by Jeffrey Epstein

The Epstein stain is very hard to get rid of.

Among the many people exposed by the DOJ document releases as being connected to late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was former Barack Obama White House Counsel and former Goldman Sachs chief legal officer Kathryn Ruemmler.

We have reported here on TGP about how the evidence of her close relation ship with Epstein led to her resignation from her job at Goldman Sachs.

And yesterday (15), Ruemmler testified before the House Oversight Committee, calling the convicted sex offender a ‘masterful liar’.

She said Epstein used her to ‘legitimize’ himself, but had to acknowledge that he ‘referred paying clients to her law practice.’

The New York Post reported:

“Ruemmler, who resigned as Goldman’s top lawyer earlier this year after previously undisclosed communications with Epstein became public, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Wednesday that she maintained years of dealings with him because of those business relationships.

‘I did not see any evidence of ongoing criminal conduct or misconduct of any kind by Epstein during the time I dealt with him’, Ruemmler told lawmakers in her opening statement, adding that she ‘would have immediately reported him to law enforcement’ had she seen evidence that he was abusing women or girls.”

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New Mexico says US Justice Dept hindering probe of former Epstein ranch

New Mexico’s top law enforcement official on Thursday accused the U.S. Department of Justice of hindering the state’s investigation into ​Jeffrey Epstein by withholding unredacted files on the late sex ‌offender.

The Democratic-run state re-opened an investigation in February into activities at Epstein’s former ranch south of state capital Santa Fe, where he is accused of abusing women and ​girls for nearly three decades.

Nearly five months into the investigation, New ​Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez has yet to announce any ⁠results.

Political pressure to release U.S. Department of Justice files on Epstein has dogged ​President Donald Trump during his second term. He has suggested the country move on ​from investigating the late financier’s crimes.

In a June 30 letter, opens new tab to Acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche, Torrez said the Justice Department had failed to respond to a state request ​in February for unredacted files containing names of Epstein survivors, witnesses, co-conspirators, ​and other individuals essential to the New Mexico probe.

In a statement on Thursday, Torrez said ‌the ⁠delay, which has now lasted 130 days, was “unreasonable under any rule of reason.”

In response, a U.S. Justice Department spokesperson said the agency responded to the New Mexico request in June.

“The DOJ reiterates that it welcomes New ​Mexico undertaking additional ​investigation of the ⁠Zorro Ranch and stands ready to provide necessary assistance with New Mexico’s investigation,” the spokesperson said, adding that ​the agency was ready to investigate and possibly prosecute ​any federal ⁠crimes the New Mexico investigation uncovered.

In March, Torrez said investigators faced significant obstacles in the Zorro Ranch probe. He cited the years that had passed ⁠since ​Epstein’s alleged crimes, possible deterioration or disappearance ​of evidence at the ranch which was sold in 2023, and possible jurisdictional issues surrounding any ​potential prosecutions.

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