USVI 171th YEAR ....vas I II IL• Regular $3.28 (No change) Premium $3.60 (No change) Diesel — $3.32 (No change) * A $0.14 gas tax is added to each gallon of fuel. t. Croix abig SUNDAY-MONDAY, JANUARY 11-12, 2015, NO. 9 No escap ng Epste INN 1 750 Private island Little St. James is at center of scandal in national headlines BRITNEY KNIGHT ST. CROIX — Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is again making national headlines for allegedly hosting an under age orgy on his private island dubbed Little St. James — and so is the Virgin Islands. The billionaire financier spent 13 months in jail following guilty pleas in 2008 in connection with soliciting girls for underage pros- titution, but recent alle- gations that Britain's Prince Andrew, Nobel prize- winning physicist Stephen Hawking and promi- Epstein nent lawyer Alan Dershowitz, were among the men in attendance at Epstein's home during that alleged orgy, have thrown the territory back into the headlines. Dershowitz, a member of the "Dream Team" in former NFL star O.J. Simpson's murder trial and Hawking are accused alongside the Prince, of having sexual rela- tions with a teenage associate of Epstein on the island. Articles associating the Virgin Islands with Epstein's private island have appeared in print newspapers in Washington, D.C. and New York and online news- papers like the Daily Beast and Smoking Gun, as well as in media in other parts of the world to include Britain and Australia. "Epstein's Caribbean island of Little St. James lies a short dis- tance from St. Thomas — part of the U.S. Virgin Islands," an arti- cle in the online edition of Britain's Daily Mail notes. Several photos accompany the article and among them are one of the island, again with references to the U.S. Vir- gin Islands. Hawking, the celebrated physi- cist, who at 21 was diagnosed with ALS and is wheelchair-bound because of the degenerative dis- ease, attended a conferenc