A New Mexico ranch that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was suspected of using to traffic underage girls has hit the market for $27.5 million.
As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the planned sale of the 8,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch has been confirmed by Sotheby’s International Realty. Located about 35 miles from Santa Fe, it was purchased by Epstein, who died in 2019 by apparent suicide in prison, in 1993 and is made up of around 7,575 private acres as well as 423 acres of Bureau of Land Management-leased land. (It also initially included more than 1,000 acres of grazing land whose lease with New Mexico’s commissioner of public lands was recently canceled.)
Along with a 30,000-square-foot mansion, the estate comes with an air strip, a firehouse, barns, a log cabin, a yurt and several smaller houses. It was designed by late Parisian architect Alberto Pinto and had the ostentatious extravagance characteristic of Epstein’s New York and Florida properties, like an indoor swimming pool, 4,000-square-foot courtyard and a living room larger than a standard American home.
The sale will go toward Epstein’s estate, which attorney Daniel H. Weiner told the WSJ is worth around $210 million — his primary Manhattan mansion sold in March for $51 million while real estate developer Todd Michael Glaser bought the Palm Beach property for $18.5 million for the land value and razed it in November.
After Epstein killed himself in a New York prison while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, a judge ordered a victim compensation fund established through the sale of Epstein’s properties. Along with Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and Palm Beach estate, Zorro Ranch was named in a federal investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking ring — several teenage victims have come forward to claim that they were brought there for the purposes of being raped and trafficked.
Similarly to the Palm Beach estate, the buyer of Zorro Ranch is likely to buy it for its land value, which has been skyrocketing throughout the Southwest in the last year, and raze it to erase the connection to Epstein. A Sotheby’s representative told the WSJ that the sale of Zorro ranch will go “including as necessary to compensate claimants, tax authorities, and creditors.” Neil Lyon Group at Sotheby’s will be handling the sale.