Why Did Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico Look So Much Like George Washington's Mount Vernon?

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Why Did Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico Look So Much Like George Washington's Mount Vernon?

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez; Mar 23, 2026

Fifteen years ago this July, I toured George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate on the Potomac River with my young son (now an adult). I’d taken him to Washington D.C. for the 4th of July, and the former Washington plantation belonging to this nation’s first president was one of many museums and historical sites we visited. It was one of those moments that lodges permanently in memory — the colonnaded piazza at our backs, the vast river plain below, the distant Maryland hills glowing with light, and the horrific contrast between all that splendor and the squalid, unheated quarters reserved for enslaved Africans, and the only slightly less terrible quarters for white indentured servants.

Washington was an athletic, ambitious narcissist who wanted power but wasn’t born to it. He married not for love but for property, money and slaves. His wife Martha had been married off by her father at 15 to a much older man, Daniel Parke Custis, and when he died his fortune became hers. Including more than 300 human beings. Martha would later write in her letters to friends that George seemed far more content to empty himself into enslaved women than he was in paying husbandly attentions to her. The whole thing was disgusting. I stood in the forest where hundreds of enslaved people were buried in unmarked graves — while all around me American tourists in red-white-and-blue t-shirts snapped photos and felt patriotic —and I wept.

I did not know then that I would one day be looking into what happened at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in my home state of New Mexico. I did not know that when I finally began combing through every available photograph and video of that property — aerial surveys, real estate listing archives, FBI-released images, drone footage — something would nag at me. A feeling of recognition I couldn’t immediately place. Like someone tugging at my heel from underground, to get closer to the earth and listen to the tree roots.

Then it came to me. I had seen this estate before. But it wasn’t in New Mexico. It was on the Potomac.

What follows is the result of a systematic visual comparison between George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate and Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. I am not an architect. I am a journalist with thirty-four years of professional experience and a memory sharpened by years of noticing what other people miss. What I found, documented entirely from publicly available sources — the Mount Vernon estate’s own virtual tour, professional real estate listing photography, aerial and satellite imagery, and FBI-released photographs — is either the most extraordinary coincidence in the history of American real estate, or it is something else entirely.

extensive article with many photos: https://alisav.substack.com/p/why-did-jeffrey-epsteins-zorro-ranch