Warning: The article contains descriptions of sexual violence that some viewers may find disturbing.
A new lawsuit filed against Jeffrey Epstein’s estate claims that the sex-trafficker and his gal pal Ghislaine Maxwell “brutally” raped a young Muslim woman in Florida in 2008 and afterward threatened “that she would end up in the pond to be consumed by the alligators if she told anyone about the crimes committed against her.”
In her complaint filed this month, Jane Doe says that the British socialite Maxwell recruited her and groomed her for Epstein, sending her expensive gifts and assuring her the financier “could get her highly placed employment.”
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The lawsuit says Epstein also dragged Doe to a body of water filled with alligators and warned her she’d be fed to the reptiles—as other girls who crossed him allegedly had—if she revealed his sickening abuse. The lawsuit also claims Epstein mutilated Doe.
These death threats terrified Doe, the complaint adds, “especially given Epstein’s claimed extensive network of powerful allies.”
The allegations contained in Doe’s lawsuit are starkly different from previous complaints filed by victims of the wealthy sex-offender, and appear to be the first time allegations of mutilation have emerged relating to Epstein’s sex ring. In dozens of other civil cases filed against Epstein, women have accused him of molesting and raping them as underage girls during sexualized massages at his mansions across the country.
Doe alleges she was a real estate broker in the Palm Beach area and introduced to Epstein and Maxwell, who called herself “G-Max,” at a barbecue hosted by her boss, who allegedly was friends with the financier. (Maxwell faces trial this summer for grooming and abusing underage girls for Epstein. She has pleaded not guilty.)
Throughout 2007, the lawsuit says, “Maxwell began an extended effort of inducement, persuasion, and grooming of the Plaintiff to have her work for Epstein.” Doe was 26, a devout Muslim and married mother of an 8-year-old son when Epstein allegedly trafficked her the following year.
“For a period extending over five months, Plaintiff was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted by Epstein, raped and sexually assaulted by others to whom Epstein trafficked her, and forced by Epstein and other persons working on behalf of and/or in concert with Epstein to pose naked and performing sexual acts for photographs and videos,” the lawsuit alleges. “She was also assaulted, coerced, and subjected to unwanted and unnecessary surgery of her genitals, mutilated, threatened, and sex trafficked, and compelled to engage in trafficking activities in support of Epstein’s sex trafficking of other young women and girls.”
Doe, who was born in Turkey, has lived in Florida since June 2001. At the time Epstein allegedly assaulted her, Doe was a resident of Broward County.
Doe “should be permitted to proceed under a pseudonym because she will have to disclose matters of the utmost intimacy, including various sexual assaults, rapes, the making of pornography without her consent, and genital mutilation,” her lawyers wrote in the complaint.
The lawsuit says Doe’s employer said Epstein wanted to rent or purchase a real property from him, but that she must not process his ID or other information. Epstein then rented a property for $10,000 in cash per month.
“The cash was provided directly to Plaintiff, as a real estate broker, in exchange for Epstein’s right to use the property as he saw fit,” the complaint says.
Around the same time, Maxwell allegedly gave Doe her phone number and in mid-2007 took Doe’s passport for “safekeeping.” Doe’s lawsuit says the passport was placed in a locked box in Epstein’s Palm Beach lair and not returned to Doe until May 2008—about two months before he pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor.
The complaint says that Doe, a skilled hairdresser, eventually caved to Maxwell’s employment offers with Epstein in January 2008, and she visited his Palm Beach mansion “to cut his hair and discuss employment opportunities.”
But when she arrived, Epstein “was completely naked, and he proceeded, with Maxwell’s assistance to brutally rape” Doe, the lawsuit claims. At the time, Epstein had firearms on display “for the purpose of frightening and intimidating her,” the suit adds.
When Doe said she was going to report the rape to police, Maxwell allegedly claimed she’d call police herself. The lawsuit says that two people who claimed to be cops arrived and threatened to arrest Doe and charge her with prostitution and take away her son.
Afterward, Maxwell and Epstein allegedly forced Doe to drive with them, in her own vehicle, where they picked up her young son and traveled to a hotel two hours away in Naples.
During the drive, Maxwell and Epstein allegedly forced Doe to stop “at a large body of water that was infested with alligators” to issue a death threat.
“Epstein then ushered the Plaintiff to the body of water and told her in explicit detail that, as had happened to other girls in the past, she would end up in this body of water and be devoured by the alligators, should she ever reveal what Epstein had done to her,” the lawsuit alleges.
Once at the Naples hotel, Epstein and Maxwell allegedly raped and sexually abused Doe in front of her son.
They continued to abuse her through May 2008, the lawsuit says, while also suggesting they could secure future employment for her and her then-husband within the FBI.
Doe’s suit says Epstein and his agents also claimed “they possessed powerful and corrupt influence over” the FBI, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Florida law enforcement and “other persons of great power.”
They threatened “to have her prosecuted as a prostitute, to take her child away, to destroy her marriage, to expose her to federal immigration authorities, to have her and her family deported, and/or to have her imprisoned,” the complaint alleges.
Doe also says Epstein trafficked her to multiple other men, including a “heavy set older man” named Walter and another older man who was allegedly a local judge. Epstein allegedly told Doe to lie about her age and claim she was 17.
The complaint also alleges Epstein forced Doe into a botched vaginal surgery that left her mutilated and disabled. “In approximately early May 2008, in a particularly appalling act of savagery, Epstein forced Plaintiff to submit to unwanted and unnecessary vaginal surgery, performed, as best Plaintiff can recall, in a wealthy person’s home by a man with a Russian accent, for the ostensible purpose of tightening her vagina and creating the false impression that she was a virgin for a ‘high profile’ client,” the lawsuit says.
The startling accusations also include claims of Epstein forcing Doe to drive minor girls to various locations, as well as keep a locked box with Epstein’s property at her home. “Plaintiff was instructed that if she ever touched or opened that box she would be killed,” the complaint says. “She was also left with burner phones, wires, and other electronic devices that Epstein was seeking to conceal from discovery by law enforcement authorities.”
Maxwell came to collect the box in May 2008, the complaint alleges.
Doe is represented by the Coffey Burlington firm in Miami and a New York personal injury firm, Phillips & Paolicelli, court records show.
According to the complaint, “Prior to 2008, during that year, and through the present, Plaintiff did not regularly follow news or public affairs and was unaware of the legal and criminal matters relating to Epstein, including Epstein’s 2008 felony plea agreement, his subsequent incarceration, his release thereafter, his later arrest in July 2019, or his death while in custody on August 10, 2019.”
The suit says Doe didn’t learn of Epstein’s indictment or death in a Manhattan jail until last summer, when she learned the feds arrested Maxwell.
