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I always struggle when I think about what we owe the dead.
Do we owe them the truth? An account of their life? And why should they care? They’re dead!
Funerals aren’t really for the dead but for the living. So, too, with eulogies. I suspect that’s why we really care about them. We want to control the narrative. Legends can form and get set into cement. You can bury a lot of bodies in that cement.
So it is with Virginia Giuffre, who allegedly took her own in an Australian manse this past week.
We’ve been over my views about the real Jeffrey Epstein. I think they are worth bringing up once again.
We began this Substack several years ago by talking about Jeffrey Epstein, a figure I knew from my stint working for Alan Dershowitz in high school. The tragedy of life is that you can never quite be reflective when you’re living it but now nearly twenty years later I can put it together.
I’ve never believed Virginia Giuffre’s story and there’s little in the newest tranche Epstein files to change much of my assessment of the state of play.
Still the news hook does provide an opportunity to expound upon my own views about what was really going on in the Epstein world. Giuffre’s stories always strained credulity. It’s telling how the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell involves behavior from the 1990s and not the Giuffre story. She apparently recanted her claims against Alan Dershowitz in 2022.
From whence does Giuffre hail? She always struck me as part of that Mormon network and indeed the aunt who allegedly raised Giuffre is LDS. She’s described in 2015 Daily Mail as “Carol Roberts Kess, a devout Mormon who helped raise [Giuffre].”
There’s always these sort of fights between the Israelis and the Mormons over dominance particularly in Utah and Las Vegas. We’ve already discussed Deseret so there’s no need to expand upon it here but suffice it to say it continues to play a role in our politics not least among the Mormons who are involved in the day to day running of the Republican Party.
The moral panic over sex trafficking is often a cover for different mafias and their relationship to sex trafficking.
Disgraced Utah attorney general Sean Reyes believed Giuffre’s story and many of his Mormon political allies seemed only too excited about it. Reyes and I essentially stopped talking when I learned about his personal corruption and after I told him that I doubted some of what was going on at the law firm of Pottinger and Edwards — the firm representing Giuffre — was on the up and up. In any event Giuffre’s settled the suit in 2017. Reyes has since gotten in trouble for his ties to fake sex trafficking organizations like Operation Underground Railroad which were covers for sex trafficking and announced his resignation at the end of his term.
What began as a legal shakedown led to a counterintelligence operation and a cleaning up of compromised companies which Epstein commandeered and exploited. These were not small companies but the backbone of the American financial and technical system — companies like Chase and ultimately Microsoft.
The way Epstein’s hustle worked is that he worked with some compromised billionaire who, in turn, would acquire companies he had an interest in. This is, incidentally, why anti-trust policies are a national security matter.
The best example I know of here is Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn whose company was acquired by Bill Gates’s Microsoft in 2017. Interestingly this acquisition took place at precisely the same time that Epstein wrote to Gates saying that Epstein knew about his extramarital affair with a Russian bridge player. Of course Epstein held LinkedIn shares.
One of my friends and I often discuss this strange connections with Giuffre and the Mormons, which was laid bare in this January 2025 interview with her Mormon aunt Carol.
Virginia was born in 1983 to Sky Roberts, an odd-job man and “horse-loving cowboy”, and Lynn, a bank worker who already had a two-year-old son Daniel from a previous marriage. The family lived in Sacramento, California but moved to Loxahatchee in Palm Beach County, Florida, when Virginia was just four years old.
Another aunt, Kimberley Roberts, said yesterday: “The family wasn’t wealthy but Lynn came from money and Virginia was given a trust fund by her maternal grandmother. Lynn’s mother took the family on lavish holidays when Virginia was a child. She was brought up with good morals; respect your parents, don’t talk back, don’t drink or do drugs.”
BUT while Virginia’s early years on her father’s small ranch were “idyllic” according to aunt Carol, everything changed when she was 12 and was molested by a family friend: “Sky called me one day and said that Virginia had been molested. He didn’t go into great detail but he said he needed to send Virginia to live with me. Of course I said yes immediately.”
Carol, who was then living in Monterey, California, added: “I’m a Mormon. I don’t drink, smoke or drink caffeine. Virginia needed stability. She was very quiet and had an eating disorder. She’d have a piece of lettuce and say she’d eaten. If your world feels out of control the one part of your life you can control is what you eat.”
Another friend argues that Giuffre was targeted by the Israeli mob because she was Mormon. Her previous abuse would make her the ideal target, this friend says.
I quote:
Her original trafficker was Ron Eppinger who was sex trafficking women from Eastern Europe to the United States.
Her dad worked at Mara Lago. The Israeli mob used Virginia to go after Jeffrey Epstein.
Sure enough, a little digging in shows that Eppinger was a “Miami pimp… kept her confined to an apartment that was part of an underground brothel network. After Eppinger was arrested in 2000, Giuffre reunited with her father in West Palm Beach, she said. Eppinger pleaded guilty in 2001 in U.S. District Court in Miami to charges including involvement in trafficking for prostitution.”
Eppinger also had Las Vegas ties. That first casino sounds familiar.
Bradley J. Edwards, Giuffre’s old attorney, is also tied up with the Israeli-connected Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.
In my view Giuffre lost all her credibility when she recanted her claims of sexual assault from Alan Dershowitz.
The question remains: Who was running her? And are they still active today?
I suspect the only way we will ever really be allowed to talk about what really happened with Jeffrey Epstein is through a novel.
Are there publishers brave enough to publish it?
Hi again Charles. I know I'm new to leaving comments. It's amazing but I first discovered the pleasure of reading your blog the very day Musk banned you on Twitter. Which was ironic and frustrating as I found your feed very interesting-a friend of mine had recommended it to me. I knew of course of your reputation-which precedes you and I recall your feud with Roger Stone on whose idea it was for Trump to bring the Clinton accusers to that 2016 debate. I would be happy to be a paying reader and may do in the near future but at present alas I'm one of the 60% supermajority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck
Again as I noted in my first comment a few weeks ago I remain obsessed with that time you were able to release 20 months of correspondence with Vance-anyone who'd read what he said to you in those texts would not have been shocked by the way he and Trump ambushed Zelensky in that oval office setup-I know you've become more positive on Trump again but even people who like Trump saw that moment as shameful. While it seems that you've kind of gone back to being loyal to Trump I've also thought you're the kind of guy-if you were ever interested that the Democrats could use on their team as I suspect you know where a lot of bodies are buried on the GOP oppo research side of things.
Obv you're under no obligation to answer this but I'd never realized you actually worked for Dershowitz in high school-think you might have mentioned it but went right over my head. Just wondering have you since lost touch with him or do you still correspond now and again? And would you consider yourself a fan of his today?
Sorry Charles, you've been bamboozled.
Giuffre spun a yarn about an elite pedophile ring that appealed to a credulous population desperate for wild stories of elite misconduct, truth be damned.
She was both victim and victimizer. She trafficked far more young women to Jeffrey Epstein than the government accused Ghislaine Maxwell of, and victimized the many people, men AND women, who got caught up in her imaginative conspiracy theory.
Virtually every aspect of the Epstein conspiracy theory is based on her shaky word. The elite pedophile ring with the politicians and princes, the pedophile island, the secret video tapes, the supposed blackmail? It all originated with Giuffre, who made it all up.
Had she never existed, what would be left of the Epstein case? Not much. Some rich and mostly unknown pervert paid high school girls $300 for sexual massages in Florida. His arrest in 2006 never even made it to the front page of the Palm Beach Post.