Karyna Shuliak, a native of Belarus, emigrated to the United States with Jeffrey Epstein’s help, becoming his lover, confidant, beneficiary of his vast wealth and ignorer of his treatment of other women, many of whom would later claim to be victims of his abuse. That’s what the New York Times reported on July 26 in a lengthy expose.
With Epstein’s help, Shuliak married another woman in New York, figuring that “might be the easiest way to gain U.S. citizenship without raising red flags that the marriage was arranged solely to avoid deportation”, according to the Times.
They jetted around the world together and he funneled payments of nearly $1 million to her over the years. He also sent tens of thousands of dollars to her parents in Belarus, the Times reported.
With Epstein’s death, Shuliak could inherit as much as $100 million from his estate, the Times reported.
While much of the coverage of Epstein’s behavior has focused on his exploitation of young girls and woman, the Times article revealed something equally appalling — the extent to which other people were complicit. Throughout his miserable life, Epstein relied on the willingness of other people to accommodate him, to protect him by ignoring his transgressions, to obscure his motives, to assist in his abuses.
One notably complicit player was Alexander Acosta.
According to a May 12, 2026 report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Epstein was arrested on charges of solicitation of prostitution in 2006, after the stepmother of a 14-year-old girl reported to police that an older man had molested her stepdaughter. In Florida, local, state, and federal law enforcement investigated the case for years, compiling extensive evidence from dozens of victims.
But, under pressure from Epstein’s stable of prominent attorneys, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta negotiated a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) under which Epstein served only 13 months in jail on state charges of solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of a minor. Signed in 2007, the deal shielded Epstein and “any potential co-conspirators” from future federal prosecution by Acosta’s office for a set of sex crimes. The NPA negotiated by Alex Acosta, with its narrow guilty plea and lenient sentence, enabled Epstein to continue his abuse and trafficking activities for almost another decade.
Acosta later served as Secretary of Labor under President Trump from April 2017 until his resignation in July 2019.
In Shuliak’s case, the complicit helpers were numerous, according to the Times.
Shuliak had always wanted to be a dentist. In 2012, after Columbia’s College of Dental Medicine initially rejected her, Epstein asked his dentist, Dr. Thomas J. Magnani, a powerful alumnus, to put him in contact with the dental school dean. Mr. Epstein dangled the idea of making up to a $10 million donation. In the end, he would give only about $210,000 to Columbia, according to an accounting by the university, but it was enough to grease the wheels.
Then Dr. James Fine, a dental school administrator, gave Dr. Shuliak a heads-up on the topics she would encounter during an admissions exam in April 2012 to test her practical skills as a transfer student.
By the time she applied to Columbia in 2012, Shuliak had overstayed the student visa she had obtained in 2010. Epstein chose, from the ranks of his assistants, a 30-year-old woman from Minnesota to be her spouse and the women were married three weeks later at the Office of the City Clerk.
After the wedding, a Brooklyn immigration lawyer unnamed by the Times who worked for Epstein submitted an immigration form stating that the woman wanted to list Dr. Shuliak as her wife and beneficiary. The request was approved, and unnamed complicit immigration officials dismissed Shuliak’s pending deportation proceedings. Months after the marriage, Shuliak got a green card, making her a lawful resident. Attempts to use marriage to get a U.S. green card usually face very strict checks, with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) looking closely at applications to stop marriage fraud. In May 2018, she officially became a U.S. citizen, then divorced her spouse a year later.
According to the 2026 report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Shuliak’s former wife claimed she had been forced into marriage. Even though the report concluded that the marriage may have been done to provide Shuliak with the “legal basis to continue residing in the United States” it didn’t recommend any legal challenge to her citizenship. You could consider that failure being complicit in fraud as well.
The congressional report is replete with stories of people who helped Epstein in his pursuit of women to abuse.
According to the report, New York immigration lawyer, Mehmet Arda Beskardes, worked closely with Epstein from 2013 to 2018, helping Epstein arrange visas and other immigration documents for the women in his network. On one occasion, the report said, he may have facilitated an illusory marriage between Shuliak, and one of Epstein’s victims, apparently to provide Shuliak a legal basis to continue residing in the United States.
Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, also wrote a letter to immigration authorities in support of the marriage, later acknowledging that the letter was “embellished”, the report said.
The Times reported further that in 2023, when Shuliak applied for a postdoctoral dental program at Columbia, apparently to fulfill a requirement she needed to obtain a license to practice in the state, the same two dentists who helped her gain admission to Columbia in 2012 once again came to her assistance, according to a copy of her admissions file reviewed by The Times. The file shows that Dr. Fine, the dean overseeing Columbia’s postgraduate residency programs, created a special “faculty internship” for her at the Midtown Manhattan dental practice he shared with Dr. Magnani.
Both men gave her their highest recommendation for the program, the Times said, from which she graduated in May 2025.
It looks like the roster of those complicit in Epstein’s predations also may include some officials at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, which Epstein attended as a teenage bassoonist and later supported with donations.
On July 28, 2026, the New York Times reported that Epstein returned to mingle with students, several of whom later said they had been subjected to his grooming and abuse. A report by a law firm hired by the school included the accounts of two of the three former Interlochen students who have described disturbing encounters with Mr. Epstein. In one case, a woman told the investigators of going to meet him at the campus lodge where “Epstein engaged in sexual conduct with her….”
The Times said the report included additional claims by a former Interlochen student who told investigators that Epstein had paid for her to fly to New York the summer after she graduated, and that she had given him a massage at his home and he “may have asked her to remove her top.” Her mother called Interlochen, her mother told investigators, to warn the school that Mr. Epstein was “preying on their students,” but they said no one from Interlochen had followed up.
And the list of those complicit in Epstein’s behavior goes on. It’s criminal.
Will all these complicit people pay a price. Maybe not in the courts, but, hopefully in their souls. As Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”
ThinkingOregon 