Jeffrey Epstein‘s former butler has said that the paedophile financier ‘loved life too much’ to kill himself in his first public interview.
Valdson Viera Cotrin, who ran Epstein’s home in Paris, told The Telegraph that he had spoken to his former employer before he died and claimed he had been in good spirits.
Epstein was found hanged in his cell on August 10, 2019, just weeks after being arrested in New York and charged with sex trafficking underage girls.
But Mr Cotrin, who has remained loyal to his former boss, has insisted Epstein would never have killed himself and revealed that his employer had told him he was planning to negotiate with the judge in the case to secure bail.
‘I don’t believe this was suicide. He loved life too much,’ Mr Cotrin said.
He also recalled seeing his boss for the last time, describing how Epstein was relaxed and had spoken about making more investments.
Epstein’s brother Mark has also suggested that the financier may have been murdered, and even ordered a second autopsy.
‘We got the news that he had hanged himself, and honestly, he loved life too much to float away like that,’ Mr Cotrin added.
The butler also made the extraordinary claim that Epstein had told him he had been offered a job by Donald Trump in his administration in 2016 – but that he had turned it down.
There is no evidence that the allegation is true and Trump has always maintained that he stopped speaking to Epstein in 2004.
Mr Cotrin insisted that he never saw Epstein with underage girls, and said that young women only hired to give him massages and cut his nails.
The butler had never spoken publicly until now due to concern for his own safety.
He pointed to what he considers Epstein’s mysterious death and also the suicides of Virginia Giuffre, who accused Prince Andrew of sexual abuse, which he denied, and of Jean-Luc Brunel, who ran a modelling agency that procured girls for Epstein.
Giuffre, 41, killed herself at her home in Australia in April and Brunel was found dead in his prison cell in Paris in 2022 while he awaited trial on charges of raping a teenager.
Mr Cotrin’s remarks come as the US government comes under pressure to make public the so-called Epstein files.
The former butler also spoke about Prince Andrew’s visits to Paris and New York, and claimed he had chauffeured the British royal ‘five or six times’.
He said he had met former US president Bill Clinton onboard Epstein’s private jet during a stopover in Paris and shared an image of the two smiling.
The Telegraph published an image showing Mr Cotrin posing for a photographer with the former president on board the so-called Lolita Express, the plane Epstein allegedly used to traffic underage girls and women for sex.
Mr Cotrin recalled that Epstein often laughed at a painting he had bought depicting Mr Clinton wearing a blue dress and red high heels, imitating the outfit ostensibly worn during the president’s infamous encounter with Monica Lewinsky.
Another picture shared by Mr Cotrin shows the UK’s ambassador to Washington Lord Mandelson attending Epstein’s birthday in 2007 and claimed that he drove Woody Allen around and met Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates a few times.
The interview comes after it emerged that Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, wants to keep grand jury records secret in the sex trafficking case that sent her to prison.
Maxwell hasn’t seen the material herself, her attorneys said – the grand jury process is conducted behind closed doors.
But she opposes unsealing what her lawyers described as potentially ‘hearsay-laden’ transcripts of grand jury testimony, which was given in secret and without her lawyers there to challenge it.
‘Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable and her due process rights remain,’ attorneys David O. Markus and Melissa Madrigal wrote.
Government attorneys have been trying to quell a clamor for transparency by seeking the transcripts’ release – though the government also says the public already knows much of what’s in the documents.
Most of the information ‘was made publicly available at trial or has otherwise been publicly reported through the public statements of victims and witnesses,’ prosecutors wrote in court papers Monday.
They noted that the disclosures excluded some victims’ and witnesses’ names.
Prosecutors had also said last week that some of what the grand jurors heard eventually came out at Maxwell’s 2021 trial and in various victims’ lawsuits.
There were only two grand jury witnesses, both of them law enforcement officials, prosecutors said.
