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- [00:06]
Jessica Mendoza
The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein has been focused on his crimes against underage girls. It was what he was convicted of, and it's what led to his arrest. Before his death, some of the girls who were trapped in his web for years were as young as 14. But as the Epstein files reveal, that wasn't the whole story. After he was convicted of soliciting a minor in 2008, Epstein didn't stop being a predator. He just changed his strategy. Epstein focused on trafficking adult women, coercing them into sexual favors for him and his friends.
- [00:42]
Khadijah Safdar
He obviously was convicted in 2008, and the takeaway from that was that he was going to continue his sex trafficking operation, but he was going to find adults that looked like teenagers.
- [00:54]
Jessica Mendoza
That's our colleague Khadijah Safdar. We interviewed her as she was recovering from an illness, which is why her voice sounds a little scratchy. Khadijah's been covering Epstein since 2019.
- [01:06]
Khadijah Safdar
As long as they're of legal age, he felt that that would mean that the authorities wouldn't come after him. And unfortunately, he was right that he didn't get as much scrutiny because he was sex trafficking adults. And so that was how his scheme worked. And he was actually running, I would say, an international sex trafficking operation where he was moving women from other countries
- [01:29]
Jessica Mendoza
to the us Women who felt they had no choice but to do what he told them, even when that meant coercing other women into being victims, too. One of those women was Svetlana Pozhedaeva, a woman who had been in Epstein's control, where she was abused and coerced into recruiting other women for him. Her name can be found in some of the millions of documents that have been released related to Jeffrey Epstein. Now Svetlana says she's struggling to regain control of her own story and make sense of what happened to her.
- [02:07]
Khadijah Safdar
There's a lot of complexity to the way Epstein operated, and there's more than meets the eye. He was very manipulative. And there's what you see on the surface, like in the emails, and then there's just like, really what's happening behind the scenes?
- [02:25]
Jessica Mendoza
Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica mendoza. It's Friday, April 3rd. Coming up on the show, inside Epstein's scheme to manipulate, abuse and traffic adult women.
- [02:54]
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- [03:24]
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- [03:59]
Jessica Mendoza
Svetlana Pozhodaeva is from Russia. She has blue eyes, dark hair, and she's tall. She went to a top university in Moscow where she studied political science. She speaks Russian, French, Italian, Spanish and English. Svetlana's dream was to become a model, and in her 20s she was living in Milan to try and make that dream come true. By the way, Svetlana isn't her current name. The Wall Street Journal isn't publishing that
- [04:26]
Khadijah Safdar
she had real jobs. At the time, she was working with famous Italian fashion brands.
- [04:32]
Jessica Mendoza
In 2008, Svetlana connected with someone who said they could open doors for her.
- [04:37]
Khadijah Safdar
And she met an individual who billed himself as a modeling scout who told her that she could get an audition with Victoria's Secret and that she had all the talents to be able to do that and that all she needed to do was meet a billionaire who had those connections and could get her this opportunity.
- [04:57]
Jessica Mendoza
And so that led her to Jeffrey Epstein. Khadijah, you've been talking to Svetlana for years. What was their relationship like when they first met?
- [05:07]
Khadijah Safdar
Early on, Epstein showed an interest in her book and made it sound like he was really gonna, you know, put her in front of people that were gonna give her these opportunities. And he told her, you have to exercise. You don't have the right body type right now, but you have to exercise and you can make it big. And so she went back thinking, you know, that she's gonna gather her photos and she's going to exercise. She was doing basically everything he asked of her because she thought that this is what's going to get her where she needs to go.
- [05:40]
Jessica Mendoza
Epstein told her he could be her ticket to the modeling big leagues. He arranged for Svetlana to move to the US where she worked for MC2 Model Management, an international modeling agency that Epstein funded. He did other things for her too, like give her money and housing. He even paid for cosmetic work for her, which he said would help improve her modeling career.
- [06:02]
Khadijah Safdar
And then he would offer favors, too, or things that he would frame as fevers. For example, at one point, he offered her liposuction, and he said that he was gonna help her with her quest to, like, improve her body because he thought that she was too fat. And she describes a lot of this as, like, where she thought he was the one who was being generous towards her, but it was like her self esteem was just slowly eroding through this process.
- [06:27]
Jessica Mendoza
How did she think of her relationship with him at the time? Like, did she think of herself then as his girlfriend or, you know, a friend? Like, what was the situation?
- [06:39]
Khadijah Safdar
She thought of him as a mentor.
- [06:41]
Jessica Mendoza
A mentor, but also someone who she says sexually abused her.
- [06:46]
Khadijah Safdar
What he would do with the women, there's a pattern here, is he would often ask for a massage, and then it would escalate into, like, sexual stuff. And when they would feel uncomfortable, he would say, that's not going to work. If you want a career in modeling, like, you have to be able to be, like, really sexually open. Like, let me teach you how to do that. She actually chalked up a lot of the fact that she was uncomfortable in the beginning to the fact that she was Russian. She thought, maybe in Russia, like, maybe I'm just conservative and, like, I really need to open up here because this is the US and if I'm going to make it big, I have to listen to this man and listen to what he's telling me to do.
- [07:25]
Jessica Mendoza
But Epstein's role as her mentor in the modeling industry didn't amount to much for Svetlana. She booked some modeling jobs here and there, but she never really broke out like she hoped she would. And according to Khadija's reporting, Epstein often made it seem like it was Svetlana's fault that her career wasn't gaining traction. Eventually, he found another role for her as his assistant.
- [07:48]
Khadijah Safdar
He framed it as an opportunity to, like, get business experience, learn how to interact with world leaders, something that would set her up for something really big in the future. But over time, like, what he would be asking her to do was learn how to do massage, learn how to set the table, learn how to cook steak so you can sort of see, like, the decline from somebody who went to an elite university, speaks multiple languages, like, was on the track to becoming a top model is now like setting tables for billionaires and serving them.
- [08:26]
Jessica Mendoza
Did Svetlana ever question her relationship with him?
- [08:30]
Khadijah Safdar
She said she grew up in a military family, and in that family, you just don't question authority. And so when he was, like, constantly instructing her on what to do, it seemed normal and that she was supposed to just follow his lead. And she just got used to being told what to do by him, what type of clothes to wear, how to cut her hair, whom to date, whom not to date. She says that. That just, like, over time, just started becoming normal, like, that's what she was expected to do. And she says by the time she turned 30, she was so used to him having complete control over everything that she didn't even see or know any life beyond that.
- [09:06]
Jessica Mendoza
And while this relationship with Epstein wasn't what Svetlana signed up for, she said she didn't feel like she could leave him because he had leverage over her, including images where she wasn't fully clothed.
- [09:18]
Khadijah Safdar
Later on, when she started realizing that things were not right, like, that was something that she, like, registered. He has my photos. He has compromising material about me. She felt that he had this, like, enormous leverage over her and that she really had to keep him in her good graces, because if she didn't, things could go wrong for her.
- [09:37]
Jessica Mendoza
Svetlana was trapped not just because she worked for Epstein or because he had these compromising images of her, but also because he controlled her visa and immigration status through the modeling agency that he funded. Khadijah's reporting showed that Epstein used this leverage to coerce Vetlana to lure other models into his web. He used victims to find other victims.
- [10:00]
Khadijah Safdar
People who were involved in the case have called it similar to a pyramid scheme. Several of the victims that are public even now, they have admitted that they also recruited and brought in other girls, you know, into his scheme. And if you were sending profiles of women to him, he would, like, leave you alone, and you would be in his good graces for a bit. You could visit your family, or you would get some alone time. And so the incentive was clear that, like, that was, like, what you were
- [10:26]
Jessica Mendoza
expected to do, manipulating victims into bringing in other victims. This was Epstein's strategy, how he was able to control so many women.
- [10:36]
Khadijah Safdar
And one of the features was that, like, when these women had been involved in that, they started feeling like they were part of it, you know, and then that make that actually Makes it harder for them to leave. Because once you feel like you've done something wrong or that you're complicit, you know, you can't say anything. And that was, I think, deliberate.
- [10:58]
Jessica Mendoza
What did Svetlana say about being made to do this, to bring in other women into the situation she was in?
- [11:06]
Khadijah Safdar
Yeah. Let me actually read her words for you. She says, I feel shamed and I think about those other women all the time. That's the hardest part of all of this. I was too consumed by my own abuse to see beyond it. I had to appear happy to keep smiling while I privately was battling eating disorders, depression, and insomnia.
- [11:26]
Jessica Mendoza
A former prosecutor Khadijah interviewed compared the situation that Svetlana was in to domestic violence.
- [11:33]
Khadijah Safdar
She said that, like the way that those relationships are not clear cut, the victim will often go back again and again and not see. And you'll see like, you know, like all these wonderful interactions. But that doesn't often negate the fact that this is a relationship of domestic violence.
- [11:48]
Jessica Mendoza
A relationship of abuse.
- [11:49]
Khadijah Safdar
Yeah, yeah, a relationship of abuse, exactly. And so my source said that this is similar, this trafficking, you know, schemes are similar and they have to be looked at in a more comprehensive way and not just, you know, like you can't just like pull an email and think you understand what took place.
- [12:10]
Jessica Mendoza
But that's what some people did. When millions of documents in the Epstein files were released last year. They would become an obsession for Internet sleuths and journalists. Some of them questioned Svetlana's relationship with Epstein and her role in his web of abuse. Now Svetlana finds herself trying to escape Epstein all over again. That's next. So good, so good, so good.
- [12:46]
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- [12:57]
Khadijah Safdar
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- [13:13]
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- [13:50]
Jessica Mendoza
Svetlana Pozhodaeva never got away from Epstein while he was alive. It took his arrest and eventual death in prison in 2019 for her to be freed from his grip. After Epstein died, Svetlana tried to make a new life for herself. She changed her name, moved to another state, got a new job. She thought she had put that period behind her. But then six years later, the Department of Justice released the Epstein files.
- [14:19]
Khadijah Safdar
President Trump has now signed the Epstein files bill into law.
- [14:23]
Jessica Mendoza
The final step. At first, Khadija says Svetlana thought her name and those of other victims would be redacted.
- [14:30]
Khadijah Safdar
And then she went on the website to, like, enter her name into the search bar, and she saw that there was, like, many instances in emails of her name unredacted.
- [14:40]
Jessica Mendoza
In a previous statement, the justice department said that 0.1% of released pages were found to have unredacted victim information and that it was fixing mistakes. When notified in the files were emails of Svetlana forwarding photos of other women to Epstein. There were also emails of Svetlana being gracious toward him. Khadija says getting the women to write these kinds of messages was part of how Epstein worked.
- [15:07]
Khadijah Safdar
Epstein would actually require many of the women in his orbit to send him thank you or gratitude emails. And they're like effusive notes thanking him for all the things he's done for them. And that was an expectation that he had. And so in the actual files, you'll see, like, all these effusive thank you emails. And I think just reading that on face value may lead people to believe that, you know, he's just so generous, he's being so nice to all these women. But without the context that that was an expectation, it's hard to understand that.
- [15:40]
Jessica Mendoza
Did you hear from any other adult women who found themselves in a similar situation as Fitlana?
- [15:46]
Khadijah Safdar
I actually got calls from several victims, like, hysterically crying on the phone. It wasn't just her. It was like a similar story where they had rebuilt their life and they were trying to run away from this chapter of their life. And in some cases, they hadn't even told their families, like, what happened to them. And they were so deeply ashamed and embarrassed about it. This was just surfacing, not just, you know, for them to have tell their families, but for, like, the whole world to see. It was devastating.
- [16:17]
Jessica Mendoza
Svetlana contacted the Department of Justice, which eventually did redact her name. But at that Point, it was too late. Bloggers and journalists had gotten a hold of her.
- [16:28]
Khadijah Safdar
She was getting outreach, like, repeatedly from different journalists and bloggers and people digging into the files, citizen journalists, people like, questioning whether she's a victim.
- [16:41]
Jessica Mendoza
Svetlana said one blogger contacted her family and threatened to reveal her new name. The blogger said that since Svetlana was in her 20s at the time of her association with Epstein, she didn't count as a victim.
- [16:53]
Khadijah Safdar
Well, one of the things with Svetlana is because she was in his orbit for such a long period of time, she had actually been photographed by paparazzi. And, like, there's been news stories written about her. So, like, she was somewhat on people's radar. And for that reason, she became an easy target. People started, you know, digging into her.
- [17:18]
Jessica Mendoza
Many people also homed in on Svetlana because she was Russian. They thought that since her parents worked for the Russian military, she may have been some kind of operative.
- [17:28]
Khadijah Safdar
The implication that she feels was that they're raising that to, like, imply that she wasn't really a victim, that she must be a spy, or, like, there's all these theories around Epstein because there's so many unanswered questions. And so those were, like, the ways in which people were digging into this. And she really feels like she and other Russian women have been singled out in a way that other victims who kind of had the similar experiences haven't.
- [17:55]
Jessica Mendoza
What else has Svetlana said about the experience of seeing her name in the Epstein files? All of these people reaching out to her?
- [18:04]
Khadijah Safdar
I mean, when she came to me to say that she wanted to go on the record, she said to me, this is her quote. I am so exhausted. I haven't slept or eaten properly for weeks. I'd rather tell this embarrassing story myself and get it over with once and for all so I can finally be free and close this chapter. People don't realize that any one thing that she's told me is, like, true of several other women. But I think if you're coming at this cold, it's easy to, like, make her the focal point or singling her out or talking about her, like, Russian connections and all of that.
- [18:37]
Jessica Mendoza
Svetlana's story shows how broad and wide ranging Jeffrey Epstein's sexual crimes were. They involved minors, they involved adults. And many of these weren't just one off crimes. They took place over years.
- [18:51]
Khadijah Safdar
When I was speaking to one of the former prosecutors who has been really looked at some of these cases before, she said to me that this is often. It's not like a singular crime, like where you go in and you do something bad to somebody. It happens over time. When they examine these crimes, they look at, like, the extent and the comprehensiveness of their relationship and the power dynamics over time.
- [19:13]
Jessica Mendoza
Epstein was never charged for any of his alleged crimes against adult women. So what is Svetlana up to now? How is she trying to move on again?
- [19:28]
Khadijah Safdar
She actually took off from work like she couldn't concentrate anymore on her work. And I've been in touch with her and she's actually been, like, preparing materials for victims that she think could be helpful resources of dealing with, you know, the media. And she's trying to, like, find a way to transform her experience into something positive, you know, and she doesn't want the idea that she went through all of this and it to have been for, like, nothing. She wants it to, like, somehow translate into something better.
- [20:00]
Jessica Mendoza
Today, Svetlana is still struggling to make sense of what happened to her and the speculation over whether or not she was a victim. Here's what she told Khadijah.
- [20:10]
Khadijah Safdar
She said that had Jeffrey Epstein told me during our very first meeting, come work with me, I will abuse you daily, not pay you for the first few years, then put you on a payroll to keep your visa valid. I will force you to bring other women. I would have told him to go f himself right away, but that's not how he did it.
- [20:43]
Jessica Mendoza
That's all for today. Friday, april 3rd. The journal is a co production of Spotify and the wall street journal. The show is made by katherine brewer, pia gadkari, max green, isabella japal, sophie codner, ryan knudsen, matt kwong, colin mcnulty, annie menoff, laura morris, enrique perez de la rosa, sarah platt, allen rodriguez espinosa, heather rogers, pier singh, jeevika verma, katherine whalen, tatiana zemis, and me, jessica mendoza. Our engineers are griffin tanner, nathan singapak and peter leonard. Our theme music is by so wiley. Additional music this week from katherine anderson, peter leonard, bobby lord, nathan singapak, griffin tanner and blue dot sessions. Fact checking this week by mary mathis and najwa jamal. Thanks for listening. See you on Monday.
- [21:46]
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