While Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton were among the wealthy and influential men Jeffrey Epstein had as business associates, a court filing made public on Wednesday implies the late financier so desperately wanted to be close to the spotlight that he boasted falsely about his contacts with A-list Hollywood stars.
In a deposition, Johanna Sjoberg, the late financier and sex offender’s accuser, stated that he enjoyed talking about his connections to Hollywood stars like Cate Blanchett and Leonardo DiCaprio, and that these claims seemed like thinly veiled braggadocio.
“I saw one press report that said you had met Cate Blanchett or Leonardo DiCaprio,” a lawyer questioned Sjoberg.
“No, I didn’t meet them,” she answered. “I used to talk to Epstein about them when I was massaging him. He would get off the phone a lot at that time, and he would say things like, ‘Oh, that was Leonardo,’ or ‘That was Cate Blanchett, or Bruce Willis.'” That sort of thing.
“So you’re name-dropping?” the attorney asked.
Sjoberg answered, “Yes.”
“So you hadn’t met Leonardo DiCaprio or Cate Blanchett?”
“I haven’t,” Sjoberg responded when pressed further.
If you had, could you recall?
She remarked, “I would hope I would remember.”
“What about Cameron Diaz?” inquired the attorney.
“No.”
Leonardo DiCaprio’s agent refuted any conversations between the actor and Epstein. The statement from Diaz’s agent said, “Despite the fact that he may or may not have mentioned her name or implied that he knew her, Cameron never met Jeffrey Epstein, nor was she ever in the same place as him or had any association with him whatsoever.” Requests for comment from the representatives of the other individuals identified were not immediately answered.
The deposition was a component of Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s accuser, in her defamation action against Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was found guilty of sex trafficking in connection with Epstein’s abuse of young girls. In the summer of 1991, Maxwell got to know Epstein, who had just relocated to New York at the time her father bought the New York Daily News.
Even though Giuffre and Maxwell reached a settlement in 2017, throughout the course of the last few years, portions of the case’s long-sealed documents have been made public. The Miami Herald and other media outlets worked to make the files public, which led to their release.
The documents’ assessment of Epstein’s links to prominent people mainly confirms what has previously been revealed about his allies and throws some light on his desire to take advantage of them. In one document, Epstein instructed Maxwell to name a few well-known people as a counterargument to Giuffre’s accusations of misconduct.
For example, Epstein proposed that she might be cleared through communication with the late, well-known British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. According to earlier claims, Hawking attended a meeting on a nearby island in 2006 before dining on Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands.
The strongest evidence that Virginia’s accusations are untrue is the Clinton Dinner and the new version in the Virgin Islands that Steven Hawking participated in an underage organization, Epstein wrote in an email to Maxwell. “You can issue a reward to any of Virginia’s friends acquaionts family that come forward and help prove her allegations are false,” Epstein wrote.
Even though Epstein made dubious claims regarding certain superstars, he did have relationships with a lot of performers. In her deposition, Sjoberg stated that she met renowned illusionist David Copperfield at one of Epstein’s properties and that she saw the late pop singer Michael Jackson at his Palm Beach mansion.
When you were with Jeffrey, did you ever meet anyone famous? Someone asked Sjoberg. According to court filings, she replied, “I met Michael Jackson… at [Epstein’s] house in Palm Beach,” alluding to Epstein’s estate in the upscale south Florida city.
When asked whether Sjoberg gave Jackson a massage, she replied, “I did not.” According to Sjoberg, Copperfield “performed some magic tricks” during supper.
Sjoberg claimed, “He asked me if I knew that girls were getting paid to find other girls.”
She claimed in the deposition that Copperfield failed to provide her with any further details about the situation. She was also asked, “Did he say whether they were teenagers or anything along those lines?”
She stated, “He didn’t.”
Prior to the documents’ public release, there were rumors that comedian Chris Tucker and actor Kevin Spacey accompanied Epstein on a private jet tour of Africa.