Hot Type: Epstein and Russian Connections to One of the World's 'Sleaziest Pimps'
American columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda exclusively interviews investigative reporter and bestselling author Craig Unger about Jeffrey Epstein’s overlooked ties to alleged ‘red sparrows’
The problem with investigating and reporting on transnational mob ties is that no matter how careful you are with word choice, it always takes you right to the gutter. There is literally no way to write about Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia, without feeling like you’ve just soiled your soul.
Currently, Americans have been focused on the depraved and cruel world of human trafficking — no, not the pretend conspiratorial kind pushed by Russian propagandists to try to tar Democrats — but the real one that hurts real people, the one with ubiquitous ties to the current occupant of the White House.
For some reason, of all the billions of words written about the toxic boogeyman Jeffrey Epstein, very little has been written about his direct ties to Russia and what that may reveal about his true objectives. Epstein, who committed suicide in prison in 2019, was a longtime buddy of Trump, and bizarrely, a lot of sketchy people paid him big millions for ‘tax advice’.
One person who has been documenting the convicted child sex predator’s ties to Russia is investigating reporter and New York Times best-selling author Craig Unger, who has been revisiting the subject of his books, American Kompromat, and House of Trump, House of Putin, on his Substack.
In this exclusive Q & A for Byline Supplement’s Hot Type column, I get Unger to go on the record about the overlooked Russian connections to the ‘sleaziest pimp’ in the world.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Can you please start by telling us about Epstein’s overlooked Russian connections?
Craig Unger: I first started writing about this for my 2021 book American Kompromat, and I’ve been going back to it on my Substack page via a new section called The Epstein Files: The Russian Connection. It has three or four posts so far, with more to come.
Epstein’s operation was quite complex, and I don’t think it’s been fully explored at all. I was first drawn to it because I knew how explosive it could be as kompromat. Extramarital sex or sex with a prostitute might cause a minor scandal for a powerful man, but if you remember the case of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, it can blow over in a few days.
Of course, sex with an underage girl is a very different thing and can have grave criminal consequences. And when you look at the list of Epstein’s “friends” and the various people who came to his parties, his island, or used his plane—Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and, of course, Donald Trump—very serious questions arise. So in terms of kompromat, the Epstein scandal could have extraordinarily explosive kompromat that could have real political repercussions.
Given that I’ve written so much about Trump’s ties to Russia, I was fascinated that Epstein employed at least two Russian women, who appear to be ‘red sparrows’. The term is used to refer to women intelligence operatives who are trained to use seduction and manipulation to achieve various ends, such as the extraction of information. These two attached themselves to Epstein’s operation in a way that was very unlike the young girls who were there involuntarily and who were more or less sex slaves.
So I’ve already written Substack posts about two young Russian women, Svetlana “Lana” Pozhidaeva and Masha Drokova, who worked for Epstein as young professionals under very different conditions and for very different reasons than women like Virginia Giuffre.
Pozhidaeva was a highly educated professional who I believe was an FSB operative, who was pursuing Putin’s attempts to get as much information as possible about American progress in artificial intelligence and other tech and scientific advances. Masha Drokova, who had been a pro-Putin activist and a rather famous one at that, has actually become a successful venture capitalist.
On a very different note, I’m starting to look into Russia’s role in providing Epstein with dozens of young girls. As we know, and as I’ve written in American Kompromat, Epstein allied with Jean-Luc Brunel, an agent who had his own modelling agency. And though he had a handful of supermodels who made lots of money, the vast majority of his models were attractive young women and girls who couldn’t get much work and were often sent en masse to parties given by oligarchs, where transactional behaviour of one sort or another often took place. In addition to working with Epstein, Brunel sometimes worked with a Russian model agent/matchmaker/pimp who could provide dozens of women on a moment’s notice. I am investigating this and will be reporting on that in an upcoming Substack post, so please stay tuned.
Another point on this that I don’t want to be overlooked, but which doesn’t really deal with Russia: When Epstein was setting up his operation, he took on Jean-Luc Brunel, the owner of MC2 Modelling Agency, to bring in the girls. Every modelling agency has “scouts” to bring in the kind of girls they need, and Epstein needed to figure out how to structure a pay scale for the scouts. In the end, he decided to copy the payment structure used by an agency that did the kinds of things he wanted: Trump Model Management.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: In my opinion, that does go back to Russia because, as you have proven repeatedly in your work, Trump’s ties to the Russian mob go back decades. But why do you think Trump’s buddy Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia have been largely ignored?
Craig Unger: Part of the answer is that it is quite understandable (and justifiable) that much of the early attention has focused on the victims who were trafficked — that is to say, Virginia Giuffre’s testimony and her lawsuits, etc.
I would also add that I’ve been a reporter for more than 50 years, and it’s hard to think of a story more titillating than this. Money! Power! Sex! Murder/suicide, sex trafficking. Real mysteries that can have real global impact, but which no one has really solved. Russia is part of that, but it’s not necessarily at the top of the list.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: What red flags go up when Pozhidaeva changes career course and also works for Brunel, another sex trafficker who died by suicide?
Craig Unger: Pozhidaeva’s resume before becoming a model and the dramatic turns in her career were quite extraordinary when you think about it. Scholar, model, women’s empowerment activist, tech entrepreneur—and the next minute she is also working for one of the sleaziest pimps in the world.
She was educated at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a prestigious academy run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was summa cum laude at what is the training ground for Russian diplomats and intelligence officials. So she was a gorgeous young woman with an education not unlike that of a young Hillary Clinton. She went to the Russian equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Stanford and on to grad school. She was on a career path to being a major Russian diplomat.
And then she does a U-turn and ends up working with Jean-Luc Brunel, who was very much the French counterpart of Epstein. They worked together and, presumably, trafficked together. Like Epstein, Brunel ended in a suicide—or so it seems—while he was in jail for sex trafficking.
I think it’s important to understand the context here. Putin was and is obsessed with artificial intelligence. One side of Epstein we should not forget is that in his quest for legitimacy, he liked to give money to Harvard and MIT and hang out with Bill Gates, Marvin Minsky — a pioneer in AI. Lana was an enormously attractive and presentable hostess for events with Epstein and the titans of Silicon Valley. That’s part of the role she played for Epstein, but we have no idea what she may have gleaned in terms of intelligence.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: How odd is it that Masha Drokova was a celebrated pro‑Putin activist in Russia, who went on to work with Epstein as a publicist and then became a notable venture capitalist in Silicon Valley?
Craig Unger: Masha Drokova is a terrific character in all this. When she was 16, she was a leader of Nashi, the pro-Putin youth movement sometimes compared to Hitler Youth. She became internationally famous when Putin appeared at one of her rallies, and she suddenly rushed up to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. A movie — Putin’s Kiss — followed. And before long, she was in New York working as Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist as he was networking with the CEOs of Silicon Valley, scientists from Harvard and MIT, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc.
All of which was a great way to get her foot in the door at Silicon Valley. She did exactly that, quite successfully, and has worked her way up from being an angel investor to having a significant portfolio as a VC.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I just finished reading and reporting on Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, which does an amazing job of profiling PR man Vladislav Surkov, who I think is primarily responsible for the reality TV fascism that’s killing the democratic world. Can you talk about the Surkov connection to your Epstein findings? I understand he is a creator of the Nashi movement, which Masha headed as a youth.
Craig Unger: Vladislav Surkov is another fascinating figure who Americans should know more about. He was known as the Kremlin’s chief ideologue and “grey cardinal.” He put forth the strategy of hybrid warfare, arguing, as General Valery Gerasimov had told Putin, that Russia’s military was for shit and that Russia would be better served by preparing for a new kind of warfare that did not involve bombs, bullets or boots on the ground. Instead, he ginned up various active measures and massive amounts of disinformation through social media and generally destroyed the whole notion of reality.
As I see it, this strategy was first successfully employed when Putin operatives installed Viktor Yanukovych as President of Ukraine, with the help of campaign manager Paul Manafort, and then helped install Donald Trump as President of the United States. Again, with the help of campaign manager Paul Manafort.
I think what Surkov has done is loathsome but brilliant, and it is somewhat responsible for Americans not sharing the same reality, the same basic facts. And then you have Masha Drokova, a very seductive figure who is making waves as a VC in Silicon Valley.
I think she and Surkov are a killer combo.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Is there evidence that these two women — Lana and Masha — fit the Red Sparrow frame?
Craig Unger: Broadly speaking, I think both Lana and Masha fit the bill. I think their “legends” strongly suggest that is exactly what they are doing. But I must confess, I do not know what they actually delivered to Moscow.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: We know Deutsche Bank had to pay a $150 million fine from a New York regulator for allowing Epstein to make payments to Russian models and withdraw suspicious amounts of cash during five years as a client. Based on all your reporting, wtf was going on?
Craig Unger: I’d love to know more about this—specifically what “models” were being paid and which “publicists.” In addition, Jean-Luc Brunel, who trafficked girls to Epstein, almost certainly got them from Russian traffickers, and I’d love to see if there were any cash transfers to some likely parties.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Why do you think the majority of the New York and national media world built myths around these guys as billionaire financiers long after they left visible trails of slime and tears and destruction?
Craig Unger: Trump was good copy. I was a reporter at New York Magazine in the early 1980s when Trump provided great fodder for the tabloids like the New York Post. I think it may be his greatest talent and the key to his success. He famously used the pseudonym John Barron to call the Post and tell them how Trump (he was pretending to be Barron) was dating this hot model or that starlet. It was a time when the big swinging dicks of Wall Street and the titans of real estate were the leading characters in the social comedy of New York life and were portrayed as such in NY Magazine, Vanity Fair, Manhattan, Inc., and the New York Observer.
The reporters who covered Trump often wrote in terms that they thought of as somewhat critical, but the truth was more often than not, Trump came off as a brash buccaneer; he loved what they wrote about him and encouraged them enormously. The only reporter who really landed a glove on Trump was Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice back in the seventies and early eighties, and, later, Tim O’Brien, now with Bloomberg.
A huge part of the reason he remained relatively untouched is access journalism: If you are writing about someone regularly, you don’t want to piss them off so much they won’t talk to you again.
Unless I’m mistaken, Epstein didn’t get nearly as much press as Trump until later. But when I was at Vanity Fair, he was very much part of that world and palled around with Peggy Siegel, the powerful entertainment world publicist. She was very much an “enforcer” for Hollywood in the sense that if a reporter was sniffing around one of her clients for a scandal, he or she would be barred from access — not just with that specific client but forever more. If you had a reputation as a tough investigative journalist — fuggedaboutit!
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Lastly, can Trump ever wash himself clean from the Epstein muck — his long ties and the previous lawsuit charging him and Epstein with rape of a 13-year-old — or could this be the thing — sparked by his overt cover-up — that finally takes him down?
Craig Unger: I think this poses a serious threat to Trump. At first, I didn't think so, but lately I’ve seen Joe Rogan and a few other Trumpers who seem massively pissed, as if he betrayed them.
It seems a huge part of MAGA really took that Pizzagate nonsense seriously and wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein mess, because they hate pedophiles and they thought loads of Democrats were pedophiles. They desperately wanted Trump to expose the truth, and now, because he has not done so, they feel betrayed.
In addition, Trump is terribly undisciplined and keeps tripping all over himself. Saying that Virginia Giuffre was “stolen" was an unforced error that seems to have big repercussions. He said he broke off his friendship with Epstein in 2000 after the “creepy” Epstein “stole” her, but two years later, he told New York Magazine that Epstein was one of his best friends and a terrific guy [and was quoted as saying Epstein ‘likes beautiful women as much as a I do, and many of them on the younger side’]. These kinds of errors have a cascading effect and can create the sense of an ongoing narrative that demands more and more revelations.
We need some of that.
Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs weekly in Byline Supplement. She is the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 90 countries.
Great piece Heidi - and Craig!