A group of survivors who were victimized by Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell slammed FBI Director Kash Patel’s “shocking” testimony that the late sex offender only trafficked young girls to himself.
Patel faced two days of grilling this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee, becoming combative in response to bipartisan questions about President Donald Trump’s connections to Epstein.
He repeatedly deflected and tried to blame previous administrations—including officials who served during Trump’s first term—for the current administration’s failure to provide new revelations in the case.
During an exchange Tuesday with Republican Sen. John Kennedy he also insisted there was “no credible information, none… that [Epstein] trafficked to other individuals,” a claim he repeated Wednesday in response to questioning from Rep. Thomas Massie.
In a joint statement provided to CNN’s Jack Tapper, 12 of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims said they were “shocked” by Patel’s testimony and were “struggling” to understand its meaning.
“Even the limited information that has been made public includes accounts such as Virginia Giuffre’s report that Epstein trafficked her to other individuals besides himself,” the statement said.
Giuffre, who died by suicide at age 41 in April, was one of Epstein’s most prominent victims. She said that Epstein introduced her to Prince Andrew, who sexually abused her. The prince has denied the claims, and reached an out-of-court settlement with her in 2022 that contained no admission of liability or an apology.
In their statement, the survivors noted that during witness interviews with the FBI, Epstein and Maxwell’s victims named at least 20 other men they were trafficked to, as Massie pointed out during Wednesday’s hearing.
During Patel’s testimony, the FBI director seemed to suggest that the reports naming other men were real, but that officials in previous administrations had deemed them not credible, the survivors continued.
“He has not read the reports himself; he has not spoken to the victims himself; and yet he plans to defer to unnamed officials from prior administrations who treated the reports as not credible?” the statement said.
“Those previous administrations are the ones that Kash Patel spent years accusing of a cover-up. Now he will pass the buck to them to decide that information about other men in the Epstein-Maxwell trafficking ring is not even worth following up on?”
There are victims and witnesses in the case who still have not even been interviewed, the survivors added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI and Department of Justice for comment.
Trump was good friends for more than a decade with Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Officials ruled the death a suicide, but MAGA loyalists have claimed for years that Epstein was murdered to protect his powerful friends and clients.
During his re-election campaign, Trump vowed to release the FBI’s files in the case, only for the administration to announce in July that the evidence showed there was no “client list” and that Epstein had in fact died by suicide.
The findings sent Trump’s supporters into a tailspin and launched a new, bipartisan effort to release the files.
It also led to new scrutiny about Epstein’s relationship with Trump, who allegedly contributed a graphic drawing and poem to a book of letters that Maxwell assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for luring, grooming and sexually abusing young girls for Epstein. In late July, Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison facility after she told the Department of Justice that Trump had never done anything “inappropriate”.
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