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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. 
There is no clear alternate narrative. No one is 
accusing him of anything, except sometimes guilt by 
association. (In addition to Robert Maxwell, who will be 
accused of fraud, there's Steven Hoffenberg, 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 persists: 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 
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 
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 
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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 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 private and secretive, but grandly so. 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. And 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 
ultimate sleaze ball—was suddenly being ferried around 
in the jet of...who exactly? The New York Post was the 
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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. (Epstein had become an active backer of advanced 
scientific research and a TED fixture.) A small group 
assembled at the private plane terminal at JFK, most of 
us unfamiliar with our benefactor, and as we headed in 
the direction of the discreet private plans we were gently 
pointed to our ride: Epstein's 727. 
It was like something out of a men's magazine 
fantasy of the luxe life. The quiet of the plane, 
engineered into acoustic perfection, seemed spooky. 
Epstein was accompanied by three young women who 
were witty, poised, helpful, as well as powerfully 
alluring. And Epstein, tanned, relaxed, with a wide open 
smile, was an attentive host, soliciting every guest's 
story and views. (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 whooping from one end of the plane to the 
other. Then they described for Epstein, in what I cannot 
now remember was a put-on or entrepreneurial 
brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would 
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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.) 
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 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 live in a two bedroom apartment 
in Queens," responded Carter. 
And then the real troubles began. Epstein, in man-
who-can-have-everything fashion, 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—`Jack Shacks,' they're 
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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." He says all this in a 
straightforward manner that seems utterly tone-deaf to 
its effect, as if he suffers from a sort of cultural autism. 
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, 
identified as "SG" in court documents, called the police. 
The police interviewed the girl [WHO WAS HOW OLD 
AT THE TIME?] who supplied the names of other girls, 
some of whom were younger than 18. 
In the end, the police tracked down 18 girls—nine 
of whom were under 18 [THIS IS IMPORTANT: HOW 
OLD WAS THE YOUNGEST?]; the others were in 
their 20s and 30s; one woman was in her 60s—a number 
of whom gave statements describing scenarios not 
terribly different from Epstein's description above, 
except in this version of events a cold and forceful 
Epstein demanded that unwitting juveniles perform 
repulsive acts on him. (Although the nature of the 
allegations will dramatically grow into threesomes and 
forced sexual encounters, nobody at this point alleged 
anything more than Epstein masturbating.) 
A shadowy rich man, friend of the louche and 
disgraced president, at all times surrounded by a retinue 
of young and gorgeous women doing his bidding, is 
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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 
girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell—the daughter of the 
disgraced Robert Maxwell—encouraged at least one of 
the girls to come to Epstein's home (and is henceforth 
known as the procurer or madam for Epstein and, later, 
his friends). It certainly doesn't look good. 
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. 
Epstein might have just been hit with solicitation 
charges and paid a fine even though some of the girls 
were underage; prostitution charges in Florida (as in 
most places) have no age limits and the Palm Beach 
grand jury proposed solely a solicitation charge. But 
Epstein's flamboyance and his friendship with Clinton 
invited the scrutiny of the Bush FBI, and ultimately 
Epstein and his legal team decided to go for a plea deal. 
The result was a baroque set of agreements with both 
the Feds and Palm Beach county, which mandated jail 
time (Epstein was sentenced to 18 months, of which he 
served 13—nearly all Florida prisoners serve only 70% 
of their officially sentenced time) and sex offender 
status. The deal also provided for an unusual, if not 
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unprecedented, arrangement by which he agreed to pay 
the legal fees for 40 girls specified by the FBI in civil 
suits against him and not to oppose their claims, 
resulting in an overall settlement costs that may be as 
high as $20 million. 
It is in part this impossible-to-explain weird-justice 
outcome that has made some people think he was 
covering for someone else--one person in particular. 
"So?" I ask directly, one day late in our interviews. 
"Explain this. It does make it look like you were 
covering for you-know-who." 
"Covering?" He chuckles. "First, by the way, you-
know-who was never there. Never came to the island. 
Not once. Not ever. But you're right, the settlement was 
preposterous. Nobody has ever heard anything like it. 
But while it was breathtaking and perverse and, well, 
Kafka-esque, it was also straightforward: you sign this 
or else we will federally indict you in ways that will 
threaten your property, the people who work for you, 
and put you in jail for ten years. I took the deal." 
A bit more baroqueness: one of the lawyers 
representing some of the plaintiffs, Scott Rothstein, 
would also go to jail for recruiting investors to pay for 
these suits on the fraudulent basis that settlements had 
already been reached and that many of the listed women 
had agreed to take reduced immediate cash payments. 
Epstein got out of jail in 2009. The experience does 
not seem to have much dented his general bonhomie. 
One evening over dinner he and the former director of 
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ports in the semi-rouge state of Djibouti, who had fallen 
afoul of the regime and found himself in prison, 
exchanged jail stories--they agreed, not as bad you'd 
think. Epstein, having done his time, moved almost 
seamlessly back into his life, to the shock-shock of 
tabloids whenever they seemed to be reminded of his 
existence (notably, when Epstein's payment of Fergie's 
debts slipped out, likely leaked by Fergie herself). 
Some things changed. While surprising few others 
dropped him, the Clinton's did, an irony of the present 
tabloid interest in his old address book with its many 
Clinton contacts. And his sex offender status 
transformed him from libertine and playboy to 
paedophile, a distinction in the current climate it is 
almost impossible to argue. 
While he has reguarly entertained PR proposals 
aimed at his public rehabilitation, until Gates prodded 
him, and then until this recent renwed tabloid fever, he 
had concluded that he was perfectlysatisfied living 
behind high walls and in his own exclusive club. 
Even now, this new Dershowitz-Prince Andrew 
chapter seems like a parralel distubance rather than 
something that is actually effecting his world. "Bad 
press is not something actually bad," he notes, trying to 
balance perception and reality. 
And, indeed, the tabloid narrative and his own 
narrative rather define wholly separate universes. 
The, the ongoing case, with the filings that 
introduced the Dershowitz and Prince Andrew 
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allegations, he notes, was brought by the imprisoned 
Rothstein's former partner, Brad Edwards, part and 
parcel of the settlment industry that has grown up 
around him. 
This new chapter relies entirely on the testimony 
and the memoir—excel is of which were published by 
the Daily Mail—of 
, who claims that 
Ghislaine Maxwell met her, when she was 17, at Donald 
Trump's Palm Beach resort and got her a job in the 
Epstein house, which she held for several years, 
traveling in the Epstein entourage. It is Roberts—who 
refused to cooperate with the FBI's 2007 investigation 
of Epstein—who has propounded the "sex slave" 
narrative. She claims that "massage" was a code word 
for sexual acts, and that she worked for Epstein for TK 
years for $TK, having sex with him and his friends, and 
reporting on the details to Epstein so he would have 
blackmailable details about them. In the laundry list of 
big names, she also claims to have met (though not had 
sex with) Bill Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore through 
Epstein. 
This is all, says Epstein, utterly false, including that 
she met Clinton and the Gores, who Epstein says he has 
never met. Indeed, there has been no corroboration of 
the Roberts charges nor any new evidence or further 
prosecution and Dershowitz is suing her for libel. 
Roberts who was part of the original settlement is now 
seeking an additional suing Epstein for an additional 
$50 million from Epstein, and planning a book on her 
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life and the scandal. 
It is a curious attribute of his character that, other than 
perhaps being more circumspect about what legal advice 
to follow, Epstein would not have done anything 
differently. (When I suggested recently to Epstein that 
one obvious way to blunt the animus bearing down on 
him would be to get married, he said he'd rather go back 
to jail.) His life, living it as he wants, seems to him to be 
an extraordinary accomplishment. Being on the wrong 
side of morality, custom, politics, feminists, the media, 
that's just a bit of bad luck. 
And it is perhaps this attitude of his that irks his 
critics the most. 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 catchall 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 (excuse me, peadophile) in a correct 
and prudish world—someone who somehow didn't get 
the memo about vast changes in mores and culture. 
But Epstein's friends—and I think that is, in the 
end, the best word for the powerful people who orbit 
him—are willing to take him as he comes. Epstein is 
their confidant. Not the only nexus of them, but one of 
them. Dr. Epstein. Lay on my couch. As he is 
everybody's confident, everybody becomes his 
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confident. This is a back and forth, a power loop. His 
expertise is knowing what other people know. Which 
surely offers a unique sense of confidence that it is 
possible to understand how the world works. And in a 
time of such radical flux and existential instability, 
everybody wants to seek out someone who might have 
some answers or at least make you feel like he does—
even, and maybe especially, the rich. The fact that he's 
an outsider, even a pariah, nobody you have to fear, in 
his own way a secret (and all powerful people like 
secrets) is—if you're not caught in his company—
reassuring too. 
In the last days of my interviews with Epstein, he 
was called by a particular world-stage individual, indeed 
among the richest and most powerful—proudly louche 
himself—who, feeling out of his depth in a world of 
crashing oil prices and wild currency fluctuation, had 
come to believe he might benefit from some private 
tutoring. And so the math teacher got on his plane. 
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