A Convenient Death
The Mysterious Demise
of Jeffrey Epstein
by Alana Goodman &
Daniel Halper
4
What Happened
The Possibilities
With a dead man at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and the world watching, immediately
speculation grew about what actually happened that Saturday morning in August. There were only
two possibilities: suicide or murder.
No theory was without holes; none would fully account for the events that took place. And,
importantly, evidence was scarce. But to many who read or watched the coverage, none of that would
matter. They had already made up their minds.
The official story would have the public believe that Epstein’s demise was the work of his own hands.
According to the chief medical examiner, he died by hanging himself. The motive was clear: after years of
getting away with crimes, he realized that the jig was up. Decades in prison for a sixty-six-year-old man
meant a lifetime punishment, and he did not want to face that.
“I don’t care about my legacy. The minute I’m dead, I’m dead. It’s over,” Epstein once told a friend
and adviser. “I don’t care what people think of me. I only care about what’s happening to me while I’m
alive.” [ What a selfish prick DC]
According to the suicide theory, Epstein might have died still believing that he did nothing wrong. He
was keen to protest his innocence to those around him. But he was also socially and politically intelligent
enough to realize that he would never be exonerated by a court of law. He therefore came to the
conclusion that his tawdry ways had caught up to him and that he would never be able to escape the
confines of lockup. His alleged suicide attempt weeks earlier had been his first attempt to get off easy.
Those who believe he killed himself argue that after his suicide attempt Epstein used his masterful
manipulation skills to convince everyone around him that in fact he was not actually interested in taking
his own life. That it had been some sort of misunderstanding with his alleged-murderer cellmate.
In this version of the story, Epstein got his way. He was alone, free to take his time to set up another
suicide attempt. And this time he did it right. He quickly got his affairs in order, filing a new will two
days before his death.
With a cell to himself, he was more careful this time. He fashioned the bedsheets into a noose,
positioned the noose on his bed frame, and then placed it around his neck. Finally, with a drop to his
knees, the noose slipped tighter and tighter around his neck, before cutting off circulation and breaking his
neck, becoming the first MCC prisoner to die by suicide in thirteen years.
But that scenario did not sit well with a lot of observers. There seemed to be almost a comedy of
errors that night—certainly a confluence of egregious mistakes.
Just how could the most high-value criminal defendant in America kill himself while supposedly
under twenty-four-hour surveillance in federal custody? How could he have known the guards would
conveniently not check on him for more than eight hours? In response to this question, another theory
began to emerge—that, yes, he killed himself. But he did not act alone.
“It’s hard to do,” said Albie Rivera in an interview. “For him to do it that way, it would have to mean
that he had this totally planned.”
It’s plausible he had the assistance of others. Maybe some guards or fellow inmates had helped
orchestrate Epstein’s final act. He needed help to get off suicide watch and return to the general prison
population. He, the theory goes, used his connections within the confines of lockup to get his wishes. He
needed time alone, in his own cell and without interference from prison guards. Here again, they say, he
used the power at his disposal to get what he wanted.
Ever since he entered prison, he had been waving around his wealth. Just as it was a powerful elixir
in the outside world, it allowed him to seduce hopeless prisoners so he could get what he wanted in the
confines of MCC. This allowed him to get the space, time, and resources to do the dirty deed.
—
Some believe Epstein hanged himself but that, instead of being a suicide, it was a meticulously planned
ruse by Epstein that went massively awry. An accidental death.
“He was showing he was suicidal to get moved to a hospital,” said Laura Goldman, a friend of
Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and alleged accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in an interview.
“And why do I know that? Because I was there and that’s how I got out.”
Goldman spent time at MCC in the 1990s after threatening a man who she claimed sexually assaulted
her. She said she was able to get transferred to a mental health facility after an unsuccessful suicide
attempt.
After she learned that Epstein was locked up at MCC in July 2019, Goldman said she talked to
Ghislaine’s sister Isabel about the incident.
“I did mention when he was arrested, ‘You know that’s where I was, and I attempted suicide,’” said
Goldman. “Ghislaine and Isabel both knew that.”
Epstein’s first alleged suicide attempt in July had gotten him placed on twenty-four-hour suicide
watch, but it hadn’t gotten him a transfer out of MCC, nor out of the notoriously dilapidated Special
Housing Unit. Epstein would not have been a candidate for the facility’s general population because his
safety would be at risk as such a high-profile prisoner accused of underage sex crimes.
Epstein, a gifted manipulator, successfully persuaded MCC psychologists to take him off suicide
watch after just a week. Would a second, botched attempt have shown that the prison couldn’t properly
supervise him and be entrusted with his protection? Would his lawyers, the victims, and the public
demand that he be transferred somewhere that could adequately ensure his safety?
One of Epstein’s lawyers, Martin Weinberg, tore into the conditions at MCC during a court hearing
shortly after his client’s death.
“We think your Honor trusted the government, the Bureau of Prisons, to keep our client safe and keep
him in civilized conditions,” said Weinberg. “I’ve called [MCC] medieval. There’s vermin on the floor.
There is wet from the plumbing. There is no sunlight. There is limited exercise. It is simply conditions
that no pretrial detainee—and I would go farther as a criminal defense lawyer—no United States
defendant should be subjected to.”
Epstein’s own list of grievances against the prison—the burned food, the bugs—were laid out in the
legal pad left in plain sight on his cell table. Photos of his room after his death show that the top mattress
from his bunk had been pulled onto the floor, where it was placed perpendicular to the bottom bunk. Why?
Would it have been uncomfortable for him to rest his knees on the concrete floor while kneeling forward
into the noose?
Dr. Baden, the defense pathologist, estimated that Epstein died several hours before the guards
reportedly found him at 6:30 a.m. Was Epstein expecting them to check on him during their mandatory
3:00 a.m. head count—the one they allegedly slept through?
As someone familiar with the prison, Goldman thinks it’s a serious possibility.
“Listen, it was a reasonable gambit, except for the fact they didn’t come and check on him, that had he
attempted suicide twice, he either would have been moved to [a hospital], or Oklahoma where there’s a
male mental health facility,” she said. “But his lawyers might have been able to get him out of that because
they would have said they need him to help prepare for trial.” [These two are pushing the suicide angle too hard, mofo was either murdered, or more likely is sitting on some island sipping wine and laughing at us DC]
—
It might be possible to explain away the failure of the cameras and guards as neglect. But it’s also
possible that there was collusion, not for assisted suicide, but for someone to take out Epstein without his
knowledge or consent. Or, as this theory is popularly known, “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
This was another alluring possibility. It made sense. Epstein had tales to tell about some of the richest,
most powerful men in the world. And contrary to public speculation, those around him thought he was
optimistic about his chances to get out of prison.
“So the guy killed himself the next day, but on Friday he’s planning on fighting this case and he’s all
pumped up about it?” his lawyer David Schoen said with some measure of disbelief during an interview.
“I don’t buy into those conspiracy theories. I don’t think Bill Clinton killed him or Hillary,” he said.
But Schoen does not believe that Epstein just up and offed himself, either. “I think it was just a regular,
old somebody [who] killed him,” Schoen said at his Atlanta-area home. This meant a fellow inmate,
rather than a politician who might have been compromised. In this theory, the deed was done by someone
who did not want Epstein alive, but not necessarily for anything that had occurred outside MCC walls. [Oh vey, sigh got to put on my hip boots DC ]
“It would be that somehow a prison door is left open, is left unlocked. [Epstein’s] door and another
prisoner’s door will be left unlocked,” said Baden. “And that prisoner can go in and do what he wants
and come back out and nobody would be the wiser.
“But it would require somebody to be active in it. One person would have to do that,” Baden added.
MCC guards said cell doors are not locked electronically at the prison. Officers still carry old fashioned Folger Adam keys that open the tier gates and the individual cell doors. Rivera revealed that it
was possible certain cells could be “purposely unlocked and left unlocked” by a correctional officer or
someone else with a key.
“Whoever those two officers were, if they allowed somebody else to go in and do that to him. That’s
possible,” said Rivera.
“I honestly believe, if that did happen, it would have had to happen with the help of some of the staff.
It’s almost impossible for somebody to plan that, or be able to get it off without help. You got to have
some type of help.”
This wasn’t the first mysterious death in this jail. On May 19, 2015, a prisoner at MCC named
Roberto Grant died in custody while awaiting sentencing on robbery charges. Prison officials initially
told Grant’s family that the thirty-five-year-old had died of a drug overdose while high on synthetic
marijuana.
1
“He showed signs of being choked,” said Andrew Laufer, an attorney for Grant, in an interview. “His
mother and his ex-wife came down to the prison to find out what happened. They told them it was an OD
on K2, which it wasn’t.”
The autopsy found no drugs in his system. But it did find signs of “blunt force trauma,” including signs
of strangulation and injury to the hyoid bone in his neck. Still, the manner of death was ruled
“inconclusive” by the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office.
Like Epstein’s case, there was no surveillance footage available from Grant’s cell on the night of his
death, said Laufer. Grant had also had bad relationships with some of the correctional officers, according
to his lawyer. But his family, who sued MCC for $20 million, believes he was murdered, by either other
inmates or guards, and his cause of death was covered up by prison officials.
“I think [the prison has] been preventing us from finding out more information. I believe that they want
to do anything but take responsibility for my client’s murder,” said Laufer. “And that goes for any other
case I’ve had. I’ve had clients lose fingers in doorways—get chopped off. I’ve had clients get fractures.
They never want to admit any wrongdoing. It’s always the client’s fault, as they always like to allege.”
Laufer said he sees some similarities between the deaths of his client and Epstein. But in Epstein’s
case, he said he wouldn’t rule out negligence by the guards.
“My personal feeling, and until I see the additional evidence, is gross negligence. I see plenty of that
there,” he said.
Alan Dershowitz, who was still in regular contact with Epstein’s legal team at the time of his death,
said Epstein’s attorneys seemed to have a fairly strong case and were confident of their chances.
“The thing that does surprise me is he was more of an optimist,” said Dershowitz.
“He had a pretty
good case. His lawyers told me he had a shot at winning. That’s why his lawyers don’t believe he killed
himself.”
Others, including the president of the United States and other politicians, openly suggested that
Epstein’s death was somehow the result of foul play.
2
“I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario
because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Attorney General Bill Barr admitted in an interview.
3 “I
think it was important to have a roommate in there with him and we’re looking into why that wasn’t done,
and I think every indication is that was a screw-up,” Barr told the Associated Press. “The systems to
assure that was done were not followed.”
The seemingly wild theories about Epstein’s death were not without some shred of scientific
evidence. Dr. Baden took to Fox News to contradict the official narrative one morning in October 2019.
“I think that the evidence points toward homicide rather than suicide,” he told the cable news channel.
4
Explaining the specific injuries suffered by Epstein that morning in his cell, Baden stated that they
were “more consistent with ligature homicidal strangulation” than suicide. “Hanging does not cause these
broken bones and homicide does,” he said. “A huge amount of pressure was applied.”
Baden’s explosive findings were, for the record, rejected by New York City officials. “Our
investigation concluded that the cause of Mr. Epstein’s death was hanging and the manner of death was
suicide. We stand by that determination,” Sampson said in a statement to Fox News.
5 [Like I am going to believe an official from the most corrupt city government on the planet save maybe Chicago, keep dreaming DC]
“We continue to
share information around the medical investigation with Mr. Epstein’s family, their representatives, and
their pathology consultant.”
But if, as the meme succinctly suggests, the government is hiding something and “Epstein didn’t kill
himself,” then who killed him? It is incontrovertible that quite a few stood to gain by his death. The rich
and famous, with much to lose, certainly feared that Epstein would sing to authorities. Rumors swirled
that he had blackmail—videos, photos. By contrast, very few people, if any, benefited by having so many
questions unanswered when Epstein died.
There was another factor that led to the belief becoming so widespread. Epstein had gotten away with
his crimes for so long, with hardly anyone paying any sort of price. Additionally, media and institutions
had helped provide cover for him to operate with impunity. The idea that now, all of a sudden, the media
could be trusted to tell the truth about Epstein after getting him so wrong for so many years belied belief
for many around the country.
Even after details of Epstein’s depraved crimes started to go public, his mysterious hold over some of
the world’s most powerful men continued. He and Prince Andrew strolled together through Central Park,
in full view of photographers, months after Epstein was released from house arrest for soliciting underage
prostitutes. He also hosted the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers at his office and flew Bill Gates
to Palm Beach on his Gulfstream jet. He dined with Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Chelsea
Handler, and Woody Allen at his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot Manhattan mansion.
These were just some of the big names caught up in a story driven by fraud, theft, and rape. Epstein’s
death exposed at least some of the dirty secrets of how wealth, politics, celebrity, and the media enabled
this predator to harm countless victims over the course of decades. And what other secrets might there be
that would drive someone to drastic action in order to keep them hidden?
Which is why most who knew Epstein, whether they liked him, were violated by him, or simply had a
business relationship with him, believe he was murdered.
—
While there are a number of ways that Epstein’s murder in MCC could have been carried out, that still
leaves wide open the question of who did it, or ordered it done. Given Epstein’s decades of sordid
behavior and the many influential figures who crossed his path as it was going on, the list gets long fast.
But the picture will become clearer after a look back at Epstein’s life, how he treated those he met along
the way, and how key figures in politics, the media, and the intellectual elite still fear telling the truth
about Jeffrey Epstein.
5
Blackmail
Guests approaching Epstein’s home on the Upper East Side saw a sedate and gorgeous building with
views of the Frick Collection, located across the street. They entered through fifteen-foot oak doors
that emphasized the grandeur of this desirable New York address.
The first thing they would see upon entering would give them quite a shock: an oil portrait of President
Bill Clinton, wearing a blue dress and red high heels, sitting seductively in a chair in the Oval Office.
“It was hanging up there prominently—as soon as you walked in—in a room to the right,” the New
York Post quoted a source as saying.
1 “Everybody who saw it laughed and smirked.”
The painting, titled Parsing Bill, created by the artist Petrina Ryan-Kleid in 2012 and sold at Tribeca
Ball, an arts school fund-raiser, is obviously a tongue-in-cheek mockery of Clinton’s most embarrassing
and devastating moment as president—his Oval Office affair with a then intern who famously kept a
semen-stained blue dress as evidence of her affair with the commander in chief.
Beyond the sick joke, the message of the Clinton portrait seemed obvious: a warning to his rich and
powerful guests that he had dirt on them, and that they had better do as he asked. Epstein was friendly
with Clinton, proudly displaying this visual message to all his acquaintances. And he did not hesitate in
his final years to explain to others that this was one way he maintained power.
On August 16, 2018, Epstein invited a New York Times journalist to that very home to help spread the
word.
“The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr.
Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He
also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing,
including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use,” the journalist James
B. Stewart would report.
2
Stewart added, “During our conversation, Mr. Epstein made no secret of his own scandalous past—
he’d pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from underage girls and was a registered sex
offender—and acknowledged to me that he was a pariah in polite society. At the same time, he seemed
unapologetic. His very notoriety, he said, was what made so many people willing to confide in him.
Everyone, he suggested, has secrets and, he added, compared with his own, they seemed innocuous.
People confided in him without feeling awkward or embarrassed, he claimed.”
The tell-all article was written after Epstein’s death, because the conversation occurred under an onbackground agreement, which the writer asserted lapsed upon his interlocutor’s demise. (An agreement to
keep comments on background is a condition that usually allows the reporter to use information learned
from a source, and usually even quotations, as long as the source himself is never specifically identified.)
And yet the conversation, as retold by Stewart, offers one of the clearest views into Epstein’s mind.
—
In 1995, a twenty-six-year-old by the name of Maria Farmer had recently taken up a job at Epstein’s New
York mansion. Her job was to work the front desk.
She noticed suspicious activity. “I saw many, many, many, many, many” young women coming to the
house, she recalled in a 2019 interview with CBS.
3
“All day long. I saw Ghislaine going to get the women. She went to places like Central Park. I was
with her a couple of times in the car . . . She would say, ‘Stop the car.’ And she would dash out and get a
child.”
Farmer recalls that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged procurer, told her she was “getting
Victoria’s Secret models.”
Farmer was unsettled. “One day I said to Jeffrey, ‘What goes on in this house?’ Like, ‘Why are you
always upstairs?’ And he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ And so he took me up there in the elevator. And we went
—he showed me all of Ghislaine’s quarters.”
In his own bathroom, Epstein had on display “a marble, like, altar thing over here, and he said that’s
where he gets his massages.”
He also showed her the intricate camera system he had set up throughout the house. “I looked on the
cameras, and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed. I’m like ‘I am never going to use the restroom here,
and I’m never going to sleep here,’” she told the news network.
Epstein told her that the video footage from his house was meticulously stored and safeguarded. “I
keep it. I keep everything in my safe,” he told her.
Why, exactly, he chose to disclose his high-tech surveillance system to his employ is a matter of
speculation. Perhaps Epstein wanted those he sought to overpower to know that he had dirt on them too.
Regardless, Farmer would not be the only one to hear his boasts.
One close friend said he asked Epstein to give his wife a tour of his home in New York a few years
ago. During the visit, Epstein proudly boasted about the cameras he had in each room.
“He gave [my wife and I] a tour. And all he kept pointing out was cameras. There were cameras
everywhere,” said the friend in an interview.
“He had cameras in every room of his house. He had cameras in the bathroom. He was doing it for
some reason. He didn’t tell me what the reason was, but here’s a good guess: there’s a lot of famous
people he had something on.
“That was the first time I heard him tell [about] the cameras, the cameras, the cameras. I kind of knew
that was what was going on, and he’d allude to it in other ways, but at this point he was proud of it.”
The greatest evidence of Epstein’s photo cache was discovered in a raid on his New York mansion
shortly after his July 6, 2019, arrest at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
Prosecutors said they recovered what amounted to child pornography, nude snaps of his victims. “At
least hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of sexually suggestive photographs of fully- or partially nude
females” were found safely stored at Epstein’s home,
4 according to a court memo written by the U.S.
attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, on July 8, 2019.
The images “appear to be of underage girls, including at least one girl who, according to her counsel,
was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken,” the prosecutor stated.
More surprising, perhaps, was how neatly organized the stash appeared at his home. It was laid out in
“compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: ‘Young [Name] + [Name],’ ‘Misc nudes
1,’ and ‘Girl pics nude,’” the documents would allege.
Although it is not known if the images featuring child porn also featured Epstein or others in his orbit,
he proudly kept an array of G-rated photos of his high-profile friends on display for any common visitor.
Epstein showed off his photos with world leaders, pointing to a framed picture of the crown prince of
Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and saying, “That’s M.B.S.” The journalist James B. Stewart took
note of photos of Woody Allen, a good friend of Epstein’s who has also been accused of sexual
misconduct, and Bill Clinton, another friend who likewise has been accused of sexual assault and even
rape.
But while it has become clear just how Epstein went about obsessively documenting the visits of the
rich and powerful to his home and their private activities while there—he was hardly shy about the
camera system even when he was alive—his motivation for doing so is less obvious. Why did Epstein
feel the need to rig his bedrooms and bathrooms with cameras? Was it just his own voyeuristic
perversion? Or was there something deeper?
Arguably, this obsession with following and filming and documenting the most intimate habits of the
powerful came out of Epstein’s obsession with power itself. It wasn’t just the sexual behavior of his
powerful friends that interested him; it was everything about their lives. This might have been used for
blackmail and other purposes to Epstein’s direct advantage, but his fascination went deeper than that. He
had conned his way into the upper ranks of high society but perhaps still felt a bit like the outsider looking
in. Today we might call that impostor syndrome. He was around people with real power, but he had to
find different ways to try to grasp it for himself. And to understand the real roots of that obsession, you
have to understand where he came from.
PART II
An Indecent Life
6
Ill-Gotten Gains
Years of Deception and Fraudulent Fortunes
He could see your weaknesses.
STEVEN HOFFENBERG
A photo in Epstein’s senior yearbook shows him at sixteen years old, walking shirtless along the beach
in Coney Island. He’s chubby and pale, his belly hanging over the top of a pair of old jeans cut into
knee-length swim shorts. His frizzy brown hair is badly in need of a trim. His eyes are trained on the
ground, an awkward gummy smile on his face.
The man who would one day wield so much power and wealth, inflicting so much pain on poor
suffering victims along the way, in high school was poor, unattractive, and unhappy with that state of
affairs.
“He was getting beaten up all the time for being a schmuck—looking like a schmuck, or whatever. He
must have had a rough time, and there was probably never a girl that ever looked at him,” said one
longtime friend of Epstein’s in an interview.
“He really had some kind of contempt for women . . . And I think he was getting back at all those
fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old girls who would never talk to him because he looked like such a
schmuck,” added the friend.
He had a rough time, and it seemed that he decided to do whatever it would take to leave it behind, to
learn charm in order to manipulate those in power, and to get what he wanted from men, women—and
girls.
Epstein was born January 20, 1953, the day President Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated. The
elder son of Seymour and Pauline, the lucky few from their respective families who had not perished in
the Holocaust, Jeffrey Epstein grew up in a middle-class area of Coney Island, nearly an hour away from
Manhattan using public transportation. The neighborhood was Sea Gate, the oldest gated community in the
city.
1
The Epsteins were rare in that both Seymour and Pauline worked but were still firmly on the very
lower end of middle class. Seymour, born December 4, 1916, in Manhattan to European immigrant
parents, first held down construction work, where he demolished homes, before getting a more stable job
with New York City’s Parks Department, where he picked up trash. Neighbors have recalled Seymour’s
stutter. Pauline, born October 5, 1918, in Brooklyn to Lithuanian immigrant parents, worked as an aide in
a school.
The Epsteins lived in an apartment taking up the middle third of a decently sized house in Sea Gate at
Maple Avenue. In 1955, Mark Epstein was born, stretching the family’s already thin resources. The family
couldn’t afford much more than the essentials.
“[Jeffrey] hated his childhood because they were poor,” recalled Steven Hoffenberg in an interview.
Poor though he was, Epstein had one notable resource. By all accounts, he was smart. A natural math
whiz who skipped a couple grades. A piano virtuoso. He was also generous, mentoring other kids at
Lafayette High School along the way.
Despite being remembered as a schmuck, Epstein seems to have had at least a bit of a social life. His
friends affectionately called him Eppy, and he had at least one girlfriend, who remembered him fondly
years later.
“That last year in school, I think he kind of loved me,” one high school sweetheart recalled in the book
Filthy Rich. “One night on the beach he kissed me. In fact, our history teacher made up a mock wedding
invitation for Jeffrey and myself to show to the class. That seems pretty inappropriate now. But back then,
we all thought it was funny. Jews and the Italians, that was pretty much who went to Lafayette High
School. They didn’t socialize that much. And though my mother was crazy about him, she told me Jewish
boys don’t marry Italians.”
2
Epstein graduated early and quickly moved to leave Coney Island behind. In the fall of 1969, he
enrolled at the Cooper Union and studied physics. The college’s main attracting feature for the student
from humble roots was its cost—free. He was sixteen years old, but as he did in high school, he began
tutoring his fellow students. This time he charged for his services. For the first time, Jeffrey Epstein was a
working man.
Mysteriously, Epstein, despite his brilliance, did not seem able to stick to his studies. He lasted only
until the spring of 1971, before he left without earning a degree. Months later he began studying
mathematics at New York University. He was affiliated with the prestigious Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences. He would leave that higher institution in June 1974, though it is unclear why,
again without any sort of degree.
Somewhere along the way he found other work—an unceremonious job in Brooklyn as a roofer. It
seemed the boy from the poor family was going back to where he came from.
But Epstein would not tolerate returning to his old world. And it is at this point that he would begin to
try his hand at being a confidence man—reliant on the world of fraud, distortion, and lying to get ahead.
His first documented fraud was fudging his résumé to get a job at the Dalton School. Founded in 1919,
Dalton is one of the most prestigious educational institutions in New York City and normally hired only
the best. Yet somehow, in the early 1970s, the college dropout and former roofer Jeffrey Epstein
persuaded them to hire him to teach the children of Manhattan’s leading families.
He is believed to have been hired by the school’s headmaster, who coincidentally left the school amid
an unrelated brouhaha months before Epstein’s official start date in 1974. The schoolmaster was Donald
Barr, the father of William Barr, who would serve as attorney general of the United States at the time of
Epstein’s arrest and subsequent death.
3
At Dalton, Epstein taught physics and math, and he coached the school’s math team. His students were
mostly the older kids, high school upperclassmen who were seventeen or eighteen years old, not too far
off from Epstein himself, who was only in his early twenties.
For a working-class kid, this was a glimpse into a whole new world. True, he was only a lowly
teacher, but his students were the kids of the adults who ran the city—the political players, the media
honchos, and the money managers.
“I come from a background where I had no money and it was only by understanding math and science
that I was able to live the life I currently lead,” Epstein would later recount in court documents.
Or, as his former boss Hoffenberg described it in an interview, “His greatest dream was to be
super rich, to be a multimillionaire, generated by this hatred of his childhood.”
At Dalton, Epstein socialized with his students and was well liked by them, though in retrospect some
worrisome traits began to emerge. Specifically, it was the way he interacted with young female students.
“It was just kind of a general circle of girls,” the former student Scott Spizer recalled in an interview with
National Public Radio. “He was much more present amongst the students, specifically the girl students,
during non teaching hours . . . it seemed just, it was kind of inappropriate.”
There was an acute awareness of what Kerry Lawrence of the graduating class of 1976 calls
“creepiness.”
4
“When you had a faculty member that girls were paying attention to, it was somewhat disconcerting,”
Lawrence added.
Years later, Epstein would demure in a deposition on whether he had sexual relations with any
students. Asked whether he had been intimate with anyone he taught, he answered, “Not that I remember,”
a typical lawyerly response that left open the possibility of such teacher-student relations.
After two years at Dalton, the school decided to move on from the unconventional teacher because he
wasn’t “up to snuff,” the interim headmaster Peter Branch would recall many decades later. “It was
determined that he had not adequately grown as a new teacher to the standard of the school,” he would tell
another reporter.
5
Which of course was always true. Epstein had no business being a teacher, because he did not have
the qualifications required to serve in such a capacity. He had weaseled his way into the job, only to be
found out eventually that he did not have the qualifications. An important lesson, perhaps, in retrospect—
that the longer the con, the harder and harder it is to maintain.
For his next opportunity, Epstein seems to have switched tactics a bit, attaining it not exactly by lying
but by using charm to get what he wanted from the powerful people with whom he surrounded himself.
Either because he knew his end was near or because it was all part of his plan, Epstein used parent-teacher conferences to network, telling his kids’ parents that he was looking for work on Wall Street,
according to the Miami Herald.
6
According to Filthy Rich, Epstein began tutoring the son of the Bear Stearns executive Alan “Ace”
Greenberg, and some believed he dated his daughter, Lynne.
7 Then he charmed the father into giving him a
job at the prestigious investment bank. The college dropout from Brooklyn scored a job on Wall Street in
1976, at a time when most hires there were graduates from the most prestigious colleges in America.
Epstein thrived. He picked up the language, innately understood financial concepts, and finally began
to make decent—and soon great—money. He also, for apparently the first time, got his taste of forbidden
fruits, entering an inappropriate relationship with his assistant.
But that would not be enough. And soon he was unsatisfied and looking for love. Epstein was
highlighted as “Bachelor of the Month” in the July 1980 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.
8
Accompanied by a photo of the Wall Streeter sporting his best impression of a Beatles haircut, the
personal ad stated, “Financial strategist Jeffrey Epstein, 27, talks only to people who make over a million
a year! If you’re ‘a cute Texas girl,’ write this New York dynamo at 55 Water St., 49th floor, N.Y.C.
10041.”
The Brooklyn boy had created a new persona: a “New York dynamo” who works only with the most
wealthy and who cultivated exotic—southern!—women.
Thanks perhaps to the effect of his alter ego, Epstein quickly moved up the chain. That same summer,
he was named a limited partner, a step below full partner but still a remarkable rise for someone with no
family connections and no financial experience. He had only his relationship with Greenberg and a
quickly developed mentor-mentee relationship with Bear Stearns’s CEO, James Cayne.
A year later, under murky circumstances and more than a whiff of scandal, he was out. There were
allegations of an inappropriate and perhaps illegal loan, insider trading, and a deal gone bad. But none of
the charges stuck. Asked by SEC investigators about the rumors of his departure in testimony given on
April 1, 1981, Epstein admitted that he heard “it was having to do with an illicit affair with a secretary.”
It is unclear whether Epstein himself believed whether the rumor mill had gotten this one correct.
Epstein also told SEC investigators “he was offended by the company’s investigation of a twenty thousand-dollar loan he’d made to his friend Warren Eisenstein,” according to Filthy Rich. “On top of
that, questions about Epstein’s expenses had come up. In the end, Bear Stearns fined him $2,500—an
embarrassing thing, to be sure.”
9
Scandal could not keep Epstein down, however. He struck out on his own, in a solo venture he
registered to his apartment and called the Intercontinental Assets Group Inc. He intended the company to
specialize in recovering assets for the ultra-wealthy, and soon enough he was a successful “financial
bounty hunter”—a moniker he clearly relished.
Epstein also started offering “strategic advice” that would assist his clients in limiting their tax
liability. He counted on the fact that wealthy clients would spend millions of dollars for his services if
they stood to save tens or hundreds of millions in taxes. By the late 1980s, he changed his business plan
again, setting up shop under the name J. Epstein & Company. His private firm’s gimmick would be to
manage the money for the richest of the rich: billionaires.
Shortly after beginning his new firm, Epstein found two anchor clients. The first was the client of a
lifetime, the underwear magnate Leslie H. Wexner, the chairman and CEO of L Brands, which owns the
clothing company the Limited and the lingerie maker Victoria’s Secret.
They met in a strange and purely accidental way when Epstein was seated next to Wexner’s friend
Robert Meister on a flight to Palm Beach. Both were in first class. Meister, an insurance executive, talked
up his client Wexner, who he revealed was unhappy with his money managers. Epstein’s services as a
money manager were offered, and soon thereafter an introduction was made.
The two hit it off. Wexner and Epstein were fast friends and even closer business associates. “People
have said it’s like we have one brain between the two of us: each has a side,” Epstein told the Vanity Fair
profiler Vicky Ward in a breakout piece about him in 2003 titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.”
10
Wexner’s trust in Epstein was so immense he’d end up signing over his house—the Manhattan mansion
considered the largest residential home in the city—to him. Epstein would be named a board member of
his personal foundation. But perhaps the biggest sign of his trust was giving him power of attorney over
his wealth, allowing the young, and perhaps somewhat unproven, wealth manager to have the financial
power of a billionaire.
Epstein helped design and manage the building of Wexner’s yacht, Limitless. He involved himself in
all matters business and personal, often visiting the clothing tycoon’s Columbus, Ohio, mansion. It helped
that Epstein eventually acquired his own home nearby in New Albany, Ohio.
Epstein even helped the Wexner's find a nanny. “I’ll just put Jeffrey on it,” Abigail Wexner, Les’s wife,
reportedly announced at a party after voicing frustration about her child care.
“Les is an insecure guy with a big ego . . . he had a lot of money but craved respect,” the former vice chair of L Brands, Robert Morosky, would later tell The Wall Street Journal.
11 “They played off each
other’s needs.”
The second client, Towers Financial, got Epstein into trouble. Towers would go down as the biggest
financial Ponzi scheme in American history prior to Bernie Madoff.
Steven Hoffenberg, who once owned the New York Post, ran the company.
“Jeffrey was my partner in what we did raising the billion dollars. He worked with me every day,
seven days a week and he was in the mix with everything that I did,” said Hoffenberg in an interview with
CBS News.
12 “I was the CEO of Towers Financial Corporation, a public company, and Jeffrey was my
main assistant, associate, or partner. And the company did do a billion dollars in raising money. And it
was criminal.”
The way the scheme worked was that Towers Financial would sell bonds and notes, using the
proceeds to funnel money to pay interest to earlier accounts. Of course, much of that money went to
Hoffenberg himself. Epstein, for his part, was on a retainer pulling in $25,000 a month for his financial
advice.
While perpetrating this fraud, Epstein also began a new, relatively low-stakes, but nonetheless
revelatory form of fraud, according to those who knew him.
13
Hoffenberg’s Towers Financial tried to take over Pan Am Airways. The point person on the deal
ultimately failed Epstein. Upon hearing that an acquaintance of his was traveling to Spain in a few days,
Epstein offered, “If you like, I can upgrade you to first class. Much better food.”
“How?” asked the acquaintance, the author and journalist Edward Jay Epstein.
“Drop your ticket off with my doorman tomorrow morning. It won’t cost you a penny,” the financier
instructed.
Years later, the writer would recall, “I brought my ticket to the doorman on Friday morning, and
Friday evening I picked it up with a first-class sticker and a first-class seat assignment.”
Apparently, Jeffrey Epstein had been using stickers procured during the failed Pan Am deal to upgrade
friends and acquaintances—without the hassle and expense of actually going through the airlines. It was
surprisingly easy to pull off.
The writer recalls that he should have realized then the jig was a fraud, even if it was reflective of his
acquaintance. And it couldn’t go on forever.
“It was all dazzling fun, but in late 1988 a dark cloud poked its way into the festivities. It began when
I tried to board an All Nippon Airways flight that Epstein had upgraded to first class. The A.N.A.
representative told me it could not be a first-class ticket, which cost $6,000, because I had paid only
$655. When I pointed to the first-class sticker, she said anyone could steal one and paste it in. I was
unceremoniously moved to coach,” Edward Jay Epstein would write in 2019.
Just as the small-scale fraud came to an end, the large-scale one also did. Hoffenberg ultimately
pleaded guilty to $460 million worth of fraud in 1995. “Epstein has remained free and has used and
benefited from the ill-gotten gains he amassed as a result of his criminal and fraudulent activities,”
Hoffenberg, who has been keen in recent years to blame his former associate for the financial crimes, has
alleged in court documents.
14
🔎💲💲🔍
Epstein had now reached the top of his field, finding his way there through a mixture of charm and fraud.
He was willing to lie to get what he wanted, and to manipulate powerful people through unknown means
into giving him a massive amount of money and power. But was that enough? No, he wanted more.
7
The Accomplice
When Jeffrey Met Ghislaine
If I see somebody he likes, I go over and say, “How would you like to meet a rich man?”
GHISLAINE MAXWELL
In 1990, Epstein spent $2.5 million on a Palm Beach mansion.
1 The intercoastal waterfront home is an
eight-thousand-square-foot, five-bedroom, eight-bathroom stunner, with privacy bushes and a white
fence giving cover to the exclusive enclave. The location is prime—less than a mile and a half from
Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, which was purchased five years earlier. It is now estimated to be
worth nearly $17 million.
Epstein’s rise from Coney Island boy to Upper East Side man had taken less than a decade—with
stops at Dalton, Bear Stearns, and then his own shops along the way. He had money and all the luxuries of
wealth. Multiple homes, private jets, and beautiful women.
Yet in spite of his newfound wealth, Epstein had a difficult time fitting in with elite society circles.
Friends described him as crass with no taste for the arts, food, or culture.
“Palm Beach is a pretty snooty place,” said another friend of Epstein’s in an interview. “There’s no
way they were accepting him. Forget all the other things you know about him. He was a lower-middle class Jew. He was from Coney Island. His father was a Parks Department employee. This guy didn’t have
an air of class about him. That alone would shun him in Palm Beach.”
But Epstein still wanted their acceptance. “Pretension was very important to him,” said the friend.
Epstein might have lived among the elites, but he was not one of them. That is, not until he met
Ghislaine Maxwell.
Once he met her, his life would change. She introduced him to class, was his match in every way, and
would eventually become his partner in one of the darkest schemes one could ever imagine.
🙈🙉🙊
In the early 1990s, Ghislaine Maxwell was young, popular, and broke. The French-born ninth child of the
British media mogul Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine, then in her early thirties, had moved stateside after her
father’s suspicious passing.
On November 5, 1991, Robert Maxwell, owner of the Mirror Group newspapers in the U.K. and the
New York Daily News, had been found dead, floating off the Canary Islands, miles from his yacht, Lady
Ghislaine, named for his reportedly favorite child.
2
Immediately questions arose as to whether he had
simply fallen off his boat in the middle of the night, committed suicide, or been killed.
Robert Maxwell had plenty of enemies. His insatiable quest for power and influence led him to raid
his companies and banks to help prop up his ever-growing schemes. There were also allegations that he
had been a spy—for the Israeli Mossad or for the British or Russian intelligence services. Foreign
intelligence services often recruit connected businessmen to become assets or operatives to funnel
information on colleagues or political figures they know back to spies. Maxwell, with his transatlantic
connections in media, politics, and business, would have been a good recruiting target.
Some thought Maxwell had committed suicide, but his wife maintained that he had not.
In her memoir, A Mind of My Own, she revealed that an autopsy discovered “precise details of a
whole range of injuries which had been caused before death; there were significant hemorrhages in and
around damaged tissues on the back, shoulders, and arms.”
3
The report explicitly states, “It is impossible
to exclude homicide.”
Suicide or not, Ghislaine was left without a father and without resources. The comforts her family
fortune afforded her had been wiped out. Especially when it became clear after her father was gone that
he had looted hundreds of millions of dollars from the pensions of his company to help cover his debts
and keep his empire afloat.
Ghislaine Maxwell had become accustomed to all the trappings of the British elite. With her long,
dark wavy hair, she had a way about her that made the men in her life swoon.
But in order to live the life she aspired to, she needed currency. And, given her family’s sudden
predicament, she needed it quick—and from somewhere else.
—
Despite her father’s passing, Ghislaine Maxwell was quick to use his Rolodex and ingratiate herself into
America’s most elite social circles. She had helped make inroads into New York City when her father
owned the Daily News. But now she decided to stay there permanently and make it her home.
“Ghislaine basically didn’t have a job, and she went to the opening of anything that had a gold
envelope to it,” said her friend Laura Goldman in an interview. “She was quite a social person, but part
of it was that she wasn’t working all day, so she could go to everything.”
Ghislaine would party with the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the magazine editor Tina Brown, and
Arianna Huffington, the socialite wife of a Republican congressman. She was also friends with American
royalty (the Clintons) and British royalty (Prince Andrew).
4
Some called her “Goodtimes Ghislaine,” a source told The Sun. “She was a huge networker at these
bashes, going from famous person to famous person and introducing people who didn’t have a prior
connection to each other,” the source said.
5
But with her father’s passing, she too was missing something—money.
Which is why in the early 1990s Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell would turn out to be such a durable
duo. Each provided what the other one lacked.
“She told me how she had absolutely no money in her pocket and was bawling her eyes out on the
streets of New York just prior to meeting Jeffrey,” recalled another friend in an interview.
Epstein was very rich and still very much a bachelor. Eva Andersson, the former Miss Sweden and
now a doctor, dated Epstein for eleven years before throwing in the towel in the early 1990s. “He really
loved her,” recalled a friend in an interview. But he had no interest in tying himself down to one woman.
What he was interested in was someone who could help him make his way in posh society. Soon
Ghislaine and he would be a couple—and then even more. Maxwell was Epstein’s “half ex-girlfriend,
half employee, half best friend and fixer,” as one acquaintance described it.
6
According to Epstein’s former house manager Juan Alessi, Ghislaine served as both Epstein’s
girlfriend and the head of his household staff from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. “She was the
manager of all the households, because he has homes all over the world,” he said in a deposition.
7
The status of their relationship was a mystery even to Epstein’s inner circle. “There was a period of
time when she was his girlfriend, and then there was a period of time when she was not,” said a longtime
associate of Epstein’s, noting that the precise beginning and end of these periods was unclear.
While the couple often shared a bed and Maxwell acted like his significant other—cooking breakfast
for Epstein’s overnight guests, accompanying him to social functions—Epstein openly downplayed their
romantic involvement. “Nah, she’s not my girlfriend; she’s just somebody I know,” Epstein told one male
friend, according to an interview.
Conchita Sarnoff, a journalist and advocate against human trafficking who knew the couple, has said
of Maxwell, “She seemed in love when I first saw them together. I believe Jeffrey was taking care of her.
I feel Ghislaine clung to Jeffrey because she felt protected by him.”
8
Epstein, Sarnoff said, “seemed less in love but more enamored.”
Together their social life flourished. Maxwell introduced Epstein to her friends Prince Andrew and
the Duchess of York, her contacts on the New York social scene, and she was on Epstein’s arm when he
first visited the White House under President Bill Clinton. She also provided Epstein with companionship
and real-world lessons on how elites operate. [ Elites? more like pond scum DC ]
The relationship was not just based on mutual benefit. Friends said Maxwell was deeply in love with
Epstein and hoped to marry him. People close to the couple noted that Epstein shared many characteristics
with Maxwell’s late father—a serial philanderer with a taste for very young women—whom she had
revered from childhood.
Epstein “was her sun and moon,” said Maxwell’s friend Laura Goldman. “Everything revolved around
him.”
Privately, Epstein was also deeply protective of his relationship with Maxwell. One longtime friend,
who was charmed by the British brunette, recalled asking Epstein if it would be okay to ask her on a date.
Epstein said it didn’t bother him, and the gentleman took Maxwell out to dinner in New York.
“That was a bad idea,” revealed the friend in an interview. “[ Jeffrey ] didn’t talk to me for six months
after that.”
—
Maxwell fed one of Epstein’s needs. It was roughly around this time that he got her to satisfy another.
Epstein would provide the money Maxwell desired to live the lifestyle she sought. Maxwell, in turn,
would provide young girls for Epstein.
Epstein made no attempt to be monogamous. He always seemed to have a rotation of attractive young
women hanging around his homes or accompanying him to parties.
One friend recalled asking Maxwell where Epstein met all these girls in New York. Maxwell took
credit for finding them.
“If I see somebody he likes, I go over and say, ‘How would you like to meet a rich man?’” claimed
Maxwell.
The curious friend asked Maxwell where she slept while Epstein was having sex with these other
women.
“I get out of the bedroom,” said Maxwell, nonchalantly.
“Maxwell is very clever,” the journalist Conchita Sarnoff has observed.
9 “In spite of her personal
insecurities, as a result of her father’s death and financial challenges, I believe she nevertheless knew
exactly what she was doing when she agreed to solicit girls on his behalf. However, I don’t think that
phase of their relationship began until she understood Epstein would not marry her.”
She would accompany him as he jet set across the globe, catering to his every whim. “Every pretty
girl in New York, in those days, Ghislaine would invite to Jeffrey’s,” Maxwell’s acquaintance Euan
Rellie has said. “Her job was to jazz up his social life by getting fashionable young women to show up.”
10 [The things people will do for money, geez DC ]
—
Although it is unclear exactly when Epstein began preying on underage girls, accusers have dated it back
over two decades. Numerous victims tell similar tales: they were young, vulnerable, and overpowered by
Epstein and his associates.
George Houraney, the director of the American Dream Calendar Girls pageant, said in an interview
that he was forced to ban Epstein from his events in the early 1990s after he started preying on the
contestants—some of whom were as young as fifteen.
Epstein had started showing up at the pageants in Las Vegas. He was in his late thirties, with a cocky
swagger and a business card falsely identifying him as the head of Victoria’s Secret.
The contest was a less sophisticated version of Miss America and took place at casinos in Vegas,
Atlantic City, and the Bahamas. Hundreds of girls from across the country competed, hoping it would be
their ticket to Hollywood stardom or the New York City catwalks.
Unlike Miss America, the contest was open to girls as young as fifteen years old. National winners got
cash prizes and were featured in the American Dream Girl bikini calendar, often posting on top of a hot
rod.
“The girls that came to me were always young, mostly naive. Some of them had never even been on an
airplane,” said Houraney in an interview.
“There was no age limit except you had to be fifteen or older, so we had a lot of teens enter,” he said.
“It was a chance for them to get a scholarship, or money, or whatever, or [try to] get an acting job.”
The event had some corporate sponsors, including the men’s cologne brand English Leather. Epstein
said he wanted to sign on as a backer. But it soon became clear he had another interest in the show.
Houraney said he started getting complaints from girls and their parents. Contestants claimed Epstein
promised to help them with their careers and then tried to pressure them into “sexual situations” and
badgered them to send him nude photos.
“By the third event, I found out he was trying to get girls in his room and that’s against all my rules.
Girls weren’t allowed in sponsors’ rooms or judges’ rooms. You know what I mean?” said Houraney.
After that, Houraney said he banned Epstein from the events.
But this didn’t dissuade Epstein. Houraney said he ran into him later at an American Dream Calendar
Girls party hosted by Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump had partnered with the beauty pageant through
his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.
According to Houraney, the party was supposed to be a meet and greet for American Dream girls and
representatives of beauty brands, such as Revlon and Max Factor. He said Trump’s staff handled the guest
list, and Epstein was the only “sponsor” who was actually invited.
“In walked Jeffrey Epstein, and I had a fit,” said Houraney. “He thought because he’s now friends with
Trump, and I’m producing events at Trump’s [casino], that he can just buy Trump and still get into my
events.”
Furious, Houraney said he pulled Epstein aside.
“You know, you can’t keep doing this. You’re going to get arrested,” Houraney told him.
Epstein laughed it off.
“I’ve got enough money to get out of anything I ever need,” Epstein responded, according to Houraney.
“There’s plenty of countries I can live in like a king and I don’t have to worry.”
All the same, perhaps it was after this that Epstein decided that his and Maxwell’s ordinary efforts to
procure young women were not enough and began what would become their notorious pyramid scheme
for preying on underage girls.
—
It worked like this: Epstein or someone working on his behalf would solicit a young girl to come to his
house or where he was staying to give him a “massage.” The unsuspecting victim-in-waiting would nearly
always be from a poor or otherwise disadvantaged background.
She’d be offered a chance to make, say, $200 giving a “massage,” wherein she’d be sexually coerced
or assaulted by Epstein. Depending on how much sexual gratification she gave him, she’d be paid more.
But on some occasions the girl would not succumb to Epstein’s demands. That would be okay, too, so
long as she in turn recruited other girls from her peer group who in her place would perform on demand.
In fact, every girl had the opportunity to make more money this way. With the payment for recruiting being
the same as for being sexually violated, both became options. They could themselves service Epstein or
recruit other kids to the cause. The ideal scenario, in Epstein’s eyes, was for a girl to do both.
Which all helps explain why Epstein targeted girls from low-income families. They were more
attracted to the idea of getting paid $200. Perhaps not an exorbitant sum, but an amount of money they had
no other opportunity to obtain for an hour’s work. Additionally, their friends—and their friends’ friends—
could also more easily fall prey to the financier. There was another bonus, perhaps, that Epstein and his
consorts had in mind when they plotted their devilish scam. Lower-class kids would be less likely to be
believed by law enforcement and adults.
Epstein’s appetite was so ferocious he would, at his height, require “massages” three times a day.
Moreover, he craved variety and youth.
“He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them,” a victim who claimed to have recruited at
least seventy girls would tell the Miami Herald.
11 “He wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was
never enough.”
Meeting Epstein’s needs required a significant operation. His house staffers, including Maxwell, his
assistant Sarah Kellen, and his butler Alfredo Rodriguez, were needed to help keep the system running.
“He explained to me that, in his opinion, he needed to have three orgasms a day. It was biological, like
eating,” said Johanna Sjoberg, a woman who was in her early twenties when she started giving Epstein
sexual massages.
12
The phone memos found by police in the house make it clear that his employees spent a large portion
of their days trying to help feed his sexual appetites.
Many of the notes, written by household staffers, document phone messages from young girls and
attempts to schedule Epstein’s “sessions.” “She is wondering if 2:30 is okay cus she needs to stay in
school,” read one phone memo in February 2005.
Prior to 2003, the recruiting of girls was handled primarily by Ghislaine Maxwell, according to
Epstein’s house manager Juan Alessi and others. Maxwell often passed out business cards to pretty girls
at spas and on college campuses.
“Ms. Maxwell was the one that recruited,” said Alessi in a court deposition. “I remember one
occasion or two occasions she would say to me, [ Juan ], give me a list of all the spas in Palm Beach
County, and I will drive her from one to the other to PGA in Boca; and she would go in and drop 20 . . .
business cards,” he said. “Was never, never done by me or Mr. Epstein or anyone else that I know of.”
Alessi said Maxwell was demanding and would often make him drive her up and down the coast to
search for girls to hire.
“She was rotten spoiled and she tried to drive the house like a palace and not a home,” he said.
Although Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend at the time, she seemed eager to bring in additional
women for him, according to Sjoberg.
“She let me know that she was—she would not be able to please [ Epstein ] as much as he needed and
that is why there were other girls around,” said Sjoberg in a court deposition.
—
As Epstein was finding his way in a new social class, he had found a partner to help navigate this new
world. Together, with Maxwell, he was able to satisfy his social needs and sexual desires.
But Maxwell’s friend Goldman said the British socialite never gave up hope that her relationship with
Epstein would one day have a degree of normalcy.
“I guess she kept thinking if she brought one more girl, did one more thing, that he would marry her,”
said Goldman in an interview. “She really thought that he would marry her in the end. She always,
always, always believed that.”
Next
The Victims 45s
footnotes
2. James Patterson, John Connolly, and Tim Malloy, Filthy Rich (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017). 3. Jerry Lambe, “The ‘Epstein-Barr’ Problem of New York City’s Dalton School,” Law & Crime, July 13, 2019, lawandcrimle.com/highprofile/the-epstein-barr-problem-of-new-york-citys-dalton-school/.
3. Elisabeth Maxwell, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
6. Megan Twohey and Jacob Bernstein, “The ‘Lady of the House’ Who Was Long Entangled with Jeffrey Epstein,” New York Times, July 15, 2019,www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/us/ghislaine-maxwell-epstein.html.
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