Alert – ‘There are more girls, Maureen… more than you can ever imagine’: My chilling emails from Epstein’s sex slave that put me center stage in the sensational new document dumps… and where the truth REALLY lies, by MAUREEN CALLAHAN

Finding yourself named in a document dump involving the world’s largest underaged sex ring, a dead pedophile billionaire, his convicted female accomplice, a disgraced Prince of England, and the conflicting statements of an alleged victim is without compare.

When I learned that I was included in the Epstein documents unsealed on Monday, my first response was disbelief.

Then again, of course this was going to happen. It was only a matter of time.

Much has been written in recent days about the documents concerning Sarah Ransome — who first approached me in 2016 with bombshell claims that she had videotapes of Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Richard Branson having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘girls’. Claims these men vehemently deny.

The truth is: a lot of what we have read is not fully accurate.

Yet I would never call Ransome a liar, either.

 Finding yourself named in a document dump involving the world’s largest underaged sex ring, a dead pedophile billionaire, his female accomplice, a disgraced Prince of England, and the conflicting statements of an alleged victim is without compare. (Pictured: Sarah Ransome).

When I learned that I was included in the Epstein documents unsealed on Monday, my first response was disbelief. Then again, of course this was going to happen. It was only a matter of time. (Pictured: Prince Andrew with Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell).

Much has been written in recent days about the documents concerning Sarah Ransome – who first approached me in 2016 with bombshell claims that she had videotapes of Bill Clinton , Prince Andrew and Richard Branson having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein ‘s ‘girls’. Claims these men vehemently deny. (Pictured: Epstein and Clinton).

Here’s what really happened, and how I became part of this most extraordinary and unending story.

Back in 2016, I was one of the first journalists to write about Epstein’s continued abuse of underage girls.

I was at the New York Post then, and the blockbuster writer James Patterson, along with co-authors John Connolly and Tim Malloy, had just published ‘Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy’.

Epstein was still alive, which made this book an even bigger deal.

Legally, it had to be bulletproof. Even an author as wealthy as Patterson doesn’t want a libel suit brought by a super-connected billionaire.

Most damning and revelatory were the police reports contained in the book — interviews by Palm Beach police detectives with young girls and women alleging sexual abuse and human trafficking.

That Patterson got access to these and other documents tells us one thing: That the police investigating Epstein were so disgusted with the sweetheart deal he got in 2008 for raping girls as young as 14 that they seemingly briefed Patterson.

The book was a nuclear bomb, and I wrote as such. But as the weeks rolled on, I didn’t see much coverage elsewhere. Why?

Perhaps because Epstein socialized with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump – who also denies all claims against him – and neither left nor right-wing media wanted to cast the worst possible aspersions on their guy.

Then Sarah Ransome got in touch with me after reading my article. She told me she, too, had been a victim of Epstein and his right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell.

Her emails to me were released on Monday as part of the demand by famed attorney Alan Dershowitz – who was part of Epstein’s defense team in that first 2008 trial – that they be published.

Dershowitz himself had been fighting accusations that he had sex with some of Epstein’s girls — claims that have since been retracted and that he has wholly denied, all the while trying to rope me in as one of his defenders. More on that in a bit.

Back in 2016, I was one of the first journalists to write about Epstein’s continued abuse of underage girls. Sarah Ransome (pictured on Little St. James island) got in touch with me after reading an article I wrote. She told me she, too, had been a victim of Epstein and his right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell.

Ransome, as I remember, first reached out to me via email almost immediately after the article was published on Sunday, October 9, 2016.

It’s a message I no longer have, and don’t recall the exact date she sent it. But apparently she regretted her tone, because on Thursday, October 13, Ransome emailed me again:

‘I apologize for my heated first email to you however when I came across your acticle [sic] in the NYC Post… everything came flooding back. I would never dream of contacting anyone about this but something made me reach out to you.

‘What they did was wrong and I have spent the last 10 years trying to forget what happened on that island. There are more girls Maureen. More then [sic] you can ever imagine. They’re scared and so am I but Jeffery [sic], Clinton and Trump must pay for what they did to us as must the rest of the men that were involved in their seedy inner circle. We have to get the rest of the girls to come forward somehow?’

Her emotionality didn’t put me off; in fact, it felt justified.

The Harvey Weinstein scandal was a year away from breaking. Victims of sexual violence, the kind of stuff Ransome was claiming, were still far too easy to brush off as unhinged fantasists or opportunists seeking payouts.

Here is a bit of what I initially reported, via Patterson’s book, in the Post: A 14-year-old girl called ‘Mary’ told Palm Beach police that Epstein sexually assaulted her in his massage room.

A 16-year-old girl that Patterson calls ‘Alison’ told the same police department that Epstein raped her so violently that he tore out her hair, and that there had ‘been nights that I walked out of there barely able to walk, um, from him being so rough’.

Alison then told police she couldn’t come forward because she was sure Epstein would harm her, that she often heard him on the phone threatening to break people’s legs or have them killed.

Through that lens, what Sarah Ransome claimed didn’t sound crazy at all.

I replied to her email saying yes, I wanted to know more. After that, I spoke to her only over the phone. I didn’t trust her not to take any written communications from me and somehow, in the future, try to use them against me if I couldn’t independently verify her version of events.

But in her deposition, which was part of another document dump this week, Ransome says we only spoke once.

I recall that differently. I’m sure it was more than once, because she really, really wanted me to write about what she said happened to her and other girls.

Ransome, as I remember, first reached out to me via email. It’s a message I no longer have, but apparently she regretted her tone because she emailed me again: ‘I apologize for my heated first email to you however when I came across your acticle [sic] in the NYC Post… everything came flooding back.’ (Pictured: Epstein and Maxwell and Donald Trump and Melania).

She wrote: ‘What they did was wrong and I have spent the last 10 years trying to forget what happened on that island. There are more girls Maureen. More then [sic] you can ever imagine. They’re scared and so am I but Jeffery [sic], Clinton and Trump must pay for what they did to us.’ (Pictured: Epstein and Maxwell with Clinton at the White House).

I told her that publishing her allegations required proof. Did she have photos, phone or flight records, friends or family members to whom she disclosed contemporaneously?

That’s when Ransome told me she had a box, tucked away somewhere and maybe under her bed, containing those videotapes of these important men having forcible sex with trafficked young girls.

Show it to me, I said.

Here’s what she wrote to me about that: ‘Unfortunately, I cannot send you the footage… but I can confirm that I do have footage in my possession. I have backed up the footage on several USB sticks and have securely sent them to various different locations throughout Europe with only one other person close to me, knowing where their locations are, just in case anything happens to me before the footage is released’.

I told her that I would fly anywhere she wished to view the footage for myself.

And that’s when Ransome got squirrely. She was evasive. She had all these excuses as to why she couldn’t meet and show me this ostensibly damning evidence, and that’s when I backed off the story – something she has never admitted.

I believed there were no tapes. I never said that to her, but I felt sure.

Now: Does that mean I think Sarah Ransome is a complete and total liar?

No, I don’t. Journalistically, yes, her story fell apart without strong proof. And it was such a consequential contradiction that I could never publish anything she said, even if she came back to me, because as a journalist I could never trust her again.

But as a human being?

I thought for sure that Ransome had been in Epstein’s circle — and she had, there is proof — and that she had been victimized. She seemed profoundly broken, as any young girl or woman in that situation would have been. She seemed desperate for the media to pay attention, to listen to her, and perhaps she felt that only by making such a grandiose claim would she get that attention.

In short: I understood.

Smash cut to 2019: A New Yorker profile of Alan Dershowitz referenced Ransome’s communications with me, though the magazine did not refer to me by name.

The key line: ‘Ransome told me [the New Yorker writer] that she had invented the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior, and to make him believe that she had evidence that would come out if he harmed me [meaning Ransome herself].’

I knew that the New Yorker investigation was in the works, because months before it ran I received a call out of the blue, from someone identifying themselves as a fact-checker with the magazine. I was part of a piece about Alan Dershowitz, the fact-checker said, and they wanted to know what I knew about Ransome.

Ransome got squirrely. She was evasive. She had all these excuses as to why she couldn’t meet and show me her ostensibly damning evidence, and that’s when I backed off the story -something she has never admitted. (Pictured: Clinton and Maxwell on Epstein’s private jet).

Smash cut to 2019: A New Yorker profile of Alan Dershowitz (pictured) referenced Ransome’s communications with me, though the magazine did not refer to me by name. I knew the piece was in the works, because months before it ran I received a call out of the blue, from someone identifying themselves as a fact-checker with the magazine.

I told them nothing. For one thing, if a reporter has questions about you, especially for a piece involving a global sex ring, they should call you themselves.

For another? Well, back in 2017 I had received another cold call – at home, on my cell – from none other than Alan Dershowitz.

This was intrusive. It’s one thing for a stranger to call the newsroom and ask to be put through to you. It’s another for that stranger to get a reporter’s private information and try, as I felt Dershowitz was doing, to use the element of surprise to extract information.

I had no idea how he had my private number. Or how he knew that Ransome had recently been in touch with me.

That was a shock.

As any decent journalist is and should be, I am protective of my sources. Given the enormity of what she was alleging, I would have to be even more cautious with Ransome.

But Dershowitz was as dogged with me as he is against any opponent in court. He kept asking what Ransome had said to me, telling me he was completely innocent, and demanding why I wouldn’t come forward and defend him?

I told Dershowitz that wasn’t my job.

Also: I couldn’t prove what Ransome was saying, but I couldn’t disprove all of it either.

Thirdly: I didn’t even know Alan Dershowitz! I still don’t. I’m not going to be a character witness for a stranger. He should have had more sophistication than to ask.

Perhaps he felt that desperate, that cornered. That’s the sympathetic reading.

I told Dershowitz I wasn’t writing the story and that had to be good enough for him. And if it wasn’t — frankly, I didn’t care.

I thought that was the end of it, that surely Dershowitz had more pressing problems and more important people to nag, but he wouldn’t stop. He kept trying to drag me into this mess, and when that fact-checker from the New Yorker called me two years later, I knew he would keep going until he exhausted himself.

Nor was I surprised, after backing off this story, to receive unhinged emails from Ransome.

Back in 2017 I had received another cold call from none other than Alan Dershowitz. He was as dogged with me as he is against any opponent in court. He kept asking what Ransome had said to me, telling me he was completely innocent, and demanding why I wouldn’t come forward and defend him? I told him that wasn’t my job.

It made sense. In her mind, I represented the media at large, and she took my refusal to continue as proof that nothing would ever happen to Epstein and the powerful men he procured young girls for.

Here is part of an email she sent days after she first reached out to me, dated Friday, October 21, 2016:

‘I will… make sure that everyone on [the] planet see’s [sic] that footage and photo’s [sic] and will release them to Wiki leaks by Sunday. I will take down Epstein and his bunch of f**k wit cronies myself!!!!!!!!! … You’ve just lost your exclusive and I AM SUPER F**KED OFF NOW!!!!’

Saturday, October 22, 2016:

‘I hope you go to sleep at night wondering just quite where you will end up after this life is finished. Don’t believe me? I can prove that too. You don’t know who I am and I am not going to go away until I have achieved my goals on getting the bad guys where they belong’.

Her emails didn’t scare me; they saddened me. I believed her about ‘the bad guys’. She was right about that.

This is why the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is the story that will never die: All these rich, powerful, connected men who flew the Lolita Express and visited Epstein’s ‘pedophile island’, their names in flight logs and phone records, the photographs and a Palm Beach police investigation, Epstein’s conviction for soliciting sex with an underage girl and Maxwell rotting in prison — and not one of these men has so much as been called in for questioning.

The news, last week, that the Met police are refusing to investigate Prince Andrew in light of all this new information. The photos of Bill Clinton on vacation in Mexico, laughing as these new documents broke, not a care in the world with his equally slithery pal Gavin Newsom.

If you were Sarah Ransome, you’d be angry too.

In her last email to me, sent that Sunday October 23, she wrote: ‘I would like to retract everything I have said to you and walk away from this’.

She knew I was never going forward with her story. She knew I believed the box of sex tapes didn’t exist. But I think she needed to feel power, and if writing an email claiming that the decision was hers, so be it.

This is why the Epstein scandal is the story that will never die: All these powerful men who flew the Lolita Express and visited Epstein’s island – and not one of them has so much as been called in for questioning. The news, last week, that the Met police are refusing to investigate Prince Andrew in light of all this new information. The photos of Bill Clinton on vacation in Mexico, not a care in the world with his equally slithery pal Gavin Newsom (pictured).

‘I shouldn’t have contacted you and I’m sorry I wasted your time’, she wrote. ‘I’m disappointed that you have made little contact or didn’t do anything to help me… but I understand your stance… Prehaps [sic] if I was in your position I would have done the same?’

That concession told me she understood and maybe even suspected that not publishing her claims was actually, in the long run, good for her.

I learned something from her newly unsealed deposition this week. I had never known exactly what about my 2016 article had made Ransome want to reach out to me and I don’t think I asked.

‘The last sentence’, she said in court at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, ‘one of the last sentences I remember was, will we ever know the true extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. And I wrote her after that because, well, it still continues, doesn’t it?’

That is a true statement. It does still continue, and monsters still walk among us.