For more than two decades, the public conversation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes has centered almost exclusively on what he and his accomplices did to girls and young women. Yet a startling new disclosure from the unredacted federal files suggests the predator’s appetite for destruction extended further than the public ever knew. According to a sitting member of Congress who has reviewed the documents, a lawsuit alleges that young men were drugged and raped at Epstein’s secluded New Mexico compound, Zorro Ranch.
U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat serving on the House Oversight Committee, told a Santa Fe podcast last month that one of the lawsuits buried in the file trove came from a man who said he was lured to the 7,500-acre ranch under the pretense of attending a party, only to be drugged and sexually assaulted. He further alleged that other young men at the same gathering suffered the same fate. The story, picked up this week by the New York Post, adds a previously underreported dimension to a scandal already saturated with horror.
That such an allegation existed in federal records for years without surfacing publicly raises an obvious question. How many other crimes committed at Zorro Ranch were quietly catalogued, redacted, and shelved while the architects of the cover-up assured the public that justice had been served?
- A lawsuit referenced in the unredacted Epstein files alleges a man was drugged and raped at Zorro Ranch, along with other young men present at the same party.
- Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) disclosed the allegation after reviewing federal documents as a member of the House Oversight Committee.
- At least 10 girls and young women, including the late Virginia Giuffre and Annie Farmer, have alleged abuse at the 7,500-acre New Mexico compound dating to the mid-1990s.
- The FBI never conducted a full forensic investigation of the ranch property, and a 2019 New Mexico state probe was halted at the request of federal prosecutors.
- An anonymous 2019 tip claimed two “foreign girls” were buried in the hills near the ranch following sex acts that turned fatal — a claim never substantiated but never properly investigated either.
- The ranch was sold from Epstein’s estate before a full forensic investigation could be completed; it is now owned by former Texas state Sen. Don Huffines, who renamed it Rancho de San Rafael and operates it as a Christian retreat.
- New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez relaunched a criminal probe in February, and the state legislature unanimously approved a bipartisan truth commission to deliver an initial report by July 31.
- Stansbury and other lawmakers have accused the U.S. Department of Justice of redacting names of “powerful perpetrators” in apparent violation of the statute permitting only victim redactions.