The Jeffrey Epstein files: New Zealand mentioned more than 1000 times

Monday, 2 February 2026

New Zealand is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Jeffrey Epstein files released by the US Justice Department.

Type in New Zealand on the publicly available search engine and you get 1081 hits.

Amongst them was bank records for Epstein’s one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, showing interest earned and tax paid on a large New Zealand government bond investment in mid-2009.

There was also an email from Epstein to Google co-founder Larry Page in 2014, who is a New Zealand citizen, accepting an invitation to test his New Zealand catamaran.

Also featured in the documents was a New Zealand couple, Brice and Karen Gordon, who managed Epstein’s New Mexico Zorro ranch.

Stuff is looking through the files, if you would like to flag anything please contact newstips@stuffdigital.co.nz with the subject Epstein files. A link to the file search engine is here.

Brice Gordon alone features in more than 11,000 of the files, many of which detail discussions about upgrades and maintenance at the ranch.

They also discussed travelling to New Zealand for holidays and to visit family.

Former University of Auckland professor Brian Boyd was also mentioned, with emails showing Epstein had offered to fund a book Boyd hoped to write.

Boyd appeared on TVNZ’s Breakfast on Monday to talk about how he met Epstein at brunch, where there was discussion about Epstein potentially funding a book Boyd wanted to write.

“It came to nothing in the end,” Boyd said. “That was the only time I met him.”

Boyd said he was already working on a biography, but “the book that was really bubbling in my mind was a book on Lolita”.

“So I said a book on Lolita, and his ears pricked up, and I didn’t know why, of course,” he said.

Boyd told Breakfast he had been told Epstein would attend the meeting with a couple of assistants, but said he was instead surrounded by four or five young women who were immaculately dressed. He said they were reportedly recent graduates, about 22 years old, but appeared younger. Boyd said he was unaware of any allegations against Epstein at the time.

Boyd is a world-leading scholar on Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov and had planned to write a book on Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, a critically acclaimed but controversial work that was reportedly one of Epstein’s obsessions.

The novel is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a professor who becomes sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita.

Previously released US Justice Department material included images of Epstein writing passages from Lolita on the bodies of young women. His private plane was nicknamed the “Lolita Express”.

Epstein died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges involving underage girls. His death was ruled a suicide.

Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for trafficking under-aged girls to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.