From Russia(to Jeffrey), with Love
The Epstein saga is even more interesting when you look at the Russian women who helped run his operation. Here's a look at Svetlana Pozhidaeva.
As long everyone is raising a hullaballoo about Jeffrey Epstein again, I thought I might as well chime in with what I think is the most overlooked part of the Epstein saga, namely his ties to Russia.
Let’s start with one of his most accomplished assistants, a woman named Lana(as in Svetlana) Pozhidaeva, a striking young Russian multi‑hyphenate— scholar, model, women’s empowerment activist, and tech entrepreneur— who had ties to both Epstein and his not-so-esteemed friend and colleague, the late Jean-Luc Brunel, who owned a modeling agency and was later convicted of sex trafficking. I wrote about Pozhidaeva at length in American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump and other Tales of Greed,Corruption, and Treachery, from which this piece is adapted. In addition, Pozhidaeva was investigated by The Daily Beast in 2019.
Raised in a Moscow apartment complex built for staffers of the NKVD, the Stalinist precursor of the KGB, Pozhidaeva was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the prestigious academy run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is a training ground for Russian diplomats and intelligence officials. Reputed to be the most elite university in the country, MGIMO has been dubbed the “Harvard of Russia” by Henry Kissinger because it has trained so many figures in Russia’s political, intellectual, and financial elite.
According to the Italian edition of Maxim, Lana gave up a promising tennis career at the age of sixteen to become the youngest freshman at MGIMO, where she graduated with the equivalent of summa cum laude, having mastered, along the way, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as if she were on course to join the Foreign Ministry.
But then her career took a bizarre turn. Her stellar academic credentials notwithstanding, Pozhidaeva somehow ended up becoming a model who was represented by MC2, a modeling agency owned by Epstein-pimp-to-be Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in which several young models accused him of drugging their drinks, groping them sexually, and rape. The CBS reporter, Craig Pyes, told Michael Gross. the author of Model: The Ugly Truth of Beautiful Women, that Brunel “ranks among the sleaziest people in the fashion industry. We’re talking about a conveyor belt, not a casting couch. Hundreds of girls were not only harassed but molested.”
Brunel was arrested in December 2020 at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris before boarding a plane for Senegal where he said he was going on holiday. While he was being investigated for sexual harassment and the rape of two minors, he was held on remand in Paris’s La Santé prison.
In February 2022, The Guardian reported, Brunel was found dead, hanging in his prison cell in La Santé as he awaited trial for trafficking underage girls for Epstein, who died under similar conditions in three years earlier.
As a model, Pozhidaeva was featured prominently in Maxim Italia and Ukraine Vogue, moved to the United States, and then began her association with Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike the very young local Florida girls Ghislaine Maxwell and her team had recruited from broken homes and trailer parks, Lana was older—at this writing, thirty‑ five— and very well educated, self‑possessed, and refined enough to play hostess to distinguished academics, Silicon Valley titans, and movie stars.
Once Pozhidaeva got to New York, she became president of a New York– based charity called Education Advance, which received most of its $56,000 in funding from Epstein in 2017 to support education science and technology. Pozhidaeva later told the Daily Beast that Epstein’s donation “helped develop an impactful program at MIT.”
Education Advance deleted its website on Monday after The Daily Beast began investigating and contacted a director of the nonprofit, Pendleton King, who told The Beast that Education Advance would return Epstein’s $55,000 donation.
With Epstein’s help, Pozhidaeva also founded a New York-based monthly event series for female entrepreneurs and professionals called WE Talks. (“WE” stands for Women's Empowerment, Encouragement, and Entrepreneurship.)
Epstein also gave $50,000 to Pozhidaeva for the benefit of the Open Cog Foundation, a project that aims to build an open source artificial intelligence framework. Epstein also gave her an opportunity to study and attend conferences with scientists. “What she liked was that he donated a lot to science and helped researchers and interesting people,” a source told the Irish Mail on Sunday
Pozhidaeva did not return multiple phone calls and emails from me. According to the Daily Beast, Pendleton King, who was Pozhidaeva’s boyfriend and was the director of Education Advance, said Pozhidaeva knew very little about the allegations against Epstein when the foundation accepted his donation. “She’s never been involved in anything shady,” King said.
With Epstein’s help, Pozhidaeva also founded a New York– based monthly event series for female entrepreneurs and professionals called WE Talks. (“WE” stands for Women’s Empowerment, Encouragement, and Entrepreneurship.)
None which made much sense. How on earth could Pozhidaeva be an activist lobbying for women’s’s empowerment, when she was working with sleazy sex traffickers like Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel?
“She was in one of the best, most prestigious academic institutions in Russia,” said Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB who defected to the United States more than 30 years ago. “She could make a breathtaking career in the Foreign Office or in any foreign company working in the Moscow office. She would make a great career. But instead she goes into the so‑ called modeling business?”
Shvets, whose work with the KGB entailed deep analysis of case files like Pozhidaeva’s, said there had to be a simple explanation. “Each intelligence officer operates under a so‑ called legend or a cover story,” he told me. “This is like their official work history, which they show to the world. The purpose of this legend is to cover up years you spent training at the KGB or FSB.
“What was most striking about Pozhidaeva was that she had a terrific academic career in Russia and then threw it away on something completely unrelated. She attended, as she says, a top college in Russia, like Stanford in the United States,” said Shvets. “And she was a straight‑ A student. This is important to understand. She sacrificed four years and then two more years for a master’s degree. It’s an achievement.”
But suddenly after this, Shvets noted, “She says, ‘Fuck it all. Fuck my previous six years. Fuck everything I was doing.’ I mean, it’s amazing— it just does not happen in real life.”
“Of course, we know what Epstein was doing with the ladies. But in this particular case,” Shvets told me, “Epstein takes her and introduces her to renowned American and international scientists.”
“How could someone as intelligent and well educated as Pozhidaeva become an activist for women while possibly seeking patronage from Jean‑ Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein, who directed and participated in human trafficking and the rape of underage girls for more than two decades?”
According to Shvets, the only answer is that it all must have been part of a deliberate effort to introduce Lana to a network of scientists and to help her set up a charity that made lots of donations to companies associated with artificial intelligence. And that leads Shvets to believe that she worked as a penetration agent with the assistance of Jeffrey Epstein. “She penetrated the network in the United States related to supercomputer and artificial intelligence,” he told me.
Shvets added that you can’t understand the scope of Russian intelligence until you understand that Putin sees artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and control of advanced computer technology as Russia’s most vital national security issue. “This is, for Putin, as essential to the survival of his regime as it was for Stalin to get the A‑ bomb,” Shvets told me. “There are seventeen thousand Russian IT guys working in the United States, and a great number of them are connected with Russian intelligence— bright people who’ve been working inside Apple, Microsoft, and other companies for years.
“For Russian intelligence, it would have been like a Klondike to penetrate Epstein’s network of tech people who work on artificial intelligence and supercomputers. It would have been the equivalent of penetrating the Manhattan Project in World War II.”
Similarly, a report from the Brookings Institute concluded that Russia’s use of AI as a weapon can make its recent disinformation operations pale by comparison. “AI has the potential to hyperpower Russia’s use of disinformation— the intentional spread of false and misleading information for the purpose of influencing politics and societies,” the report says. “And unlike in the conventional military space, the United States and Europe are ill‑ equipped to respond to AI‑ driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) in the information space.”
Coming soon: Why did Epstein hire celebrated pro-Putin activist Masha Drokova as his publicist?
Mr Unger, you have been able to identify all these seemingly disparate figures around Epstein and weave together a coherent narrative so well - thank you. People need to understand how foreign governments (in this case, Russia) operate within the US to further their own interests at the expense of US national security. You are providing a great service for his country as well as practicing the art of journalism at a high level...
As usual, you are bringing light to the seedy darkness of Russian intelligence. This is another important piece of the Epstein puzzle, that demonstrates his crimes were more complicated than being a pedophile. That so many powerful figures continue to keep his secrets is disturbing as hell. Epstein's close relationship with Trump, and both mens' affinity for Russia and Israel, emphasizes the extent America's national security is jeopardized. Considering that the Republican regime is in total servitude to Trump, it begs the question: Are any of them not an accessory or willing accomplice, to the wholesale betrayal of the United States?