An amended federal lawsuit claims Playboy founder Hugh Hefner contacted the FBI multiple times in 2005 to report Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of a Playmate who alleged she was raped and trafficked, but the bureau waited until 2020 to follow up.
Audra Lynn Christiansen, Playboy's Miss October 2003, told Hefner when she was 23 years old that Epstein had raped her and that she had been trafficked to Macau casino billionaire Stanley Ho, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Hefner, she said, had the "clout" and the connections to get someone at the FBI to listen. He made the calls. The FBI, the lawsuit alleges, sat on the information for a decade and a half.
The amended complaint, filed in May, is part of a broader case brought by 32 victims of Epstein against the United States government, the New York Post reported. It paints a picture of a federal law-enforcement apparatus that received credible warnings about Epstein's predatory behavior for more than two decades, starting as early as 1996, and failed to act until it was far too late.
Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Stanley Ho died in 2020. Hefner died in 2017. The FBI did not contact Christiansen until October 2020, fifteen years after Hefner first picked up the phone on her behalf.
The complaint's language is direct. It states that "Mr. Hefner called the FBI multiple times on behalf of Ms. Christiansen to report Jeffrey Epstein." Christiansen, now 46, had told Hefner that her agents introduced her to Epstein, who wanted to meet her after seeing one of her Playboy shoots. What followed, the lawsuit alleges, was rape and trafficking to Ho at a casino in Macau.
Hefner's role in this story complicates his legacy in both directions. The late Playboy founder was himself accused of rape posthumously in the documentary "Secrets of Playboy," roughly five years after his 2017 death. Several women alleged he was a predator. Those claims never made it to court, and Hefner was never accused of rape while he was alive. But the lawsuit now places him on the other side of the ledger, as someone who tried to alert federal authorities to Epstein's conduct and was apparently ignored.
That the FBI received tips about Epstein from a figure as prominent as Hugh Hefner and did nothing underscores a pattern that New Mexico lawmakers have also pursued, preparing subpoenas targeting the FBI, the DOJ, and banks connected to Epstein's financial network.
In June, the FBI moved to have the lawsuit dismissed. Its argument, as characterized in court filings, was that the bureau was "not required to investigate every complaint" it received. The case remains ongoing.
Jordan Merson, the lawyer representing the victims, pushed back hard. He told the New York Post:
"The fact that the FBI is trying to utilize procedural technicalities to try to avert accountability and responsibility for its failures to properly investigate Jeffrey Epstein for over 20 years should be deeply concerning to all."
Merson added a pointed question about the bureau's posture:
"How can you learn from errors if you do not acknowledge them?"
The FBI's legal position, that it bears no obligation to follow every lead, may be technically defensible in isolation. But applied to a case where the bureau received repeated warnings from a household name about a financier who was later charged with sex trafficking, the argument reads less like a legal principle and more like an institutional reflex to avoid scrutiny.
The Department of Justice released a tranche of Epstein-related documents earlier this year. Among them was a 2011 email in which Epstein described Stanley Ho to a friend, calling Ho "the leader of the Chinese mob" and saying he "owns most of Macau." The email also referred to Ho as "the richest man in Hong Kong."
Ho, who died in 2020, was widely known as a casino magnate sometimes dubbed China's "Godfather of gambling." The lawsuit's allegation that Christiansen was trafficked to him adds a grim international dimension to the case, and raises the question of what the FBI might have uncovered had it followed up on Hefner's calls in 2005 instead of waiting until everyone involved was either dead or beyond reach.
That question echoes findings from other corners of the Epstein investigation. A New Mexico commission identified at least 35 likely victims at Epstein's Zorro Ranch property and has sued the DOJ for blocking its probe, another instance of federal agencies standing between investigators and answers.
The timeline is damning on its own terms. In 2005, a Playboy Playmate told the founder of Playboy she had been raped and trafficked. The founder called the FBI, not once, but multiple times. The FBI did nothing visible. Epstein continued operating for years. He was arrested, cut a widely criticized plea deal in Florida in 2008, and was arrested again in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges in New York. He died in his jail cell before trial.
Only in October 2020, after Epstein was dead, after Hefner was dead, after Ho was dead, did the FBI reach out to Christiansen to follow up on the information she had provided through Hefner fifteen years earlier. The lawsuit frames this as part of a pattern of FBI failures stretching back to 1996, when the bureau first received complaints about Epstein's sexual abuse and allegedly declined to act.
Meanwhile, the scope of the federal government's knowledge about Epstein's network continues to expand, and so do questions about what officials chose not to pursue. Acting Attorney General Blanche has stated that the DOJ lacks evidence Epstein trafficked victims to other men, a claim that sits uneasily alongside the allegations in this very lawsuit.
Epstein's connections to powerful figures have drawn scrutiny from multiple directions. An outside review confirmed that Bill Gates brushed off staff warnings about his ties to Epstein for years, and a model scout named more than 2,000 times in the Epstein files was recently found dead outside Paris, threads in a web that keeps growing even as the principals die off.
The FBI's motion to dismiss argues procedure. The victims' lawsuit argues facts. Thirty-two plaintiffs say the bureau had the information, had the source, and had the time, and chose to do nothing until it was too late to matter. Whether a federal court agrees will determine if the FBI ever has to answer for the calls it let ring.
When the most famous magazine publisher in America calls the FBI to report a sex trafficker and the bureau waits fifteen years to pick up the thread, the problem is not a lack of tips, it is a lack of will.
