Department of Justice
By
Nadia Santiago
A new report from The New York Times traces how Karyna Shuliak, Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend of nearly eight years, went from a 21-year-old dental assistant in Manhattan to the woman who will inherit his large inheritance.
Shuliak was the last person Epstein called from his cell before he killed himself in August 2019, the Times reported. He is now set to inherit up to $100 million from her estate, including a 33-carat diamond ring he left her “in consideration of marriage,” according to a report in the newspaper.
The 37-year-old Belarusian dentist has never identified himself as a victim, and authorities have never treated him as a co-conspirator in his sex trade, The Times found. The FBI appears to have never interviewed him, and no lawyers representing hundreds of Epstein’s victims have filed a lawsuit.
Shuliak was 21 years old and living in New York on a student visa when a young Siberian woman, who later told the Times that Epstein had molested her, introduced them in March 2011. Epstein was 58 years old, had already pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a young person, and left quickly: Broadway tickets, Broadway tickets, his helicopter trip to New Mexico, his trip helicopter to the US in July. The Virgin Islands a few months later. He backed off at first, telling her he was going to “learn some information” about her. He told her to ignore “rumors and stories.”
By 2012, he was paying tuition at Columbia dental school, according to the Times. After the school turned him down, Epstein leaned on his dentist, who was a strong student, and made a $10 million offer. He ended up offering about $210,000, and he was admitted. Two Columbia dentists also fed him the topics he would face on his admissions exam, the paper reported. “You are the purest man of all people,” he wrote to June.
When his visa expired, the Times found, Epstein arranged for a 30-year-old woman from his pool of assistants, later identified as one of his victims, to marry Shuliak in New York in 2013. Shuliak got his green card, became a US citizen in 2018, and divorced his wife the following year. A House Oversight report this year called marriage “nonsense.” Immigration authorities did not challenge the right to citizenship.
Over the course of about eight years, according to the Times, Epstein bankrolled her nearly $1 million, sent tens of thousands more to her parents in Belarus, and gave her a credit card to buy whatever she wanted. He helped manage his buildings and staff, ordered “cold Voss water” for his drivers, and helped him try to buy a Moroccan palace weeks before his 2019 arrest. Thousands of their emails are now public: war on sex, instructions from a sexual health company, links to pornographic images, discussions of birth control and acne medication.
Asked about her by the Times, Epstein’s brother Mark said, “I wish this woman nothing but the best.” A Belarusian friend who once lived with her in the Brooklyn apartment told the newspaper that she believed Shuliak was “really in love” with Epstein.
The estate is now worth between $120 million and $200 million after victims are paid, the Times reported. Shuliak, who received his New York dental license in November, had been working quietly in the Downtown Brooklyn office until a patient spotted him in the released files. His last day was February 12. “Of all the things that have happened to me, I never won the lottery,” the patient told the Times. “I met Epstein’s girlfriend.”
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