A long-serving U.S. attorney and chief federal prosecutor for the state of New Mexico was exposed Friday for their previously undisclosed ties with Jeffrey Epstein, ties that veteran journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez suggested could explain why a prominent Epstein survivor’s report about sexual abuse went unanswered.
That former federal prosecutor was John J. Kelly, a prominent attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico who served as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Mexico from 1993 to 2000. In 2024, Kelly was asked by a local news outlet why his contact information appeared in Epstein’s contact directory, often referred to as Epstein’s “little black book.”
“I have no clue. You’ll have to ask Mr. Epstein,” Kelly told KOAT-TV Target 7, an affiliate of ABC News, more than four years after Epstein was found dead in his New York jail cell.
Recently unearthed documents from the Justice Department’s release of Epstein files, however, reveal that Kelly worked as Epstein’s power of attorney to help facilitate the purchase of the disgraced financier’s infamous Zorro Ranch property in early 1993, just months before he would be named the state’s chief federal law enforcement officer, Valdes-Rodriguez exclusively reported on her Substack, Alisa Writes.
“In the eyes of the state of New Mexico, Kelly was Epstein,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote, noting that the revelation “directly [contradicted] his account of barely knowing Epstein.”
It was also during Kelly's tenure as New Mexico’s top federal prosecutor that then-16-year-old Annie Farmer filed a report with the FBI about being sexually abused by Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell at Zorro Ranch.
“According to reporting by the New York Times and the Guardian, the report, which protocol would require to be forwarded to Kelly’s offices, was never investigated,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote. “No federal investigation of Zorro Ranch was ever opened during Kelly’s tenure.”
Kelly has not been charged with a crime. He did not respond to Valdes-Rodriguez’s request for comment.
