Jeffrey Epstein accuser links powerful men to financier: civil court filing

[August 10, 2019]  NEW YORK (Reuters) - A woman who accused Jeffrey Epstein of keeping her as a sex slave said one of the financier's associates had instructed her to have sex with at least a half-dozen prominent men, according to a court filing unsealed on Friday in a civil lawsuit.

The claim by Virginia Giuffre came in a deposition that was included among roughly 2,000 pages of documents related to her defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, the associate whom Giuffre has said helped Epstein procure girls for sex.

Lawyers for Maxwell did not respond to several phone and email requests for comment.

Epstein has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking involving dozens of underage girls as young as 14, from at least 2002 to 2005. He is being held in a Manhattan jail.

Lawyers for Epstein did not respond to requests for comment outside business hours. Maxwell has not been criminally charged.

The Giuffre deposition and the other documents were released after a federal appeals court in Manhattan rejected Maxwell's bid to keep them under seal.

Giuffre claimed in a May 3, 2016, deposition that Maxwell directed her to have sex with people including former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, modeling agent Jean Luc Brunel and financier Glenn Dubin.

It was not clear from the deposition transcript included in the court documents how old Giuffre was at the time of the alleged direction. The transcript does not indicate whether Giuffre actually engaged in sex with the four men.

None of the four men has been criminally charged in connection with Epstein. Richardson, Mitchell and Dubin, or their respective representatives, all said the various allegations against them were false. A lawyer for Brunel did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein appears in a photograph taken for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services' sex offender registry March 28, 2017 and obtained by Reuters July 10, 2019. New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services/Handout via REUTERS

A spokeswoman for Richardson said the former governor had never met Giuffre. "These allegations and inferences are completely false," she said. "To be clear, in Governor Richardson's limited interactions with Mr. Epstein, he never saw him in the presence of young or underage girls."

Mitchell said in a statement: "The allegation contained in the released documents is false. I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre."

A spokeswoman for Dubin said he was "outraged" by the unsealed allegations, which he considered "demonstrably false and defamatory," and said that he had flight records and other evidence that "definitively" disproved them.

The name of U.S. President Donald Trump, who was once a friend of Epstein, appears in a Nov. 14, 2016, deposition of Giuffre, in which she said Trump and Epstein had been good friends.

In response to a question about how she knew whom Trump had sex with, Giuffre said she "didn't physically see him have sex with any of the girls."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Sheila Dang, Lawrence Delevingne and Koh Gui Qing in New York; Editing by Bill Rigby, Noeleen Walderand Leslie Adler)

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