Little Saint James sits among the mountain peaks of an ancient volcanic chain that now rises from the Caribbean seafloor to form the Virgin Islands. Trade winds sweep the island year-round, bringing drier winters and wetter summers. In 1993, illusionist David Copperfield proposed to model Claudia Schiffer on the island, three months after meeting her. By 1997, venture capitalist Arch Cummin owned the property and listed it for $10.5 million. The island had a main house, three guest cottages, a caretaker's cottage, a private desalination system, a helipad, and a dock. In April 1998, a company called L.S.J. LLC purchased it for $7.95 million. Documents showed that Jeffrey Epstein was the sole member of L.S.J.

Epstein transformed the island into his primary residence, calling it "Little St. Jeff." He hired designer Edward Tuttle, known for his work on Aman Resorts, to renovate the main house into a colonnaded villa completed sometime after March 2003. By 2008, the estate employed 70 staff, all bound by strict confidentiality requirements. In 2005, Epstein had a dedicated power and fiber optic cable installed between St. Thomas and the island, eliminating the need for generators and giving him a private data connection. His personal residence was a stone-walled cabana whose turquoise-ceilinged dome -- blown away by Hurricane Maria in 2017 -- became one of the island's most recognizable features. Inside, visitors described a single large room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a dark wood desk, and a black Wurlitzer grand piano.

According to attorneys for the survivors, Little Saint James was where many of the crimes against minors were committed. Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent survivors, stated in legal filings that she was lured into Epstein's trafficking ring while working at Mar-a-Lago as a teenager. Court documents detail how Epstein and associates brought girls to the island, exploiting the isolation that made the property so difficult to monitor. Locals reported seeing underage girls being brought to the island as late as 2019, years after Epstein had been registered as a sex offender. The nicknames that locals gave the island -- none of them flattering -- reflected what the surrounding community suspected long before federal authorities acted. In August 2019, following Epstein's death in a Manhattan jail cell, FBI agents searched his residence on Little Saint James.

After Epstein's death, all of his holdings were transferred into the "1953 Trust," named for his birth year. In March 2022, Little Saint James and neighboring Great Saint James were listed at $110 million, with proceeds earmarked to settle lawsuits brought by survivors. The sale price reflected not the island's tropical appeal but the legal weight pressing down on the estate. In May 2023, billionaire Stephen Deckoff, through his firm SD Investments, acquired both islands for $60 million -- less than half the asking price and roughly equal to the island's 2019 assessed value of nearly $64 million. What Deckoff intends for the property remains unclear. What is clear is that the island's legacy belongs to the people who survived what happened there -- people whose courage in coming forward ultimately exposed a network of abuse that wealth and isolation had concealed for years.