Epstein Wanted To Turn His Island Into a Resort for Paying Customers

Jeffrey Epstein was shopping around an idea to turn his private islands into a luxury resort with the help of a well-connected Dubai businessman, leaked emails show.

Epstein, a financial manager for the ultra-wealthy, had owned Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands since 1998. Locals have described it as a place where Epstein, who pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008 and was indicted for sex trafficking in 2019, would bring teenagers. Federal authorities, the government of the Virgin Islands, and several accusers have said that Epstein molested girls on the island.

In 2016, Epstein purchased neighboring Great Saint James in a deal designed to look like the buyer was the Dubai businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem. (Sultan is his name, not his title.) When the purchase came to light after Epstein’s death in 2019, bin Sulayem implied to the Miami Herald that Epstein had used his name without his consent.

But a leaked email from December 2016 shows someone using bin Sulayem’s email helping pitch a business idea for both islands. “Mr Jeffry [sic] Epstein is very dear friend and a business associate of mine he owns two beautiful islands at US Virgin Islands he wants to develop a private resort only for his , his customers and friends private use,” he wrote in an email to the architecture firm Creative Kingdom, also CC’d to Epstein.

It’s not clear what came of the contact. There is a gap of more than two years until the next email with Creative Kingdom, which sent Epstein a “project package” with samples of other architectural work in early 2019, a few months before Epstein died in jail. Creative Kingdom specializes in tourism projects, having worked on high-end resorts in Dubai and elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates.

The emails show that a person using bin Sulayem’s email also reached out to Epstein and his assistant to schedule visits to the island in 2014 and 2016. It’s unclear whether Epstein followed through.

Bin Sulayem is the CEO of Dubai Ports World, a logistics firm close to the Emirati government. He enjoyed a friendly relationship with Epstein, who kept a photo of bin Sulayem in his New York home and referred to bin Sulayem as “the right hand of maktoum,” the ruling family of Dubai. Epstein introduced bin Sulayem to two of his business associates, American businessman Leslie Wexner and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. 

Materials from Epstein’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee last week include photos of bin Sulayem seated on a boat and at an Asian restaurant, although Epstein himself is not in the photos.

The leaked emails come from Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit organization widely seen as a successor to WikiLeaks. It obtained around 20,000 emails and attachments from the inbox jeeproject@yahoo.com from an unnamed source and distributed them to journalists and other researchers. Drop Site News, which covered the Wexner connection, was able to verify some of the emails using cryptographic signatures.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg obtained a similar set of emails from the same Yahoo account and verified their authenticity. Distributed Denial of Secrets’ source had insisted they are not the source of the Bloomberg story.

This leak to Distributed Denial of Secrets does not appear to include every single message sent to jeeproject@yahoo.com during the years covered. The leak does not include Epstein’s other Yahoo or Gmail accounts—most of the recent House Oversight Committee disclosures came from jeevacation@gmail.com—or his private email servers.

Epstein and bin Sulayem’s dream of turning the two islands into a resort may eventually come to fruition, though without either man’s involvement. After Epstein’s death, his estate sold the islands to businessman Stephen Deckoff, who plans to turn them into a “world-class destination.” As part of a settlement with Epstein’s estate, the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands will take half the proceeds of the sale to support survivors of sexual abuse. 

Dubai Ports World and Creative Kingdom did not respond to repeated email requests for comment.