The Truth About Jeffrey Epstein's Island

The following article contains references to child abuse and sexual assault.

Years after his death, Jeffrey Epstein remains a shadowy figure shrouded in mystery and scandal. A convicted pedophile who rubbed shoulders with presidents, royalty, and some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people, Epstein was accused of sex trafficking underaged girls in a sick scheme that spanned decades — his girlfriend-accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted for her role in those crimes. 

The source of Epstein's fortune — estimated at more than $600 million — remains murky, and many theories have been floated. Was he running a Ponzi scheme? Laundering money for the rich and famous? Or maybe even blackmailing them? That's still a matter of conjecture, as are whispers that he was an intelligence asset, working for the CIA or possibly Israel's Mossad.

While those mysteries remain unknown, what has been established is that ground zero of Epstein's nefarious activities was Little St. James, a tiny island within the U.S. Virgin Islands. On that private island, Epstein constructed a top-secret compound, replete with helipad, hidden CCTV cameras, and luxurious amenities. Over the years, there have been many reports about Little St. James, some of which are proven facts but much of which has remained hidden. As for what took place there prior to Epstein's death, there have been numerous allegations made — many of them shocking beyond belief. To find out more, read on to discover the truth about Jeffrey Epstein's island. 

It was back in 1998 that Jeffrey Epstein purchased Little St. James, a small island situated about two miles off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As the Independent reported, Epstein picked up the 72-acre island from its previous owner, venture capitalist Arch Cummin, reportedly paying approximately $8 million. 

The location and terrain of the island offered several advantages for Epstein in terms of maintaining privacy from the outside world while also being easy to access. The close proximity to St. Thomas meant he could land his private jet there and then helicopter over to his island, which is only accessible by chopper or boat. Government officials believed the island's remoteness was a big factor for Epstein because it was nearly impossible for his activities on the island to be monitored. "So he felt that he could basically be protected. He could get away with it," Denise George, Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, told CBS News.

According to George, Epstein — who reportedly made a few trips to his island each month — had additional measures in place to maintain secrecy. That, she said, extended to when authorities tried to access the island by boat. "They were stopped at the dock, and they were told 'No, this is as far as you can go because this is my private property, and I would not allow you to go in any farther,'" she said.

Once Jeffrey Epstein took ownership of Little St. James — which he nicknamed "Little St. Jeff" — he began work to develop the property as his own private tropical paradise. As The New York Times reported, this included the construction of various buildings on the island, including a large villa housing a library, a movie theater, and a Japanese-style bathhouse. 

Those building projects, however, wound up placing him in continual conflict with the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources. One reason was that the plans he submitted for approval were very different from the structures that were eventually built. Another issue, according to a 2010 memo obtained by the Times, was Epstein's "long history of egregious and blatant disregard for environmental regulations." Epstein's strategy was to resolve those problems by paying fines, applying for new permits retroactively after the work had already been done, and making donations to local charities and schools. 

In 2016, Epstein purchased another nearby island, Great St. James, a larger island about twice the size of Little St. James, reportedly paying $22.5 million. As the Miami Herald reported, he was then a convicted sex offender when he tricked officials by setting up a shell company purportedly owned by Dubai businessman Ahmed bin Sulayem; Sulayem claimed to have no knowledge that his name was connected to the purchase of the island, and it wasn't until much later that authorities discovered Epstein was the true owner. 

Construction on Jeffrey Epstein's private island required a lot of manpower. In 2019, the Associated Press reported that the workers hired signed non-disclosure agreements, refusing to discuss their experiences on the record. One former worker, who insisted on remaining anonymous, told AP that Epstein utilized a large ferry to shuttle an estimated 200 workers to and from his island each day. "When he was there, it was keep to yourself and do your thing," the source said, noting that Epstein's workers were well paid and that employees were often given old machinery and left-over building supplies and lumber. 

After construction had been completed, that same level of secrecy extended to those who worked for Epstein on the island. As Bloomberg reported, there was one superseding rule in place for those staffers: they had to remain in the shadows by staying out of Epstein's line of vision whenever he visited the island. "Epstein could never catch sight of them," a former staffer told Bloomberg.

There was another rule that was even more ironclad: Epstein decreed that nobody on his staff, apart from the intermittent ministrations of a housekeeper, was allowed in his private quarters. That was particularly true of a steel safe situated in Epstein's office, which was protected with a degree of security and secrecy that led to a belief there was something far more valuable than money contained within.

Jeffrey Epstein's island may have been shrouded in secrecy, yet there were longstanding suspicions among the locals in nearby St. Thomas about what he was up to. When Epstein entered a guilty plea to charges of soliciting an underage girl for sex, and was then sentenced to jail, those rumors about the island escalated. "Everybody called it 'Pedophile Island,'" Ken Goodrich, a St. Thomas charter boat operator, told the Associated Press. "It's our dark corner."

According to locals, it was hardly a secret that Epstein regularly flew teenaged girls to St. Thomas on his private jet — which came to be nicknamed the "Lolita Express" — and brought them to his island. "It was like he was flaunting it," an employee who worked at the St. Thomas airstrip utilized by Epstein told Vanity Fair. "But it was said that he always tipped really well, so everyone overlooked it."

A former air traffic controller who worked at the airstrip recalled seeing Epstein accompanied by "female children" on numerous occasions. "One incident in particular really stands out in my mind, because the girls were just so young," that source told Vanity Fair. Another airstrip employee shared his recollections of the girls who accompanied Epstein on his frequent trips to the island, also who appeared to be of high school age. "They looked very young," he said, adding that he felt disgusted by what he said. "We'd always be joking, 'How many kids are on board this time?'"

In 2020, not long after Jeffrey Epstein's 2019 death (which, like his life, was characteristically murky), U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George filed a massive criminal complaint against Epstein's estate, alleging that his island was at the center of a criminal enterprise involving the sex trafficking of underage girls.

"The Epstein Enterprise in 1998 acquired Little St. James in the Virgin Islands as the perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault," the complaint declared, noting that the girls Epstein brought there had no way to escape the island, as it was too far to swim to the nearest island. Meanwhile, Epstein also had security guards patrolling the island, monitoring everyone who came and went. "Remember, he owns a whole island," George told CBS News. "So it wasn't a situation where a child or a young woman would be able to just break away and run down the street to the nearest police station." One alleged victim, however, claimed they were apprehended while trying to escape, which George detailed in her complaint.

The Epstein estate ultimately settled, paying the U.S. Virgin Islands $105 million to make the sex trafficking case go away. A large chunk of that money was placed into a fund to help those who were victims of sex trafficking and sex abuse.

Numerous women have come forward to detail their sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein while they were underage, but chief among them is Virginia Guiffre (pictured above). Giuffre made international headlines with her claims that Epstein paid her thousands of dollars to have sex with Prince Andrew on Little St. James when she was still a minor. She also alleged that Epstein forced her to engage in an orgy with a number of other girls, who were also underage.

Then there was the allegation of another alleged victim, who requested to remain anonymous, who told CBS News that Epstein sexually assaulted her in the office of his island compound. "He also trapped me in his bedroom on the island where he had a gun strapped to his bedpost," she recalled. "I couldn't leave. The only means of getting off the island was either helicopter or boat." Another accuser, Sarah Ransome, claimed that Epstein held onto her passport so that even if she did manage to make it off the island, she wouldn't be able to get far.  

Steve Scully, who worked as an IT contractor on Epstein's island, recalled that the thing that struck him most was the ages of the numerous girls who accompanied Epstein to his island. "They couldn't have been more than 15 or 16 years old," he told ABC News.

Arguably, the most bizarre feature on Jeffrey Epstein's island is a temple-like blue-and-white striped structure, topped with a gold dome and Egyptian-style gold statues (the dome reportedly blew off in a hurricane). The curious building has led to various conspiracy theories that it was a sex dungeon, or even the site of occult rituals. 

According to NBC News, the building was originally designed to be a music conservatory — although the plans that had been submitted for permits are starkly different from what was actually constructed. A report from the Associated Press bolstered that theory, with workers reportedly claiming they were building a music room in which a grand piano sat; an unidentified piano tuner, in fact, claimed to have tuned it. IT contractor Steve Scully, however, told ABC News that when he entered the "temple," it was being used as a gym, with its most notable feature a massive framed photo of a topless woman.

Speaking with Business Insider, engineer James Both highlighted a very odd — and perhaps sinister — design feature. "It's styled like what you might see on a castle, with what appears to be a reinforcing lock bar across the face," he explained. "What makes it peculiar is that if you wanted to keep people out, the bar would be placed inside the building, [but the] locking bar appears to be placed on the outside ... as if it were intended to lock people in." 

Two days after Jeffrey Epstein's 2019 death, Little St. James Island was raided by the FBI. The timing of the raid was likely no coincidence; as criminal defense attorney David Weinstein told The Guardian, the fact that Epstein was no longer alive would make the seizure of evidence a cakewalk. "The evidence that they've seized from him directly, the only person who can contest the seizure [as unlawful] could be Epstein or somebody who lived with him," Weinstein explained. "Now that he's dead, he can't challenge that. All of that becomes fair game."

Drone-shot footage obtained by NBC News showed FBI agents and NYPD officers removing several computers from Epstein's home on the island, with agents riding golf carts as a means of transportation while investigating the island.

What else was taken during that raid? The FBI isn't saying, and the bureau has yet to reveal what kind of information was on those computers' hard drives. And while it isn't known whether they took anything from the safe Epstein kept on the island, FBI agent Kelly Maguire testified (during Ghislaine Maxwell's trial) that agents broke open the safe in Epstein's New York City townhouse during a July 2019 raid, discovering CDs, tapes, photographs, passports, and diamonds. Because they were still waiting on a judge to sign off on the search warrant, they couldn't remove evidence; they could only photograph it. When they returned, all that evidence had vanished.

One of the more salacious aspects of Jeffrey Epstein's island is the number of celebrities who allegedly visited it. In documents unsealed in January 2024, Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre claimed to have had dinner with former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Little St. James but conceded she'd never personally witnessed him engaged in any sexual activity (she did, however, claim to have had sex with Prince Andrew while underage on Epstein's island). Other alleged guests on the island included Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, and his wife, Tipper Gore. Those unsealed documents also included photos of late physicist Steven Hawking on the island, along with an email from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell offering a bounty to anyone who could disprove rampant rumors that Hawking took part in an "underage orgy" on Little St. James. Meanwhile, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman confirmed that he'd visited Little St. James, while an unidentified accuser alleged she had sex with famed attorney Alan Dershowitz on the island.

The waters were muddied by bogus claims about other celebrities appearing online. One of these alleged that Whoopi Goldberg was among those who visited Epstein's island. "Let me bring that up, the conspiracy theory folks," Goldberg told viewers on "The View," as reported by the New York Post. "I have to explain, because there was a fake list and I'm on it. I don't know, they said I was on the island, and I'm like, 'I don't go anywhere!'"

Among the various documents that were unsealed in early January 2024 was the transcript of a deposition from Sarah Ransome (pictured above), who'd accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sex trafficking her when she was underage. In her deposition, she revealed that all the underage girls shuttled to Epstein's island were provided with clothing from Victoria's Secret. "There was a constant influx of girls," she said, via the Daily Mail. "All of the outfits — there were clothes that were provided on the island by Jeffrey Epstein, which were all Victoria's Secret clothing: bikinis, nightwear," Ransome said, as reported by the New York Post. 

According to Ransome, Epstein required plenty of young girls on Little St. James to be on call in order to service him sexually upon a moment's notice. "We were called on, like, a rotation visit for Jeffrey throughout the day and evening," she alleged in her deposition. "I was finished, another girl was called by Ghislaine. And when they had finished, another girl was called. 'Jeffrey wants to see you in his bedroom,' which meant it's your turn to be abused. That kind of thing."

In a 2019 interview, Ransome detailed her unsuccessful escape attempt and why she was willing to attempt a two-mile swim in shark-infested waters just to get away. "I had been raped three times that day," she told The Telegraph. "A shark would have been my best friend at that point."

After successfully suing Jeffrey Epstein's estate over underage sex trafficking on his island, U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George focused on a new target. As CBS News reported, in 2022, she launched another criminal complaint, this one against JP Morgan Chase & Co. In her suit, George alleged that the financial services firm had deliberately "turned a blind eye to evidence of human trafficking for more than a decade because of Epstein's own financial footprint," with the firm happy to look the other way while Epstein continued to make them money. George sought 

"JP Morgan facilitated and concealed wire and cash transactions that raised suspicion of — and were in fact part of — a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the Virgin Islands," the complaint added, alleging that the primary business in which Epstein was engaged on Little St. James was human trafficking. As George explained, Epstein never would have been able to be so successful at his illicit enterprise had he not had the backing of JP Morgan, accusing the firm of benefiting from his trafficking of underage girls.

Once again, George emerged victorious in her legal battle. JP Morgan ultimately settled the suit for $75 million; just days later, and perhaps not coincidentally, George was fired as AG.

Even after Jeffrey Epstein's death, his island continued to be under heavy guard. However, security wasn't as airtight as thought when self-described "urban explorer" Andy Bracco revealed he and a friend snuck onto Little St. James in August 2020.

According to the Independent, Bracco didn't divulge how they managed to evade security, but he did post the video on YouTube. As Bracco told Newsweek, he and his friend decided to bail when they felt they might be close to getting caught, but then returned 12 hours later. 

Of most interest to Bracco was the temple-like structure, which he was able to walk up to and capture on video — which boasted the monogram "JE" on its side. While Bracco didn't enter, he did manage to take a peek inside. "Getting in would then subsequently have allowed me to access the tunnels," he said, referencing the unproven rumor of a network of underground tunnels throughout the island. "Between my two visits to the island I did peer into the temple from the outside and noticed the staircase descending downwards." According to Bracco, he'd been contacted by others who'd made similar — albeit unsuccessful — attempts. "All have been stopped by either coast guard, armed private security on boats, or the two that made it to the island both told me an automated PA system yelled at them saying coast guard has been contacted and to turn back immediately," he added.

In March 2022, the estate of Jeffrey Epstein offered his two islands for sale. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the initial asking price for both was $125 million. Go figure, but apparently, no one was champing at the bit to spend that much money on a place known as "Pedophile Island." As a result, a few months later, the price for the islands was reduced to $55 million per island, or $110 million for both, a total 230 acres of land.

More than a year later, both Little St. James and Great St. James were purchased by billionaire Stephen Deckoff, who paid $60 million — less than half of the original $125 million asking price. Deckoff's goal was to open up the islands as a high-end resort for well-heeled tourists. 

"I've been proud to call the U.S. Virgin Islands home for more than a decade and am tremendously pleased to be able to bring the area a world-class destination benefitting its natural grace and beauty," Deckoff told Forbes, emphasizing that he'd never met Epstein and had never set foot on either island before making the purchase. "I very much look forward to working with the U.S. Virgin Islands to make this dream a reality."

While Jeffrey Epstein used Little St. James as his own private pedophile paradise, its new owner had very different plans for the island. After purchasing the islands, Stephen Deckoff's investment firm, SD Investments LLC, issued a press release detailing his plans for the properties. "Mr. Deckoff plans to develop a state-of-the-art, five-star, world-class luxury 25-room resort that will help bolster tourism, create jobs, and spur economic development in the region, while respecting and preserving the important environment of the islands," declared the release. 

In early January of 2024, the New York Post published aerial photos that indicated some major changes had already been made. That was particularly true of the mysterious "temple," with white paint covering the distinctive blue-and-white stripes.

Interestingly, Epstein's brother, Mark Epstein, shed some light on why Epstein bought the second island in the first place. "I said, 'What do you need two islands for?' He said if somebody else bought it, in a short period of time he'd been looking at McDonald's arches [from the smaller] island," he told the Post.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault or child abuse,, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
• The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.