Caravanserai

Image The Use of Islands in the Capitalist World-System

    Marina Karides

July 1, 2026 

Islands appear to have stirred the global contemporary zeitgeist. Pacific Islanders who have been tending to the dangers and disappearance of their homelands by sea level rise for decades, have gained international attention. More recent is the preoccupation with Kharg island, Iran’s port for crude oil export. “Kharg Island Obliterated” was the headline of a White House social media post, dismissing, as often occurs, island worlds, in this case people with livelihoods and an ancient autochthonous population.

Trump’s imperialism manifests in his preoccupation with islands. It is evinced by his relentless pursuit to acquire Greenland and his obsession with the Chagos Islands especially Diego Garcia, where a US run military facility sits (BBC 2026). In addition, Trump has requested $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a maximum security prison extending the penal use of islands.

On a positive note, Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show in February 2026 displayed the beauty of island relationality through music, dance, and representational gestures of tight communities. And also the resistance of an island and its diaspora to the impact of coloniality including: the archipelago’s liminal political and legal status as an unincorporated territory; US military presence on the island of Vieques (Velázquez 2025); and most recently, despite tremendous protest, a tax law change (Act 60) in 2019 to attract foreign residents.

And then there is Little St. James Island, of which the toxicity, containment, and violence by rich men and sexual crimes against girls and young women are being slowly and painfully unpeeled for public consumption. This essay is mostly centered on Little St. James, one of the US Virgin Islands (USVI), which is both an unincorporated territory of the US and a tax haven. The Dutch held the island in an acutely miserable plantation system leading to revolts which halted slavery on the islands. The Danish West Indies, were renamed the US Virgin Islands (sadly an ode to Columbus’ nomenclature) when purchased by the US during WWI to protect the Panama Canal. Military bases were installed during WWII and the Virgin Island National Guard (VING), recently exposed for systemic predatory sexual abuse of women recruits, is the present military body.

The next section outlines island feminisms, which I mark as a world-system, post-colonial, Indigenous, and Black feminist informed perspective. I then seek to historicize the context of the group of mostly elite and wealthy men that collected on St. James Island to consume girls and young women. I draw from past examples to make a thematic presentation of the intersection of islands, sexual exploitation, and the expansion of the world-system. I consider how subterfuge and secrecy are embedded in capitalism and how the island serves as an opportune repository. Lastly, I unpack the case filed by the US Virgin Islands against the Epstein Estate showcasing the centrality of a global capitalist network and the sexual commodification of girls and young women. Effectively led by the USVI Attorney General (AG) Denise George, I address her legal pursuit and political risk as an act of island feminist praxis (Rodríguez-Coss 2020).

Island Feminisms: A World-System Perspective

My long time thinking on islands began in Trinidad and Tobago (Karides 2010) applying world-systems, intersectional, and postcolonial perspectives on street vending and micro-enterprise development. I conducted a similar study in the Republic of Cyprus (Karides 2008). Then to Lesvos, Greece (Karides 2021) where I consider how Ancient Greek gendered socio-economic structures, expectations of hospitality, and the Ottoman Empire influence contemporary lesbian place making, women’s cooperatives, and convivial economies on the island. Most recently, I worked with a team researching faculty employment, gender equity, diversity, and inclusion, and economic survival on island campuses that also seek to become a Native Hawaiian place of learning (Karides, et. al. 2020, Rita and Karides 2022).

Through this research, I arrived to island feminisms (Karides 32:2017):

Island feminism refers to the intellectual sensibilities of island place and constructs of gender and sexuality as intertwining forces that contour the particular conditions of life – economic, geographical, and ecological – and cultural and political manifestations on islands. Like most feminisms, it is action oriented, in pursuit of just and fair conditions for all beings, but is guided by specific interest in islanders’ local and subaltern strategies that remain resistant to hegemonic discourses and practices of power.

By introducing island feminisms I sought to highlight that: the social hierarchies within islands are vulnerable to racist and misogynistic histories of dislocation, genocide, and settlement; the spatial physicality of islands are used as container for capital’s expansion and expression; and autochthonous and Indigenous islanders are resisting these impacts by sustaining intimate communities of care which include their physical environments. As a feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, critical understanding of islands, archipelagos, and oceans, I distinguish island feminisms from island studies which I consider a mainstream approach to the study of islands (see a recent review of the field by Foley, et al. 2023).

I pinpoint the original intrigue to study islands sociologically or through a human geographic lens to Epeli Hauʻofa’s (1994) eloquent and influential essay “Our Sea of Islands.” Hauʻofa (1994) reframes the Pacific Islands as Oceania, shifting the dependency framing of this region and characterization of islands as isolated to a regionally grounded understanding of oceanic connectivity and the reciprocal relations across the Pacific archipelagos and their diaspora. Counter to neoliberalism’s single strategy solution to economic development, Hau’ofa (19940 inspired the study of islands on their own terms and not in comparison or dependent on continental spaces and logics.

Regional approaches to the study of islands have predominated, most notably in the Pacific and the Caribbean, but also islands as grouped in the Arctic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, or the South China Sea, addressing distinct  histories and presenting varied forms of feminisms. By going beyond the region, ocean, or archipelago to recognize islands as nodes and launching points of the capitalist world system and in relation to each other, island feminisms adds a “pewsy” and critical island perspective.

A Geopolitics of  Sex and Island Place

The structure of sexual violence on islands is connected to the expansion of the capitalist world-system. It includes the unsolicited arrival and returns in the late 1700s of Captain James Cook and hundreds of his predatory Royal Navy sailors to the Pacific. The soldiers committing rape, abusing women, and spreading disease, while Cook unabashedly claimed islands (Hawaiʻi as the Sandwich Islands, Aoteaora as New Zealand) for the British empire (Hall 2009). In the Caribbean, arguably the first expression of globalization (Hall 1990), initiates with the vile and excessive violence that were driven by Christoper Columbus. Documented by Bartolomé de las Casas, this included the rape of young girls, rampant dismemberment of bodies as punishment, and Indigenous genocide, destroying a peaceful maritime world-system in fifty years.

Whether as captains, cooks, sailors or botanists, the men who joined these oceanic journeys set sail with an unquestioned sense of racial and cultural superiority and deep-seated ideas of the subordinate location of women. Their engagement with women were differentiated by class, race, or nation, but also geographies. The island, being on or from an island and the island itself is an axis of social inequality that intersects with race, class, gender, etc.

Across the globe—Vieques, USVI, Guahan, Philippines, Okinawa—the island-focused expansion of US military bases arrives with numerous and regular instances of sexual violence (Rios 2023) shaped by and shaping continental ideologies of island women. Just over 20 percent of approximately 860 US military bases are on islands. A far off second to the US in the operation of foreign military bases is the UK with 118 of which 30 percent are on islands. The sexual violence associated with military presence on islands has been well-documented through feminist scholarship. Though not focused solely on islands, Enloe’s (1990) Bananas, Beaches, and Bases was an influential sociological contribution on how to blend feminism with political economic analysis. Enloe (1990) reframes the radical feminist sentiment “the personal is political” (Hanisch 1969) by exploring how the “personal is international” and that the “international is personal” (1990:195). She argued that an understanding of military bases requires “looking at the seemingly normal, routine, and everyday interactions that take place on and around these installations (Enloe, Lacey, and Gregory 4: 2016). Given their geographic scope, size of populations, and continental bias of islanders, the impact of the military is intensified on islands.

A Body of Land Exploited

Securing islands and the sexual violence this imposes is tied to purposing them for economic gain–first via colonization, then through postcolonial relations. The plantation, an island of islands, became a signature formation of capitalist expansion (McKittrick 2006), the form moving from island to island across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Agricultural plantations were replaced in many insular spaces with the construction of mammoth entities for tourism, hotels and resorts, still governed by the logic of the plantation, present another source of extractive wealth accumulation.

Yet islands also have proven economically strategic for sustaining the global circuit of goods, providing safe harbor, and securing geopolitical interests—continental shores just do not oblige the same way. Islands serve as transshipment hubs in the maritime transportation network (Verschuur, Koks, and Hall 2022). In their novel research that seeks to connect “the structure of the global economy and the bottom up representation of the transportation network used to facilitate this economic structure,” Verschuur, Koks, and Hall (2022) find that fifty percent of global trade in value terms is maritime, with small islands being up to two times more reliant on their ports. For Small Island Developing States (SIDS), over 80 percent of imports and exports arrive or depart through their maritime structures. While essential to island economies, ports that are critical domestically and serve global supply chains are also primarily found on islands. That waterways control the global economy became exceedingly evident by the struggle in the Strait of Hormuz.

Another example of islands appropriated as hubs for capital gain, is the extensive establishment of off-shore financial centers on them. As a strategy of economic development that evolved with neoliberal financial deregulation in the 1980s, island governments changed tax laws. Peppered throughout the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, many small island economies have become dependent upon their status as tax havens making them vulnerable to money laundering and financial policy decisions upon which they hold no sway (Hampton and Christenson 2002).

Finally, a dizzying set of varied political arrangements and jurisdictions that tie islands to their past occupiers, perpetuate the systemic power of core nations limiting island sovereignty. The current illegal US military boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific under the pretext of “narco-trafficking operations” is another illustration of the subordinate status of islands. According to the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, the US is in breach of international human rights law. The present death toll of over two hundred in waters near to islands is an outcome of the US rejecting laws that islands depend upon. This includes the prohibition of the unilateral use of force in international waters and its obligation (despite it not being a signatory) to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UN News 2025).

A Body of Land Surrounded by Secrets

With an island feminist perspective we arrive to the atrocities on Little St. James with much disgust but little surprise. Painfully central is patriarchy and misogyny and the physical and emotional violence wrought on girls and women for years with the capitulation and silence of so, so many “important” persons—politicians, scientists, doctors, financiers. In other words, the assortment of privileged actors brought together by Jeffrey Epstein are contemporary reflections of those aboard Columbus’ or Cooke’s ships, rich men making their way together to islands with the interest of increasing their wealth.

There is nothing of island geographies that beg for control, corruption, or depravity. My arguments do not essentialize islands. Rather as a specific sort of spatial arrangement, islands are contrived as conduits bleak aspects of capitalism. Capitalist accumulation requires subterfuge in many forms. And while this can include activities such tax havens, insider-trading, toxic dumping, foremost, is its utter dependency on the hidden cost of labor--capital’s indispensable act of subterfuge. As a whole, islands have been exploited by foreign entities to keep things secret. In the various forms of extractive labor on plantations, as penal colonies, the exploitive work for the production of tourist experiences, or financial off-shoring, islands proffer opportunities for hiding.

Hiding is entrenched in capitalism. What is the purpose for sole ownership or the type privacy sought in purchasing an entire body of land? Contemporary owners of islands are often exceptionally wealthy, concealing their behaviors and seeking to avoid others’ rules including the jurisdiction and regulations by which the islands they own are officially governed.

Through the fetishism of commodities, Marx shows us that the forgetting of labor is at the foundation of capitalist expansion. The girls and young women were hired labor—paid to give massages, which lead to physical and emotional violence and abusive relationships with Epstein. Many were compensated as recruiters to rope in other girls. Feminist scholarship continues to delineate the many ways that the construction and exploitation of gender devalues women’s work and leads to the consumption of girls and women as sexual objects. This includes the racist stereotypes around sex and gender that drive sex trafficking, transporting girls and women from one location to another.

The Island Responds

Islander, “a native or inhabitant of an island” first appeared in print around 1550 as did the term “colony.” Interestingly, the trend in the use of the term in print rose distinctly in the 1820s and then dropped dramatically over the 1900s. Starting in the 1990s the term shows a rising trend reaching in 2019 its 1800 level (.15 occurrences per millions of words) (Google Books Ngram Viewer 2026). The trend of the term islander (in English) is telling in that it traces to the expansion of the world-system and the role islands play in it. Unlike the term “colony,” which has gone flat, the increased use of “islander” affirms islands’ topicality as outlined at the start of this essay.

In this last section, through the case (ST-20-CV-014) filed by the Government of the US Virgin Islands (USVI) in January 2020 under the leadership and meticulous work of then Attorney General Denise George, I consider an islander response to Epstein’s hustle on Little St. James Island. The legal case against the Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, his Trust, LLCs, and others outlines his pattern of multiple holdings to the extent that they are known and how he secured the purchase of two islands (one after his 2008 conviction) to hide the exploitation, harm, and containment of girls and young women.

USVI vs the Epstein Estate is an example of an island feminist praxis (Rodríguez-Coss 2021). Though the perspective is capable of revealing specificities of island inequalities, historical conditions of colonization and appropriation, “Island feminist praxis identifies contemporary feminist activist strategies of resistance as they contest dominant constructs of islands and heteropatriarchal gender paradigms” (Rodríguez-Coss 2021). That the AG and her team succeeded in holding Epstein and his estate to account, supported young girls and women in their testimonies, and compensation for them deserves more public attention as comparison to the failure of the US Justice Department. It also reflects the potential for a strategic essentialism (Spivak 1985) of islanders to resist the stereotypes and exploitation of the island.

The 48 page lawsuit which includes 22 separate accounts filed by USVI AG Denise George is instructive for considering how the island matters for global capitalism. The two themes that organize the lawsuit are the maze of financial dealings and formation of off-shore companies and the containment, trafficking, and manipulation of girls.

Holding Liable Epstein’s Labyrinth of LLCs

The case documents the network of limited liability companies (LLC) upon which Epstein relied upon to hold his wealth, limit detection and liability, and secure secrecy and silence, paying off many through these companies who witnessed or facilitated human trafficking and harm against children.

Little St. James was first acquired by a Delaware entity of which Epstein was the sole member, L.S.J., LLC and eventually sold it to Nautilus, LLC, for ten dollars which he incorporated in the USVI. The allegations suggest that Epstein continued to establish new entities and transferred property and funds to “conceal the unlawful acts described in the Complaint.” (16)[1]

Shell companies are entities that generally exist on paper alone created by those with enormous wealth in off-shore locations to hide their known assets, reduce tax liabilities, or to hide illegal activities. They are formed in island places like the USVI which become “tax havens” because of the minimal taxes charged. Delaware, is a US state which is considered a tax haven because of its distinct policies such as privacy protection where the names of shareholders or officers do not have to be publicly disclosed and where the owner, member, director, in other words all positions of an LLC, can be held by one person. Such was the case with LSJ, LLC, of which Epstein was the sole person on record.

Table 1. Limited Liability Companies and Other Connected Financial Entities of the Epstein Enterprise


Financial Entity                                 Year                Purpose

 

LSJ, LLC                                            1998                Epstein sole member, purchased island, 7.95

million (registered in Delaware)

 

Financial Trust Company                   1998                Replaced Epstein and Company, as wealth

                                                                                    management for Leslie Wexner

Nautilus, LLC                                     2011                Purchased Little St. James island for ten                                                                                                        dollars

Freedom Air Petroleum, LLC            2011                To hold assets

LSJ Employees                                   2011                Services and payroll for island

Maple Inc.                                           2011                New York mansion used to hold and                                                                                                             abuse victims. Sold to Epstein by Leslie                                                                                     Wexner under market and through                                                                                      installments

 

JEGE, LLC                                         2012                Owned, operated, and managed private

                                                                                    luxury jets, including those used for

                                                                                    trafficking children

Hyperion Air, LLC                             2012                Aircraft holdings

Plan D, LLC                                      2012                Aircraft holdings with pilot Lawrence

                                                                                    Visoki used to transport predators and                                                                                                           victims

 

The 2013 Butterfly Trust                    2013                Established to move and store wealth

                                                                                    through Morgan Stanley, and others banks

 

Southern Trust Company, Inc.           2013                Hired Cecil de Jongh, Governor’s wife,

                                                                                    received a major tax break, took over from

                                                                                    Financial Trust as his main business entity

LSJ Emergency, LLC                        2015                Services

Great St. Jim LLC                              2015                Registered falsely under an Emirati                                                                                                               business associate

Poplar Inc.                                           2017                Carry out transaction on permitting                                                                                                                matters for Great St. Jim, LLC

1953 Trust                                           2019                Established two days prior to Epstein’s                                                                                                          death, seen as an attempt to hide assets from                                                                                     victim’s claims to distribute to his allies


All but the first of these entities are legally incorporated in USVI which collectively amount to an international crime ring. Banks (Bear Sterns, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, among others) should have identified patterns and/or the size of financial transactions as questionable but selected to not act or delayed reporting until after Epstein’s death or after his arrest (Goldstein 2024, US Senate Finance Committee 2025). Epstein alone held at least 50 separate accounts with JPMorgan Chase.

In the instance of Great St. Jim LLC, the shell company was illegally formed in 2015 for the purpose of purchasing Great St. James. Sulant Ahmed bin Sulayem, a long time associate of Epstein with whom he shared misogynistic and potentially criminal communications that became public with the release of the files by the US DOJ, still denied the use of his name when Epstein asked for it to set up a shell company to purchase the neighboring island. Christian Kjaer, the former owner, had been explicit in his refusal to sell the island to Epstein. It was only when Southern Trust Company, Inc., began filing for building permits that it was made known that Epstein was the owner.

This revelation did nothing to halt Epstein’s efforts—under the shell business entity, Southern Trust Company, Inc. he received tax breaks from Bryan, who remains as USVI Governor though evidence mounts on his corrupt association with Epstein (Carlson 2026). The allegation in the case pursued by AG George, is that Great St. James was purchased “to further shield his conduct on Little St. James from view” and prevent escape or the girls obtaining help from others (27).

Along with an intentionally dizzying array of shell companies, two primary forms by which Epstein sustained his island empire was by purchasing secrecy and allegiance. This includes threats to those who signed non-disclosure agreements (NDA), which is an especially unfortunate aspect given that attempts to conceal illegal activity disqualifies it in court. The island was locally referred to as pedophile or orgy island and yet sex crimes persisted. The accountability of hundreds of employees and others remains in question, so many who witnessed girls and young women being brought to the island, the aftermath of illicit sex crimes or the girls who tried to run away. While workers will bear the moral weight of their silence, ethnographic research here could be especially useful to determine how exactly he deterred autochthonous Virgin Islanders from reporting and to develop strategies to deter such impact in the future.

Many news articles on Epstein imply that it was his unique “stealth and rule-bending guile,” implying that even smart powerful men were seduced by him. A PEWS inspired island feminism approach demonstrates that presently and historically, systemic stealth, secrecy, and the abject commodification and abuse of women and island populations are foundational to the global movement of capital. There is nothing special about Epstein.

The Carceral Island: The Gendered Manipulation and Containment of Girls and Women

There is a long legacy of transporting and trafficking humans to islands and forcing or misleading and containing them in terrible labor conditions. The lawsuit alleged that: “a pattern and practice of trafficking and sexually abusing young women and female children on this private, secluded island of Little St. James, where Epstein and his associates could avoid detection of their illegal activities from Virgin Islands and federal law enforcement and prevent these young women and underage girls from leaving freely and escaping abuse” (italics mine 23). It goes on to share the testimony of a fifteen year old girl who was “forced into sexual acts with Epstein and others and then attempted to escape by swimming off the Little St. James island. Epstein and others organized a search party that located her and kept her captive by, among other things, confiscated her passport.” (54)

With Epstein, and for many tourists who are seeking solace or secrecy, the island is flipped from socially thick communities of islanders, to a place for secrecy and hiding. The parameters of Little St. James were heavily securitized including the use of guard dogs. Snorkelers and tourist boats that ventured near the shores of Little St. James were accosted by security guards (Coto 2019). In 2018, when investigators sought to disembark, they were refused entry as Epstein claimed the dock as his front door, further demonstrating how he manipulated the physical geography of islands for illegal activities. The lawsuit alleged that Epstein Estate “took advantage of the secluded nature of the islands in furtherance of its crimes.”(63)

Moving groups of young women and girls from all over the world to a small Caribbean island requires a wide net of coordination and manipulation. Pilots, air traffic controllers, and others along the transportation circuit must have had some awareness that kids were not traveling with their parents. Indeed the court filing states, “Air traffic controllers and other airport personnel reported seeing Epstein leave his plane with young girls some of whom appeared to be between the age of 11 and 18 years.” (48) Furthermore, “flight logs and other sources establish that between 2001 and 2019 the Epstein Enterprise transported underage girls and young women to the Virgin Islands.” (32) Even more insidious is the calibrated tactics of Epstein’s pedophilic pursuits as suggested in the allegation that the “Epstein Enterprise kept a computerized list of underage girls who were in or proximate to the Virgin Islands.”

There is no direct route to Little St. James Island. The nearest landing strips to the island were on St. Thomas. From there, girls were either carried by helicopter or at times put on boats and trafficked to St. James Island. The girls and young women agreed to board flights under false pretense. Some, as stated, were told that they would be paid to give massages; others that a visit to the island was an opportunity to launch modeling careers; others were lured by offers of scholarships, or money, gifts, or medical care for ill family members.

That girls and young women were manipulated by these offers or false opportunities is understandable when framed in the context of a capitalist sexist world system. To think of the realization that may have occurred, when for example, a girl said no, or a woman, said no more, or sought to leave the island, is heartbreaking, their presence on the island no longer perceived as voluntary but recognized as imprisonment.

Conclusion

Islands are determinately key sites for the onset and extension of the capitalist world-system, a position that welcomes critique and inquiry especially from a PEWS perspective into how certain geographies or spatial manifestations shape the trajectory of global economic transformation (including the British isles).

The deception sustained by Epstein involved networks of actors to perpetuate a stream of girls and young women to the island, and many wealthy participants seeking and seizing the chance to engage in what amounts to sex crimes that they believed would remain hidden. Historical comparisons on the space of islands parallel: wealthy and privileged generally white or European men arrive in groups to islands in pursuit or in demonstration of wealth and ownership; adults and children are trafficked to them for their labor; local populations are disappeared or exploited; and girls and women are sexually assaulted, raped, and objectified in misogynistic demonstrations of power.

A proposition here is to (re)invigorate PEWS with feminist and geographical or spatial approaches. In other words, is there any use in thinking about the role of geographical units in the world-system, specifically islands? While this essay is focused on the histories of those that exploit the island, island feminism scholarship mindfully addresses the generative and deeply relational lives of islanders in their centuries of resistance and their very varied and particular social histories from region to region, island to island, ocean to ocean. Yet both the exploitation of island geographies to sustain the capitalist world system, and the remarkable resistance by islanders on the ground deserve critical exploration.

Finally, feminist PEWS scholarship is overdue for another blossoming. Consider that found in the tranche of files released in December 2026 was left icon Noam Chomsky’s 2019(!) advice to Jeffrey Epstein: “The best way to proceed is to ignore it. That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder” (Vargas 2026). Also terrible, is the defense of Chomsky by left scholars (see Grandin 2025 and 2026 update in The Nation) that coddle his relationship to Epstein (Hall 2026).

In a recent call for papers for a proposed PEWS session, “Gender Dynamics in the Capitalist World-System in Crisis” at the 2026 ASA meetings (which PEWS Council and members are now boycotting in multiple forms), the organizer received zero papers! Though favoring my own scholar-activism, I maintain a deep commitment that the combination of a world-system perspective with a Black, Indigenous, and postcolonial feminism is truly potent and desperately needed right now.

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Rita, Nathalie and Marina Karides. 2021. “I have an accent, so people know I’m not from here”: A Racial and Ethnic Analysis of International STEM Faculty in Hawai‘i” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(10): 1873-1895.

Rodríguez-Coss, Noralis. 2021. “An Intersectional Analysis of Island Feminist Praxis in Puerto Rico. In Gender and Island Communities edited by Firouz Gaini and Helene Pristend Nielsen, 158-173. London: Routledge.

Superior Court of the Virgin Islands: Division of St. Thomas and St. John. 2020. “Government of the United States Virgin Islands V. Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, The 1953 Trust, Plan D, LLC; Great St. Jim, LLC; Nautilus, Inc.: Hyperion Air, LLC; Poplar, Inc., John and Jand Does,” January 15, 2020, Case No.: ST-20-CV-014, https://vicourts.hosted.civiclive.com/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=16364025

Spivak, Gayatri. 1996. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by Larry Grossberg and Cary Nelson, 66-111. Houndmills: Macmillan.

Tax Notes. 2023. “USVI Government Complicit in Trafficking, JPMorgan Chase Says” Tax Notes Research, June 20, 2023, https://www.taxnotes.com/research/federal/other-documents/other-court-documents/u.s.v.i-government-complicit-in-trafficking-jpmorgan-chase-says/7gwtv

UN News. 2025. “US strikes in Caribbean and Pacific breach international laws, says UN rights chief” UN News: Global perspective on Human stories, https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/10/1166234

US Virgin Islands Department of Justice. 2022. “US Virgin Islands Attorney General Settle Sex Trafficking – Case Against Estate Of Jeffrey Epstein And Co-Defendants For Over $105 Million” December 1, 2022, https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/

US Senate Committee on Finance. 2025. “Continuing Epstein Investigation, Wyden Releases New Analysis Detailing How Top JPMorgan Chase Executive Enabled Epstein’s Sex Trafficking Operation” Ranking Member’s News, Democratic Staff Memorandum, November 20, 2025, https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/continuing-epstein-investigation-wyden-releases-new-analysis-detailing-how-top-jpmorgan-chase-executives-enabled-epsteins-sex-trafficking-operation

Vargas, Ramon Antonio. 2026. “Newly released files shed new light on Chomsky and Epstein relationship” The Guardian, February 3, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-files-noam-chomsky

Verschuurs, J., Koks, E.E. & Hall, J.W. 2022. “Ports’ critically in international trade and global supply-chains. Nat Commun 13, 4351 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32070-0



[1]The numbers refers to the claims as numbered in the legal filing of         USVI v. the Epstein Estate,             https://vicourts.hosted.civiclive.com/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=16364025

 

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