She ran the United Nations’ ocean conservation programme from a prestigious office inside the fortified UN complex in Gigiri, Nairobi. She held the rank of Director.
She was a Swedish diplomat with a PhD, a LinkedIn profile full of accolades, and a mandate to protect the world’s seas.
She also, according to newly released US government files, maintained a years-long intimate friendship with Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted paedophile — during which he sent her a sex toy, she invited him to move to Kenya with her, and she advised him to flee the United States as a sexual assault case mounted against him.
The woman is Lisa Emelia Svensson. And what the files reveal about her relationship with the world’s most notorious sex offender is now sending shockwaves through the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), whose gleaming Nairobi headquarters was apparently oblivious — or chose to remain oblivious — to what one of its most senior directors was doing on her personal time.
“Come and Visit”
The story begins not in Nairobi, but in Washington DC, where Svensson served as Sweden’s Ambassador for Oceans, Seas and Fresh Water. It was 2012, four years after Epstein had already been convicted and registered as a sex offender for procuring a minor for prostitution in Florida.
Despite knowing this, Svensson wrote to Epstein in August that year asking him to use his connections to get her a prestigious academic fellowship. “Hi Jeff, my dream is to spend some time in the fall/winter at an inspiring university doing a post-doc,” she wrote. “So I need your advice and help! Would you take up the challenge?”
Epstein, ever the predator who wore the costume of a philanthropist, replied that he would send her a plane ticket. She responded by asking for his phone number.
Within months, the correspondence had turned unmistakably personal. By October 2012, Epstein was sending her messages about their availability to meet.
Then, in November of the same year, he sent her what the court documents describe as an adult toy. Her response, preserved now in federal files for the world to read, was not one of shock or disgust. “Thanks for your gift,” she wrote. “Always wanted one. Hilarious, so kind of you.”
The exchange did not read like one between two strangers. It read like one between two people who were entirely comfortable with each other — even as Epstein’s crimes against girls were already a matter of public record.
Nairobi, and a Lie That Unravelled
In August 2016, Svensson arrived in Nairobi to take up her position at UNEP as Chief of the Marine Branch at Director/Coordinator (D1) level, reporting to Executive Director Erik Solheim, a Norwegian diplomat who had taken over just two months earlier.
On paper, it looked like a prestigious appointment. Behind the scenes, however, Svensson had brought her Epstein relationship with her — intact, and in full bloom.
Just one month after arriving in Kenya, she wrote to Epstein: “Gave up on Swedish men, moved to Kenya. Wish me good luck. Come and visit.”
When Epstein’s name surfaced in connection with hers during the 2020 trial of his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, UNEP issued a carefully worded statement to a Norwegian newspaper that had come asking questions.
The organisation insisted that any interaction between Svensson and Epstein “happened when she was with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs” — that is, before she joined UNEP. It directed the reporters to the Swedish embassy for further comment.
That statement, it now turns out, was flatly wrong.
The newly released tranche of Epstein files, disclosed by the US government in late 2025 and early 2026, shows that Svensson was in active and personal contact with Epstein throughout her entire Nairobi tenure, from 2016 right up until July 2019 — the month he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.
UNEP has not issued any fresh public statement addressing this discrepancy.
“You Need to Evacuate”
In September 2016, as a civil lawsuit accusing Epstein of sexually abusing a minor was filed in New York, Svensson’s response was not to distance herself from the man. It was to protect him.
Writing to Epstein from her UN office in Nairobi, she advised him to prepare to flee the country. “If any presidential candidates win, you need to evacuate,” she told him, using the US election as her reference point for when it might be time for a convicted sex offender, then facing fresh accusations, to run.
The following February, she flew to meet him. According to Epstein’s appointment diary — now part of the publicly released files — she was the last person he saw on Valentine’s Day eve, February 13, 2017. The entry recorded the meeting beginning at 6.30pm.
The Paris Escape, Enabled by the UN
By March 2017, barely seven months into her UN posting, Svensson had already decided that Nairobi was not where she wanted to be. She told Epstein in an email that she had informed her boss, Solheim, that she intended to relocate to Paris.
Solheim approved the arrangement, allowing her to lead the UNEP marine team remotely from France, purportedly on the grounds of “family considerations.”
The arrangement caused an uproar inside UNEP. A furious internal complaint, later published by the media outlet PassBlue and copied to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, named Svensson directly.
“In contrast, you, sir, have approved that your friend, a D1, Lisa Svensson, can work from Europe because, for personal reasons, she does not wish to work in Nairobi,” the complaint read. “She leads the marine team remotely, while the rest of the staff under her responsibility are in Nairobi. Her big office in Nairobi remains vacant with her name and organisational equipment.”
By April 2017, Svensson had updated Epstein on her plans to spend the summer finding an apartment in Paris and refreshing her French. She also asked whether she could stay in his Paris flat.
The UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services later confirmed in an official report that the telecommuting arrangement for two senior managers — widely understood to include Svensson — was not in compliance with UN regulations.
Solheim, whose tenure had been marked by nearly $500,000 in irregular travel and hotel expenses and a pattern of bestowing favours on selected staff, was asked to resign by Guterres in November 2018. His departure was extraordinary: it is exceptionally rare for a UN Under-Secretary-General to be pushed out.
The Final Ask
Even as Solheim was forced out and the internal affairs of UNEP unravelled, Svensson continued her correspondence with Epstein. On March 30, 2019, she wrote him an email with the subject line “pick ur brain.”
In it, she told him she was “still looking for a way out of Nairobi” and that she had secured funding from a philanthropist for 18 months of ocean work. She needed, she told him, an organisation in Paris that could receive private money and employ her. She asked if he had any useful contacts.
Four months later, on July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in New Jersey on federal charges of sex trafficking dozens of minors. He died by apparent suicide in his Manhattan federal jail cell one month later, on August 10, 2019.
Svensson, according to her LinkedIn profile, continued in her UNEP role until September 2021. She then moved to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Deputy Director for Global Cyber and Digital Affairs. She currently serves at the Swedish Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva.
What UNEP Must Now Answer
The question of what UNEP knew, and when it knew it, is no longer abstract. The UN’s own ethics framework demands the highest standards of conduct from its staff, and the organisation has in the past year declared that Epstein’s documented pattern of abuse may amount to crimes against humanity.
Yet here, running one of its senior directorates in Nairobi, was a woman who was advising the same Epstein to flee the United States as fresh abuse allegations were filed against him, who was meeting him on Valentine’s eve, and who was asking to stay in his Paris apartment.
All while drawing a UN salary, holding a diplomatic passport, and presiding over a vacant director’s office in Gigiri.
UNEP has not commented publicly on the newly released files. The Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Svensson’s current employer through her posting in Geneva, has also remained silent.
Svensson herself has previously denied the substance of Epstein’s claims about their relationship, calling an earlier email from Epstein to Maxwell — in which he mentioned her — “completely incorrect.” She has stated that she distances herself from everything Epstein and Maxwell were proven to be involved in.
Whether those denials are sustainable in the face of documents written in her own hand, from her own Nairobi office, is now a matter for the public record.
The files do not accuse Svensson of any crime. But they raise pointed questions about the moral judgment of someone entrusted with senior UN leadership, the due diligence of an organisation that waved away media queries with a statement now shown to be false, and the culture of impunity that allowed a director to abandon her post in Nairobi, move to Paris on irregular grounds, and continue a relationship with a convicted paedophile — all without consequence.
The Epstein saga has a long history of swallowing reputations whole. Nairobi’s chapter, it appears, is only just beginning to be read.
