Latest / The Vault: The Epstein Files / France’s Epstein Investigation Expands as New Victims Come Forward (5/19/26)

Transcript

France’s Epstein Investigation Expands as New Victims Come Forward (5/19/26) · The Vault: The Epstein Files

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What's up, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the
• 0:03
  Epstein Chronicles. For years, people have tried to shrink Jeffrey
• 0:08
  Epstein down to a Manhattan scandal, a Palm Beach scandal,
• 0:11
  or a rich man gone bad scandal. That was the
• 0:15
  lie from the beginning, because the truth was always far bigger,
• 0:19
  far uglier, and far more international than the public was
• 0:22
  encouraged to understand. Epstein didn't build a local operation. He
• 0:27
  built a transnational trafficking network that moved through airports, embassies,
• 0:32
  private terminals, elite universities, royal circles, hedge funds, modeling agencies,
• 0:37
  luxury compounds, and billionaire dinner parties with the ease of
• 0:41
  a multinational corporation. The machinery stretch from New York to
• 0:46
  Palm Beach, from New Mexico to the US Virgin Islands,
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  from Paris to London, from Eastern Europe to South America.
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  Girls were recruited in one country, transported through another, abused
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  in a third, and then discarded while the most power
• 1:00
  people on earth hid behind lawyers, wealth, intelligence connections, and
• 1:05
  institutional silence. That's what made Epstein different. He wasn't operating
• 1:10
  in the shadows of society he was operating inside its
• 1:13
  highest levels in plain sight, and now, years after his death,
• 1:18
  inside the federal jail cell that somehow managed to malfunction
• 1:21
  at every critical moment imaginable. The story's not getting smaller,
• 1:26
  it's getting bigger. France is now seeing a growing wave
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  of women step forward with allegations connected to Epstein's orbit,
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  with roughly ten new accusers reportedly emerging and describing encounters
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  that investigators and journalists are now once again being forced
• 1:42
  to examine under an international lens. And that matters because
• 1:46
  it blows apart the fairy tale that Epstein's crimes were
• 1:49
  isolated to a handful of locations in America. The allegations
• 1:53
  coming out of France reinforce what survivors, investigators, and even
• 1:58
  core documents have said for decade. This operation moved through
• 2:02
  Europe with the same confidence and protection it enjoyed in
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  the United States, the same social circles, the same money,
• 2:10
  the same access, the same culture of intimidation and silence,
• 2:14
  And every new accusation raises the same haunting question that
• 2:18
  nobody in power has ever adequately answered. How does a
• 2:21
  man accused of trafficking girls across continents for decades, continue
• 2:25
  to gain more influence, more access, more protection, and more
• 2:29
  elite connections instead of less. Well, I'll tell you why,
• 2:34
  because this was never about one predator. That's another comforting
• 2:37
  myth people tell themselves. Epstein was the nucleus of a
• 2:41
  much larger ecosystem, an ecosystem filled with fixers, recruiters, facilitators, financiers, socialites, lawyers, assistants, handlers,
• 2:51
  and powerful friends who all benefited in one way or
• 2:54
  another from proximity to them. You don't move vulnerable young
• 2:58
  women across borders through luxury properties, hunt to private jets,
• 3:02
  and into circles occupied by billionaires, royalty, celebrities, politicians, and
• 3:07
  academics without infrastructure. Human trafficking on this scale requires logistics,
• 3:13
  It requires protection. It requires institutional failures stacked on top
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  of institutional failures until corruption becomes indistinguishable from normal business operation.
• 3:24
  And that's why every new accuser matters, not because it
• 3:27
  adds another headline, but because every testimony is another crack
• 3:31
  in the facade that powerful people spent decades constructing around Epstein. Now,
• 3:37
  the French allegations are especially significant because Europe has long
• 3:40
  existed as one of the murkier, less examined fronts of
• 3:44
  the Epstein story. London has been scrutinized because of Prince Andrew.
• 3:49
  Paris has surfaced repeatedly in social and modeling circles tied
• 3:52
  to Epstein and Glenn Maxwell. Connections to Scouts agencies, wealthy intermediaries,
• 3:57
  and elite social networks have floated around for years like smoke,
• 4:01
  without enough public pressure to force a real fire investigation
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  underneath it. But now, as more women come forward, investigators
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  are once again confronting the possibility that Epstein's enterprise was
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  not merely international and travel patterns, but international in structure.
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  A rich criminal who travels overseas is one thing. A
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  coordinated trafficking apparatus that operates fluidly across borders is something else. Entirely,
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  and listen, Despite all the documentaries, all the hearings, all
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  the lawsuits, all the podcasts, all the endless headlines, were
• 4:34
  still nowhere near a full accounting of what Epstein's empire
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  actually was, not even close. The public has fragments, flight
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  logs here, depositions there, redacted files, sealed records, settlements, leaked emails,
• 4:48
  carefully worded denials, but the complete architecture, the full network,
• 4:52
  the financial relationships, the recruitment pipelines, the protection mechanisms, the
• 4:57
  extent of who knew what and when. That picture remains incomplete,
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  which is precisely why these new accusations matter so much,
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  because the story refuses to stay buried. It seems like
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  every day more voices emerge, more document surface, more contradictions appear,
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  more carefully maintained reputations begin to rot under scrutiny. Jeffrey
• 5:20
  Epstein's dead, but the system that allowed them to thrive
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  for decades clearly is not. Today's article is from France
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  twenty four dot com and the headline around ten new
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  victims come forward and France's Epstein investigation. This article was
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  authored by France twenty four. Around ten new suspected victims
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  have come forward in the French probe into the network
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  of late USX offender Jeffrey Epstein. A Paris prosecutor set
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  on Sunday. Well, that's good, and I hope more come
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  forward because the more people that come forward and give information,
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  the closer we're going to get to people actually being
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  held to count. Right, you could ignore one person, hell,
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  maybe even two, What about ten? What about twelve, what
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  about fifteen, France opened to human trafficking investigation after the
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  US Justice Department in January released the latest cash of
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  files from the investigation into the disgraced financier who died
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  in prison in twenty nineteen while facing charges of trafficking
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  underage girls for sex. And look, this is a probe
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  that should have been opened from the very beginning. France
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  played a gigantic part, and there's a lot of people
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  who were French citizens who worked for Jeffrey Epstein. Obviously
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  we know about Jean le Brunel, but there were others.
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  He had a whole network, and every single person that
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  accepted any of his largests, anybody that accepted his money,
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  they should be hemmed up. A French magistrate are seeking
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  to investigate possible offenses committed in France or involving French
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  perpetrators who facilitated his crimes, although they should have a
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  problem finding those, plenty of those out there. Top Paris
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  prosecutor Loura Bacau set around twenty suspected victims had made
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  themselves known after she urged potential victims to speak up
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  in February. Well, look again, there's going to be people
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  that come forward, and of course there's going to be
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  people that don't. And I think when people come forward
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  and they have allegations against a guy like Jeffrey Epstein,
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  we should probably listen to what they have to say. Now,
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  that doesn't mean that everybody is going to be truthful,
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  that there's not going to be people looking to, you know, benefit,
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  that's always part of it. But I think we have
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  to go in with an open mind and we have
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  to listen to all the allegations for what they are.
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  Because I'm telling you, the vast majority of the people
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  that have come forward have told the truth. Some were
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  already known to investigators, she told RTL broadcaster, But we
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  also had new victims come forward, ones we didn't know
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  at all. There are around ten of them, she added,
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  So that's significant, right, ten people with a story to tell.
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  What that story's going to be, who knows. The choice
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  that we've made for the time being is to listen
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  to these victims, she said, a certain number of them
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  are abroad, so the investigators are trying to set up
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  meetings to suit when they're able to come to Paris.
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  Investigators were also scouring through the so called Epstein files
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  and would be searching them for any names mentioned by
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  alleged victims. She said, Yeah, they're gonna have to do
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  the whole entire thing groundwork from the very bottom up.
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  And I don't know much about the French system or
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  French law enforcement, but I'm guessing that they're going to
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  take it serious. You would think that something like Epstein
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  would get people going, but as we've seen in America,
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  that's not always the case, especially when you have powerful
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  people that have, you know, something to lose, and I'm
• 9:02
  pretty sure all these people that were around Epstein have
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  plenty to lose. We have also got to go back
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  out to mister Epstein's computer, his telephone records, his address books,
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  she said, adding her team would be making a request
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  for international assistance. Well, I wouldn't count on that. I mean,
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  it is the Epstein administration after all. French investigator searched
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  Epstein's luxury Paris apartment in September twenty nineteen, more than
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  a month after he was found hanged in his New
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  York jail cell after allegations that he procured young women
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  to abuse in France. I don't even think it's allegations
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  at this point, we've heard from the women who got
• 9:42
  abused by him and Weinstein in France. We've heard from
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  how many women about Jean lup Brunel, about Daniel said
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  about all of the other people that were involved in France.
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  Oh yeah, there's a story to tell here, and I'll
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  tell you what. You know, what else France should look
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  into the death of our When you go through the emails,
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  there was a bunch of emails of al Secyl and
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  Jeffrey Epstein arguing about money. Then al Secyl meets his
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  demise in France falls off a cliff. Okay, I guess
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  none of the people who could potentially be implicated have
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  been questioned so far, but Cow added, however, Epstein pleaded
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  guilty in two thousand and eight to procuring for prostitution
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  a girl under the age of eighteen and served thirteen
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  months in prison before being released on probation. All right,
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  so things are heating up in France, and we'll keep
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  an eye on it and we'll see what comes of it,
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  and when we have some more information, we'll get it
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  added to the catalog. All the information that goes with
• 10:46
  this episode can be found in the description box.