Newly surfaced court documents show Hugh Hefner, who died at 91 in 2017, personally alerted the FBI to Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of a former Playboy Playmate in 2005 — and the bureau sat on the tip for roughly 15 years.
Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown surfaced the claim this week in her Substack, tracing it to a 2024 negligence complaint survivors brought against the federal government in the Southern District of Florida, case No. 9:25-cv-80880.
Former Playmate Audra Christiansen told Hefner in 2005 that Epstein had abused and trafficked her, then asked him to call the FBI directly — she reasoned agents would respond faster to a call from someone with his public standing than to a report from her alone.
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Hefner made the call, and the FBI agreed to look into her account. She didn’t hear back until October 2020. The complaint says Epstein raped her shortly after they met and trafficked her for roughly the next decade, citing an FBI exhibit in the case.
“Law enforcement has failed Epstein’s survivors for decades and continues to do so today,” attorney Arick Fudali, who represents several plaintiffs, told NewsNation. The government has moved to dismiss the case on several grounds, including that survivors waited too long to sue.
A magistrate judge rejected that argument in December but recommended dismissal on separate immunity grounds tied to the FBI’s investigative discretion — a recommendation still awaiting a ruling from the district judge.
Christiansen’s account isn’t the only Epstein tip the government let sit for years. The same case centers partly on Maria Farmer, another Epstein victim who told the FBI in 1996 that Epstein was abusing minors — a report congressional Democrats cited last December in demanding a DOJ inspector-general probe into the bureau’s inaction.
The disclosure adds to a broader pattern of FBI and DOJ missteps handling Epstein-related evidence. A federal judge in June ordered the bureau to sharply speed up its record releases after calling its proposed production pace unacceptable, months after NPR reported the department had omitted interview records tied to a separate Epstein accuser who alleged Trump assaulted her when she was a minor.
