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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. 
There is no clear alternate narrative, except perhaps 
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? 
EFTA01200545

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 
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.) 
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 
EFTA01200546

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 
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. (Epstein had become an active backer of advanced 
scientific research and a fixture at the conference.) 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 
EFTA01200547

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 
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. (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, and then later, with Mort 
Zuckerman, backing the launch of Radar magazine.) 
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 
EFTA01200548

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 
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 
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 
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. 
EFTA01200549

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, in essence, 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.) 
A shadowy rich man, friend of the louche and 
disgraced president, at all times surrounded by a retinue 
of young and attractive women doing his bidding, is 
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 
EFTA01200550

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 
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. (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.) 
It is in part this impossible-to-explain weird-justice 
outcome that has made some people think Epstein was 
covering for someone, or something, else—perhaps his 
most high-profile friend? 
EFTA01200551

"So?" I ask, 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—nobody has ever 
heard of anything like [this agreement]. But while it was 
breathtaking, 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 might put you in jail for ten years. I took the deal." 
(Indeed, the deal protected him from federal 
prosecution, and protected his "co-conspirators," the 
employees who supplied him with massage girls, from 
being charged as accessories to molestation and sex with 
minors.) 
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 
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 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 
EFTA01200552

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. 
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 
now, this new 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. 
And, indeed, the tabloid narrative and his own story 
rather define divergent realities. The ongoing case, with 
the filings that introduced the Dershowitz and Prince 
Andrew allegations, was brought by the imprisoned 
Rothstein's former partner, Brad Edwards. It relies 
entirely on the testimony and the memoir, exce is of 
which were published by the Daily Mail, o 
IM
who claims that Ghislaine Maxwel me er, 
e 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 
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 
EFTA01200553

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 that Epstein introduced her to 
Bill Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore (though there was 
no sex involved). 
who was part of the original settlement—
which some accounts put as high as $1 million—has 
sought an additional $50 million {NEEDS STATUS 
CHECK} from Epstein [CLARIFY THAT SHE IS NOT 
SUING HIM BUT SUING THE GOVT AND SAYING 
SHE'LL DROP IT IF HE PAYS HER?], and is planning 
a book on her life and the scandal. But there has been no 
corroboration of the 
charges nor any new 
evidence or further prosecution. Epstein says she never 
met Clinton through him and, indeed, that he himself 
has never met the Gores. Dershowitz is suing her for 
libel. 
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 have 
the effect of derailing the Hillary Clinton presidential 
campaign. In the meantime, it is delaying—quite an 
understatement—Epstein's hoped-for public 
rehabilitation. 
It is a curious attribute of his character that, other than 
perhaps being more circumspect about what legal advice 
EFTA01200554

to follow, Epstein would have done little 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, pedophile) 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 confidant, everybody becomes his 
confidant. This is the back and forth, the power loop. 
His expertise is knowing what other people know. 
Which surely offers a unique sense of confidence that it 
EFTA01200555

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. 
In the last days of my interviews with Epstein, he 
was called by a particular world-stage individual, 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. Epstein welcomed him to the club. 
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