More than two decades before Jeffrey Epstein took his own life, a woman in California filed one of the earliest sex-crime complaints against him: that he groped her during what she thought was a modeling interview for the Victoria’s Secret catalog. Alicia Arden said she never heard back from investigators. She sees it as a glaring missed opportunity to bring the financier to justice long before he was accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls and women, reports the Associated Press. “If they would have taken me more seriously than they did, it could have helped all these girls,” said Arden, an actress and model. “It could have been stopped.”
In response to Associated Press inquiries and a public records request, Santa Monica, Ca., police agreed to summarize parts of the detective’s notes to a reporter. The detective wrote that Arden did not want to press charges against Epstein but wanted him warned about his behavior, an assertion that she strongly denies. Arden is adamant that she did not, in any way, communicate to the police that she did not want to press charges. She was outraged to hear that the police say otherwise. Arden sent modeling portfolio shots to Epstein’s New York office after hearing from a mutual friend that he could help get her into the Victoria’s Secret catalog. In a California hotel, he asked her to undress and said, “Let me manhandle you for a second” as he began groping her buttocks. Arden said she pushed his hands away and left. At the time Epstein died on Aug. 10, he had pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges. The New York City medical examiner ruled the 66-year-old’s death a suicide on Friday.