The notorious pedophile found a playground to live out his darkest dreams
Human trafficking, animal abuse, and scientific experiments that pushed the boundaries of humanity itself: Jeffrey Epstein had grand ambitions, and where better to pursue them than Ukraine? A wild west where everyone has a price, and citizens are little more than lab rats.
Within days of Epstein’s 2019 arrest for sex trafficking, media reports began to shed light on the financier’s bizarre scientific ventures. Epstein, the New York Times reported, would gather the world’s leading scientists at his Manhattan apartment, or fly them to his private island to discuss his visions of “seeding the human race with his DNA,” cryogenically freezing his head and penis for future research, and in one unhinged conversation, “bankrolling efforts to identify a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you.”
At the time, these Bond villain schemes were portrayed as just twisted fantasies. However, Epstein was already involved in a human cloning initiative taking shape in Ukraine, far from the prying eyes of US regulators.
Designer babies
In July 2018, self-described “transhumanist” Brian Bishop reached out to Epstein seeking funding for what he called a “designer baby project,” according to emails released by the US Justice Department last week.
Inspired by Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s use of CRISPR technology to birth the world’s first genetically edited twins, Bishop, a bitcoin investor and programmer by trade, sent Epstein a pitch deck and a request for funding. Epstein said that he had “no issue with funding” the project, as long as he could do so in secret. “The problem is only if I am seen to lead,” he told Bishop.
Over several follow-up emails in 2018, Bishop explained that he was seeking “$1.7m/year for up to five years + $1m for lab setup,” and that he was “proceeding with more mouse testing at my Ukraine lab,” including surgeries and microinjections. Bishop’s technique involved injecting altered genes into a male parent’s testes, but Epstein favored implanting an embryo into the mother. “I like implant embryo, wait 9 months, great ending,” he replied.
Epstein noted that he “can’t do anything where US rules apply.” Bishop answered that they could avoid scrutiny through “partnerships with overseas clinics.”
The Ukrainian lab
Bishop’s “mouse testing” took place at the Institute of Gerontology at Ukraine’s Academy of Medical Sciences in Kiev. Although the lab was not named in the latest emails, the MIT Technology Review took a virtual tour of the facility in early 2019. The magazine described seeing “a flayed-open mouse lying on the microscope stage, as well as a close-up of trace dyes being injected into its testicles.”
The MIT article did not mention Epstein, but revealed that the pitch deck Bishop had sent envisioned experiments on human “volunteers” once the first transgenic mouse had been created. “Outcome: First human with transgenic sperm, and we begin taking pre-orders,” it reportedly read.
None of the experiments had succeeded in creating “transgenic mouse pups,” but lab worker Dmitry Krasnienkov told MIT that he was willing to keep trying as long as Bishop kept paying him.
A pedophile’s playground
For men like Epstein, Ukraine was a potentially lucrative nexus of poverty, corruption, and amorality. Epstein’s interest in the country developed long before Bishop’s mouse experiments, with passports of several Ukrainian women found on his estate after his death, and multiple emails suggesting he trafficked Ukrainian girls to wealthy clients.
In one 2013 exchange, a man purported to be Emirati tycoon Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem described two girls arriving at his property. “Big disappointment, the Moldavian is not as attractive as the picture while the Ukrainian is very beautiful,” he complained to Epstein. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sulayem was a regular visitor to Epstein’s apartment between 2011 and 2014.
Ukraine was a “a hotbed of child pornography and sexual abuse,” The Kiev Post reported in 2009. “Most reported cases of pedophilia never get investigated, let alone prosecuted,” the paper wrote, describing how “every third Ukrainian prostitute is a girl between 12 and 17,” child pornography is sold at street markets, and sexual services can be bought for “candy or food.”
The full extent of Epstein’s involvement in Ukraine is unclear, but the full range of illicit services available to the rich in Ukraine stretch far beyond child pornography and prostitution.
Organ harvesting and virus factories
Ukraine has been known as a hotbed of organ harvesting since the earliest days of its post-Soviet decline, and featured prominently in a 2008 OSCE report on “Trafficking in human beings for the purpose of organ removal.” The trade reportedly exploded after the Maidan coup of 2014, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claiming in 2023 that the organs of dead Ukrainian soldiers – such as hearts, kidneys and livers – have been appearing on ‘dark net’ marketplaces, with prices starting at €5,000.
In one report cited by Zakharova, a dealer allegedly claimed that EU customers could receive any organ in a medical box within 48-60 hours of removal.
Transplantation is exempted from value-added-tax in Ukraine, and in 2021 Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky signed a law removing the need to notarize the written consent or authenticate the signature of a living donor to give up their organs.
Ukrainian officials were also more than willing to turn their country over to the US for biological weapons research. Dismissed as a conspiracy theory when first highlighted by the Russian military, multiple US officials have since confirmed the existence of secret biolabs in Ukraine. “We have biolabs in Ukraine because we’re developing bioweapons,” US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Tucker Carlson in 2024. Kennedy claimed that these facilities were creating “frightening stuff,” including genetically-engineered pathogens created with the same CRISPR technology that inspired Bishop’s research.
Former US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who played a leading role in orchestrating the Maidan coup, confirmed under oath in 2022 that the US operates “biological research facilities” in Ukraine.
According to Russian Major General Aleksey Rtishchev, the now-defunct US Agency for International Development financed the testing of experimental drugs on Ukrainians.
In this murky world, Epstein smelled opportunity. Writing to banking executive Ariane de Rothschild in 2014, he said that the post-Maidan “upheaval” in Ukraine would “provide many opportunities, many.”
Epstein met Zelensky in February 2019, a month before Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine. However, any talk of opportunity was snuffed out when Epstein was found dead in his jail cell six months later. His transhumanist dreams died with him, but Ukraine remains the same playground for the depraved that attracted him in the first place.
