Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts
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Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling?
The Editors6:00 A.M.
A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York.
Epstein in his townhouse in 2015. Photo: Christopher Anderson for New York Magazine
Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita Express,”some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.
If you watch Fox News, you will believe Bill Clinton was Epstein’s No. 1 pal and enabler. If you watch MSNBC, this scandal is usually all about Donald Trump. In fact, both presidents are guilty (at the very least) of giving Epstein cover and credibility. There are so many unanswered questions about Epstein, but one that looms over all of them is whether the bipartisan crowd who cleared a path for him will cover its tracks before we can get answers — not just Clinton and Trump and all those who drank at Epstein’s trough but also (among others) institutions like Harvard, Dalton, and the Council on Foreign Relations, or lawyers like the New York prosecutor Cy Vance Jr., whose office tried to downgrade Epstein’s sex-offender status; Kenneth Starr, who tried to pressure Republican Justice Department officials to keep the Epstein case from ever being prosecuted; and Alan Dershowitz, who tried to pressure the Pulitzer Prizes to shut out the Miami Herald for its epic investigative reporting that cracked open the case anew.
In 2015, Gawker published Epstein’s “little black book,” which had surfaced in court proceedings after a former employee took it from Epstein’s home around 2005 and later tried to sell it. He said that the book had been created by people who worked for Epstein and that it contained the names and phone numbers of more than 100 victims, plus hundreds of social contacts. Along with the logs of Epstein’s private plane, released in 2015, the book paints a picture of a man deeply enmeshed in the highest social circles.
Collectively, these documents constitute just a glance at the way society opened itself to Epstein in New York, Hollywood, and Palm Beach. In the weeks since his arrest, we have learned even more about the cliques he traveled in and the way they protected him. Though some observers have likened Epstein’s enigmatic rise as a glamorous social magnet to that of Jay Gatsby, a more appropriate archetype may be the fixer, sexual hedonist, and (ultimately disbarred) lawyer Roy Cohn. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Cohn was a favor broker for boldface chums as various as the top Democratic-machine politicians, the mobster Carmine “Lilo” Galante, Nancy Reagan, the proprietors of Studio 54, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Andy Warhol, the publishers Rupert Murdoch and Si Newhouse, Dershowitz, and the ambitious young real-estate developer Donald Trump.
This project is meant to catalogue how Epstein’s secure footing in elite spheres helped hide his crimes. It includes influential names listed in his black book, people he flew, funded, and schmoozed, along with others whose connections to him have drawn renewed attention. Certainly, not everyone cited here knew of everything he was up to; Malcolm Gladwell told New York, “I don’t remember much except being baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.” Some said they never met Epstein at all, or knew of him only through his ex-girlfriend and alleged accomplice, the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Others backed away from him after the scandal. But all of the influential people listed here were attached in some way to Epstein’s world. The sum of their names constitutes a more concrete accounting of Epstein’s power than could any accounting of his disputed wealth. Consider this a pointillist portrait of enablement that all too chillingly overlaps with a significant slice of the Establishment.
More at the link above.
The Editors6:00 A.M.
A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York.
Epstein in his townhouse in 2015. Photo: Christopher Anderson for New York Magazine
Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita Express,”some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.
If you watch Fox News, you will believe Bill Clinton was Epstein’s No. 1 pal and enabler. If you watch MSNBC, this scandal is usually all about Donald Trump. In fact, both presidents are guilty (at the very least) of giving Epstein cover and credibility. There are so many unanswered questions about Epstein, but one that looms over all of them is whether the bipartisan crowd who cleared a path for him will cover its tracks before we can get answers — not just Clinton and Trump and all those who drank at Epstein’s trough but also (among others) institutions like Harvard, Dalton, and the Council on Foreign Relations, or lawyers like the New York prosecutor Cy Vance Jr., whose office tried to downgrade Epstein’s sex-offender status; Kenneth Starr, who tried to pressure Republican Justice Department officials to keep the Epstein case from ever being prosecuted; and Alan Dershowitz, who tried to pressure the Pulitzer Prizes to shut out the Miami Herald for its epic investigative reporting that cracked open the case anew.
In 2015, Gawker published Epstein’s “little black book,” which had surfaced in court proceedings after a former employee took it from Epstein’s home around 2005 and later tried to sell it. He said that the book had been created by people who worked for Epstein and that it contained the names and phone numbers of more than 100 victims, plus hundreds of social contacts. Along with the logs of Epstein’s private plane, released in 2015, the book paints a picture of a man deeply enmeshed in the highest social circles.
Collectively, these documents constitute just a glance at the way society opened itself to Epstein in New York, Hollywood, and Palm Beach. In the weeks since his arrest, we have learned even more about the cliques he traveled in and the way they protected him. Though some observers have likened Epstein’s enigmatic rise as a glamorous social magnet to that of Jay Gatsby, a more appropriate archetype may be the fixer, sexual hedonist, and (ultimately disbarred) lawyer Roy Cohn. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Cohn was a favor broker for boldface chums as various as the top Democratic-machine politicians, the mobster Carmine “Lilo” Galante, Nancy Reagan, the proprietors of Studio 54, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Andy Warhol, the publishers Rupert Murdoch and Si Newhouse, Dershowitz, and the ambitious young real-estate developer Donald Trump.
This project is meant to catalogue how Epstein’s secure footing in elite spheres helped hide his crimes. It includes influential names listed in his black book, people he flew, funded, and schmoozed, along with others whose connections to him have drawn renewed attention. Certainly, not everyone cited here knew of everything he was up to; Malcolm Gladwell told New York, “I don’t remember much except being baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.” Some said they never met Epstein at all, or knew of him only through his ex-girlfriend and alleged accomplice, the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Others backed away from him after the scandal. But all of the influential people listed here were attached in some way to Epstein’s world. The sum of their names constitutes a more concrete accounting of Epstein’s power than could any accounting of his disputed wealth. Consider this a pointillist portrait of enablement that all too chillingly overlaps with a significant slice of the Establishment.
More at the link above.
Barr, Donald: The headmaster who offered entrée.
Barr was ousted shortly before Epstein, 21 and without a college degree, showed up for his first day of work teaching math and physics at the Manhattan’s elite Dalton School in the early 1970s. Barr announced his resignation soon after, in February 1974: “He was disliked by the faculty, he was highly controversial, he hadn’t raised much money, he was very conservative,” said the board’s chairman. Barr’s leadership style was described as “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” at the time. Memorably, several former students told the New York Times that Epstein was overly familiar with teenage girls at the school. Donald’s son William would intersect with Epstein’s orbit while serving as a counsel at Kirkland and Ellis in 2009. The law firm secured Epstein his obscenely lenient 2007 non-prosecution deal, which the Justice Department is now reviewing. In July, Barr the son refused to recuse himself from the ongoing Epstein investigation.
Barr was ousted shortly before Epstein, 21 and without a college degree, showed up for his first day of work teaching math and physics at the Manhattan’s elite Dalton School in the early 1970s. Barr announced his resignation soon after, in February 1974: “He was disliked by the faculty, he was highly controversial, he hadn’t raised much money, he was very conservative,” said the board’s chairman. Barr’s leadership style was described as “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” at the time. Memorably, several former students told the New York Times that Epstein was overly familiar with teenage girls at the school. Donald’s son William would intersect with Epstein’s orbit while serving as a counsel at Kirkland and Ellis in 2009. The law firm secured Epstein his obscenely lenient 2007 non-prosecution deal, which the Justice Department is now reviewing. In July, Barr the son refused to recuse himself from the ongoing Epstein investigation.
Blaine, David: Magician.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.Blaine put on a private show for Epstein’s dinner guests in 2003, doing card tricks for the likes of Sergey Brin, Mort Zuckerman, and Bill Clinton aide Doug Band. The dinner was organized by Ghislaine Maxwell and included a group of young women who were introduced as Victoria’s Secret models.
Blair, Tony: Former British prime minister.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Bloomberg, Michael: Billionaire, private-jet enthusiast, former mayor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.Blaine put on a private show for Epstein’s dinner guests in 2003, doing card tricks for the likes of Sergey Brin, Mort Zuckerman, and Bill Clinton aide Doug Band. The dinner was organized by Ghislaine Maxwell and included a group of young women who were introduced as Victoria’s Secret models.
Blair, Tony: Former British prime minister.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Bloomberg, Michael: Billionaire, private-jet enthusiast, former mayor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Clinton, Bill: President and problem.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.As soon as the Epstein news broke two weeks ago, the taunting and tallying began, suffocating in its familiarity. First were the jeering reminders, as if we didn’t know it in our every molecule: It wasn’t just Donald Trump who’d be ensnared in this stygian nightmare of underage sexual assault and trafficking of girls, it was Bill Clinton, who’d been a friend and repeat flier on Epstein’s plane. Then came the numbers, the attempts to quantify the nature of the Clinton-Epstein relationship. Clinton issued a statement toting up four plane trips, one Epstein meeting in Clinton’s Harlem office, one visit to Epstein’s home, and zero trips to his island. Meanwhile, reporters recalled that Gawker’s published flight logs had tallied 12 separate plane legs and that Epstein had more than 20 numbers and email addresses for Clinton and one signed photo of him in his home, along with one of Woody Allen and one of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
All of this was presented as if these numbers could clarify some exact science of guilt or complicity. The reality is: Yes, Clinton was grimy and had grimy friends, and, more broadly, this is how powerful men have behaved toward women and one another. Yes, we know it’s dirty and mean and exhausting and true.
We know, of course, because the shadow of Clinton’s sexual history and his associations with other men who have terrible legacies of sexually inappropriate-to-criminal behavior have for decades hung like a greasy and unscrubbable film over the Democratic Party he once led. Clinton palled around not just with Epstein but with Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein and Trump himself.
They hung out together and flew together and went to each other’s offices and visited each other’s homes and appeared on each other’s TV shows and had each other’s phone numbers and attended each other’s weddings and created a circle of money and protection. The prosecutorial and defensive math — the haggling over flights and phone numbers — is just used to complicate this basic reality.
Those on the left have been going over how we’re supposed to feel about him for decades, but in the arguing about it, we have been asked to focus again and again on Clinton and his dick and what he did or didn’t do with it. The questions we’ve asked ourselves and one another have become defining.
Are we morally compromised in our defense of him or sexually uptight in our condemnation? Are we shills for having not believed he should have resigned, or doing the bidding of a vindictive right wing if we say that, in retrospect, he probably should have?
Meanwhile, how much energy and time have been spent circling round this man and how we’ve felt about him, when in fact his behaviors were symptomatic of far broader and more damaging assumptions about men, power, and access to — as Trump has so memorably voiced it — pussies?
After all, Clinton was elected president during a period that may turn out to be an aberration, just as the kinds of dominating, sexually aggressive behaviors that had been norms for his West Wing predecessors had become officially unacceptable, and 24 years before those behaviors would again become a presidential norm. So yes, Clinton got in trouble, yet still managed to sail out of office beloved by many, his reputation as the Big Dog mostly only enhanced by revelations of his exploits.
But the election of Trump over Clinton’s wife, and the broad conversation around sexual assault and harassment that has erupted in its wake, has recast his behavior more profoundly. The buffoonery, the smallness and tantrums of Trump, has helped make clear what always should have been: that the out-of-control behavior toward women by powerful men, the lack of self-control or amount of self-regard that undergirded their reckless treatment of women, spoke not of virility or authority but of their immaturity. And the people who have paid the biggest price for these men’s fixation on sex as a measure of manhood have, of course, not been the men themselves.
In Clinton’s case, it has been Monica Lewinsky, whose life and name became defined by her relationship to him. It has been his wife, Hillary, who, in addition to having been celebrated and pilloried for her defense of her husband, also had to conduct one of her three historic presidential debates with women who’d accused him of sexual misconduct sitting in the audience, invited there by her opponent as props to unsettle and disempower her. It has been decades of left feminist women who have had Clinton’s misdeeds thrown in our faces as proof of our own hypocrisy.
I try sometimes to imagine a contemporary Democratic Party without Bill Clinton in its recent past — yes, of course, from a policy perspective, but also simply from a personal one. What if so much energy had not been eaten up by his colleagues, by his wife, by feminists, by his supporters and friends and critics, all of whom had to dance around him, explain their associations with him, or carefully lay out their objections to him without coming off as frigid reactionaries?
What else might we have done with our politics had we not been worrying about Clinton and his grubby buddies? What further power have they taken from us? —Rebecca Traister
Clinton, Chelsea: First Daughter.
Ghislaine Maxwell attended her wedding after Epstein had first been charged. This was shortly after she skipped a deposition for the Epstein case, claiming she needed to return to the U.K. to be with her deathly ill mother.
Coleridge, Nicholas: Chairman of Condé Nast Britain.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Collins, Phil: Musician.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Copperfield, David: Magician.
According to a message-pad entry dated January 27, 2005, at 3:55 p.m., Copperfield rang Epstein’s line while he was out. The handwritten entry reads, “Magic David called.”
Couric, Katie: Journalist.
Among those who attended a dinner at Epstein’s townhouse for Prince Andrew in 2010.
Cosby, Bill: Comedian, convicted rapist.
Lived across the street from Epstein in Manhattan.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.As soon as the Epstein news broke two weeks ago, the taunting and tallying began, suffocating in its familiarity. First were the jeering reminders, as if we didn’t know it in our every molecule: It wasn’t just Donald Trump who’d be ensnared in this stygian nightmare of underage sexual assault and trafficking of girls, it was Bill Clinton, who’d been a friend and repeat flier on Epstein’s plane. Then came the numbers, the attempts to quantify the nature of the Clinton-Epstein relationship. Clinton issued a statement toting up four plane trips, one Epstein meeting in Clinton’s Harlem office, one visit to Epstein’s home, and zero trips to his island. Meanwhile, reporters recalled that Gawker’s published flight logs had tallied 12 separate plane legs and that Epstein had more than 20 numbers and email addresses for Clinton and one signed photo of him in his home, along with one of Woody Allen and one of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
All of this was presented as if these numbers could clarify some exact science of guilt or complicity. The reality is: Yes, Clinton was grimy and had grimy friends, and, more broadly, this is how powerful men have behaved toward women and one another. Yes, we know it’s dirty and mean and exhausting and true.
We know, of course, because the shadow of Clinton’s sexual history and his associations with other men who have terrible legacies of sexually inappropriate-to-criminal behavior have for decades hung like a greasy and unscrubbable film over the Democratic Party he once led. Clinton palled around not just with Epstein but with Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein and Trump himself.
They hung out together and flew together and went to each other’s offices and visited each other’s homes and appeared on each other’s TV shows and had each other’s phone numbers and attended each other’s weddings and created a circle of money and protection. The prosecutorial and defensive math — the haggling over flights and phone numbers — is just used to complicate this basic reality.
Those on the left have been going over how we’re supposed to feel about him for decades, but in the arguing about it, we have been asked to focus again and again on Clinton and his dick and what he did or didn’t do with it. The questions we’ve asked ourselves and one another have become defining.
Are we morally compromised in our defense of him or sexually uptight in our condemnation? Are we shills for having not believed he should have resigned, or doing the bidding of a vindictive right wing if we say that, in retrospect, he probably should have?
Meanwhile, how much energy and time have been spent circling round this man and how we’ve felt about him, when in fact his behaviors were symptomatic of far broader and more damaging assumptions about men, power, and access to — as Trump has so memorably voiced it — pussies?
After all, Clinton was elected president during a period that may turn out to be an aberration, just as the kinds of dominating, sexually aggressive behaviors that had been norms for his West Wing predecessors had become officially unacceptable, and 24 years before those behaviors would again become a presidential norm. So yes, Clinton got in trouble, yet still managed to sail out of office beloved by many, his reputation as the Big Dog mostly only enhanced by revelations of his exploits.
But the election of Trump over Clinton’s wife, and the broad conversation around sexual assault and harassment that has erupted in its wake, has recast his behavior more profoundly. The buffoonery, the smallness and tantrums of Trump, has helped make clear what always should have been: that the out-of-control behavior toward women by powerful men, the lack of self-control or amount of self-regard that undergirded their reckless treatment of women, spoke not of virility or authority but of their immaturity. And the people who have paid the biggest price for these men’s fixation on sex as a measure of manhood have, of course, not been the men themselves.
In Clinton’s case, it has been Monica Lewinsky, whose life and name became defined by her relationship to him. It has been his wife, Hillary, who, in addition to having been celebrated and pilloried for her defense of her husband, also had to conduct one of her three historic presidential debates with women who’d accused him of sexual misconduct sitting in the audience, invited there by her opponent as props to unsettle and disempower her. It has been decades of left feminist women who have had Clinton’s misdeeds thrown in our faces as proof of our own hypocrisy.
I try sometimes to imagine a contemporary Democratic Party without Bill Clinton in its recent past — yes, of course, from a policy perspective, but also simply from a personal one. What if so much energy had not been eaten up by his colleagues, by his wife, by feminists, by his supporters and friends and critics, all of whom had to dance around him, explain their associations with him, or carefully lay out their objections to him without coming off as frigid reactionaries?
What else might we have done with our politics had we not been worrying about Clinton and his grubby buddies? What further power have they taken from us? —Rebecca Traister
Clinton, Chelsea: First Daughter.
Ghislaine Maxwell attended her wedding after Epstein had first been charged. This was shortly after she skipped a deposition for the Epstein case, claiming she needed to return to the U.K. to be with her deathly ill mother.
Coleridge, Nicholas: Chairman of Condé Nast Britain.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Collins, Phil: Musician.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Copperfield, David: Magician.
According to a message-pad entry dated January 27, 2005, at 3:55 p.m., Copperfield rang Epstein’s line while he was out. The handwritten entry reads, “Magic David called.”
Couric, Katie: Journalist.
Among those who attended a dinner at Epstein’s townhouse for Prince Andrew in 2010.
Cosby, Bill: Comedian, convicted rapist.
Lived across the street from Epstein in Manhattan.
Kennedy, Ted: Senator.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Epstein had his home number.
Kent, Geoffrey: High-end safari entrepreneur.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Kerry, John: Secretary of State.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
The seven numbers listed for Kerry in Epstein’s address book include the direct line to his presidential campaign.
Khashoggi, Adnan: Saudi Arabian man of mystery.
To bolster their argument that private-jet owner Epstein is a massive flight risk, SDNY prosecutors produced an expired Austrian passport under an alias that listed Saudi Arabia as Epstein’s primary country of residence. His lawyers claim the fake ID was for the “personal protection” of “an affluent member of the Jewish faith” traveling in the Middle East, but it could also point to one of his more secretive income sources.
According to his former friend the journalist Jesse Kornbluth, in the mid-1980s Epstein said he “worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators” and occasionally subcontracted to those same autocrats to “help them hide their stolen money.” A source who spoke with journalist Vicky Ward said one of Epstein’s clients was the late Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal who helped smuggle cash for the Marcos family out of the Philippines. In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland for concealing assets and later faced fraud and racketeering charges in the U.S. (He was later acquitted.) That year, he sold his 282-foot yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, who soon flipped it to Donald Trump. —Matt Stieb
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Epstein had his home number.
Kent, Geoffrey: High-end safari entrepreneur.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Kerry, John: Secretary of State.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
The seven numbers listed for Kerry in Epstein’s address book include the direct line to his presidential campaign.
Khashoggi, Adnan: Saudi Arabian man of mystery.
To bolster their argument that private-jet owner Epstein is a massive flight risk, SDNY prosecutors produced an expired Austrian passport under an alias that listed Saudi Arabia as Epstein’s primary country of residence. His lawyers claim the fake ID was for the “personal protection” of “an affluent member of the Jewish faith” traveling in the Middle East, but it could also point to one of his more secretive income sources.
According to his former friend the journalist Jesse Kornbluth, in the mid-1980s Epstein said he “worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators” and occasionally subcontracted to those same autocrats to “help them hide their stolen money.” A source who spoke with journalist Vicky Ward said one of Epstein’s clients was the late Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal who helped smuggle cash for the Marcos family out of the Philippines. In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland for concealing assets and later faced fraud and racketeering charges in the U.S. (He was later acquitted.) That year, he sold his 282-foot yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, who soon flipped it to Donald Trump. —Matt Stieb
Kissinger, Henry: Secretary of State and national-security adviser.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
One of the century’s most notorious practitioners of cutthroat realpolitik, Kissinger served on the Council on Foreign Relations with Epstein.
Kissinger, Nancy: Philanthropist.
Epstein and Kissinger served on the Rockefeller University board alongside Nobel laureate Joseph Goldstein, socialite Brooke Astor, and Texas billionaire Robert Bass.
Kleman, Leah: Art dealer.
She told Vanity Fairin 2003 that Epstein lived like a “modern maharaja” and described his haggling over art prices as “something like a scene out of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.”
Koch, David: Plutocrat.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Kosslyn, Stephen: Harvard psychologist.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
“He is amazing,” Kosslyn said of Epstein in a 2002 New York profile. “Like a honeybee — he talks to all these different people and cross-pollinates. Just two months ago, I was talking to him about a new alternative to evolutionary psychology. He got excited and sent me a check.”
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
One of the century’s most notorious practitioners of cutthroat realpolitik, Kissinger served on the Council on Foreign Relations with Epstein.
Kissinger, Nancy: Philanthropist.
Epstein and Kissinger served on the Rockefeller University board alongside Nobel laureate Joseph Goldstein, socialite Brooke Astor, and Texas billionaire Robert Bass.
Kleman, Leah: Art dealer.
She told Vanity Fairin 2003 that Epstein lived like a “modern maharaja” and described his haggling over art prices as “something like a scene out of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.”
Koch, David: Plutocrat.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Kosslyn, Stephen: Harvard psychologist.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
“He is amazing,” Kosslyn said of Epstein in a 2002 New York profile. “Like a honeybee — he talks to all these different people and cross-pollinates. Just two months ago, I was talking to him about a new alternative to evolutionary psychology. He got excited and sent me a check.”
Love, Courtney: Singer.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Maxwell, Ghislaine: Epstein’s ex turned right-hand woman.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
With Ghislaine Maxwell at Cipriani Wall Street in 2005. Photo: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
She was there at the socialites’ dos: Cornelia Guest’s holiday bash, Georgette Mosbacher’s party for the writer Michael Gross. At real-estate mogul Aby Rosen’s birthday, at Harvey Weinstein’s cocktail party. At film screenings and store openings and fashion shows, at Tina Brown’s home and Arianna Huffington’s and the Time 100 Gala. For years, though not lately, Maxwell was a constant on the New York social scene in its most Upper East iteration. She was a friend of everyone, if an intimate of few.
Maxwell seemed to know many rich and powerful men — articles mention her dining with Bill Clinton, photos show her partying with Elon Musk and deep in conversation with Stephen Schwarzman — but her most durable connection has been with Epstein. She was, as he once put it, his “best friend.” Maxwell, 57, has been accused in civil suits of serving as his procuress, luring women and girls into Epstein’s web.
In court documents, Epstein’s accusers allege that Maxwell — who denies all and has never been criminally charged — acted as a recruiter, an instructor, and in some cases a participant in the abuse he practiced. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims Maxwell recruited her on behalf of Epstein when Giuffre was a 16-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, where Epstein has a home, said much of her grooming came from Maxwell. “The training started immediately,” Giuffre said in a video interview with the Miami Herald. “It was everything down to how to give a blow job, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants.”
“Every pretty girl in New York, in those days, Ghislaine would invite to Jeffrey’s,” said Euan Rellie, an investment banker and social fixture who has known Maxwell for years and who, along with his wife, the author and socialite Lucy Sykes, was a fellow guest at a dinner for Prince Andrew at Epstein’s townhouse in the early aughts. Maxwell and Epstein had been attached, but she was “now an employee of his, as I understood it,” Rellie said. “Her job was to jazz up his social life by getting fashionable young women to show up.” He presumed the young women to be in their 20s.
Tabloid reports on Maxwell claim she managed Epstein’s properties from his office on Madison Avenue, which appeared in public records for many years as one of Maxwell’s addresses. Epstein, for his part, said she wasn’t on the payroll, yet she did errands for him: hunted for a yoga teacher in California and acted as intermediary when he wanted to give his friend the billionaire Les Wexner a family portrait painted by Nelson Shanks.
She was said to be wickedly funny and unusually knowledgeable, glamorous, and, on top of that, British. (“I think New Yorkers are charmed by that high-end English accent,” photographer Patrick McMullan said.)
What’s more, she was exotic. She had explored the seas and could pilot a helicopter, or maybe a submarine, one acquaintance thought — a MacGyver of the gala circuit.
Maxwell arrived in New York in the early ’90s, on the cusp of her 30th birthday. English-born and poshly educated, she was the favorite daughter of Robert Maxwell, the English media mogul, whose holdings included newspapers, notably the tabloid Daily Mirror in London, and the Macmillan publishing house in the U.S. Ghislaine had founded a social club for women in London and worked for another of her father’s papers, and, according to the New York Post, she came as his emissary to American society when he bought the New York Daily News in 1991.
But that same year, Robert was found dead — by suicide, murder, or accident (the official inquest’s ruling, though opinions vary) — in the Atlantic, off the Canary Islands. (He was last seen on the deck of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.) Soon after, he was discovered to have plundered the pension funds of the Mirrorto shore up his floundering empire. Ghislaine was reported to have an income for life from a family trust, but at £80,000 a year, it would hardly be enough to sustain a high-flying lifestyle.
The meet-cute of Epstein and Maxwell in New York is unclear, and neither has historically gone into any great detail. By 1992, they were already linked, showing up at a Mar-a-Lago party with each other in Palm Beach, where Trump and Epstein ogled women together in front of NBC cameras. Suffice it to say they were romantically linked and then platonically linked. (Epstein told people his former paramours move “up, not down,” to friend status.)
For a woman seen everywhere about town, she is curiously silent in the press, except where ocean conservation is concerned. In 2008, she hosted a cocktail party for the board of the nonprofit Oceana at her townhouse on East 65th Street. And by 2012, she had launched the TerraMar Project, a conservation nonprofit of her own, of which, according to tax filings, she was president but from which she drew no salary. She gave a ted Talk about its work and talked it up at the U.N. and in the press, which credited TerraMar as her “brainchild.”
From the New York social world, she has vanished. “I have not seen her in a zillion years,” one acquaintance said. The party photos dried up in 2016. Her 65th Street townhouse was sold for just over $15 million that year. Where is she now? One social-watcher guessed the islands; others think Europe. She incorporated a company — Ellmax, a play on her name — in the U.K., and TerraMar’s last two years of tax filings listed the address of an accounting firm near Boston. (An executive there declined to provide any forwarding information.)
“She seemed like a woman who didn’t have any real job, didn’t have any real boyfriend, had lost her dad,” Rellie said of his impressions of her when they’d met. “A woman adrift who was clinging on to whatever she could find.” —Matthew Schneier
Read More: The Socialite on Epstein’s Arm
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Maxwell, Ghislaine: Epstein’s ex turned right-hand woman.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
With Ghislaine Maxwell at Cipriani Wall Street in 2005. Photo: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
She was there at the socialites’ dos: Cornelia Guest’s holiday bash, Georgette Mosbacher’s party for the writer Michael Gross. At real-estate mogul Aby Rosen’s birthday, at Harvey Weinstein’s cocktail party. At film screenings and store openings and fashion shows, at Tina Brown’s home and Arianna Huffington’s and the Time 100 Gala. For years, though not lately, Maxwell was a constant on the New York social scene in its most Upper East iteration. She was a friend of everyone, if an intimate of few.
Maxwell seemed to know many rich and powerful men — articles mention her dining with Bill Clinton, photos show her partying with Elon Musk and deep in conversation with Stephen Schwarzman — but her most durable connection has been with Epstein. She was, as he once put it, his “best friend.” Maxwell, 57, has been accused in civil suits of serving as his procuress, luring women and girls into Epstein’s web.
In court documents, Epstein’s accusers allege that Maxwell — who denies all and has never been criminally charged — acted as a recruiter, an instructor, and in some cases a participant in the abuse he practiced. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims Maxwell recruited her on behalf of Epstein when Giuffre was a 16-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, where Epstein has a home, said much of her grooming came from Maxwell. “The training started immediately,” Giuffre said in a video interview with the Miami Herald. “It was everything down to how to give a blow job, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants.”
“Every pretty girl in New York, in those days, Ghislaine would invite to Jeffrey’s,” said Euan Rellie, an investment banker and social fixture who has known Maxwell for years and who, along with his wife, the author and socialite Lucy Sykes, was a fellow guest at a dinner for Prince Andrew at Epstein’s townhouse in the early aughts. Maxwell and Epstein had been attached, but she was “now an employee of his, as I understood it,” Rellie said. “Her job was to jazz up his social life by getting fashionable young women to show up.” He presumed the young women to be in their 20s.
Tabloid reports on Maxwell claim she managed Epstein’s properties from his office on Madison Avenue, which appeared in public records for many years as one of Maxwell’s addresses. Epstein, for his part, said she wasn’t on the payroll, yet she did errands for him: hunted for a yoga teacher in California and acted as intermediary when he wanted to give his friend the billionaire Les Wexner a family portrait painted by Nelson Shanks.
She was said to be wickedly funny and unusually knowledgeable, glamorous, and, on top of that, British. (“I think New Yorkers are charmed by that high-end English accent,” photographer Patrick McMullan said.)
What’s more, she was exotic. She had explored the seas and could pilot a helicopter, or maybe a submarine, one acquaintance thought — a MacGyver of the gala circuit.
Maxwell arrived in New York in the early ’90s, on the cusp of her 30th birthday. English-born and poshly educated, she was the favorite daughter of Robert Maxwell, the English media mogul, whose holdings included newspapers, notably the tabloid Daily Mirror in London, and the Macmillan publishing house in the U.S. Ghislaine had founded a social club for women in London and worked for another of her father’s papers, and, according to the New York Post, she came as his emissary to American society when he bought the New York Daily News in 1991.
But that same year, Robert was found dead — by suicide, murder, or accident (the official inquest’s ruling, though opinions vary) — in the Atlantic, off the Canary Islands. (He was last seen on the deck of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.) Soon after, he was discovered to have plundered the pension funds of the Mirrorto shore up his floundering empire. Ghislaine was reported to have an income for life from a family trust, but at £80,000 a year, it would hardly be enough to sustain a high-flying lifestyle.
The meet-cute of Epstein and Maxwell in New York is unclear, and neither has historically gone into any great detail. By 1992, they were already linked, showing up at a Mar-a-Lago party with each other in Palm Beach, where Trump and Epstein ogled women together in front of NBC cameras. Suffice it to say they were romantically linked and then platonically linked. (Epstein told people his former paramours move “up, not down,” to friend status.)
For a woman seen everywhere about town, she is curiously silent in the press, except where ocean conservation is concerned. In 2008, she hosted a cocktail party for the board of the nonprofit Oceana at her townhouse on East 65th Street. And by 2012, she had launched the TerraMar Project, a conservation nonprofit of her own, of which, according to tax filings, she was president but from which she drew no salary. She gave a ted Talk about its work and talked it up at the U.N. and in the press, which credited TerraMar as her “brainchild.”
From the New York social world, she has vanished. “I have not seen her in a zillion years,” one acquaintance said. The party photos dried up in 2016. Her 65th Street townhouse was sold for just over $15 million that year. Where is she now? One social-watcher guessed the islands; others think Europe. She incorporated a company — Ellmax, a play on her name — in the U.K., and TerraMar’s last two years of tax filings listed the address of an accounting firm near Boston. (An executive there declined to provide any forwarding information.)
“She seemed like a woman who didn’t have any real job, didn’t have any real boyfriend, had lost her dad,” Rellie said of his impressions of her when they’d met. “A woman adrift who was clinging on to whatever she could find.” —Matthew Schneier
Read More: The Socialite on Epstein’s Arm
Monckton, Rosa: Former CEO of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Epstein’s “close friend since the early 1980s,” according to the 2003 profile of Epstein written by Vicky Ward in Vanity Fair: “Monckton recalls Epstein telling her that her daughter, Domenica, who suffers from Down syndrome, needed the sun, and that Rosa should feel free to bring her to his house in Palm Beach anytime.”
Murdoch, Rupert: Media mogul.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Murdoch has two numbers — one New York, one California — listed in the address book.
Myhrvold, Nathan: Businessman.
The legendary patent troll turned impresario of molecular gastronomy dined at Epstein’s home.
Pagano, Joe: Venture capitalist.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.The chief executive, secretary and treasurer, principal accounting officer, and principal financial officer of an insecticide-research company, Pagano even visited Epstein in jail.
Pastrana Arango, Andrés: Former Colombian president.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Filed in the address book under “ex president of Colu.”
Perelman, Ronald: Revlon chairman.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
The billionaire invited 14 guests, including Epstein, Jimmy Buffett, and DNC co-chair Don Fowler, to his Palm Beach home for a Bill Clinton fund-raiser in 1995.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Epstein’s “close friend since the early 1980s,” according to the 2003 profile of Epstein written by Vicky Ward in Vanity Fair: “Monckton recalls Epstein telling her that her daughter, Domenica, who suffers from Down syndrome, needed the sun, and that Rosa should feel free to bring her to his house in Palm Beach anytime.”
Murdoch, Rupert: Media mogul.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Murdoch has two numbers — one New York, one California — listed in the address book.
Myhrvold, Nathan: Businessman.
The legendary patent troll turned impresario of molecular gastronomy dined at Epstein’s home.
Pagano, Joe: Venture capitalist.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.The chief executive, secretary and treasurer, principal accounting officer, and principal financial officer of an insecticide-research company, Pagano even visited Epstein in jail.
Pastrana Arango, Andrés: Former Colombian president.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Filed in the address book under “ex president of Colu.”
Perelman, Ronald: Revlon chairman.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
The billionaire invited 14 guests, including Epstein, Jimmy Buffett, and DNC co-chair Don Fowler, to his Palm Beach home for a Bill Clinton fund-raiser in 1995.
Pinker, Steven: The linguist who became a celebrity optimist.
With Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker. Photo: via Facebook
Pinker is one of the famous intellectuals most often linked to Epstein, but he says he flew on Epstein’s private plane only once in 2002 and that he was involuntarily placed next to him for a picture at Lawrence Krauss’s Origins Project’s annual conference in 2014: “If I had more wherewithal, I would not have indulged my friend in sitting with him. Despite what various friends and colleagues all said about what a genius he was, I found him tedious and distasteful. Even before I knew about the criminality, I found it irritating to talk to him, all the more so because the reason he was in the conversation was because he had given money to these various projects. He likes schmoozing with smart and intellectual people, but he couldn’t really or had very little interest in exploring an issue. He’d wisecrack, change subjects, or get bored after a few seconds. He’s a kibbutzer more than a serious intellectual.” Nevertheless, Pinker supplied some linguistic expertise that his friend Alan Dershowitz used to defend Epstein during the 2008 trial. —Matt Stieb
Pinto, Alberto: Interior designer for the gold-leaf life.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Forget for a moment the mural featuring Epstein in the middle of a prison yard complete with guards and barbed wire. Let’s also forget the life-size doll hanging from a chandelier, and the chess set with figures of his staff as pieces to play with. Let’s instead focus on the very lush Euro-Orientalist décor of Epstein’s 21,000-square-foot seven-story Beaux-Arts mansion, decorated by none other than the late great Alberto Pinto, one of the world’s top prestige interior designers. His clientele included princes, moguls, and wannabe princes, as captains of industry so frequently are, and Epstein clearly aspired to that provenance and history. He flew Pinto on his private plane, as he did other architects and designers (Jean-Michel Gathy, Ricardo Legorreta, and Peter Marino are also listed in Epstein’s flight logs), and lived like a modern pasha in rooms lavished with money that bought custom-tooled gold leather walls (at least they were made to look like tooled-leather walls) and leopard-print upholstered armchairs in the dining room that appear to be covered in silk velvet. It was exactly the sort of project Pinto relished, flexing all the artisanal muscle that a designer of his stature can exercise when cushioning his client’s home. —Wendy Goodman
With Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker. Photo: via Facebook
Pinker is one of the famous intellectuals most often linked to Epstein, but he says he flew on Epstein’s private plane only once in 2002 and that he was involuntarily placed next to him for a picture at Lawrence Krauss’s Origins Project’s annual conference in 2014: “If I had more wherewithal, I would not have indulged my friend in sitting with him. Despite what various friends and colleagues all said about what a genius he was, I found him tedious and distasteful. Even before I knew about the criminality, I found it irritating to talk to him, all the more so because the reason he was in the conversation was because he had given money to these various projects. He likes schmoozing with smart and intellectual people, but he couldn’t really or had very little interest in exploring an issue. He’d wisecrack, change subjects, or get bored after a few seconds. He’s a kibbutzer more than a serious intellectual.” Nevertheless, Pinker supplied some linguistic expertise that his friend Alan Dershowitz used to defend Epstein during the 2008 trial. —Matt Stieb
Pinto, Alberto: Interior designer for the gold-leaf life.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Forget for a moment the mural featuring Epstein in the middle of a prison yard complete with guards and barbed wire. Let’s also forget the life-size doll hanging from a chandelier, and the chess set with figures of his staff as pieces to play with. Let’s instead focus on the very lush Euro-Orientalist décor of Epstein’s 21,000-square-foot seven-story Beaux-Arts mansion, decorated by none other than the late great Alberto Pinto, one of the world’s top prestige interior designers. His clientele included princes, moguls, and wannabe princes, as captains of industry so frequently are, and Epstein clearly aspired to that provenance and history. He flew Pinto on his private plane, as he did other architects and designers (Jean-Michel Gathy, Ricardo Legorreta, and Peter Marino are also listed in Epstein’s flight logs), and lived like a modern pasha in rooms lavished with money that bought custom-tooled gold leather walls (at least they were made to look like tooled-leather walls) and leopard-print upholstered armchairs in the dining room that appear to be covered in silk velvet. It was exactly the sort of project Pinto relished, flexing all the artisanal muscle that a designer of his stature can exercise when cushioning his client’s home. —Wendy Goodman
Richardson, Bill: Former New Mexico governor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Zorro Ranch, Epstein’s New Mexico property. Photo: Reuters/REUTERS
Epstein donated $50,000 to each of his gubernatorial campaigns. A spokeswoman for Richardson told the Albuquerque Journal that Richardson recalls visiting Epstein’s New Mexico ranch only once, during his first run for governor in 2002.
Riggio, Steve: Barnes & Noble CEO.
Photographed with Epstein at the 1999 Edge Foundation Billionaires’ Dinner, and twice met him at the TED conference.
Rivers, Joan: TV host, actress, and comedian.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Rose, Charlie: Television journalist.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
You learn things answering phones, and in the spring of 2005, answering Charlie Rose’s phone at his PBS show, you would learn that his friend Jeffrey Epstein had some recommendations to make for whom Rose ought to hire as his next assistant. Written call logs from 2005 and 2006 show Epstein and his own assistant calling dozens of times, making plans for lunch and tea in Manhattan or to try to meet up in Paris. Epstein also called with a total of five women’s names and phone numbers. One woman was described as “world’s most perfect assistant she used to work for Harvey Weinstein he’s lucky if he can get her.” Another entry reads, “Jeffrey Epstein wants to talk to you before you call these two girls.” A fourth woman shows up on the manifests of Epstein’s jet, including on Bill Clinton’s trip across Africa, and wound up working at the Clinton Foundation. Two former staffers remember another Epstein referral, a young woman not mentioned in the logs, who interned at the show. In all, Rose hired three (“Jeffrey Epstein from time to time recommended various candidates for open positions at the Charlie Rose Show,” Rose’s representative said in a statement, but said the ex-host only learned about Epstein’s alleged abuse years later, when he pleaded guilty in Florida). When I called one of these women recently, she was stunned to learn she was one of many women Epstein recommended for the job. “I was being offered up for abuse,” said the woman, who was 22 at the time she worked for Rose. It helped her understand not only how her boss Rose — whom in 2017 she would accuse, along with 34 other adult women, of sexual harassment — had treated her, but also how the rest of the staff had seen her. And it helped her understand a grim version of networking among powerful men. —Irin Carmon
Sacco, Amy: Nightlife impresario.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
The undisputed club queen of aughts New York, Sacco ran Lot 61 in Chelsea, which was famous for using fresh fruit in its drinks, and later Bungalow 8, which prided itself on discretion, the kind of place where celebrities could behave badly and not have to worry about appearing in “Page Six.” Sacco was a pioneer of marrying nightlife with concierge-style indulgences for the very rich: Her staff would get you whatever you needed: pizza delivery, peanut M&M’s, a private flight to Miami leaving from Teterboro as soon as you could get there.
Schank, Roger: Chief learning officer at Trump University.
Visited Epstein in prison in 2008.
Schumer, Chuck: New York’s senior senator.
One of many politicians to receive donations from Epstein over the years. Epstein gave bipartisanly but not equally: Between 1990 and 2004, he gave more than $139,000 to Democrats and just over $18,000 to Republicans. Epstein also gave to a handful of politicians in New Mexico, where he’d purchase the Zorro Ranch from former governor Bruce King and where he was not required to register as a sex offender. In recent weeks, politicians including Schumer decided to donate an equal amount to charity.
Shriver, Maria: Journalist and former First Lady of California.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Two California numbers are listed in the address book.
Siegal, Peggy: Elite New York’s glue.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
A brazen and relentless publicist of the old school, Siegal understands one thing well: “Bringing people together. Everyone needs to feel that they belong.” At least a certain kind of accomplished person, no matter, frankly, how they went about getting there (who was she to judge?). Known for her movie premieres and other guest-list-driven social events, she bragged that she “ruined the Hamptons” to Vanity Fair in a profile back in 1996.
Publicity-party invites are an amoral game, driven by status and FOMO. Like everyone, she worked with Harvey Weinstein when he was an Oscar machine, the toast of the town. So you can’t blame Siegal for including someone who already knew all the boldface power people. In 2008, in the teeth of the accusations against Epstein, he was spotted by a New York party reporter, “unshaven, smiling that feline-monkey grin,” at the Siegal-engineered screening of the HBO film Bernard and Doris at the Time Warner Center. But after prison, apparently Epstein needed her more than ever: In a Times story on how Manhattan’s A-list refused to shun him, Siegal in particular was willing to help him (for free, apparently), “using her gate-keeping powers to usher Mr. Epstein, a friend, into screenings and events.” In 2010, she threw a dinner party at his Upper East Side townhouse for Prince Andrew, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, and Woody Allen. She and Epstein might have had other reasons to get along: Siegal, who has just turned 72, is a self-invention as well, without a particularly pedigreed background. Also notable is the fact that, as she told Vanity Fair in 2012, “my favorite way to travel” to Cannes is “on a friend’s G5 from Teterboro to Nice.” —Carl Swanson
Slater, Rodney: Secretary of Transportation under Bill Clinton.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.Flight logs record Slater taking a flight from Ghana to Nigeria in September 2002.
Soros, Peter: Nephew of George Soros.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Conspiracy theorists looking through Epstein’s black book will be disappointed that George Soros never appears — but they can find Peter.
Spacey, Kevin: Actor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Flew with Bill Clinton to Africa (and, according to flight logs, the Azores) on Epstein’s plane.
Spector, Warren: Bear Stearns executive.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.
Stanburry, Caroline: Socialite.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Went on to star on Bravo’s Ladies of London.
Starr, Kenneth: Former United States solicitor general.
Obviously, lawyers do not share guilt for their clients’ crimes. But it’s striking that Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”
It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo. —Jonathan Chait
Stephanopoulos, George: Former White House communications director.
Attended a dinner at Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse for Prince Andrew in 2010. “That dinner was the first and last time I’ve seen him,” Stephanopoulos said recently. “It was a mistake to go.”
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Zorro Ranch, Epstein’s New Mexico property. Photo: Reuters/REUTERS
Epstein donated $50,000 to each of his gubernatorial campaigns. A spokeswoman for Richardson told the Albuquerque Journal that Richardson recalls visiting Epstein’s New Mexico ranch only once, during his first run for governor in 2002.
Riggio, Steve: Barnes & Noble CEO.
Photographed with Epstein at the 1999 Edge Foundation Billionaires’ Dinner, and twice met him at the TED conference.
Rivers, Joan: TV host, actress, and comedian.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Rose, Charlie: Television journalist.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
You learn things answering phones, and in the spring of 2005, answering Charlie Rose’s phone at his PBS show, you would learn that his friend Jeffrey Epstein had some recommendations to make for whom Rose ought to hire as his next assistant. Written call logs from 2005 and 2006 show Epstein and his own assistant calling dozens of times, making plans for lunch and tea in Manhattan or to try to meet up in Paris. Epstein also called with a total of five women’s names and phone numbers. One woman was described as “world’s most perfect assistant she used to work for Harvey Weinstein he’s lucky if he can get her.” Another entry reads, “Jeffrey Epstein wants to talk to you before you call these two girls.” A fourth woman shows up on the manifests of Epstein’s jet, including on Bill Clinton’s trip across Africa, and wound up working at the Clinton Foundation. Two former staffers remember another Epstein referral, a young woman not mentioned in the logs, who interned at the show. In all, Rose hired three (“Jeffrey Epstein from time to time recommended various candidates for open positions at the Charlie Rose Show,” Rose’s representative said in a statement, but said the ex-host only learned about Epstein’s alleged abuse years later, when he pleaded guilty in Florida). When I called one of these women recently, she was stunned to learn she was one of many women Epstein recommended for the job. “I was being offered up for abuse,” said the woman, who was 22 at the time she worked for Rose. It helped her understand not only how her boss Rose — whom in 2017 she would accuse, along with 34 other adult women, of sexual harassment — had treated her, but also how the rest of the staff had seen her. And it helped her understand a grim version of networking among powerful men. —Irin Carmon
Sacco, Amy: Nightlife impresario.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
The undisputed club queen of aughts New York, Sacco ran Lot 61 in Chelsea, which was famous for using fresh fruit in its drinks, and later Bungalow 8, which prided itself on discretion, the kind of place where celebrities could behave badly and not have to worry about appearing in “Page Six.” Sacco was a pioneer of marrying nightlife with concierge-style indulgences for the very rich: Her staff would get you whatever you needed: pizza delivery, peanut M&M’s, a private flight to Miami leaving from Teterboro as soon as you could get there.
Schank, Roger: Chief learning officer at Trump University.
Visited Epstein in prison in 2008.
Schumer, Chuck: New York’s senior senator.
One of many politicians to receive donations from Epstein over the years. Epstein gave bipartisanly but not equally: Between 1990 and 2004, he gave more than $139,000 to Democrats and just over $18,000 to Republicans. Epstein also gave to a handful of politicians in New Mexico, where he’d purchase the Zorro Ranch from former governor Bruce King and where he was not required to register as a sex offender. In recent weeks, politicians including Schumer decided to donate an equal amount to charity.
Shriver, Maria: Journalist and former First Lady of California.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Two California numbers are listed in the address book.
Siegal, Peggy: Elite New York’s glue.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
A brazen and relentless publicist of the old school, Siegal understands one thing well: “Bringing people together. Everyone needs to feel that they belong.” At least a certain kind of accomplished person, no matter, frankly, how they went about getting there (who was she to judge?). Known for her movie premieres and other guest-list-driven social events, she bragged that she “ruined the Hamptons” to Vanity Fair in a profile back in 1996.
Publicity-party invites are an amoral game, driven by status and FOMO. Like everyone, she worked with Harvey Weinstein when he was an Oscar machine, the toast of the town. So you can’t blame Siegal for including someone who already knew all the boldface power people. In 2008, in the teeth of the accusations against Epstein, he was spotted by a New York party reporter, “unshaven, smiling that feline-monkey grin,” at the Siegal-engineered screening of the HBO film Bernard and Doris at the Time Warner Center. But after prison, apparently Epstein needed her more than ever: In a Times story on how Manhattan’s A-list refused to shun him, Siegal in particular was willing to help him (for free, apparently), “using her gate-keeping powers to usher Mr. Epstein, a friend, into screenings and events.” In 2010, she threw a dinner party at his Upper East Side townhouse for Prince Andrew, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, and Woody Allen. She and Epstein might have had other reasons to get along: Siegal, who has just turned 72, is a self-invention as well, without a particularly pedigreed background. Also notable is the fact that, as she told Vanity Fair in 2012, “my favorite way to travel” to Cannes is “on a friend’s G5 from Teterboro to Nice.” —Carl Swanson
Slater, Rodney: Secretary of Transportation under Bill Clinton.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.Flight logs record Slater taking a flight from Ghana to Nigeria in September 2002.
Soros, Peter: Nephew of George Soros.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Conspiracy theorists looking through Epstein’s black book will be disappointed that George Soros never appears — but they can find Peter.
Spacey, Kevin: Actor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Flew with Bill Clinton to Africa (and, according to flight logs, the Azores) on Epstein’s plane.
Spector, Warren: Bear Stearns executive.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.
Stanburry, Caroline: Socialite.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Went on to star on Bravo’s Ladies of London.
Starr, Kenneth: Former United States solicitor general.
Obviously, lawyers do not share guilt for their clients’ crimes. But it’s striking that Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”
It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo. —Jonathan Chait
Stephanopoulos, George: Former White House communications director.
Attended a dinner at Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse for Prince Andrew in 2010. “That dinner was the first and last time I’ve seen him,” Stephanopoulos said recently. “It was a mistake to go.”
Trump, Donald: President and partygoer.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
There it was, yet another tape. This time, the now-president was filmed, in footage dredged up by NBC, in 1992 at Mar-a-Lago, hosting a party attended by a bevy of Buffalo Bills cheerleaders — and Epstein, from whom Trump has tried to distance himself since the arrest. He knew him only like anyone else in Palm Beach knew him, he said recently, although there were several entries for Trump in the black book, including a “direct emergency contact,” and 17 years ago Trump had boasted to this magazine that he’d known him forever and that he was a “terrific guy.”
It’s not just the denial in the face of evidence that, yes, he really did hang out with the guy that makes this set of film so classically Trumpian. The tape distills Trump to a certain essence: In this frame, he dances, snapping his fingers and spinning, surrounded by women — but profoundly alone, backing off and avoiding eye contact the second a woman moves in to dance with him. In another frame, he smiles with self-satisfaction as a crowd of women chants his name. Surrounded by a group of cheerleaders about to pose for a picture, he reaches around the waist of one and pulls her sharply in to him, then briskly cups her behind in a businesslike, joyless fashion while she reaches for her hair to maintain smiling composure. It’s as if he thinks it’s his vaguely grim duty, as an American man playing the campiest possible version of swinging billionaire bachelor, to grab the closest available body part.
And most telling is his sideline locker-room talk with Epstein, whom the camera catches entering the party, greeted warmly by Trump. Like teenagers, they stand at the edges of the dance floor, pointing out the women they like, laughing at private jokes about them, rating them as hot. Here, there is joy. You see in this moment two outer-borough boys who have successfully crashed the Manhattan Establishment, who have boorishly, clumsily used money to get everything they want — but whose desires have never moved beyond an adolescent vision of the world, of women, of men, of the good life, of who merits consideration and who can be used.
In middle age, Trump had enough self-control to understand that his worst instincts were best received by men who were an awful lot like him. Now, as an old man — the oldest teenager ever — Trump has lost even that filter. He’s turned the whole country into his bunga-bunga party, made a Mar-a-Lago of the world stage, and divided us into Epsteins and cheerleaders — either co-conspirators who love the license his immaturity grants or else disposable collateral damage. —Noreen Malone
Read More: NBC Obtained Trump-Epstein Footage After Trump Kissed an Anchor Without Consent
Trump, Ivana: Donald Trump’s first ex-wife.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Trump, Ivanka: Daughter of Donald and Ivana Trump.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Trump, Melania: Wife of Donald Trump.
With Trump, Melania, and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in 2000.Photo: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images
Epstein has reportedly bragged that he’s the one who introduced Melania to her future husband. At the very least, the three have traveled together: She flew with Epstein on then-boyfriend Donald Trump’s plane in 2000.
Read More: Remembering the Time Jeffrey Epstein Rode on Donald Trump’s Plane
Tucker, Chris: Actor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Flew with Bill Clinton to Africa on Epstein’s plane.
Tuttle, Edward: Architect of a conspiratorial fever dream.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.
Aerial detail of “the temple” on “Pedophile Island.” Photo: via Inside Edition
Who built the temple? Tuttle, a designer of luxury resorts by trade, renovated the main compound on Epstein’s 70-acre private island in 2003. Sometime between 2009 and 2013, a “temple” appeared on the island: a large, boxy, blue-and-white-striped structure with a golden dome, surrounded by palm trees. In the days after Epstein’s arrest, the temple became the object of fervent speculation online. It was the kind of irresistible conspiracy-bait that exemplifies the Epstein story: On the one hand, shouldn’t it be enough that a mysteriously wealthy banker with connections to the globe’s most powerful people was apparently operating a child sex-trafficking ring without dabbling in theories about occult island temples? On the other hand, though, once you’ve accepted that, why would occult island temples be so out of the question? On the edges, the Epstein saga could seem less like a news story than like a brutal, unreadable fairy tales. Or maybe it was a desire to take a story about financial power and social privilege colluding to protect a criminal predator and transform it into something more terrible and monumental. After weeks of speculation, the first eyewitness account revealed that what the “temple” contained wasn’t a necromantic shrine but a gym, decorated with a framed photograph of a topless woman. —Max Read
Vance, Cyrus Jr.: Prosecutor in the crosshairs.
There are currently 475 level-three sex offenders registered in New York County, but in 2011, when an attorney from the office of Cy Vance, Manhattan DA, argued that Epstein’s risk level should be reduced, Justice Ruth Pickholz responded, “I have to tell you I am a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this.” Pickholz denied the request — Epstein’s risk assessment put him 20 points above the required threshold for the highest level of offender — and the DA’s office later reversed its request. Though there’s no indication Vance and Epstein were friendly, his office has been criticized previously for declining to pursue sex-crimes charges against Harvey Weinstein that coincided with a donation from his attorneys (though Weinstein has since been charged by Vance’s office) and fraud charges against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. —Irin Carmon
Wachner, Linda: Head of the textile corporation behind Calvin Klein and Speedo.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Wallace, Mike: 60 Minutes journalist.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Walters, Barbara: Broadcast journalist and TV personality.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Weinstein, Bob: Former co-chairman of Miramax Films and the Weinstein Company.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Wexner, Leslie: The money behind the money.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Retailing billionaire Leslie Wexner was Epstein’s only known client, the man who transferred the rights to that famous townhouse to him for free in 2011, years after they were supposed to no longer be in contact. The relationship stretches back to the late 1980s, a time when Wexner’s star was on the rise. A 1985 cover story for New York visited him in Columbus, Ohio, where his retail empire was built. Journalist Julie Baumgold described how he, not unlike Epstein, was a self-made man, addicted to self-improvement, how he didn’t know how to pronounce La Grenouille correctly and wanted to have his picture taken at the Whitney, and noted that “Wexner is what used to be known as a ‘confirmed bachelor.’ ” (He later married and has four children.) Not long after that piece, he was introduced to Epstein, who had left Bear Stearns under a cloud and was broke. He and Wexner hit it off, and Epstein soon began managing Wexner’s finances. Wexner’s credibility lent plausibility to the notion that Epstein managed billions from his Caribbean-island redoubt. Associates of Wexner, who is now worth $6.6 billion, didn’t understand the attraction. Soon after the men began working together, Epstein moved into Wexner’s Upper East Side mansion. Wexner bought the seven-story townhouse in 1989 for $13.2 million but apparently lived there only for a few months. The title was transferred in 2011 to a Virgin Islands entity controlled by Epstein. It is now worth $56 million. —Michelle Celarier and Carl Swanson
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
There it was, yet another tape. This time, the now-president was filmed, in footage dredged up by NBC, in 1992 at Mar-a-Lago, hosting a party attended by a bevy of Buffalo Bills cheerleaders — and Epstein, from whom Trump has tried to distance himself since the arrest. He knew him only like anyone else in Palm Beach knew him, he said recently, although there were several entries for Trump in the black book, including a “direct emergency contact,” and 17 years ago Trump had boasted to this magazine that he’d known him forever and that he was a “terrific guy.”
It’s not just the denial in the face of evidence that, yes, he really did hang out with the guy that makes this set of film so classically Trumpian. The tape distills Trump to a certain essence: In this frame, he dances, snapping his fingers and spinning, surrounded by women — but profoundly alone, backing off and avoiding eye contact the second a woman moves in to dance with him. In another frame, he smiles with self-satisfaction as a crowd of women chants his name. Surrounded by a group of cheerleaders about to pose for a picture, he reaches around the waist of one and pulls her sharply in to him, then briskly cups her behind in a businesslike, joyless fashion while she reaches for her hair to maintain smiling composure. It’s as if he thinks it’s his vaguely grim duty, as an American man playing the campiest possible version of swinging billionaire bachelor, to grab the closest available body part.
And most telling is his sideline locker-room talk with Epstein, whom the camera catches entering the party, greeted warmly by Trump. Like teenagers, they stand at the edges of the dance floor, pointing out the women they like, laughing at private jokes about them, rating them as hot. Here, there is joy. You see in this moment two outer-borough boys who have successfully crashed the Manhattan Establishment, who have boorishly, clumsily used money to get everything they want — but whose desires have never moved beyond an adolescent vision of the world, of women, of men, of the good life, of who merits consideration and who can be used.
In middle age, Trump had enough self-control to understand that his worst instincts were best received by men who were an awful lot like him. Now, as an old man — the oldest teenager ever — Trump has lost even that filter. He’s turned the whole country into his bunga-bunga party, made a Mar-a-Lago of the world stage, and divided us into Epsteins and cheerleaders — either co-conspirators who love the license his immaturity grants or else disposable collateral damage. —Noreen Malone
Read More: NBC Obtained Trump-Epstein Footage After Trump Kissed an Anchor Without Consent
Trump, Ivana: Donald Trump’s first ex-wife.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Trump, Ivanka: Daughter of Donald and Ivana Trump.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Trump, Melania: Wife of Donald Trump.
With Trump, Melania, and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in 2000.Photo: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images
Epstein has reportedly bragged that he’s the one who introduced Melania to her future husband. At the very least, the three have traveled together: She flew with Epstein on then-boyfriend Donald Trump’s plane in 2000.
Read More: Remembering the Time Jeffrey Epstein Rode on Donald Trump’s Plane
Tucker, Chris: Actor.
Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log.
Flew with Bill Clinton to Africa on Epstein’s plane.
Tuttle, Edward: Architect of a conspiratorial fever dream.
Name found on Epstein’s private jet log.
Aerial detail of “the temple” on “Pedophile Island.” Photo: via Inside Edition
Who built the temple? Tuttle, a designer of luxury resorts by trade, renovated the main compound on Epstein’s 70-acre private island in 2003. Sometime between 2009 and 2013, a “temple” appeared on the island: a large, boxy, blue-and-white-striped structure with a golden dome, surrounded by palm trees. In the days after Epstein’s arrest, the temple became the object of fervent speculation online. It was the kind of irresistible conspiracy-bait that exemplifies the Epstein story: On the one hand, shouldn’t it be enough that a mysteriously wealthy banker with connections to the globe’s most powerful people was apparently operating a child sex-trafficking ring without dabbling in theories about occult island temples? On the other hand, though, once you’ve accepted that, why would occult island temples be so out of the question? On the edges, the Epstein saga could seem less like a news story than like a brutal, unreadable fairy tales. Or maybe it was a desire to take a story about financial power and social privilege colluding to protect a criminal predator and transform it into something more terrible and monumental. After weeks of speculation, the first eyewitness account revealed that what the “temple” contained wasn’t a necromantic shrine but a gym, decorated with a framed photograph of a topless woman. —Max Read
Vance, Cyrus Jr.: Prosecutor in the crosshairs.
There are currently 475 level-three sex offenders registered in New York County, but in 2011, when an attorney from the office of Cy Vance, Manhattan DA, argued that Epstein’s risk level should be reduced, Justice Ruth Pickholz responded, “I have to tell you I am a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this.” Pickholz denied the request — Epstein’s risk assessment put him 20 points above the required threshold for the highest level of offender — and the DA’s office later reversed its request. Though there’s no indication Vance and Epstein were friendly, his office has been criticized previously for declining to pursue sex-crimes charges against Harvey Weinstein that coincided with a donation from his attorneys (though Weinstein has since been charged by Vance’s office) and fraud charges against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. —Irin Carmon
Wachner, Linda: Head of the textile corporation behind Calvin Klein and Speedo.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Wallace, Mike: 60 Minutes journalist.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Walters, Barbara: Broadcast journalist and TV personality.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Weinstein, Bob: Former co-chairman of Miramax Films and the Weinstein Company.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Wexner, Leslie: The money behind the money.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Retailing billionaire Leslie Wexner was Epstein’s only known client, the man who transferred the rights to that famous townhouse to him for free in 2011, years after they were supposed to no longer be in contact. The relationship stretches back to the late 1980s, a time when Wexner’s star was on the rise. A 1985 cover story for New York visited him in Columbus, Ohio, where his retail empire was built. Journalist Julie Baumgold described how he, not unlike Epstein, was a self-made man, addicted to self-improvement, how he didn’t know how to pronounce La Grenouille correctly and wanted to have his picture taken at the Whitney, and noted that “Wexner is what used to be known as a ‘confirmed bachelor.’ ” (He later married and has four children.) Not long after that piece, he was introduced to Epstein, who had left Bear Stearns under a cloud and was broke. He and Wexner hit it off, and Epstein soon began managing Wexner’s finances. Wexner’s credibility lent plausibility to the notion that Epstein managed billions from his Caribbean-island redoubt. Associates of Wexner, who is now worth $6.6 billion, didn’t understand the attraction. Soon after the men began working together, Epstein moved into Wexner’s Upper East Side mansion. Wexner bought the seven-story townhouse in 1989 for $13.2 million but apparently lived there only for a few months. The title was transferred in 2011 to a Virgin Islands entity controlled by Epstein. It is now worth $56 million. —Michelle Celarier and Carl Swanson
Will be interesting to see if anything comes out of this. To many powerful people with corrupt political and media connections.
Nope. And dead men tell no tales.
Well done, whoever in the administration that allowed this to happen. Proud? Drain the swamp, etc?
Just more proof that government is corrupt and inept in everything it touches. And people like you want the government to control all aspects of our life. Insanity.
YOUR government is corrupt and inept in everything it touches. It was republican government that let him and his ring off the first time, and Biff brought in the guy that let him off the hook. Now this. Well done, republicans.
Agreed.
I have become a cynic to the point that I believe a lot of this kind of thing occurs and that 90% of the responsible folks will never see a court room.
You really believe that there has been a wholesale change of bureaucracy in less than 3 years?
That's an insane position to take.
"Wholesale change in bureaucracy" too much? (not what I said, btw)How about:
"starved bureaucracy funding so that it's serially understaffed and incompetent" or
"wholesale change in management that enabled the highest profile criminal in the country to turn up dead in a secure cell."
Are either of those crazy?
