SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico investigators have sent letters to JPMorgan, Google, and more than two dozen companies ordering them to preserve records tied to Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates, a sign that the state’s criminal probe into the financier’s former Zorro Ranch is widening.
The letters, which the Wall Street Journal obtained through a public records request, compel the companies to preserve documentation while the state’s Department of Justice pursues subpoenas. They were sent last month and reach across the spectrum of companies that would have touched Epstein’s movements: banks, phone companies, airlines, and tech giants.
The preservation requests seek data belonging not just to Epstein, but also to his longtime assistant Lesley Groff, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a federal sentence for sex trafficking. The letters also demand correspondence belonging to anyone those individuals communicated with. When asked who else may receive the preservation letters, the attorney general’s office said it plans to send additional requests, including for records belonging to Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, Epstein’s longtime lawyer and accountant, who have been serving as co-executors of his estate. Both Groff, Indyke, and Kahn have previously denied wrongdoing.
As MSI previously reported, New Mexico’s investigation is one of several parallel efforts that reopened this year. The probe runs alongside a separate state legislative “truth commission” that has its own subpoena power and has been issuing requests to government agencies, banks, and law enforcement since the commission was launched in February.
“Reopening the investigation into allegations at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch was undertaken with deep respect for survivors and a commitment to accountability,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement obtained by the Journal. Torrez called the letters one step and said his investigation required the testimony of survivors. “We continue to seek out insight from anyone with information concerning abuse or other illegal activity that occurred at the ranch,” he said.
Zorro Ranch is a roughly 8,000-acre property about 30 miles south of Santa Fe. Epstein bought it in 1993 and built a secluded mansion on the large property. At least 10 women and girls have said they were groomed or abused at the ranch, among them prominent accusers who have described being assaulted there by Epstein and Maxwell.
The Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files — totaling millions of pages earlier this year — brought new scrutiny to the property, surfacing allegations of abuse there as well as an unverified tip that two girls died and were secretly buried on the grounds. That claim helped drive a search by authorities of the ranch in March.
Among the letter recipients are major financial institutions including JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and American Express; payment platforms such as PayPal; and the biggest U.S. airlines and the clearinghouse that processes ticketing data across the industry. Travel-booking services including Expedia were also contacted. A second cluster went to phone and tech providers such as AT&T and Verizon and email, cloud and messaging services including Google, WhatsApp and Yahoo.
Deutsche Bank said it will cooperate with government investigations. Other recipients declined to comment or did not respond.
The state asked each recipient to preserve all documentation it might have previously turned over to the FBI or the U.S. Department of Justice in connection with their investigations into Epstein and his associates.
Since reopening the case in February, Torrez has said he asked the federal Justice Department for complete, unredacted access to its Epstein files and has said he has not received it. Going directly to the companies offers state investigators an alternative path to the evidence.
A spokeswoman for the federal Justice Department said it “has not refused to assist any jurisdiction investigating potential criminal conduct related to Jeffrey Epstein.”
New Mexico’s earlier investigation into Zorro Ranch was closed in 2019 at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The attorney general’s jurisdiction does not extend to abuse alleged at Epstein’s other properties, including his Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach estate, and private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.