By: Fern Sidman

In a development that has reverberated through Turkey’s political and judicial corridors, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened a formal investigation into allegations that minors from Turkey were trafficked to the private island of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious American sex offender whose crimes have become emblematic of elite impunity and transnational exploitation. The inquiry, first reported on Tuesday by DW Türkçe and closely followed by bianet.org, was initiated after a social media post by opposition lawmaker Turhan Çömez cited recently released documents from the United States Department of Justice that appear to reference the transportation of young girls from multiple countries, including Turkey, into Epstein’s orbit of abuse.

The announcement has injected a new and unsettling dimension into a scandal that many had presumed was geographically and jurisdictionally distant from Turkey. As bianet.org has reported, the decision by prosecutors to examine these allegations reflects not only the gravity of the claims but also the growing expectation among Turkish civil society that crimes of such magnitude cannot be treated as foreign tragedies beyond domestic concern. The investigation, launched on December 23, underscores a belated but consequential recognition that the global networks of trafficking and sexual exploitation may have intersected with Turkey in ways that demand rigorous scrutiny.

Turhan Çömez, a member of parliament from the opposition Good (İYİ) Party, catalyzed the inquiry through a starkly worded post that circulated widely on social media. Drawing upon files released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier in December, Çömez asserted that “these documents state that young girls from Turkey were taken to the island of abuse,” adding that the victims reportedly faced difficulties because they did not speak English. “It is, in a single word, a terrible crime against humanity,” he wrote. The language was deliberately searing, framing the alleged acts not merely as criminal violations but as offenses against the moral fabric of humanity itself. The report at Bianet.org noted that Çömez’s intervention resonated with a public already sensitized to the vulnerabilities of children in an era of globalized crime.

According to judicial sources cited by DW Türkçe and relayed by bianet.org, Turkish prosecutors are now engaged in the painstaking task of reviewing approximately three million pages of recently released documents for any references that might implicate Turkish nationals or point to criminal acts committed within Turkey’s jurisdiction. The sheer volume of material, spanning years of litigation, depositions, and evidentiary filings, attests to the labyrinthine complexity of the Epstein case, which has sprawled across continents and implicated networks of facilitators, enablers, and alleged co-conspirators. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office is reportedly searching for concrete evidence that might establish a nexus between the Epstein operation and crimes affecting Turkish citizens, whether through trafficking routes, recruitment networks, or financial intermediaries.

At the center of the current inquiry is a criminal complaint dated May 2009, filed by a plaintiff identified in court documents as “Jane Doe No. 102” to protect her identity. The complaint, portions of which have been widely circulated and analyzed by journalists, alleges that Epstein transported minor girls from various countries, including Turkey, the Czech Republic, and regions across Asia.

The document describes a pattern of abuse in which the plaintiff was allegedly provided accommodations alongside Epstein to ensure her constant availability as he traveled on his private jet. Each journey, the complaint asserts, followed a grimly repetitive script of sexual exploitation, often involving “a vast array of aspiring models, actresses, celebrities, and/or other females, including minors, from all over the world.”

The language of the complaint, as cited in the bianet.org report, is both expansive and chilling. It claims that Epstein transported minors from multiple countries, many of whom spoke no English, thereby rendering them particularly vulnerable to isolation and coercion. The document further asserts, controversially, that African-American women were the only group excluded from Epstein’s “sexual escapades,” a claim that underscores the selective and racialized dimensions of the alleged abuse. While such assertions remain allegations within a legal complaint and have not been adjudicated in a Turkish court, their inclusion in official filings has lent them a gravity that Turkish authorities can no longer ignore.

For Turkey, the investigation opens a series of fraught questions about accountability, jurisdiction, and the protection of vulnerable populations in an interconnected world. The bianet.org report emphasized that even if the alleged crimes were perpetrated abroad, the possibility that Turkish minors were trafficked into Epstein’s network demands a domestic response grounded in both criminal law and human rights principles. International legal frameworks, including conventions against trafficking in persons and the sexual exploitation of children, impose obligations on states to investigate credible allegations, cooperate with foreign authorities, and provide redress to victims.

Ankara’s decision to open an inquiry, therefore, carries implications not only for Turkey’s internal legal processes but also for its posture within the global regime of anti-trafficking enforcement.

The investigation also intersects with broader debates in Turkey about transparency, judicial independence, and the politicization of criminal inquiries. While Çömez’s role as an opposition lawmaker has lent the issue political salience, the bianet.org report cautioned against reducing the matter to partisan maneuvering. The allegations, if substantiated, would constitute crimes of extraordinary severity, transcending domestic political rivalries. Civil society organizations, women’s rights advocates, and child protection groups have called for the inquiry to be conducted with scrupulous rigor, insulated from political pressures that might dilute its scope or impede its conclusions.

Yet the challenges confronting prosecutors are formidable. The evidentiary trail, dispersed across jurisdictions and embedded in voluminous U.S. court filings, requires sophisticated legal cooperation and forensic analysis. Establishing whether any Turkish minors were indeed trafficked, identifying potential intermediaries, and determining whether any acts of recruitment or facilitation occurred on Turkish soil will demand collaboration with foreign law enforcement agencies and access to classified or sealed records. Bianet.org has reported that judicial authorities are particularly focused on uncovering any links between suspects in the Epstein case and crimes committed in Turkey, a task that could implicate financial transactions, travel records, or communications networks that cross national borders.

The emotional resonance of the allegations has been amplified by the broader cultural reckoning with the Epstein scandal, which has come to symbolize the ways in which wealth and power can distort justice. In Turkey, as elsewhere, the notion that minors might have been trafficked from a predominantly Muslim country into a clandestine network of abuse controlled by a Western financier has provoked both outrage and introspection. The bianet.org report observed that the case touches on deep-seated anxieties about the vulnerability of children in a globalized economy, where borders can be porous to crime even as they remain rigid for the marginalized.

As the inquiry unfolds, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office faces the dual imperative of managing public expectations and safeguarding the integrity of the legal process. Premature conclusions could compromise the investigation, yet prolonged silence risks eroding public trust. The bianet.org report highlighted the delicate balance prosecutors must strike between transparency and confidentiality, particularly in cases involving alleged sexual exploitation of minors, where the protection of victims’ identities and psychological well-being is paramount.

In the broader panorama of transnational justice, Turkey’s investigation stands as a reminder that the reverberations of crimes committed in one jurisdiction can echo across continents. The Epstein case, long perceived through the prism of American celebrity and elite complicity, now implicates a wider geography of harm. Whether the Ankara inquiry will yield concrete findings remains uncertain. What is clear is that the willingness of Turkish authorities to interrogate these allegations marks a significant moment in the country’s engagement with global mechanisms of accountability. In confronting the possibility that Turkish children were ensnared in one of the most infamous abuse networks of the modern era, Turkey is being called upon to reckon not only with the shadows cast by distant crimes but with the imperative to protect its most vulnerable citizens from the darkest currents of globalization.