Child Sexual Abuse > Jeffrey Epstein's Pedophile Island - all you wanted to know and more

 

Jeffrey Epstein’s island: What really happened there?

Accusers say billionaire’s private paradise of Little St James in U.S. Virgin Islands was centre of international sex trafficking ring

The guests to Epstein’s islands came from across the world and from the highest ranks of society: celebrities and scientists and members of royal families, touching down in a private jet and then boarding a helicopter to the island.

Its owner liked to call it “Little St Jeff”. The locals called it “Pedophile Island.”

But what is the truth about Little St James, the 75-acre private paradise in the U.S. Virgin Islands that billionaire sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein once called home?

A criminal complaint from the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands described it as “the perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault”.

On this island, the complaint says: “Epstein and his associates could avoid detection of their illegal activity from Virgin Islands and federal law enforcement, and prevent these young women and underage girls from leaving freely and escaping the abuse.”

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The island featured in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial. She was convicted of five sex-trafficking charges and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars plus a $750,000 fine on 28 June, 2022.

Finally, in May 2023, it was sold to a wealthy investor for less than half of its original asking price, with the hope of turning it into a luxury resort.

Here is everything we know about Little St James and what Epstein did there.

Where is Jeffrey Epstein’s island and what is it like?

Little St James is a small island fringed by coral reefs in the bright blue waters of the U.S. Virgin Islands, with sheltered inlets and forested groves rising to dramatic windswept ridges and craggy cliffs.

It lies just off the south-eastern tip of St Thomas, one of the Caribbean archipelago’s three main islands.

The Virgins were purchased from Denmark by the U.S. government at the height of the First World War in order to stop them being used as a German submarine base.

Today, many financial experts regard them as a tax haven, with huge discounts on corporation tax and personal income tax available to companies based there.

It was in the Virgins that Epstein registered as a sex offender in 2010, following his first conviction for child prostitution in 2008. He also based his shell companies in a small unmarked office in a seaside strip mall on St Thomas, alongside a Sam’s Mini-Mart and a salon called Happy Nails.

In 1998, he bought Little St James from venture capitalist Arch Cummin via a shell company, reportedly paying just under $8m (£6m). The new owner quickly scoured away all the native vegetation and replaced it with 40-foot palm trees.

Starting in 2007, Epstein began a massive programme of building and remodelling that drew suspicion from local officials. His main compound nearly doubled in size, sprouting into a plush mansion with an outside terrace connecting the master bedroom and the swimming pool, along with a desalination system.

Satellite photos show a sprawling network of terraces, cottages, beach houses, swimming pools, docks, utility buildings, a helipad, a tennis court, slipways, some kind of enclosed lake or lagoon, and various huts of unknown purpose, all connected by palm-lined roads where golf buggies ferried guests from place to place (a journey across the island reportedly took about five minutes).

Stunning drone footage posted on YouTube offers a closer look, with a huge sundial at the centre of the island big enough to walk around on and two tall American flags posted at opposite ends of the island.

At the other end from Epstein’s manor is a squat, boxy blue and white striped structure often referred to as a “temple”, surrounded by a terrace with a red labyrinth motif. It previously had a golden dome and two gold statues on its roof, which were reportedly torn off in Hurricane Maria.

Let's see... if there were 72 black-eyed virgins on the island, it would qualify as Paradise for murderous, Muslim terrorists.😒

The building differs greatly from Epstein’s original planning permit for an octagonal music pavilion and has become a lightning rod for fevered speculation. Theorists have variously described it as the entrance to an underground lair, an altar to an Egyptian deity, a burial ground for his parents, or a site of ritual sexual abuse, but an investigation by Business Insider concluded that it was most likely a private study and music room for Epstein.

In 2016, Epstein also bought the neighbouring island of Great St James, about twice as large at 165 acres, allegedly pretending that the real buyer was a Dubai businessman named Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.

“He wasn’t well received,” one St Thomas resident told the Associated Press. “People think he’s too rich to be policed properly.”

Please continue reading this exceptional article on France24 at:

What was life like on the island?

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This Day in History > Nine Women, WWII Resistance Fighters, Survive a Nazi Death march

 

‘Unwavering friendship’: The true story of nine women who escaped a Nazi death march

Long read

Europe

“The Nine”, by Gwen Strauss, tells the extraordinary true story of how nine young women from the Resistance survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and then escaped from a death march in Nazi Germany. Its American author recounts their remarkable getaway, their friendship and the lives the women led once back home.

“It wasn’t until she told me, one day over lunch, that I realised she was a war hero.”

Gwen Strauss’ great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky, was one of nine women who used their wits and courage to escape a Nazi death march and find the Americans in the spring of 1945, as World War II was drawing to an end. Seven of the nine were in the French Resistance and two were in the Dutch Resistance. They were all arrested in France and deported to Ravensbrück, Hitler’s concentration camp for women.

April 30 marks 80 years since Ravensbrück was liberated by the Soviets.

“In my family, we always talked about Daniel, Hélène’s husband, and all the things he’d done,” Strauss recalls. Daniel Bénédite was a well-known Resistance fighter who had helped save artists like Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Hannah Arendt.

“But Hélène didn't talk about her story, and neither did we,” says Strauss.

Hélène Podliasky was arrested when she was 24 and working as an agent de liaison for the French Resistance. Her nom de guerre was Christine. © Martine Fourcaut

This was typical not only within the families of women who had been deported, but also in society in general. After the war ended, the women lucky enough to have survived the concentration camps rarely talked about what had happened to them.

‘She wanted to tell me’

But Strauss knew Hélène had an extraordinary story, and so, a few weeks after their lunch, she recorded her great-aunt’s account. Ten years later, in 2012, Hélène, who was in her nineties, died peacefully after a short illness.

“She wanted to tell me, because she knew it would be forgotten otherwise,” says Strauss.

She did not immediately start writing about Hélène’s escape from Nazi Germany. “I let it sit, and I regret that,” she says. “Because if I had started sooner, I might have been able to interview more of the women. By the time I started to really investigate the story, all of them had died.”

In 2017, appalled by the white supremacist riots in Charlottesvile, Virginia, Strauss decided the time had come to revisit Hélène’s story of resistance and resilience and write "The Nine: How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany" (Manilla).

‘I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real’

An archivist in Leipzig tracked down documents which showed Hélène’s name, because she had spent time there at a forced labour camp. “That was really a gut punch. I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real,” says Strauss. But tracking down the other eight members of the group was not easy, in part because they had nicknames and noms de guerre.

Click here to watch our documentary

By sheer chance, some years earlier, she had come across a book, "Neuf filles qui ne voulaient pas mourir" (Nine girls who didn’t want to die, Arléa), in a Parisian book shop. “It was just sitting there on the table.” The author, Suzanne Maudet, known as Zaza, was one of the nine and had been very close to Hélène.

She contacted Zaza’s nephew, because he was the one who had got her book published and his name was in the preface. “I went to see him in Rennes, with my daughter,” Strauss recalls. “That was an incredible interview, an incredible day talking with him, because I discovered how traumatic the whole thing was for Zaza.”

Continue reading this story on France24 at:

The death march

Wolves Among the Sheep > JW man sued for historic CSA; One Survivor's Story - Fighting off Suicide

 

Jehovah’s Witnesses administrator confessed child abuse without substantial consequence, lawsuit says

Barry Davis says Joseph Fitzgerald Hall molested him in the 90s, yet Hall kept working for the church nearly unimpeded

Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans

Mon 21 Apr 2025 12.00 BST

A US man serving in various administrative roles for the Jehovah’s Witnesses sexually molested a child whom he met while working for the Christian religious sect in New Orleans – then continued his career virtually unimpeded and moved to North Carolina after completing a disciplinary suspension of less than a year, he has admitted in writing and in a sworn deposition.

The stunning revelations about Joseph Fitzgerald Hall and how he has been managed by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York that runs the Jehovah’s Witnesses are contained in a lawsuit that the abuse survivor has been pursuing against both the group and the administrator.

In a recent interview, the survivor, Barry Davis, explained that one of his main reasons for coming forward was to ensure the congregation that Hall later joined in Charlotte, North Carolina, knew the full truth about him. Hall, while testifying under oath in the course of the lawsuit, acknowledged that “there is no requirement to tell someone why you were disfellowshipped”, which is the term to describe the suspension he served over his abuse of Davis.

“They should know out there,” Davis said. “This needs to be exposed to anybody it needs to be exposed to.”

Davis, now 46, also said he shed his anonymity to support others who for years have been speaking out about child abuse within the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He contended that the evidence in his case “just kind of drives the nail in” about the reality of the issue.

Please continue reading on The Guardian at:

In his opinion, he said: “Nothing’s changed.”

‘I was sexually abused, you never really get over it’: How survivors grapple with lifelong trauma

Boudicca Fox-Leonard

Sat, April 26, 2025 at 12:00 PM PDT

5 min read

In the end, the toll was too much for Virginia Giuffre. “She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse,” her family noted in their mourning statement.

The fact that her abuse happened a quarter of a century ago, when she was in her teens, was no bar to misery today. Time, after some experiences, is no healer.

James* also suffered sexual abuse as a youngster. Waking up to the news of Giuffre’s death brought his own struggles vividly to mind again. Including thoughts of suicide.

“For any survivor of abuse, as soon as someone succumbs to it and decides that they can’t carry on with it, you kind of think ‘OK’,” he says.

“You go through the strategies on how you need to survive yourself and keep pushing through, because it is something that stays with you forever. It never lets go.”

In her later years, Virginia Giuffre revealed that she had suffered abuse from her early teens while living as a runaway in Florida. James was also abused at the age of 13 by the Reverend David Barnes, a prolific abuser who served as chaplain at Sutton Valence School in Kent from the mid-1970s to 1987.

Subsequently he found that the trauma permeated every part of the life he wanted to lead. “When it happened to me I was so traumatised by it I started drinking heavily and smoking. And it was a constant battle. I started setting goals: I’ve got to live until 18, maybe then I’ll sort my head out. Then it was 21, then it was 30, then I got married and thought: ‘If I can just make it to 35 and have my first child.’ You’re constantly battling in your own head with survival. It never goes away, it affects everything.”

One of the particularly insidious effects of sexual abuse on young people, he says, is that somehow it is often the victim who feels to blame.

“There’s a huge amount of shame that comes with sexual abuse,” explains James. “You’re constantly questioning it, reliving the past and revisiting how it happened and what you could have done to change things, the effect that it’s had on you since then. It’s constant from every part  of your life, from when you’re being intimate with your wife to when you’re just in the quiet of night,” says James.

According to Debi Roberts, CEO of The Ollie Foundation, a suicide prevention and well-being charity, the overwhelming majority of people who end their lives don’t actually want to die. “What they want is for the pain to end,” she says.

The charity believes suicide intervention and prevention knowledge should be widely distributed, to support those in moments of despair.

In particular, she says, it is important to support survivors of sexual assault, for whom seeking help can be more difficult as they don’t necessarily meet the criteria to be diagnosed with mental illness.

“They often find the pathway of support ending abruptly because there isn’t a mental illness. But the irony is that when left with the caustic and constant drip of your pain, you can end up in a mental health crisis,” she adds.

The toxic effect of abuse, she says, can mean living for decades with “the spectre of suicide”. For years many victims don’t act on those thoughts. “Then there are days when the hope evaporates.”

It is a vigilance that James is acutely aware of. In spite of seven years of therapy, his own method of coping has been “to keep pushing forward” with his life, both in his career and in his home life.

“I never allow myself to stand still and rest because it means that the memories come back and it’s hard to live with.”

He has found that talking about it, sometimes in articles like this, can help: “Then I know that other survivors feel like they’re not alone. And you’re basically raising awareness and scaring off other predators.”

But he has chosen to retain his anonymity. He cannot imagine the ordeal of Giuffre, who gave hers up.

“She decided to give up her anonymity and because of that she was constantly going to be reading about herself and people are going to be judging and trolling. And it’s bad enough being anonymous. With such a high profile, [and] with such high profile people involved, it is unimaginable. I should imagine she just thought she couldn’t carry on with this.”

Roberts explains that moral injury, which refers to the psychological distress that arises from experiencing events that violate a person’s moral or ethical code, falls into two areas.

“On the one hand moral injury can be experienced when you perpetuate or witness or fail to prevent something that goes against your moral values. The second area of moral injury is where you were not protected by an individual or an organisation, or a country, a government that should have protected you. That is very much what we’re talking about here.”

Roberts says the trauma of sexual assault – even if that abuse was decades ago and the abuser is nowhere near you now – can leave the foundation of your life totally unstable, because you were not protected.

“You were vulnerable and maybe an institution didn’t protect you, or people close to you didn’t protect you or believe you. The issue here is that you were not kept safe then or now and that makes the world a very challenging place to be in,” explains Roberts.

“It’s awful to have been a victim and have to defend yourself. It breaks people. It is absolutely horrific.”

James knows that all too well: “The important thing to remember that no matter how much someone is compensated, if they’ve been offered however many millions, it never erases what sexual abuse does.”

*Name has been changed.

When life is difficult, Samaritans are here – day or night, 365 days a year. You can call them for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.