To girls without much money who needed help with college or a career, visiting Jeffrey Epstein's 10,000-acre New Mexico ranch felt like being treated to an exclusive resort.
Flown in from around the country to the gated compound, they rode horses across a mesa dotted with ancient rock carvings. They posed for pictures at Epstein's 26,700-square-foot mansion. They hiked, swam, shopped and watched movies.
Hanging out with a wealthy middle-aged man was weird, but Epstein made the girls feel special. He asked about their goals, offered advice and handed them cash. And then the trips turned dark.
Epstein touched their thighs, had them strip for a massage or attacked them with a sex toy, and the girls grew confused and frightened. Alone, far from home and surrounded by photographs of Epstein with celebrities and politicians — some of whom had visited the ranch — they believed there was nothing they could do to stop him.
One victim, 15 at the time, jumped on an ATV the day after Epstein assaulted her and went racing across the property with another young guest and crashed into a tree. "Don't worry," the other girl said, the victim later recalled. "No one gets in trouble for anything here."
The victims eventually understood that Epstein had used money and power to exploit them for sex. Starting in 2006, they began to come forward — not just the girls, but women as well. At least 10 have alleged that starting in the mid-1990s, Epstein groomed or abused them at the ranch, according to an NBC News review of court testimony, lawsuits and other records. Half were teenagers when Epstein harmed them.
Yet to this day, no one has fully accounted for the crimes committed at Zorro Ranch, a failure that confounds victims, local officials and the public. Decades of missed chances allowed the ranch to escape scrutiny, prolonging its secrets and delaying justice for the girls Epstein brought there.
The lost opportunities span the nearly two decades since Epstein was first caught paying underage girls for sex in Florida and cut a sweetheart deal that spared him serious prison time, according to a review of federal and state records, police reports and interviews with current and former officials. The 2008 agreement ended a federal investigation that found at least one allegation of abuse in New Mexico, where weak sex offender laws allowed Epstein to avoid registering with local authorities. The state didn't make human trafficking a crime until 2008, which left one less pathway to prosecution.
New Mexico authorities didn't open their first investigation into Epstein until 2019, after the statutes of limitations had expired for some crimes. That investigation was shut down at the urging of federal authorities in New York, who were building their own multistate case but left the ranch largely unexamined.
Only now, with revelations about the ranch turning up in the Department of Justice's newly released Epstein files — including an unverified tip that two "foreign girls" died during sex and were secretly buried on the property — are state officials promising to finally figure out what happened out there in the high desert. Two fresh investigations have been launched: one by the New Mexico Department of Justice, and one by a truth commission of four state lawmakers. On Monday, state authorities conducted the first ever search of the ranch — six years after Epstein died.
Epstein's victims and their relatives say the scrutiny is long overdue.
"I ask the FBI and local law enforcement to continue uncovering the evil abuse and trafficking that took place on Zorro Ranch, and hold all those involved, who turned a blind eye, fully accountable," Rachel Benavidez, a massage therapist who was abused at the ranch during visits starting in 2000, told NBC News in a statement.
But after so many years and with a new owner redeveloping the property into a Christian retreat, it's not clear that the state will be able to make up for the lost time.
The ranch still elicits a sense of shame for New Mexicans who drive by on Highway 41. Locals have erected a memorial outside the entrance, laying flowers, hammering crosses in the ground and hanging protest signs demanding justice.
"We need to find out what happened," said Lou Gibney, 65, a semiretired construction worker who lives outside Albuquerque. "It's incumbent upon our nation to get to the bottom of all this stuff one way or another and find out what the truth is — regardless of where the chips fall."
Epstein's New Mexico ranch has been overshadowed by his other real estate holdings, such as his seven-story Manhattan townhouse or his private island in the Caribbean, but in some ways it was more lavish and more secluded: acres of grassland, a wide-open sky, mountains in the distance.
One of his victims, Virginia Giuffre, compared the ranch to Disneyland, writing in her memoir about "manicured grounds and gurgling fountains, a tennis court, and a grass airstrip and hangar." She wrote that the property "had its own miniature town that housed his servants and groundskeepers." Epstein called the main house his "castle," she wrote.
Giuffre, who took her own life last year, lived in "two worlds" at the ranch, finding solace in the outdoors while also enduring unspeakable abuse, her family said. "She took all the beauty she could from it, but there was a lot going on behind closed doors that was horrific," her brother Sky Roberts said in an interview.
Epstein purchased the land in 1993 from the family of the sitting governor, Bruce King. He also acquired grazing leases from the state that gave him control over a wider expanse — as well as additional privacy, with the closest neighbors miles away and the nearest city, Santa Fe, 30 miles to the north.
"I think New Mexico is the prettiest, most spectacular state by a long shot," Epstein told The Albuquerque Tribune in 1995. His plans to build the biggest house in Santa Fe County made headlines that year, although he told the newspaper, "It's just a normal home."
After buying the land, Epstein moved quickly to transform it, building on cliffs overlooking a ravine. The dozens of structures included a vintage rail caboose, a log cabin, a yurt, a firehouse and buildings made to look like a Western film set. He named the property Zorro Ranch, an apparent nod to the partially masked fictional swashbuckler who kept a double identity.
Over the nearly 30 years that Epstein owned the ranch, he would visit about five or six times a year, his longtime pilot, Larry Visoski, latertestifiedin federal court.
As with his other properties, Epstein used the ranch to host and court celebrity friends and public figures. His guests there included filmmakerWoody Allenand linguist and social criticNoam Chomsky, and the newly released files show Epstein unsuccessfully urging others to visit — including tech billionaire Elon Musk and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. None of those four have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
Epstein told associates that he wanted the ranch to be the site of a large eugenics experiment, in which women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies,The New York Timesreported in 2019. There's no evidence that ever happened. One of his accusers, Johanna Sjoberg, a college student who visited the ranch in 2005, said in a deposition that Epstein asked her to be the mother of his child, which she did not agree to.
The ranch was so sprawling that Epstein's employees had trouble maintaining the property, especially because he was absent most of the year, according to newly released documents. They complained of staff shortages, turnover and employee conflicts. Ina resignation emailfrom 2012, sent by someone whose name is redacted, an employee wrote about being "tired, sick of, frustrated and exhausted from trying to take care of this Ranch" and receiving "disrespect" from co-workers. "They can have their wish and rule your Ranch without me," the employee wrote.
Within three years of Epstein buying the ranch, victims say it became another site of his abuses.
"It was this giant ranch sort of in the middle of nowhere. And it seemed very empty on the interior, meaning there wasn't really any other people around," one of Epstein's teenage victims later testified, using the pseudonym "Jane." She had met Epstein at a summer camp in Michigan and testified in 2021 at the federal trial of Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Epstein had a slightly different pitch for each girl or woman he wanted to bring to New Mexico depending on what she seemed to need most — money, a parent, a job, connections to the art world, a getaway.
Annie Farmer was a 16-year-old from Arizona worried about money for college when she met Epstein through her older sister, who worked for him. Epstein paidto fly her to his ranch in 1996; she saw him as a philanthropist and believed the purpose of the trip was to join other college hopefuls and finalize plans for a summer volunteer opportunity in Thailand. Instead, she found herself alone at the massive ranch, far from anyone she knew, afraid of what would happen if she didn't comply with Epstein's demands.
Epstein and Maxwell took Farmer shopping for what she said were "very expensive" cowboy boots, according toFarmer's testimonyat Maxwell's trial. Then, Farmer said, they went to a movie, where he caressed her hand and touched her thigh. Later, she said, she was pressured into giving Epstein a foot massage, which led to Maxwell giving a massage in which she touched Farmer's breasts. The next morning, Farmer said, Epstein crawled into bed with her and pressed his body against hers in an attempt to cuddle. Farmer said she escaped to the bathroom, then hid there until the moment passed.
In 2004, Epstein enticed a 15-year-old girl — known publicly by the pseudonym Jane Doe 15 — to visit the ranch as part of a trip to Las Vegas to see a magic show with her sister and other girls. She recalled Epstein telling them they could do whatever they wanted — ride the horses and ATVs, use the pool and hot tub.
Then Epstein summoned her to his room, where he assaulted her with a vibrator, she said.
"I remember feeling so small and powerless, especially after he positioned me by laying me on his floor so that I was confronted by all the framed photographs on his dresser of him smiling with wealthy celebrities and politicians," Jane Doe 15 later recalled in court.
She also recalled feeling both abandoned and reliant on Epstein, like she "could die out there and no one would care."
Another target was a 15-year-old aspiring violin player in Texas who met an associate of Epstein's at a shopping mall near the New Mexico border. The associate — unnamed in court records — told her that a nearby rich man would pay to hear her play the violin, according to her testimony at a court hearing.
"Epstein targeted and took advantage of me, a young girl, whose mother had recently died a horrific death and whose family structure had deteriorated," she said.
Giuffre, who met Epstein in Florida, said in a deposition that he once sent her to New Mexico to have sex with politician Bill Richardson. Richardson, who has since died, called the allegation "completely false." Richardson, who was the state's governor from 2003 to 2011,confirmedvisiting the ranch, and the recently released Justice Department files show that Richardson and Epstein remained in touch long after Epstein's crimes became public. In 2016, Richardson asked to have dinner with Epstein in New York, according to emails between their assistants.
The women did not speak about their abuse for years because, they have said, Epstein used money and threats to keep them silent. If they told, he warned of financial, reputational or physical harm.
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But eventually, some of the women did speak to law enforcement. In 2006, Farmer told an FBI agent investigating allegations against Epstein in Florida about her trip to New Mexico with Epstein and Maxwell a decade earlier. The FBI agent, who was based in Florida, wrote a report based on the interview.
The FBI continued to "develop witnesses and victims from across the United States," according to an agency memo. That included at least one interview with someone associated with Epstein in New Mexico in early 2007.
But the information about Zorro Ranch went nowhere: After two years of investigation and plea negotiations, Alex Acosta, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, agreed in 2008 to let Epstein plead guilty to state charges and avoid a federal case, in a deallater criticizedby a Justice Department watchdog as reflecting "poor judgment." (Acosta has said that prosecutors opted for a plea deal because they were concerned it would be difficult to secure a conviction at trial.)
The investigation into possible New Mexico crimes ended.
In 2009, Epstein completed his Florida jail term and, as part of his plea agreement there, began the process of registering as a sex offender in the places he lived. In New Mexico, the state Department of Public Safety notified Epstein by letter that he needed to register with the local sheriff.
But a month later, after a detective met Epstein at his ranch, the state said in a second letter that he did not have to register after all. Because Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to misconduct with a victim over the age of 16, which is the age of consent in New Mexico, authorities determined he had not committed a child sex offense that required registration, according to a later Justice Department review. Epstein also had sexual contact with a 14-year-old victim, according to a report that her mothermade to police in Palm Beach, Florida, but that wasn't included in the plea deal and so didn't matter for the New Mexico sex offender registry.
That meant Epstein didn't have to check in with New Mexico police and didn't have his name placed on an online list. The Justice Department review later determined that Epstein's lawyers "thoroughly researched" how the deal would affect Epstein's sex offender registration in other states, but prosecutors "failed to anticipate" that Epstein would escape the sex-offender registry in New Mexico.
Epstein continued to host scientists, celebrities and tech executives at his ranch — and continued to bring at least one victim. A woman who called herself Priscilla Doe said in a lawsuit years later that Epstein took her to New Mexico repeatedly from 2007 to 2010, using wealth and threats to coerce her into having sex with him and his friends.
Priscilla Doe said that when she met Epstein in New York, she was a poor aspiring ballet dancer in her early 20s who needed cash to pay her mother's rent. Epstein repeatedly told her "that her opportunities were endless as long as she complied with his dictates but that he could take it all away from her if she did not," according to her suit.
Epstein's lease of state land shows how little scrutiny he received from New Mexico, even after he became notorious. State officials have broad discretion to decide who gets to lease public lands, but for decades they renewed Epstein's lease of 1,200 acres without complaint, even though his stated purpose, cattle grazing, was later deemed dubious by state authorities.
With time, more victims came forward. Giuffre said she flew around the world, including to New Mexico in 2001, as Epstein's sex slave. Sjoberg, the college student whom Epstein repeatedly pressured into sexual massages, said she too had been taken to the ranch. But the allegations did not catch the public's attention, or law enforcement's, until 2018, when the Miami Heraldpublished an exposeabout the plea deal in Florida.
The news prompted federal authorities in New York to launch a new investigation, and the New Mexico Attorney General's Office began to examine the ranch on its own.
State investigators spoke to victims and built what they thought was a promising case, Hector Balderas, who was New Mexico's attorney general at the time, told NBC News in a recent interview. His investigation spanned multiple states and identified potential suspects in addition to Epstein and Maxwell, he said. He declined to share specifics. "We had taken statements involving child sex trafficking and we had obtained corroborating records that confirmed an illicit enterprise," Balderas said.
But when federal prosecutors in New York heard about the New Mexico effort, they urged the attorney general's office to stand down, arguing that the state investigation might interfere with their work, Balderas said. His team agreed and briefed the New York prosecutors on its work. The New York prosecutors in turn promised to share any information they gathered about state crimes committed in New Mexico.
New York authorities arrested Epstein in July 2019 on charges of trafficking underage girls, but the indictment did not mention New Mexico. The only time the ranch came up was at a bail hearing in which Annie Farmer testified that Epstein had flown her to New Mexico and was "inappropriate" with her.
The next month, Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, ending the New York case. FBI officials in Washington, D.C., pressed agents in New York about plans to search the ranch. "Can you let me know the reasons we have not gone out there yet?" FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich wrote William Sweeney, the assistant director in charge of the New York office.
The request was passed to an agent who wrote: "At this time we don't have PC for a search of the NM residence," using an abbreviation for probable cause. He said agents did not believe there was anything of value left at the ranch.
Before closing the New York case, a judge allowed several victims to give statements about what they'd been through. The group included Jane Doe 15, who described being assaulted by Epstein at the ranch. "What I remember most vividly was him explaining to me how beneficial the experience was for me and how much he was helping me to grow," she said. "Yikes."
A few days later, newly elected New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard held a news conference in which she tore up the ranch's lease. "This land was no doubt used to protect the privacy of Epstein and his co-conspirators," Garcia Richard said.
The New Mexico Attorney General's Office sent its case file to New York prosecutors in mid-September with a letter saying the material could be used in the potential prosecution of Epstein's co-conspirators. "Epstein's death should not be the end of this criminal inquiry," Chief Deputy Attorney General Clara Moran wrote.
Federal prosecutors went after Maxwell, charging her in June 2020 with helping Epstein groom and abuse underage girls. The indictment focused on New York, though it mentioned Farmer's 1996 experience at the ranch to show Maxwell and Epstein's pattern of behavior. Maxwell was found guilty of conspiracy and sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
New Mexico authorities, meanwhile, waited for a response from New York. In July 2020, Balderas' office sent a follow-up letter asking federal authorities to seize the ranch in hopes that the proceeds could be used to help Epstein's victims. Again, Balderas said, his team got no reply. He left office in 2022 without bringing a case against anyone at the ranch, and today he blames the federal prosecutors.
"They essentially gutted our ability to aggressively seek justice for victims," Balderas said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI did not respond to questions from NBC News.
In January, the Justice Department released millions of pages of documents related to its Epstein investigations, and within them were more revelations about the ranch: its visitors, its victims and new claims about other potential crimes.
The most troubling was a tip emailed to Eddy Aragon, a New Mexico radio host, in September 2019, after Epstein's death. The writer said two bodies were buried somewhere at the ranch. Aragon forwarded the email to the FBI.
The claim, allegedly from a former ranch employee, included no date or names and no potential site of the alleged burials on a ranch that is 12 times the size of New York's Central Park.
It's not clear whether the FBI investigated the tip. Aragon said he never heard from the bureau.
"They could have done something years and years and years ago for these victims," Aragon said.
The new disclosures lit a fire in New Mexico, and officials pledged a new effort to determine what exactly happened at Zorro Ranch.
"We had a government that failed to follow up," said U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat whose district includes the ranch.
Garcia Richard, the land commissioner, sent a letter to state and federal authorities asking them to investigate the burials claim — or clarify whether it had already been examined — and repeated her 2019 invitation to search the state lands.
"There's more there," Garcia Richard said. "A lot has been left out or fallen into the cracks."
She and other officials say they hope that the New Mexico Department of Justice's new investigation and the new truth commission will expose the full story of what happened at the ranch, determine whether anyone else can be prosecuted and change state laws to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
Zorro Ranch is now owned by Don Huffines, a Texas businessman and politician who bought it from Epstein's estate in 2023. Last monthhe announced plansto turn it into a Christian retreat and said he had renamed it San Rafael Ranch. He said he would grant access to any law enforcement agency that wanted to visit the property. A spokesperson for Huffines, the Republican nominee for Texas comptroller, a statewide office, said in a statement that he has been "fully cooperating with the New Mexico DOJ to organize a thorough and legitimate investigation into any possible wrongdoing by the property's former owner."
Regulators ordered Huffines to stop construction at the site in January, and state authoritiessearched itfor the first time on Monday. It is not clear if anything meaningful was found.
The day before the search, Giuffre's brother Sky Roberts and his wife, Amanda Roberts, who live in Colorado, drove to the ranch, joining local officials and residents to rebuild a roadside memorial that had been taken down days earlier. Giuffre rarely mentioned the ranch to them, explaining that she did not want "this evil" to touch them, her brother said.
For the first time, Sky and Amanda Roberts saw the beauty and isolation that Giuffre wrote of. They wept, but also felt her comforting presence. They hoped they were giving her soul some peace. And they vowed to keep fighting for answers.
"This isn't just about singular abuse," Amanda said. "It all ties in with a systemic failure and how people in power use systems and governments to get away with whatever they want."
