Epstein Likely Wasn’t the Boss. So Who Was?

His child sex trafficking ring blackmailed powerful men. Much of the evidence is still unaccounted for. Here's why I believe the people running him were the ones sexism tells society to shrug off.

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Please note: The following essay is a hypothesis. It is not fact. Nor is it fiction. It is an essay based on available evidence that asks — what if?

Jeffrey Epstein — Jesus, I still puke a little every time I have to write that fucking name — ran a child sex trafficking operation spanning decades, multiple continents, and the highest levels of global political, financial, and scientific power. He is dead. The children he trafficked are now adults, and they’ve spent years fighting for accountability. The blackmail material Epstein collected through his network — video recordings, photographs, kompromat on heads of state, royals, financiers, academics — has never been fully accounted for. And probably never will be.

But here’s the question that bugs me: Who was doing the actual blackmailing? Because Epstein was too busy being a complete degenerate. We are all still so fixated on the horrific nature of his crimes that we’re not asking the most important questions: Who controlled the material he gathered, how did it benefit them, and are they still doing it?

After spending a lot of time with the files, doing my own investigations beyond those files, and interviewing some of the people involved, I’ve come to a conclusion that might surprise you: I believe Jeffrey Epstein’s direct handlers were women.

Before going further, a distinction that matters enormously and must be stated plainly.

The overwhelming majority of women in Jeffrey Epstein’s world were victims. Trafficked. Groomed. Coerced as children. Threatened into silence as adults. They have spent years — many of them decades — fighting to be believed, fighting for accountability, fighting against a legal and cultural system that minimized their suffering and protected their abusers. They are owed every ounce of respect and attention this story can generate.

I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the women who were chosen to make their nightmare possible precisely because no one would ever suspect them. Not the media. Not detectives. Not the public. Not even Epstein. Women who believed the work they were doing for the organizations that sent them was important enough to justify any atrocity.

The First Woman: Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell is described, in the vast majority of American media coverage, simply as Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend. A woman so broken and enamored of Jeffrey (barf) that she would have done anything to make him happy — including procuring children for him to rape.

I reject this assessment. I reject it, and I posit a new one: Maxwell was an intelligence operative, and she deliberately manipulated Epstein into her orbit, knowing full well what he was and why he’d be useful to foreign intelligence, and it was she who ultimately controlled him. The assumption that he controlled her is part of the ruse, built into its design by people who know American society better than it knows itself. Someone who knew, from this operation’s inception, that the nature of Epstein’s crimes would achieve two aims: gathering kompromat on powerful men, and insulating the women managers and handlers, cast as girlfriends and victims, from any sort of scrutiny at all.

I believe Ghislaine was Epstein’s handler. And before she was his handler, she was her father’s daughter — which is to say, she was already inside one of the most consequential intelligence operations of the twentieth century before Epstein ever entered the picture. She was to the manor born.

Robert Maxwell — her father — was a Czech-born British media baron with documented ties to Mossad, MI6, and Soviet and Eastern Bloc intelligence services simultaneously. He built his fortune through academic publishing, which gave him access to scientific research across the Western world. He sold backdoored PROMIS software — a database tracking system originally developed for the U.S. Department of Justice — to intelligence agencies on multiple continents. Among the documented recipients: Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico in 1984, one of America’s primary nuclear weapons research facilities.

Robert Maxwell died in 1991, falling from his yacht near the Canary Islands. The circumstances have never been satisfactorily explained.

His favorite daughter Ghislaine did not exit the family business.

She inherited it.

And it wasn’t publishing.

The Succession: How Robert Maxwell Built His Replacement

The conventional framing of Ghislaine Maxwell’s relationship with her father is quasi-psychological — the devoted daughter of a domineering man, so thoroughly shaped by his narcissistic controlling personality that she spent her adult life recreating him in surrogate form, first in Epstein, then in grief. This framing is reductive. It renders her passive. A product of her father’s pathology rather than an agent in her own right.

The documented record points toward something more deliberate.

Robert Maxwell took Ghislaine with him everywhere. Among all his children, she was the one present at meetings, traveling at his side, absorbing his network and his methodology across decades of multi-agency intelligence work. At Oxford, she was president of the Oxford Union — an institution that selects for precisely the qualities her father needed in a successor: social intelligence, organizational command, the ability to move through rooms of powerful people and be remembered as formidable rather than threatening.

Robert Maxwell was many things, but subtle was not among them. He was physically enormous, loud, domineering, impossible to miss. He attracted attention in every room he entered. Ghislaine moved differently — beautiful, warm, charming, socially fluent and disarming in a way her father never was. She could sit beside a prince and read as a friend. She could recruit a sixteen-year-old girl at a Palm Beach resort and have that girl feel seen and cared for. She could run an operation spanning decades and continents while the world’s attention remained fixed on the man beside her.

What her father (and others in his intelligence community, no doubt) recognized in her was a singular capability. A successor with all of his strengths and connections, but also with many remarkable gifts he lacked. Someone who could continue the operation after he was gone — and continue it more effectively, precisely because she would be underestimated in ways he never was. Like all women in intelligence are.

I believe he was training her. Deliberately, perhaps. From childhood. The trips, the meetings, the introductions — these were apprenticeship. She was the child most like him, and also better than him at everything he did, while seeming clueless. A three-letter agency dream come true.

When Robert Maxwell died in 1991 — possibly because he had threatened to expose the operation rather than let it outlive him, as documents suggest — Ghislaine executed the transition with the precision of someone who had been rehearsing it. She was in New York within days. Epstein, likely already identified by intelligence (CIA, methinks) as a potentially useful sociopath, was ready to be handled.

The handoff was seamless.

The grief narrative serves the operation. The widely reported assertion that her father’s death and controversy left her destitute gave her a perfect excuse to attach herself to a degenerate college dropout made newly rich by inexplicable gifts from Les Wexner. She was just a silly old girl, a devastated and useless spoiled daughter clinging to a father-surrogate, or so the story goes. It renders her invisible as an operative. She is sort of sympathetic, until the survivors tell a different tale. She is explicable.

She is someone an investigator looks at with pity or curiosity rather than scrutiny. To this day.

The Asset: How Jeffrey Epstein Was Built

Jeffrey Epstein came from nowhere. This is the established biographical fact that everyone accepts and almost no one has adequately explained.

The son of a New York City parks department groundskeeper and a school aide, raised in a working-class gated community in Coney Island, Epstein attended Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971, then transferred to NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where he studied mathematical physiology until June 1974 — five years of college at two institutions, leaving without a degree. Then, at age twenty-one, with no credentials and no connections, he was hired to teach mathematics and physics at the Dalton School, one of the most elite private institutions in Manhattan.

A guy named Donald Barr hired him. Barr was the headmaster. Barr was also a wartime OSS officer — the intelligence organization that became the CIA. Barr wrote a science fiction novel in 1973, the year before he hired Epstein, whose plot centered on the sexual enslavement of children by a ruling class. Barr’s son, William Barr, became Attorney General of the United States and was in that position when Epstein was arrested in 2019 and when Epstein died in custody. If I wrote it in a novel, my editor would say it was too on-the-nose to be believable.

The Dalton hiring has always been presented as an anomaly — a lucky break facilitated by Epstein’s charm and mathematical gifts. The more precise question is who prepared the ground before Barr made the hire. Epstein’s five college years are the darkest gap in his documented biography. For someone who would become notorious for his social networking, his relationships, his endless cultivation of connections, the Cooper Union and NYU years are a near-total blank in the public record. No documented girlfriend. No documented mentor. No documented social world of any kind.

What arrived at Dalton in 1974 was already fully formed. The strategic use of women as connection vectors was already his instinctive operating mode before he ever reached Wall Street. Sociopath 101. The charm. The social hunger. The moral flexibility. The willingness to lie about credentials, to manipulate, to use people instrumentally. All of it was already in place.

My hypothesis — grounded in the documented record but extending beyond it — is this: Epstein was identified and cultivated by an intelligence organization long before Dalton. Possibly while still at NYU. Possibly earlier. Someone, or a network of someones, recognized in him the precise profile intelligence looks for in a long-game asset. Mathematically gifted. Socially ambitious beyond his station. Charming. Handsome. Morally unencumbered. And an insatiable, violent pedophile — which made him simultaneously controllable and useful as the engine of a blackmail operation targeting other powerful men with the same pathology.

The cultivation would have been invisible to Epstein himself. This is the crucial point.

Epstein was a clinical narcissist. The clinical narcissist’s entire psychological architecture is organized around a single structural need: to be seen as exceptional. To be the most brilliant, the most connected, the most desired person in any room. That need is absolute. Without constant reflection of their own greatness, the narcissist experiences something close to psychological disintegration.

Which means whoever controls the mirror controls the narcissist entirely. Intelligence recruiters know this.

Tell Jeffrey Epstein that he is the most extraordinary mathematical mind you have encountered. That his social gifts are without parallel. That he deserves to move among the most powerful people in the world. That the remarkable trajectory unfolding before him is the natural consequence of his own exceptional nature. He will do anything to remain inside that reflection. He will never question the source of the flattery, because narcissists consume flattery and move on — the mirror is all that matters, the person holding it is invisible, and their motives incomprehensible to a person who believes everyone’s motive is admiration of themselves.

This is how you build an asset without the asset knowing they are being built. You don’t explain the operation. You don’t recruit in the conventional sense. You simply become the most important mirror in the room. You open doors and let him believe his charm opened them. You make introductions and let him believe his brilliance earned them. You engineer his rise and let him spend the rest of his life insisting he was self-made.

Epstein did insist this. Fiercely. Constantly. His self-made mythology — the groundskeeper’s son who conquered Manhattan through sheer genius — was the most important thing in the world to him. He never questioned it. There is no evidence it’s true. But he believed it, because malignant narcissists, while capable of great evil, are deeply naive in a specific way.

By 1981, five years into his Bear Stearns career, Epstein was already telling associates he was an intelligence asset. He said this openly, to multiple people. This is documented. He said it a decade before Ghislaine arrived, before the full operational network was assembled, before Zorro Ranch or Little St. James or any of the infrastructure that would define his public infamy.

He said it because somewhere in those blank college years, someone had told him something true. He simply misunderstood who was running whom. He believed he was an asset because he was indispensable. But 2019 would prove otherwise.

Robert Maxwell had known Epstein before his death. According to Epstein’s former business partner Steven Hoffenberg, Maxwell introduced Ghislaine to Epstein in the late 1980s. The introduction was pre-arranged. The handoff — when Maxwell died in 1991 and Ghislaine landed in New York within days — was seamless because it had been planned. This is what I believe when I connect the dots.

Two intelligence operations — one American-rooted, one Maxwell-rooted — had already found each other. When Maxwell died, Ghislaine carried one operation into the other.

Epstein believed he was in charge. He was a narcissist being run by a woman he systematically underestimated. His own misogyny — his belief that women were instruments of pleasure and social leverage, never principals, and utterly pointless beyond age 18 — made him the perfect host for an operation he never fully understood he was inside. The misogyny that made the outside world blind to Ghislaine also made Epstein blind to her.

The Second Woman: Karyna Shuliak

After Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 Florida conviction — after his eighteen-month sentence — he hired multiple public relations firms to rehabilitate his image. He needed, urgently, to become someone other than a convicted sex offender, if he wanted to remain powerful.

It was during this period that Karyna Shuliak appeared in his life.

She came from Belarus — a Russian client state, the last dictatorship in Europe, whose intelligence services are answerable ultimately to Moscow. She spoke fluent English. She was emotionally sophisticated, gracious, already an adult. She was already in her 20s. In college to be a dentist. Confident. With supportive parents.

She was by every account unlike Epstein’s type. He preferred desperate children who’d been abused and neglected. Helpless, terrified, tiny people so used to being hurt they did not know how to fight back.

What the DOJ files show about Karyna Shuliak is remarkable for what it excludes. She was verbally and emotionally abusive toward Epstein. She slapped him on multiple occasions. She took control of his household staff, his finances, his schedule. She managed his operations. The terror and degradation that saturates every account of Epstein’s actual victims is entirely absent from the accounts involving Shuliak. She was seemingly never trafficked by him to anyone else.

She appears at the same time Ghislaine is likely headed toward a conviction and jail, too. His former “girlfried” handler is soon to be incapacitated.

Enter Karyna.

The evidence points toward someone new, who was possibly running him. Someone who was sent into his life at a precise time when he thought he needed to rehabilitate his image. I would image he was told, by the people to whom he provided the kompromat he collected, that they had a young woman who looked even younger, someone who would fit seamlessly into the image everyone had of him, whilst improving it, who could handle the day-to-day tedium that Ghislaine had managed for him.

What I can’t help wondering is this: What if she had been sent to oversee the operation's final chapter — whatever that chapter was? The narcissist’s blind spot — his ego — would not allow him to believe this pretty young thing who needed his help to get into Columbia, could have anything but undying admiration and gratitude towards him. He’d have thought his bosses sent her to massage his image. But what if she was sent — by whichever organization was running the operation — to learn it from the inside?

Two days before Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody — in what the official record calls a suicide, in a cell that lacked functioning surveillance cameras during the relevant hours, on a night when both his guards were asleep — he signed a new will naming Karyna Shuliak as his primary heir.

The FBI files on Epstein say she was in Russia the day he died.

She is described by the American press as Jeffrey Epstein’s last girlfriend. Every report I have seen of her seems to focus on her youth, her beauty, and the assumption of her being just another of his many victims, someone who needed him to pay for her mom’s cancer treatments and her own graduate school tuition. What if all of that is by design?

She arrived from a Russian client state. She appeared during his image rehabilitation, and became part of it. She dominated and managed him behind the scenes, not the other way around. She inherited his estate two days before his death. She was in Russia when he died. She remains near his island. She has never been interviewed.

Nobody looked at her twice, because in western patriarchal societies, women — and especially pretty young women who take large sums of money from powerful men for things like college — are dismissed as nothing at all.

She inherited Zorro Ranch, the one Epstein property that was never searched. She hung onto it from 2019 to 2023.

And when it sold, it was to a woman no one rarely seems to notice is there. A woman who, on the surface at least, appears to be a typical MAGA Republican Christian (Catholic) wife from Texas.

But she is also a woman who inexplicably, in 2018, traveled to Moscow with Rand Paul, to meet with high-ranking officials. Paul was there to hand deliver a letter from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin.

The Third Woman: Mary Catherine Huffines

Zorro Ranch was purchased by a trust created a month beforehand, designed to keep the identities of the buyers secret. It almost worked. But in February 2026, reporter Clara Bates at the Santa Fe New Mexican figured out who they were by looking at court records associated with the trust.

The buyers were Mary Catherine Huffines and her husband, Donald Huffines. He is a former Texas state senator now running for Texas comptroller as a MAGA republican. Donald Huffines describes himself as a “5th-generation Texan” and “Trump Republican,” who has raised over $1.5 million for Donald Trump’s campaigns. One of the Huffines’ sons, Russell, currently works in the Trump administration. Lots of attention has been paid since February to Donald and Russell Huffines.

None has been paid to Mary Catherine, even though she is listed as a trustee on the deed to Zorro Ranch. The automatic assumption? She’s just the wife. She’s just the mom.

But is she?

Myers was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father was the City Archivist of Providence — the man who controlled access to the documentary memory of the city. Her mother came from the Goodwin family, Rhode Island Democratic political royalty: her first cousin Maryellen Goodwin served as Rhode Island Senate Majority Whip for decades, holding the same seat once occupied by Maryellen’s father, Thomas Goodwin.

Federal Election Commission records tell a different story than the one the Huffines family presents publicly. Mary Catherine Huffines — filing variously as Mary Cathryn Myers and Mary R. Myers — donated to Ron Paul beginning in 1996. She continued donating to Rand Paul’s RANDPAC for years afterward. This giving predates Don Huffines’ public political career. It is personal. It is sustained. It represents nearly three decades of financial commitment to a specific political dynasty.

The Paul political network intersected with Russian financial and influence operations at multiple documented points. Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign manager Jesse Benton was convicted of funneling Russian money to Donald Trump — pardoned by Trump, then convicted again. The Ron Paul Institute’s board included John Laughland, a founding member of a pro-Russian think tank announced by Vladimir Putin on the same day stolen credit cards were used to donate to Ron Paul’s campaign and over 100 million promotional spam emails were distributed. Russian state television RT heavily promoted Paul fundraisers in apparent violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Ron Paul was the first American presidential candidate RT ever interviewed.

Mary Catherine Huffines was funding this operation. Independently. Before her husband’s career made it convenient or expected.

In August 2018, she traveled to Moscow as a participant at a session of the Russian Federation Council — the upper chamber of the Russian parliament — alongside Rand Paul, Don Huffines, his twin brother Phillip, and Konstantin Kosachev, the Federation Council’s foreign affairs chairman, who was under official U.S. sanctions at the time. The trip was never meant to be made public, and only became so after Texas political reporters saw Russian news service photos of the event coming across the wires, showing the Huffines brothers at the meeting. Mary Catherine was seated beside her husband at the table in the meeting, and the stern, thoughtful look on her face there is nothing like the polished smiling stepford wife you see with Don on the Texas campaign trail.

In 2023, she bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch — 7,600 acres in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, where survivors described systematic abuse of children, where a bidirectional microwave communications system links the property to Sandia peak, where the land sits roughly equidistant between Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratories, America’s two primary nuclear weapons research facilities.

When the Huffines were identified as the new owners, their spokesman told reporters they’d purchased the property to turn it into a “Christian retreat.” An associate of the Huffines told me this was a cover story concocted for the family as damage control, by their Dallas public relations firm. It’s a good story. In America, the only thing people underestimate more than women is anything labeled “Christian.”

The Huffines family began extensive excavation of the property. They began construction on it, without proper licensing. A strange thing for a family in the real estate development business to overlook.

Yet when Mary Catherine is described anywhere, if she is described at all, it is as Don’s wife. A religious Texas mother and grandmother. In truth, she is the person who attended a Federation Council session with a sanctioned Russian official. She is a woman whose son is sitting in Donald Trump’s White House. She is the trustee who controls Jeffrey Epstein’s former ranch, halfway between two nuclear weapons labs, with its active microwave link.

Nobody looks at her twice.

If They Are Assets, Who Are They Working For?

I want to be honest with you about the limits of what I know.

I cannot tell you for sure any of these women are assets. I don’t have that kind of access. I also can’t tell you which intelligence operation — or operations — if any, sits at the top of this. And I am deeply skeptical of anyone who tells you they can, with certainty.

Many people far smarter than me, with far more access than I have, have spent years trying to answer that question.

The most serious analysts point to Russia, whose intelligence services have the longest and most documented history of exactly this kind of operation. Russia didn’t invent sexual blackmail. It industrialized it. The KGB professionalized seduction with an almost bureaucratic seriousness. Female agents known as lastochki — “swallows” — were trained to target foreign diplomats, journalists, soldiers, and businessmen. The classic documented case: in 1958, the KGB mounted one of its most elaborate honeytrap operations against French Ambassador Maurice Dejean, involving over 100 officers and agents, celebrated Russian writers and actresses conscripted as cover, and even Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself playing a role. Dejean was compromised. The material was held as leverage for years.

Others point to Israel. In 1986, Mossad deployed a female agent, Cheryl Bentov, code-named “Cindy,” posing as an American tourist from Florida, to seduce Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu in London. Vanunu had been leaking details of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program to the British press. Bentov persuaded him to fly to Rome for a romantic weekend, where waiting Mossad operatives overpowered him, drugged him, and smuggled him onto a waiting ship bound for Israel — a honeytrap operation that has been officially approved practice in Israel. He served eighteen years in prison.

And then there is the CIA, which does not comment on whether its agents use sexuality to obtain information, but current and former intelligence officials say it does happen occasionally. The OSS — the CIA’s wartime predecessor, which produced Donald Barr — ran female operatives extensively in World War II. Betty Pack, code-named “Cynthia,” seduced her way through the Italian and Vichy French intelligence establishments, obtaining naval cipher codes that changed the course of the war, and was called by her boss “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.”

And then there is a hypothesis I find increasingly difficult to dismiss: that in the Epstein case, it is all of them simultaneously. A multinational operation, run not in service of any single nation-state, but in service to multinational business conglomerates and organized criminal operations (honestly, the distinction is often hard to make) — the interlocking interests of defense contractors, oil companies, tech surveillance firms, biotech, drug and gun dealers, and media conglomerates whose money moves across borders and whose need for political leverage respects no flag.

What I can also tell you is that the kompromat Jeffrey Epstein’s operation collected? Someone has it. And the people most likely to know where it is are the people everyone has already agreed not to look at.

I could be wrong about all of this. I am just a writer. What I have presented as hypothesis, is hypothesis. What I am certain of is the pattern. Three women. Categorically different from the survivors. Positioned at the legal, financial, and operational control points of a network that runs from a dead pedophile’s ranch in New Mexico to the White House to the Russian Federation Council. Described everywhere as “just” girlfriends, daughters and housewives.

Just girls.

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