Reporting Epstein—and the Feeling We Were Being Watched
A firsthand account from the road with survivor Virginia Giuffre, when the FBI called a key witness at an uncanny time
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
When I saw that the FBI was tracking the flights of Julie k Brown —the journalist who re-opened the case against Jeffrey Epstein through her explosive Perversion of Justice reporting—I was immediately brought back to my own experience covering this story, and the unsettling feeling that I, too, was being tracked while traveling with Virginia Giuffre.
Brown revealed that in the grand jury documents from the Ghislaine Maxwell case, the FBI maintained a file containing her American Airlines flight booking information. She wrote in her Substack: “The document appears to be details of an itinerary for a series of flights I booked in July [2019] just before the SDNY and FBI arrested Epstein.”
Just six months later, when Giuffre and I were knocking on the doors of witnesses to her abuse, we had the same unnerving sense that we were being watched.
Juan Alessi was one of the very few people who opened his door to us to talk about the period when Giuffre was under the control of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Alessi was Epstein’s houseman for decades. He drove high-school-aged girls to and from Epstein’s home, sometimes picking them up directly from school. He was driving Maxwell on the day she found Giuffre working at Mar-a-Lago. He was a crucial witness who would later testify in the case against Maxwell.
But at the time, it was still unclear whether federal prosecutors would pursue anyone beyond Epstein himself, who had died in prison awaiting trial. Giuffre and the other survivors I followed were, in many ways, taking justice into their own hands. You can hear our investigation on Broken: Jeffrey Epstein, executive produced by Brown.
When we arrived at Alessi’s mini-mansion on a golf course, he invited us inside and seated us on his leather tufted couch. As he spoke, he bobbed and weaved between what he could remember—and what he suddenly could not—about his years with Epstein. In his telling, he was an innocent bystander to the abuse, not the man who had paid hundreds of teenage girls.
Then something uncanny happened.
In the middle of our conversation, Alessi received a phone call from the FBI. He told us he hadn’t heard from them since July.
You can hear the full exchange—or a clip of it—on The Tara Palmeri Show.
“I thought this was over,” Alessi said into the FBI agent on the other end of the receiver. “I thought he was dead and he was over. It’s finally over. I guess it’s not.”
We hear the agent ask Alessi to do a follow-up interview, and they agree to speak the following week.
The rest of this post reflects firsthand reporting and experiences not included in the video.
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