Almost 90 flights linked to Jeffrey Epstein arrived at and departed from UK airports, some with British women on board who say they were abused by the billionaire, a BBC investigation has found.

We have established that three British women who were allegedly trafficked appear in Epstein’s records of flights in and out of the UK and other documents related to the convicted sex offender.

US lawyers representing hundreds of Epstein victims told the BBC it was “shocking” that there has never been a “full-scale UK investigation” into his activities on the other side of the Atlantic.

The UK was one of the “centrepieces” of Epstein’s operations, one said.

Testimony from one of these British victims helped convict Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell of child sex-trafficking in the US in 2021. But the victim has never been contacted by UK police, her Florida-based lawyer Brad Edwards told the BBC.

The woman, given the name Kate in the trial, was listed as having been on more than 10 flights paid for by Epstein in and out of the UK between 1999 and 2006.

The BBC is not publishing further details about the women in the documents because of the risk this might identify them.

US lawyer Sigrid McCawley said the British authorities have “not taken a closer look at those flights, at where he was at, who he was seeing at those moments, and who was with him on those planes, and conducted a full investigation”.

Under the Jeffrey Epstein Transparency Act, the deadline to release all US government files on the sex-offender financier is Friday.

But the flight logs were among thousands of documents from court cases and Epstein’s estate which have been already made public over the past year, revealing more about his time in the UK, such as trips to royal residences.

The BBC examined these documents as part of an investigation trying to piece together Epstein’s activities in the UK.

It revealed that:

• The incomplete flight logs and manifests record 87 flights linked to Epstein – dozens more than were previously known – arriving or departing from UK airports between the early 1990s and 2018
• Unidentified “females” were listed among the passengers travelling into and out of the UK in the logs
• Fifteen of the UK flights took place after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor, which should have raised questions from immigration officials

Although Epstein died in jail in 2019, before his trial on charges of trafficking minors for sex, legal experts have told the BBC a UK investigation could reveal whether British-based people enabled his crimes.

Two months ago the BBC sent the Metropolitan Police, which has previously examined allegations about Epstein’s activities in Britain, publicly available information about the UK flights with suspected trafficking victims on board.

Later, we sent the Met a detailed list of questions about whether it would investigate evidence of possible British victims of Epstein trafficked in and out of the UK.

The Met did not respond to our questions. On Saturday, it released a broader statement saying that it had “not received any additional evidence that would support reopening the investigation” into Epstein and Maxwell’s trafficking activities in the UK.

“Should new and relevant information be brought to our attention”, including any resulting from the release of material in the US, “we will assess it”, the Met said.

US lawyer Brad Edwards, who has been representing Epstein victims since 2008, told us “three or four” of his clients are British women “who were abused on British soil both by Jeffrey Epstein and others”.

Other victims were recruited in the UK, trafficked to the United States and abused there, he said.

Mr Edwards said he is also representing women of other nationalities who say they were trafficked to the UK for abuse by Epstein and others.

Our analysis shows Epstein used commercial and chartered flights, as well as his private planes, to travel to the UK and to arrange transport for others, including alleged trafficking victims.

More than 50 of the flights involved his private jets, mostly flying to and from Luton Airport, with several flights at Birmingham International Airport, and one arrival and departure each at RAF Marham in west Norfolk and at Edinburgh Airport.

Limited records of commercial and chartered flights taken by Epstein, or paid for by him, show dozens more journeys, mainly via London Heathrow, but also Stansted and Gatwick.

In a number of the logs of Epstein’s private planes, including some detailing trips to the UK, women on the flight are identified only as unnamed “females”.

“He’s absolutely choosing airports where he feels it will be easier for him to get in and out with victims that he’s trafficking,” said Ms McCawley.

Private aircraft did not have to provide passenger details to UK authorities before departure in the same way as commercial aircraft during the period covered by the documents we examined. The Home Office told us they were “not subject to the same centralised record-keeping”.

That loophole was only closed in April last year.

Kate, the British woman who testified against Maxwell, was on some of the commercial flights in the records we examined. She described in court that she had been 17 when Maxwell befriended her and introduced her to Epstein – who then sexually abused her at Maxwell’s central London home.

In the 2021 trial, she described how Maxwell gave her a schoolgirl outfit to wear and asked her to find other girls for Epstein. As well as the dozen flights to and from the UK, Kate told the court she had been flown to Epstein’s island in the US Virgin Islands, New York and Palm Beach in Florida, where she says the abuse continued into her 30s.

Mr Edwards, her lawyer, told BBC News that even after that testimony, Kate has “never been asked” by any UK authorities any questions about her experience – “not even a phone call”.

He said that if British police were to launch an investigation into Epstein’s activities and his enablers, Kate would be happy to help.

Prof Bridgette Carr, a human-trafficking expert at the University of Michigan Law School, said trafficking cases usually require many people working together.

“It’s never just one bad person,” she said. “You don’t think about the accountant and the lawyer and the banker – or all the bankers – and all these people that had to implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, be OK with what was happening for it to continue.”

There are also questions about how Epstein was able to travel freely to the UK after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for sex, which meant he had to register as a sex offender in Florida, New York and the US Virgin Islands.

Epstein was released from prison in 2009 after serving 13 months. Documents suggest Epstein took a Virgin Atlantic flight from the US to London Heathrow in September 2010, just two months after he completed his probation on house arrest.

Home Office rules at the time said foreign nationals who received a prison sentence of 12 months or more should, in most cases, have been refused entry.

But immigration lawyer Miglena Ilieva, managing partner at ILEX Law Group, told us that US citizens did not usually require a UK visa for short stays, so there was no application process where they would be asked about criminal convictions.

“It was very much at the discretion of the individual immigration officer who would receive this person at the border,” she said.

The Home Office said it does not hold immigration and visa records beyond 10 years and added “it is longstanding government policy that we do not routinely comment on individual cases”.

During the 1980s, Epstein also used a foreign passport – issued in Austria with his picture and a false name – to enter the UK as well as France, Spain and Saudi Arabia, according to US authorities.

Epstein also listed London as his place of residence in 1985, when he applied for a replacement passport, ABC News has previously reported.

In its statement on Saturday, the Met said it had contacted “several other potential victims” when it examined 2015 allegations by Virginia Giuffre that she had been trafficked for sexual exploitation by Epstein and Maxwell.

Ms Giuffre also said she was forced to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on three occasions, including when she was 17 at Maxwell’s home in London, in 2001. The former prince has consistently denied the allegations against him.

The Met said its examination of Ms Giuffre’s claims “did not result in any allegation of criminal conduct against any UK-based nationals” and it concluded that “other international authorities were best placed to progress these allegations”.

That decision was reviewed in August 2019 and again in 2021 and 2022 with the same result, it said.

But for lawyer Sigrid McCawley, the message the Met is sending to victims is “that if you come to law enforcement and this is a powerful person you’re reporting on… it will not get investigated.”

At a meeting of his cabinet at the White House two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump looked around the long room filled with his top advisers, administration officials and aides, and made a prediction.

The next Republican presidential candidate, he said, is “probably sitting at this table”.

“It could be a couple of people sitting at this table,” he added, hinting at possible electoral clashes to come.

Despite a constitutional amendment limiting him to two four-year terms, his supporters chanted “four more years” at a rally last Tuesday night in Pennsylvania. Trump said at the time that the final three years of his second term amount to an “eternity”.

But in the cabinet room last week, when talking about prospects for the 2028 Republican president nomination, he was clear: “It’s not going to be me.”

The next presidential election may seem a long way off, but Trump’s own speculation – and certain frictions within Trump’s coalition – suggest that the jockeying to succeed and define the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement after Trump is well under way.

In last month’s local elections, the Republican Party lost support among the minority and working-class voters who helped Trump win back the White House in 2024.

Members of his team have feuded over policy. And some, most notably Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, have cut loose from his orbit, accusing the president of losing touch with the Americans who gave him power.

There has been speculation about fractures within the Maga base in certain quarters of the international press, as well as at home. On Monday, a headline in The Washington Post asked: “Maga leaders warn Trump the base is checking out. Will he listen?”

The warning signs are there. While Trump has long been known for being in tune with his base, the months ahead will pose a series of challenges to the president and his movement. Nothing less than his political legacy is at stake.

It was all smiles and talk of historic presidential achievements inside the friendly confines of Trump’s newly redecorated, gold-bedecked cabinet room two weeks ago.

But the presidential aspirants Trump may have had in mind as he looked around the table hint at just how hard it could be to keep his Maga movement from stretching apart at the seams.

Vice-President JD Vance sat directly across from the president. As his running mate, he is widely considered to be Trump’s most likely heir apparent – the favourite of Trump’s sons and libertarian Silicon Valley tech billionaires.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on the president’s immediate right. The former Florida senator, who competed with Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, had spent the past 10 years undergoing a Maga transformation.

He has jettisoned his past support for liberalising immigration policy and his hard line on Russia in lieu of Trump’s America First foreign policy. But if there is anyone close to an old-guard Republican with influence in Trump’s party, Rubio tops the list.

Then there is Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose vaccine scepticism and “Make America Healthy Again” agenda have sent earthquakes through the US health bureaucracy; he sat two down from Rubio. The Democrat-turned-independent-turned-Republican is a living embodiment of the strange ideological bedfellows Trump made on his way to re-election last year.

And finally, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, was tucked off to the corner of the table. While the former South Dakota governor is not considered a major presidential contender, her advocacy for aggressive immigration enforcement – including a recent call for a full travel ban on “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies” – has made her a prominent face of administration’s policies.

Each might believe they could, if they chose to run, become Trump’s political heir and take control of the political movement that has reshaped American politics over the last decade.

But to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin’s comments at the birth of American democracy, whoever wins the Republican nomination will have been given a winning coalition – if they can keep it.

Of course none of this is guaranteed – nor is it certain that the next generation of Maga leaders will be someone from the president’s inner circle. Trump stormed the White House as a political outsider. The next Republican leader may follow a similar path.

“It’s going to be up to the next Republican president who follows Trump to set him or herself apart,” says former Republican Congressman Rodney Davis of Illinois, who now works for the US Chamber of Commerce.

“But at the same time make sure that you don’t go too far away, because clearly it’s Donald Trump [who] got elected president twice.”

When the November 2028 presidential election rolls around, American voters may not even want someone like Trump. Some public opinion polls suggest that the president may not be as popular as he once was.

A survey by YouGov earlier this month indicated the president had a net approval rating of -14, compared with +6 when he took office again in January. Then there are concerns about the economy and his relentless efforts to push the boundaries of presidential power.

Leadership of Trump’s movement still represents the keys to the Republican empire, however, even if that empire has drastically changed in recent years.

“I think the Republican coalition has become fundamentally different over the last few decades,” said Davis, who served in Congress from 2013 to 2023. “The Republican coalition that existed when Ronald Reagan was elected is not the Republican coalition anymore.”

Back in the 1980s, the Reagan coalition was a fusion of free-market economics, cultural conservatism, anti-communism and international foreign affairs, says Laura K Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right.

Trump’s party, she continues, was perhaps best described by long-time Trump adviser and current state department official Michael Anton in a 2016 essay advocating for Trump’s election. In contrast with the Reagan era, its core principles include “secure borders, economic nationalism and America-first foreign policy”.

Earlier this month, the conservative Manhattan Institute released a comprehensive survey of Republican voters, shedding more light on the composition of Trump’s coalition.

It suggested that 65% of the current Republican Party are what it calls “core Republicans” – those who have supported party presidential nominees since at least 2016. (If they were alive in the 1980s, they may well have voted for Reagan.)

On the other hand, 29% are what the Institute called “new entrant Republicans”. It is among those new Republicans that the challenge to the durability of Trump’s coalition presents itself.

Only just over half said they would “definitely” support a Republican in next year’s mid-term congressional elections.

According to the survey, the new entrants are younger, more diverse and more likely to hold views that break with traditional conservative orthodoxy. They hold comparatively more left-leaning views of economic policy, they tend to be more liberal on immigration and social issues, and they may also be more pro-China or critical of Israel, for example.

Jesse Arm, vice-president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, told the BBC in an email: “A lot of the conversation about the future of the right is being driven by the loudest and strangest voices online, rather than by the voters who actually make up the bulk of the Republican coalition.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the so-called new entrant Republican voters are significantly less supportive of some of Trump’s would-be heirs. While 70% of core Republicans have positive views of Rubio and 80% for Vance, just over half of new entrants feel that way about either.

Other findings could be more concerning for Republicans.

More than half of new entrants believe the use of political violence in American politics “is sometimes justified” – compared to just 20% among core Republicans.

It also suggests they may be more likely to be tolerant of racist or anti-Semitic speech and more prone to conspiratorial thinking – on topics like the moon landings, 9/11 and vaccines.

Trump was able to attract these voters into his coalition. The question is whether he and his political heirs can keep them there – or if they even want to.

“The real takeaway is not that these voters will ‘define’ the post-Trump GOP, but that future Republican leaders will have to draw clear lines about who sets the agenda,” argues Mr Arm.

“The heart of the party remains normie Republicans, not the edgelords that both the media and the dissident right are strangely invested in elevating.”

The divides revealed in the Manhattan Institute poll helps explain some of the most notable frictions within the Trump coalition over the past few months.

The Trump-Greene feud that culminated in the latter’s resignation from Congress began with her backing of a full release of the government files connected to the Jeffrey Epstein underage sex-trafficking case – long a source of conservative conspiracy theories.

It broadened, however, into a critique of Trump’s Middle East policy and accusations of his failure to address cost-of-living and healthcare concerns for low-income American voters.

An earlier high-profile Maga split erupted over Trump’s economic policy, with billionaire Elon Musk, a strong supporter and member of Trump’s inner circle at the start of the year, going on to condemn certain tariffs and government spending policies.

The president has, for the moment, largely tried to stay out of another bitter clash within conservative ranks over whether Nick Fuentes, a far-right political commentator and Holocaust denier, is welcome within the conservative movement.

It’s a dispute that has roiled the influential Heritage Foundation and pitted some powerful right-wing commentators against each other.

According to Ms Field, those who follow Trump may find it a difficult conflict to avoid. “Nick Fuentes has a huge following,” she says. “Part of how the conservative movement got the energy and power that they’ve got is by peddling to this part of the Republican Party.”

In the halls of the Republican-controlled Congress, some signs of friction with the president’s agenda are showing. Despite White House lobbying, it couldn’t stop the House from passing a measure mandating release of the Epstein files.

The president has also been unable to convince Senate Republicans to abandon the filibuster, a parliamentary procedure Democrats in the minority have been able to block some of Trump’s agenda.

Meanwhile, Trump’s party has been stumbling at the polls, with the Democrats winning governorships in Virginia and New Jersey last month by comfortable margins.

In dozens of contested special elections for state and local seats over the past year, Democrats have on average improved their margins by around 13% over similar races held in last November’s national elections.

All of this will be front of mind for Republicans ahead of the 2026 mid-term congressional elections – and it will do little to ease the concerns held by some that, without Trump at the top of the ticket, their coalition will struggle to deliver reliable ballot-box victories.

Yet even a defeat next year – or in 2028 – is unlikely to mark the end of Trumpism.

The ascent by Trump’s Maga movement to the pinnacle of American power has been far from a smooth one. It includes a mid-term rout in 2018 and Trump himself losing in 2020, before his re-election last November.

But the changes that Trump has wrought within the Republican Party itself appear to be foundational ones, according to Ms Field. His Maga coalition builds on strains of populist movements in the US that date back decades or more – from Barry Goldwater’s insurgent presidential campaign in 1964 to the Tea Party protests during Barack Obama’s presidency.

“These things are not coming out of nowhere. They are forces in American politics that have been underground for a while, but have been just kind of fermenting.”

The old Republican order, she argues, is a relic of the past.

“The Trump movement is here to stay and there’s no real likelihood of the old establishment returning with any sort of clout – that much is clear.”

Top picture credit: Getty Images

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