Jane and the Second Pilot - Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Day 8
“There was a divider between the two sections, he said, and while they were flying it always remained closed.”
The day’s proceedings were dominated by examination and cross-examination of the government’s witness, David Rodgers.
Rodgers, who worked for Jeffrey Epstein for 28 years, combed meticulously through a personal log he kept showing flights Epstein flew to locations around the world, and the passengers who flew on them.
This testimony was crucial in proving the government’s case that their first witness, who testified anonymously as Jane, was brought across state lines by Ghislaine Maxwell to commit sex acts as a minor.
Rodgers remembered Jane flying four times on the plane with Epstein, Maxwell, and other passengers. She was the only passenger he remembered flying that attended Interlochen, a prestigious summer music camp in Michigan for talented children where Epstein maintained a lodge named after him and built with funds he donated.
Rodgers said he remembered meeting Jane, per the records from his personal log, on November 11th, 1996. These records weren’t the original flight manifests. He had them at one point, he said, but “they were turned over to an attorney of Jeffrey’s.”
Rodgers’ personal log was entered into the record under seal as government exhibit 662, with a redacted version, gx662-R released to the public. The reason for the redaction, said prosecutors, was because the redacted portions of the exhibit showed information about anonymous witnesses, and third parties.
The redacted document shown to the public blacked out the column showing the names of passengers who traveled on Epstein’s plane. Later under cross-examination, the defense, trying to make the case to the jury that the names listed in the log were an innocuous list of Epstein’s friends and family hitching rides, elicited some of those names from Rodgers. They included the decorator Alberto Pinto, the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin and his wife Eva, a former girlfriend of Epstein’s, and their children Selena and Jordan, as well as celebrity chef Adam Perry Lang and MIT professor Marvin Minsky.
Rodgers worked as Epstein’s chief pilot from 1991 to 2002. The other pilot who testified in the trial earlier this week, Larry Visoski, was Rodger’s co-captain for that time period. The two men then switched roles, with Rodgers becoming Epstein’s co-captain until 2019, when Epstein died awaiting trial in a Manhattan federal prison.
Before Rodgers worked for Epstein, he told the court, he was employed by a real estate developer in Columbus, Ohio, the hometown and base of Epstein financier and clothing billionaire Leslie Wexner retail empire.
Rodgers testified that the names of all his passengers weren’t always known to him. When that happened, he told the court, he would mark them in his log as “pax” or “passenger”; later he would specify “man” or “woman.” But if he did come to learn their names at a later date, he wouldn’t return to the log to update the names.
That meant, he told the court, that the first time that somebody’s name appears in his log didn’t necessarily reflect the first time they flew on one of Epstein’s planes.
If he didn’t know the passengers, Rodgers said, he would usually meet them as they came on the plane. After he went into the cockpit though, he had no way of observing what was happening inside the cabin.
There was a divider between the two sections, he said, and while they were flying it always remained closed.
The defense tried to disprove the idea that Jane, who Rodgers testified was the same woman as the government’s witness last week, was in fact the same Jane that he was thinking of.
They pointed out that there was another woman in Epstein’s circle who shared Jane’s name, and that because all but one of Rodgers’ log entries for Jane used only her first name, these entries could refer to her.
But that strategy backfired. Pushed on the question, Rodgers was unequivocal. “I’ve only flown two persons of that name,” he said. “And the second person I met in September of 2003 was not the one.”