Released documents again show how Jeffrey Epstein used powerful connections

NEW YORK — Newly released court documents describing Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls provide a reminder of how the financier leveraged connections to the rich, powerful and famous to recruit his victims and cover up his crimes.

The more than 40 documents released late Wednesday — the latest of thousands that have been made public — were sprinkled with the names of celebrities and politicians who socialized with Epstein or worked with him in the years before he was publicly accused nearly two decades ago of paying underage girls for sex.

Most of those names were familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely, including the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s former girlfriend, household manager and chief recruiter of young, vulnerable females.

It was during Maxwell’s criminal trial two years ago that Epstein’s victims, some of whom aspired to be models or artists, described how he dropped the names of his famous and influential friends to suggest that he was the victims’ ticket to reaching their dreams. Maxwell, 62, was convicted of sex trafficking charges and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The roughly 250 documents being unsealed, starting this week, in one of the lawsuits against Maxwell mostly rehash what has long been known about a man who traveled in elite circles until his July 2019 sex trafficking arrest left him so cornered that he took his own life in jail.

But they have included a few fresh details about a pyramid of abuse that grew over three decades and damaged dozens of teenage girls and young women.

Among the famous people in Epstein’s orbit before he was exposed as a sexual predator were former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, singer Michael Jackson and magician David Copperfield, according to the…