Fwd: New Mexico Wants Answers About Zorro Ranch. Here's What They'll Find.
meg sheketoff
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dissent in Bloom <dissent...@substack.com>
Date: February 21, 2026 at 5:25:29 PM EST
To: megshek...@gmail.com
Subject: New Mexico Wants Answers About Zorro Ranch. Here's What They'll Find.
Reply-To: Dissent in Bloom <reply+33zjod&1fxb7k&&192e80100906a5f5bef78705235567a3...@mg1.substack.com>
New Mexico Finally Wants Answers About Zorro Ranch. Here's What They'll Find.
Flight Logs, Phone Records, and Victim Journals Expose How Epstein Built a Human Trafficking Operation on 10,000 Acres of Desert
READ IN APP The year is 1993. Jeffrey Epstein writes a check for $12.5 million and Bruce King, former governor of New Mexico, hands over the keys to Zorro Ranch. What changed hands isn't just real estate, but 10,000 acres (15 square miles) of isolation, along with six underground floors.
It is located 30 miles from Santa Fe, 50 miles from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and 20 miles from the Santa Fe Institute, and yet much further than that from anyone paying attention. Epstein launched his human trafficking operation here, sustaining it through connections with powerful figures.
And yet the FBI never conducted a formal investigation of this place — not even when they were given a tip about buried bodies on the property.
In fact, the federal government actively prevented the state of New Mexico from investigating claiming it could jeopardize an ongoing federal investigation and compromise potential charges.
Could it be because William Barr — the head of the DOJ at the time — was implicated in the files as being a witness to the abuse?
This would not be the first time that someone in high-places protected Epstein. Lest we forget Alex Acosta is the reason Epstein was able to get away with this for so long. Acosta was the prosecutor responsible for a 2008 deal that let Epstein avoid a potential life sentence in exchange for a short stint in a county jail.
That same Alex Acosta — who later became the labor secretary during the administration of Donald Trump — told officials during his transition interviews for the Trump administration, he point-blank told them to leave the Epstein stuff alone because he 'belonged to intelligence' both national and foreign and was 'above his pay grade.
As of today, six years, six months, and eleven days have passed since Jeffrey Epstein died.
It was only after the latest Epstein files surfaced this year did pressure build high enough for the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office to act again. In that time, the ranch changed hands, now owned by the family of MAGA Republican Don Huffines. His team says construction of a ‘Christian retreat’ has begun, bringing excavation, demolition, and the destruction whatever was left behind.
And yes, this is more significant than some people may realize.
The ranch was the epicenter of Epstein’s operations. Far more than people realize. Little Saint James was the headline, but this was the foundation. The island became the thing people argue over. The ranch, where the architecture of it all took shape, stayed in the shadows for the most part.. until now. I have spent the last few weeks investigating every available resource I could find — flight logs, the Epstein files, court records, and victim testimony — and this is what I was able to put together.
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The Significance of Zorro Ranch
On the map, Zorro Ranch was not in the middle of nowhere. It was in the middle of a very specific somewhere: Santa Fe’s political class, Los Alamos’s national security and nuclear weapon network, and the Santa Fe Institute’s world of complex-systems research that treats networks, evolution, and information as things you can model and manipulate.
The Santa Fe Institute is a scientific think tank built by scientists from Los Alamos, the lab that created the atomic bomb. In 1984, George Cowan and Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann founded it as a “boundary-breaking research center.”
By the early 1990s, Jeffrey Epstein had donated at least $275,000 after Ghislaine Maxwell introduced him to Gell-Mann, a connection that ran through her father’s foundation, that had already funded a $300,000 professorship there. Epstein placed his ranch just 23 miles from the institute and 50 miles from Los Alamos, a location he later admitted was intentional.
Gell-Mann even personally thanked Epstein for financial support in his 1994 book The Quark and the Jaguar.
Close enough to brush shoulders with those he wanted to influence, far enough to operate without witnesses.
But there’s a reason beyond proximity to power that kept Epstein interested in the sciences, and that’s exactly what his plan was for the ranch.
The flight logs and call records for New Mexico make clear that human trafficking was taking place there. People were flown into the remote ranch and did not always leave on the same plane. Names like “Nadia” and labels such as “Female (1)” appear on flight arrival records, but the handlers records show they departed without them.
That kind of separation is consistent with how trafficking operations move people. Research shows traffickers isolate victims by moving them to new locations where they're alone and dependent on the trafficker, a form of psychological manipulation and control tactic that matches the pattern of people being dropped off at the isolated ranch.
During the busiest years, passengers were repeatedly listed as “Female (1)” or “Male (1),” with no real names attached. The anonymity was built into the official logs.
The compound itself was built for control. Between 1994 and 1999, Epstein transformed the property into a 33,339-square-foot hacienda-style mansion with its own 4,400-foot private airstrip, a hangar, a helipad, surveillance cameras at every gate, and hidden cameras installed in Kleenex boxes purchased from a spy shop.
Beneath the main residence sat a confirmed underground floor of roughly 8,000 square feet containing massage rooms, jacuzzi rooms, and mechanical rooms that housed the surveillance network’s servers and recording equipment.
DOJ emails from 2017 reference image files suggesting up to six underground levels accessed by a sub-cellar elevator.
A reverse osmosis water system permitted to discharge over 10,000 gallons per day serviced the compound. This is infrastructure that researchers have questioned whether the surface buildings alone could justify. This was not a home. It was an operation.
Victim accounts match the flight data. Annie Farmer was flown to the ranch at sixteen in 1996 and later said she was sexually abused there. Virginia Giuffre (formerly reports) on two recorded flights leaving Santa Fe with known Epstein associates, aligning with her testimony regarding the ranch.
The trafficking at Zorro Ranch was not the end goal but instead it was the mechanism. The end goal was something Epstein talked about openly, to scientists, at dinner parties, at conferences he hosted. He wanted to use the ranch as a human breeding facility.
Girls’ journals recovered in the files describe Ghislaine Maxwell, who appeared on 37 percent of all flights to New Mexico, taking their babies. It includes photos of sonograms and heartbreaking pleas to keep their babies.
One girl describes being repeatedly impregnated by Epstein starting at age 16, with babies taken away shortly after birth. She calls herself a “human incubator.” She talks about how Ghislaine Maxwell was present during at least one birth and would tell her to "close her eyes" so she wouldn't see the baby. She documents at least one miscarriage caused by pregnancies too close together, multiple live births where babies were immediately taken, and severe psychological trauma and dissociation.
She wrote it out the only way she could. In her journals. In code. With magazine clips.
Think about what it means to be fourteen years old. You’re in eighth or ninth grade. You still have a curfew. You might have just started wearing makeup. Your biggest worry should be a math test or whether someone likes you back. You are, in every meaningful sense, still a child… one navigating the bewildering early stages of figuring out who you are.
Now imagine a man with a private jet tells you — or tells someone in your life — that he wants to help with your education. That he’s a philanthropist. That he has connections.
Maybe your family doesn’t have much money. Maybe you’ve been told this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You’re flown to a remote ranch in New Mexico that is thousands of acres of desert, 30 miles from the nearest town. There’s a private airstrip. Surveillance cameras everywhere. The only way in or out is through a gate controlled by ranch staff. There is no one to call. There is nowhere to go.
The girls who survived this carry it in their bodies and their minds for the rest of their lives. The testimony they’ve given in courtrooms, on the record, and some even under their own names is among the bravest speech any human being can offer.
They walked into systems that had failed them at every turn and said this happened to me anyway.
How Zorro Ranch Worked As A Trafficking Hub
At the top were Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell appeared on 37 percent of all flights to New Mexico and was present on nearly every trip through 2001. Beneath her was Emmy Tayler — a British actress who has sued victims — listed as “Ghislaine’s assistant,” who flew to the ranch thirty three times, sometimes even without Maxwell. When Maxwell stepped back after 2001,
Sarah Kellen moved into her role without any break in operations, handling scheduling and logistics for the next several years.
On the ground, a woman named Sabrina Gzaskow coordinated arrivals. Her subpoenaed phone records show call activity rising every time a flight was inbound, moving between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in a steady, repeated pattern.
Ranch manager Brice Gordon and his wife ran the property day to day. In 2013, Brice was coordinating appointments with Epstein.
In February 2007, the FBI interviewed ranch manager Brice Gordon and his wife. They told agents Epstein typically spent several weeks there in summer with his assistant, bodyguard, personal trainer, and "sometimes his masseuses" who were flown in via the private airstrip. Then someone called the staff and told them they were no longer allowed to speak with the FBI. The interview was immediately terminated.
The flight logs show how it worked.
Over ten years, 105 documented flights moved people in and out of New Mexico in what investigators call passenger laddering, meaning the people who flew in were often not the same people who flew out.
The flights followed a tight, repetitive triangle: Teterboro, New Jersey; Van Nuys, California; and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Teterboro sits just outside New York City, close enough for a quiet drive into Manhattan, yet far enough removed from the bustle of major commercial airports to avoid unwanted attention.
Over time, Maxwell’s role faded, and Epstein’s younger girlfriend Karyna Shuliak (born in 1989) stepped into her place.
Before the ranch, Epstein had already been grooming her future by paying her tuition, buying her opera tickets, and personally coordinating with the dean of Columbia’s dental school to ensure her admission.
Karyna emailed him in 2012, four years after he was convicted in Florida for prostitution: “You are the purest man out of all men” and in another email she stated, “I love you very much, you will always have me, no matter what, as long as it makes you happy.”
Epstein listed her as his emergency contact on official medical forms, minimizing the relationship to a simple “friend,” even as he paid her expenses. Over an eleven-month span in 2014, she racked up almost $295,000 on one credit card alone.
He spoiled her the way he controlled everyone: with generosity that doubled as leverage. After she finished school, Karyna (sometimes spelled Karina in the files) moved into an operational role.
By 2015, she was ordering large quantities of children’s items to Zorro Ranch, shipped directly to 49 Zorro Ranch Road.
Image Source: The DOJ.
In 2016, Epstein was having controlled prescriptions delivered there through the “Zorro Management Group.”
By 2018, Karyna was emailing ranch staff about household orders, running the property like it was still very much in use.
None of this made sense on paper. Epstein hadn’t flown to New Mexico since 2006. So, it looks like he was not there. But he was, and we know this because Brice Gordon was rescheduling appointments with him back in 2013.
The ranch never stopped operating and Karyna was the one keeping it going. Two days before he died in his cell at MCC New York, Epstein signed her into a trust (“The 1953 Trust”) that left her $100 million, all of his loose diamonds, and property rights. He helped her defraud immigration officials and obtain legal status.
Flight logs show that she traveled with Epstein on numerous trips, including his final flight from Paris to New York in August 2019, where FBI agents were waiting on the tarmac to arrest him. She was the last person to talk to him before he died.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Was It Worth It?
It is worth remembering how he got here. Epstein did not build this alone. His access to wealth, to elite circles, to the kind of credibility that lets a college dropout sit across from Nobel laureates and former governors all of that came through the Maxwell family. Robert Maxwell was one of the most powerful media moguls in Europe before his mysterious death in 1991.
It was Ghislaine who introduced Epstein to the Santa Fe Institute, to Murray Gell-Mann, to the world of people who could make him look legitimate. She was the bridge between a financial predator and the institutions that gave him cover.
But at the end of the day, Epstein looked out for exactly one person. He used Ghislaine until she was no longer useful, replaced her with someone younger, and when the walls closed in, he made sure his money went where he wanted it to go. He did what he always did. Ghislaine was sentenced to twenty years in prison, and Karyna walked off… free. The last sighting of her was in NYC in 2024.
Ghislaine, I have no pity for you. You knew what was happening, you participated willingly, and you did so for calculated reasons. Your family name gave Epstein access to elite institutions he never could have reached alone, and in exchange for building his credibility and recruiting vulnerable girls, you believed his power would protect you from the disposability you saw coming. But he discarded you the way that you discarded those girls, and while he arranged his own exit, the young women you helped deliver into his hands are still carrying the weight of what you chose to do.
Zorro Ranch was not a home. It was a machine built to process human beings, and the people who enabled it walked away richer, freer, and more protected than the children who survived it.
Karyna Shuliak is still out there, living quietly on a hundred million dollars and a trail of unanswered questions that I am only beginning to pull apart. There is more to this story than I could fit here. The flight patterns, the intelligence connections, the institutions that looked the other way on purpose.
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