First, he promises to fix you.
It all starts off with a question.
What’s your dream?
Actor. Model. Artist. Dancer. Singer.
He can make it happen.
Admission into elite universities. A job that promised travel around the world. An audition to model for Victoria Secret.
Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein promised to make young girls believe he could shape their future.
For many, the dream of a university education and a catwalk career turned out to be much darker.
Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse.
Scholarships and Victoria Secret
She was sitting at a picnic table eating ice cream with friends in between classes at an art camp in Michigan in the early 90s.
A couple [Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell] walked past her and asked if she liked her classes, her teachers.
They asked her about her life, where she lived, her mum’s phone number.
She came from a family of singers, who were grieving the loss of their father.
The couple invited Jane and her mum over for tea at their Palm Beach house and talked about a passion for mentoring.
He said he was a long standing donor to Jane's school, he said he gives scholarships to young, talented students like her.
He starts giving her cash, sometimes he’d tell her to give it to her mum and pays for her voice lessons.
She said she wanted to be an actress and model. He told her that he was best friends with the owner of Victoria Secret.
He said she would need to get photos taken in her underwear and "not to be a prude" about it.
She asked what that meant and then he pulled her onto his lap and masturbated.
She was raped and forced into sexualised massages, threesomes and orgies within the first year of meeting the couple.
This is how he lured his first known victim. She was 14.
Epstein and his co-conspirators would go on to groom, abuse and traffic dozens over the next decade, exploiting their future hopes detailed in their diaries
A high-school girl wrote the beginning of it in her diary entry in 1996 after a trip to New York to meet Epstein.
Survivor, Annie Farmer recalled being 16 with her sights set on going to a good university: "He sat me down very seriously to talk about going to college and how to improve my resume."
Another survivor, Sarah Ransome said in a Miami Herald interview in 2019: "He said he could get me into the fashion institute of technology. He would pay for my schooling — I mean they [Epstein and Maxwell] helped me on my essay."
And everything they saw around him suggested the dream was real.
A private jet, mansions across the country and connections to politicians, celebrities and royalty.
Often, the first meeting came through someone they trusted.
One young woman had just moved to the United States when her modelling agent told her he knew a man who could help her get into the Victoria's Secret world — something she had dreamed about since she was a child.
At Epstein’s New York mansion, she was told that if he liked her, photographers would start shooting her immediately.
She took her portfolio, but he never asked to see it. Instead, he pulled off his robe and got close to her. She tried to leave, but the door was locked.
"I had spent all of my savings getting Victoria's Secret lingerie to prepare for what I thought would be my audition, but instead it seemed like a casting call for prostitution," she said in a statement in 2019.
Catwalk auditions
And she wasn't the only woman to audition for him. The latest tranche of files released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) include videos of girls and young women strutting down a makeshift catwalk before twirling in front of the camera.
Some appear topless, while others wear lingerie, bikinis and heels; their ages are unclear.
In one video, head shots pinned to a whiteboard can be seen in the background of what appears to be a casting office.
The videos support the claims that Epstein and Maxwell posed as fake model scouts to lure girls and young women into his orbit.
He often bragged about his close ties with Victoria Secret titan Jean-Luc Brunel, multiple lawsuits from survivors say.
Survivors saw how it operated. Maria Farmer was in her 20s, procuring art for Epstein and Maxwell, when they abused her.
She witnessed Maxwell recruiting models for what Epstein called the Limited Corporation.
"She [Maxwell] said it wasn't just for Victoria’s Secret, but it was mostly for them," she told 60 Minutes Australia in 2020.
When Maria asked why the girls were so young, Maxwell replied that the Limited Corporation had many companies and "these girls model … and they start young".
One day, a girl came downstairs crying. When Maria asked why, Maxwell said she "didn't get the job" and "needs to toughen up".
Maxwell is the only former Epstein associate convicted in connection with his scheme.
Epstein repeatedly drew girls and young women into his "network" by promising help with admissions to elite institutions, including Columbia University and New York University (NYU).
Letters sent by the House Committee to Columbia and NYU said Epstein counselled the girls about their schooling and paid for their classes.
“According to these survivors, Mr. Epstein and his co-conspirators promised victims that he would ensure they were admitted to Columbia — all while he and his co-conspirators continued to sexually assault and rape them,” the letter to Columbia stated.
"Epstein promised young women, some of them minors at the time, that he would arrange for them to be admitted to NYU," the letter to NYU stated.
Survivors later described how these promises were used to keep them close.
"When you are in, you can't get out. If you didn't do what he said, he would make sure that I would not be working in New York," Sarah said.
The Epstein files unveil a "global criminal enterprise" underpinned by supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny, and the dehumanisation of women and girls from around the world, a panel of experts with the United Nations Human Rights Council said.
"So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity," the experts said in a statement.
Jane Doe would be in her 30s now.
She is among the 1,200 survivors and their family members who appear in the files — a cache of about 3.5 million pages made public so far. The DOJ continues to withhold millions more.
Survivors have been speaking out for years, telling their stories about the sex trafficking operation that is still unravelling.
"For five administrations, survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have been left in the dark, waiting for answers and accountability. After three decades, it’s finally time to bring the secrets out of the shadows."
