The Adult Women Caught in Epstein’s Web of Abuse

0:05Khadeeja Safdar: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. 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 look like teenagers.

0:54Khadeeja Safdar:That's our colleague Khadija Safdar. We interviewed her as she was recovering from an illness, which is why her voice sounds a little scratchy. Khadija's been covering Epstein since 2019. 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 to the U.S. 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.

1:42Khadeeja Safdar:One of those women was Svetlana Pojadaiva, 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. 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.

2:24Khadeeja Safdar:Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, April 3rd.

2:37Khadeeja Safdar:Coming up on the show, Inside Epstein's scheme to manipulate, abuse, and traffic adult women.

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3:59Khadeeja Safdar:Svetlana Pozhodaiva 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. She had real jobs at the time. She was working with famous Italian fashion brands. In 2008, Svetlana connected with someone who said they could open doors for her. 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.

4:56Khadeeja Safdar:And so that led her to Jeffrey Epstein. Khadija, you've been talking to Svitlana for years. What was their relationship like when they first met? Early on, Epstein showed an interest in her book and made it sound like he was really going to, you know, put her in front of people that were going to 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 going to 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.

5:39Khadeeja Safdar:Epstein told her he could be her ticket to the modeling big leagues. He arranged for Svetlana to move to the U.S., 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 in housing. He even paid for cosmetic work for her, which he said would help improve her modeling career. And then he would offer favors, too, or things that he would frame as favors. For example, at one point he offered her liposuction and he said that he was going to help her with her quest to like improve her body because he thought that she was too fat.

6:15And 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.

6:26Khadeeja Safdar: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? She thought of him as a mentor. A mentor, but also someone who she says sexually abused her. 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. 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.

7:04She 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 U.S. 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.

7:24Khadeeja Safdar:— 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. 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.

8:06So 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.

8:26Did Svitlana ever question her relationship with him? 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.

9:06Khadeeja Safdar: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. 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. 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.

9:49Khadeeja Safdar:Khadija's reporting showed that Epstein used this leverage to coerce Svetlana to lure other models into his web. He used victims to find other victims. 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 expected to do.

10:27Khadeeja Safdar:Manipulating victims into bringing in other victims. This was Epstein's strategy. how he was able to control so many women. 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 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. What did Svetlana say about being made to do this, to bring in other women into the situation she was in. Yeah, let me actually read her words for you.

11:08She 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.

11:25Khadeeja Safdar:A former prosecutor Khadija interviewed compared the situation that Svetlana was in to domestic violence. 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. A relationship of abuse, 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.

12:09Khadeeja Safdar: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

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13:35Khadeeja Safdar:Svetlana Pojadaiva 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, and got a new job. She thought she had put that period behind her.

13:58Khadeeja Safdar:But then, six years later, the Department of Justice released the Epstein files. President Trump has now signed the Epstein files bill into law. At first, Khadija says, Svetlana thought her name and those of other victims would be redacted. 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. 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.

14:40Khadeeja Safdar:There were also emails of Svetlana being gracious toward him.

14:47Khadeeja Safdar:Khadija says getting the women to write these kinds of messages was part of how Epstein worked. 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.

15:25Khadeeja Safdar:Did you hear from any other adult women who found themselves in a similar situation as Fitlana? 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 to tell their families, but for like the whole world to see. It was devastating.

16:02Khadeeja Safdar: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. 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. 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. 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.

16:51So, like, she was somewhat on people's radar. And for that reason, she became an easy target. People started, you know, digging into her.

17:03Khadeeja Safdar: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. The implication that she feels was that they're raising that to imply that she wasn't really a victim, that she must be a spy, or there's all these theories around Epstein because there's so many unanswered questions. And so those were 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.

17:40Khadeeja Safdar:What else has Svetlana said about the experience of seeing her name in the Epstein files, all of these people reaching out to her? 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.

18:22Khadeeja Safdar: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. When I was speaking to one of the former prosecutors who has really looked at some of these cases before, she said to me that this is often 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. Epstein was never charged for any of his alleged crimes against adult women.

19:07Khadeeja Safdar:So what is Svetlana up to now? How is she trying to move on again? She actually took off from work. Like, she couldn't concentrate anymore on her work. And, you know, 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 happen for, like, nothing. She wants it to, like, somehow translate into something better.

19:46Khadeeja Safdar: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 Khadija. 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.

20:28Khadeeja Safdar:That's all for today, Friday, April 3rd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

21:02Khadeeja Safdar:The show is made by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Catherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapop, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis and Najwa Jamal.

21:22Khadeeja Safdar:Thanks for listening. See you on Monday.

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