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The wealthy bankers, political leaders, and prominent academics who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island traveled by private jet and spent afternoons scuba diving or riding jet skis.

The girls and young women that Epstein shuttled to the island had a drastically different experience: confiscated passports, extensive sexual abuse, and conditions so dire that at least one said she tried to escape by swimming away.

For nearly two decades, Little St. James, Epstein’s roughly 70-acre island, was the perfect tool for him to both cultivate powerful friends and abuse young women and girls. It offered Epstein both a glamorous setting to attract famous figures and the seclusion he needed to prey on his victims.

Now, a trove of millions of pages of documents released by the Department of Justice creates the clearest picture yet of Epstein’s tropical crime scene, a mysterious locale that’s at the center of a sex trafficking scandal still roiling global politics today.

A CNN review of thousands of emails, photos, videos, and documents from the DOJ files adds critical new details to how Epstein transformed the island into his personal fiefdom – and highlights warning signs of the terrible abuse perpetrated there that some staffers and victims say was happening in plain sight.

The testimony outlined in the DOJ documents calls into question claims by some influential visitors to Epstein’s island who have denied knowing about the financier’s sex trafficking – and shows several of those guests boasting of sexual exploits or engaging in crude conversations with the convicted sex offender.

“The activities were so obvious and bold that anyone spending any significant time at one of Epstein’s residences would have clearly been aware of what was going on,” one victim stated in a court document.

Those warning signs include photographs of naked young girls on his walls, airport workers who reported Epstein had traveled with girls who appeared underage, and an interior decorator who said he’d been asked to design one of the island’s bedrooms with pink furnishings and bunk beds.

Some staffers and victims have also called out specific Epstein guests, the documents show, such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who both spent a day on the island in 2007, according to a victim’s statement. “They observed that we did not speak and that we remained mute,” the victim, whose name is not included in the public document, wrote in the statement. “They witnessed the trauma on our faces and in our eyes. Sergey and Anne witnessed our souls and bodies riddled with fear. They said nothing. They did nothing.”

Brin and Wojcicki did not respond to requests for comment.

In the wake of Epstein’s death in a federal jail cell in 2019, his estate sold Little St. James and the neighboring island of Great St. James, which Epstein also owned, for about $60 million, at least some of which has gone to paying settlement costs related to his abuse.

But questions about the island and its place in Epstein’s sprawling financial empire have only grown in the years since his death.

Little St. James became “the hub” of Epstein’s sex trafficking because it was the ideal place to “isolate his victims,” said Thomas Volscho, a City University of New York professor who has studied Epstein’s crimes.

“You’re in paradise,” he said, “but you’re in hell at the same time.”

From tropical paradise to human trafficking hub

When Epstein bought his island for about $8 million in 1998, he was a financier with a spotless criminal record, a growing network of prominent friends, and a home base in one of Manhattan’s largest private residences. In a Wall Street Journal real estate listing at the time, the island’s previous owner, venture capitalist Arch Cummin, described life on Little St. James: “You can hop off a plane and never see anybody again.”

The windswept island is more than a mile away from St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, and only accessible by helicopter or boat. Over the course of 20 years, maps and documents illustrate how Epstein transformed the somewhat desolate Little St. James into what appeared on the surface to be a luxurious vacation destination complete with a theater, library, stand-alone gym, tiki hut, and staff residences.

Satellite images from 2002 show just a handful of buildings, with the main house and a few cabanas and outlying structures on the island’s northern tip. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Epstein significantly expanded the living spaces, adding a larger pool, new cabanas, a massive sundial, and a bizarre temple-like structure overlooking the island’s southwest coast.

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