Tag: sex trafficking

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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Warren Buffett PAUSES Donation to Gates Foundation as Probe Over Epstein Leaks Continues

The Epstein curse continues to plague Gates.

We have been reporting here on TGP on how Bill Gates’ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are causing him problems that go beyond the mere reputational damage and family breakdown.

Today, it arises that billionaire investor Warren Buffett will not make his usual mid-year donation to the Gates Foundation for the first time in 20 years.

Buffet reportedly awaits more details about the charity’s links to Epstein.

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Are The Epstein Survivors Being Exploited Yet Again?

On February 8, 2026, the advocacy group World Without Exploitation launched a 40-second public service announcement during the Super Bowl featuring Jeffrey Epstein survivors demanding the full release of federal files related to Epstein’s sex trafficking network.

The Epstein survivors held up pictures of themselves when they were initially abused by Epstein as minors or young women. “After years of being kept apart, we’re standing together,” they said.

The background was pitch black, and the music was haunting.

The PSA ended with the following: “Stand With Us. Tell Attorney General Pam Bondi IT’S TIME FOR THE TRUTH.”

As a longtime advocate for justice in the Epstein case, the PSA felt like a supernova. I felt an eruption of gratitude. But as my elation faded, I wondered how World Without Exploitation could afford the PSA.

The co-founders of World Without Exploitation, Lauren Hersh and Rachel Foster, have certainly generated remarkable fanfare. In fact, they’ve even been hailed as two of Time magazine’s most influential 100 people of 2026.

I’m the director of Epstein Justice, a 501(c)(3), and our raison d’être is an independent congressional commission to investigate the Epstein case. Like many nonprofits, we struggle to find funders. So, I’ve marveled at the success of World Without Exploitation, which was founded in 2016. By 2019, the Atlanta Jewish Times reports, World Without Exploitation was the “umbrella group of 140 organizations.” The landing page of its website states: “Our 175+ member groups are working to end exploitation.”

But I started to hear whispers about World Without Exploitation that were less than stellar. Let’s dive in.

The Strange Case of World Without Exploitation Co-Founder Lauren Hersh

On paper, Hersh would appear to have impeccable credentials to be the director of an organization dedicated to ending exploitation. She joined the Brooklyn (King’s County) District Attorney’s office in 2004 after graduating from Brooklyn Law School, then transitioned to the domestic violence bureau before joining the rackets division, where she ultimately became “chief” of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Sex Trafficking Unit. Yet Hersh’s last case as a Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney would be marred by apparent prosecutorial misconduct. The case involved the alleged trafficking and rape of a young woman by four men.

The Backstory of Hersh’s Resignation from the Brooklyn DA’s Office

On March 31, 2010, a 22-year-old Brooklyn woman told NYPD officers that Damien Crooks took her to a party, where she was raped and beaten. She said that she managed to escape her abusers and phoned her best friend. Her friend took her to the police, and she was then sent to the hospital. A June 2, 2012, New York Times article reports that at 6:30 AM the following morning, the young woman talked to an NYPD detective and filed a formal statement, discussing rapes, beatings, and Crooks pimping her out. She said she was “afraid for her life.”

By 10:45 AM, however, she was interviewed again by a second NYPD detective and recanted her prior statements. She informed the detective interviewing her that she was a prostitute, was not forcibly raped by Crooks, and had had consensual intercourse with him several times over the preceding years. The detective wrote that the accuser promulgated her allegations, because one of the men at the party had sex with her, and he hadn’t worn a condom and hit her. The following day, the NYPD terminated its investigation – a turn of events that would prove integral to Herch’s prosecutorial problems.

But the woman’s allegations were not without foundation. She lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has been a melting pot for both Orthodox Jews and African Americans. Crooks lived in the house directly behind her family’s house.

The young woman said she’d been molested by a family member. She also said her teenage nightmare continued when her brother asked her to purchase marijuana from Jawara Brockett who lived nearby. As her brother waited for her downstairs, she said she was forced to have oral, anal and vaginal sex with three men that included purported perpetrator Jawara Brockett.

The alleged victim claimed that she quickly became immersed in a double life. Women at a neighborhood hair salon remembered a teenager regularly ducking into the salon’s bathroom, where she disrobed from long dresses and slipped into clothes suited for working the streets.

There is a picture of the alleged victim donning a crimson dress – surrounded by black men, including one she named as a perpetrator. Like the men, her hand is rounded into a “C,” which law enforcement asserts is a signal for Crips. One of her alleged perpetrators, Jamali Brockett, would ultimately be sentenced to 24 years in prison on unrelated federal charges for sex trafficking women and minors.

Police records reveal that when she was 13 and 14 years old, in 2004 and 2004, she phoned the police at least four times to report assaults and provided her address. The NYPD said that one arrest was made because of the alleged victim’s complaints in 2003, but the responding commanders didn’t remember meeting her father, who claimed that the police never visited their family home. Her best friend also said that she approached police officers on the street as a teenager, but they had a callous attitude: “You put yourself in this situation, you get yourself out.”

In September of 2004, the alleged victim said a tipping point occurred: a “client” stabbed her. By the time she made it home at 3:00 AM her sweatshirt was drenched in blood. Her panic-stricken parents met her at the front door – and would eventually place their teenage daughter in a psychiatric hospital. She was discharged in 2006, finished high school, and enrolled in John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The young woman maintained that Crooks’ threats against her sister drove her back into a life of prostitution.

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Transcript Shows Bill Gates Claim Epstein Issued ‘Veiled’ Threats Over Affairs

Bill Gates told lawmakers in a recent interview that Jeffrey Epstein threatened him subtly over his affairs but did not overtly blackmail him, according to a transcript released on June 23.

Epstein in 2013 “made some veiled references that made me wonder whether he had become aware” of one of the affairs, Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, told the House of Representatives Oversight Committee on June 10.

Epstein later sent a reimbursement request to Gates, according to Gates. The request was for expenses that Epstein said he paid for one of the women with whom Gates had an affair.

“I viewed it as a tactic to reengage with me,” Gates said. “I’d never asked him to do anything with respect to the person we’re discussing, so I was rather surprised. That was the first time I knew explicitly that he’d become aware of that affair.”

Gates said he directed staff members not to pay Epstein.

Still, Gates maintained that Epstein did not blackmail him.

“He never blackmailed me, but looking at these emails, it raises a serious probability that he contemplated blackmailing me,” Gates said, referring to documents released by the Department of Justice in January.

Gates also said: “He never sent me anything that I would call blackmail. As I’ve said, he made veiled references to things like we should all want to be friends.

“Now that I see the January release of documents, it appears that in many cases he, at least in emails to himself, was sort of rehearsing how either he or he coaching someone else might choose to blackmail me, but none of those messages were ever sent to me.”

Gates had said through a spokesperson in 2023 that Epstein tried to “leverage a past relationship” to threaten him, without providing details.

Epstein, a convicted sex offender, died in federal prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking of minors.

Gates has said he met with Epstein multiple times from 2011 through 2014, and that he ended the relationship in 2014 after concluding that Epstein could not deliver on claims that he could raise billions for global health efforts.

Gates said in his opening statement that he should have never met with Epstein in the first place but that he never witnessed any indication Epstein was involved in criminal conduct.

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Aus police to review interactions with Epstein accuser before her death

Interactions between Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre and Australian police prior to her death will be reviewed, Western Australia’s police commissioner has confirmed.

Giuffre, 41, died by suicide at her semi-rural property north of Perth in April of last year.

The investigation will focus on officers’ handling of a dispute between Giuffre and a former partner, commissioner Col Blanch said.

Giuffre was at one point charged with breaching a restraining order in relation to the dispute.

She had long alleged she was trafficked for sex to former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and others when she was a teenager.

Giuffre was one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers and was an advocate for survivors of sex trafficking.

The review would be carried out in response to a letter sent by Giuffre’s family, Blanch said.

“We respond to over 100,000 family violence incidents every year,” he told a Western Australia parliament hearing on Wednesday morning.

“I’d love to give assurance on every single one, but I can’t — but that one will be subject to a review.”

The state’s coroner and ombudsman could also launch investigations, he said.

Members of Giuffre’s family have called for a coronial inquest into her death, which has been backed up by a group of domestic violence experts.

An open letter signed by 16 experts in domestic violence, family violence and violence against women was sent to the WA coroner earlier this month.

“Virginia Giuffre spent much of her adult life in courageous pursuit of accountability for the abuse she suffered, taking significant personal risk to expose a network of exploitation and in doing so helping to protect other women,” the letter read.

“It would be a profound injustice if the question of whether systems failed her in her final months were not examined with equivalent rigour.”

It said she may have been a victim of domestic violence in the lead up to her death, and cited a 2022 WA Ombudsman investigation that found 56% of women and children who died by suicide in the state had previously been identified as victims of domestic and family violence.

“Her public profile means there is an unusually detailed record of her final months – and what that record shows is deeply consistent with what our research tells us about how these deaths occur, and how they are too often overlooked.

“Conducted with full attention to the domestic and family violence context of her death, such an inquest has the potential to generate findings and recommendations that reach far beyond this one case and that could prevent future deaths.”

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What’s missing from the Epstein files? Questions persist about unexplained redactions, missing documents, email gaps

When the Department of Justice released more than 3 million pages of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, survivors, advocates and lawmakers quickly raised questions about an apparent discrepancy: the DOJ had said it collected more than 6 million pages of material during its investigation but was only releasing half that number.

The Justice Department tells CBS News it “has released every document required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” and maintains that those unreleased 3 million documents were either duplicative, unrelated to Epstein or protected by legal privilege.

But concerns persist about evidence that important documents are still being withheld. CBS News has analyzed the archive not only for what has been disclosed, but also for documents that appear to be absent. Our key findings include:

  • Questionable redactions, including public figures’ names
  • Most Epstein emails from older accounts not included in files
  • Missing email attachments
  • No record of Signal communications
  • Lack of massage scheduling records after 2009
  • Missing prison surveillance footage
  • Missing documents from DEA investigation into Epstein
  • Other potentially relevant materials from ICE, Treasury, CIA and other agencies were not included because the law only applies to DOJ records.

The Government Accountability Office recently announced it was launching an investigation into the way documents that were released had information blacked out. That move comes at the request of several members of Congress.

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Everything we know about the Bibb County child sex trafficking ring investigation

Authorities in Bibb County uncovered a child sex trafficking ring involving at least ten victims that has been happening for at least two years in an underground storm shelter.

Officials are searching for at least 15 additional suspects; eight suspects have already appeared in court.

The investigation, which was announced on July 19, 2025, but began months earlier in February, has led to the arrest of eight suspects. More arrests and charges expected.

The Department of Homeland Security is assisting in the investigation, including looking into possible gang ties and the immigration status of the suspects.

“I’ve been in law enforcement for 33 years, and this is absolutely the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen when it comes to the victimization of children. I know God’s forgiveness is boundless, but if there was a limit to it, I think we’ve reached it,” said Sheriff Jody Wade.

The storm shelter contained chairs, beds, and other items used to restrain and drug the children.

Assistant District Attorney Brian Jones described the scene inside the storm shelter, saying, “there were chairs and beds and things of that nature and the children were drugged by Mr. Trejo and tied to the bed, into the chair, into a pole. And then people would come and pay money to have sex with these children.”

A photo of the storm shelter has been released to help trigger the memory of victims who may have been drugged.

“There are some allegations with individuals that we will have a hard time identifying, just because we don’t know their names. And the children were drugged, according to one of the co-defendants. And so they may not be able to recognize or be able to identify anyone,” Jones said.

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