He once called her his “favourite” and often told her he loved her. But Karyna Shuliak, the last person Epstein spoke to from prison before his death, remains an enigma.
The young dentist was smiling and soft-spoken, wearing a Columbia University fleece jacket and with her long hair held back by a clip. She was introduced by her assistant simply as “Dr Karyna”.
But what the patient – who had come to the office in December expecting to see a different dentist – didn’t know was that she was being treated by Dr Karyna Shuliak, the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend.
Shuliak was the last person Epstein called before he killed himself in his jail cell in 2019. She could inherit as much as $US100 million ($142.9 million) from his estate, including a 33-carat diamond ring, according to a trove of investigative records released by federal authorities.
But on that winter day, Shuliak was working as a part-time dentist in an unremarkable office in Brooklyn, according to dentists who work or used to work at the practice.
He once called her his ‘favourite’ and often told her he loved her. She had free use of a credit card to buy whatever she wanted. They jetted around the world and he funnelled payments of nearly $US1 million to her over the years.
Her attempt to forge something of a normal life, though, was soon shattered when the Justice Department released 3 million pages of investigative files and emails it had gathered on Epstein. The files, released in late January, included thousands of intimate emails between Shuliak and Epstein and dozens of photographs of her and of them together.
Suddenly, their nearly eight-year relationship was on vivid display for all to see. They had fights about sex – with both wanting more at different times. She placed orders to a sexual wellness company for couples. She periodically sent him links to graphic pornographic videos. In some emails, they discussed birth control pills and acne medications and treatments.
Shuliak, 37, emerges as a complicated and unusual figure in Epstein’s world, based on a close review of the files and conversations with several people familiar with her. A native of Belarus who met Epstein when she was 21, she has not identified herself as a victim, nor have federal authorities considered her a co-conspirator in Epstein’s sex trafficking. There is no indication that the FBI ever interviewed her, and lawyers for hundreds of his victims have never deposed her.
He once called her his “favourite” and often told her he loved her. She had free use of a credit card to buy whatever she wanted. They jetted around the world together, and he funnelled payments of nearly $US1 million to her over the years. He also sent tens of thousands of dollars to her parents in Belarus, the files reveal.
Over the years, she earned enough of his trust to help manage his properties and staff and even played a critical role in his effort to buy a Moroccan palace just weeks before his 2019 arrest.
Epstein controlled the relationship, but there is little doubt she benefited from it professionally, personally and financially.
The emails reveal new details about how Epstein helped her get into Columbia University’s dental school – and how he helped her obtain US citizenship by asking one of his female victims to marry her. In one email, he suggested that the fastest “way to a green card” was through a same-sex marriage.
This year, congressional Democrats accused Epstein of exploiting the immigration system and called out Shuliak’s marriage to an American woman, which ended in divorce, as a potentially “illusory” one. US immigration authorities have not challenged the process through which Shuliak obtained her citizenship.
During this year’s northern spring, Shuliak was living in the Manhattan condo building in which Epstein’s brother, Mark, has a financial stake.
Through her lawyer, she declined to comment.
In a brief interview, Mark Epstein said, “I only wish that woman the best.”
A friend of Shuliak’s from Belarus, who once shared an apartment with her in Brooklyn and asked not be named to protect her privacy, said she believed Shuliak “truly loved” Jeffrey Epstein.
‘Go slow’
Karyna Shuliak had lived in New York for only nine months when she met Epstein in late March 2011.
She had moved from Belarus on a temporary student visa to study English at a school in Manhattan. She was making about $US15 an hour as a dental assistant and applying for waitressing jobs while she tried to figure out how to continue the dental education she began in Belarus.
A young woman from Siberia would introduce her to Epstein, the files show. The woman said in an interview with The New York Times that she had periodically been expected to recruit other young women, presumably to provide Epstein with sexualised massages. And that appeared to be Epstein’s intention with Shuliak.
The Siberian woman, who asked not to be named because she said Epstein had abused her, had sent Epstein a photo of Shuliak, describing her as pretty. After some back and forth, it was decided that Shuliak and her roommate from Belarus would meet Epstein at his Manhattan mansion.
“Go slow,” the Siberian woman advised Epstein in an email.
Their first encounters fit the familiar pattern he used with other women. Epstein flattered, pampered and tried to manipulate her, the files show. Almost immediately, he offered to help her realise her dream of becoming a dentist.
But the emails show that Shuliak pushed back – at least in the first few months.
A few weeks after they met, she wrote to Epstein, telling him she thought he was a “remarkable person”. But she added that she could not accept his help “due to some views which strongly stay in my mind, no matter how stupid it may look”.
“I wish you all the best and apologise if I wasted your time,” she added.
Although she doesn’t specify what upset her, their introduction occurred after Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to a charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor and had been accused of abusing dozens of other teenagers.
His response was to berate her for listening to “rumours and stories”.
She responded: “This world is very cruel sometimes and in most cases we have to pay a certain price for things. I should say that I have read some information about you.”
Epstein, who was 58 at the time, did not take no for an answer. The emails released by federal prosecutors show that he bought Shuliak and her roommate tickets to see The Lion King on Broadway and dinners at restaurants. He treated her to a scenic helicopter ride around Manhattan.
By July 2011, she had visited his New Mexico ranch; a few months later, his private island residence in the US Virgin Islands.
‘You are the purest man’
Ever since she was a child, Shuliak had wanted to be a dentist.
She was inspired by her own family’s dental problems and what she saw as the poor dental health in Belarus, she wrote in an admissions essay to dental school reviewed by the Times. She completed four of five years of dental school in Minsk, but stopped her studies to go to New York.
By the winter of 2012, she accepted Epstein’s help to get into dental school. After Columbia’s College of Dental Medicine initially rejected her, Epstein asked his own dentist, Dr Thomas Magnani, a powerful alumnus, to put him in contact with the dental school dean. Epstein dangled the idea of making up to a $US10 million donation. In the end, he only gave about $US210,000 to Columbia, according to an accounting by the university, but it was enough to grease the wheels.
‘If that is not a lot to ask, please enjoy it but keep me away from it … I will stay with you no matter what, as long as you are happy. I love you.’A Karyna Shuliak email to Jeffrey Epstein
The Justice Department files include a text message chain showing how Magnani and Dr James Fine, a dental school administrator, gave Shuliak a heads-up on the topics she would encounter during an admissions exam in April 2012 to test her practical skills as a transfer student. Neither Magnani nor Fine responded to a request for comment.
After she passed and Columbia admitted her, Epstein arranged for Shuliak’s mother to visit from Belarus. He would pay Shuliak’s tuition for her three years of school.
“You are the purest man out of all men,” Shuliak wrote to him in June 2012. “All your love and care, my parents, school, apartment. THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING!!!”
They fought at times over his insistence on having sex with other women in their 20s, including with the small group of assistants who did chores for him and whom he referred to as his “family”, according to the emails.
“I understand you need it however these are the things that don’t feel natural to me, it feels somewhat dirty to me,” she wrote to him in August 2012.
Nowhere in the Justice Department files that were reviewed by the Times does Shuliak express a broader ethical concern about how he was treating those other women, many of whom would later claim to be victims of his abuse. Instead, she asked Epstein to keep his relations with those women out of her sight.
“If that is not a lot to ask, please enjoy it but keep me away from it,” she wrote. “I will stay with you no matter what, as long as you are happy. I love you.”
Getting a green card
By the time she applied to Columbia in 2012, Shuliak had overstayed the student visa she obtained in 2010.
In early 2013, Epstein found a solution to keep her in the country, the files show. Two years earlier, New York became one of the first states to legalise same-sex marriage. Epstein concluded that a marriage in New York between two women might be the easiest way to gain American citizenship without raising red flags that the marriage was arranged solely to avoid deportation.
Epstein chose, from the ranks of his assistants, a 30-year-old woman from Minnesota to be Shuliak’s spouse.
Brad Edwards, the lawyer for the woman, said that his client was a victim of Epstein and that he could not speak about her situation. But he said that, as a general rule, “nobody was permitted or dared ever to disobey Jeffrey Epstein”.
The emails show that Epstein instructed the woman to meet Shuliak on the morning of September 16, 2013, at the New York City Marriage Bureau. The woman was told to have her bags packed so she could immediately fly to the Virgin Islands after getting the marriage licence, while Shuliak would stay behind to attend her dental school classes.
The women were married three weeks later at the Office of the City Clerk. Photos were taken of the ceremony.
After the wedding, a Brooklyn immigration lawyer working for Epstein submitted an immigration form stating that the woman wanted to list Shuliak as her wife and beneficiary. The request was approved, and immigration officials dismissed Shuliak’s pending deportation proceedings.
Months after the marriage, Shuliak got a green card, making her a lawful resident.
Outwardly, the marriage had signs of legitimacy. The two women shared an apartment in the Upper East Side building that was partly owned by Epstein’s brother and where Epstein had housed many of his assistants. They had a joint bank account at Deutsche Bank and went on trips together to London, Europe and Japan.
In May 2018, Shuliak officially became a US citizen. A year later, she and her spouse divorced.
According to a report released this year by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Shuliak’s former wife claimed she had been forced into marriage. The woman, in a statement to the Epstein estate, said she had not known that the wedding had been scheduled just days before Shuliak’s deportation hearing.
The report concluded that the marriage may have been done to provide Shuliak with the “legal basis to continue residing in the United States”. It did not recommend any legal challenge to her citizenship.
‘I met Epstein’s girlfriend’
In early 2019, Shuliak and Epstein seemed every bit a couple. She was living most of the time in his New York mansion and took along her cat, Blueberry, when they travelled together.
She had become a licensed dentist in the Virgin Islands, Florida and New Mexico after completing dental school in 2015. But there is no evidence that she had much of a practice, even though the files detail dental equipment installed at some of his residences. Instead, she spent much of her energy helping to manage his properties and staff.
No task seemed too small. She instructed his drivers to keep “cold Voss water” in Epstein’s cars, organised a floral installation for his mansion, ordered a shipping container filled with outdoor furniture for his island and managed repairs and cleaning schedules for the Manhattan apartments that his brother was invested in.
In mid-June 2019, the pair travelled together to Paris, where Epstein had an apartment. On July 6, Epstein returned home to the United States, while Shuliak stayed in Europe. When his plane touched down at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, federal agents were waiting and arrested him.
About a month after his arrest, in a 20-minute phone call from a jail in Lower Manhattan, Epstein told Shuliak that the federal sex-trafficking charges would take longer to resolve than he had thought. He advised her to find another place to stay for the time being, according to an account of the call provided by her lawyer to federal authorities. The lawyer, Maurice Sercarz, said he had told her “to be strong”.
The next morning, August 10, 2019, Epstein was found to have died by suicide in his cell.
Shortly before his death, Epstein amended his will to leave to Shuliak much of the $US600 million fortune he had at the time, including the large diamond ring “in contemplation of marriage”, according to a handwritten note on a related document. But how much she will actually receive is unclear. The estate is worth between $US120 million and $US200 million after paying out large sums to his victims, records show. There are dozens of beneficiaries in addition to Shuliak, including Mark Epstein’s children, who stand to inherit $US10 million.
Yet despite this potential windfall, Shuliak did not give up on her desire to be a dentist. By 2023, she was back in New York applying for a postdoctoral dental program at Columbia, apparently to fulfil a requirement she needed to obtain a licence to practise in the state.
The same two dentists who helped her gain admission to Columbia in 2012 once again came to her assistance, according to a copy of her admissions file reviewed by the Times. The file shows that Fine, the dean overseeing Columbia’s postgraduate residency programs, created a special “faculty internship” for Shuliak at the Midtown Manhattan dental practice he shared with Magnani.
Both men gave her their highest recommendation for the program, which she graduated from in May 2025 along with six other students. In November, she received her dental licence to practise in New York.
In the aftermath of the release of the Epstein files, Columbia demoted Fine and removed Magnani from his alumni leadership posts. The men declined to comment. The university did not recommend any consequences for Shuliak, whom it said had met the qualifications for admission.
About the same time as she received her New York dental licence, Shuliak answered a want ad on Indeed.com for a part-time job as a dentist in Brooklyn, according to a dentist with the practice, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss workplace issues. It was there that Yoonhae Kim, a patient, was treated by her twice, for a cleaning in December and a filling in February.
Kim said she hadn’t realised Shuliak’s true identity until she saw photographs of her released with the Epstein files. Feeling duped because she was not informed of Shuliak’s full name and wanting to warn other patients, she reached out to the Times.
“I was so upset,” Kim said. “I just couldn’t believe it. Of all the things that happened to me, I didn’t win the lottery. I met Epstein’s girlfriend.”
Shuliak’s last day working at the Brooklyn office was February 12. She was supposed to work on February 16, but she called in sick and never returned. The notoriety from the files probably made it difficult for her to keep working there, the dentist at the practice said. Shuliak’s lawyer declined to say whether she had got another dental job.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
