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It's an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the 
dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken 
only by the household help ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and 
beverages. 
In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach slippers, and half glasses, 
Jeffrey Epstein sits at the head of the table. He spends most of his day in the 
dining room, remote from the world, in front of a lap top and beside a row of 
reading glasses (there are a lot of them in case, apparently, he misplaces a 
pair, but being quite meticulous he never does) advising, or instructing, a 
startling collection of the rich and powerful, slotted in on an hourly basis. 
The apartness of Epstein's dining room might seem to offer some 
buffer in this leveled, angry age for a super rich man who attends to even 
more fabulously rich men (and the occasional extremely rich woman). On 
the other hand, with the paparazzi often posted near by, the outside world 
seem dangerously close too. (Once I arrived for a visit and found several 
police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they'd come for 
Jeffrey. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state, also 
visiting him.) 
His subject for the morning is "hyper wealth." His subject is always 
wealth—how capital should react to the given global political, economic, 
and cultural moment. The otherwise baronial dining room is disturbed by an 
ever-present white board, on which he scribbles calculations and notes, 
conducting perhaps the world's most rarified economics class, often to many 
of the world's finance ministers and foremost economists. 
Epstein's apartness or parallel life reflects much of the other-worldly 
characteristics of the wealth revolution that began in the late 1970s and that 
continued through the Wall Street boom of the 80s, the tech boom of the 
90s-surviving, to often bitter attack, the banking crisis—and that has now 
seen the emergence of the international billionaire and oligarch class. He has 
quite turned himself into a hyperbolic representations of this wealth and 
hence, in a way, become accountable for it. 
His own way to riches was to become a canny student of the new 
money, as well as one of its large than life characters, as it grew to an 
unanticipated and disruptive scale. His stock in trade is not precisely the 
making of money, but the issues that arise when money, at a heretofore 
unimaginable rate, makes itself, altering many basic economic, social and 
personal calculations. 
He recounts a dinner he had two nights before. It is, like much of what 
he does, a conspiracist's fantasy. The six men at this dinner, all technology 
entrepreneurs, represented, together, several hundred billion dollars. 
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"In the past, only governments had this kind of money," says Epstein 
conversationally, but making a pedagogical point, "money of a reality 
altering scale. In fact, it used to be that the rich, reaching a certain point of 
philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they 
want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of 
social-engineering philanthropy, unique. They alone had such resources and 
will. Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger 
fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even 
have imagined. 
"Except that it's actually hard to give away this kind of wealth, 
without unintended consequences that can cause more problems than you're 
solving." 
Epstein's long-time business thesis is that the rich know very little 
about money. They may know about their own businesses, but the great 
sums that are the result are an ultimate after thought and demand an entirely 
different sort of intellectual discipline. The Forbes 400, says Epstein, not 
immune to an amount of wonder, increased their wealth by $500 billion last 
year, meaning, in effect, that on average every Forbes-list billionaire makes 
more than another billion every year. And, points out the 62-year-old 
Epstein, they will almost all be dead in 40 years, most well before that, 
meaning $4.2 trillion, compounding everyday, will have to be given away. 
"So, to understand the future, what you have to begin to do is follow the 
money, not in Watergate-like terms backwards, as in who has gotten it, but 
forwards to where it will go and who will get it." 
Epstein can find himself echoing aspects of Thomas Piketty on the 
inequities of the accumulation of wealth ("the divide is between people with 
assets, which appreciate, and people without assets, who fail to advance—
that is, of course, the miracle of compounded interest"), except for the fact 
that Epstein, knowing the rich, understands a curious point that Piketty 
doesn't: "Nobody, nobody, wants to give it all to their children. Everybody 
now has the modern appreciation that one of the curses of great wealth is 
that it can make your kids weird and fucked up." 
Epstein's position in this private allotment of a decent fraction of the 
U.S. Gross Domestic Product is not as philanthropist but as a higher sort of 
banker or guru or brain—a rich whisperer—making him, in addition to rich 
himself, arguably, among the most influential people you've never heard of. 
Though, likely, you have heard of him, but not for his prowess with 
high abstraction, but for a scandal of such luridness that he is, for a great 
many, the poster child of the lawlessness of privilege, and for a much 
smaller circle, the poster child for what can happen when you become the 
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target of a resentful world. He is that Epstein, according to the Daily Mail—
among his most frothing-at-the-mouth antagonists—"one of America's most 
notorious sex offenders." 
And yet the mighty and powerful, apparently evaluating the nature of 
disgrace on their own terms, beat a path to his door. It's a fantastic conclave 
of influence in his dining room: financiers, billionaires, heads of state, 
economic ministers. 
He surely represents the kind of insiderism that is mostly just a 
figment in outsiders' fantasies. Except for the fact that, straining credulity, 
Epstein is real. His is an ultimate sort of fantasy of power, wealth, and 
secrecy. (In 2004, when the then owners of this magazine put it up for sale, I 
was involved with a group trying to buy it—an effort in which Epstein 
volunteered to invest $20 million. New York was subsequently sold to 
another wealthy investor.) Were the International Jewish conspiracy to 
actually exist, it might be here in his dining room (while not everybody in 
his circle is Jewish, an obvious "think Yiddish" point of view prevails). 
Without ever being asked to keep what I have heard here off the 
record, I've willingly done so, least I not be invited back. And, too, to 
protect him. Who would understand Jeffrey? Who could explain him? 
Certainly Epstein's past encounters with the press (and in many ways 
with the entire outside world) have been about as disastrous as any could be, 
helping to open a Pandora's box of lifestyle vulnerabilities that sent him to 
prison on a prostitution charge in 2008. 
And yet here he is, in his 50,000 square foot mansion, dispensing 
advice to world leaders and business titans. 
Indeed, Epstein has been advising Bill Gates on a new way to increase 
the already vast clout of the Gates Foundation by adding funds from other 
wealthy individuals that can use the Gates resources (the Gates Foundation 
now employs 1,200 people), but which can be directed to separate causes 
and goals. And it is Gates who at the end of the summer began prodding 
Epstein to begin a process of public rehabilitation. 
Hence, as part of an effort to get "out in front" of the unfavorable 
notice that might greet Gates' public association with him, Epstein agreed to 
several on the record conversation with me, in the hope, on his part, that, 
after five years since his release from prison and relative peace, he might be 
able to leaven his reputation. And with the hope on my part of learning more 
about how and if the rich are different than you and me (although we can 
fairly dispense with the if). 
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Then, just before the New Year, Epstein forwarded me a heads-up 
email that Alan Dershowtiz, one of Epstein's long time friends—they have a 
bickering brotherly relationship—and occasional legal advisors, had 
received from a reporter at Politico and forwarded to Epstein. The Politico 
reporter had been following Epstein-related court filings (there is a 
determined contingent of Epstein reporters) and found a new one added to 
an old law suit with some rather jaw-dropping claims. 
Eight years after the original suit, a Florida lawyer was now seeking 
to add new plaintiffs to the old case. This new filing was accompanied by 
allegations connecting a catch-all of bold-faced names associated with 
Epstein more than ten years ago, including Dershowtiz and Britain's Prince 
Andrew, to a "sex slave" ring—indeed, that Epstein's purported sex slaves 
had had sex with Dershowitz and the Prince at Epstein's command. 
This seemed to me to be merely a desperate, even comic-book, 
filing—just a lawyer trying to revive a dead case. I responded to Epstein that 
I doubted this would be seen as credible by anyone. 
Epstein, who sometimes seems to have an out-of-body attitude to his 
own fate and bad press, said he thought it might be "quite a show." 
Two days later, the Daily Mail, which has become the effective 
ground zero in the English language for anti-privilege, and moral 
opprobrium (the more salacious the better), and whose editor Paul Dacre has 
a long time feud with Prince Andrew, put the story on its front page. 
(Epstein also has a long relationship with the family of disgraced press 
baron, Robert Maxwell, another reliable target of the British press.) Flimsy 
and far-fetched court filings in the U.S. by settlement-hungry plaintiffs 
might be discounted by skeptical U.S. reporters, but, the U.K. media, 
constrained by onerous rules about legal proceedings in the U.K., promptly 
went into tabloid frenzy (even the normally sniffy Guardian, in full anti-
royal and anti- billionaire fever, joined the tabloid show) and effectively 
exported the story back to the U.S., where Epstein's connection to Bill 
Clinton, and, hence as a shadow over Hillary, became the news. 
"I told you," said Epstein. 
There is Epstein in his inner world, trying, quite ostrich like, not to 
look out. Little beyond his strict realm seems palatable or even in a sense 
familiar to him. He's a foreigner out here. Not too long ago, I met him for 
lunch in the West Village, the first time in more than ten years, he said, he'd 
been out to lunch in a restaurant (a not particularly pleasant experience for 
him and we were done in 30 minutes). 
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Then there is the outside world pressed to the glass, appalled and 
titillated by the monster inside the big house—a kind of Boo Radley of the 
Upper East Side. I have taken friends by the Epstein mansion, and the 
reaction to its other-worldly size in Manhattan is almost always the same: a 
gasp. Press accounts, seldom supplying new information, ever recycle and 
repeat the mysterious (and monstrous) billionaire mythology, with brief 
glimpses of him stepping out of the house (the same photos endlessly 
republished), and the assumption of depravity inside. 
In fact, the life in the house, without wife or children or conventional 
domestic demeanor, in some way conforms to the most scripted fantasies: a 
life somewhere between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. 
The domesticity of the house, and the background of Epstein's 
problems, centers around a group of young women who act as his support 
staff and companions. Some have worked for him for many years, marrying, 
having children, and continuing as part of his business and household 
infrastructure. One woman, on an afternoon when I was there, recently 
married, had just returned from an around the world honeymoon that Epstein 
had arranged for her. Some are his romantic interests. His present girl friend 
is in dental school. One former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a Swedish 
model and Miss Universe finalist, became a doctor and married hedge 
finder Glen Dubin and together they finance the Dubin Breast Center at 
Mount Sinai Hospital. Most at one time will travel with him to his other 
floating residences—the ranch in New Mexico, a vast apartment in Paris, the 
Island in the Caribbean, the house in Palm Beach. 
This is so outside of conventional living or staffing or romantic 
relationships that it is hard to describe in a straightforward or straight-faced 
way. It sometimes seems part of Epstein's implicit challenge: not just look at 
me, but do you even believe what you see? Or it seems he is just oblivious to 
what others are thinking. A willful and perhaps fatal tone deafness. 
But Hefnerian prurience can also be quite businesslike: poised young 
women in a mansion on the Upper East Side with various office 
responsibilities are really not that different from any of the art galleries in 
the surrounding neighborhood. 
Epstein's young women mingle freely with his powerful guests, not so 
much as hostess or, in tabloid language, harem-like (or as "sex slaves"), but 
often as attentive students (that, of course, might be regarded as having its 
own fetish-like attraction). 
Not long ago, Epstein invited me to sit in on a day of presentations to 
him in his dining room by various "quants." Quant theory involves making 
investments based solely on mathematical and statistical models. This 
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method can often have uncanny predictive powers. But the problem is it 
doesn't scale very well—the market, having discerned a pattern of 
successful investing, quickly copies and discounts the advantage. Epstein's 
effort was to identify a dozen or so promising algorithms (each quant is 
effectively hawking his secret sauce algorithm) and invest up to $5 million 
with each. I knew paltry little about this and so rather found myself 
identifying with the young women to whom Epstein was explaining the 
basic math and mechanics—out of my league, but grateful for the lesson. 
The Epstein house/office is, by careful design, exclusive and club like, 
part hang out, part secret society. Along with the difficulty in explaining 
why, even after his jail term, the rich and powerful continued to beat a path 
to his door, it's also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to whose 
turf, that everybody, when they went to see Epstein, comes to him. 
A week in late September, U.N. week as it happened, began, on 
Sunday, at Epstein's house with a colloquial for billionaires—Gates, Mort 
Zuckerman, and Peter Thiel [TK]. 
Epstein, preternaturally responsive to both the price of oil and to the 
politics of the middle of east, entertained that evening a delegation from 
Qatar, including Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister. Hamad, 
indeed, lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein 
have the same decorator. Epstein, in his relaxed and amused manner, kept 
prodding: "Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of 
that?" 
The Qatarians, in some mild diplomatic discomfort, seemed most 
worried that their bid for the World Cup might be compromised by bribery 
allegations. 
At 9:00 next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining 
room by Reid Weingarten, who's represented among other fat cats in 
trouble, Worldcom's Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sach's Lloyd Blankfein 
and is one of attorney general Eric Holder's closest friends. Weingarten, 
horse, with a cold, and dejected, is just back from a failed defense of former 
Connecticut Governor John Rowland. 
After a blow by blow of the trial, there's a discussion of the 
Qartarian's visit—Epstein is serving chocolate made from pistachios grown 
on the Sheikh's farm—and speculation about who actually controls ISIS. 
"Why?" I asked Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the 
room, "do some many people keep coming back here, everything 
considered." 
"Why we camp out here? I guess because there's no place like it." 
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Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-
room. It's a young man named Brock Pierce, a former child actor, and 
dotcom high flyer—a principle in a gaming company called DEN, a 
notorious dotcom burnout, with its own sex scandal—who is now a leading 
investor in Bitcoin. He describe himself as the "the most active investor in 
the field." 
And, indeed, is the first clear explanation I actually get about Bitcoin. 
It is so good that Epstein stops him and checks to see if his next appointment 
is here. And seconds later, Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and 
President of Harvard, enters the dining room. Summers, off Diet Coke, digs 
deep into the Sheikh's chocolates, focuses in on the Bitcoin investor. 
"Okay," he says, after listening for a bit, "I have opportunities here. 
But an additional feature of my decision problem roughly speaking is that 
the worst that could happen to you is that you could lose all the money you 
put into it. Whereas, I could go—I mean I don't look that great now—but I 
could go from being seen as a figure of some probity and some intelligence 
to being a figure of much less intelligence and much less probity..." 
"Well," says Pierce in some dramatic understatement, "you are going 
to have some low quality characters playing early in the space..." 
That evening, there is a small cocktail party, which includes the 
former Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and Thorbjorn Jaglandthe 
head of the Noble Peace Prize Committee, who offers an affable, but general 
scathing, critique of U.S. diplomacy (and a brief defense of Obama's Peace 
Prize award) and to whom Epstein offers a ride back to Europe on his jet. 
The next morning, it's Ehud Barack, the former Israeli Prime Minister 
and Israel, for breakfast. Barack is, over his omelet, able to defend both 
Obama and Putin. Then Kathy Ruemmler, who has just left her job as White 
House Counsel joins. She is already in the mix as a possible next attorney 
general, but, in fact, will withdraw from consideration in part to work with 
Epstein. [TK Ruemmler quotes...] 
Larry Summers wife, Elisa New, drops by. She teaches American 
poetry at Harvard and is putting together a proposal for a series on poetry 
that WGBH in Boston may produce and Epstein is advising on where she 
might go for added support (he also makes mince meat of her budget). 
There follows the former head of the UN Security Council, Hardeep 
Purie, and then head of the central bank of Kazakhstan, Kairat Kelimbetov. 
Then Nathan Myhrvold the former chief technology office at 
Microsoft. Then Martin Nowak a Professor of Biology and Mathematics and 
Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, the institute 
that Epstein has funded with $30 million. Part of Nowak's research has to do 
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with trying to "describe cancer mathematically." Epstein preempts Nowak's 
explanation (which I'm not quite getting): "Think of cancer the same way as 
you think of a terrorist group. The NSA has been able to thwart a great 
number of terrorism acts by intercepting communication signals from one 
terrorist to another. That same dynamic, a form of signal intelligence, of 
finding a terrorist in Europe, can be used to intercept communication 
between cancer sells. Cancer cells merely communicate in protean code 
rather than electronic code. If you can decode what the signals are saying 
you can jam those signal between terrorist calls—essentially wipe out their 
cell phones. Likewise if you can decode biological signals you can jam them 
too, that's the holy grail." 
Then Richard Azel, a Nobel prize winner in physiology. Then Ron 
Baron who, in his Baron Fund, has $26 billion under management. Then 
Josh Harris the co-founder of Apollo Global Management ($164 billion 
under management) and owner of the New Jersey Devils and the 
Philadelphia 76ers. 
Perhaps it's just the ultimate feminist nightmare: Men (and a few 
opportunistic women) continue to come to Epstein's because—no matter 
their public bows to modern manners—they simply don't care that he 
offends every aspect of reconstructed gender and political sensibilities. In 
private, it remains a man's world—a rich man's world. 
Or, it's a guilty pleasure. People who know Jeffrey exchange 
"Jeffrey" stories. "That's Jeffrey," says Mort Zuckerman, the real estate 
billionaire and publisher of the Daily News (ever vitriolic in its coverage of 
Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of 
Epstein escapades. It is an outreness that Epstein seems delighted to 
cultivate. In his Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet on the Avenue Foch, a 
neighborhood otherwise occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed 
baby elephant in his living room—that is, the elephant in the room. (Epstein 
says too it's a reminder that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor 
genes and humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is 
Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). 
Or, in a more sophisticated view, it's a two tier understanding of the 
world. There is a media version of the world, which most of us live in and 
largely accept, and are certainly influenced by. And then there are those 
people who live in the media itself and therefore know that it's mostly bunk. 
If the media says it, as likely some version of the opposite is true. I might 
guess too that for many of his visitors there's an order of identification: there 
but for the grace of God. Any hyper-prominent person might, at any time, 
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run afoul of prosecutors, the political moment, the media, or the Internet hoi 
polloi. 
In this view, Epstein is a sort of Dreyfus of the rich. 
And then there is the glue of wealth. Once, at lunch in the Epstein 
dinning room with Bill Richardson, the former Governor of New Mexico, 
and past Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a few minutes, 
I asked the obvious question, the one everybody asks each other, "How did 
you meet Jeffrey?" Richardson seemed surprised: "Jeffrey," he said, as 
though stating what should have been perfectly obvious, "is the biggest 
landowner in New Mexico." 
And then there is Epstein's yet more structural explanation as to why 
after prison and with continuing tabloid infamy he can maintain his valued 
place. It comes back, not unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: 
"At a certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with an 
institutional interest. You are part of government, or you want to be in 
government, or you are connected to a bank or other portfolio, or you have 
key relationships with certain corporations or industries. Because of my 
situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional ties which makes me in 
some sense one of the few wholly independent sources of information and 
actual honest brokers. That's the usefulness of disgrace." 
And then there is too, that he is right. Since I began working on this 
piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble, 
and euro have all born out. ((If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said 
I should in early September, by the end of January I would have made $TK 
million. Alas, I did not invest.) 
And something else, which perhaps also surely accounts for Epstein's 
continuing relationships with the rich and powerful: 
Most everyone who is now of a certain age and certain ambition and 
certain status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the 
new age of wealth that started in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, 
or, as Vanity Fair would baldly and ingratiatingly dub it, the new 
establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further 
and further remove from the ordinary one. Epstein is just one version, albeit 
picaresque, as well as louche, of this shared story. 
He often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches 
tale: born in 1953 in Coney Island, father works for the city's Parks 
Department, mother a housewife. 
The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in 
Bensonhurst, goes on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He drops 
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out after two years and begins taking classes at the NYU's Courant Institute 
of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, 
gets a job teaching math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, 
during a chance encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, 
Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most 
brilliant math teacher at Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often 
wondered what had become of him.) 
It's his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concludes, just as 
many problems as the people in Coney Island, just different ones, almost 
invariably involving divorce and money. "I found it interesting as a science 
experiment," he recalled recently as we chatted about his life. "It did not 
really involve me. I could just stand back and watch." 
Dalton fathers were attracted to him. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher 
of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit 
Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with 
Sulzberger in his wood paneled station wagon to the family's country estate 
and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the 
front.) 
In 1976, another Dalton father, asking "wouldn't you rather be rich 
than be a teacher?" introduced him to Bear Stern's chief Ace Greenberg, a 
conversation Epstein recounts as this: 
Greenberg: "Everyone tells me you're super smart in math and you're 
Jewish and you're hungry...so why don't you start working here 
tomorrow?" 
Epstein: "What?" 
Greenberg: "If your supposed to be so flicking smart, don't you 
understand English?" 
Epstein: "Ok. Count me in." 
Hence, Epstein, like many in the late 70s, arrived on Wall Street. 
As will happen to a generation of others, by the fortuitous luck of 
being on Wall Street at that point in time, Epstein is transformed by a new, 
much faster, form of upward mobility than has ever before existed. With a 
facility for mathematics as well as for getting along with rich men, he 
transforms at an even faster rate than so many others who are also being 
quickly transformed. 
He moves into the penthouse of a new building at 66th Street and 
Second Avenue—still in the shadow of the Maxwell Plum era when the 60s 
on Second was the glamour address—a building that was he says, as a fond 
memory, full of "actresses, models, and euro trash." (It would shortly 
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become the Studio 54 era, where Epstein, who has never had drink or taken 
any drugs, was a regular). 
If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of 
Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type 
able to embrace a level of acute abstraction. 
"In the past," says Epstein, "investing was all about reputations and 
relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. 
Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a 
50's mentality. But in the mid 70s options started to be traded. In essence, 
the first formal derivatives. The movement of this instrument is not directly 
attached to the stock price. The world of investing began turning from 
relationships to math. In a sense I didn't really make money as much as I 
tried to create it. This was intellectual activity of a fairly high order." 
Intellectual activity aside, he meets Helen Gurley Brown and she 
makes him Cosmopolitan Magazine's Bachelor of the Month in 1980. 
"What," I ask, "was your social life like?" 
"Well, I was a playboy." 
"That's all? Not looking to get married?" 
"No. Never. I never wanted to get married. I enjoyed sex. I adore 
women. I wanted freedom. I was attracted to the rich because of their 
freedom. But I wanted also to avoid their burdens. And I didn't want to hide. 
I didn't want to be a hypocrite. I wanted to be free. I was not remotely 
ambivalent about what I wanted: to be free. That was the reason to make 
money." 
His rise at Bear Sterns was a steep one. And he soon became the 
protegee of Jimmy Cayne (also hired by Ace Greenberg on a whim—he met 
him in a bridge game—who would go on to run Bear and to lose his fortune 
in Bear's 2006 collapse). Epstein's leave taking or ouster from Bear is the 
result of politics, envy, overreaching, or a securities violation, or...unclear. 
But, no matter, he leaves in 1982 with billionaire clients, including Marvin 
Davis, a real estate developer who owns Twentieth Century Fox, and Herb 
Seigel, a major media investor in the 1980s. Epstein is datin 
Now begins the Concorde phase of his life—and the Concorde phase 
of the 1980s. If the 80s are happening pell mell in New York, they're 
happening at double time and catch up speed in London. Epstein is 30 years 
old and living, in Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous fashion (he befriends the 
show's star, Robin Leach), at English shooting parties at country estates with 
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Saturday night black tie dinners, where he's meeting the over-the-top 
families of Europe. 
"I didn't take it seriously," Epstein recounts. "I was not caught up in 
it. I wasn't trying to make a billion dollars. There was no ultimate goal. It 
was just fun to meet smart people, interesting people. But no long-range 
plans. Often no short-term plans either. I would head to Kennedy and, on the 
theory that most important events in one's life are serendipitous, I wouldn't 
decide where I was going until I got there." 
At the same time, he is developing a perception, or, at least a market 
differentiation: the hyper wealthy had different problems than the very 
wealthy. Dealing with a billion dollars was different from dealing with $100 
million: 
"If you had a billion dollars I would think the last thing you should be 
worried about was money, in truth money was what you most worried about. 
How to make more of it, how to give away more of it, how to protect you 
children from it, how to hide it from your wife or husband, how to minimize 
your taxes on it. The traditional wealth service structure, an accountant, and 
investment advisor, a personal lawyer, and an idiot brother-in-law, became 
hopelessly outdated as amounts exponentially increased. 
"You can't spend a billion dollars, you can just reallocate it to a 
different investment class. And you can't give away a billion dollars without 
a vast staff, in effect going into the business of giving away money, yet 
another business you are likely to know little about." 
At just about this point in the narrative, the questions or the 
incredulity begins in social circles and eventually in the media. He begins to 
acquire the major symbols of riches but does this without position, public 
holdings, or obvious paper trails. How can a person have enough money to 
merit increasing attention, but no clear way of having gotten it? Epstein gets 
stuck in that tautology. He may be rich, but he is without institutional 
protection or bona fides. He is a questionable substrata of wealth. He's a 
freelancer. 
That's the rub: he doesn't work for anyone. Without institutional 
credentials he's...well, nobody knows what. 
For a period, one part of his activities he says is recovering monies for 
countries looted by exiled dictators or military strongmen. If early in his 
career he might seem like a sort of George Peppard (there's a physical 
resemblance) in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a charming hustler, later he's George 
Peppard in Banacek, a smart and astute operator. 
Then, in his telling, he's representing a series of vastly wealthy people 
and families. He's not just doing their bidding or their investing, he's 
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helping them to navigate the ambitions of their wealth. They've satisfied 
their business dreams. Now there are the separate challenges and 
possibilities of their actual wealth. If they had big dreams before, it's 
nothing to what they can have now. 
In essence, as Epstein becomes more of a public figure the response to 
this description of his livelihood, is, in the media and in high social circles, 
"bullshit." True, there is no clear alternate narrative. No one is accusing him 
of anything, accept, sometimes, guilt by association. (In addition to Robert 
Maxwell, who will be accused of fraud, there's Steven Ho ffenberg, briefly a 
New York high flyer, who went to jail for a Ponzi scheme, for whom 
Epstein acted as a consultant—along with, he points out, Paul Volcker.) But 
the characterization persist: if it's not clear, it must be murky. Sure, 
Goldman Sachs partners and tech geniuses, they might have stratospheric 
wealth, but what to make of a Coney Island, Zelig-like no-namer? 
In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles is on television 
acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein is sitting 
with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Galley in 
London (Diana is wearing her "revenge" dress that evening). Graydon 
Carter, into his second years as editor of Vanity Fair, is also at the dinner. 
Epstein's rise and Carter's rise are not, with a little critical interpretation, 
that different. Both are a function of the age of new money, both are helped 
by strategic relationships with the exceptionally wealthy (i.e. they are social 
climbers), both men have made themselves up. To say that Epstein, in the 
company of the Princess, sticks in Carter's craw would be a big 
understatement. Epstein becomes one of the "what do you know about him" 
figures in Carter's gossip trail—a story waiting to happen. A variety of the 
gossip that begins to circulate about Epstein—for instance, that he secretly 
films his guests—is seeded by Carter, who once advised me not to go to 
Epstein's house or accept a ride in his car least I risk being blackmail. ("For 
what?" I asked Carter. "You can't even begin to imagine," said Carter.) 
Epstein is playing a cat and mouse game with his own growing wealth 
and influence. He is private and secretive, but grandly so. He joins the board 
of Rockefeller University. He's suddenly on the Trilateral commission, that 
cabal of business people who fancy themselves, and who are fancied by 
conspiracy buffs, as running the world. He buys from his client Limited 
Founder Les Wexner the larges private house in Manhattan. (Rumors will 
continue for many years, that Wexner owns the house and Epstein is just 
squatting in it—an 18-year squat.) He buys an airplane. He buys another. He 
expands his holdings in New Mexico. He begins a Zanadu refurbishment of 
his Caribbean Island. 
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He befriends Bill Clinton in his new after-office life. 
And that's quite the fatal pairing. 
The post-Monica Clinton, now having pardoned the on-the-lam 
financier Marc Rich—at this point, before his own rehabilitation, Clinton 
really is the world's ultimate sleaze ball—is suddenly being ferried around 
in the jet of... who exactly? 
The New York Post is the first to take formal media note of the 
Clinton-Epstein connection, hinting at a sex and money bromance. ("I 
suppose travel with Clinton changed the arc of my life," Epstein tells me. 
"There were, I knew, lots of obvious reasons not to do it, but having the 
ability to spend 100 hours with a former president just doesn't happen to 
many people.") 
The instinctively private Epstein is not just increasingly exposed, but 
clearly curious about the nature of exposure. 
I met Epstein around this time. Epstein had become a more and more 
active backer of advanced scientific research and in 2002 he was taking a 
small group of scientists out to the TED conference in Monterey. The TED 
organizers invited various other TED participants, including me, to join the 
flight. A small group assembled at the private plane terminal, most of us 
unfamiliar with our benefactor, and as we headed in the direction of the 
discrete private plans we were gently pointed to our ride: Epstein's 727. 
It is some thoroughly updated drawing room set-up, all of us 
nervously ensconced in this luxury plane, waiting for our unknown host to 
arrive—and soon he does, tanned, relaxed, with wide open smile, 
accompanied by three young women. 
It would be unlikely, outside of a men's magazine fantasy of the luxe 
life, that you could locate this in reality. Epstein's attentions, taking time 
with each of his passengers, seemed impossible to account for. The quiet of 
the plane, engineered into acoustic perfection, seemed spooky. Epstein's 
three companions were witty, poised, helpful as well as powerfully 
alluring—as though stewardesses of bygone times. 
(One more thing about this trip: Google founders, Larry Page and 
Sergey Brin, with their company still in its infancy, came out to see the 
plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran 
whopping from one end of the plan to the other. Then they described for 
Epstein, in what I can not now remember as a put on or entrepreneurial 
brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google 
bras with the Os as convenient cups. In fact, the name Google, they said, 
was invented out of the belief that men would focus on a word with two Os 
in it.) 
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Not long after this trip, Epstein's assistant called to invite me for tea at 
his house in New York, where Epstein, with what seemed to me little 
understanding of the subject, began to ask me about media—the upside, 
downside, and nature of media coverage. New York magazine was then 
soliciting him for a profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British 
tabloid reporter, Vicki Ward, to the job. 
Both profiles—New York's by Landon Thomas—pivot on the Clinton 
connection and detail the same quandary, how a man without clear 
institutional bona fides nevertheless achieves wealth and influence. Ward—
who would more recently assert in the Daily Beast, that she was barred by 
Vanity Fair from writing about under-age sex evidence (a fact that could be 
read the other way: Vanity Fair, even looking to take down Epstein, did not 
find the evidence credible or supportable)—follows a rabbit hole of 
questionable contacts who might or might not have been the source or 
sources for Epstein's wealth, but gets no closer to an answer, beyond 
confirming her own sense of dubiousness. 
Epstein, sensing that he might be exposing himself, tried to stop the 
process (Ward, often operatic about her journalistic exploits, says he 
threatened her), called Carter and said he was having second thoughts about 
being a public figure. 
"Then you should live in a two bedroom apartment in Queens," 
responded Carter. 
And then the troubles began. 
Epstein, in man-who-can-have-everything fashion, and without the 
remotest sense of observance or propriety—as though a kind of cultural 
autism—has, for many years, ordered up a daily massage following his 
workout sessions. 
"Often these were massage massages," says Epstein matter of factly, 
"but sometimes these were happy ending massages, especially in Palm 
Beach, where there are many massage parlors—lack Shacks,' they're 
called—that do outcalls. There was no sex. An often there was no happy 
ending. Often I would be on the phone for the entire massage. There were 
however a lot of massages and a lot of girls, with one girl recommending 
others." 
It is after Epstein's round of publicity and widely touted association 
with Clinton, that the stepmother of one of the massage parlor girls, 
identified as "SG" in court documents, who went to Epstein's house (most of 
the girls return to Epstein's house many times) calls the police. The police 
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interview the girl who then supplies names of other girls. Some of whom are 
younger than 18. 
In the end, the police track down 18 girls—nine who are under 18; the 
others in their 20s and 30s; one woman is in her 60s—a number of whom 
give statements describing scenarios not terribly different from Epstein's 
description above, except each is laid out in clinical, lurid, and near-identical 
detail. A cold and forceful Epstein demands that unwitting juveniles (though 
they have come here for this very purpose) perform repulsive (or at least 
repulsively described) acts on him. (Although the nature of the allegations 
will dramatically grow into threesomes and forced sexual encounters, 
nobody at this point alleges anything more than Epstein masturbating.) 
Epstein vastly raises the stakes by calling Dershowitz, who flies into 
Palm Beach to put the local authorities in their place—alienating Palm 
Beach officialdom—and, doubling down on the profile of the case, brings in 
Roy Black the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy 
Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. 
Here's the narrative: the shadowy rich man, friend of the louche and 
disgraced President, at all times surrounded by a retinue of young and 
gorgeous female retainers doing his bidding, is now found to have gathered a 
network of wrong-side-of-the-tracks Palm Beach girls to provide him with 
weird sexual services. (It somehow reads weirder that he doesn't have sex 
with them.) To boot, his former girl friend, Ghislaine Maxwell—the 
daughter of the disgraced Robert Maxwell—encouraged at least one of the 
girls to come to Epstein's home (and forever more has become a fixture of 
further weird possibilities in this tale). 
Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter is reported to say: "This is 
bigger than Rush Limbaugh," who, in a storm of publicity, has just been 
arrested in Palm Beach for possession of controlled drugs. 
On one side are some of the nation's most powerful defense attorneys 
(who, increasingly, seem more stumblebum than effective), on the other 
side, a round-up of hapless girls, with sensational tales of perversion and 
infamy (in the telling they are not so much sex workers, as Dickensian 
victims), relatively speaking giving the Palm Beach authorities the choice 
between utter capitulation to the powerful or standing on the side of the 
seemingly exploited and powerless. 
Still, with a cold eye, it also quite appears to be a straightforward tale 
of prostitution (however more or less kinky). And even though some of the 
girls are minors, age is not a distinguishing factor in a solicitation charge in 
Florida, nor in most places (in New York, for instance, at this time soliciting 
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sex with anyone over the age of 14 is a class D misdemeanor calling for a 
$100 fine—the law has recently been changed to TK). 
In fact, the "SG" tells the police that she lied about being 18 because 
otherwise she knew she would not have been admitted to the house (other 
girls will say they knew this is what they had to say, nevertheless not 
stopping them from saying it). 
The local sex crimes prosecutor, Lana Belhalevic, interviews all the 
girls and determines that the offense is solely related to prostitution—that 
there are no real victims here. 
Dershowitz, with chest pounding bravado, rejects a series of lower-
level plea deals and Palm Beach District Attorney Barry Krischer takes the 
unusual step of empanelling a grand jury, which returns with a 
recommendation of a single count of soliciting a prostitute—a charge 
without jail time. (And Epstein can apply to have his record expunged after a 
year.) 
At which point, Reiter, the police chief, at odds with the District 
Attorney's office, recruits the involvement of the FBI. This is of course the 
Bush-era FBI and Epstein presents quite the Clinton-connected scandal. 
Still, solicitation, even of a minor, is not a federal crime. The FBI hits on the 
novel interpretation that if Internet solicitation can be considered interstate 
commerce, so can telephone solicitation, permitting them to begin a deep 
dive investigation into Epstein's friends, many of whom receive subpoenas 
and are threatened with prosecution. 
It's all quite in the eye of the beholder: On the one end, Epstein is 
paying for sex acts (Epstein paid $200 for a massage with or without happy 
ending), on the other, he is abusing teenage girls. It's a catch-22: How can a 
girl not old enough to vote be a prostitute? And yet, many girls not old 
enough to vote are prostitutes. 
Compounding Epstein's predicament, the world outside of his 
carefully constructed and controlled environment is someplace that he seems 
not just ill-equipped to handle but in which he seems to be blindly grouping 
about (i.e. he's totally tone deaf). I visited him once during this time and 
found him weighing the conflicting advice of some of the most vaunted and 
egomaniacal lawyers (along with Dershowitz and Black, celebrity criminal 
attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, and Clinton prosecutor, Ken Starr) of the day—
anyone with new advice, Epstein seemed to hire—as well as a catchall of the 
leading crisis managers, who he seemed to retain at will, all wrangling for 
fees and primacy. 
Certainly, the upshot of his dealings with the Justice Department seem 
to involve a through-the-looking-glass logic. The government threatens to 
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prosecute him (with the possibility of a 10-year sentence) and various 
friends, associates, and lovers, or offers what seems to be unprecedented 
deal in which Epstein's lawyers (not federal prosecutors, but Epstein's 
lawyers, in some ultimate act of self incrimination) have to go to the Palm 
Beach authorities and convince them to up the charges to an offense that will 
send him to jail and get him a sex offender status. Except that a solicitation 
charge won't produce that result. Therefore he has to agree to a procurement 
or pimping charge (even though he has paid money, not received it—the sine 
qua non of pimping). What's more, in a unique, if not unprecedented 
arrangement, he has to agree to pay the legal fees of any of the girls who 
want to sue him—and, not to defend himself from their suits—forcing him 
to settle with each of the girls for what are reportedly high 6-figure sums or 
more. 
He's sentence to jail in 2008 for 18 months and serves 13 (while 
Epstein is now frequently accused of somehow managing to cut short his 
sentence, almost all Florida prisoners serve only 70% of their officially 
sentenced time). 
Jail hardly ends the legal catch all. Epstein's butler, Alfredo 
Rodriguez, steals and tries to sell an alleged journal or calendar with 
Epstein's activities—but he tries to sell it to an undercover agent. Rodriguez 
is sentenced to 18 months in jail on a charge of theft and of withholding 
evidence (it is not so much a journal as a list of phone numbers, which were 
apparently collected or saved by Rod Rodriguez; all of this material was 
subsequently included in a court filing by Edwards). Scott Rothstein, a 
lawyer whose firm represented additional girls in their suits against Epstein, 
also goes to jail for recruiting investors to pay for these suits on the 
fraudulent basis that settlements had already been reached. It's the largest 
fraud in Florida history and Rothstein receives a 50-year sentence. 
Then, Brad Edwards, Rothstein's former partner, sues the federal 
government in 2008 for abridging the rights of two of the original 
complainants under the Crime Victim Rights Act (giving victims the right to 
be consulted about the disposition of their cases) regarding the Justice 
Departments agreement not to prosecute in favor of the state action. In 2014, 
Edwards tries to ad 
another of the original comlaants, 
who has previously settled with Epstein, to the long-running suit. 
who was paid a settlement under the original terms of Epstein's agreement—
that he would pay attorney's fees and not oppose any law suits against 
him—is now trying to overturn the agreement under which she was paid, 
and, with Edwards, further suing Epstein for $50,000,000. 
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Indeed, 
with the Daily Mail being her prime outlet, emerges 
as the most vocal accuser—and, in fact, the some total of the current story 
and attention. 
That is, there is no story without her and what is being billed as her 
memoir of her "sex slavery" with Epstein, written ten years after the fact. 
Along with the Dershowitz and Prince Andrew charges, 
puts, with 
rather some narrative detail, both Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore on the 
island—and in fact Clinton, apparently with the acquiescence of the Secret 
Service, flying in a helicopter piloted by Epstein's girlfriend, an amateur 
pilot. Epstein's lawyers say that not only have Clinton and the Gores never 
been to the Epstein Island, but that there is easy proof of this in secret 
service records, which would seem to make the memoir opportunistic or 
hallucinatory fiction. 
The FBI, in a recent filing, has argued that 
should not be 
party to the suit against the government because she refused to cooperate 
with the government in its investigation in 2007, hence has no standing as a 
victim. (At the same time, the FBI included her on the list of 40 victims with 
whom it mandated Epstein reach a settlement.) 
It is hard to find a more hyperbolic intersection of media and lawyers 
then in Epstein's case. 
Edwards, over the six years of his law suit, tries to depose Clinton, 
Donald Trump, and Dershowitz—almost all of his targets coming directly 
from the original Vanity Fair and New York Magazine articles about 
Epstein. 
In addition to Prince Andrew as a British hot button, first connected to 
Epstein through 
interview with the Daily Mail in 2010, Clinton 
takes on a new role as Hillary spoiler through his connection, real or 
imagined, to Epstein and sex slaves. 
Almost everybody identified in any story about Epstein is approached 
by other media seeking to write about Epstein, often with financial 
incentives. 
No new stories or even new details emerge. Every aspect of the 
current story is based on court filings describing events that may or may not 
have taken place prior to 2007. It's as though a kind of ground-hog day of 
moral opprobrium, a desire to repeat and to savor a new the old details. 
A recent Reuters story identified a charity that Epstein has not given 
money to in 15 years that said if he does give again, they would give it back. 
The world cleanly divides, with Epstein (and friends) behind secure 
walls and the Mail and social media and upholders of new norms ever more 
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incredulous and apoplectic that Epstein not only walks free but prospers too. 
Although he has spent more than a year in jail and paid out what may 
be as much as $20 million, he yet seems somehow to have gotten away with 
it—that worst sin of all. He is the unrepentant catch all of up-to-the-minute 
badness: the financier whose wealth is a product of Wall Street math rather 
than work; a rich middle-age white man who not only parades his wealth and 
entitlement, but has a Peter Pan complex to boot; an insistent Playboy in a 
correct and prudish world—someone who somehow didn't get the memo 
about vast changes in mores and culture. 
When I suggested recently that one obvious way to blunt the animus 
would be to get married, he said he'd rather go back to jail. 
He is Calvin Harris's song, It Was Acceptable in the 80s, come to life. 
This is all, of course, a Gatsby-like tale: An enigmatic, and strangely 
appealing figure, able to invent and inhabit his own world is a mystery to try 
to decipher. Of course Gatsby in New York Post and Daily Mail parlance 
would likely be just a freaky financier too. 
And this story is, in its way, about the limitation of journalism, in 
which the most compelling parts of the tale—Epstein's ambitions and 
impulses would be well suited to a long running cable drama—need to be 
sacrificed not just to moral certainty but to a rather preposterous fantasy of 
moral certainty. 
Anyway, I hope I get invited back to Jeffrey's house soon. 
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