Multiple young men were drugged and raped at Jeffrey Epstein’s remote New Mexico ranch, it has been claimed, as local authorities continue to investigate historic allegations of abuse.
Democrat congresswoman for New Mexico Melanie Stansbury, fighting for justice for survivors, says one alleged victim claimed he had been invited to a party at the late pedophile’s 7,500-acre Zorro Ranch, where he said he was plied with drugs and raped.
In the recently released 60 Minutes Australia episode, Stansbury says the unnamed man described “multiple young men… raped at the ranch in front of him after he was drugged”.
“Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were serial abusers; they really were super predators, and it was just how they lived their lives,” she added.
Harrowing testimonies heard in Sunday’s documentary aired as state authorities pressed on with their reopened probe into allegations of abuse at the compound.
Authorities in New Mexico are now trying to determine how many local women and girls were abused at the ranch, after a number of residents came forward with fresh allegations. To date, only one resident was known to be from the state.
But state representative Marianna Anaya, who co-sponsored the state’s Truth Commission probe into Epstein, said Monday that the group has been in contact with a number of locals who now say they were also abused at the ranch.
“I can confirm that we have been reached out to by local alleged victims,” she told Reuters. It marked the first time the commission has acknowledged contact with locals who say they were abused at the ranch during the quarter-century Epstein owned the property.
The Truth Commission is working with the New Mexico Department of Justice to help survivors who may have viable criminal cases bring charges against Epstein’s co-conspirators, Anaya added.
Horrific claims of abuse have come into focus since New Mexico reopened its investigation into allegations of child sex trafficking at the ranch in February, citing the U.S. Justice Department’s release of millions of files on Epstein, including allegations that he buried the bodies of two girls in hills outside the property.
That tip off, claimed to have been written by a former ranch staffer, alleged that “two foreign girls” had been buried near the ranch, having died “by strangulation during rough fetish sex”.
The note sent to the FBI was seemingly never investigated, and the state of New Mexico shelved its probe into the ranch in 2019, following a request from federal prosecutors in New York.
Chauntae Davies, who has previously spoken out about her alleged abuse at the ranch, detailed her experiences to 60 Minutes Australia.
“Zorro Ranch was probably the most eerie, just giant and quiet, and literally in the middle of nowhere, and miles and miles of just mountains and dirt for miles,” she said.
She went on to describe hearing of other victims “waking up in a dark room with a female doctor standing over them, feeling like maybe there is some kind of procedure that had happened.”
Davies, who says she was abused by Epstein between 2001 and 2005, remained haunted by her time at the isolated ranch, where she said no matter how loudly you screamed, nobody could hear you.
The sprawling property includes a 21,000 sq-ft mansion, a log cabin, a guest house, a pool and an airstrip on part-private, part-public land. State officials told CBS in 2019 that Epstein was so secretive about it that they had very little access or knowledge about what was happening there.
Davies said she spent a lot of time in her room “like a mouse in a trap, waiting for a knock on the door and for someone to say, ‘Jeffrey is ready for his massage now’”. She said that would mean rape.
She said she remembered overhearing conversations about “trying to create the perfect baby” and “a ‘hunt’, if you will, for the perfect gene pool”.
She told CBS News in 2019 that she often saw “random young women, some models, other women” at the ranch, but was unsure whether they were sexually abused.
Maria Jose Rodriguez Cadiz, who heads Solace Sexual Assault Services in Santa Fe, the only such support centre in the region, said in 2019 that around 45 people had approached the centre to seek information, therapy and other services in relation to alleged sexual abuse at the ranch.
She estimated that between a quarter and a half of those contacts were from women who said they had been abused at the ranch, although she added that the centre did not keep detailed records.
