He Had Power Over Me

South African-born Sarah Ransome is one of the women who became ensnared in Jeffrey Epstein’s web of abuse

- Sandy Cook

She stood on a remote outcrop of the island, staring down at the crashing waves and thought, “I’ll take my chances with the sharks.”

Anything was better than the abuse she was enduring day and night on Little St James, the 28-hectare Caribbean island owned by American financier Jeffrey Epstein.

South African-born and -raised, Sarah Ransome was a strong swimmer and determined to make it to the mainland to escape Epstein and his posse of powerful pals.

But the tycoon had installed video cameras all over the island and soon a search party found her and dragged her back to the main house.

“I’d been raped three times that day,” Sarah says in an interview with Britain’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper. “A shark would’ve been my best friend at that point. I didn’t even think about it – it was just, ‘Get me away’.”

Sarah made international headlines when she was one of several survivors who testified against the 66-year-old sex offender who took his own life in a New York jail in August last year.

She also tells her harrowing tale in Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, the Netflix documentary series that exposes the billionaire’s jaw-dropping road to riches and the powers of manipulation that helped him create a vast sex network.

Her accounts of being abused on Little St James – the so-called “paedophile island” that Epstein had dubbed Little St Jeff ’s – tell of a man who used young women for his own personal enjoyment and who took pleasure from making them feel damaged.