How paradise became a playground of sexual depravity for the rich and famous: What really happened on Epstein’s private ‘paedophile island’ and will the luxury Caribbean retreat ever be opened to the public again

Months before the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his New York prison cell in August 2019, he was still whisking young women away to his private US Virgin Islands retreat in the Caribbean.

Employees who worked on the airstrip on St Thomas – from where he would helicopter or ferry guests over to the remote Little St James – shared an inside joke about their billionaire visitor.

‘Every time he landed or took off, it was always brought up. We’d always be joking: “How many kids are on board this time?”’ an anonymous worker told Vanity Fair.

The same worker compared spying on the secretive financier to witnessing a ‘serial killer in broad daylight’, because Epstein sauntered without shame, surrounding himself with underage girls despite being on the island’s registry of sex offenders for a decade.

Earlier in December, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released hundreds of never-seen-before photos and four videos of Epstein’s 28-hectare Caribbean retreat.

He called his home away from home Little St Jeff’s, but locals had other nicknames for his secluded getaway, including ‘Island of Sin’, ‘Paedophile Island’, and ‘Orgy Island’. 

The photos and footage did not immediately give away any secrets about the sinister paradise, but they did reveal a few peculiar features: a dentist’s room with masks fixed to the wall, a photograph of a man’s hand holding a smaller, feminine hand, and a chalkboard scrawled with cryptic words such as ‘truth’, ‘deception’ and ‘power’.

Over the years, rumours have swirled about which members of the rich and famous accepted invitations to join Epstein on the island, with visitors including Lord Peter Mandelson, former boss of Barclays Jes Staley, and the former Duke of York. All deny any wrongdoing and insist they were never aware of his criminal behaviour.

But what’s happened to the notorious island since Epstein’s death, where scores of underage girls were allegedly trafficked and sexually abused – and will the luxury locale ever escape its sordid history and re-open its gates to the public?

In April 1998, a company called L.S.J. LLC – whose sole member was Epstein – bought Little St James for $7.95 million (£6 million).

Previously owned by venture capitalist Arch Cummin, it is located a little over a mile from St. Thomas, a lush tropical island east of Puerto Rico full of winding mountain roads and picturesque Danish colonial-era homes. 

Some time after buying ‘Little St Jeff’s’, in 2016 Epstein purchased the larger, 67-hectare Great St. James for $17.5 million, and soon drew up plans to develop the island by building homes, an amphitheatre, as well as an underwater office and pool.

According to a lawsuit brought by the Virgin Islands against Epstein’s estate in 2020, the smaller island was ‘the perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault’.

Underage girls and Epstein’s A-lister guests would arrive on one of the billionaire’s Gulfstream jets at Cyril E King Airport on St Thomas, before being shuttled to Little St James in a black helicopter.

Alternatively, visitors were ferried over in groups aboard a 38-foot vessel called the ‘Lady Ghislaine,’ apparently named after Epstein’s imprisoned co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for her role in the financier’s sex trafficking of teen girls.

Indeed, Little St James is so remote – accessible only by sea or air – that one 15-year-old victim previously described trying to escape the island by swimming, before being captured and having her passport confiscated.

In a 2022 settlement, the Epstein estate agreed to pay at least $105 million to the Virgin Islands after local authorities alleged that ‘dozens of young women and children’ were trafficked, raped and assaulted on the two islands.

That year, the Epstein’s Caribbean retreats went up to sale for $125 million, but when they were eventually sold to investor Stephen Deckoff, he bought the two islands for the much-reduced price of $60 million, with a portion of the money going towards the settlement.

Deckoff, the founder of Black Diamond Capital Management, vowed he’d use the tropical islands to develop a 25-room luxury resort, promising to open them up into a ‘world-class destination’.

But will the dark past of the paradisal islands ever fully disappear, or continue to haunt future visitors?

In addition to the main residential compound on Little St James – a stone mansion with cream-coloured walls and a bright turquoise roof – the island had four guest villas, a helipad, a private dock, two pools, three private beaches, a gym and a tiki hut.

Fit with winding dirt roads, 40-foot palm trees and lucrative tax benefits, Epstein described the island as his ‘favourite place’, the perfect faraway getaway for the billionaire with an open-secret.

The financier spent millions developing his remote playground, fitting his villa with a wood-panelled library, a Japanese bathhouse and a movie theatre.

The island also contained eccentric elements, including a solar clock, an ever-moving Holstein-Friesian cow statue and a blue-striped temple which was topped by a gold-colored dome until Hurricane Irma blew it off, according to locals.

Little St James might have felt like a five-star hotel to his Hollywood guests, but it was a hellscape for the scores of underage girls who have repeatedly alleged they were trafficked and raped there.

In the 2020 lawsuit against Epstein’s estate, US Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George said Epstein would use helicopters ‘to transport young women and underage girls between St. Thomas and Little St. James’.

Virginia Giuffre, the late accuser of Epstein who took her own life aged 41, claimed in a civil suit that the former Prince Andrew abused her there and dubbed the locale ‘orgy island’.

Prince Andrew denied the claims and said he has no recollection of meeting Giuffre.

‘Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls and I had sex together,’ she wrote in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, describing an episode on the billionaire’s ‘private sanctuary’. 

‘The other girls all appeared to be under the age of 18 and didn’t really speak English.

‘Epstein laughed about how they couldn’t really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with.’

According to flight logs for Epstein’s private jet, the former Duke of York paid at least one visit to the island, although former staff claimed he visited Little St James many times.

‘Everybody called it “Pedophile Island,”’ said Kevin Goodrich, a resident from St. Thomas who operates boat charters. ‘It’s our dark corner,’ he told the Associated Press news agency.

‘My colleagues and I definitely talked about how we didn’t understand how this guy was still allowed to be around children,’ a former air traffic controller told Vanity Fair.

‘We didn’t say anything because we figured law enforcement was doing their job. I have to say that that is regrettable, but we really didn’t even know who to tell, or if anyone really cared.’ 

It was understood that Epstein tipped workers well to stay quiet, including the employees on Little St James, who he often gave machinery to free of charge.

In the months following his death while awaiting trial for sex trafficking, intrigue about the dark truth of ‘Epstein Island’ only spread – with tourists taking boats out to get a glimpse of the paradise shrouded in mystery.

‘It’s part of the tour and has been forever,’ Kristi Query, owner of Virgin Islands Yacht Charters in Compass Point Marina on St. Thomas, told Bloomberg.

‘It brought some kind of notoriety to the Virgin Islands,’ said Vernon Morgan, a taxi driver and St. Thomas native. ‘We would much rather that the Virgin Islands be seen in a different light.’

Epstein was eager to treat his famous guests – reportedly paying for a submarine to be modified to give a sea bed tour to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who had never been underwater until he visited Epstein’s island.

US President Donald Trump, who was friends with Epstein for around 15 years until they fell out in 2004, said in July he ‘never had the privilege’ of visiting his former associate’s island.

‘In one of my very good moments, I turned it down, I didn’t want to go to his island,’ Trump said.

He claimed without evidence that Bill Clinton travelled to Little St James ‘28 times’, which the former president has denied.

Multiple batches of documents related to Epstein were turned over to the Democrats, after they subpoenaed the Epstein Estate in August.

The documents were purported to show some of the billionaire’s phone and flight logs, as well as some daily schedules and financial ledgers.

The following month, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon – formerly Trump’s chief strategist – were all named in copies of Epstein’s daily schedules released by Democrats.

The schedules appeared to mention tech mogul Musk possibly flying to an ‘island’ in 2014.

Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, was critical of Epstein on an August 2024 episode of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast.

‘You know, I met Epstein a few times as well,’ Thiel said. He explained that he was introduced to the disgraced financier by another Silicon Valley executive in 2014.

‘I didn’t check, didn’t ask any – enough questions about it,’ he said. He surmised that ‘Epstein knew a lot about taxes’.

As well as being a billionaire’s playground for illicit sexual activity, Epstein used St. Thomas to register a number of his businesses.

He took advantage of a US Virgin Islands tax-cut programme that allowed certain people who invest at least $100,000 locally to have their income and other tax rates cut substantially or entirely eliminated.

One of the companies that successfully received the tax break was Southern Trust, a business Epstein founded for DNA research.

Specifically, he hoped to create an algorithm to mine information from genetic sequencing databases, as a way to find treatments for cancer.

‘Places, frankly, like St. Thomas are the perfect place to sequence people because it is so isolated,’ Epstein said during a business pitch in 2012.

Clearly unsettling the audience with his talk of ‘Frankenstein’-esque scientific pursuits, Epstein assured his listeners: ‘I am not a madman.’

However, it is well documented that the financier had a particular fascination with genetics, and even invited physicists to his island to discuss with them how he could perpetuate his own DNA in the human population.

Indeed, on multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Epstein confided in scientists and businessmen about his peculiar ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm.

If his goal was achieved, around 20 women would then give birth to his children at the 33,000-sq-ft Zorro Ranch – another property where young women, including minors, were allegedly abused – sources told the New York Times in a 2019 investigation. 

Among the photos released by the Democrats of Epstein’s island is a ‘no trespassing’ sign on the beach, a wet room with more than a dozen bottles of toiletries, including shower gel and hair products, and a Lorex CCTV system of 16 cameras facing outside the building.

There is a huge amount of art, including a white and red piece which says ‘I am the subject’, a painting of a woman bending over in the sea, the outline of her spine visible, and a white lamp made from a sculpture of a nude woman.

There is also a photograph of a Panasonic landline telephone. Three of the names on the speed dial have been redacted, but the remaining names include Darren, Rich, Mike, Patrick and Larry.

In a statement, the committee’s Democratic leader, Robert Garcia, said: ‘These new images are a disturbing look into the world of Jeffrey Epstein and his island.

‘We are releasing these photos and videos to ensure public transparency in our investigation and to help piece together the full picture of Epstein’s horrific crimes.

‘We won’t stop fighting until we deliver the full picture of Epstein’s horrific crimes.’

The photo dump was followed by the much-anticipated release of 300,000 pages of Epstein-related files by the US Department of Justice on December 19, as a show of ‘transparency’.

Among the Epstein files included several photographs of former President Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor lying across five women’s laps, and Epstein posing alongside Michael Jackson. 

But the public, Epstein’s victims, and a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans were left wanting more, pointing out the huge swathes of redactions – with nearly 700 pages entirely blacked out – and all the important files that were held back. 

Despite the ongoing controversy and speculation surrounding the scale of the financier’s crimes, development is allegedly occurring to develop his tropical locale into a luxury tourist resort, fit for all the family.

Deckoff, whose net worth is valued at almost $3 billion by Forbes, announced he had acquired both islands in May 2023 through one of his firms, SD Investments.

A press release at the time stated: ‘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.’

It did not clarify which of Epstein’s islands would host the new tourist destination, but the billionaire – who owns multi-million dollar properties in Colorado, New York City, and a Beverly Hills mansion – began the process of hiring architects and engineers to begin the big project.

According to the release, the private equity mogul has made a career turning ‘distressed situations into successful enterprises’, and would work with the Virgin Islands government to ‘make this dream a reality’.

Deckoff initially had a view of opening the luxury destination in 2025, but work on the development of the tourist destination seems to have already subsided, before it even properly began. 

A spokesman for the Virgin Islands government told The Telegraph that building new structures would require Deckoff to submit planning applications, but no such plans have been submitted for either Little St James or its neighbour, Great St James.

Even tour companies based around the Virgin Islands said they had not witnessed any evidence of building on either island, while satellite images show that both locales have barely changed since Epstein’s sudden death in prison.

‘Nothing has really happened on either one of those islands. We haven’t seen anything going up at all,’ one individual who operates a boat charter company told the newspaper.

‘I have not seen anything and I’m out and about… that’s my little area,’ another tour guide who works around Little and Great St James said.

Only time will tell whether tourists in the future are willing to visit the Caribbean paradise, or whether it will always be haunted by its disturbing past – with bottled-up secrets still unravelling today.