Among the possessions of the Danish West Indies that the USA bought from Denmark were 3 large islands and several dozen small ones, including Little Saint James, which Jeffrey Epstein acquired in 1998

Among the political terms of the sale were a US guarantee of Denmark's neutrality and US recognition of Danish sovereignty over Greenland.

The islands, now known as the Virgin Islands, cost the USA a mere 25 million dollars. For Denmark these colonial territories, with a population of around 26 thousand, were a drain on the treasury: after the abolition of slavery in 1848, the cost of maintaining them had become far too high.

In those years Epstein's island, though it lay under Danish colonial rule, had no administrative significance of its own, owing to its small size and lack of infrastructure