Did I Work for Jeffrey Epstein?

A True Story in Narrative Form By Robin P.

Work in Progress — Second Edit

Warning: Adult Content and disturbing subject matter.

With Jeffrey Epstein dead in federal custody following his 2019 death, and Ghislaine Maxwell subsequently convicted for her role in the sexual abuse and trafficking of minors, I began asking myself a question that still bothers me:

Did I unknowingly work for Jeffrey Epstein?

I don’t know the answer.

What I do know is what happened to me, what I saw, what I was told, and what I discovered years later. Somewhere along the way, those pieces began forming a picture I never expected to see.

This story begins in Placerville, California, in the late 1970s.

The Christmas Present

Christmas 1978.

I was 12-years-old when I found a present beneath our Christmas tree from the family maid!

I mentioned it to my mother.

She smiled.

“Put it down,” she said.

When Christmas morning arrived, everyone gathered around the tree. Presents were opened one after another. At some point, my mother pointed toward the package from the maid.

“Open that one.”

Everyone except me seemed to know what was inside.

I began tearing away the wrapping paper.

It was a magazine.

Then I recognized it.

“Sex to Sexty.”

I froze.

I didn’t want to open it any farther.

Then the room erupted in laughter.

My mother finally explained what had happened.

The maid had found the magazine hidden underneath my mattress while changing my sheets. She had asked my mother what she should do with it.

My mother, apparently seeing an opportunity for some Christmas humor, told her to wrap it and give it to me.

I was 12. I was too young to buy something like that, and I honestly had no idea where it had come from. Nobody ever claimed ownership.

I was the youngest kid in the family.

I had been set up.

And the entire family had been waiting for Christmas morning to watch the joke unfold.

At the time, it was simply an embarrassing family story.

Years later, I would look back on it differently—not because of the magazine itself, but because pornography and the strange world surrounding it would eventually become an unexpected thread running through my life.

I had no idea where that thread would lead.

Eighteen

When I turned 18, my mother asked me a question that completely confused me.

“Where are you moving?”

“I’m not moving.”

She explained.

I was now a man.

It was time for me to leave home.

After 28 years of raising children, she was ready for a child-free house. She had already made arrangements for me to move in with my oldest brother, Scott, in San Jose.

Scott lived in Willow Glen and was a journeyman union contractor.

I arrived with an unusual collection of experience for someone my age.

My mother was a retailer and manufacturer of high-end ready-to-wear clothing for dogs. I had spent years around her business and had learned retail marketing, manufacturing and sales simply by being at her side.

I had also taught myself computer programming when I was 17.

The computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80.

Back then, that felt like the future.

My education, however, had taken an unexpected detour.

I was spending time in Placerville Juvenile Hall because I had stolen an IBM Selectric typewriter from my high school.

Two months in juvenile hall.

Permanent expulsion from the school district.

No high school diploma.

That was my formal education.

Everything that followed, I largely taught myself.

Construction

Scott and I started a construction company.

We were subcontractors, and our work eventually included an IBM assembly facility in Morgan Hill and custom homes in Blackhawk Estates in Livermore.

Some of those homes were remarkable.

They were being built for people working in the emerging computer industry, and the technology being installed in the houses was ahead of its time.

Telephone wiring to most rooms.

Catagory 5 Computer wiring.

What we would now recognize as extensive networking infrastructure.

And then there were the wall jacks.

Everywhere.

Bathrooms included.

At the same time, Scott operated something called a BBS—a Bulletin Board System.

This was before the modern Internet.

Users connected to computers over telephone lines.

Scott’s BBS also contained adult material. I knew about it, but pornography wasn’t my interest. I was busy running the business.

Our construction company was successful.

We also developed a business strategy that gave us an advantage during union disputes. We established separate entrances for union and nonunion workers, allowing nonunion crews to continue entering a jobsite when union workers were striking. It was called a “Dual Gate” worksite.

It was an aggressive business practice.

And it worked.

But success in construction came with another side.

One I didn’t like.

The Envelope

The construction industry in the Bay Area was rife with corruption.

I learned quickly that getting a building inspector to sign off on completed work could become a serious problem if the inspector didn’t show up on time—or decided to become extraordinarily particular about minor details.

Delays could cost thousands of dollars a day.

On some of our larger projects, the potential cost approached $10,000 for every day a schedule slipped.

I learned what everyone around me seemed to already understand.

Sometimes you took the inspector to lunch.

Sometimes the lunch came with an envelope.

Cash.

I remember carrying the inspection sign-off card to a bar, handing over the envelope, and watching the inspector remove the card, sign and date it, return the card to me and keep the envelope.

We did good work.

That was the rationalization.

The envelope was supposedly about timeliness, not the quality of the work.

At the time, I accepted it as part of the business.

Then a large sports facility roof collapsed in a state north of us.

The workmanship had apparently been approved by inspectors.

That changed something inside me.

I had seen enough.

I was tired of the construction business.

And I was especially tired of my brother.

Scott was aggressive, domineering and, in my view, a bully.

I loaded my truck.

I left San Jose.

And I drove to a college parking lot in Pomona.

I enrolled in school.

The Internet

Scott’s business eventually moved increasingly toward computers and away from traditional construction.

Then he called me.

He wanted help launching a website on something new called the Internet.

At the time, the concept was revolutionary.

The old computer bulletin boards had connected people directly over telephone lines. Now a much larger network was emerging.

We saw an opportunity.

Our idea was to build an online network for architects, engineers and contractors—the AEC industry.

Architects.

Engineers.

Contractors.

We were early.

Scott handled the computer communications side.

I handled business management and sales.

We sold access to people already using computers in the construction industry and then sold advertising to companies supplying those industries.

Among the companies we pursued were major manufacturers such as GMC and Craftsman.

Meanwhile, I became a national sales manager for a manufacturing company and eventually moved deeper into online retail.

I knew sales.

I understood manufacturing.

I understood business.

But I was not a sophisticated computer programmer.

I needed programmers.

And that was where things became complicated.

The Programmers

Through Scott’s BBS operation, he had developed relationships with people who were interested in computers—and in the adult material distributed through the system.

Some of these people were extraordinarily talented programmers.

They were operating at a technical level far beyond my own.

They helped install and maintain servers I used for e-commerce.

At one point, one of them asked me to keep a particular server operating even though the hosting company wanted me to upgrade it.

They maintained it for me.

They charged me nothing.

At the time, I regarded that as a favor.

Looking back, I see something else.

A red flag.

I simply didn’t recognize it then.

I knew enough programming to read my server traffic logs.

And the traffic didn’t make sense.

The amount of traffic coming through some of my dedicated servers was far greater than my legitimate e-commerce activity could explain.

Then an exploit exposed shared-server passwords because of a configuration problem at the hosting company.

Another exploited program had been installed for my e-commerce operation.

I shut the server down.

The programmers gave me a bad feeling.

I didn’t trust them.

Their technical abilities were so far beyond mine that I couldn’t effectively police what was happening on equipment I was paying for.

I still didn’t know what was generating all that traffic.

I only knew that something was wrong.

And I walked away.

Livermore

Years passed.

Scott increasingly moved into computer consulting and development.

Then came another Christmas.

My mother was going to visit Scott and exchange gifts. She invited my wife and me to come along.

Scott had moved to Livermore.

I knew the area.

Livermore was home to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia-related research facilities.

I have always been fascinated by high-energy physics and theoretical astrophysics. The science happening in that region fascinated me.

Scott, however, had something else on his mind.

As soon as I arrived, he wanted to show me his new warehouse.

It was only a short drive from his house.

On the way, he told me the warehouse was located near what he described as an Internet “backbone.”

When we arrived, we pulled into a row of metal warehouse buildings.

Scott jumped out.

He walked inside.

Then he pointed at the concrete floor.

“Right here,” he said.

He told me he was going to drill down and access the Internet through what he described as a trunk line.

Then he made an even more extraordinary claim.

He said he was going to use the connection to access computers at the laboratory.

He told me the government facility had enormous storage capacity and extremely fast connections.

I remember listening to him and thinking:

This is insane.

I tried not to be rude.

It was Christmas.

But he was describing what sounded to me like a plan to penetrate a secure government research network.

He also claimed he had insiders helping him.

I knew enough about computers to understand that this wasn’t something I wanted to be involved with.

I dismissed the entire conversation as nonsense.

After a few hours, my wife and I left.

On the way home, I told her what Scott had said.

I put it out of my mind.

Or at least I tried.

Later, Scott asked me to help his son come up with descriptive names for a collection of adult photographs.

I found an excuse to leave.

The contrast between the two conversations bothered me.

But I didn’t know what to make of it.

The Business

Several years later, my mother asked me to help Scott with another business.

This one involved a database-driven network for high-level construction industries.

Large aggregate companies.

Heavy equipment.

GPS-positioned machinery.

The kind of business where my marketing background made sense.

The work was easy for me, and it gave me the opportunity to attend CONEXPO-CON/AGG in Las Vegas as a sales director.

I could work remotely from Lake Arrowhead.

The money was good.

Scott handled the Internet side.

Another man handled accounting and financing.

His name was F. Hornblower.

At first, the name simply struck me as unusual.

The world is full of unusual names.

Then the checks started arriving late.

Once, one of my payments bounced.

I called about it.

I was told that the financial operation routinely disputed payments because some percentage of recipients never noticed or pursued the reversals.

The explanation was that the company kept the money from those who didn’t challenge the transactions.

I was told my payment had been disputed accidentally because I was new.

I eventually received the money.

I was also told the financier was extremely wealthy and lived on a private island somewhere in the Caribbean.

Again, I accepted the explanation.

The money was good.

The work was minimal.

Then things changed.

Scott told me lawyers had taken control of the business and moved it to Canada.

Soon afterward, I learned that Scott had moved again.

This time to Georgia.

The Island

The story about the financier’s island bothered me.

But not enough.

Not yet.

At the time, I had no reason to connect the financier with anyone famous.

No name jumped out at me.

No alarm went off.

It was simply another strange detail in a series of strange details surrounding my brother’s businesses.

Then the business disappeared.

Or, more accurately, it changed hands.

I was told the lawyers had taken it over.

Years later, I would learn the name of a major Internet pornography company operating in Canada.

Pornhub.

I cannot independently establish from my personal knowledge that the business I worked for became Pornhub.

That is part of the mystery.

It is one of the connections I eventually began trying to understand.

Littleton

After September 11, 2001, I became increasingly withdrawn.

The world had changed.

I had also heard about the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, but I didn’t know exactly where Columbine was in relation to Scott’s home in Littleton.

Then my sister Ann called.

She told me things were bad.

She wanted me to contact Scott.

I didn’t particularly like my brother.

But I loved my nieces and nephews.

I called the number Ann had given me.

One of my nephews answered.

He was the same nephew who, years earlier in Livermore, had been helping with descriptive names for pornographic images.

We talked.

At some point, I asked him about Columbine.

He told me it was in the next school district from Littleton.

Then he said something that stopped me cold.

He said the black trench coats worn by the killers were “kind of cool.”

I was stunned.

I couldn’t reach Scott.

I called Ann.

We agreed that something had to change.

She offered to give Scott a place to stay in Placerville if I could get him there.

So I rented a large U-Haul.

I drove to Littleton.

When I arrived, Scott hadn’t even started packing.

Eventually, I got him out.

We loaded the truck and headed back to California.

When we arrived in Placerville, I tried to contact Ann.

No answer.

She had gone to Scotland.

The house I had available was between renters.

So I let Scott and his children stay there temporarily.

Temporary became years.

The Aphrodisiac

Scott had no job.

But he had a business plan.

He had a product.

He had an online sales channel.

I asked what he intended to sell.

“A female aphrodisiac,” he told me.

I asked how it worked.

His answer disturbed me.

He said it didn’t really matter whether it worked.

He could sell it.

My first instinct was to put him out.

But there were children involved.

Three nephews and two nieces.

They ranged in age from 17 down to 7.

I couldn’t simply turn my back on them.

The Chinese-made product turned out to be difficult or impossible to import, and that business failed.

Then Scott returned to pornography.

This time, he was operating from my rental property in Placerville.

And eventually, something happened that changed how I viewed everything that had come before.

I learned that the story Scott had told me years earlier about penetrating the computers associated with the Livermore-area laboratory was not simply a drunken fantasy or one of his outrageous stories.

According to what I later learned, an intrusion had occurred, and Scott was allegedly involved.

I also recognized the name of one of the programmers who had worked on my servers.

The same name appeared in connection with another individual reportedly involved in computer crimes and child-pornography offenses.

I cannot prove that the two were the same person.

But I recognized the name.

And suddenly the old memories came rushing back.

The strange programmers.

The unexplained server traffic.

The free server maintenance.

The adult-content network.

The alleged government computer intrusion.

The mysterious business.

The lawyers.

Canada.

The financier on an island.

The pornography operation.

The pieces were no longer isolated incidents in my mind.

They seemed connected.

But a suspicion is not proof.

That distinction matters.

The Breaking Point

By then, I had reached my limit.

I forced Scott and his family out of my property.

The confrontation became violent.

One of his children, now older, was involved in an altercation that left me with a concussion.

After that, the family fractured.

I have had no meaningful communication with most of them for roughly a decade.

For years, I tried not to think about any of it.

Then the name Jeffrey Epstein became impossible to ignore.

A wealthy financier.

A private island.

A network of powerful connections.

Sexual exploitation of young women and girls.

And suddenly I remembered the man I had been told about years earlier—the financier who supposedly lived on a private island in the Caribbean.

I remembered the strange business arrangements.

The unexplained money.

The mysterious accountant.

The lawyers who supposedly moved the company to Canada.

The people surrounding my brother.

The programmers.

The pornography.

The servers.

The connections I had dismissed because, taken individually, none of them seemed impossible.