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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 staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate 
foods and beverages. 
The real world seems terribly far away, but with 
paparazzi often posted near by, it's 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 him again. But it was a security detail for a 
controversial head of state who had come for tea. 
We met several years before he became arguably 
the world's most notorious sex offender. In 2002, his 
plane, a meticulously appointed 737, ferried a group of 
people to the TED conference in Monterey. He was the 
mysterious and peculiarly gracious host arriving after 
everyone had boarded: tanned, relaxed, attentive, 
soliciting every guest's story and views, and 
accompanied by three young women not his daughters, 
witty, poised, helpful, and beautiful—out of a men's 
magazine fantasy of the luxe life. 
One more thing about this trip suggesting 
something of his unique view of the public world and 
what you got to see when you are near him. Google 
founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their 
company rising into the stratosphere, came out to see his 
plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other 
Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the 
plane to the other. Then, sitting in the plane's plush 
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living room, they described, in what I could not be sure 
was 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. 
Since that trip, and through his travails, I have often 
been invited to his house to participate in the 
conversations that take place there. 
In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach 
slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein—that Epstein, 
most recently embroiled in charges involved under age 
girls and Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew—spends 
most of his day at his dining room table in the in front of 
a laptop 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) conducting what 
must surely be the world's most extraordinary 
colloquial. 
These meetings, and this lifestyle, have somehow 
stayed private or secret—or apart—not out of any 
formal or stated restrictions, but because, in some sense, 
it would be very hard to explain just what you're doing 
there with a brazen sex offender in a guffaw-inducing 
home flaunting all moderation. 
And yet, defying disgrace, and tolerating his tone 
deafness—or mocking attitude toward the zeitgeist—so 
many come. Gladly. Willingly. Feeling that his 
invitation is quite an extraordinary privilege. 
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Among his frequent guests is Bill Gates, for whom 
Epstein has become a key advisor, proposing a way to 
leverage the resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates 
Foundation to accommodate many other fortunes, so 
that, Epstein explains, "you might join 50 or 60 
billionaires on one giving project." 
As part of a Gates-encouraged effort to get "out in 
front" of the notice that might be expected to greet the 
Gates association with him, Epstein agreed to these on-
the-record conversations with me. 
His subject, on a morning in late fall, sitting at the 
dining room table—its faux-baronial quality disturbed 
by an ever-present white board—is "hyper wealth." His 
subject is always wealth—how capital should react to 
the given global political, economic, and cultural 
moment. 
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. The 
scene is, like much of what he does, a conspiracy 
theorist's fantasy—the six men at this dinner, all 
technology entrepreneurs, representing, together, several 
hundred billion dollars and now trying to figure out how 
to use it to shape the world to their liking. 
"In the past, only governments had this kind of 
money, money of a reality altering scale," says Epstein 
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in a chipper and smoothed-out Brooklynese. "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 ultimately an afterthought 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." 
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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 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 a philanthropist but as a sort of adviser or guru or 
brain—a rich whisperer—making him, in addition to 
rich himself, arguably among the most influential people 
you've only heard of for reasons that have nothing to do 
with his influence. 
Epstein sometimes seems to have an out-of-body 
attitude toward his own fate and bad press—that's 
something that occurs in a less interesting parallel 
world. Not long ago, when I met him for lunch in New 
York, he noted that he hadn't been out to lunch in a 
restaurant in ten years. It was a not particularly pleasant 
experience for him and we were done in 30 minutes. 
On the other hand, Epstein's life sometimes seems 
part of a purposeful challenge: not just look at me, but 
do you even believe what you see? But, perhaps, he is 
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just oblivious to what others are thinking: a willful and 
in a sense fatal tone deafness. 
Press accounts recycle the mysterious billionaire 
mythology—a man of vast and unsourced riches living 
in a parallel universe of absolute entitlement—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, rather 
conforms to the scripted fantasies: somewhere between 
Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. There is indeed a 
group of young women—in their twenties and thirties—
who act as Epstein's 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, had just returned from an 
around-the-world honeymoon that Epstein had arranged 
for her. Some are, or have been, his romantic interests. 
His present girlfriend, whom he met four years ago at a 
dinner party in New York, has just graduated dental 
school. One former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a 
Swedish model and Miss Universe finalist whom 
Epstein has known for more than thirty years, became a 
doctor—Epstein sent her to medical school—and 
married hedge funder Glen Dubin. Together they 
finance the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai 
Hospital. 
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Epstein will sometimes move a meeting in his 
dining room outside to the park—his idea of going out 
to lunch is a Sabrett's hot dog—with the various girls in 
the house the accompanying entourage, as though 
something out of an 18th-century French court. 
But the 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. They mingle freely with 
his powerful guests, not so much as hostesses—or, in 
tabloid language, harem-like "sex slaves"—but as 
attentive students (which, of course, might be regarded 
as having its own fetish-like attraction). Epstein 
explicitly denies that there is an sexual quid pro quo. 
("If you're screwing someone you work with they can 
come in late—that's what Jimmy Goldsmith used to 
say.") Still, the constant attendance of so many comely 
young women, seems so outside of conventional living 
or staffing or social or romantic relationships that it is 
hard to describe in a straightforward or straight-faced 
way. And while it may be part of the appeal for the men 
who come to visit Epstein, it is as well a peculiarity they 
put up with in order to spend time with him. 
The Epstein house/office is, by careful design, 
exclusive and clubby, part hang out, part secret society. 
Along with the fact that, even after his jail term, the rich 
and powerful have continued to so eagerly solicit him, 
it's also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to 
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whose turf, that, when they want to see Epstein, they 
tend to come to him. He's created a world and you enter 
it. 
His conversations are less meeting-like—focused 
and agenda-driven—then narrative. In effect: the outside 
world comes to Epstein's and he eagerly solicits reports. 
It's a real time newspaper, or the news you don't read in 
a newspaper, market movements before they occur, the 
health and eccentricities of world leaders, high level 
government appointments soon to be announced. 
It's Sunday lunch—in his schedule from a week 
last fall—with Gates, Mort Zuckerman, the real estate 
billionaire and owner of the Daily News, and Peter 
Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook 
investor. 
That evening its Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the 
foreign minister of Qatar. Hamad lives across the street 
in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the 
same decorator. (Epstein, in his relaxed and amused 
manner, keeps prodding: "Why are you financing the 
bad guys? What do you get out of that?") 
Next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the 
dining room by the lawyer Reid Weingarten, who's 
represented, among other fat cats in trouble, 
Worldcom's Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sachs's Lloyd 
Blankfein. Weingarten, hoarse with a cold, is still 
lamenting his failed defense of former Connecticut 
Governor John Rowland. After a blow-by-blow of the 
trial, they discuss the Qatarian's visit—Epstein served 
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chocolate made from pistachios grown on the Sheikh's 
farm—and speculate about who actually controls ISIS, 
with Weingarten arguing that the Turks are not getting 
enough scrutiny. There is, in Epstein's dining room, 
always an alternative version of world events—
"perception versus reality," says Epstein, "not to imply 
that one necessarily has greater weight than the other." 
"Why," I ask Weingarten, when Epstein briefly 
steps out of the room, "do so many people keep coming 
back here, everything considered." 
"Why we camp out here? I guess because there's 
no place like it." 
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 who 
now describes himself as the "the most active investor" 
in Bitcoin and the programmable currency space. 
After a bit, Epstein invites his next appointment to 
join them: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary 
and President of Harvard, off Diet Coke, digs deep into 
the Sheikh Hamad chocolates, then focuses in on the 
Bitcoin investor. 
"Okay," he says, after listening for a bit to Pierce 
and his update on the rapid Bitcoin price swings, "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 
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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 seeming dramatic 
understatement, "you are going to have some low 
quality characters playing early in the space..." 
That evening, in the Epstein dining room (he seems 
rarely to use the rest of the house's 50,000 square feet), 
there is a small cocktail party, which includes the former 
Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and 
Thorbjorn Jagland, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize 
Committee, who offers an affable, but generally 
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, for breakfast. Barack is, over his 
omelet, able to defend both Obama and Putin. Then a 
high ranking official from the Obama White House, 
whose name I am asked not to use. 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 with trying to "describe 
cancer mathematically." (Epstein preempts Nowak's 
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explanation : "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 Axel, a Nobel prize winner in 
physiology. Then Ron Baron who has $26 billion under 
management in his Baron Fund. 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. 
The question is why, in the face of such disgrace, 
with the paparazzi so near, the high and might still 
come? 
Perhaps simply that it's intelligence of a high order. 
Not just market moving information, but Epstein and 
Summers trying to unravel the conundrum of zero 
interest rates, or Epstein and Noam Chomsky on 
memory and language, or Epstein TK... 
What goes on at Epstein's house might seem just to 
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confirm everyone's worst fears about power and the 
powerful: it's all insider stuff. But the conversations at 
Epstein's are the conversations, I suspect, that rich men 
dream of, but in the real world, such a buttoned-down 
and agenda-driven place, are actually hard to have. 
"That's Jeffrey," says Mort Zuckerman, (whose 
paper, the Daily News, is ever vitriolic in its coverage of 
Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye. 
On Epstein's part, there is the wink: 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). 
Epstein has a 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 
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brokers. That's the usefulness of disgrace." 
In some sense, too, it is perhaps generational: Most 
everyone who is now of a certain age and ambition and 
status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally 
suited to, the era of wealth that started in the late 1970s. 
A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would 
baldly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly 
parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further 
remove from the ordinary one. 
Epstein often tells his middle class to riches tale: 
born in 1953 in Coney Island, father worked for the 
city's Parks Department, mother a housewife. 
The captain of the math team at Lafayette High 
school in Bensonhurst, he went on to Cooper Union 
where the tuition is free. He dropped out after two years. 
Without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, he 
got 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.) 
Dalton fathers perhaps sensed in him a young man 
on the make. 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 
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paneled station wagon to the family's country estate and 
Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the 
backseat to the front.) Another Dalton father, asking 
"wouldn't you rather be rich than be a teacher?" 
introduced him to Bear Stearn's chief Ace Greenberg. 
Hence, Epstein, like many in the late `70s, arrived 
on Wall Street. 
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 `50s 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.." 
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 was the result of politics, 
envy, overreaching, or a securities violation, 
or...unclear. But, no matter, when he left in 1982 he 
took with him billionaire clients, including Marvin 
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Davis, a real estate developer who owns Twentieth 
Century Fox, and Herb Seigel, a major media investor in 
the 1980s. At this point, Epstein was datin 
If the `80s were happening pell mell in New York, 
they were happening at double time and catch up speed 
in London. "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." Thirty-year-old Epstein was living a 
Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous (he befriended the 
show's star, Robin Leach), at English shooting parties 
and country estates with Saturday night black tie 
dinners, where he was meeting the over-the-top families 
of Europe. 
At the same time, he was 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. "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." 
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For a period, one part of his activities, he says, was 
recovering monies for countries looted by exiled 
dictators or military strongmen. Then, in his telling, he 
was representing a series of vastly wealthy people and 
families—not just doing their bidding or their investing, 
but helping them to navigate the ambitions of their 
wealth. If they had big dreams before, it's nothing to 
what they can have now. 
If early in his career he might have seemed 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. 
At just about this point in the narrative, the 
incredulity about Epstein began to circulate in social 
circles. Epstein had acquired the major symbols of 
wealth but without position, public holdings, or 
obvious paper trails. His is a questionable substrata of 
wealth, without institutional credentials or bona fides. 
He's a freelancer. That's the rub: he doesn't work for 
anyone. 
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 
was on television acknowledging his love for Camilla 
Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein was sitting with his arm 
around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine 
Galley in London (Diana wearing her "revenge" dress 
that evening). Graydon Carter, in his second year as 
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editor of Vanity Fair, was 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, both have 
made themselves up. To say that Epstein, in the 
company of the Princess, stuck in Carter's craw would 
be an understatement. Epstein became one of the "what 
do you know about him" figures in Carter's gossip 
trail—a story waiting to happen. Carter once advised me 
not to go to Epstein's house or accept a ride in his car 
least I risk being blackmailed. ("For what?" I asked 
Carter. "You can't even begin to imagine," said Carter.) 
He joined the board of Rockefeller University. He 
was 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 
bought, from his client Limited Founder Les Wexner, 
the largest 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 
bought an airplane. Then another. He expanded his 
holdings in New Mexico. He began a Xanadu-like 
refurbishment of his Caribbean Island. 
He befriended Bill Clinton in his new after-office 
life—and that would prove to be 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 
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ultimate sleaze ball—was suddenly being ferried around 
in the jet of...who exactly? The New York Post was 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." 
I met Epstein around this time, on the flight out to 
TED. 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. (Epstein's 
flirtation with the media would result in his backing an 
unsuccessful effort, of which I was a part, to buy New 
York Magazine in 2004.) 
New York magazine was then soliciting him for a 
profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British 
tabloid journalist, 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 achieved such wealth and influence. 
Epstein, sensing that he might be exposing himself, 
called Carter and said he was having second thoughts 
about being a public figure. 
"Then you should have lived in a two bedroom 
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apartment in Queens," responded Carter. 
And then the real troubles began. Epstein had a 
prodigious massage parlor outcall habit especially in 
Palm Beach with its many "Jack Shacks." After 
Epstein's round of publicity and widely touted 
association with Clinton, the stepmother of one of the 
massage parlor girls who went to Epstein's house called 
the police. The police interviewed the girl—who was 
TK at the time, but whose website identified her as 18—
and the girl supplied the names of other girls, some of 
whom were also younger than 18. 
In the end, the police tracked down 18 girls—nine 
of whom were under 18; the others were in their 20s and 
30s (one woman was in her 60s)—a number of whom 
gave statements describing happy-ending massages. 
(Although the nature of the allegations will dramatically 
grow into threesomes and forced sexual encounters, 
nobody at this point alleged anything more than this.) 
Epstein called in Dershowitz, who flew into Palm 
Beach to put the local authorities in their place—
alienating Palm Beach officialdom—and, further 
amping up the profile of the case, also brought in Roy 
Black, the famous criminal attorney who defended 
William Kennedy Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. 
The release by the Palm Beach authorities of the 
depositions by the 18 girls describing the incremental 
details of the sex acts, the timing of the charges coming 
just after Rush Limbaugh's high profile Palm Beach 
drug bust, the Clinton connection and then with the 
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sudden interest of the Bush FBI in the case, moved the 
case from solicitation to scandal, and a plea deal with a 
sentence of 18 months. 
He got out of jail in 2009, serving 13 months, and 
moved mostly seamlessly back into his life, to the 
shock-shock of tabloids whenever they are reminded of 
his existence (notably, when Epstein's payment of 
Fergie's debts slipped out, likely leaked by Fergie 
herself). 
Some things changed. While surprisingly few 
others dropped him, the Clinton's did, an irony of the 
present tabloid interest in Epstein's old address book 
with its many Clinton contacts. And his sex offender 
status has transformed him from libertine playboy to 
pedophile in tabloid parlance. 
While he has regularly entertained PR proposals 
aimed at his public rehabilitation, until Gates prodded 
him, and until this recent renewed tabloid fever, Epstein 
had concluded that he was perfectly satisfied living 
behind high walls and in his own exclusive club. Even 
the recent Dershowitz-Prince Andrew chapter seems 
like a parallel disturbance rather than something that is 
actually affecting him. "Bad press is not something 
actually bad," he notes, trying to balance perception and 
reality. 
But true or not, the story has taken on a life of its 
own, with the US and British tabloid press continuing, 
so far unsuccessfully, to search for a smoking gun 
connecting Clinton to underage girls, which could 
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