The Epstein Client List: Nick Bryant on the Black Book and Flight Logs

“Epstein didn’t kill himself” became the meme of 2019, printed on shirts and hats and shouted everywhere. Years later, people are still asking the same question: where is the client list? Nephilim Death Squad put that question to Nick Bryant, the journalist who says he was the first to put Jeffrey Epstein’s “black book” and flight logs on the internet. His answer wasn’t the one the hosts expected. Stop chasing the death theories, he said. The evidence to start prosecuting people already exists.

This article follows the Nephilim Death Squad episode “The Client List w/ Nick Bryant” (above). Claims about people, numbers and events are Bryant’s as he stated them on the show. Where we couldn’t verify something, we say so.

Who is Nick Bryant?

Bryant is a New York journalist and author. He introduced himself with his books: The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal; Confessions of a D.C. Madam: The Politics of Sex, Lies and Blackmail (co-author); and The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars. He said the common thread in all three is “political blackmail by intelligence.” He says he spent seven years on the Franklin case, which he calls “kind of a carbon copy of the Epstein network,” and has worked on child-exploitation stories since 2002. He also runs a nonprofit, Epstein Justice.

How the black book and flight logs got out

By Bryant’s account, Epstein came onto his radar in 2012, when the public story was still that Epstein acted alone. He went to South Florida, built a relationship with an attorney who had represented several victims, and eventually got a copy of Epstein’s black book. He started calling the victims listed in it, and they told him about being flown around. At that point, he said, he knew Epstein “was overseeing a network.” He later got flight logs as well.

Then nobody would publish them. Bryant said he came back to New York in 2012, pitched publishers and magazine editors, and “no one wanted to touch it.” It took three years before a platform would run it: Gawker, where he published the black book and then the flight logs. After that, “the floodgates opened,” and he says only two outlets credited him.

“Told to stand down”

Bryant’s central charge is that the justice system protected Epstein. He said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida had a list of 34 underage victims. He said the U.S. Attorney at the time, Alexander Acosta, was expected to take it to a grand jury but was told to stand down because Epstein “was intelligence,” which Bryant noted has been reported in many outlets. An order like that, he argued, can only come from the White House or the top of the Justice Department.

He also went after the earlier state grand jury. He explained how easily a grand jury can be steered by a prosecutor who picks the evidence and the witnesses. He said Palm Beach police had statements from five underage girls and knew of 17 more, but only two testified, and those two were treated as though they were the ones on trial. His summary is blunt: children were abused “without any kind of state or federal intervention.”

Blackmail is the thread running through all of Bryant’s work. He passed along what a blackmail photographer once told him: once you’re compromised, you’re on a beautiful yacht, and you can either enjoy it or the people on the yacht “are going to make sure that you drown.”

The media’s role

Bryant says the media has failed twice. First by burying the story. The hosts brought up the ABC reporter caught on a hot mic saying she had the Epstein story years before it blew up and was told to quash it. Second by feeding the public what he calls “salacious dirt” about famous names instead of pushing for prosecutions. He said that when CNN booked him to comment on a document release, he mentioned his nonprofit to the producer, and about ten minutes later got a text: “Nick, we’re going in another direction.” He also said the victims’ suffering has barely been shown: “these girls went through hell.” One of the hosts asked about Netflix’s Epstein documentary, which the host felt cast Ghislaine Maxwell as something like a victim and Epstein as a lone mastermind. Bryant called it “a horrible documentary.”

What about the occult angle?

This is Nephilim Death Squad, so the hosts asked about the temple on Little St. James and the symbolism conspiracy researchers keep pointing to. Bryant was careful. He acknowledged the temple, the owl on it, and that some people he respects believe it points to Moloch, but said, “I just go where there’s proof… we don’t know for sure.” His conclusion: “I’ve been looking for occult symbolism or occult practicing and practitioners, and I haven’t seen that yet.” He was just as cautious about whether Epstein is really dead. He acknowledged the anomalies that night (the cellmate moved, guards not doing their jobs, the video not working) but called the whole debate a red herring. The point, he said, is that girls were trafficked for 25 years and “need justice.”

He went further and warned that unfounded speculation hurts the case. In his view, QAnon-style theories that people “just wanted to believe” without proof hurt researchers and organizations doing real work. He pointed to an Atlantic article he remembered as being called something like “the great child hoax.” His point was that nobody needs to speculate when there is already enough evidence to indict people.

The “client list” and the 2025 releases

Asked how damning the flight logs are, Bryant said it depends on context: there were perpetrators on that plane, but he was sure there were also innocent people. He was firmer about the black book, saying he knows there are perpetrators in it and that people named in victims’ lawsuits appear in it. The hosts brought up the 2025 “phase one” file release, which they saw as a letdown. Bryant called it a fiasco and a debacle. Being “a charitable person,” he said, he would chalk it up to incompetence. What mattered to him was the reaction: outrage came from the left and the right, and he said protecting children may be the one thing both sides agree on.

He also said the government and media have “settled on” 14 as the youngest age, but he believes the case goes further. He said two therapists he knows through a trauma-studies society believe their clients were trafficked by Epstein before age 10. That’s his report of what they told him. Independent verification: UNKNOWN.

What Bryant wants

His fix is simple. He says Epstein’s recruiters are already known (he pointed to a New York Times article naming them) and still haven’t been charged. Indict them on multiple counts, the way mafia RICO prosecutions get small-time crooks to roll over on their bosses, and he says they’ll “turn over” on the perpetrators almost instantly. He is also a fierce critic of the Epstein victims’ compensation program. He said roughly 225 women applied, about 150 received awards, and eight declined because they didn’t want to sign the NDA. The hosts called the NDA condition “nefarious.” Bryant’s point is that paying victims for their silence works against finding the other perpetrators. “We don’t need them to sign an NDA and get some money,” he said. “We need them to basically tell us who their perpetrators were, and then arrest them.”

We aren’t naming individuals Bryant or the hosts accused, and we aren’t repeating allegations beyond what’s described above. Watch the full episode for his complete account.

Wear the meme

The 2019 slogan the hosts bring up on the show is still on a shirt: the Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself T-Shirt, with the portrait behind bars. The rest are in Epstein Shirts, and more designs like it are in Conspiracy Shirts.

Episodes cited

• Nephilim Death Squad, “The Client List w/ Nick Bryant”