For Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Goldsmith family was a gateway to elite society and he wanted to be in their circle.
The disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 facing sex-trafficking charges, longed for a billionaire’s lifestyle and cultivated the family’s friends, bankers, business associates and advisers.
But Sir James Goldsmith, who was knighted by the Queen in 1976 and became a prominent British politician, remained wary of the American financier and even “despised” him, his daughter Jemima recently told the Guardian.
Two decades before Epstein came under federal investigation, Goldsmith – who died in 1997 – told a confidant that Epstein was a “sexual deviant” who was recruiting children for illicit activities.
Goldsmith “told me not to have anything to do with him, that he was a pervert, and he didn’t want him near any of us. He had four daughters to protect,” recalled the famous French architect Robert Couturier, who designed opulent homes for Goldsmith in New York and Mexico.
Goldsmith’s alleged warning came around 1987, years before complaints about Epstein’s solicitation of young girls for sex began filtering into federal law enforcement. Epstein’s network of pretty “girls” evolved into what authorities describe as a global sex-trafficking ring that catered to the ultra-rich and powerful.
It would become a scandal that touched royals, politicians, businessmen, academics, foreign diplomats and celebrities around the world, and left more than 1,000 victims in its wake.
“That is the pity of it all. It was all preventable,” Couturier told the Guardian. Epstein, born on Coney Island, had been on the radar of New York’s elite since he first surfaced at society events, often on the arm of heiresses, Couturier said.
“He was a charmer and a talker. Lots of rich people are deeply gullible, as protected as they are from reality. No one did anything about it.”
In the mid-1980s, Sir James Goldsmith – known as “Jimmy” – announced he was making a shift in his US business operations. Goldsmith had hired a new chief executive who would open an office for him in Hilton Head, South Carolina, an emerging luxury resort.
Goldsmith’s Hilton Head office is rarely mentioned in writings about his reign as the “lucky gambler”, as Time Magazine called him, an adviser to US presidents who became one of the world’s richest men by betting on undervalued companies. His conglomerate, with command centers in Paris and London, had its US headquarters in New York, close to his elegant Manhattan townhouse where Goldsmith entertained and where the young Epstein trolled for wealthy clients.
Hilton Head at the time was undergoing a chaotic development boom that brought in a rush of speculators, shady operators and vacationers lured by star-studded golf tournaments and tennis matches. Its population, 11,000 in 1980, doubled in a decade. Its tiny airport was suddenly a busy landing strip for private jets, including a $10m Gulfstream owned by Goldsmith’s company that was parked there for quick hops.
Epstein developed a lifelong fascination with Goldsmith, his family and fortune, an investigation by the Guardian found.
Epstein’s connection to Goldsmith, and the presence of the billionaire’s company and his associates on a South Carolina sea island – which was attracting an infusion of investors – is potentially relevant because of an alleged sexual assault that is said to have occurred there in the 1980s. A woman known only as Jane Doe 4 claimed in four FBI interviews after Epstein’s 2019 arrest that he had assaulted her during his visits to the island in the 1980s, when she was still a teenager. She has also claimed the man she only knew as “Jeff” trafficked her to other men, including Donald Trump.
The White House has vehemently denied the allegation about the US president, calling it “completely baseless” and “backed by zero credible evidence”.
The Guardian has been examining records, digging into archives and conducting interviews to explore intersections of Goldsmith and Epstein and try to understand if Epstein, with decades of secretive movements and a web of global financial ties, might have had reason to be on Hilton Head in the 1980s when those alleged assaults by Epstein occurred. This remains a mystery, but Epstein’s relationship with Goldsmith provides some additional clues.
Those who dismiss the claim of Jane Doe 4 – including Epstein’s brother Mark – have cited the lack of a public record of his presence on the island as proof that her story is untrue. Mark Epstein told the Guardian he has “no knowledge of him being in Hilton Head”.
Understanding how Epstein won and retained access to power and privilege throughout his life is important as criminal investigations of his sexual abuse and financial crimes continue around the globe. Federal prosecutors in New York have opened an investigation into the two overseers – Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn – of Epstein’s $577m estate, according to the Wall Street Journal. Both have denied they knew of Epstein’s criminal behavior. The Department of Justice has said that Epstein “harmed” over 1,000 people, including minors who were sexually abused.
The justice department has released about 3.5m documents under the Epstein Disclosure Act, including reams of emails, letters and bank transactions. But the trove includes almost no records from the 1980s, leaving a large gap in the public’s understanding. Epstein’s alleged victims continue to accuse the justice department of a cover-up for holding back documents that might implicate Trump and other powerful men in Epstein’s exclusive circle. Trump has said he ended their friendship in 2004 after a real estate dispute and kicked Epstein out of his Mar-A-Lago club in 2007 for poaching employees.
It is unclear whether Goldsmith’s concerns about Epstein stemmed from specific encounters, and there is no indication that Goldsmith ever reported his concerns to local or federal law enforcement.
It took decades for the FBI to catch up with Epstein’s crimes. Federal investigators in Florida charged him in 2008 with soliciting sex from minors after a two-year investigation in which they interviewed young women, including some minors, who he paid for sexual encounters in his Palm Beach mansion. He served 13 months in jail under a lenient deal cut with federal prosecutors.
Until now, the earliest warning about Epstein’s criminal behavior is believed to have come in 1996, when one alleged victim – an artist named Maria Farmer – claims she alerted authorities that she was sexually assaulted by Epstein, according to a lawsuit she has brought against the FBI. Farmer has also claimed that Epstein stole nude images she had of her two minor siblings, which she kept for her personal use in her artwork. The FBI has said in response to the ongoing litigation, which now includes 34 alleged victims, that agents do not have a duty to investigate “every single tip that comes across their desk”.
A fascination with ‘Sir James’
Since Epstein’s death, Goldsmith has been portrayed as an important influence in his early career.
The New York Times last year described Sir James as a connection Epstein shrewdly calculated was “worth nurturing for the long haul”. It recounted a party scene at Goldsmith’s Upper East Side mansion where Epstein, trained in classical piano, serenaded guests with a piano solo from the grand entry hall.
Goldsmith’s warnings about Epstein came just as Epstein signed one of his biggest clients, the Ohio retail magnate Les Wexner, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, who was then ranked by Forbes as the 10th richest person in the US. Wexner says he severed the relationship with Epstein in 2007 after discovering he had stolen funds from Wexner.
Some questions about Epstein and Goldsmith may never be answered given the secrecy surrounding these events and the refusal of key sources to answer questions.
Meanwhile, the debate over the government’s release of the Epstein files rages on. Attorney general Todd Blanche has declined to release about2.5m Epstein documents he deemed duplicative. An independent journalist, Katie Phang, is suing Blanche to try to force their release, and Blanche recently quietly turned over some of the documents related to Jane Doe 4 to a federal judge, who is reviewing the documents in his chambers.
Prominent figures caught up in the Epstein controversy include former US president Bill Clinton, former Prince Andrew, former Harvard president Larry Summers and billionaire investor Leon Black. Black was recently held in contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with subpoenas issued to him by the House oversight committee in connection to its Epstein investigation.
Epstein’s emails about the Goldsmiths sometimes suggested bruised feelings and revealed he was watching the family from afar. He was not among the dozens of invited guests in 1997 to Jemima Goldsmith’s grand wedding party to the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, who served as Pakistani prime minister, according to the guest list.
Just before he finished his lenient 2008 sentence for sex crimes in Palm Beach, Epstein scolded a young Romanian admirer for turning down her exclusive invite to a swanky dinner at Jemima’s Oxfordshire estate.
“That was a BIG mistake,” he wrote in an angry 2010 email.
Epstein criticized daughter Jemima’s choice of husband, calling Khan – who is now divorced from Goldsmith and in jail on corruption charges – a “whacko”.
In a 2018 text, Epstein wrote of Imran Khan: “makes donald look like einstein. incapable of truth. , devout islamisist . many nuclear weapons. ( not erdogan or khomeni). he was married to two friends of mine. one daughter of jimmy goldsmith.”
After the family distanced itself from him, Epstein gathered gossip about James’s daughter Isabel’s haughty behavior and joked when a hurricane seemed destined to damage Las Alamandas, her posh Mexican resort.
“hurricane will hit isabel goldsmith resort and bye bye,” he wrote to a friend in 2015.
Epstein elevated his access to the British elite when, in 1990, he started dating Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of a British media baron, who hobnobbed with British royals and enhanced Epstein’s standing among upper-crust families like the Goldsmiths. Maxwell became Epstein’s closest partner in recruiting young women, according to her federal indictment. She is serving a 20-year sentence.
Three Goldsmith heirs told the Guardian in emails they never met Epstein and doubted their father had any business dealings with him. Isabel Goldsmith did not respond to messages.
“I’m not sure I had ever heard of Jeffrey Epstein before he hit the news for the first time. So I’m presuming my father did not know him,” said Ben Goldsmith, an environmentalist and investor who was 16 when his father died.
Zac Goldsmith, a conservative member of the House of Lords, said he never met Epstein and was not aware of his fascination with the family.
Jemima Goldsmith Khan, who owns a London-based film production company, said she never met Epstein. “I heard that my father despised him – he was certainly not a friend of his,” she said.
Sir James was a king of US corporate takeovers in a frenetic era of Wall Street deal-making, earning hundreds of millions by seizing control of vulnerable companies and cutting thousands of American jobs. Goldsmith sold his New York investments in 1987 and made a hasty exit back to London after correctly predicting the Black Monday stock market crash.
Epstein was a takeover amateur who concocted his own deals while working as a consultant to a shady Manhattan debt collection company, Towers Financial, whose chief executive, Steven Hoffenberg, was later convicted of running a $450m Ponzi scheme. Before his death, Hoffenberg accused Epstein of masterminding the scheme. Epstein was never charged.
Hoffenberg’s most ambitious effort was an attempted takeover of troubled Pan Am Airlines, the prestigious international carrier Epstein had fantasized as a boy about one day owning, according to an email from one of his friends.
Working from its Hilton Head office, Goldsmith’s takeover team had already analyzed Pan Am’s books and backed off from making an offer. Developer Donald Trump also flirted with a takeover bid but never made it, media reports show.
Couturier met Epstein through Isabel Goldsmith, the titan’s oldest daughter. Jet-setting Isabel became friendly – but not romantically involved – with Epstein, he said, and Isabel and Epstein both socialized in New York City’s nightlife scene. Epstein kept Isabel’s phone contacts at several addresses in his “little black book” later seized by the FBI as evidence.
Couturier had grown close to James Goldsmith and his long-term girlfriend, who hired him in 1981 to renovate a mansion on East 80th Street. Goldsmith cut famous takeover deals around the dining room table, and his catered parties attracted the cream of Manhattan society.
Isabel told Couturier that Epstein wanted to discuss hiring him for another renovation at a huge Upper East Side brownstone purchased by Wexner, he said. Epstein later moved into the restored mansion at 9 East 71st Street, about a half mile from Goldsmith’s, and decorated its dark wooded interior with his private art collection and gaudy fabrics. It became a center of his sexual misconduct, an address where the FBI in 2019 carried out boxes of photographs of alleged victims, massage tables and sex toys.
Wexner also owned a dilapidated historic townhome next door at 11 East 71st Street that needed total renovation. The house was eventually bought through a trust by Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who has said he hardly knew Epstein, his nextdoor neighbor. Under questioning by House investigators, Lutnick acknowledged visiting Epstein for lunch at the predator’s Caribbean island, Little Saint James.
Couturier was approached and interviewed by the FBI in 2010, after Epstein’s first arrest. A record of the interview, which is included in the Epstein files, indicates that Epstein had approached Couturier for a high-paying project on Little Saint James Island, where he was asked to provide “decor and furniture appropriate for teenage girls, with pink furnishings and bunk beds”.
Couturier told the Guardian he remembered Sir Jimmy’s earlier warning. He withdrew from the contract, leading to a legal dispute.
Goldsmith was hardly a prude, Couturier said, but he had no tolerance for inappropriate behavior with children. Goldsmith’s own domestic life was what his daughter Alix once described as “unconventional”, with three wives, numerous girlfriends and eight children. Two children were born in New York to his longtime girlfriend, a French journalist who moved with him to the city.
Another link between Epstein and Goldsmith was Bear Stearns, where Epstein was a junior broker until he was targeted in an internal investigation of his trading practices. He quit in 1981 with an indignant resignation letter that was included in the Epstein files.
Goldsmith remained a major Bear Stearns client, and Epstein, who somehow remained on good terms with the brokerage top brass, invested his own and his clients’ money into the firm, which collapsed in 2008.
Epstein always kept an air of mystery around his business deals. In the 1980s, he described himself to friends as a “bounty hunter” who traveled the world to recover stolen money for rich clients.
He and Goldsmith knew many of the same influential people. The Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, an international arms dealer, hired Epstein in the 1980s for unspecified work, according to published reports. Khashoggi and Goldsmith were both trusted advisers to President Richard Nixon, who met with them after his 1974 resignation to discuss overseas income opportunities, according to a Nixon biographer.
Epstein became friendly with a wealthy international investor, Jean “Johnny” Pigozzi, who was in Goldsmith’s circle of advisers and is one of the trustees of Goldsmith’s estate, according to published reports. At one point, Epstein’s girlfriend Maxwell emailed Pigozzi to get price estimates for his French estate and nature preserve in Panama, saying she had an interested potential buyer, the emails show.
Pigozzi, an art collector and heir to an auto fortune, is best known in popular culture as the inventor of the “selfie” because of his candid photographs of the rich and famous, including Goldsmith. He did not respond to messages.
Goldsmith’s massive holding company, GOSL, had operations around the world and a corporate office in Manhattan run by his trusted team.
But in 1985, GOSL filed papers with the state of South Carolina seeking authorization to do business in the state, the Guardian found. It opened an office in Hilton Head, the home of Al Dunlap, a notorious corporate raider Goldsmith was hiring to run his US operations.
Dunlap had been living part-time on Hilton Head since the early 1980s when he was running a company that made paper cups. He was among the many corporate bigwigs who had discovered Hilton Head as a sanctuary for executives and government officials who needed privacy. Most exclusive neighborhoods were gated and developed on former rice plantations.
Dunlap – who died in 2019 – had the Wall Street clout to ask investors to come to him. A newspaper account describes one session in 1985 at a new Marriott waterfront resort in Hilton Head where Dunlap pitched a Lily-Tulip stock offering backed by Wall Street firms to 70 out-of-town investors before leaving on a global capital-raising tour.
Some locals say the atmosphere on the island was so frenetic, with investors and deal makers arriving for meetings, that anyone could slip in and out without notice.
Goldsmith’s office in Hilton Head was tasked with selling millions of acres of forest land the company had acquired in takeovers of US paper companies. Its vast new holdings stretched from the Pacific north-west to the Adirondacks, making Goldsmith’s company one of the largest owners of undeveloped US land.
The Guardian tracked down former GOSL executive Phil Lader, who was in charge of land sales, to ask if he recalled seeing Epstein in Hilton Head during the time GOSL had an office there. The short answer was “no”.
Lader was a Hilton Head resident and former chief executive at Sea Pines. In 1981, he founded the prestigious Renaissance Weekends, which drew luminaries to the island for private invitation-only retreats. He was especially close to Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas when he and his wife, Hillary, began coming to Lader’s exclusive gatherings. Other featured guests included Wall Street executives, university and government officials and leaders in the arts and sciences.
Goldsmith hired Lader as a GOSL vice-president in 1986, just after he lost a Democratic party bid for the South Carolina governorship. Lader was appointed Clinton’s deputy White House chief of staff in 1993 and moved to London four years later when he was appointed ambassador to the court of Saint James’s.
Lader said he never met Epstein and “never heard the name Jeffrey Epstein in my years on Hilton Head”. Epstein reportedly made 17 visits to the Clinton White House and later flew Clinton on his private jet.
A partially redacted 2011 exchange in Epstein’s emails shows he was aware of Renaissance Weekends, which are promoted on social media as gathering places for “thought-leaders”. An unnamed friend asked if Epstein had heard of the gatherings.
“Of course,” Epstein wrote. Asked if it was “something i should do?”, Epstein wrote “yes”.
Renaissance Weekends were held in Hilton Head for 20 years, then moved to Charleston. Similar programs are also held in other cities.
The woman who would come to be known as Jane Doe 4 first called an FBI victim hotline to report her alleged abuse on 10 July 2019. It was four days after Epstein’s arrest at a New Jersey airport. The agent manning the phones recommended that she be interviewed in person, near her home in Vancouver, Washington. One of her close friends made a separate call to anonymously report Jane Doe 4’s abuse.
Jane Doe 4’s federal class-action lawsuit, filed later in New York against the Epstein estate, alleges she met Epstein around 1984, when she was a teenager, and had sex with him for several years when he visited the island. She said he rented properties, including a villa at Sea Pines, from her mother’s realty firm.
In four FBI interviews in 2019 she described her abuser’s specific sexual quirks – including his use of butt plugs. Several were seized when the FBI gathered evidence in Epstein’s home in 2019.
Some details squared with accounts given by other young victims who came forward during the previous Florida investigation. She described how he allegedly asked her to recruit friends and took nude photographs of her, also part of a pattern, and repeatedly plied her with drugs and alcohol. The FBI seized thousands of photographs and videos depicting victims when it searched his various properties.
The Marriott hotel on Hilton Head figures heavily in her allegations. She told the FBI about a pool party there with local teenage girls and older males. She claimed the older man she knew as “Jeff” made a brief appearance at the pool before taking her back to his rented villa. She also mentioned a neighbor she had talked with during the period of alleged abuse.
Her local attorney told the Guardian he sat in on the FBI interview and interrupted when she began describing telling other girls about “Jeff”. The lawyer said he feared the FBI might accuse her of aiding her abuser in soliciting other minors.
FBI notes in the case, which were first reported by the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, repeat the woman’s allegation that at one point, Epstein transported her to New York or New Jersey where she claims he introduced her to Trump, who forced her into a sex act. She estimated she was about 13-15 years old, which would place the dates between 1983 and 1985, but she acknowledged a fuzzy memory. Trump said in a 2002 interview with New York magazine that he had known Epstein for 15 years, which would date their relationship to 1987. The White House has denied Jane Doe 4’s allegations.
Jane Doe 4 also offered names of some of her high school friends who might have seen her with Epstein.
But there is no evidence the FBI ever followed up on the leads Jane Doe 4 gave investigators. Its interest in her case appears to have died abruptly when she asked agents what the point was of her continued cooperation and told them she intended to join a class-action lawsuit, filed by the Bloom Law Firm in December 2019.
A relative of Jane Doe 4 told the Guardian that she had been scarred by “layers of trauma” as a young girl from family tragedies and upheavals. She had spent time in foster care and had just finished elementary school when the family made its way south.
Jane Doe 4 declined to answer questions from the Guardian relayed through the relative, who considers her account “plausible” because she was often unsupervised in her early teens. Three friends contacted by the Guardian did not respond to messages.
Jane Doe 4’s attorney at the Bloom Law Firm told the Post and Courier she ultimately reached a settlement with Epstein’s estate but declined to give an amount.
Court records show a claim she filed with the Epstein victims’ compensation fund, a formal review panel funded by the estate, was denied. The dates of her alleged abuse are much earlier than most other victims who have come forward with claims.
In response to lawmakers’ questions about whether Jane Doe 4 had received a settlement from the estate, an attorney for Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, said he could not recall details of all 60 women who settled with the estate outside of the compensation fund.
The record is far from definitive about whether Epstein ever visited Hilton Head during this time. He did not own a private plane in the 1980s, so no travel logs are available. Epstein did have other real estate development interests at that time, including a long friendship with a developer who was building an oceanfront golf course on nearby Kiawah Island.
Later records in the Epstein files show his plane landing at the nearby Savannah airport several times from 2013 to 2019, for unknown reasons. The emails show a redacted exchange in 2014 suggesting he was on Hilton Head for a March visit.
Kenneth Lannon, a retired FBI expert in child sexual victimization who has trained hundreds of law enforcement agents to investigate abusers, said it was “highly likely” Epstein had victims pre-dating his Florida arrest and that he probably “started out slowly and just got better and better at it as time went on.
The typical child sex abuser, he said, begins targeting and grooming potential victims soon after puberty, although they may come across as “nice guys” in regular social interactions. Money and the ability to travel freely make the crimes easier to pull off, he said.
Child victims are often so starved for attention they become compliant and have more than one encounter with the abuser.
Jane Doe 4 had a troubled life after leaving Hilton Head. She married several times and moved to the west coast. She returned to be with family in Georgia and was arrested in 2023 for stealing money from a dying man. She pleaded guilty and spent a year in jail. Her brothers were well educated; one worked for a few years as a Bear Stearns trader before the brokerage collapsed in 2008.
A family member told the Guardian in June that Jane Doe 4 was “staying off the grid” and lived in fear of retaliation from the Trump administration amid the ongoing controversy over the handling of the case.
Additional research by Sophie Sullivan
