Father of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘secret’ UK girlfriend says he knew she dated the paedophile

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last updated 4 August 2020

The father of a British woman revealed to have been Jeffrey Epstein’s “secret” girlfriend has admitted that her family knew she had dated the late paedophile.

Shelley Anne Lewis, now 43, was identified in an email sent to Epstein by British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell that was made public along with hundreds of pages of other court documents last week, The Sun reports.

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A self-styled “spiritual entrepreneur”, Manchester-born Lewis is “believed to have taken scores on flights on Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’ private jet”, says the Daily Mail. After being identified, she could now be approached by US prosecutors for help in the case against Maxwell, who is accused of procuring girls for Epstein to sexually abuse.

Asked by the newspaper whether Lewis’s family knew of her relationship with Epstein, her 71-year-old father Brian, a retired businessman, said: “As a young girl we knew she was seeing someone in New York.

“So yes, we did.”

“Now everything has gone mental,” he added. “It is just getting crazy.”

His daughter - who now runs a firm that hosts yoga retreats in the US and writes children’s books - was 22 when she started dating Epstein. The pair met “while she worked in the contemporary art department of Christie’s auction house in New York”, according to The New York Post.

Lewis has not commented on the disclosure of her identity. However, the Daily Mail reports that in previous interviews, she has said “she was helped by a ‘mentor’ in New York who ‘was so original in all his thought processes that he couldn't even see the box’”.

There is no suggestion that Lewis was aware of or took part in any criminality.

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Joe Evans is the world news editor at TheWeek.co.uk. He joined the team in 2019 and held roles including deputy news editor and acting news editor before moving into his current position in early 2021. He is a regular panellist on The Week Unwrapped podcast, discussing politics and foreign affairs.

Before joining The Week, he worked as a freelance journalist covering the UK and Ireland for German newspapers and magazines. A series of features on Brexit and the Irish border got him nominated for the Hostwriter Prize in 2019. Prior to settling down in London, he lived and worked in Cambodia, where he ran communications for a non-governmental organisation and worked as a journalist covering Southeast Asia. He has a masterâ€™s degree in journalism from City, University of London, and before that studied English Literature at the University of Manchester.