Will & Estate

These are the amounts earmarked in the trust, not guaranteed payouts. Before anyone is paid, the estate must settle debts, taxes and legal claims and hold back the reserves the trustees are directed to retain (here, $60M). What each beneficiary actually receives depends on what is left after those obligations are met.

The people closest to Epstein appear in more than one instrument. Ann Rodriguez, his island manager, is both a Southern Trust employee and a $5M beneficiary. Ghislaine Maxwell is in both the 1953 Trust ($10M) and the Butterfly Trust. Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn are trustees, executors, $50M and $25M beneficiaries, Southern Trust officers, and had their own debts to Epstein forgiven.

In addition, the Trustees are directed to retain $50,000,000 and a further $10,000,000 to settle claims against the estate, and each Trustee is entitled to $250,000 per year in compensation (EFTA00099303).

The two men who controlled it

Attorney Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn occupy every role at once: they are the sole trustees of the 1953 Trust, the co-executors of the will, the two largest individual beneficiaries ($50M and $25M), officers of the Southern Trust Company, and both had personal debts to Epstein forgiven. The U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General later alleged in litigation that the pair were “participants in” the trafficking operation (EFTA00129035).

Executors, and how the role changed

Over sixteen years the executor role moved from Epstein's Wall Street friends to his own paid professionals. The 2019 will controls; the earlier codicils are superseded but show the shift.

Successor executors named in the 2019 will, in order (EFTA01266268):

Boris Nikolic (Bill Gates's former science adviser; said he was unaware he had been named.) → Kathryn Ruemmler (Former Obama White House Counsel, later a Goldman Sachs executive.) → Steve Hanson (Named as "Stephen Hanson," the final fallback.)

The trust chain

The 1953 Trust was the last of eight revocable trusts Epstein created and revoked over eighteen years. The chronology is enumerated in an SDNY filing (EFTA00086220); the trustees below are read from each trust's own signed agreement. The same arc as the executors runs through the trustees: prominent outsiders held fiduciary control over Epstein's assets early on, then control narrowed to his paid professionals. Bold marks a trustee who was not Indyke or Kahn.

The outsiders who briefly held fiduciary control: Ghislaine Maxwell (2001), Jes Staley (2012–14), Andrew Farkas (2012), David Mitchell (2013–14) and Kathryn Ruemmler (2018). Staley was a senior JPMorgan executive when he was named to the 2012 trust (he left the bank in 2013); Ruemmler, Obama's former White House Counsel, was in private practice in 2018 and only later became general counsel of Goldman Sachs.

The Butterfly Trust

A separate trust Epstein created on December 27, 2006, which the FBI identified as a “conduit for money paid to female victims” (EFTA00037690, EFTA00037696). Its beneficiaries and trustees are largely the same inner circle that inherits under the 1953 Trust. Karyna Shuliak, the will's single largest beneficiary, was also the sole named beneficiary on one Deutsche Bank account list, and Ghislaine Maxwell is a beneficiary of both trusts. Named beneficiaries over the trust's life include Karyna Shuliak, Ghislaine Maxwell, Nadia Marcinkova, Sarah Kellen, Lesley Groff, Ann Rodriguez, Larry Visoski, Jojo Fontanilla, Michelle Saipher, Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn, Lisa Kahn, Paul Barrett, Shelley Lewis (EFTA01297515, EFTA00161958). Its acting trustees, in sequence, were Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn, Harry Beller, Erika Kellerhals, Bella Klein (EFTA01356894, EFTA01297515). A December 2014 Deutsche Bank report put the trust's balance at $490,582.06 (EFTA01456234); the New York State DFS complaint found Epstein sent more than 120 wires totaling $2.65M to its beneficiaries (EFTA00161958).

Southern Trust Company

Epstein's U.S. Virgin Islands company, marketed as a DNA-database and data-mining venture, drew Economic Development Commission tax breaks and, per a New York Times investigation, booked roughly $200M in revenue after his 2008 conviction (EFTA00023239); its account held $109,981,919 in December 2015 (EFTA02347813). Leon Black alone wired it more than $158M (EFTA00027019), including a single $20M invoice for “algorithms” (EFTA00585292).

Debts forgiven

Beyond the bequests, Epstein forgave money owed to him by 9 people in his circle, another form of transfer that shows up in the estate records.

Darren Indyke, Jean-Luc Brunel, Jojo Fontanilla, Karyna Shuliak, Larry Visoski, Lesley Groff, Mark Lloyd, Nina Keita, Richard Kahn

Primary sources: EFTA00099303 and EFTA01266204, two copies of “The 1953 Trust” dated August 8, 2019, released by the U.S. Department of Justice with different redactions. Beneficiary names and amounts are transcribed verbatim; a name is shown when either copy discloses it and the person is not a protected victim. The 9 beneficiaries redacted in both copies are not reconstructed here (their bequest amounts are shown). Roles across the other instruments are drawn from the cited filings and our person records. A machine-readable version of this data is available at data/will_estate.json.