An amended federal lawsuit alleges Playboy founder Hugh Hefner called the FBI multiple times to report Jeffrey Epstein for sexual abuse after a Playmate told him she had been raped and trafficked, and the bureau never acted on the tip.
Audra Lynn Christiansen, Playboy's Miss October 2003, was 23 years old and living at Hefner's Beverly Hills mansion in 2005 when she told the magazine publisher that Epstein had raped and trafficked her. Christiansen asked Hefner to contact the FBI on her behalf, believing his law enforcement connections and public stature gave him the clout to get her allegations taken seriously. Hefner obliged, calling the bureau multiple times that year to report the financier, the New York Post reported, citing details from the amended complaint.
The FBI never publicly addressed the tip. It did not contact Christiansen until October 2020, a full 15 years after Hefner first picked up the phone.
The case, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, names 32 Epstein victims as plaintiffs suing the United States. Their central claim: the FBI had credible reports about Epstein's sexual abuse stretching back as far as 1996 and failed to act on them for more than two decades. Hefner's calls in 2005 are now part of the evidentiary record supporting that allegation.
A 2020 FBI report of a phone call with Christiansen, included in the court filing, adds a disturbing detail. Christiansen told the bureau that her agents introduced her to Epstein after her Playboy shoot was published. Epstein, she said, specifically wanted to meet her once the centerfold came out. The Minnesota-born former model, now 46, also confided in Hefner that Epstein had trafficked her to Stanley Ho, the Macau casino billionaire once described as China's "Godfather of gambling."
Ho died in 2020. But his name surfaced again in Department of Justice files released in recent years. A 2011 email from Epstein to his associate Boris Nikolic referred to Ho as "the richest man in Hong Kong" who "owns most of Macau... the leader of the Chinese mob." The email places Ho squarely within Epstein's international network, and aligns with Christiansen's account of being trafficked to him.
The broader Epstein saga continues to pull powerful names into its orbit. Bill Gates recently called his own Epstein meetings a "grave error in judgment" during closed-door House testimony, and congressional investigators have pressed further into those connections.
Rather than address the substance of Hefner's 2005 tip or the 15-year gap before contacting Christiansen, the FBI moved in June to have the entire lawsuit dismissed. The bureau's argument was procedural: it said it was "not required to investigate every complaint" it received.
That legal posture drew a sharp response from Jordan Merson, the attorney representing the 32 victims. Merson told the 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."
He followed with a simpler question:
"How can you learn from errors if you do not acknowledge them?"
The case remains before the courts. No ruling on the FBI's dismissal motion has been made public. With Todd Blanche now confirmed as attorney general, the Department of Justice faces renewed scrutiny over how it handles the Epstein file going forward.
Hefner himself is a complicated figure. After his death in 2017, women in the documentary "Secrets of Playboy" accused him of sexual misconduct, though those accusations never made it to court and were never leveled while he was alive. But on the specific question of Epstein, the lawsuit's account is clear: when a young woman living under his roof told him she had been raped and trafficked, Hefner contacted federal law enforcement, repeatedly.
The FBI's response was silence. No investigation. No follow-up for a decade and a half. When agents finally did call Christiansen in October 2020, Epstein had already been arrested, jailed, and found dead in his cell. Stanley Ho was dead. Hefner was dead. The window for accountability had narrowed to a courtroom.
Separate congressional inquiries have continued to probe Epstein's network of enablers and the institutions that looked the other way. Investigators found that Epstein tried to leverage prominent figures' personal vulnerabilities to maintain influence, a pattern consistent with the kind of coercion alleged in this lawsuit.
The amended complaint, first reported by journalist Julie Brown on her Substack, paints a picture of a federal agency that had the information it needed and chose not to use it. The lawsuit alleges the FBI received credible reports about Epstein's abuse going back to 1996, nearly a decade before Hefner's calls. Each missed signal compounded the next. Each year of inaction meant more victims.
Thirty-two of those victims are now asking a federal court to hold the United States accountable. The FBI's defense, that it can pick and choose which complaints to pursue, may be legally sound in the narrowest sense. But it does nothing to explain why a prominent public figure's multiple calls about a serial predator landed in a bureaucratic void.
Federal law enforcement that sits on credible abuse reports for 15 years and then argues it had no duty to act is not an agency that failed. It is an agency that chose not to succeed. The victims' lawsuit asks the courts to say so plainly, and the American public deserves to hear the answer.
