What I found in the Epstein Files: Episode 3 - Who is Jide Zeitlin?

In Episode 3 of What I Found in the Epstein Files, Debilyn Molineaux investigates one question:

Who is Jide Zeitlin?

What begins as a brief mention inside the Epstein files unfolds into a deeper investigation involving Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Bannon, Oleg Deripaska, sanctions discussions, political influence, and private communications that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

After finding that Zeitlin appeared in more than 300 Epstein-related files, Debilyn spent more than six weeks manually reviewing documents, organizing timelines, and tracing recurring threads that AI-generated summaries failed to explain.

This episode explores:

• Steve Bannon introducing Jide Zeitlin to Jeffrey Epstein
• Connections to Oleg Deripaska and sanctions-related discussions
• The “Barker Plan” and questions surrounding divestment strategies
• Political and business influence efforts in Africa
• Communications involving Deepak Chopra
• The changing relationship between Epstein and Zeitlin through 2018–2019
• New allegations that surfaced after publication of the original investigation

This investigation does not claim direct criminal proof. Instead, it examines patterns, relationships, influence, and communications that may have remained hidden without deeper review.

Correction:
 Karyna Shuliak, who inherited the bulk of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, was Belarusan, not Russian.

Referenced materials and research links:

Who inherited Epstein’s estate?
 https://alisav.substack.com/p/the-handler-karyna-shuliak-jeffrey

The Barker Plan:
 https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6170-Informational-Materials-20180712-19.pdf

Spreadsheet referenced in the episode: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vjEKnGhvwVoLSfOtFgVFSRZ4xDxmuzxrWATTVYASP-k/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Additional PDFs referenced in the investigation can be found through The Epstein Library or Debilyn’s archived downloads. 

Hosted by Debilyn Molineaux

What I Found in the Epstein Files explores power, corruption, influence networks, and the hidden systems shaping public life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, I'm Debbie Lynn Molineau, and this is what I found in the Epstein Files. For those of you who don't know, I have been looking at the Epstein Files as this lesson in power and how power is so corrupting. It touches so many aspects of our lives and we don't even realize it. So I've been doing some research, uh, you know, some amateur investigative research into the Epstein files themselves or through publicly available records. So I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago called Who is Jide Zeitlin? And I got a very interesting email that ended with this line: Jide Zeitlin is a con man, a pervert, and a thief. There is nothing legitimate about what he does. Well, that was intriguing. So here we go. Who is Jaide Zeitlin? In late March 2026, I was listening to this AI native podcast for a few episodes that was talking about the Epstein files and what was revealed. And it was really interesting because it helped me understand the business structure, the kind of multi-level marketing of the abuse network itself, of having girls recruit other girls into the abuse network. And they also covered then the possibility of Epstein being a foreign spy, a US spy, or setting honey traps and doing a blackmail operation. And they identified the CIA or Mossad, or of course, then the blackmailing scheme itself. But conspicuously, the Russians were not mentioned as a possibility of him being a spy for them. Given that the woman who inherited the bulk of his estate is Russian and fled to Moscow right after he was uh found dead in his jail cell. I almost said as he after he was killed. I think the fact that the Russians were in participating or aware of is likely, but of course, there's no evidence. So let's go look and see what there is. So as I was having this wondering a couple months ago, I remembered back in 2016 that there was a lot of reporting about Trump laundering Russian trafficking income through outrageously priced real estate deals. And so at the time, there was this one name that kept popping up over and over and over again in this, and it was Oleg Dara Postka. Now, Oleg Dara Poska uh is a Russian billionaire who was part of the corrupt Ukrainian uh regime that Zelensky ousted. So this is all like connected up with Ukraine and Russia, and I'm like, okay, is Oleg Dera Poska in the Epstein files themselves? And the short answer is yes, 17 files. Given the thousands of other people that are mentioned in there multiple times, the fact that Oleg Dera Poska is only in there 17 times kind of created a little flag for me. So then I went, okay, well, let's look at 17 files. 14 of those 17 files were uh FBI or US government documents that mentioned his name as they were going to be sanctioning him as a person from doing business with anyone in the United States. The remaining three documents were duplicate or triplicate emails between Jeffrey Epstein and somebody named Jaid Zeitlin. And so I'm like, okay, well, who's this Jaid Zeitlin guy? And the the reason that Oleg Dara Poska's name was mentioned was because Jaid Zeitlin was asking Epstein if he had contact information for Oleg Dara Poska. And he asked two questions. Zeitlin asked two questions in this email. One was, how's your day look tomorrow? Because they're trying to get together in person. And do you have contact information for Oleg Dara Poska or Ivan Glassenberg? Epstein replied, easy. Does 11 work? And this was on May 4th, 2018. So I wondered about this Jaid Zeitland guy. Who is he and why is he interested in getting in touch with Oleg Dara Poska? And so when I looked up Jaid Zeitland's name, he has 311 files listed. And I identified at least two that were referenced, but not public. Actually, I think it was three that I cover in the longer form blog. But first of all, let me just give you a little background on Jaid Zeitlin. He was born in Nigeria, and his mother was a maid for the Zeitlin family. And so she was single, and in his early life, she would take him to work with her and he would play with the Zeitlin children. His father, or the Zeitlin father, was um a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. So he actually ended up working all over the world. When he left Nigeria, Lagos, Nigeria, he suggested to Jide's mother that they could provide more opportunities for him than she could. And she agreed and he went with the Zeitlands and became part of their family. So he eventually, you know, they went from Pakistan to uh Manila, the Philippines, and then he ended up living in Connecticut by age 11. He attended private schools and he developed friends among wealthy families. He went to Amherst College, where he graduated with a degree in finance and ended up working for Goldman Sachs. And he was there for 20 years. And then he moved to Fashion Giant Tapestry before he abruptly resigned in 2020. After it was revealed he had posed as a photographer in extramarital affairs. All right, so that's the stage. That's the background on who Jaid Zeitlin was before we get into this like uh communications uh chain with Jeffrey Epstein. Okay, so we've set the stage for this project to explore how the connection between Jeffrey Epstein, Oleg Dara Posca, and how Jaid Zeitlin fits in. And so, like an efficient researcher that I am, I turned to ChatGBT and asked it to analyze the 311 files. And it was unsatisfying. I'm going to give you just a quick example of what came back. This report reconstructs the highest confidence portion of the 311 file Jides Island corpus in the public Epstein archive, with an emphasis on two priority channels, the business sanctions thread and the ban and Jide Epstein channel. The most offensible conclusion at this stage is that the corpus is thread dense and duplication heavy. The identifiable records cluster strongly in February, April, May, and June of 2018, with a smaller tail into late April 2019. Okay, and that's the chat. That was like the lead paragraph on the chat results, if you will, of I asked it, like what does this tell us? So maybe that helps you understand why. I did this research by hand. It took me over six weeks, and I read every one of those 311 files. I created a spreadsheet for sorting it chronologically, which helped me to highlight the duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates, whatever. And if you'd like your brain to explode, the link to the sheet will be in the show notes. But back to what's important here. Who is Dry Zeitlin and why was he connected to Epstein? Well, there are seven threads to follow here. And I'm going to name them as we go. And a spoiler alert here, this investigation did not reveal any criminal activity directly. It pointed to opportunistic possibilities and some creepy communication that would have flown under the radar had it not been in the Epstein files. Okay, here's the first thread. Zeitlin was introduced to Epstein by none other than Steve Bannett in February of 2018. And after they had an initial phone call within a day or two, their first in-person meeting happened in late April. And then by the first week of May, Zeitlin was visiting Epstein at the Palm Beach house. And his follow-up email showed a budding romance. Oh my God, they were so flattering towards each other. And what happened is in the house is not revealed. But I can say that I am fairly certain Zeitlin had sex with somebody. And given the tone of his thank you email, it just seems very likely. So that's thread one. Steve Bannon. Thread two, it was during this early May period that Epstein introduces Zeitlin to Sultan bin Salayam, who is looking for an advisor in West Africa to make infrastructure investments for his company. And Zeitlin knows ministers in Nigeria. And in the exchanges, he's noting that he got stuck at the White House, telling Epstein that he didn't get to meet Sultan in person. And he throws in that he also met with the vice president. Hmm, 2018, Vice President Pence. Or was he actually talking about the vice president of Nigeria? It's really unclear. But in the end, this thread over several months never went anywhere. And Zeitlin complained months later about being disrespected. All right. On to the third thread. In an email on May 5th, 2018, this is the day after the Palm Beach visit, Zeitlin thanks Epstein for his thoughts regarding Dara Poska. And they exchange articles about U.S. sanctions that name Dara Poska personally and the three companies from which he must divest if those companies want to do business in the United States. And they reference a mutual friend throughout this thread of their relationship. So I would guess, but cannot prove that Zeitlin wanted to insert himself in place of Dara Posca for these three companies, to act as a straw man, but not appearing to be one. At best, this is a fantasy of Zeitlin. At worst, it's an illegal maneuver to avoid US sanctions. The next exchange happens a couple of weeks later and indicates that the plan is proceeding. And they share this article from the Financial Times about Glencoe shares are falling. And then Zeitline mentions that he is getting to Bolton and R Cudlow, both uh Trump administration officials, this week. The next email from Epstein admonishes him that email is not a secure channel. Duh. Okay. Here's the fourth threat. At some point, for some unknown reason, like there's nothing uh preceding or following this, there is an email where Zeitlin feels compelled to defend himself over a scandal in India with a company that he serves on the board for. And it's connected to Zeitlin being confirmed as a U.S. ambassador to the UN management reform by President Obama. And he's stating that he was cleared, which of course was later debunked, and the nomination was withdrawn. So here we are on the fourth thread. I'm going to bounce back to because the third thread picks up again in July when the Barker plan is shared between Zeitlin and Epstein. Now, this document looks very confidential from a consultant firm who works on crisis management and the people who were involved in the Barker plan, which is not Epstein and Zeitlin, by the way. So I'm just wondering how Zeitlin got a hold of it. But the the plan itself is outlining how DeraPasca is divesting primary control of the of the three companies. And the they are requesting an extension with the U.S. Treasury Department to complete the divestment. And Zeitlin knows this looks a lot like my plan. All right. Picking up leaving that third thread alone. We're going to go to the fifth thread. Because later that year, a fifth thread pops up, and it looks like Epstein and Zeitlin are looking at consulting and influencing politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And nothing appears to have matured out of this, other than these two men speculating on how they could uh have an opportunity there. The sixth thread was Epstein introducing Jaid Zeitlin to Deepak Chopra, spiritual guru to many, disappointed to millions at the moment. Deepak Chopra shared a video that I could not find. I looked. If anyone out there has it, please share it with me. And but I wonder if Zeitlin and Chopra connected later on. And if so, what happened? Like it's just idle curiosity on my part. Nothing else notable was in the files here. So that sixth thread died. And by January of 2019, the relationship between Zeitlin and Epstein is clearly waning. Zeitlin is not responding quickly to Epstein's requests for meetings. And it's noted that there is one exchange where it's noted that Dara Posca is looking to divest his remaining 20% share of energy company that he owns if the restructuring plan is not approved and private investment is a possibility. So this appears to be just kind of like a little update on thread three, but nothing happens there. All right, the seventh and final thread picks up in February of 2019 when Epstein emails his friend, who is the CEO of Tapestry, and asks him to interview a young woman for a job. She brings cookies and he tells her, and Zeitlin ends up telling her to update her CV to explain the two-year gap when you work for a businessman whose name you don't have to share. And that's what I found in the Epstein Files about Jide Zeitlin, but this isn't the end of that story. After publishing this very long blog about who is Jaid Zeitlin that seemingly proves nothing, I was contacted by a woman who I will call Grace, who thanked me for the story. And she sent me additional emails between the young woman who was looking for a job and Epstein. And in those emails, Epstein was coaching her how to provide sexual favors for Jaide Zeitlin in order to get an interview with the HR department. Grace was also the woman who caused Zeitlin's departure from tapestry and the appointment to the UN withdrawn by the Obama administration. She knew Jaid Zeitlin very well because she was romantically involved with him about 20 years ago. And she closed one of her emails with that assessment that I read at the top. Jide Zeitlin is a con man, pervert, and a thief. There is nothing legitimate about what he does. Healing takes time. Finding justice helps.