Early in 2019, Julia Molchanova opened a credit-monitoring app on her phone. It showed credit cards and spending that she didn't recognize.
She had spent years as one of the young women Jeffrey Epstein called his "assistants," a cover Molchanova said he used to hide his sexual abuse. She started to suspect that Epstein was also using accounts set up in her name for his own purposes and decided to challenge him for the first time.
"I feel uncomfortable to discuss future," Molchanova wrote to Epstein on April 4, 2019, sweat soaking into her shirt as she nervously typed the message. She told Epstein she didn't know anything about an entity he had set up in her name and that she wanted to "have my normal life."
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Molchanova publicly discussed her ordeal for the first time, revealing that she was the lead Jane Doe plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Bank of America.
"I'm going forward to prove that women have a voice and the ability to rebuild themselves, move forward and do good things in life," said the 37-year-old, who recently started a fashion brand and plans to advocate for crime victims.
The lawsuit, filed last year, said Jane Doe was abused by Epstein for several years and held accounts at Bank of America that Epstein used to facilitate his sex trafficking. The suit accused the bank of ignoring suspicious transactions.
Molchanova said the legal process was grueling, including sharing her private medical history, but she said she feels good knowing it may have spared other victims. "The man was supposed to be in jail. It was the system that failed us," she said.
A federal judge recently approved a $72.5 million settlement with Bank of America that will be distributed to dozens of Epstein victims. The judge said the case "brought actual justice, although partial" for the women.
In a statement, Bank of America said that it maintains it didn't facilitate sex trafficking crimes and "this resolution allows us to put this matter behind us and provides further closure for the plaintiffs."
Brad Edwards, an attorney who represented Molchanova and other Epstein victims in the lawsuit, said, "She had every reason to protect her privacy and move forward quietly with her life. Instead, she chose to stand up-not only for herself, but for hundreds of women whose names the world may never know."
A sidewalk meeting
Epstein's sexual exploitation didn't end with his 2008 conviction in Florida-as many of his famous associates later said they believed-but continued until his second arrest in 2019. He lured dozens of women, largely from Russia and Europe, by promising to use his connections to powerful people to get them jobs or other opportunities, according to a Journal investigation from 2023.
After 2008, he targeted young women who were over 18 like Molchanova but looked like teenagers, often seizing on vulnerabilities to draw them in.
Molchanova described how Epstein's methods became sophisticated after he was caught in Florida getting sexual massages from teenage girls. Epstein registered an LLC in Molchanova's name, presenting the business to her as her own design company, but she said he used it for his own activities.
"He was a very manipulative man," she said. "It was an illusion that you have something. In reality, I had nothing, and it was only beneficial for him."
Molchanova said she was 22 when she met Epstein in December 2011 on a trip to New York. She was living in Russia at the time and spoke little English. He spotted her on the street, near Barneys on Madison Avenue, said something about her blue eyes, and directed her to his nearby townhouse as if he was pointing out a tourist attraction.
Inside there were several people, and through a young Russian woman who translated for him, Epstein invited her to breakfast the next morning. When she returned, he asked a steady stream of questions, all of them translated by the woman: What did she want? What did she dream of doing?
Molchanova, a design student in Russia, told Epstein she was interested in fashion design. Epstein, she said, offered to help her enroll at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. "That was the hook," she said. Back in Russia, she signed up for extra classes to learn sewing in preparation for an FIT program. The money for the sewing classes came from Epstein.
Epstein lured her to New York in January 2012 to show her FIT and put her in an apartment he controlled where he kept many of his victims. On this trip, he sexually abused her for the first time. When she expressed her discomfort, she said he told her that sexual openness was part of American culture and that she'd have to change to assimilate.
What really closed the trap, she said, was a trip to Paris the next month. She went there with her boyfriend. In the middle of an argument with her boyfriend that turned abusive, she got scared and texted Epstein, who happened to be in Paris too. Epstein helped her escape her boyfriend and put her on a flight home to Russia.
'It was like a cult'
Molchanova eventually moved to New York and started following Epstein's advice, hoping she'd break into design, but no FIT education materialized. A spokeswoman for FIT said the university is continuing to investigate references to the school.
Over time Epstein expected her to become an "assistant," though there was never any real work, and his advice turned into a set of rules. She was supposed to thank him constantly, act happy and be friendly to everyone.
"It was like a cult," she said. Aside from coercing the women into sex acts on a regular basis, Epstein also expected the women to bring him other women, she and other Epstein victims have said.
Because she didn't bring anyone, Molchanova said, his anger intensified toward her and he would constantly ask what she was doing to make herself useful. She said on a few occasions, he sent her to a room in his home to stay in isolation for multiple days.
Molchanova said Epstein kept tabs on her spending. She remembers receiving less than $3,000 a month from him, but said the amount fluctuated. She said he dictated what she wore, how long her hair should be, what doctors she visited and whom she spent time with.
Documents show Epstein arranged for Molchanova and another woman to marry one another around 2013-a tactic the Journal has reported he used with other women too.
In 2014, Epstein's lawyer Darren Indyke helped form a company registered under her name called JSC Interiors. She said Epstein passed it off as a way to help her launch a design business. She ran a couple of design-related errands like arranging flowers, and then Epstein used an account associated with the company to move money and make transactions without her knowledge, she said.
"I still have so many questions about what that company was, because no one ever explained it to me and I wasn't allowed to ask questions," she said. "It made me super scared because I couldn't understand what I was responsible for."
Molchanova said she only found out years later, and that Epstein's activities in her name went beyond Bank of America, including the spending she discovered from the credit monitoring app and a furniture order for nearly $40,000 that she recently found in the Justice Department files.
In a statement, attorneys for Indyke and Epstein accountant Richard Kahn said Molchanova never informed them she was a victim of abuse or trafficking. "Julia appeared to be one of Epstein's assistants working through an LLC that Epstein set up for interior design purposes," the statement said.
"Indyke and Kahn saw no basis to refuse to provide her with services she requested," the statement said, as they did for other Epstein employees. The two men have no knowledge of Epstein arranging her marriage or anyone else using the cards in her name, the statement said.
Both Kahn and Indyke recently told Congress they didn't facilitate or know about Epstein's criminal activities.
'i am angry'
Molchanova said Epstein's control extended to other parts of her life. When she tried to date other men, he dictated what she wrote to them and demanded a full account of everything that passed between them.
The design work never materialized. Instead Epstein sent her to Faith Kates's modeling agency Next Management for a job interview. In a May 2015 email, Kates told Epstein that Molchanova said she didn't want to sit at a desk all day and had never worked at an office.
Epstein berated Molchanova for not asking for a front-desk job. "You told them you were going to school and didn't want to work at a desk," he wrote to her in an email. "i am angry."
In a statement, Next Management said it never had a relationship with Epstein. "Faith Kates' multi-decade long, personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was completely and absolutely unknown to Next Management and its top executives," it said.
Kates didn't respond to requests for comment. After the Justice Department released some of her correspondence with Epstein, Kates said in late 2025 that she was retiring from Next Management.
Epstein also placed Molchanova in internships arranged by his friends, including a stretch she describes interning for the publicist Peggy Siegal in 2016. Molchanova said she felt out of place, held back by her limited English.
"If he really wanted to help, he would have sent me to learn English," she said. "Instead, it was all a bunch of nonsense."
Siegal didn't respond to requests for comment. She previously told the Journal that she was unaware of Epstein's nefarious behavior and it was a mistake to associate with him.
'my life is over'
Those years took a toll on Molchanova's body and her mind. As her weight fluctuated, Epstein criticized her and called her fat. At her lowest, Molchanova said, she was thinking about suicide and Epstein didn't let her see a therapist. Her mental health declined further, she said, after a tabloid in 2016 ran photos of her with Epstein. "I remember thinking that I'm trapped forever, and my life is over."
In 2017, Epstein's lawyer handled the paperwork for her to get divorced, and she describes the years after that as an effort to get out. She had a serious boyfriend that she hoped she could marry to escape Epstein, but Epstein kept summoning her back, and the abuse continued. She didn't tell her boyfriend what was happening, and they eventually broke up.
In early 2019, Molchanova finally confided in a friend about how ensnared she was in Epstein's web, and that person gave her a road map for getting out. It led her to send emails that March to Epstein's bookkeeper, asking why the credit cards she didn't recognize were showing up on her credit report. The bookkeeper responded that the report was showing the balance of Epstein's entire American Express account and that she would have Molchanova removed from the account.
Molchanova told Kahn, the accountant, that she wanted to see her tax returns and that she wanted to be removed from JSC Interiors. Kahn wrote back that since she was uncomfortable, she could hire another accountant to handle her returns and that he would send paperwork she could sign to exit JSC Interiors.
Around the same time, she sent the email confronting Epstein. He invited her to Palm Beach, but she didn't go. "I thought for sure, at that moment, someone would find me on the bottom of his pool if I go," she said.
Lesley Groff, Epstein's longtime assistant, texted her trying to get her to call Epstein. She also began getting calls from another young woman in Epstein's orbit. Despite the outreach, she never went back.
In a statement, lawyers for Groff said she performed administrative tasks for Epstein and "had no knowledge of Epstein's crimes while she was working for him."
Long before she escaped, Molchanova gave Epstein the code name "mishka," a Russian term that translates loosely as "little bear"-from a popular song that describes a bear who is a criminal.
In June 2019, she made a painting depicting the bear being arrested and decapitated. She never imagined that on July 6 Epstein would be arrested and that a few weeks later he would be found dead.
Comments