I. This is a call to action.

Two months ago, Plainsite published The Trap, an investigation into Stephen Hanson, the New York restaurateur, and his decades-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. That piece was drawn from the official DOJ Epstein File Transparency Act archive, which is one of the largest document releases in modern American history. The archive contains thousands of emails, hundreds of files, and evidence of crime, complicity, and coverup that will never be fully accounted for by the existing press.

Plainsite is not the New York Times. We do not pretend to be. We are readers of these documents who keep finding people the public record names but never explains. The redacted teenager freaking out about college in the Brynn-era emails. The anonymous victim in the FBI FD-302 represented by Gloria Allred. The young women who appear in passing in Hanson’s correspondence as gifts, as guests, as people brought to show their faces. The Scottsdale woman.

This piece is about one of them.

We are asking for your help finding the woman Steve Hanson called the girl from Scottsdale.

The press has not found her. The Trap did not find her. Kim Severson’s front-page New York Times investigation did not find her. Adam Robb’s earlier piece on Substack did not find her. Two months of national coverage have produced extensive reporting about Steve Hanson and not a single public word from or about the woman whose entire life he describes, in his own dehumanizing language, across thirteen emails to a convicted child sex offender.

That is not an accident of journalism. That is the shape of how stories like this almost always go. The documented record of powerful men contains their words about women. It almost never contains the words of the women themselves. We at Plainsite believe she deserves to exist in this record as something more than what Steve Hanson called her. We believe the other women in this archive deserve the same. We can only do one at a time. This piece is for her.

If you can help us find her, please keep reading.

II. What the documents say about her

Hanson never names her. In thirteen documented emails to Epstein between June 2014 and July 2016, he calls her a sequence of things, each one tracking how he hardens his framing of her as he prepares to discard her.

In June 2014, when Epstein casually inserts a reference to her into a condolence chain, she is simply the girl(EFTA00667046). Epstein writes, yes i know, how s the girl, and Hanson does not ask which girl, because they already share a referent.

In January 2016, in a 3:16 AM email, she is the girl I have known for awhile (EFTA02477498).

In February 2016, Hanson confirms the relationship’s origin in his own words. She is who I have known for many years, actually from when I had my hotel in Scottsdale and she and her friends would hang around (EFTA02392003).

In March 2016, she becomes that girl from Scottsdale, a rotten bitch, a total psychopath (EFTA02468686). In the same email, Hanson describes the decade-long relationship as something that started out 10 years ago as a business deal. The deal involved, by his own account, flipping houses, a diamond ring he bought her that she was supposed to flip and never did, and horses that actually isn’t that bad on increased value.

In May 2016, she is again that girl I told you about from Scottsdale, and Hanson writes the line that gave The Trap its frame: there is no one else I would trust with this nightmare (EFTA02463523).

In July 2016, after Epstein has coached him through the framing, she is reduced to the California person(EFTA02458203). Epstein’s final documented advice in the correspondence is the now-infamous suggestion that there are companies in China set up to deal with female blackmailers.

Then the documented correspondence about her stops.

The shape of what these emails describe is not ambiguous. A man in his fifties met a young woman at his hotel in Scottsdale, in his own words from hanging around the property with her friends. He bought her things. He flipped real estate with her. He bought her horses. He paid for her life. He took her calls almost daily. This is not, in any normal reading of the word, a business deal. It is what powerful men have called the women they have used and paid for for as long as there have been powerful men. It was a sexual relationship. He spent a decade in it. He spent the next two years trying to figure out how to make her go away.

What the documents establish:

She met him at the James Hotel in Scottsdale, which he owned from 2004 to 2006. She and her friends would hang around.

The relationship began at the same time, lasted ten years, and involved real estate, a diamond ring she did not sell, and horses owned in her name or jointly.

He spoke with her almost daily.

By 2016, she was three thousand miles away. She was in California.

What the documents do not establish:

Her name.

Her age in 2004, or now.

What she looked like then, or now.

Whether she was a model, a hotel guest, a hospitality worker, a friend of someone in his life, or something else.

Whether she is alive.

Whether she has ever spoken to anyone about Steve Hanson.

III. A timeline

What we know, what we can reasonably infer, and what we do not yet know.

2004. Steve Hanson opens the James Hotel in Scottsdale. The same year, Margaret Merritt founds The Agency Arizona, a modeling agency that operates from inside the James during the years Hanson owns the hotel. The J Bar lounge inside the property becomes a regular stop on the Scottsdale social scene.

2004 to 2005. Approximately when Hanson meets the woman he will later call the girl from Scottsdale. In his own words, she and her friends would hang around the hotel. Whether she was a model represented by The Agency Arizona, a guest of the hotel, a friend of guests, a hospitality worker, or something else is not in the public record.

2006. Hanson sells the James Hotel. The Agency Arizona relocates at the same time. The current owner of the agency, Terri Camberlango, confirmed to Plainsite that the agency had been located inside the James during Margaret Merritt’s ownership and moved when the hotel changed hands. Margaret Merritt did not respond to Plainsite’s outreach. Kim Severson has separately reported reaching out to Merritt and similarly receiving no response.

Approximately 2006 onward. What Hanson would later describe as the business deal. House flipping. The diamond ring. The horses. Daily phone calls. By his own framing, this is the decade he was paying for her life.

June 25, 2014. First documented Hanson-Epstein email about her. She is already a standing topic between the two men.

January 7, 2016 through July 30, 2016. The Scottsdale correspondence. Thirteen documented emails in which Hanson begs Epstein for help silencing her. The decade-long business deal. The hardening of his language. Epstein’s eventual suggestion about China.

After July 30, 2016. Silence in the documented record about her. The DOJ archive contains no further written reference. Whether Hanson and Epstein continued to discuss her by phone, by text, on walks, in person, is not known.

2019. Epstein is arrested federally. He dies in federal custody.

June 2026. The Trap. The New York Times investigation. Renewed attention on Adam Robb’s earlier reporting, in which he wrote that he had considered traveling to California to look for her but had not done so. None of these pieces names her. None of them locates her.

Today. If she was a young adult during the James Hotel years, she is somewhere in her late thirties to mid forties now. The internet in 2004 was not what it is now. Instagram did not exist. Facebook was a college-only network. MySpace was the dominant social platform. Most photographs from the J Bar scene of that era do not live on a publicly searchable internet. They live in physical archives, in modeling agency books, in lifestyle magazine back issues, in the personal collections of party promoters and scene photographers, and in the memories of people who were there.

She could be living anywhere. She could look like anyone. A reader who knew her then, even briefly, may not have thought about her in years. A reader who knows her now may not connect her to anything in this archive.

IV. The James years, and The Agency Arizona

Steve Hanson’s pattern with younger women has been part of his public reputation for decades. In her June 2026 New York Times investigation, reporter Kim Severson wrote that “Hanson had hired models for work events, and invited them to his restaurants. He dated several of them, too, former business associates and a longtime family friend said.”The Times further described him as “a wingman who enjoyed the company of attractive women, and had the means to help manage and entertain them.”

That context matters when you read his own words about meeting the girl from Scottsdale at his hotel, where she and her friends would hang around.

The hotel itself, and its J Bar lounge, were not quiet places. In 2005, the East Valley Tribune reported that the James Hotel had been named America’s Sexiest Resort by Travel and Leisure magazine, with the J Bar singled out as one of the hottest hotel-bar scenes in the country. The New York Times, in a September 2005 travel feature titled Where’s the Party? Scottsdale!, recommended the James as the place to stay for prime people watching and V.I.P. access to its hot J Bar. The Phoenix New Times, in its 2005 Best of Phoenix issue, named the J Bar the Best Place to Act Like You Got Big Chips, describing it as a super-slinky waterin’ hole that packs in the booful people on peak nights Thursdays through Saturdays. The piece was written in the dated, frankly grotesque, frat-magazine voice of its era, but it captures, in real time, what the scene actually was. It describes a venue in which the women were positioned by the bar itself as part of the décor, where wealthy men were expected to perform wealth, and where the entire economic and social transaction of the room ran in one direction.

That was the room in which Hanson, then in his fifties, married, with daughters, met the woman his own emails describe as having hung around his hotel.

The Agency Arizona, founded by Margaret Merritt the same year Hanson opened the James, operated from inside the hotel for the entirety of his ownership. Margaret Merritt has not responded to outreach from Plainsite or, separately, from the New York Times. We are not asserting any specific connection between the agency and the woman Hanson would later call the girl from Scottsdale. We do not know whether she was one of Merritt’s models. We do not know whether she ever set foot inside the agency.

What we can say is this. If she was a model represented by The Agency Arizona during those years, and if Steve Hanson, the married owner of the building the agency operated in, was sleeping with her, there is a non-trivial chance she told someone. A roommate. A booker. Another model. A photographer. A friend. Twenty-two-year-old women who are involved with married fifty-year-old hotel owners do not always keep it entirely to themselves.

This is one of the most specific research paths still open to us. We are asking:

If you modeled for The Agency Arizona between 2004 and 2010, we would like to hear from you.

If you booked, photographed, or otherwise worked with The Agency Arizona during that period, we would like to hear from you.

If you remember the J Bar scene of those years and a woman from it who was rumored to be involved with Steve Hanson, we would like to hear from you.

We will not publish your name without your explicit permission. What you share will be held in confidence by default.

V. The horses

There is one detail in the documented correspondence that we believe may be the strongest lead in the entire archive.

Horses.

In Hanson’s own words, the relationship involved buying horses together. He writes in March 2016 that the horses isn’t that bad on increased value, suggesting they were appreciating assets. The plural matters. He is talking about multiple horses, jointly owned in some structure, somewhere in the American horse world, during some portion of the years between roughly 2006 and 2016.

Where those horses were is not in the documents. They may have been in Arizona, where she lived in the early years. They may have been in California, where Hanson refers to her by 2016. They may have been moved between training facilities, as horses owned by wealthy buyers often are. They may have competed. They may have been bought and sold and replaced. We do not yet know.

What makes this lead particularly worth following is the contrast it draws to the rest of Steve Hanson’s life during those same years.

Deana Hanson, Steve’s wife, was a known figure in the east coast equestrian world. She and Steve’s two daughters were active in the East Hampton equestrian scene, photographed at the Hampton Classic by lifestyle press over multiple years and documented in publications such as New York Social Diary. Getty Images carries wire-service photographs of the Hanson family in the same equestrian social context, identified by name.

During the same period, by his own written account, Steve Hanson was buying separate horses with another woman, in another geography, as part of what he later called a business deal in his emails to Jeffrey Epstein.

The horse world is small and has long memories. Trainers, judges, vets, transport companies, breeders, and stable hands often work across multiple regional circuits. Someone who knew the Hanson family in the Hamptons, or in Palm Beach, may also have known, or known of, the woman elsewhere who shared Steve’s other set of horses. Someone who worked the major shows during those years may remember a woman with a wealthy older partner who funded her, who appeared at certain events and not others, who came from out of state.

If you are part of the American equestrian community in any capacity, and you remember a woman who fits any part of this, please reach out. You may not know her last name. You may not know his. You may remember a first name, a stable, a region, a horse. That is enough to start.

VI. The silence, and why we are concerned

In the months since the publication of The Trap, the New York Times piece, and Adam Robb’s earlier reporting, no journalist has publicly located her. No woman has come forward as her. No one in Hanson’s orbit has named her.

We at Plainsite are not asserting what that silence means. It may mean many things.

It may mean she does not know. She may be living a life that has nothing to do with national news cycles. She may not have heard her own life described in the third person on a Substack.

It may mean she does not want to come forward. She may have taken a settlement and signed an NDA. She may have a family and a quiet life. She may have been told, by people whose threats she took seriously, that speaking would cost her.

It may mean she is afraid. There are reasons a woman who was paid for a decade to stay quiet about a wealthy and powerful man would, when that man’s name lands on the front page of the New York Times, become more afraid rather than more willing.

What we want to say openly is that we are concerned for her wellbeing.

The way Steve Hanson chose to discredit her in writing, to a convicted sex offender, before she had said a single public word, was not the response of a man who was simply tired of an inconvenient relationship. It was the construction of a narrative weapon. Rotten bitch. Total psychopath. Money hungry. Liar. Blackmailer. He spent ten years paying her and two years systematically dehumanizing her on the record, all while asking the most prolific child sex trafficker of our era for advice on what to do about her.

If you are a woman who has ever been on the receiving end of a powerful man’s prepared narrative about you, you know what that pattern feels like. The Scottsdale woman is one of an enormous number of women whose lives are described in archives like this, in language like this, by men like this. She is the one we are looking for today. Other Plainsite pieces will look for others.

We hope she is well. We are asking for help finding her so she has the option of telling her own story, in her own voice, on her own terms, if she chooses. If she chooses not to, that is also a choice we will respect.

VII. The ask

If you knew Steve Hanson during the Scottsdale years, we would like to hear from you.

If you worked at, visited, photographed, or remember the J Bar lounge or the James Hotel during 2004 to 2006, we would like to hear from you.

If you modeled for, worked with, or remember The Agency Arizona during the years Margaret Merritt owned it, we would like to hear from you.

If you are part of the American equestrian community and remember a woman with a wealthy older out-of-state partner who paid for her horses, we would like to hear from you.

If you know or knew a woman who matches what the documents describe, a woman in her late thirties to mid forties now, with ties to Scottsdale in the mid-2000s, who moved to California by 2016, who had a long financial entanglement with a married New York restaurateur involving real estate and horses, we would like to hear from you.

If you are her, we would like to hear from you.

The Protonmail address for tips is PLAINSITEINVESTIGATES@proton.me.

Plainsite will not publish your name without your explicit permission.

Plainsite will not publish any name in this piece, in the comments of this piece, or anywhere else without verification and consent.

What you share will be held in confidence by default. You decide whether and how it is used.

Do not post identifying information about possible candidates in the comments. Speculation about specific women’s identities in public comment threads can do real harm to real people who may have no connection to this story. If you have a name, send it privately.

VIII. Why this matters

This piece is one tiny piece of one of the largest document releases in modern American history. The Hanson-Epstein correspondence alone runs across thousands of pages. The Scottsdale woman is one of dozens of named or unnamed women in that correspondence whose lives are described, in passing, in a man’s words, with no opportunity for their own.

We at Plainsite are reading the documents. We will keep reading. But the documents are not enough. The press is not enough. The Trap was not enough. Kim Severson’s New York Times piece was not enough. Adam Robb’s piece was not enough. Even all three together have not produced a single public word from or about the woman at the center of the most candid emails in the entire archive.

We need your help.

If you can offer any of it, please write.

Plainsite is reading the documents. We are looking for her. We are not the only ones who should be.

All findings drawn from documents in the official DOJ public release, public business records, and Plainsite’s own reporting. Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what those sources support.

Citations and links to embed:

• Phoenix New Times 2005 Best of Phoenix, J Bar entry: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/best-of-phoenix/2005/people-and-places/

• East Valley Tribune 2005 Devil Picks, James Hotel: https://www.eastvalleytribune.com/news/get-outs-2005-devil-picks/article_a6f0a9ce-768e-53a2-881a-d71e3e99441a.html

• New York Times, September 23, 2005, Where’s the Party? Scottsdale!: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/travel/escapes/wheres-the-party-scottsdale.html

• Kim Severson, New York Times, June 8, 2026, When Jeffrey Epstein Needed Favors, This Restaurant Mogul Was There: [link]

• New York Social Diary, Hampton Classic coverage: https://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/win-place-or-showingoff-at-the-season-ending-hampton-classic-horse-show/

• Getty Images, Hanson family equestrian photograph: https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/news-photo/deanna-hanson-stephen-hanson-diana-taylor-and-michael-news-photo/2233095829

• Adam Robb, B.R. Guest’s Steve Hanson Had a Horse Girl Problem, Press Trip Substack, April 2026:

• The Trap, Plainsite Investigations, June 2026:

  ]

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I. The Man He Trusted

Between June 2014 and July 2016, Steve Hanson, founder of BR Guest Hospitality and one of New York’s most prominent restaurateurs, sent a series of emails to Jeffrey Epstein about a woman. Not to his lawyer. Not to a therapist. Not to a close family member. But to Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails, now part of the official DOJ document release, trace a two-year arc in which Hanson grows increasingly frightened, increasingly obsessive, and increasingly reliant on Epstein’s counsel about a woman he had been involved with for a decade. They also trace something else. The gradual construction of a narrative weapon, the label of liar, the label of blackmailer, deployed against a woman before she has said a single public word.

What emerges from reading these emails in sequence is a portrait of two men who share the same fundamental instinct when a woman threatens their control. Discredit her first. Build the story. Get ahead of the truth.

“there is no one else I would trust with this nightmare”

Stephen Hanson to Jeffrey Epstein, May 1, 2016 (EFTA02463523.pdf)

One of those men was a convicted sex offender who trafficked girls across international borders and whose estate would ultimately pay hundreds of millions in settlements to his victims. The other man chose him, above everyone else in his life, as the one person he could trust.

The woman at the center of these emails is never named in the documents. She is, instead, given a sequence of labels, each one tracking how Hanson’s framing of her hardens over time. In June 2014, when Epstein first references her, she is simply “the girl.” In January 2016, she is “the girl I have known for awhile.” In February, Hanson locates her in his own past for the first time, writing in his own words, “who I have known for many years, actually from when I had my hotel in Scottsdale and she and her friends would hang around.” By March 2016, in a 3 AM panic email, she has become “that girl from Scottsdale,” “a rotten bitch,” and “a total psychopath.” In May, she is again “that girl I told you about from Scottsdale.” By July, after Epstein has coached him through the framing, she is reduced to “the California person,” a label so abstract it removes her from gender, history, and place entirely.

She is systematically dehumanized through abstraction, even as the evidence of their relationship accumulates in the very act of describing it. He never calls her a woman. Not once. In thirteen documents spanning two years, she is always “the girl,” or worse.

What the documents establish, in Hanson’s own words, is that he had known her for a decade. He lent her money to purchase a diamond ring. He funded horses. He fielded her calls almost daily. He had been paying for her life, or a significant portion of it, for long enough that he calls the situation a “trap,” a word that appears across multiple emails, always describing the situation, never his own choices that created it.

He never once asks what she needs. He never expresses concern for her wellbeing. She is described exclusively in terms of the inconvenience she causes him. A nightmare. A trap. A source of panic that wakes him at 3 in the morning. Not concern for her. Concern for himself.

II. Five Documents

What follows is the full arc, in order. Five emails. Twenty-five months. One pattern.

June 25, 2014. Epstein already knows. In the middle of a condolence chain about a mutual acquaintance’s death, Epstein inserts a single casual line. “yes i know, how s the girl” (EFTA00667046.pdf ). No clarification. No “which girl.” He already knows her, and Hanson’s response is, “I’m in Tahoe, business.” He does not answer the question. By June 2014, this woman is already a standing topic between these two men. Hanson had no active company at this point. BR Guest had been sold. There is no documented business reason for Hanson to be in Tahoe in June 2014.

January 7, 2016, 3:16 AM. The diamond ring. Eighteen months later, Hanson contacts Epstein again. Subject line, “Need to talk to you.” The email arrives at 3:16 in the morning (EFTA02477498.pdf). He frames a diamond ring as a loan she never repaid. The sums and the daily calls accumulate into a portrait of a man who has been paying for years and is starting to panic. He does not say, “I made a mistake.” He says, “some bs story being said about she and I.” The story exists. He needs Epstein to help him get ahead of it.

February 6, 2016. The Scottsdale origin, confirmed. Four weeks later, Hanson writes again. Subject, Jeffrey. This email does something none of the others do. It confirms exactly where this began. In his own words, “who I have known for many years, actually from when I had my hotel in Scottsdale and she and her friends would hang around”(EFTA02392003.pdf). The James Hotel Scottsdale opened in 2004 and sold in 2006. That places the start of this relationship at approximately 2004 to 2005, consistent with his “10 years ago” reference one month later. This email is also where he names Brynn, his eldest daughter, for the first time. Epstein now has a named reference. Ten months later, Hanson will bring Brynn, then 15, to meet Epstein privately. That visit is the subject of Part 2.March 13, 2016. The Scottsdale panic. Subject, Jeffrey (EFTA00634942.pdf). He wakes up in a panic. He describes the relationship as “started out 10 years ago as a business deal,” placing the origin at 2006, his Scottsdale years. He admits the core truth in his own words, “years ago I made the decision to keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family.” He has been paying for a decade. To prevent her from speaking. This is hush money in everything but name. In the same email, the language hardens. She becomes “that girl from Scottsdale,” “a rotten bitch,” “a total psychopath.” He mentions his daughters as “especially” important. His wife Deana is not referenced. She is not part of his moral accounting.

May 1, 2016. “How are you,” the disguised subject. The subject line reads “How are you” (EFTA02463523.pdf). The email contains nothing about how Epstein is. It is entirely about the Scottsdale woman and Hanson’s escalating fear. He has disguised the subject because he does not want a paper trail with her name on it. He is still waking at 3 AM. He still calls it a trap. Now he imagines dying and not being there to defend himself. He worries about his daughters’ perception of him. He does not mention his wife. And he writes the line that gives this entire investigation its name, “there is no one else I would trust with this nightmare.” The man he is writing to has, by this point, served time for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

July 30, 2016. The script arrives. On July 3, Hanson emails Epstein about “the California person,” horses, phone calls, 3000 miles away. Still “the trap I’m in.” He asks for a way out of the “horrible situation.” On July 30, Epstein replies (EFTA02458203.pdf). This is the moment the coaching completes. Hanson came to Epstein over two years with vague anxiety, with self-pity, with “rotten bitch” and “psychopath.” Epstein sends him back with a weapon. Epstein tells him she is a blackmailer. Tells him to cut her off completely. And references, explicitly, operations in China that “are set up to only do that.” To get rid of female blackmailers.

“its a shame you cant send her to another country where they deal with blackmailers more effectively. in china there are cos that are set up to only do that.”

Jeffrey Epstein to Stephen Hanson, July 30, 2016 (EFTA02458203.pdf)

This is the arc. Hanson arrived with a personal mess and a vocabulary of insult. Epstein refined the vocabulary into a strategy and, in the final email, gestured at infrastructure for making women like her disappear. Hanson did not flinch from the suggestion. He did not write back to clarify. He did not break the correspondence. He absorbed it.

III. What “Lies” Really Means

Across thirteen documents, Hanson never once denies the relationship existed. Not in the 3:16 AM email. Not in the Scottsdale confession. Not in the “how are you” email that is not about how Epstein is. He never once writes the sentence “nothing happened.”

What he says, instead, is that she is lying about someone, and that those lies are “something more than a business thing going on.” He needs to neutralize a specific claim she is making about him. He does not name the claim. He does not refute the claim. He simply moves the frame. “She lies” becomes the structure he is asking Epstein to help him build.

He chose his phrase carefully. “Keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family.” He paid so she would not speak. This is the working definition of hush money.

Who he was protecting was himself. Always and only himself. The daughters appear in the emails not as people he is shielding from a predator, but as the audience he cannot afford to lose. “Especially my daughters” is not concern for their safety. It is concern for the image they hold of him. He worries the truth will “create psychological effects” in them, not that the truth itself is true, but that they might hear it. He is afraid of dying before he can finish constructing the story. Before he can teach his daughters what to believe.

This is the pattern that runs through every email. Hanson never once takes responsibility for his own conduct. The woman is a trap. The situation is a nightmare. The money is a business deal. The years of payments are something that “started out,” passive voice, no actor, “as a business deal.” He never writes, “I made a choice. I created this. I am the reason this exists.”

It is the same pattern that surfaces later in his business correspondence. In his BR Guest separation, Barry Sternlicht calls his demand for a $2.5 million payment, in writing, “your $2.5m blackmail payment.” In Hanson’s telling, Sternlicht is the unreasonable one. In the collapse of the Life Hotel and its restaurant Henry, his partner David Mitchell is the one mishandling money. In Hanson’s telling, Mitchell is the problem. Epstein himself, when the books at Life Hotel begin to show what Epstein in his own words calls “sooo many funky numbers,” advises Hanson to sell before the audit can proceed. In Hanson’s telling, the audit is the threat, not what the audit might find.

It is always the other person. The woman. The partner. The auditor. The girl from Scottsdale, the rotten bitch, the psychopath, the blackmailer. The cast of villains rotates. The protagonist is always blameless.

The person he chose to help him maintain that story was a convicted sex offender. Not a lawyer. Not a therapist. Not a priest. A man whose expertise was how to make young women with inconvenient stories stop talking. By 2008, Jeffrey Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor, a state felony. He was required to register as a Tier 1 sex offender. He served 13 months under a controversial non-prosecution agreement so lenient it would later be condemned across the political spectrum and contribute to the resignation of a U.S. Labor Secretary who had signed off on it as a federal prosecutor.

During that 13-month sentence, Stephen Hanson was on Epstein’s approved visitor list at the Palm Beach County Stockade (EFTA00315076.pdf). He did not stop being Epstein’s friend when Epstein went to jail for sex crimes against a minor. He went to see him there.

Between 2014 and 2016, the exact window of the Scottsdale correspondence, Epstein’s status was not hidden. It was a matter of public record, reported in the press, searchable on any sex-offender registry. Anyone could find it. Hanson did not need to be told. He also did not need to be told what was alleged about Epstein beyond the 2008 conviction. He was told directly, in writing, by Epstein himself.

On Sunday, November 6, 2016, two days before the presidential election, Epstein emailed Hanson a Daily Mail article (EFTA01738461.pdf). The article reported the dismissal of Katie Johnson v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, a federal lawsuit filed by a woman who alleged that Epstein and Donald Trump had raped her in 1994, when she was 13 years old. The suit was withdrawn days before the election after the plaintiff said she had received threats.

Epstein chose to share that news with Hanson. Hanson’s reply, in its entirety, was one word and a follow-up question.

“Glad. U free at all.”

He did not ask whether the allegations were true. He did not ask his friend whether he had done what he was accused of. He did not say he was sorry the woman had withdrawn the suit, or sorry she had ever needed to bring it. He said he was glad. One word. Then he asked when they could talk.

That word is a small mirror of the Scottsdale correspondence. There, Hanson was the one who needed an accusation to go away. Here, his friend needed the same thing. The response is identical. “Glad. Let’s talk about something else.”

That choice, not an accident, not a moment of weakness, but a repeated, documented, two-year return to the same man for the same kind of counsel, is not collateral to the story. It is the story.

IV. The Wife He Never Mentions

There is a woman who appears in none of these emails. She is not the Scottsdale woman. She is the woman Hanson was married to.

Across thirteen emails spanning 2014 to 2016, discussing fear, money, a decade-long relationship with another woman, and what Hanson framed as his moral reckoning, Hanson names his wife exactly once. In a forwarded chain. In passing. About stock in a vitamin company.

Deana Hanson is the mother of his children. She is the woman most directly affected by a decade of payments to another woman. She appears in the broader correspondence, in passing references, dinner arrangements, a note that she was away with Brynn and he realized he missed them. She exists in his world. She is simply not part of his crisis planning.

Across the Scottsdale emails specifically, the thirteen documents in which Hanson is constructing his response to the woman who might speak, Deana never appears as a reason. Not as someone he is protecting. Not as someone he fears finding out. Not as someone he considers telling the truth to. Not once does he write: “Deana cannot know this.” Not once does he write: “I owe her an explanation.” Not once does he frame the Scottsdale woman’s silence as something he needs for his wife’s sake.

The daughters appear six times as the explicit reason for concealment. The phrase “the family” appears four times, always meaning him and his daughters. Deana, the woman most directly wronged by a decade of payments to another woman, is never named as a consideration in that accounting.

This is not an oversight. It is not the kind of omission a man makes by accident. It is a decision. Deana is not part of his moral accounting because Deana was never the audience. The daughters were the audience, the future audience, the one he was constructing the story for. Deana was the woman already inside the marriage, already paying her own kind of cost, already in possession of whatever truth was between them.

She does not need to be lied to in these emails because she has already been lied to. For years. For a decade.

She is, in the language of the documents, the woman the lies are no longer for.

V. What the Documents Prove, in His Own Words

These are six facts that are not subject to interpretation.

One: a relationship lasting a decade. Hanson’s own phrase, “started out 10 years ago as a business deal.” Origin, Scottsdale, 2006. His own hotel. The woman and her friends “would hang around.”

Two: payments made to silence. “Keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family.”Payments made specifically to suppress speech. Hush money by definition.

Three: protection of his own image, not his daughters’ safety. “Especially my daughters.” Six emails cite the daughters as the reason for concealment. Zero cite the wife. The threat he is managing is not what someone might do to his daughters. It is what his daughters might learn about him.

Four: 3:16 AM. The tone of the January 7, 2016 email is not a business inquiry. It is a man in crisis, writing before dawn, seeking a fixer.

Five: thirteen emails on this topic across twenty-five months. A sustained correspondence with a convicted sex offender, selected, chosen, returned to. Not an accident.

Six: the China response. Epstein, on July 30, 2016, writes that there are companies in China “that are set up to only do that,” to get rid of female blackmailers. Hanson is given a script. He accepts it.

These are not allegations. They are the record.

VI. The Daughter He Never Worried About

In the preceding sections, Stephen Hanson invoked “especially my daughters” six times as the reason he had to suppress a woman’s story.

What he does next cannot be reconciled with that fear.

The man he described as “the only one I would trust with this nightmare,” the convicted sex offender he chose as his confidant, was invited into his family. Not kept out of it.

Brynn Hanson, his eldest, was 15 years old during the period these emails document. She was a student at Marymount School in Manhattan. She was an academic. She rode horses. She joined clubs and built a college résumé.

Across April 2015 to December 2016, the exact same window as the Scottsdale correspondence, seven documented emails in the DOJ archive coordinate contact between Brynn and Jeffrey Epstein. School project advice. College advice. Term paper topics. Cosmetic demonstrations. A Thanksgiving Day visit. A holiday gift exchange.

This is the contradiction this series documents. A father whose stated fear was that his daughters would learn something was, in the same period, bringing his eldest daughter into the home of the man he trusted with that fear.

He did not protect Brynn from Epstein. He brought her to him.

VII. Seven Emails

April 4, 2015. The school project. Hanson emails Epstein, “Brynn / oldest would like your advise on a school team project. We have horse back riding but can be to u anytime after 130, so what is best” (EFTA00644503.pdf).

Stephen Hanson is a graduate of NYU’s Stern School of Business. He built a restaurant empire generating $200 million in annual revenue. He negotiated multi-million-dollar transactions and managed hundreds of employees. His family foundation lists Marymount School, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive Catholic girls’ schools, among its grantees in public IRS tax filings.

According to the DOJ documents, her father could not help her brainstorm a school team project without consulting a man with no children, no academic credentials, and a federal conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

April 5, 2015. “Be there in 10. With brynn.” The following evening, Sunday, April 5 at 10:19 PM, someone sent Epstein a five-word text: “Be there in 10. With brynn.” (EFTA02505763.pdf).

The sender’s identity is completely redacted in the DOJ archive. The email address field is blank. The metadata lists the sender as Unknown.

A teenage girl. Sunday night. After 10 PM. Arriving at Jeffrey Epstein’s home.

January 6, 2016. College advice. Hanson emails Epstein multiple items. He opens by noting he has a serious situation to discuss, but only by text, not in writing. What that situation was is unknown. He then asks Epstein for college advice for his daughter, who is anxious about not getting into a good school, studying hard, joining yearbook, building her résumé (EFTA02475176.pdf). The DOJ redacted her name in this document. The context tracks directly to what we know about Brynn from the surrounding emails.

October 28, 2015. “Show her face.” Lesley Groff, Epstein’s personal assistant, emailed Hanson: “Hello Steve…Jeffrey is here in NY at the house and says you can stop by! He says to bring your daughter if she is available so she can show Jena her face (and how great Accutane works!)” (EFTA00336648.pdf).

Hanson: “I’m 5 blocks away. I’ll see where brynn.” Groff: “Great!”

Epstein was not a physician or dermatologist. He had no medical credentials. He did, however, have, documented across the DOJ archive, a pattern of directing the physical routines of young women in his circle. Brynn was being brought to demonstrate results to another young woman in Epstein’s home. Hanson was five blocks away and went to find her.

November 24, 2016. Thanksgiving Day. Hanson: “We need to be home then at 2. But if ok I’ll bring brynn over to see [REDACTED] play with the cats” (EFTA01743243.pdf).

The person Brynn was brought to watch on Thanksgiving Day is redacted by the DOJ. Hanson confirms they needed to be home by 2 PM, a brief, scheduled visit on a family holiday, to a convicted pedophile’s home.

November 27, 2016. The term paper. Subject, “Brynn wanted me to ask.” Hanson asks Epstein for term paper topic ideas. Epstein replies, “transgender? life on mars. self driving cars. genetic engineering. living to 120 years old.”Hanson: “Tks I’m sure she will want you to proof read once she picks a topic” (EFTA02669410.pdf).

The girl in these documents was attending one of New York City’s most academically rigorous private schools. She was joining clubs, building her résumé. She did not need Jeffrey Epstein to suggest term paper topics. Her father chose to make him available to her anyway.

December 27, 2016. A holiday gift for Karina. Hanson: “When are u free today. Brynn also has a holiday gift for Karina, would like to see her at some point.” Epstein: “1030 morning or 430?” Hanson: “430” (EFTA02665313.pdf).

Karyna Shuliak is the woman Epstein left $100 million, his private island, and his properties to in his will. She was among the closest young women in his circle. By December 2016, Brynn had a holiday gift for her and wanted to see her.

The relationship between Epstein’s world and the Hanson family had become social, reciprocal, and normalized.

VIII. What This Section Does Not Claim

This series does not make claims about what happened during these visits.

The documents establish that the visits occurred. They establish the dates, the venue, the redacted companions, and the man at whose home she was a guest. They establish that her father was the one arranging her presence in those rooms. Whether Steve Hanson remained present during those visits, or left his daughter alone with Epstein, is not established by the documents we have.

But that question, while worth asking, is not the only one the record raises.

Even if Hanson never took his eyes off her, even if every visit was fully supervised, a different question remains, and it is one no one has asked him to answer: Why? Why does a father choose a convicted sex offender, a man federally registered as a Tier 1 pedophile, as the person to advise his teenage daughter on school projects, term papers, and college applications? Why is Jeffrey Epstein the one giving her access to his household, to young women in his circle, to holiday gatherings? Stephen Hanson had resources, credentials, and connections that most parents can only imagine. He chose Epstein anyway.

That choice does not require an allegation. It requires an explanation. None has ever been offered.

The contradiction the documents establish is this: a father whose stated nightmare was that a woman might tell his daughters something true about him was, in the same window, voluntarily integrating that same convicted predator into his eldest daughter’s life. The two things cannot both be expressions of the same paternal instinct.

One of them is the cover story. The other is the conduct.

The documents do not require us to choose between them. They show us both.

IX. A Name in the Federal Record

The Scottsdale emails show Stephen Hanson choosing Jeffrey Epstein as the man he would trust with a nightmare. The Brynn emails show Hanson bringing his teenage daughter into Epstein’s home.

There is a third document set in the public record, released by the Department of Justice under the Epstein File Transparency Act, that adds a fourth dimension to this relationship.

It is an FBI FD-302 interview record, dated April 1, 2021 (EFTA01250194.pdf). It documents an interview the FBI conducted, by video conference, with a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. The victim’s identity is redacted by the federal government. What is not redacted are the names of the men she identified.

She named Stephen Hanson.

In her own words, recorded by the interviewing agents: “trafficked me too.”

The interview describes a pattern. She first encountered Epstein as a teenager. By the time she turned 18, she was being summoned weekly to his Manhattan residence. She was instructed by Epstein’s assistants on how to behave when she arrived. She was paid in cash, sometimes $300, sometimes $150, after each visit. She estimates the pattern continued over multiple years.

Then, according to the document, the arrangement expanded. “EPSTEIN sent HANSON to her house,” to her own apartment, in her bedroom. “Performed fellatio on HANSON more than a dozen times. This happened in her bedroom apartment. HANSON paid her.”

The document also names Henry Jarecki, a physician, financier, and longtime Epstein associate, in the same context. The victim states that Epstein arranged for her to “entertain” Jarecki at his home, weekly, in exchange for help with college. She “really wanted to attend college,” the document records. “She obliged.”

The interview is three pages long. It is subject to a federal protective order. It is part of the official DOJ release. Every page bears the same notation: 3501.503-001.

The Scottsdale woman, in 2014, was Hanson’s nightmare because she might speak.

The woman in this FBI interview, in 2021, is the woman who did.

She did not speak publicly. She did not bring a civil suit. She sat with two federal agents on a video conference call and described, in detail, what had been done to her. The interview record now exists in the public archive of the Department of Justice. Her identity is protected. The names she gave are not.

There is no documented response from Stephen Hanson to this FBI interview. He has not been charged. He has not been deposed. He has not been asked, by the press or the public, to explain his presence in this woman’s bedroom apartment, or what “more than a dozen times” of paid sex acts with an Epstein victim, arranged and dispatched by Epstein himself, meant in the context of his correspondence with that same Epstein about another woman who was “a nightmare.”

This is the question this series has been moving toward.

In the Scottsdale emails, Hanson positions himself as the victim of a woman’s lies. He frames her as a “blackmailer,” a “psychopath,” a “trap.” He asks Jeffrey Epstein, the man we now know, in the federal record, was sending him women to her apartment, for help making her go away.

The same man. The same window. The same correspondence. The same convicted child sex offender he called “the only one I would trust with this nightmare.”

The Scottsdale woman was not Hanson’s nightmare because she was lying.

She was his nightmare because what she might say was true.

X. A Note on What Remains

The Scottsdale emails, the Brynn emails, and the FBI 302 establish the personal and criminal dimensions of the Hanson-Epstein relationship. They do not exhaust it.

A separate documentary trail in the DOJ archive establishes the financial and operational dimensions. Across the same years that Hanson was writing to Epstein about the woman from Scottsdale, the two men were partners in a sustained working relationship. Epstein ghost-negotiated Hanson’s separation from BR Guest Hospitality, including the $2.5 million payment Hanson’s business partner Barry Sternlicht would call, in writing, “your $2.5m blackmail payment.”Epstein advised Hanson on the Life Hotel and its restaurant Henry, telling him to sell before what Epstein himself called “sooo many funky numbers” in the books could be reached by an audit. On March 18, 2016, five days after the Scottsdale panic email, $500,000 was wired from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Deutsche Bank account, balance approximately $1.6 million, to the law firm of Muchnick, Golieb & Golieb. The wire was memo-lined “Loan to Steve Hanson” (EFTA01367909). Three days later, SFS LLC, an entity wholly owned by Steve Hanson, was formed to purchase an $18.5 million Gulfstream aircraft, the ownership documents explicitly designating the aircraft as wholly owned by Steve Hanson through that LLC. The lawyer who structured the LLC was Howard Muchnick, the same Howard Muchnick that Hanson had personally introduced to Epstein in 2013 (EFTA00390161).

These threads, and the friendship that made all of them possible, will be the subject of the next Plainsite installment.

XI. What the Epstein Class Looked Like

The Epstein archive is often discussed as a list of names, a flight log, a black book, a client list people keep demanding be released. That framing makes it sound like a conspiracy. It isn’t. It’s a pattern of behavior, among a recognizable class of men, that the documents render fully legible.

Stephen Hanson is not the most famous name in that archive. That is precisely what makes these emails useful. He is a competent, successful American businessman, a restaurateur, a philanthropist, the founder of a family foundation, whose correspondence with Epstein, read in order, shows what proximity to Epstein actually looked like in practice.

It looked like a man paying another woman for a decade to keep his daughters from finding out something. It looked like asking a sex offender how to make her stop. It looked like seven documented emails coordinating his teenage daughter’s access to that same man, school projects, college advice, holiday visits, across the same two-year window.

What the emails show about the men who wrote to Jeffrey Epstein:

They treated women as problems to be managed, not as people with stories of their own.

They paid to silence those stories, and reframed the payments, to themselves, as “a business deal.”

They protected the image they projected to their daughters, while exposing those same daughters to men like Epstein.

They did not consult lawyers or therapists first. They consulted Epstein. He was the expert they trusted.

They did not stop after his 2008 conviction. They continued, in writing, from their own email accounts, with their own names.

They assumed no one would ever read it. The DOJ archive is that assumption reversed.

This is the working definition of the Epstein class. Not a list. A pattern. A pattern that included presidents, princes, financiers, scientists, and at least one New York restaurateur whose foundation is still listed in the IRS tax filings of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive Catholic girls’ schools.

The pattern was not hidden. It was protected, by money, by mutual interest, by the assumption that men like these would never have their email accounts seized, indexed, and searched. The assumption held until it didn’t. The archive now exists. The pattern is now legible. The accountability is not.

Which raises a question no one in Hanson’s current world has been asked to answer. His latest venture, The Polo Room in Palm Beach, remains one of the hottest restaurants in the country. It is co-owned with Ignacio “Nacho” Figueras, the most famous polo player in the world and a global brand ambassador. Reservations are nearly impossible to obtain. The celebrity clientele continues to line up. Neither Figueras nor the restaurant’s investors have been asked, publicly, to account for what the DOJ archive now shows about their partner. The documents are public. The questions have not been asked.

That is the trickle-down no one talks about. Not wealth. Not opportunity. Suffering. The cost of a system in which money and proximity to it can purchase a decade of silence from a woman, can purchase the silence of partners, of staff, of institutions, of prosecutors, until, finally, the cost is paid by women and girls whose names we will not know, whose stories live in redacted FBI interviews and sealed depositions and the dehumanizing shorthand of men who called them “the girl” and “the California person” and “more than a dozen times.”

Plainsite exists because the documents exist. Our job is only to read them carefully, in order, and write down what they say.

XII. Two Women. No Answers. Yet.

Named nowhere in the archive. Hanson’s own words place her first in his life around 2004 to 2005, when she and her friends “would hang around” his Scottsdale hotel. She would have been in her teens or early twenties. No one has asked her for her account. The DOJ archive contains his words about her, not hers.

The unnamed Epstein victim in EFTA01250194.pdf spoke to the FBI in April 2021. She named Stephen Hanson. She described what was done to her. Her identity remains protected. So does her silence in public.

Two women. The record contains both of them. The record contains neither of their names.

What this series is asking. What accountability would require.

Was the Scottsdale woman a minor when the relationship began? Hanson’s own dating places the origin in his hotel-owner years. The question deserves an answer.

What were the sums paid to her over the decade-long “business deal”? Financial records exist.

What advice did Epstein ultimately give Hanson by phone and in person, beyond the lines we can read in email?

What did Brynn Hanson do on those visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s home?

"Who took Brynn to Jeffrey Epstein's home after 10 PM on a Sunday night? The sender of that five-word text, 'Be there in 10. With brynn,' is completely redacted in the DOJ archive (EFTA02505763.pdf). Brynn is named. The adult who brought her is not."

"Who is the young woman staying with Epstein that Brynn was brought to watch on Thanksgiving Day? Hanson writes that he will bring Brynn over to see a redacted name 'play with the cats' (EFTA01743243.pdf). That person was in Epstein's home on Thanksgiving. Their identity is protected by the DOJ."

How many more men in Epstein’s correspondence have archives that, read in order, tell a version of this same story?

Plainsite is reading them. We will keep reading the documents. One man at a time.

All findings are drawn from documents in the official DOJ public release and public financial records. Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what those documents contain.

EFTA documents referenced in this piece, in order of appearance:

EFTA02463523 · EFTA00667046 · EFTA02477498 · EFTA02392003 · EFTA00634942 · EFTA02458203 · EFTA00315076 · EFTA01738461 · EFTA00644503 · EFTA02505763 · EFTA02475176 · EFTA00336648 · EFTA01743243 · EFTA02669410 · EFTA02665313 · EFTA01250194 · EFTA01367909 · EFTA00390161

All documents available in the official DOJ Epstein File Transparency Act archive.

Public Record. Hidden Truth

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Newly unsealed emails show the chairman of one of America's most powerful law firms helping Jeffrey Epstein surveil, jail, and deport the woman who accused Leon Black.

In the summer of 2015, a woman was watched out of a Manhattan apartment building, moved through a parking garage into a car with tinted windows, and followed to JFK. Someone took down her license plates.

The man keeping the notes was not a private investigator and not a police officer. He was Brad Karp — then chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the most prestigious law firms in the country — and the man he was reporting to was Jeffrey Epstein.

That exchange sat inside the roughly three million Epstein investigative files the Justice Department released in early February. It cost Karp the chairmanship he had held since 2008. And on March 2 it became the spine of a new lawsuit, filed in Manhattan, that argues the surveillance was never an aberration — it was one early move in what the complaint calls a decade-long campaign of intimidation against anyone who tried to hold the billionaire Leon Black to account.

The woman in the files

The woman in the emails is Guzel Ganieva, a former Russian model who had been involved with Black and who, Black would later allege in his own 2022 lawsuit, demanded $100 million from him in 2015 at a meeting at the Four Seasons. To Black’s people, that demand was extortion. Ganieva later sued Black for sexual abuse — a case a judge dismissed in 2023, and a related defamation claim a New York appellate court rejected, holding that a 2015 nondisclosure agreement covered her claims and that she had ratified it by accepting roughly $9 million from Black, including a $100,000 monthly stipend, before she ever sued.

Set the merits of that dispute aside for a moment, because the files reveal something that doesn’t depend on who was right about the money. They show the machinery two powerful men built around her while the public knew none of it.

Epstein, the convicted sex offender, was advising. Karp, running a firm that billed more than $2.6 billion a year and counted Black’s Apollo Global Management as its largest client, was executing. The surveillance was contracted to the investigations firm Nardello & Co., which produced transcripts of secret recordings. In the emails the two men refer to Ganieva only as “GG,” and they trade her movements like inventory — where she went, who she met, the plates on the car that carried her to the airport. Karp reports that “GG is in Moscow” and that a transcript would follow.

It did not stop at watching her.

“Both good ideas”

The files show Epstein and Karp working through the options for making the problem disappear. In July 2015, Epstein floated going after Ganieva’s immigration status — whether her contacts could pull her visa, whether they could file something to revoke it. Karp’s reply, as quoted in the records: “both good ideas; will work on this.”

A month later, Epstein pressed harder, asking whether Ganieva could simply be arrested — extortion charges, high bail, possible deportation. The plan ran through a name that appears again and again in the correspondence: “Lorin.” That is Lorin Reisner, who had run the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan before joining Paul Weiss roughly a year earlier — exactly the kind of former top federal prosecutor a firm would want signing a criminal referral. Epstein, growing impatient, told Karp law enforcement needed to be brought in and left the choice of agency to him: the FBI or the NYPD.

It went further still. According to reporting by the Financial Times, Karp personally called then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance in April 2021 to raise the possibility of investigating Ganieva for extortion.

None of it worked. The arrest never came, the visa was never revoked, the deportation never happened. But the effort is now a matter of record.

The keys to every kingdom

This is the part worth slowing down on, because it is the whole point.

When a woman accused Leon Black, the response from the people around him was not to argue the truth of her claims in open court. It was to reach for instruments most people don’t know exist and could never afford to rent: a private intelligence firm to follow her, a former chief of the criminal division of the most powerful U.S. Attorney’s office in the country to weigh a criminal referral, a Wall Street chairman with the standing to get a sitting district attorney on the phone, and a friend in Epstein who specialized in making other people’s problems vanish. The aim, stated in their own words, was to have her surveilled, deported, or jailed.

None of that required breaking a law. None of it required corrupting a judge. That is exactly what makes it worth understanding. Real power at this altitude rarely looks like a bribe. It looks like access — the ability to point the legitimate machinery of surveillance and prosecution at a single person and ask, politely, on firm letterhead, whether anything can be done. Most of us live inside that machinery. People like Black can aim it.

This is the Epstein class. Not a conspiracy, not a cabal — a tier of wealth so far past ordinary money that it comes with keys to rooms the rest of the country can’t find the door to. Epstein’s genius was never only what he did in private. It was that he held a copy of those keys and would hand them to the right people. He was the man you called when the ordinary channels were too slow, or too clean. The men in his orbit weren’t all there for the same reasons. Some were there because he could solve things. The solving was the point.

The record that never gets made

Now watch the other side of the ledger — not what happened to the women, but what keeps not happening to Black.

This spring, a federal judge ordered Black to testify under oath. He had been named a “critical witness” in a lawsuit brought by Epstein’s victims against Bank of America, which they accused of ignoring the money Black moved to Epstein through one of its accounts — roughly $170 million, the suit alleged, which the plaintiffs cast as a primary means of funding the trafficking operation.

That figure is worth pausing on, because it’s the same relationship described two opposite ways. The 2021 review Apollo’s own board commissioned, conducted by the law firm Dechert, put Black’s payments to Epstein at $158 million in fees for tax and estate-planning advice between 2012 and 2017, and concluded the work was legitimate and that Black had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes. The Bank of America suit, counting transfers through a single bank, alleged roughly $170 million and called it fuel for the abuse. One number is Black’s house accounting, blessed by the firm he hired; the other is the victims’ accounting, filed in federal court. They describe the same river of money flowing to the same man.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff scheduled the deposition for late March: up to eight hours, under oath, on the record.

It never happened. Black’s lawyer persuaded Rakoff to push the date back ten days because the parties were “close to settling.” Then Bank of America settled — $72.5 million — and the deposition vanished with the case. Black, who is not a defendant and denies any wrongdoing or any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, was never asked the questions. The bank wrote a check, and eight hours of sworn testimony simply stopped existing.

It is the same on every front where Black might have to answer in public. Congress summoned him in March as part of its Epstein probe and asked him to sit for a transcribed interview; months later that questioning has not materialized, and the broader investigation has been reported to have stalled. Ganieva’s claims were ruled sealed inside an NDA she had been paid to sign. The surviving suit by the woman who says he raped her as a teenager goes on, but the firm that brought it has been sanctioned and pushed off the case.

Notice the asymmetry, because it is the entire story in miniature. When a woman threatened to make Black’s conduct public, his circle wrote down her license plates and weighed having her deported. When the public threatened to make Black account for himself, the record kept not getting made. They documented her exhaustively. The one moment his own sworn word was set to go on the record, it was bought back.

Not left, not right

It would be easy to file all of this under partisanship, and wrong. The judges cut straight across it.

The veteran judge who ordered Black deposed in the Bank of America case, Jed Rakoff, is a Clinton appointee — and one long known for refusing to let corporate defendants settle their way out of a full airing of the facts. He ordered the sworn testimony and rejected the bank’s bid to pause the case. And the judge who, on April 23, sanctioned Wigdor LLP — the firm pressing the cases against Black — is no captured Black ally either. U.S. District Judge Jessica Clarke is a Biden appointee, a former Chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the New York Attorney General’s office. She found that a Wigdor partner had committed serious, sanctionable misconduct in the separate suit accusing Black of raping a teenager: that the attorney lied repeatedly to the court and opposing counsel about a related proceeding, directed her client to delete a social media account, and that the plaintiff had falsified sonogram images in journals the complaint relied on. Clarke ordered Wigdor to pay Black’s fees and weighed throwing the case out before letting it proceed. The firm no longer represents that plaintiff. Black’s lawyer, Susan Estrich, said the ruling destroyed the accuser’s credibility.

That sanction has to be in this story, even though it complicates the cleaner version. Two judges, appointed by two Democratic presidents, ruled in directions that cut against the easy read: one tried to put Black on the record, the other punished the firm chasing him. Both followed the documents. So should we. And note what still happened: Black avoided the witness chair anyway — not because a judge shielded him, but because a settlement between two other parties made the question moot. That is the tell. The protection here was never partisan. It was purchased.

The same holds for the long silence before any of this surfaced. Epstein’s network of enablers outlasted administrations of both parties; files sat unreleased for years, prosecutions that should have come never did, and the serious scrutiny arriving now is late by two decades. That is not a problem of left or right. It is a problem of a class that, whoever holds office, tends to keep its keys.

What the documents leave standing

Strip away everything that’s contested and here is what remains, in the men’s own words, written when they believed no one would ever read them: a woman accused a billionaire, and the billionaire’s lawyer and the billionaire’s friend went looking for a way to put her in handcuffs or on a plane. Whether her demand was extortion or her accusation was true, that response — surveil her, jail her, deport her — is the tell. It is what power does when it would rather make a person disappear than answer her.

The new lawsuit asks a court a narrow question: was Black’s litigation against the firm representing his accusers retaliation? The files, and the empty witness chair, ask everyone else a larger and older one. When the wealthiest people alive decide a person is a problem, what, exactly, is the legal system for?

This is why accountability so rarely reaches the Epstein class. The money bought the watchers and the plates, the prosecutor’s pencil, the settlement that closed the file, the silence on every side. It bought the whole apparatus — everything except the thing that would have had to sit in that chair and answer for it. That is the one item not for sale. Money can buy you anything but a soul, and the soul is precisely what never shows up on the record.

THE RECORD

• The Epstein–Karp correspondence comes from the U.S. Department of Justice’s February 2026 release of Epstein investigative files (reported by Business Insider, The Guardian, and others). “Their efforts were unsuccessful,” per The Guardian.

• The retaliation claims and procedural history are drawn from the complaint filed by Wigdor LLP on March 2 in New York County (Manhattan) Supreme Court, reported by Bloomberg Law and the New York Post. The retaliation allegations are the plaintiff firm’s characterization.

• The Bank of America matter: Black was ordered to sit for a deposition by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff and was called a “critical witness”; the bank settled for $72.5 million in March 2026, and the deposition (set for March 26) did not occur. The suit alleged Black moved roughly $170 million to Epstein through a BofA account. Reported by NBC News, AP, CBS News, and the Boston Globe. Black is not a defendant and denies wrongdoing. Rakoff is a Clinton appointee (1996).

• The April 23, 2026 sanctions ruling is Doe v. Black, S.D.N.Y., No. 1:23-cv-06418, before U.S. District Judge Jessica Clarke — a separate case from the Ganieva and Bank of America matters. Clarke was nominated by President Biden and confirmed in March 2023.

• Karp’s April 2021 call to then-DA Cyrus Vance was reported by the Financial Times.

• The House Oversight Committee’s March 3 letter requesting Black’s testimony is published at oversight.house.gov; as of late May 2026 that interview had not taken place, and reporting (e.g., the Christian Science Monitor) described the broader congressional Epstein investigation as stalled.

• Black, through counsel, denies the underlying allegations and calls the Wigdor suit meritless. Karp has said he regrets his interactions with Epstein and stepped down as Paul Weiss chairman in early February; the firm says it never represented Epstein. Black separately paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands over claims tied to Epstein.

Plainsite — Public Record. Hidden Truth.

May 30, 2019. Ten weeks before his arrest.

Jeffrey Epstein is emailing Michael Wolff — author of Fire and Fury — from his personal Gmail account.

Wolff asks: "So MBS was paying him off? Why? Ideas?"

Epstein replies: "maybe as a favor to trump. in exchange for yemen and iran support. smells doesnt it?"

For anyone unfamiliar: MBS is Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Notice what Wolff is not asking. He is not asking whether MBS was paying someone. He is asking why. The payment is apparently already the premise of the conversation.

Notice what Epstein does not say. He does not say he doesn't know. He offers a geopolitical theory instantly — with the casual confidence of someone with proximity to the answer.

Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what the documents contain. But if we had to name the most obvious read on who "him" might be — given the conversation centers on Trump, Saudi Arabia, and the specific portfolios of Yemen and Iran circa 2019 — Jared Kushner is the name the record points toward most directly.

The document doesn't confirm it. The surrounding archive might.

Plainsite is reading it.

Source: DOJ Epstein File and Trust Archive. Public record.

Public Record. Hidden Truth.

By Plainsite Investigations

Jeffrey Epstein died in a Manhattan federal jail cell in August 2019.

In 2023 — four years later — his last girlfriend was admitted to a prestigious advanced residency program at Columbia University’s College of Dental Medicine. The senior administrator who oversaw that program arranged an unorthodox faculty internship for her beforehand. He and another Columbia dentist gave her their highest recommendations.

Columbia has now demoted that administrator, Dr. James Fine.

He remains on faculty.

What the record shows.

This is not a complicated story. It is a simple one that powerful institutions have worked hard to make complicated.

In 2012, Epstein asked Columbia dentist Dr. Thomas Magnani to help get Karyna Shuliak — then a 22-year-old dental student from Belarus whose application had already been rejected — admitted to the dental school. A text message in the DOJ archive shows Dr. Fine met Shuliak in the lobby and brought her upstairs. Dr. Magnani texted Epstein that Fine would find out what would be on her admissions exam. Columbia has called that original admission an “irregular process.”

Dr. Magnani and the vice dean for academic affairs were disciplined in February 2026.

Dr. Fine was not — because his central involvement, Columbia said, came later.

In 2023, with Epstein four years dead, Dr. Fine arranged a special internship for Shuliak at the private practice he shared with Dr. Magnani — the same practice where Epstein had been a patient. Fine then wrote her his highest recommendation for the competitive residency program he oversaw. A third Columbia dentist who had advised Shuliak since 2015 also recommended her.

Columbia’s investigation found the 2023 admission technically proper. Shuliak met the qualifications, they said.

What they did not say: how many other applicants competed for that residency without the benefit of a faculty internship arranged by the program director himself, exam intelligence leaked a decade earlier, and three internal recommenders with a documented relationship to their applicant going back to Jeffrey Epstein.

The personal statement.

Karyna Shuliak’s admissions essay described her lifelong dream of becoming a dentist. She wrote warmly of her mentors — Dr. Magnani and Dr. Fine — crediting them with shaping her career.

She did not mention Jeffrey Epstein.

The man who got her into Columbia in the first place. The man whose phone she was on when he died. The man whose will names her as primary beneficiary of an estate currently valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

That omission was a choice. Admissions committees ask applicants to describe their path. Her path ran directly through Jeffrey Epstein. She described a different path.

What accountability has looked like so far.

Dr. Magnani: disciplined. Dr. Moss-Salentijn: disciplined. Dr. Fine: demoted — but retains faculty position and directs the dental practices. Karyna Shuliak: completed her residency, holds her New York dental license, faces no stated consequences. Columbia: issued statements. Concluded its investigation. Moved on.

The pattern the Epstein files keep showing.

Epstein is gone. His network is not.

The files document, in granular detail, how access to Epstein translated into institutional access for the people around him — admissions, credentials, positions, favors. Not through dramatic corruption but through the ordinary machinery of recommendation letters, introductions, internships, and phone calls between colleagues.

That machinery did not stop when he died. It kept running on the relationships he built, the obligations he created, and the silence those obligations purchased.

Dr. Fine knew Epstein as a patient. He met Shuliak through those connections. He arranged her internship. He wrote her recommendation. He oversaw her program. Four years after Epstein’s death, the man’s last girlfriend got her New York dental license with his help.

Columbia calls its investigation concluded.

Plainsite calls it a case study.

Two questions Columbia has not answered.

How many other applicants competed for the 2023 residency that Shuliak received — and were any of them informed that the program director had arranged a private internship for a competing applicant before the selection process began?

And how many other institutions are sitting on similar conclusions — finding technical compliance while the human record of what actually happened goes unwritten?

Plainsite Investigations reports on public records. All findings in this piece are drawn from documents in the official DOJ Epstein File and Trust Archive, Columbia University’s public statements, and reporting by The New York Times. Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what those documents and statements contain.

Public Record. Hidden Truth.

In Trump’s Washington, accountability is a selective instrument.

It comes fast and hard for Trump’s enemies — political opponents, defiant prosecutors, anyone who crosses the wrong line. For loyalists, it tends not to come at all. Pam Bondi understood this arrangement and operated accordingly.

As Attorney General, she stonewalled congressional inquiries into the Epstein files. She refused to appear for a deposition despite a subpoena. The DOJ under her watch insisted it had released everything on Epstein — a claim that strained credulity for anyone paying attention. She delivered the party line, on schedule, every time she was called upon. No consequences followed.

Then Trump fired her — casually, on the same day he brought her to the Supreme Court — and replaced her with his personal defense attorney.

Shortly after leaving the Justice Department in early April 2026, Bondi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

She underwent treatment — the details of which have not been disclosed — and according to Axios, is in the process of recovering. Katie Miller, former White House staffer and wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, announced it on X Tuesday evening, writing that Bondi had been “quietly kicking cancer’s ass the last few weeks.” The post was reposted by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Bondi has not addressed the diagnosis publicly.

We don’t celebrate illness. That’s not what this is.

But there is something worth sitting with here: the entire apparatus of the federal government, as currently configured, cannot touch Pam Bondi. Congress subpoenaed her — she didn’t show. Oversight committees demanded answers — they didn’t get them. The mechanisms that are supposed to produce accountability produced nothing.

And then something entirely outside that apparatus showed up anyway.

The prognosis, for what it’s worth, is statistically favorable. Thyroid cancer has a five-year survival rate exceeding 98%. Jared Kushner battled the same disease privately during Trump’s first term and came through it. Trump has already slotted Bondi into a seat on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — an AI advisory committee — suggesting her orbit hasn’t changed much.

In Trump’s world, getting fired is often just a lateral move.

What lingers isn’t the diagnosis. It’s the contrast.

A woman who helped ensure that powerful people faced no accountability for their behavior now faces something that doesn’t care who she knows, what position she held, or which subpoena she ignored. That’s not justice — the courts didn’t deliver it, and a cancer diagnosis isn’t a verdict. But for a city where the rules of accountability have been rewritten in real time, the irony is inescapable.

Washington couldn’t touch her.

Something else did.

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Plainsite publishes investigative work drawn from public records, court filings, and primary documentation. This piece represents the editorial opinion of the author. Readers with documents relevant to this or related subjects may contact us securely.

PLAINSITE · INVESTIGATIONS · PUBLIC RECORD. HIDDEN TRUTH.

THE DEMONSTRATION

Imagine you’re a journalist. You’ve done the work. You’ve verified the documents. You’ve given the subject their right of reply. The story is solid.

A source you need for the story sends over an interview agreement. Looks standard. Looks professional. You sign it.

Buried in the language is a clause that says if Peter Thiel’s company decides your story was wrong, you owe them money. No court. No jury. No appeal. Just a bill — due in two weeks.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s Objection AI. And the case list they’ve already built tells you exactly what this is really for.

WHAT THEY’VE CHOSEN TO INVESTIGATE

• Objection AI launched on April 15, 2026. Here are the cases they have accepted so far:

• Did Joe Rogan promote animal-grade medication? — RULED FALSE

• Is the French First Lady biologically male? — RULED FALSE

• Sexual abuse at Kanakuk Christian summer camps — RULED TRUE

• Inhumane treatment at “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility — PENDING

• Did the Biden administration selectively prosecute pro-life activists under the FACE Act? — PENDING

• Is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a war criminal? — PENDING

• Did Donald Trump sign Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book? — PENDING

Read that list again. Every single case either defends a figure central to the current political coalition in power, or targets one of its critics. Not one case cuts the other direction.

That is not objectivity. That is an editorial position dressed as a tribunal.

WHAT OBJECTION AI ACTUALLY IS

The company is called Objection AI. It may be the single dumbest venture to crawl out of Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel’s increasingly warped imagination in a decade — and that is a genuinely competitive field. It calls itself “the first AI tribunal.” The public record reveals it to be exactly as dangerous as it sounds — and considerably more telling about its true purpose than its founders intend.

For $2,000, anyone who believes they’ve been defamed can open a case. Former intelligence professionals examine the disputed reporting. An AI system reviews the record and issues a verdict in as few as 72 hours.

The company’s own website states it is not a court, not a private investigation agency, not a publisher, and not a censor.

What the terms of service actually establish is a binding arbitration mechanism — with Objection AI as the designated authority.

• The terms are unambiguous:

• Any party can open a case for $2,000

• Objection AI’s process determines the outcome

• Damages are uncapped

• There are no appeals

• Payment is due within two weeks of a finding

• No limit on damages. No appeals. Two weeks to pay. For context, that’s a stricter timeline than most parking tickets.

WHO BUILT IT AND WHY

Founder Aron D’Souza was the legal architect behind Peter Thiel’s destruction of Gawker Media — the litigation that drove an entire media company into bankruptcy. He was explicit about the connection at launch.

“Peter Thiel and I used the legal system to prove that journalists are not immune from accountability. The Gawker litigation took ten years and millions of dollars. Objection industrializes this process.”

That is not a mission statement about truth. That is a threat dressed as a product description.

The seed round included Thiel, tech investor Balaji Srinivasan, and venture firms Social Impact Capital and Off Piste Capital.

Among the early clients: Michael Sackler — scion of the family behind OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma.

That is the clientele. That is who this tool is being built for.

THE GAWKER BLUEPRINT

In 2007, Gawker Media published a story outing Thiel as gay. He didn’t argue. He didn’t issue a statement. He waited, identified a weapon, and secretly financed Hulk Hogan’s unrelated privacy lawsuit against the company.

The jury verdict was $140 million. Gawker filed for bankruptcy. The company was gone.

When the New York Times asked Thiel about it, he called it one of the “greater philanthropic things” he had done.

Philanthropy.

The lesson Thiel’s team drew from that case was not that a jury found for a plaintiff on the merits. The lesson was that financial attrition works. Run legal costs high enough, long enough, and most outlets fold before a verdict comes.

Objection AI is that logic applied at scale. The goal is not to win individual cases. It is to make the threat of cases cheap enough to deploy routinely — against any journalist covering subjects Thiel and his network would prefer left alone.

THE TRAP IN THE FINE PRINT

The mechanism for trapping journalists is straightforward. A source presents an interview agreement containing an arbitration clause that locks the journalist into Objection AI’s jurisdiction.

Sign for the interview. Sign away your legal standing.

Let’s be honest about this for a second. No journalist in their right mind is going to agree to binding arbitration with a billionaire’s private AI court just to get an interview. The premise is so transparently absurd that it almost undersells how cynical the design actually is. Because the goal was never really to get journalists to sign willingly.

The platform also suggests this language could be embedded into a website’s terms of service or a publisher’s employment contracts. A reporter could end up inside Thiel’s private court system without ever knowing it happened.

Anti-SLAPP statutes currently provide meaningful protection against frivolous defamation suits in many jurisdictions. Binding arbitration agreements are specifically designed to route disputes away from those protections — into private forums where the rules are set by whoever built the forum.

THE METHODOLOGY

Objection AI claims its investigators are drawn from the best of former CIA and FBI personnel. When researchers began looking at who was actually listed on their completed cases, the named investigators were quickly replaced with “anonymous investigator” listings.

A platform demanding transparency from journalists extended none of it to its own operation the moment scrutiny arrived.

In their completed cases, investigators sourced findings from previously published journalism and open-reference websites — fed into an AI to produce a determination. No original documents. No primary evidence.

That is not fact-checking. That is Googling with extra steps and a $2,000 price tag.

WHY IT PROBABLY FAILS — AND WHY THAT MISSES THE POINT

For the arbitration mechanism to function, journalists and publishers must affirmatively consent to it. At scale, once the clause is understood, that consent is unlikely to materialize.

The platform as currently designed is probably too clumsy to achieve what its promotional materials imply.

But operational failure is not the point.

Thiel has a documented history of funding ventures that normalize ideas before those ideas become policy. Objection AI doesn’t need to bankrupt a single journalist to succeed. It only needs to exist — to make the concept of a private AI court feel like a reasonable feature of the information landscape, until a more competently built version of the same architecture arrives.

The public record of who built this, who funded it, what cases it has chosen, and how it responds to scrutiny is worth documenting now.

Before that window shifts.

SOURCES

• Objection AI launch announcement, Business Wire, April 15, 2026

• TechCrunch: “Can AI judge journalism? A Thiel-backed startup says yes,” April 15, 2026

• Popular.info: “An oligarch’s dystopian scheme to discredit journalism with AI,” April 2026

• New York Times: Peter Thiel interview on Gawker litigation, May 2016

• Sydney Morning Herald: “Defend the rich: Enhanced Games founder turns to AI,” 2026

Plainsite publishes investigative work drawn from public records, court filings, and primary documentation. This piece represents the editorial opinion of the author. Readers with documents relevant to this or related subjects may contact us securely.

PLAINSITE · INVESTIGATIONS · PUBLIC RECORD. HIDDEN TRUTH.

Full Document Transcript — EFTA Archive All findings drawn from official DOJ public release. Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what the documents contain. (Below)

THE CONFESSOR & THE PREDATOR

A Plainsite Investigation — Parts I and II

Source: DOJ Epstein File Transparency Act (EFTA) Archive · Public Financial Records

Published: April 2026

—————————————————————————————

COVER

—————————————————————————————

PLAINSITE INVESTIGATIONS

THE CONFESSOR & THE PREDATOR

How Steve Hanson used Jeffrey Epstein as a private crisis manager for his affair — and what five DOJ documents reveal about both men.

Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Hanson, Founder of BR Guest Hospitality, photographed together getting pedicures.

—————————————————————————————

EDITOR’S NOTE — PARTS I AND II

—————————————————————————————

SERIES: Five Parts · The Epstein Files · A Plainsite Investigation

SOURCE: DOJ Epstein File Transparency Act (EFTA) Archive · Public Financial Records

What follows is Parts I and II of a five-part Plainsite investigation. The subject is Stephen Hanson — New York restaurateur, founder of BR Guest Hospitality — and his deep, sustained, and documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

I. THE CONFESSOR AND THE PREDATOR

Part I focuses on one affair and the man Hanson trusted to help him manage it.

II. THE DAUGHTER HE NEVER WORRIED ABOUT

Part II examines what happened next. The same man who invoked his daughters six times as the reason he could never let the truth come out was, in the same two-year window, coordinating contact between his teenage daughter and Jeffrey Epstein. Seven emails in the DOJ archive reference or arrange those contacts — beginning six months after Hanson wrote that Epstein was “the only one I would trust with this nightmare.” The documents speak for themselves.

All findings are drawn from documents in the official DOJ public release and public financial records. Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what those documents contain.

WHAT FOLLOWS:

III. The GS 5017 Private Jet — PART III

The March 2016 purchase of a private aircraft through SFS, LLC — an entity formed solely for that purpose and listed as wholly owned by Stephen Hanson. The transaction documents appear not in Hanson’s files, but in the official DOJ Epstein archive. Epstein is present in the email chain, actively directing the purchase.

IV. The $2.5 Million — PART IV

Jeffrey Epstein’s undisclosed role in Stephen Hanson’s business dealings — and what Hanson provided in return. From the 2013 BR Guest separation, in which Sternlicht characterized Hanson’s payment as “your $2.5m blackmail payment,” to the Life Hotel collapse, in which Epstein advised Hanson to sell before the partners’ audit could proceed.

V. The Accounting — PART V

The question this entire series builds toward: what does it mean that a man with this documented history has never once been asked to account for it — not by the press, not by his industry, not by the institutions whose names appear in his family foundation’s tax filings?

PUBLICATION

Series: Five-part Plainsite investigation

Started: April 2026

Source: DOJ EFTA archive · Public financial records

Method: Document-based reporting. No allegations beyond what the documents contain.

—————————————————————————————

PART 1 — OVERVIEW: THE MAN HE TRUSTED

—————————————————————————————

Document Basis: EFTA00667046 · EFTA02477498 · EFTA02392003 · EFTA00634942 · EFTA02463525 · EFTA02458203

Cover Photo: EFTA01196242 · DOJ Public Release

Between June 2014 and July 2016, Steve Hanson — founder of BR Guest Hospitality, one of New York’s most prominent restaurant empires — sent a series of emails to Jeffrey Epstein about a woman. Not to his lawyer. Not to a therapist. Not to a close family member. But to Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails, now part of the official DOJ document release, trace a two-year arc in which Hanson grows increasingly frightened, increasingly obsessive, and increasingly reliant on Epstein’s counsel about a woman he had been involved with for a decade. They also trace something else: the gradual construction of a narrative weapon — the label of liar, the label of blackmailer — deployed against a woman before she has said a single public word.

What emerges from reading these emails in sequence is a portrait of two men who share the same fundamental instinct when a woman threatens their control: discredit her first. Build the story. Get ahead of the truth.

“there is no one else I would trust with this nightmare”

— STEPHEN HANSON TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN · MAY 1, 2016 · EFTA02463523

One of those men was a convicted sex offender who trafficked girls across international borders and whose estate would ultimately pay hundreds of millions in settlements to his victims. The other man chose him — above everyone else in his life — as the one person he could trust.

THE MEN:

Stephen Hanson — THE CONFESSOR

Founder, BR Guest Hospitality — the New York restaurant group behind Dos Caminos, Blue Water Grill, and Ruby Foo’s. Author of the emails.

Jeffrey Epstein — THE CONFIDANT

Financier. Convicted sex offender. Child trafficker. Recipient of the emails. Died August 10, 2019.

WHAT THE EMAILS SHOW:

Span: Jun 2014 — Jul 2016 (25 months)

Subject: A woman Hanson had been involved with for a decade.

Pattern: Escalating fear. Narrative construction. Pre-emptive discredit.

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SECTION I — THE AFFAIR HE COULDN’T END

—————————————————————————————

The woman at the center of these emails is never named in the documents we have. Hanson refers to her only as “that girl,” “the girl I have known for awhile,” and eventually “the California person.” She is systematically dehumanized through abstraction even as the evidence of their relationship accumulates in the very act of describing it.

He never calls her a woman. Not once. In five documents spanning two years, she is always “the girl.” Whether this reflects how Hanson genuinely thought of her, or whether it is a distancing mechanism, the effect is the same: she is diminished before she has been described.

What the documents establish, in Hanson’s own words: he had known her for a decade. He lent her money to purchase a diamond ring. He funded horses. He fielded her calls almost daily. He had been paying for her life, or a significant portion of it, for long enough that he calls the situation a “trap” — a word that appears across multiple emails, always describing the situation, never his own choices that created it.

He never once asks what she needs. He never expresses concern for her wellbeing. She is described exclusively in terms of the inconvenience she causes him. A nightmare. A trap. A source of panic that wakes him at 3 in the morning.

HOW HE NAMES HER — never “a woman”:

Email 1: “the girl”

Email 2: “that girl”

Email 3: “the girl I have known for awhile”

Email 4: “the California person”

Email 5: “the girl”

3 AM — A source of panic that wakes him at 3 in the morning. Not concern for her. Concern for himself.

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SECTION II — FIVE DOCUMENTS: THE FULL TIMELINE

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5 Emails · 25 Months

Jun 25–26, 2014 · EFTA00667046: Epstein Already Knows

Jan 7, 2016 · EFTA02477498: 3:16 AM — The Diamond Ring

Feb 6, 2016 · EFTA02392003: The Scottsdale Origin — Confirmed

Mar 13, 2016 · EFTA00634942: The Scottsdale Panic

May 1, 2016 · EFTA02463523: “How Are You” — The Disguised Subject

Jul 2016 · EFTA02458203: The Script Arrives

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DOC 1 OF 13 — EPSTEIN ALREADY KNOWS

EFTA00667046 · June 25–26, 2014

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In the midst of a condolence email chain about a mutual acquaintance’s death, Epstein inserts a single casual line: “yes i know,, how s the girl”. No clarification. No “which girl.” He already knows her, and Hanson’s response is: “I’m in Tahoe — business.” He does not answer the question.

By June 2014 this woman is already a standing topic between them. Epstein tracks her the way he tracked everything in his network. And Hanson, asked directly, deflects. He had no active company at this point — BR Guest sold, nothing yet in development. There is no documented business reason for Hanson to be in Tahoe in June 2014.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA00667046 — JUNE 25–26, 2014 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Shanson900 [REDACTED]

To: “jeffrey E.” <jeevacation@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: My Brother

Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:54:50 +0000

I’m in Tahoe - business.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 25, 2014 at 5:44 PM, “jeffrey E.” <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:

yes i know,, how s the girl

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 8:37 PM, Shanson900 [REDACTED] wrote:

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Maury DiMauro [REDACTED]

Date: June 25, 2014 at 5:35:41 PM PDT

To: [REDACTED]

Subject: Fwd: My Brother

Begin forwarded message:

From: Faith Kates [REDACTED]

Subject: Fwd: My Brother

Date: June 25, 2014 11:50:57 AM EDT

It’s with the heaviest heart I send you this note. Yesterday June 24th Michael Kates passed away. He had a heart attack and died at home. We are all in shock and having a hard time understanding it all.

Caption: EPSTEIN: “YES I KNOW,, HOW S THE GIRL” — HANSON DEFLECTS TO TAHOE

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DOC 2 OF 13 — 3:16 AM — THE DIAMOND RING

EFTA02477498 · January 7, 2016

—————————————————————————————

Eighteen months after Epstein’s casual check-in, Hanson contacts him again — at 3:16 in the morning. Subject: “Need to talk to you.” He frames the diamond ring as a loan she never repaid. The sums and the daily calls accumulate into a portrait of a man who has been paying for years and is starting to panic.

He does not say “I made a mistake.” He says “some bs story being said about she and I.” The story exists. He needs Epstein to help him get ahead of it.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02477498 — JANUARY 7, 2016 · 3:16 AM · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

Sent: Thursday, January 7, 2016 3:16 AM

To: jeevacation@gmail.com

Subject: Need to talk to you

The girl I have known for awhile now is driving me nuts. Trying to make my life difficult One issue I need your help on how to resolve is I lent her money a year ago to buy a diamond ring she was supposedly going to resell - but never has - 20 I’m concerned my family could get tricked into thinking that / for one not knowing how she has been holding me up in taking care of her - I can’t tell you the amount of money I have loaned her Both Brynn and Deana where there when I helped her out and I can’t tell you how much I mind them - I would never want to be with out them ever

I’m so distraught - I have been concerned for a while now but it’s starting to really affect me - I can’t have it ruin my life

I love them so much - as I have told you often my family means everything to me I’ve always been there for them have always been able to help me figure things out - I need your help Let’s discuss the next time I see you Jeffrey - I never want to be with out my family - as a family best from my [device metadata follows in original]

Caption: 3:16 AM · DIAMOND RING · “SOME BS STORY BEING SAID ABOUT SHE AND I”

—————————————————————————————

DOC 3 OF 13 — THE SCOTTSDALE ORIGIN — CONFIRMED

EFTA02392003 · February 6, 2016

—————————————————————————————

Four weeks after the 3am diamond ring email, Hanson writes again. Subject: “Jeffrey.” This email does something none of the others do — it confirms exactly where this began.

His own words: “who I have known for many years — actually from when I had my hotel in Scottsdale and she and her friends would hang around.” The James Hotel Scottsdale opened 2004, sold 2006 — placing the start of this relationship at approximately 2004–2005, consistent with his “10 years ago” reference one month later.

This email is also where he names Brynn — his eldest daughter — for the first time. Epstein now has a named reference. Ten months later, Hanson will bring Brynn (then 15) to meet Epstein privately. That visit will be the subject of a future Plainsite installment.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02392003 — FEBRUARY 6, 2016 · 12:34 PM · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

Sent: Saturday, February 6, 2016 12:34 PM

To: jeevacation@gmail.com

Subject: jeffrey

I have mentioned before the issues I am having with this lady - who I have known for many years - actually from when I had my hotel in Scottsdale and she and her friends would hang around - it has now grown to the point where I am very concerned that I can’t get rid of her - its not that I want to be with her - I’ve always been dodging her n=to mention how she has been holding me up in taking care of her - I can’t tell you the amount of money I have loaned her both Brynn and Deana where there last week and I can’t tell you how much I mind them - I would never want to be with out them - ever

I’m so distraught - I have been concerned for a while now but it’s starting to really affect me. I can’t have it ruin my life or my family [device metadata follows in original]

Caption: “FROM WHEN I HAD MY HOTEL IN SCOTTSDALE” · ORIGIN CONFIRMED · BRYNN NAMED FOR THE FIRST TIME

—————————————————————————————

DOC 4 OF 13 — THE SCOTTSDALE PANIC

EFTA00634942 · March 13, 2016

—————————————————————————————

Subject: “Jeffrey.” He woke up in a panic. He describes a relationship that “started out 10 years ago as a business deal” — placing the origin at 2006, his Scottsdale years.

He admits the core truth in his own words: “years ago I made the decision to keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family.” He has been paying for a decade. To prevent her from speaking. This is hush money in everything but name.

He mentions his daughters as “especially” important. His wife Deana is not referenced. She is not part of his moral accounting.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA00634942 — MARCH 13, 2016 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

To: jeevacation@gmail.com

Subject: Jeffrey

Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2016 12:46:02 +0000

I have spoken to you so many times regarding the issue I am having with that girl from Scottsdale Punch line she is a rotten bitch that consistently makes shit up - think she is a total psychopath - great at making up stories that are convincing

I mentioned before what started out 10 years ago as a business Deal - flipped a house or two - then bought some stupid ring she was going to sell yet never did - then to horses which actually isn’t that bad on increased value but the game doesn’t stop- which I wish it could stop

My issue is that years ago I made the decision to keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family. Seems the easy way out is by spending 1 minute on the phone vs who knows whats next

Punch line is - I have been concerned for a while now - distraught -thinking that this could get out of control and effect my family -and effect my kids in how they see me as a dad - we have spoken many a times how I love my family - especially the girls - I could never imagine not being close to them - not living with them. I love them so much - they mean everything to me - I never want to be with them

So I need your help on trying to figure things out - or at least how I can personally. Calm down and not be so stressed out about anything ever coming between me and my family

If you can give it some thought - I think you said you would be around a week or two

Sorry for the ramble - but woke up in a panic today

Sent from my iPad

Caption: “10 YEARS AGO AS A BUSINESS DEAL” · HUSH PAYMENTS · “WOKE UP IN A PANIC TODAY”

—————————————————————————————

DOC 5 OF 13 — “HOW ARE YOU” — THE DISGUISED SUBJECT

EFTA02463523 · May 1, 2016

—————————————————————————————

The subject line reads: “How are you.” The email contains nothing about how Epstein is. It is entirely about the Scottsdale woman and Hanson’s escalating fear. He has disguised the subject because he doesn’t want a paper trail with her name on it.

He is still waking at 3am. He still calls it a trap. Now he imagines dying and not being there to defend himself. He worries about his daughters’ perception of him. He does not mention his wife.

And he writes the line that gives this entire investigation its name: “there is no one else I would trust with this nightmare.” The man he is writing to has, by this point, served time for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02463523 — MAY 1, 2016 · 6:34 PM · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

Sent: Sunday, May 1, 2016 6:34 PM

To: jeevacation@gmail.com

Subject: How are you

Need your help trying to figure out what best course of action should be regarding my dilemma with that girl I told you about from Scottsdale The entire situation is taking a toll on me -each day it seems that I feel more remorse of having fallen into this trap - with no way out As I said before it’s been a nightmare and it’s been a nightmare especially for me - I sometimes wake up at 3am - in a panic. As now I’m concerned -what if I dye one day in the near future - I’m not around to defend my self-and prove that there was nothing between us - I’m sure she will conjure up some lies - and my worst thoughts are how it will effect the girls - they are great kids and this could throw them off - who knows the psychological affect it could cause - and all from made up stories I know your busy , but maybe if you could give this some thought - as there is no one else I would trust with this nightmare

Sent from my iPad [device metadata follows in original]

Caption: SUBJECT: “HOW ARE YOU” — DISGUISED · “NO ONE ELSE I WOULD TRUST WITH THIS NIGHTMARE”

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DOC 6 OF 13 — THE SCRIPT ARRIVES

EFTA02458203 · July 3 + July 30, 2016

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July 3: Hanson emails about “the California person” — horses, phone calls, 3000 miles away. Still “the trap I’m in.” He asks for a way out of the “horrible situation.”

July 30: Epstein replies. This is the moment the coaching completes. Hanson came to Epstein over two years with vague anxiety. Epstein sends him back with a weapon.

Epstein tells him she is a blackmailer. Tells him to cut her off completely. And references — explicitly — operations in China that “are set up to only do that.” To get rid of female blackmailers.

“its a shame you cant send her to another country where they deal with blackmailers more effectively. in china there are cos that are set up to only do that.”

— JEFFREY EPSTEIN TO STEPHEN HANSON · JULY 30, 2016 · EFTA02458203

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02458203 — JULY 3 + JULY 30, 2016 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

[HANSON TO EPSTEIN — July 3, sent from iPad]:

The California person - actually its great she lives on the west coast 3000 miles away

I invested in what started off to be one horse - has grown into a expensive hobby - but keep her from breaking my balls - except for the excessive prone calls - consistently listening to crap about horses - I can’t stan= the calls - as short as they are - they are still a pain

Any ideas on how to get out of the call loop or suck it up as its part of t=e trap I’m in ?

Call after u have some ideas - when your free

Sent from my iPad

[EPSTEIN TO HANSON — July 30, 12:13 PM]:

From: jeffrey L. <jeevacation@gmail.com>

Sent: Saturday, July 30 2016 12:13 PM

To: Stephen Hanson

Subject: Re: Jeffrey

she is such a bitch, and money hungry, you have to be careful, she will try to hold you and your family up, she will make up crazy stories, tell many lies and try to bring havoc when she realizes her money machine is no longer available / its a shame you cant send her to another country where they deal with blackmailers more effectively. in china there are cos that are set up to only do that get rid of female blackmailers. they move them to other cities countries and try to find them real work

please note

The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved

Caption: EPSTEIN: “GET RID OF FEMALE BLACKMAILERS” · CHINA OPERATIONS · THE SCRIPT INSTALLED

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SECTION III — WHAT THE WORD “LIES” REALLY MEANS

—————————————————————————————

Hanson’s Chosen Word, Unpacked.

Hanson does not say she is lying about an affair.

He says she is lying about someone — and that those lies are destroying his family.

01. He never denies the relationship.

Not in the 3:16 AM email. Not in the Scottsdale confession. Not in the “how are you” email that is not about how Epstein is. He never once writes: “nothing happened.”

02. What he says she is lying about.

“Lies” in his telling means — in his own written words — “someone” and “something more than a business thing going on.” He needs to neutralize a specific claim she is making about him.

03. The money kept the story buried.

He chose — his phrase — to “keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family.” He paid so she would not speak. This is the working definition of hush money.

04. Who he was protecting.

Not himself — his daughters. “especially my daughters.” The thing she would say — whatever it was — was something he could not let his daughters hear.

05. Who he consulted.

A convicted sex offender. Not a lawyer. Not a therapist. Not a priest. A man whose expertise was how to make young women with inconvenient stories stop talking.

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SECTION IV — THE MAN HE CHOSE TO CONFESS TO

—————————————————————————————

A Federal Sex Offender · By Choice.

Hanson writes that Epstein is “the only one I would trust with this nightmare.” The person he is entrusting with a crisis about a woman threatening to tell his daughters something he must suppress at all costs — is a man convicted of paying underage girls for sex.

That choice is not collateral to the story.

It is the story.

JEFFREY E. EPSTEIN — Convicted Sex Offender · Financier · Co-trafficker

2008 — Pleads guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor — a state felony. Required to register as a Tier 1 sex offender.

2008 — Serves 13 months under a controversial non-prosecution agreement, during which he is allowed work release for up to 12 hours daily.

2014–2016 — Runs a known sex-offender household while Hanson writes him thirteen documented emails for advice on women, daughters, and family.

2019 — Arrested on federal charges — sex trafficking of minors, including victims as young as 14. Indictment describes a decade-plus pattern.

2019 — Found dead in his Manhattan federal jail cell on August 10. Ruled suicide. His co-conspirators — and his donors — remain a matter of public record and unanswered questions.

2021 — Ghislaine Maxwell convicted on five of six federal counts of sex trafficking minors, conspiracy to entice minors, and transportation of a minor with intent to engage in illegal sex acts.

—————————————————————————————

SECTION V — THE WIFE HE NEVER MENTIONS

—————————————————————————————

A Silence That Reads As A Decision.

“Across thirteen emails spanning 2014–2016, discussing fear, money, a decade-long relationship with another woman, and his moral reckoning — Hanson names his wife exactly once. In a forwarded chain, in passing, about stock in a vitamin company.”

DEANA HANSON — Wife of Stephen Hanson. Mother of his children. The woman most directly affected by a decade of payments to another woman. She does not appear as a subject, a concern, or a consideration in any email where Hanson is planning his response to the Scottsdale crisis.

Total emails in Part 1 of this investigation: 13

Emails in which Hanson mentions his daughters as the reason for his fear: 6

Emails in which Hanson mentions his wife Deana as a consideration in the crisis: 0

Emails in which Hanson uses the phrase “the family” — meaning him and his daughters: 4

Emails in which Hanson asks how Deana will feel when this becomes public: 0

Emails in which Hanson asks Epstein to keep Deana from finding out: 0

Emails in which Hanson considers coming clean to Deana: 0

—————————————————————————————

SECTION VI — WHAT THE DOCUMENTS PROVE

—————————————————————————————

What the documents prove — in his own words.

Six Facts That Are Not Subject To Interpretation.

01. A RELATIONSHIP LASTING A DECADE

Hanson’s own phrase: “started out 10 years ago as a business deal.”

Origin: Scottsdale, 2006.

02. PAYMENTS TO SILENCE

“Keep the bs business going rather than take the chance that she attacks the family.”

Payments made specifically to suppress speech. Hush money by definition.

03. PROTECTION OF DAUGHTERS — NOT SELF

“Especially my daughters.” Six emails cite the daughters as the reason for concealment. Zero cite the wife.

04. 3:16 AM — PANIC OUTSIDE BUSINESS HOURS

The tone of the January 7, 2016 email is not a business inquiry. It is a man in crisis, writing before dawn, seeking a fixer.

05. 13 EMAILS ON THIS TOPIC

Across 2014–2016. A sustained correspondence with a convicted sex offender — selected, chosen, returned to. Not an accident.

06. CHINA — EPSTEIN’S RESPONSE

“Cos that are set up to only do that” — get rid of female blackmailers. Hanson is given a script. He accepts it.

THESE ARE NOT ALLEGATIONS. THEY ARE THE RECORD.

DOJ Epstein File & Trust Archive · Accessed October 2025

—————————————————————————————

PART 2 — THE DAUGHTER HE NEVER WORRIED ABOUT

SECTION VII — THE CONTRADICTION

—————————————————————————————

In Part 1, Stephen Hanson invoked “especially my daughters” six times as the reason he must suppress a woman’s story.

In Part 2, he does something that cannot be reconciled with that fear.

He brought his 15-year-old daughter to Jeffrey Epstein’s home. Repeatedly.

The man he described as “the only one I would trust with this nightmare” was invited into his family. Not kept out of it.

Brynn — his eldest, then a high-school student at Marymount — was brought to Epstein’s Manhattan residence for school-project advice, college advice, term paper topics, cosmetic demonstrations, and Thanksgiving-day visits. The documents span April 2015 to December 2016.

This is the contradiction this series documents. A father whose stated fear was that his daughters would learn something was, in the same period, giving them a reason to know the man himself.

Brynn’s Age · Apr 2015: 14

Brynn’s Age · Dec 2016: 15

Documented Visits: 7

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DOC 7 OF 13 — THE SCHOOL PROJECT

EFTA00644503 · April 4, 2015

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Hanson emails Epstein: “Brynn / oldest would like your advise on a school team project. We have horse back riding but can be to u anytime after 130 — so what is best.”

Steve Hanson graduated from NYU’s Stern School of Business. He built a restaurant empire generating $200 million in annual revenue. He negotiated multi-million dollar transactions and managed hundreds of employees. The Stephen P. Hanson Family Foundation lists Marymount School among its grantees in public IRS tax filings — one of Manhattan’s most exclusive Catholic girls’ schools, where Brynn was enrolled.

According to the DOJ documents, her father could not help her brainstorm a school team project without consulting a man with no children, no academic credentials, and a federal conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA00644503 — APRIL 4, 2015 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Shanson900 [REDACTED]

To: “jeffrey E.” <jeevacation@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: Today

Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2015 13:00:03 +0000

[EPSTEIN to HANSON, Apr 4, 2015 at 8:51 AM]:

can we do imax tomor with good seats?

[HANSON to EPSTEIN, Apr 4, 2015 at 8:45 AM]:

Brynn / oldest would like your advise on a school team project. We have horse back riding but can be to u anytime after 130- so what is best

Tonite furious 7. Which actually has good reviews

For both the 7 pm -imax reserved seats. C25-27. Off to the side some what - best they had.

But if we don’t like the seats we have 4 to the 740 show-regular screen

Sent from my iPad

[EPSTEIN to HANSON]:

Lady said the seats where good since the screen is so large

Sent from my iPhone

Caption: “BRYNN / OLDEST WOULD LIKE YOUR ADVISE ON A SCHOOL TEAM PROJECT”

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DOC 8 OF 13 — “BE THERE IN 10. WITH BRYNN.”

EFTA02505763 · April 5, 2015

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The following evening — Sunday April 5 at 10:19 PM — someone sent Epstein a five-word text: “Be there in 10. With brynn.”

The sender’s identity is completely redacted in the DOJ archive. The email address field is blank. Jmail lists the sender as “Unknown.”

A teenage girl. Sunday night. After 10pm. Arriving at Jeffrey Epstein’s home.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02505763 — APRIL 5, 2015 · 10:19 PM · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: [SENDER IDENTITY COMPLETELY REDACTED BY DOJ]

To: Jeffrey E / Epstein

Subject: Be there in 10. With brynn

Date: Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:19 PM

Be there in 10. With brynn.

Sent from my iPhone

[device metadata follows in original]

Caption: SENDER FULLY REDACTED BY DOJ · “BE THERE IN 10. WITH BRYNN” · SUNDAY 10:19 PM

—————————————————————————————

DOC 9 OF 13 — A SERIOUS SITUATION

EFTA02475176 · January 6, 2016

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Hanson emails Epstein multiple items. After arranging household staff for Epstein, he writes: “I have a serious situation to tell you about — need your advice but can I text you rather then in email — Then [REDACTED] keeps asking if she can get your advice on college — starting to freak out on not being admitted to a good school.”

Two things are notable. He has a serious situation he will only discuss by text — not in writing. And the name of the person freaking out about college is redacted by the DOJ.

In documents where Brynn is named freely, this name is not. That redaction — in a document about yearbook clubs and resume building — is a distinction the DOJ made for a reason.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02475176 — JANUARY 6, 2016 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson <shan[REDACTED]>

Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 2:42 PM

To: jeevacation@gmail.com

Subject: Few items

Made contact with placement agency/ lady. Mellisa Piltos She has placed couples / property mgrs / chefs-after a review of your needs she seems to have an understanding of the type of employees you want and has worked with all the big boys you know Shall I connect her with lesley ?

I have a serious situation to tell you about - need your advice but can I text you rather then in email - Then [REDACTED] keeps asking if she can get your advice on college- starting to freak out on not being admitted to a good school - she actually is studying hard and even joined the class year book club so it looks good on her resume. Are you still around thur and free after 330 ?

[device metadata follows in original]

Caption: REDACTED NAME FREAKING OUT ABOUT COLLEGE · “SERIOUS SITUATION” FOR TEXT ONLY

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DOC 10 OF 13 — “SHOW HER FACE.”

EFTA00336648 · October 28, 2015

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Lesley Groff — Epstein’s personal assistant — emailed Hanson: “Hello Steve...Jeffrey is here in NY at the house and says you can stop by! He says to bring your daughter if she is available so she can show Jena her face (and how great Accutain works)”

Hanson: “I’m 5 blocks away. I’ll see where brynn.” Groff: “Great!”

Epstein was not a physician or dermatologist. He had no medical credentials. He did have, documented across the DOJ archive, a pattern of directing the physical routines of young women in his circle. Brynn was being brought to demonstrate results to another young woman in Epstein’s home. Hanson was five blocks away and went to find her.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA00336648 — OCTOBER 28, 2015 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Lesley Groff [REDACTED]

To: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

Subject: Re: Jeffrey Epstein

Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2015 18:38:41 +0000

Great!

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 28, 2015, at 2:35 PM, Stephen Hanson [REDACTED] wrote:

> I’m 5 blocks away. I’ll see where brynn .

> Sent from my iPad

>> On Oct 28, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Lesley Groff [REDACTED] wrote:

>> Hello Steve...Jeffrey is here in NY at the house and says you can stop by! He says to bring your daughter if she is available so she can show Jena her face (and how great Accutain works)

>> Let me know!

>> Thanks, Lesley

Caption: LESLEY GROFF: “BRING YOUR DAUGHTER... SO SHE CAN SHOW JENA HER FACE” · HANSON: “I’M 5 BLOCKS AWAY”

—————————————————————————————

DOC 11 OF 13 — THANKSGIVING DAY

EFTA01743243 · November 24, 2016

—————————————————————————————

Hanson: “We need to be home then at 2. But if ok I’ll bring brynn over to see [REDACTED] play with the cats.”

The person Brynn was brought to watch on Thanksgiving Day is redacted by the DOJ.

Hanson confirms they needed to be home by 2pm — a brief, scheduled visit on a family holiday, to a convicted pedophile’s home.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA01743243 — NOVEMBER 24, 2016 · THANKSGIVING · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2016 5:34:07 PM

To: “jeffrey E.” <jeevacation@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: Brynn and I where going to stop over at 1 today. Ok?

We need to be home then at 2

But if ok I’ll bring brynn over to see [REDACTED] play with the cats.

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 24, 2016 at 12:07 PM, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:

2 better

On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Stephen Hanson [REDACTED] wrote:

Sent from my iPad

[Epstein confidentiality footer follows in original]

Caption: THANKSGIVING DAY · “BRING BRYNN OVER TO SEE [REDACTED] PLAY WITH THE CATS”

—————————————————————————————

DOC 12 OF 13 — THE TERM PAPER

EFTA02669410 · November 27, 2016

—————————————————————————————

Subject: “Brynn wanted me to ask.” Hanson asks Epstein for term paper topic ideas.

Epstein replies: “transgender? life on mars. self driving cars. genetic engineering. living to 120 years old.”

Hanson: “Tks I’m sure she will want you to proof read once she picks a topic.”

The girl in these documents was attending one of New York City’s most academically rigorous private schools — joining clubs, building her resume. She did not need Jeffrey Epstein to suggest term paper topics. Her father chose to make him available to her anyway.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02669410 — NOVEMBER 27, 2016 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Shanson900 [REDACTED]

Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2016 8:45 PM

To: jeffrey E.

Subject: Re: Brynn wanted me to ask

Tks I’m sure she will want you to proof read once she picks a topic If your swamped just let me know

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 27, 2016 at 3:24 PM, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:

transgender? life on mars. self driving cars. genetic engineering. living to 120 years old

On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Shanson900 [REDACTED] wrote:

You for some Ideas For a term paper She needs 3 ideas to start - if u have one or two

“A contemporary topic of your choice not focused on US.”

Sent from my iPhone

[Epstein confidentiality footer follows in original]

Caption: “BRYNN WANTED ME TO ASK” · TERM PAPER TOPICS · EPSTEIN TO PROOFREAD

—————————————————————————————

DOC 13 OF 13 — A HOLIDAY GIFT FOR KARINA

EFTA02665313 · December 27, 2016

—————————————————————————————

“When are u free today. Brynn also has a holiday gift for Karina — would like to see her at some point.”

Epstein: “1030 morning or 430?” Hanson: “430.”

Karyna Shuliak is the woman Epstein left $100 million, his private island, and his properties to in his will. She was among the closest young women in his circle.

By December 2016 Brynn had a holiday gift for her and wanted to see her. The relationship between Epstein’s world and the Hanson family had become social, reciprocal, and normalized.

DOCUMENT TRANSCRIPT — EFTA02665313 — DECEMBER 27, 2016 · DOJ ARCHIVE:

From: Stephen Hanson [REDACTED]

Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2016 2:56 PM

To: jeffrey E.

Subject: Re:

430.

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 27, 2016 at 7:04 AM, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:

1030 morning or 430?

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Shanson900 [REDACTED] wrote:

When are u free today

Brynn also has a holiday gift for Karina - would like to see her at some point

Sent from my iPhone

[Epstein confidentiality footer follows in original]

Caption: “BRYNN ALSO HAS A HOLIDAY GIFT FOR KARINA” · CONFIRMED FOR 4:30 PM

—————————————————————————————

SECTION VIII — WHAT THE EPSTEIN CLASS LOOKED LIKE

—————————————————————————————

One Man’s Correspondence As A Portrait.

The Epstein archive is often discussed as a list of names — a flight log, a black book, a client list people keep demanding be released. That framing makes it sound like a conspiracy. It isn’t. It’s a pattern of behavior — among a recognizable class of men — that the documents render fully legible.

Stephen Hanson is not the most famous name in that archive. That is precisely what makes these emails useful. He is a competent, successful American businessman — a restaurateur, a philanthropist, the founder of a family foundation — whose correspondence with Epstein, read in order, shows what proximity to Epstein actually looked like in practice.

It looked like a man paying another woman for a decade to keep his daughters from finding out something. It looked like asking a sex offender how to make her stop. It looked like bringing his teenage daughter to that same man’s home — seven times — within the same two-year window.

The word for that is not “scandal.” It is not “affair.” It is a category of behavior the documents require us to name honestly.

TRAITS OF THE CLASS — What the emails show about the men who wrote to Jeffrey Epstein:

01. They treated women as problems to be managed — not as people with stories of their own.

02. They paid to silence those stories — and reframed the payments, to themselves, as “a business deal.”

03. They protected the image they projected to their daughters — while exposing those same daughters to men like Epstein.

04. They did not consult lawyers or therapists first. They consulted Epstein. He was the expert they trusted.

05. They did not stop after his 2008 conviction. They continued — in writing, from their own email accounts, with their own names.

06. They assumed no one would ever read it. The DOJ archive is that assumption reversed.

Plainsite exists because the documents exist.

Our job is only to read them carefully, in order, and write down what they say.

— PLAINSITE INVESTIGATIONS · EDITORIAL BOARD

—————————————————————————————

SECTION IX — TWO WOMEN. NO ANSWERS. YET.

—————————————————————————————

The Unresolved Human Record.

THE SCOTTSDALE WOMAN

Named nowhere in the archive. Hanson’s own words place her first in his life around 2004–2005, when she and her friends “would hang around” his Scottsdale hotel. She would have been in her teens or early twenties. No one has asked her for her account. The DOJ archive contains his words about her — not hers.

BRYNN HANSON

Then 14 and 15 years old. Brought to Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan residence across 2015–2016 — with several documented emails coordinating her visits — beginning six months after her father wrote that Epstein was “the only one I would trust with this nightmare.” She has never been asked publicly what she remembers of those visits.

QUESTIONS THE RECORD LEAVES OPEN:

Q.01 — Was the Scottsdale woman a minor when the relationship began? Hanson’s own dating places the origin in his hotel-owner years. The question deserves an answer.

Q.02 — What were the sums paid to her over the decade-long “business deal”? Financial records exist.

Q.03 — What advice did Epstein ultimately give Hanson by phone and in person — beyond the lines we can read in email?

Q.04 — What did Brynn Hanson do on those visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s home?

Q.05 — Who is the redacted teenager mentioned across the Brynn-era documents — the one “freaking out about college,” the one watching “cats” on Thanksgiving?

Q.06 — How many more men in Epstein’s correspondence have archives that, read in order, tell a version of this same story? Plainsite is reading them.

We will keep reading the documents. One man at a time.

— PLAINSITE INVESTIGATIONS · END OF SERIES ONE

—————————————————————————————

SOURCE DOCUMENTS CITED IN THIS REPORT

—————————————————————————————

EFTA00667046 — June 25–26, 2014 — Epstein Already Knows

EFTA02477498 — January 7, 2016 — 3:16 AM, The Diamond Ring

EFTA02392003 — February 6, 2016 — The Scottsdale Origin

EFTA00634942 — March 13, 2016 — The Scottsdale Panic

EFTA02463523 — May 1, 2016 — “How Are You” / This Nightmare

EFTA02458203 — July 3 + 30, 2016 — The Script Arrives

EFTA00644503 — April 4, 2015 — The School Project

EFTA02505763 — April 5, 2015 — “Be There In 10. With Brynn.”

EFTA02475176 — January 6, 2016 — A Serious Situation

EFTA00336648 — October 28, 2015 — “Show Her Face”

EFTA01743243 — November 24, 2016 — Thanksgiving Day

EFTA02669410 — November 27, 2016 — The Term Paper

EFTA02665313 — December 27, 2016 — A Holiday Gift for Karina

All documents sourced from the DOJ Epstein File Transparency Act (EFTA) Archive.

Public financial records sourced from IRS tax filings, public corporate records, and court documents.

Plainsite makes no allegations beyond what the documents contain.

plainsite.com · A Plainsite Investigation · April 2026