What are we to make of the Kansas City connections in the Epstein files? | Opinion
I’ll just put my bias up here at the top. I’m uneasy about the way the investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein were released.
On the one hand, we’ve seen a number of bad actors in finance, academia and politics exposed as friends of Epstein and, in some cases, tied to alleged abuse and exploitation. Some of them are facing consequences. That part is good.
But dumping raw investigative material into a searchable database for a public that is already primed for conspiracy thinking is not something a responsible government does. The Epstein files are not findings. They are mostly just fragments: unverified tips, partial records, names that surface without context. The line between allegation and proof matters, and the database blurs it in ways a lot of people either don’t understand or don’t care to.
Take Cliff Illig, one of the wealthiest men in Kansas City. His name shows up in the Epstein files. Sounds juicy. What were Cliff and Jeff scheming down at Little St. James?
Nothing, as far as anyone can tell. Illig is just a rich businessman whose name appears to have surfaced not because of any direct relationship with Epstein, but because he and Epstein were identified as potential investors in a broad investment pitch that circulated to other rich businessmen.
He still had to deny it and issue a statement, of course.
“I want to unequivocally state that I have had zero association with Jeffrey Epstein,” Illig said last month. “The documents reflect a one-way effort by investment bankers to reach me, an attempted connection that never occurred. My thoughts are with the victims; I wish them peace as they continue to navigate this terrible situation.”
I cry no tears for a billionaire having to deploy his PR team for an afternoon. But it’s a good example of how these files can mislead.
A Kansas City pastor’s ties to Epstein
We got another round of Epstein news with a local hook this week. This one is a little more complicated.
The Rev. Stephanie Remington, a former pastor in the area, has been suspended by her church after the files revealed she worked for Epstein in 2018 and early 2019.
Epstein employed Remington first as an administrative assistant and then as a property manager for his private island. This was after Epstein had already pleaded guilty to sex offenses but before his 2019 arrest on federal trafficking charges. Leaders at the United Methodist Church say they did not know about the job and have placed Remington on a 90-day suspension while they review the matter.
Remington apparently served in pulpits across Missouri for about 15 years. She was pastor at First United Methodist Church in North Kansas City from 2011 to 2016 and before that was at The Summit in Lee’s Summit. She later did remote work for the church in Washington, D.C., and then left the mainland for the Caribbean following a divorce.
We know what came next largely because Remington told her own story.
In a blog post she wrote in 2019 — after Epstein’s final arrest, as global scrutiny intensified — Remington tried to explain how she ended up working for a man like Epstein, and why she believed it was justified. The post, first reported by United Methodist News, has since been taken offline, though copies still circulate.
It is an odd document. Remington acknowledges she knew her boss had been “accused and convicted of doing some deplorable things more than a decade prior,” but casts her decision to work for him as something akin to Jesus ministering to outcasts, a theological gloss on what was, in practice, a beachfront office job for a convicted sex offender.
The Epstein records fill in the day-to-day reality around that decision. Remington’s name appears across roughly 1,800 pages of documents. They are far from salacious: emails about travel and flights, notes about contractors and routine operations on Little St. James. Whatever she saw or knew, investigators had seven years to ask her before any of us got to read her banal correspondence regarding that infamous island.
It would be interesting to know what Remington witnessed down there. Maybe someday we will. But the files don’t tell us. What we ultimately have here is an interesting story but not a very revealing one.
Ghislaine in rural Missouri?
One last thing.
About a week before Epstein was arrested in the summer of 2019, his longtime associate — and later convicted sex trafficker — Ghislaine Maxwell took a trip to Kansas City. She appears to have been traveling with her now-ex-husband, Scott Borgerson, who grew up in Festus.
We know this because their credit card receipts ended up in the files. Among other local attractions, they hit Betty Rae’s, the Steamboat Arabia Museum, and the Chinatown Food Market — a nice little River Market afternoon.
I’m willing to believe the charms of our fine city could draw a British socialite for a day or two. But some of the pair’s other stops are harder to account for. They also appear to have visited a supermarket in Macon and a Casey’s in Slater.
Do you know where either of those towns are? I confess I had to look.
They are in north-central Missouri. Macon sits along Highway 36; you might reasonably end up passing through it on a road trip across the state. But Slater is smaller and more out of the way — about 12 miles outside Marshall, roughly an hour and a half from Kansas City, and not on the way to much of anything.
I’ve argued here that the Epstein files are mostly raw material dressed up as disclosure. But I’m only human. Whoever can explain the Casey’s in Slater has my full attention.
