Jeffrey Epstein / Dean Kamen Connection Through Aviation Influencer
Nadia Marcinko, a celebrity pilot whose adolescence was spent in the company of the now-dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the now-incarcerated Ghislaine Maxwell, had a curiously close and previously undisclosed years-long relationship with Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. This is according to people familiar with her activities during her time in New Hampshire and public records.
In 2008 and 2009, Epstein was locked up for the first time for engaging in sex with underage girls in Palm Beach, Florida. Marcinko, who lived with Epstein and was accused by victims of participating in some of the sexual assaults, spent the period of Epstein’s incarceration visiting him in jail and learning to fly. She obtained her pilot’s license and became a certified flight instructor. Two years later, she was right seating in Epstein’s private business jets. She talked about this in an interview posted to the website of First, a STEM education-promoting organization founded by Kamen, who is a pilot himself and a prolific inventor.
The 2013 article is one of the earliest public links between Marcinko and Kamen and it is not clear whether the magazine profile, the only such feature in the short-lived publication, was what brought her to Kamen’s attention or if the feature was the result of an already existing relationship, but it would not be her last encounter with Kamen.
Later that year, Marcinko told me she was flying the Embraer Phenom 300, a multi-million dollar business jet. She did not say for whom she was flying but it is worth noting that is the model aircraft owned by Dean Kamen’s New Hampshire based company DEKA and just months later she would have a private office just down the hall from Kamen’s.
A former employee at DEKA in Manchester, remembers seeing Marcinko for the first time in early 2014. It was during a quarterly employees’ meeting when Kamen announced exciting news. He was starting a company flying club. Then, praising the appearance of the attractive blonde standing beside him, he introduced Marcinko — the club flight instructor.
“Dean was really into flying,” one of those present for the announcement said. This may have been behind his decision to give her an office on the executive floor where she could run the club. But that was not the only thing Marcinko was running from DEKA headquarters.
As I have reported previously, Marcinko also used the company address as the headquarters for her website Aviloop which used videos and photos of attractive “Deal Attendants” to attract aspiring pilots.
Visitors were encouraged to view the “gorgeous” women and enter to win a one-on-one video chat with “fashion models with exciting backgrounds.” One image included the caption, “So what are you waiting for Captain.”
Marcinko’s photos were posted as were those of her friend Shannon Cusack, who arrived at DEKA around the same to take a job as Kamen’s chief of staff. Read into that what you will. Cusack’s online resume, since altered, showed her job before arriving at DEKA had been with Aviloop.
In a photo ostensibly depicting an Aviloop business meeting, another DEKA staffer, Keli Maxwell (L), appears with Cusack, Marcinko and an unidentified man.
Even with DEKA co-workers helping Marcinko enhance the apparent size of her company, the people at DEKA with whom I spoke say they were unaware at the time of Marcinko’s sordid past as Epstein’s unindicted co-conspirator in the sexual abuse of minors. Which is not to say she wasn’t the subject of discussion. She was. It was widely believed that Marcinko was living in Kamen’s suburban Manchester home. Public records indicate both Marcinko and Cusack lived for a time at his Bedford, home.
This was an especially tantalizing conversational thread at the time because Kamen already had a live-in girlfriend, DEKA’s former general counsel, Maureen Toohey, who still represents DEKA in legal and financial matters.
White House Photo
A frequent guest of presidents, in May 2016, Kamen brought Toohey on the date of a lifetime; to a White House dinner. The guest list also included network anchors, Lester Holt, Bret Baier and David Muir, actors Allison Williams, Will Ferrell, Bellamy Young and Aziz Ansari and David Letterman.
“It was no secret to the entire company that they are a couple,” a former DEKA employee told me of Kamen and Toohey, a perception confirmed by others.
Though Toohey told me she left her job as general counsel in 2007 to open her own law firm, her office remains at DEKA’s headquarters and DEKA is still a client.
“Maureen was included in every meeting with every outside counsel and with every company that invested in DEKA,” an insider told me.
It would appear that Toohey was also helping with Aviloop because when Marcinko decided to register the company in New Hampshire, she falsely claimed as her residence the home owned by Toohey on Kidder Street in Manchester. Did Toohey know about the false filing? Toohey said she did not, nor did she share the house with Marcinko. This answer is somewhat disingenuous since Toohey didn’t live in that house either. Was she directed by Kamen to allow Marcinko to use her address for purposes of incorporating Aviloop in New Hampshire? Toohey has declined to answer further questions.
So not only did Marcinko not live on Kidder Street neither did Toohey, who lives with Kamen according to DEKA employees and an online search seems to confirm that. (Carol Kenney, Toohey’s paralegal lives in the Kidder Street house.)
Had Ghislaine Maxwell not been arrested after finding her own refuge in New Hampshire, Marcinko’s bit of history in the state might have gone unnoticed. Now, however, speculation has ratcheted up and questions begat more questions.
Epstein was a genius at creating wide-ranging networks and putting influential people in his debt using young women as bait. In New Hampshire, the brainy founder of DEKA, known for its innovative and life-changing inventions has linked that company to an Epstein associate for no clear reason. The only visible products of their association (aside from DEKA employees she may have taught to fly) is Marcinko’s self-aggrandizing Instagram posts to a following in the tens of thousands, YouTube videos and a teasy/cheesy website that even at the time was already woefully out of step with what women in aviation had long been seeking, to de-sexualize the profession and move toward some level of parity.
That Marcinko found refuge in New Hampshire could very well be the result of an act of beneficence, a hand up from Kamen to a woman emerging from a decade of being both a victim and victimizer. But when explanations are few, and nothing about the story is straightforward, it is no wonder the benefit of the doubt is hard to find.
