NEW YORK (AP) — The FBI has raided Jeffrey Epstein’s bank records and emails. Search his houses. He spent years interviewing his victims and examining his connections to some of the world’s most influential people.
But while investigators gathered ample evidence that Epstein sexually abused underage girls, they found little evidence that the well-connected financier ran a sex-trafficking ring that catered to powerful men, an Associated Press review of internal Justice Department records shows.
Videos and photos seized from Epstein’s homes in New York, Florida and the Virgin Islands do not show victims being abused or implicate anyone else in his crimes, a prosecutor wrote in one 2025 memo.
An examination of Epstein’s financial records, including payments he made to entities linked to influential figures in academia, finance and global diplomacy, found no connection to criminal activity, another internal memo said in 2019.
While one Epstein victim made very public claims that he “loaned” it to his wealthy friends, agents could not confirm that and found no other victims who told a similar story, records said.
In a summary of the investigation in an email last July, the agents said that “four or five” of Epstein’s accusers claimed that other men or women had sexually abused them. But, agents said, “there was insufficient evidence to federally charge these individuals, so the cases were referred to local law enforcement.”
The AP and other media organizations are still reviewing millions of pages of documents, many of them previously confidential, that the Justice Department released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and it is possible that those records contain evidence overlooked by investigators.
But the documents, which include police reports, FBI interview notes and prosecutor emails, provide the clearest picture yet of the investigation — and why US authorities ultimately decided to close it without additional charges.
Dozens of victims come forward
The Epstein investigation began in 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl reported that she had been molested at the millionaire’s home in Palm Beach, Florida.
Police identified at least 35 girls with similar stories: Epstein was paying high school students $200 or $300 to give him sex messages.
After the FBI joined the probe, federal prosecutors drafted indictments to accuse Epstein and some personal assistants of arranging the girls’ visits and payments. But instead, Miami US attorney Alexander Acosta struck a deal that allowed Epstein to plead guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. Sentenced to 18 months in prison, Epstein was free until mid-2009.
In 2018, a series of Miami Herald stories about the plea deal prompted New York federal prosecutors to take a fresh look at the charges.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019. A month later, he killed himself in his prison cell.
A year later, prosecutors charged Epstein’s longtime confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, saying she recruited many of his victims and sometimes joined in the sexual abuse. Convicted in 2021, Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Prosecutors fail to find evidence to support the most sensational claims
Prosecution memos, case summaries and other documents made public in the latest release of department records related to Epstein show that FBI agents and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential coconspirators. Even seemingly strange and incomprehensible requests, called for tip lines, were examined.
Some allegations could not be verified, the investigators wrote.
In 2011 and again in 2019, investigators interviewed Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who in lawsuits and news interviews accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters with numerous men, including former British Prince Andrew.
The investigators said they confirmed that Giuffre had been sexually abused by Epstein. But other parts of her story were problematic.
Two other victims of Epstein who Giuffre had claimed were also “loaned” to powerful men told investigators they had no such experience, prosecutors wrote in a 2019 internal memo.
“No other victim described being expressly directed by Maxwell or Epstein to engage in sexual activity with other men,” the memo said.
Giuffre has acknowledged that she wrote a partially fictional memoir of her time with Epstein that contains descriptions of things that did not happen. She had also offered changing accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had “engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which included sensationalized if not demonstrably inaccurate characterizations of her experiences.” Those inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI, they said.
Still, American prosecutors tried to arrange an interview with Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He refused to make himself available. Giuffre settled a lawsuit with Mountbatten-Windsor accusing him of sexual misconduct.
In a memoir published after she killed herself last year, Giuffre wrote that prosecutors told her they did not include her in the case against Maxwell because they did not want her allegations to disturb the jury. She insisted that her accounts of trafficking to elite men were true.
Prosecutors say the photos and videos do not implicate anyone else
Investigators seized a large number of videos and photos from Epstein’s electronic devices and homes in New York, Florida and the US Virgin Islands. They found CDs, printed photographs and at least one videotape containing nude images of women, some of whom looked as if they might have been minors. One device contained 15 to 20 images depicting commercial child sexual abuse material — images investigators said Epstein obtained online.
No videos or photos showed Epstein victims being sexually abused, none showed men with any naked women, and none contained evidence implicating anyone other than Epstein and Maxwell, then-Assistant US Attorney Maurene Comey wrote in an email to FBI officials last year.
If they existed, the government “would have followed any leads they generated,” Comey wrote. “However we found no such videos.”
Investigators who delved into Epstein’s bank records found payments to more than 25 women who appeared to be models — but no evidence that he was involved in the prostitution of women to other men, prosecutors wrote.
Epstein’s close associates are not allowed
In 2019, prosecutors weighed the possibility of charging one of Epstein’s longtime aides but decided against it.
Prosecutors concluded that while the assistant was involved in helping Epstein pay the girls for sex and may have been aware that some were underage, she herself was a victim of his sexual abuse and manipulation.
Investigators examined Epstein’s relationship with French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was once involved in an agency with Epstein in the United States, and who was accused in a separate case of sexually assaulting women in Europe. Brunel killed himself in prison while awaiting trial on a rape charge in France.
Prosecutors also debated whether to charge one of Epstein’s girlfriends who had participated in sexual acts with some of his victims. Investigators interviewed the girlfriend, who was between 18 and 20 years old at the time, “but it was determined that there was insufficient evidence,” according to a summary given to FBI Director Kash Patel last July.
Days before Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, the FBI strategized about sending agents to serve grand jury subpoenas on people close to Epstein, including his pilots and longtime business client, retail magnate Les Wexner.
Wexner’s lawyers told investigators that neither he nor his wife had knowledge of Epstein’s sexual misconduct. Epstein had managed Wexner’s finances, but the couple’s lawyers said they fired him in 2007 after learning he had stolen from them.
“There is limited evidence of his involvement,” an FBI agent wrote of Wexner in an Aug. 16, 2019, email.
In a statement to the AP, a legal representative for Wexner said that prosecutors had informed him that he was “neither a co-conspirator nor a target in any respect,” and that Wexner had cooperated with investigators.
Prosecutors also examined accounts from women who said they had given massages at Epstein’s home to guests who attempted sexual encounters. One woman accused private equity investor Leon Black of initiating sexual contact during a massage in 2011 or 2012, causing her to flee the room.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office subsequently investigated, but no charges were filed.
Black’s attorney, Susan Estrich, said he had paid Epstein for estate planning and tax advice. She said in a statement that Black had committed no wrongdoing and had no knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities. Lawsuits by two women who accused Black of sexual misconduct were dismissed or withdrawn. One is pending.
No customer list
Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February 2025 that Epstein’s never-before-seen “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now.” A few months later, she claimed that the FBI was reviewing “tens of thousands of videos” of Epstein “with children or child pornography.”
But FBI agents wrote to superiors saying the client list did not exist.
On December 30, 2024, about three weeks before President Joe Biden left office, then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate reached out through subordinates to ask “whether our investigation to date indicates the ‘client list,’ often mentioned in the media, does or does not exist,” according to an email summarizing his question.
A day later, an FBI official responded that the case agent had confirmed that no client list existed.
On February 19, 2025, two days before Bondi’s appearance on Fox News, an FBI supervisory special agent wrote: “While media coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein case refers to a ‘client list,’ investigators found no such list during the investigation.”
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Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
___ The AP is reviewing the documents released by the Justice Department in collaboration with reporters from CBS, NBC, MS NOW and CNBC. Journalists from each newsroom are working together to examine the files and share information about what’s in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.