Today, we’ll be continuing our journey together through the sordid Epstein scandal, and I’ll be covering the tragic death of one of Jeffrey’s sexual partners, the true story behind his first arrest and imprisonment, and I’ll be reading from Jeffrey’s long-lost statement so that we can hear his own version of events from beyond the grave.

You can either listen to the full explosive episode below or read the transcript, with images.

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In this episode, we’ll continue our journey through the Epstein scandal by diving into his first arrest, exploring the aftermath, the hidden truth behind his plea deal, and following Jeff’s life as he continued to surround himself with an entourage of young attractive women, massage girls and escorts.

Below you can either listen to the full shocking episode or read the full transcript, with images.

NOTE: A special thanks to Mike Strange for helping to edit the sound levels on this episode and others.

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In this episode we’ll continue exploring the mind-boggling contradictions in Virginia Giuffre’s allegations against Prince Andrew - allegations that the media have intentionally been hiding from you. We’ll then be continuing our journey through the scandal by diving into the shocking events that led to Jeffrey’s arrest.

Below is the full explosive episode. You can either listen to it or read the full transcript, with images.

You don’t want to miss this one!

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Almost nothing you’ve read in the media is the truth.

Over the past six years, Giuffre’s claims have been my main focus. I’ve interviewed her ex-partners, members of her inner circle, and the men whom she accused.

The facts behind the fiction are explosive. So, without further delay, let’s get stuck in.

Below is the full episode along with a full transcript with images. You can listen to the full episode (including my audio interview with President Trump’s former lawyer, Professor Alan Dershowitz) or you can read - it’s your choice.

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Ransome states that she was 22 years old when she first encountered Jeffrey Epstein, during which time she was working as a high-end escort for the infamous Emperor’s Club, chargin…

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Coming up later this week: My ‘Epstein News in a Nutshell’ newsletter, an op-ed I’ve written that exposes how lawyers conspired with psychologists to influence the testimonies of Epstein accusers (for cash, as usual), some coverage of ongoing high-profile criminal cases, and the first entry of my long overdue war diary (typed away at whilst spending most of my time in a bomb shelter in Kyiv).

In case you missed the last episode of The Life & Death of Jeff, in which I cover Virginia Giuffre’s back story and first false allegations, you can watch, listen or read it by clicking the link below.

Please scroll below the paywall to listen to the latest episode, episode seven, ‘Epstein’s Favourite Recruiter’.

Without further delay, here is the full transcript for episode seven:

Welcome to part seven of The Life and Death of Jeff. In this episode we’ll continue the rocky journey through the Jeffrey Epstein scandal by exploring how Virginia Giuffre became one of Jeff’s biggest recruiters. This episode also contains parts of my interviews with Virginia’s ex-boyfriends and with the mother of one of her victims.

So, let’s begin by me taking you back to the fateful day when that victim’s life was pushed down a path from which she’d never return.

It was a typical Floridian Spring Sunday. A heat haze rose above the sun-battered car bonnet. Inside, the blonde-haired, tanned 18-year-old Virginia Roberts sat beside her boyfriend Tony, staring through the windscreen, eyes fixed on the front door as it finally swung open. A 15-year-old brunette stepped out onto the driveway. She’d dashed down from her bedroom, a room festooned with pinks and purples and blu-tacked boyband posters where, moments earlier, with a mixture of excitement and anxiety, Virginia, three years her senior, had helped her get ready for her first “business trip”.

Virginia, a legal adult then known by her nickname, Jenna, had willingly chosen Carolyn Andriano as her next mark, a girl whom she could use to make some easy “commission” by grooming her and delivering her to the old rich guy’s house in their hometown of Palm Beach. She’d already told Carolyn how she needed to dress, instructing her how to do her makeup and present herself as being older than she actually was. For Carolyn, already more physically developed than many of the other girls her own age, it wasn’t particularly hard to pull off. “Virginia gave me clothes,” she would later tell the Daily Mail. “She gave me these really tight skimpy shorts with a spaghetti strap top with all my cleavage hanging out. She just said, ‘whatever you do, don’t say your age.’”

But as a precaution, just in case the man in the mansion asked questions, Virginia had prepped her to say she was over 18. This wasn’t something new to Carolyn. She’d done it before, initially having told her boyfriend, Shawn (a close friend of Tony), that she was 17, her deception being quickly rumbled, however, when he arrived at her birthday party and saw her true age printed on the shiny balloons. But this time, there wouldn’t be any glaring indicators to give the game away. No friends and family. No birthday balloons. Just a short drive with a young adult, Virginia, an awkward introduction, a massage, and then she could depart, $300 wealthier. Shawn was with her, too, seemingly fine with the arrangement. But was it really going to be as easy as Virginia had pitched it to her? Was a guy really willing to pay her, an unqualified schoolgirl, such a huge sum of money just to rub down his back?

Pushing these questions to the back of her mind, she slumped casually into the leather passenger seat of Virginia’s car and buckled up her seat belt. Virginia darted her a smile, asking her how she was, reminding her of the importance of lying about her age should Jeffrey probe her on it – then she turned the Britney Spears song up to full blast, and Tony reversed them all out of the driveway.

Arriving at the pink mansion (Jeffrey Epstein would eventually have it painted white), Shawn and Tony waited in the car as Virginia lead Carolyn through the gates, into the tiled kitchen, and up a flight of stairs. Within moments, the 15-year-old Carolyn found herself standing beside Virginia in Jeffrey’s en-suite, curiously scanning the dresser, closet, steam room, and a polka-dot-patterned couch.

But she didn’t get a chance to sit down. “We walked into the little closet area, and she [Virginia] was pulling out the massage table,” Carolyn would recall many years later during her examination on the stand, adding that Virginia then showed her “where all the massage oils and lotions were kept, in the bottom drawer of the dresser that is on your left-hand side”.

Her testimony, given under oath, continues:

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Hello to you all. I hope you’re having a great week so far!

I’ve been busy editing my new podcast series, The Life & Death of Jeff, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay focused amidst constant Russian missile attacks here in Kyiv, grabbing a foldable chair and dashing down to the bomb shelter multiple times a day every time the air raid sir…

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Maxwell had appealed against her five felony convict…

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Maxwell had appealed against her five felony convictions, claiming her constitutional rights had been "v…

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In this episode we’ll be continuing our journey through the sordid Jeffrey Epstein scandal by taking a stroll through Jeffrey’s infamous island. You’ll also be able to listen to my interview with the French designer who helped develop the island and the mysterious so-called ‘temple’. And then we’ll be diving into another scandal - a honeypot scandal that has never before been fully exposed and that I can reveal, for the first time, involved one of Jeffrey’s girlfriends, the son of the United Kingdom’s Queen Camilla, cocaine, and a dodgy tabloid newspaper.

So, without further delay, let’s push forward on our quest for the truth…

“AN ENCHANTED ISLAND HAUNTED BY THOSE NYMPHETS OF MINE AND SURROUNDED BY A VAST, MISTY SEA” – Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

The island, nicknamed ‘Little St. Jeff’, rises out of the Caribbean and into the warm tropical air, a dusty green teardrop floating in deep blue water. White stone terraces step down toward quiet coves. A single pier stretches outward like a finger testing the temperature of the sea. Sculpted hedges, pristine lawns and palm trees are arranged as if by careful hand.

Around the same period of buying the island, Jeffrey began assembling his physical offshore infrastructure.

The United States Virgin Islands occupies a peculiar position in American law. It is under U.S. sovereignty, but treated as a separate tax jurisdiction. For Jeffrey, this meant that advisory fees earned from mainland U.S. clients could be booked through Virgin Islands entities and legally taxed at a fraction of what would have been owed in New York. It was offshore without appearing foreign. This was the same logic exploited by global tycoons whose empires run through island jurisdictions, including figures such as Richard Branson, whose island Jeffrey visited and whose companies for decades have routed ownership, licensing, and profits through low-tax island regimes. Jeffrey mastered both worlds at once: the private offshore universe of international billionaires and the quasi-domestic offshore territory used by American elites.

Internal banking records later showed Jeffrey routing massive wire transfers through Virgin Islands entities labeled only as “consulting” or “services,” with layered shell companies shielding beneficial ownership. Prosecutors would later describe his corporate web as a structure deliberately designed to conceal transactions and frustrate scrutiny. The island was not merely a destination. It was a financial instrument. Construction contracts, aviation fuel, maritime services, payrolls, security, and logistics all flowed through the same tax-advantaged architecture. Visitors arrived by private plane into a jurisdiction engineered for barely-legal tax evasion and reduced oversight.

That was the service that Jeffrey sold.

But he did, as Ghislaine Maxwell attests, clearly love his island and saw it as far more than just a convenient tax loophole.

“He purchased the island in 1996 and he was friendly with the owners,” Ghislaine told Todd Blanche. “And originally, we went to the island as guests of the owners. And then I guess at some point the owners told him they wanted to sell and he decided to purchase it. The island was very rustic. I loved it.

“We were often on the island, because he loved it. He really, really loved it. And we would go all the time. Mostly the early phase was based on improvements that could be made on the island, always going with new architects, new designers, new construction people. I’d say the first two years, almost every trip, not every one, but almost every trip contained an individual who would be brought on board to have an opinion as to how to -- I don’t want to use the word ‘improve’ the island, because I don’t think you could improve it, but to develop it.”

The island itself has become a symbol of the entire scandal and the focus of many a conspiracy theory. Around 30 hectares of rocky hills, forested groves, sheltered inlets and coral-fringed shores graced by a year-round tropical climate, he purchased it for $7.95 million in 1998 and instantly began construction work. A large main residence was built in a villa-style with colonnades, guest villas, a helipad, a private dock, swimming pools, a tennis court, slipways, and roads linking the buildings that he had surrounded by extensively landscaped lawns and gardens. Only reachable by boat or helicopter, the secluded island became his home from home, and a place where he could entertain a variety of famous friends and associates, from Peter Mandelson to Stephen Hawking, all waited on by hired members of staff.

Its most distinctive feature, now referred to by the press as “the Temple”, was a blue and white-striped box-shaped building topped with a golden dome. Could it have been built to facilitate his harem in some capacity? Or did it, as many unhinged conspiracy theories would have us believe, house an underground tunnel and chamber used in the trafficking and ‘ritual satanic abuse of children?

The evidence tells us that the answer is no. According to construction and permit records, the original plan submitted around 2010 described it as a music pavilion intended to house a grand piano, an instrument of which we already know Epstein was somewhat a master at playing. Somewhat pokey inside compared to the turquoise-ceiling cabanas, grand fireplace-adorned main residence, and the comfortable guest pavilions nearby, the two-floored structure was visited by Patrick Baron, a piano tuner who was flown in to work on the piano, and who confirmed that the interior simply consisted of, “a black grand piano, bookshelves, a dark wood desk, and a portrait of Epstein or the Pope.” Dressing the dome outside, two gold bird-like statues on the roof were removed or lost when Hurricane Maria battered the island in 2017.

One of the people brought to help develop the island and the temple was famous French architect and designer Robert Couturier.

I reached out to Mr. Couturier and, late one night, we discussed his involvement with Jeffrey and Little St. James. The following is a recording of what he told me:

I also asked him about the so-called ‘Temple’ and the conspiracy theories surrounding it, not least of all the claims that it had some sort of esoteric influence and purpose.

“I never felt that someone like Jeffrey Epstein had any inclination for the spiritual world,” he said. “The idea of, of, you know, evil, devil worshipping, and all of that is, in my opinion, complete bullshit. Sure, it was a weird building, even the builders thought it was weird. But it was fun to build.”

Some of the viral conspiracy theories have focused on the ominous patterns on the floor outside the front of the structure, with armchair detectives insinuating they were influenced by ritualistic pagan designs. But Robert was clear that this is hogwash, revealing that Jeffrey had simply asked for a unique design, that several were drawn into a sketchbook at random, and that eventually he chose one he preferred.

The dome was fabricated and painted on the mainland. The ceiling was partially decorated with a Greek-themed mural. Computers, a sound system, air conditioning and a giant carved bookcase soon followed. But Robert didn’t stay to see its ongoing development.

“I came back from the island with him,” Robert remembered his final day in Jeffrey’s company. “And I was sitting in his plane. I was very embarrassed because when we had got to the airport, and if the person who is, you know, the owner of the plane and he’s a sex offender, then you have the police there. You sort of try not to see, and try not pay attention, but it’s very difficult not to. And on that flight back, I was looking at his hands. It had been only four, maybe six weeks I had worked for him, but I told him, I said, ‘Listen, I can’t work for you anymore. I just can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.’”

By now, Jeffrey had a reputation for being a mysterious figure dripping in sleaze.

His sexual appetite having gone completely out of control some time ago, he now made sure that he had a long list of women to visit him every day for happy ending massages and B.D.S.M sessions. Sarah Kellen was the main assistant who scheduled his so-called appointments. The women, mostly beautiful aspiring models, artists, sugar babies, prostitutes and any of their friends whom Jeffrey found attractive, would come and go every day, with Jeffrey receiving at least three massages daily. And some of the women, at least his favourites, were often invited to come to his island.

The often came in small groups. They would would be shown how to provide massages. They would be told Jeffrey’s sexual preferences and how best to please him - being topless. Massaging his feet. Straddling his back and then, when he flipped over, letting him use vibrators on them while they did one of his favourite things: squeezing his nipples and giving him oral sex.

In between massages, Jeffrey would often work while the women enjoyed the island, went jet skiing, sunbathed by the pool or on the beach. They would sleep in the cabanas, each seemingly taking turns to visit Jeffrey whenever her wanted a massage, though they would all frequently also have lunch with him outside on one of the verandas or spend time with him watching movies in the main house.

Oddly, it doesn’t seem that Jeffrey’s close girlfriend at the time, British-born Shelley Lewis, was particularly bothered about the arrangement, continuing to spend time with Jeffrey despite it being obvious that he was taking unfaithfulness to another level.

One of the women who visited his island was blonde-haired, blue-eyed Anouska Honey de Georgiou, who, like Shelley, also came from England.

Born in the late 1970’s in Ascot, Surrey, by 1993 Anouska was a 16-year-old fashion model navigating the competitive London agency scene. The daughter of a wealthy British financier and a former debutante model, she possessed an upper-class pedigree but carried the emotional fractures of her parents’ recent, bitter divorce.

The official introduction to Jeffrey took place in London, initiating a ten-year career mentorship whereby Jeffrey bankrolled her high-end modelling portfolio shoots, bought her expensive designer wardrobe pieces, and footed the bill for luxury, first-class flights across the Atlantic.

Over the next decade, she was routinely flown to his Upper East Side townhouse in New York, his Parisian apartment, his Palm Beach mansion, and his private island.

They would spend time together, engage in sexual activity, and Jeffrey would shower her with expensive gifts and, as with his other young women, act as somewhat of a sugar daddy to her.

Anouska had turned down a place at Oxford University to pursue a career as a model and actress. Working as a model for Playboy, she became connected to numerous high-profile stars, including having a relationship with Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff.

A former friend of Anouska informed me that, at the time, it was rumoured that the pair split partly due to Anouska allegedly tipping off the press as to when and where they would be out together in public, in an attempt to snag herself some media attention and raise her own profile.

She also allegedly had ties to Donald Trump. In November 1997, the Mirror on Sunday reported the following in its “Confidential” gossip page written by the late Chris Hutchins: “Just weeks after ditching his second wife, America’s best-known billionaire Donald Trump has fallen under the spell of a 20-year-old English girl. Trump, 50, who has failed in his bid to secure the services of Princess Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, was in search of another British trophy when he met London model Anouska De Georgiou at a party in Manhattan. Several millionaires already had their eyes on Anouska. But she was there with Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer. And none of his would-be rivals owned a vast mansion in Florida like Donald does: Mar-a-Lago (where I have dined with him and his outgoing wife Marla) is enough to make any young girl go weak at the knees. After their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the Sunshine State, where all three enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, Anouska was installed in one of Donald’s many apartments there. Ms De Georgiou likes older men – she went out once or twice with Joanna Lumley’s ex-husband Jeremy Lloyd, who is 45 years her senior.”

Whilst never having accused Donald Trump of any inappropriate behaviour, Anouska has since claimed that, whilst over the legal age of consent, she was abused by Jeffrey for several years.

“Jeffrey Epstein manipulated me, coerced me and abused me,” she told the Evening Standard. “He cannot fathom what he did to us… The abuse, spanning several years, was devaluing beyond measure and affected my ability to form and maintain healthy relationships, both in my work and my personal life.”

Anouska attending the premiere of children’s film, Charlie and the factory. Her top ‘happened’ to come unfastened on the red carpet... ‘conveniently timed for when she stepped in front of paparazzi

Using the pseudonym ‘Kate’, she was also a prosecution witness against Ghislaine Maxwell at her trial. However, the judge instructed the jury during that trial that the testimony of neither “Kate” nor Annie Farmer could be used to indict Ghislaine, because both were over age when they claimed they were abused.

It was later revealed during that trial that Anouska had sent Jeffrey letters whilst he was in prison and had even offered to send him photographs of herself.

And something else was also briefly touched upon in that trial - the revisiting of a famous tabloid scandal, since long forgotten and never fully revealed, until now.

For the record, I see no reason for Anouska to have been allowed to use a pseudonym when acting as a witness. Outside the court room, she wilfully sold her story to the press and has given numerous interviews using her full name. But it is because of that pseudonym being used that journalists have been unable to tell you the truth about her involvement in an infamous incident that pocketed her tens of thousands of pounds.

It is ironic that Anouska’s middle name is ‘Honey’, for she acted as a honeypot to entrap the son of Queen Camila in a cocaine scandal.

Tom Parker Bowles was born in London on the 18th of December, 1974, the first child of Camilla Shand and Andrew Parker Bowles. His father was a senior British Army officer, a former cavalryman and an old friend of Prince Charles. His mother, who would eventually become Queen Camilla, had herself been part of the same aristocratic and equestrian social world as Charles since the 1960s and had long been in love with, and having an affair with, Charles himself…

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Welcome to part four of The Life and Death of Jeff. In case you missed the first three episodes, you can read them below (all episodes will be released in a podcast for you to listen to very soon):

UNREQUITED LOVE

As I touched upon in the last episode, Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s romance certainly wasn’t lifted from the pages of a fairytale.

“Epstein told me that he had a heart condition which meant that he didn’t have intercourse a lot, which suited me fine, because I actually do have a medical condition, which precludes me having a lot of intercourse,” she told Todd Blanche during her recennt interview.

“He liked other forms of sexual activities. He told me he had difficulty having an erection, and I believed him.”

Jeffrey’s claim that he suffered from erectile disfunction wasn’t a lie. Interviews I’ve conducted with his former sexual partners, and countless records I’ve poured hours examining, including emails sent by Jeffrey himself, confirm that he was almost completely impotent. With growing frustration, and amidst an ever-increasing and out-of-control sexual appetite, he searched for ways to cure his problem, but to no avail. Instead, he often used viagra and resorted to the ‘other forms of sexual activities’ that Ghislaine referred to - handjobs by prostitutes at local massage parlours and, predominantly, masturbation.

The 90s beginning to see computers and the internet available to households also provided another outlet. Pornography. Like most men, Jeffrey downloaded it, shared it with friends, and - having the financial means - even associated himself with porn stars and facilitated their careers (more on that in a future episode of this series).

But he compartmentalised his life. His day was filled with business deals and communicating with associates. His evenings filled with pornography and happy endings.

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Let’s be honest; the Epstein Scandal, and particularly the way in which the media have reported it to you over the years, is a murky, confusing mess. The maelstrom of information and disinformation has naturally left most people scratching their heads in blithering bemusement.

So let me help remedy that by injecting some clarity and context into the chaos.

This is the third instalment of my series, The Life and Death of Jeff, running you through the entire scandal (including my exclusive interviews with key witnesses) in chronological order, from the very beginning. By the time you’ve finished reading it, you’ll be more educated on the scandal than the majority of the general public and practically every journalist. You’ll only be able to find the full truth here on my Substack (full access is just a few dollars/pounds a month to support my ongoing independent work).

In case you missed the first two parts of the series, you can read them below (they’ll be released as a podcast very soon):

Today, let’s take a deep dive into how Ghislaine met Jeffrey, what their relationship entailed, and the very first allegations made against them…

THE DEBUTANTE

It’s 1990 and Ghislaine Maxwell is finding her new life in New York more than agreeable. Her father, Robert Maxwell, is at this moment in time still alive. He has entrusted her with helping coordinate some his business affairs, most notably the newspapers The European and the struggling New York Daily News.

She is also managing her own small but successful company selling gift packages to corporates.

Making money is her main, though not sole, focus. Naturally, she’s also keen to find a partner to settle down with.

Already a firm fixture on the city’s vibrant, affluent social scene, she has managed to cultivate a circle of friends and potential suitors.

Among them, she briefly hoped, was John F Kennedy Jr., the rich, handsome, sought-after son of the much-loved President who’d tragically been gunned down three decades prior.

The following is Ghislaine’s recollection given during her July 2015 interview with U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche:

TODD BLANCHE: Did you ever meet JFK, Jr.?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: When was that?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I met him at Andrew Cuomo’s wedding?

TODD BLANCHE: But would that have been before you met Mr. Epstein?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: Did you have any sort of professional or social relationship with John F. Kennedy, Jr.?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I fancied him. I thought he was very attractive. I mean, we knew each other. I thought he was wonderful and fun and I enjoyed meeting him, but I -- we went out -- I want to say we had a dinner or two, but obviously I was very excited, but that was it.

Ghislaine, herself well-known as a young, beautiful and connected woman about town, had been described as ‘a sparkling debutante’. Other men followed, but the dates, though fun, were inevitably fruitless… until she met a man whom most people simply referred to as ‘Jeff’.

“YOU CAN SEE HIM. HE’S SAFE”

“I met Mr. Epstein in 1991,” Ghislaine told Blanche. “I had never heard of him or met him before. And no one in my family had ever either. I’d moved to America in 1990. I had been running my own company up until that time, which was a company called Maxwell’s Corporate Gifts. And I had also been working for my father at the time. I had multiple jobs with him. In 1990 I was working with a new company of his, a new newspaper that he was launching, called The European. And I was in charge of launching a magazine to go with The European.”

“A girlfriend of mine, an American, told me -- I had broken up with my longterm -- I’d been engaged, getting my -- the very long-term boyfriend, and we’d broken up. And she said, as your girlfriends do, ‘I’ve got a guy for you to meet’. And I was like, ‘Who is it?’ And she goes, ‘He’s been dating my sister. You’ll love him. He’s looking for a wife’. I’m edging towards thirty. I don’t need to tell you guys, that’s a very important moment for a girl to, like, think about important things. And sure, I’d be happy to meet him.”

“And so sometime in 1991, I met him at his offices on Madison Garden. And I think the most memorable thing I can think about is he was wearing a tie, which he didn’t often do. It had a giant, seemed like a ketchup stain on it. And that was how we met. He just invited me to come and have tea, and I was like, ‘tea, that’s English. Okay’. But what was unusual, was it was in his offices. So I went to his offices and we met. And I found him very engaging, and that was that.

“I was looking for real estate for my dad to buy some, and Epstein told me that he was also looking to move from his apartment and would I help him? And I said, ‘Sure, I’m looking already,’ so I could look for him. So that’s how it started.

“And then, in 1991, my father passed away and I returned to New York after that, originally to come back and help with the family businesses, which was McMillan. And then the debacle of my father’s passing hit the family. And we lost all our businesses and my family thought that it would be best if I stayed in America, because of the intensity of the press and the drama surrounding my father’s death in England.

“So I stayed and Epstein said, ‘Well, you can keep helping me. You can help me find a house and we can decorate the house’. And it gave me something to do.

Ghislaine stated that, at this point, she and Jeffrey were ‘just friends’.

She was also clear in her answer when asked if Jeffrey had known her father before she met him.

“I know they never met,” she said, “because in 1991, before my father died, he asked me if I’d met anybody interesting or whatever, you know, because I was still trying not to be sucked back into the family business. And I told him that I had met Mr. Epstein. And the reason why I shared that I’d met Mr. Epstein, because I believed, at that time, that Epstein worked for Bear Stearns. And Bear Stearns was one of our banks. And I knew that my father was friendly with both Jimmy Cayne and with Ace Greenberg (Bear Stearns’ CEOs). But he called both Jimmy Cayne and Ace Greenberg to ask what sort of guy he was.

“And I just want to explain, briefly why my father would even do such a thing. I’ve had some interesting things that have happened in my life. And one of them was to be found on an IRA kidnap and murder list. And so I think after that event and several others, where I had stalkers and all that thing that one has, he was always quite protective of me. And so if I met somebody, he would try and verify that they weren’t going to do anything 5 hideous.”

Robert Maxwell made the call to his associates at Bear Stearns to reassure himself before giving Ghislaine a nod of approval.

“At some point my father told me, “He’s fine. You can see him. He’s safe’.”

As Jeffrey had requested, she found a house for him to rent in New York, a former Iranian embassy.

“And I didn’t know that he had any money,” she continued to recall. “I want to say it was $12,000 a month, which to me seemed like a fortune. And I said, ‘I found this house, but I don’t think you can afford it.’ He was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. Of course I can afford it’. And he rented it.”

Ghislaine was initially uncertain of how Jeffrey was making his money - enough to live a luxurious lifestyle in America’s most expensive cities. But then one day he told her.

“He told me himself that he started a business where he looked for stolen money. So if somebody. So let’s say you have El Chapo, oh God, I don’t know where he comes from [Ghislaine was using El Chapo as a hypothetical scenario - there is no evidence that Epstein ever had dealings with him]. But anyway, we’ve got El Chapo. And El Chapo’s laundering money or he’s working with the Sinaloa Cartel and he steals money from the Sinaloa Cartel and he moves it to wherever. So he’s got stolen money from the Sinaloa, goes to it. And the Sinaloa says to Epstein, ‘Can you track down my billion dollars that the other cartel stole from me?’ And Epstein will go and find the billion dollars and will take a portion of the money that was stolen, as a fee, and give back the remainder.”

Jeffrey is indeed documented as having made some of his money via this dubious method. One instance involved his former girlfriend, Anna Obregon, whose father had seen millions of dollars stolen from him. Epstein had somehow managed to ‘retrieve’ it - for a fee, of course. After that, whether it was a con or genuine enterprise, he got a taste for it and continued profiting from ‘lost money’.

But it wasn’t his main source of income. That came from helping handle the finances of wealthy clients and providing them with advice on how to exploit loopholes to pay less tax. Among them, Ghislaine confirmed, was Leon Black, Glenn Dubin (who would eventually marry Jeffrey’s longterm girlfriend Eva), Lynn Forester de Rothschild, and (most importantly) Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexner.

Ghislaine surmised that the grand townhouse in New York, that the media have long claimed was purchased from Wexner for a mere dollar, was in fact given to Jeffrey to cover a fee for his services.

“So he had this house and I had moved into 10 foot by 10 foot apartment,” Ghislaine continued, “because all of our stuff had been either lost or frozen or whatever. So he [Epstein] became, in this moment, my lifeline.”

Ghislaine recounted how their relationship developed from friends/business associates, to the glimmer of something more. But it was far from being a fairytale.

“In 1992, I slept with him one time,” she said. “I was like, ‘whoa, that’s it. We’re going to be dating’, because that’s how I thought. I felt if you slept with someone, that you were then dating them. That’s the world I came from. But we didn’t sleep together again for, I don’t know, really a significant period of time. I don’t know if it was a year. I don’t -- that feels long, but maybe nine months.”

“The first time I ever remember hearing about Jeffrey Epstein was Ghislaine inviting me to a party she was holding for her mother in New York,” her former friend Christopher Mason recalled. “And she explained that it was in the house of this guy she was dating, Jeffrey. The story Ghislaine told over and over again was that you didn’t have a chance of Jeffrey taking you on as a client if you had less than a billion dollars to invest. That was part of the mystique of the man that she was dating. She seemed deeply, genuinely in love with him.” 

 Euan Rellie recounted his first impression of Jeffrey on meeting him at one of Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s many social gatherings. “He was clearly talented, successful, well-dressed, handsome,” he said, “but he made extraordinarily little effort, frankly, as a host. It was an odd dichotomy between the two of them, with Ghislaine flitting around making everybody comfortable, getting drinks, champagne, whatever you wanted. Ghislaine kind of orchestrated the waiters bringing people snacks and so on.”

“She knew how to be a hostess in a grand old-fashioned way,” Petronella Wyatt remembers. “And I think somebody like Epstein, who was very much new money, was attracted to this because he probably saw her as upper-class, English accent, been to Oxford, wears designer clothes, has lots of well-known friends. Suddenly, they were together at all these smart parties, all the expensive parties, seemingly as a couple.” 

 “She would be quite touchy-feely with him,” said Euan Rellie. “She would touch his elbow, touch his shoulder, and they seemed intimate. We used to gossip about Jeffrey and Ghislaine to try to make sense of this slightly odd relationship. It was a rather strange mixture of facets.” 

“It wasn’t a normal relationship,” Petronella Wyatt concurred. “But it was obviously the kind of relationship she needed. She couldn’t feel secure without money, and he was a good catch for her financially. They became totally dependent on each other in a weird way.” 

 The relationship, at least in the sense of romance, doesn’t appear to have lingered past its early jet-setting, champagne-swigging honeymoon phase. Eventually it fizzled out, morphing into a burred mix of friendship, work, and the hint of something more.

“Ghislaine was in love with Jeffrey,” said Euan. “She was so spellbound by him, and my impression was she would have done anything for him. But she also played this kind of hybrid role as social fixer, social secretary. And the notion was that they had dated some time in the late 90s but had stopped, and now they were best friends.” 

As Epstein accuser Rina Oh once told me, women were naive to ever think that Jeffrey was the type of man who would ever consider settling down (you can listen to one of my interviews with Rina below):

Before he’d met Ghislaine, he’d already worked his way through a throng of women, only getting into semi-relationships with a few of them.

One of the earliest was Lynne Greenburg.

Not long after Epstein left teaching and began his role at Bear Stearns, the firm’s chief executive officer, Alan Greenberg, invited him to dinner at his home and placed him beside his 20-year-old daughter, Lynne. Lynne later said she suspected the seating arrangement was deliberate. The two connected immediately and began a relationship.

But around the same time, Jeffrey was also rumoured to be dating Ana Obregon. Born in Madrid in 1955, she came from a wealthy Spanish family, her father being a successful real-estate developer and businessman. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ana became one of Spain’s best-known celebrities, appearing in films, television series, magazine covers, and later hosting major television programs and New Year’s Eve broadcasts.

The pair met through a mutual friend around 1982 while she was living partly in New York and studying acting while trying to build an international career. Jeffrey was then a young Wall Street figure who had recently left Bear Stearns and was beginning to establish himself as an independent financial consultant. Through Obregón and her family, he was introduced to wealthy Spanish families who had lost money in the collapse of Drysdale Government Securities. Several reports have suggested that helping recover some of those funds helped him establish his reputation and earn substantial fees during the early years of his financial career (he would later go on to be arrested for alleged fraud, before going on to steal millions of dollars from one of his famous clients, Leslie Wexner).

He also dated Patricia Schmidt, another employee at Bear Stearns.

But Patricia soon discovered she wasn’t the only romantic interest in his life - and that Lynne and Ana weren’t the only rival love interests. In 2025, the New York Times interviewed Schmidt and released some of her contemporary diary entries. In them, she described having sex with Jeffrey, but noted that he preferred to kiss and cuddle, adding that he was “like a little boy almost”.

You can read some of her contemporary diary entries below.

She also wrote that, on one night at around 1am, she arrived at Jeffrey’s apartment to find him speaking on the phone to another woman, Eva Andersson.

Eva was no mere fling. Evidence and witness recollections suggest Jeffrey was likely truly in love with her (though he continued to have sexual relationships with other women during their 11 year relationship).

Eva won Miss Sweden in 1980, finished as a runner-up in the Miss Universe competition, was signed by Ford Models, and became a successful international model before later attending medical school and becoming a physician. She ultimately earned an MD from UCLA and later founded the Dubin Breast Center in New York.

Their relationship began around 1981 and lasted until 1990, after which they remained close friends, with Jeffrey even being made the godfather of Andersson’s daughter (after leaving Jeffrey, she married billionaire hedge fund manager Glen Dubin).

Eva was still in Jeffrey’s life when Jeffrey met Ghislaine. So too, we now know, were a large number of other women - most of them yacht girls, models and prostitutes. In New York he would hire hookers from high-end escorting agencies, inviting some of them onto his island to participate in bacchanalian weekend trips filled with sun, jet-skiing, and massages with happy endings. At his property in Paris, and his home in West Palm, he’d also satisfy his out-of-control lust with a string of models and massage parlour girls.

It was clear that Ghislaine wouldn’t get what she wanted out of Jeffrey. He was never going to be the marrying type.

“I think she [Ghislaine] was too old for Jeffrey,” said Petronella Wyatt. “He really liked much younger girls. But there was this bond between them. And she needed money. She couldn’t feel secure without Epstein’s money. It felt like she was doing the job of a wife without having any intimate relationship with him anymore.”

Of their relationship, Ghislaine’s brother Ian told me: “Some journalists, without any evidence, have tried to claim my father met Epstein before he died, and that’s how the connection with Ghislaine was established. The BBC documentary, The House of Maxwell, surmised that somehow the pension funds were siphoned off and Epstein then laundered them. I mean, it’s just false, ludicrous, but I guess it makes for very good television. There’s been a lot of suggestion that somehow my father had introduced the two of them. I know that not to be the case. I don’t actually know who did introduce Ghislaine to Jeffrey, or precisely when that took place – I would say 1991 or early ’92. But by early ’93, we knew that she was in a new relationship. But I was too engaged in fighting the legal case, on my defence, and my marriage at the time was falling to bits. It was just not a good time for me, so I didn’t have much of a real insight into her relationship with Jeffrey, except that it existed. She seemed happy.” 

 Ian then placed his hands together and leaned forward in his chair.

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This is the second part of my new series, The Life and Death of Jeff, where I take you on a chronological journey from the very beginning, right up to Epstein’s death, and beyond.

With exclusive interviews with key witnesses, and insight into the case that you won’t find anywhere else, by the end of reading it, I’m certain that you’ll be more clued-up on the scandal than 99% of the general public (and 100% of the media).

If you missed part one, you can read it below - Epstein’s curious, at times shocking origin story.

A year before I ever set foot in New York, I’d been on one of my regular visits to London. The person I’d planned to meet for lunch, Michael (not his real name), had been corresponding back and forth with me, mostly through email, for over a year. I’d first contacted him to get a better understanding of Ghislaine Maxwell, with whom he’d enjoyed a friendly relationship on London’s elite social scene. I wasn’t so much interested in the monster portrayed in the media. I wanted to learn about the human behind the headlines.

We met in a small Italian deli near Kensington Gardens, a vast park I fondly remember strolling through with my Bermondsey-born grandmother after begging her to show me the statue of Peter Pan. We sat, cramped at one of the small tables, businessmen and locals scurrying in and out around us as I unclipped my briefcase, removed some pre-written questions, a wad of printed sheets, and placed them on the table with a light thud.

“Oh,” he seemed surprised, moving his eyes from the paperwork to the clock above the counter, rightly guessing that the interview wouldn’t be as short as he’d envisaged or perhaps hoped. “I suppose we’d best get cracking”. Over the next couple of hours, he told me he had first met Ghislaine in 2010, the pair introduced by a mutual friend, an LA film producer.

“I was living and working in LA at the time,” he told me. “We’d meet up whenever she was over and would go for dinner or drinks. Then we met up a few times in New York. I went to a Christmas party one year, with some friends of hers in Chelsea, all nice people. Dame Vivian Duffield and others were there, and everyone was happy to see her. That’s the thing about Ghislaine, she has room presence. When she walks into a room, she lights it up. She’s witty, gregarious, she was always somebody who would befriend anyone, a politician and a supermodel all on the same night. She was lovely, warm and funny, very interesting to be with and always full of stories. Not precious or high maintenance in any way. The monster they depict her to be in the newspapers has no resemblance to the real Ghislaine at all.”

He told me he believes Jeffrey didn’t commit suicide. He surmised that he was murdered, though he had no idea who by. And, upon hearing the news that his former friend had, following Jeffrey’s death, suddenly become a named suspect, Michael said he was in a state of “shock and bewilderment”, immediately becoming fearful for her safety. So staunch in his belief of her innocence was he that he even wrote her a character reference in the hope it would be used by her attorneys when requesting bail. “I believed in her innocence then, and I still do now,” he said. “The evidence that was presented, and the witnesses themselves, don’t appear credible.”

Like most people I’ve interviewed, his focus quickly shifted to the most vocal of her accusers. “Virginia Giuffre’s a fabricator,” he said, frowns forming on his forehead. “A loudmouth. A hustler.”

He told me he’d been following my investigation closely. “You’re doing a brilliant job in getting to the truth. I think that you need to keep focusing on the victims,” he added, his fingers making inverted comma marks in the air. “Their credibility, or lack of, is ultimately what will exonerate Ghislaine.”

Though deploring any form of sexual abuse and believing the harrowing abuse stories of numerous victims of Epstein, I had highlighted major discrepancies and flat-out fabrications in some of the accusers’ claims. And I was incredibly keen to learn more about all the characters involved and to understand Ghislaine and her potential role as best as I could. Michael told me I would need to become educated on her background.  

In the following months and years to come, I would find myself frequently speaking to some of Maxwell’s siblings.

Ghislaine’s mother, Elisabeth Maxwell (nee Meynard), was of aristocratic stock. A Huguenot descendant whose distant lineage boasted French kings, her father, the mayor of a small French village, owned a profitable silk-weaving factory that supported his two daughters comfortably enough to send a nine-year-old Elisabeth to England, where she attended a convent in Birmingham before returning to her homeland in 1932 and studying law.

Following the liberation of Paris, whilst working as a translator, she was introduced to Czechoslovakian-born British Army Captain Robert Maxwell.

Robert wasn’t in fact named Robert at all. His birthname was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Throughout the war he went by numerous aliases, including Ivan du Maurier, before settling upon Ian Robert Maxwell in 1948 (for some reason, everyone dropped his first name, Ian, altogether, referring to him only as ‘Robert’ or, more often, ‘Bob’).

Awarded the Military Cross for bravely storming a Nazi machine gun nest, Maxwell, an Orthodox Jew, had returned from the war to discover that many of his relatives had been murdered in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The pair married on March 15th, 1945. Living in Maisons-Laffitte, part of the affluent outer suburbs of northwestern Paris, the children would soon fill the expanding family’s household, most of them delivered by Elisabeth’s sister Yvonne, an obstetrician described to me by one of the Maxwell siblings as “an extraordinary woman, and one of the very rare women to become and obstetrician after the war and, even rarer, to own her own clinic”.

Ghislaine was born on a crisp Christmas Day morning in 1961. 

“It’s important that you understand we were originally nine in this family,” Ian Maxwell, a rather friendly and likeable man of 68 told me. “There was our eldest brother, Michael, and there was a little girl, Karine; and they died young. Karine died in 1957 at only three from leukemia, and Michael was in a terrible car crash that didn’t kill him but left him in a coma for seven years. He never recovered and sadly died. Karine was born between me and my twin sisters, and so instead of having a natural bridge, the family, in a sense, split into two because of the age gap. So Kevin and I and Ghislaine were very close as children, and my four elder brothers and sisters were very close. Then, obviously, as we grew up, we all became equally close, and we spent quite a bit of time together.”

 “I’ve got pretty clear memories of childhood with Ghislaine,” he continued. “She was a funny little thing, very funny, good sense of humour. She was in the same bedroom as Kevin and I for at least the first three years of our lives, and we have so many stories to tell. One particular occasion that sticks in my mind is that Kevin and I quickly understood that the way to shock our parents was to use swear words, which generally got a cuff around the ear, and so we thought if we could avoid cuffing, we would teach these words to Ghislaine, because she was too small to be cuffed. And one day, while Ghislaine was held in the arms of my mother, my father next to her, the head of an Oxford college came in and said: ‘And who is this adorable little thing?’, to which Ghislaine looked back at him and casually replied, ‘Piss off!’”

 “As a young child, she loved animals. She had dogs and cats, some budgies, a hamster, and a pony. My father was rich and could afford to give her these things.” 

By now, a publishing company founded by Robert Maxwell, Pergamon Press, was booming. The boy from humble beginnings, from a two-room wooden shack with earthen floors and a pit latrine, where he and his siblings would share one pair of shoes during winter, had done good; so good, in fact, that he moved the family to the company’s leased headquarters, Headington Hill Hall, a grand Italianate mansion in east Oxford. Boasting more than 50 rooms, the new family home, described by Robert as “the best council house in the country,” had hosted countless high society parties throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Attending an all-night May Day Ball there in 1878, Oscar Wilde had arrived in flamboyant style, gaudily dressed as Prince Rupert.  

 “I was very young when we moved to Headington Hill Hall, or ‘Triple H’, as we called it,” Isabel Maxwell, the entrepreneurial, warm and spirited sister of Ghislaine, told me. “We moved into it during Easter of 1961. Our mom had been fixing it up for all of the past year as it was, in our mother’s own words, from her book A Mind of My Own, ‘a Victorian mansion built in 1858 for the brewer James Morell. It was in 15 acres of wooded parkland with a magnificent view over the dreaming spires of Oxford. It was owned by Oxford City Council, who were looking for a tenant to take over this white elephant.’ 

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Welcome to episode one of my new series, The Life and Death of Jeff.

By the time you’ve finished reading this series (or listening - I’ll soon be releasing all episodes in a podcast), you’ll without doubt know more about the Epstein scandal than 99% of the general public and 100% of the media.

As well as trying my best over the years to look past the Epstein case clickbait and get to the truth, I’ve been keen to understand the humans behind the headlines - from accusers to the accused - investigating and interviewing my way through America and beyond so that we can finally get a glimpse at the real characters in the scandal, not just their media-invented one-dimensional caricatures.

Feel free to order a paperback, hardback, or ebook version of my book, Naked Lies, which covers my 6-year investigation into the case and includes all of my exclusive interviews.

Back in New York, I glanced back at the tall prison where Epstein breathed his last. Though now closed following a damning report into its numerous failings, a solitary blue-shirted guard sat inside his shack in front of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Lower Manhattan. In a taxi driven by a silent driver, I headed further downtown, passing early rising tourists busy snapping photographs of courtroom steps where their favourite films, including The Godfather, were shot, and on to the leafy suburbs straddling Central Park.

With the yellow cab rolling to a gradual halt, I paid the fare and stepped out onto East 71st Street, Upper East Side. I’d gone there to see Number Nine, a brooding French neo-classical townhouse shaded by an equidistant row of Callery pear trees. Opulent, 15-foot-high oak doors stood framed by carved limestone angels, crowned by a pan-like bearded figure that scowled down at me menacingly. The gouges beside the door’s brass plates made by FBI agents have long since been smoothed down. A few steps away, rain-beaten, flop-cornered A4 notices pasted beside iron bars informed neighbours and passers-by of ongoing renovation work.

Described by former Vanity Fair journalist Vicky Ward as “the crown jewel of the city’s residential town houses… almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-story neighbours,” and seeming “more like an institution than a house,” the decadent Herbert N. Straus House was completed in 1932, reportedly the largest private residence in Manhattan. Straus, the sixth son of the co-owners of R. H. Macy & Co., in fact never spent a single night within its walls.

The cost of property taxes was too much to shoulder, even for such a renowned retail heir. Thus it remained unfinished when, in 1944, it was donated to the Archdiocese of New York, its 21,000 square feet, nine-floor interior converted into a hospital and, in the 1960s, a school. That was until 1989, when billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, a man now firmly ingrained in Epstein scandal lore, snapped it up for a not-so-modest $13.2 million. Wexner, the former CEO of lingerie chain Victoria’s Secret, was quick to have the building remodelled, transforming it into a mansion fit for the setting of a gothic novel, plastered with paintings and grand fireplaces.

Surprisingly, I was accidentally given a brief glimpse inside when the front doors suddenly creaked open and two workers carried out a large bubble-wrapped mirror and headed towards a white van parked nearby. My eyes fixed fleetingly on the marbled foyer, dimly lit by a large chandelier. It’s all was able to see. The two men briskly returned, their hands now empty, hard hats sitting loosely on their heads. One of them, a burly, stubble-chinned chap, scanned me up and down with a suspicious glare. Shuffling back inside, the doors swiftly closed behind them. They remained closed for the remainder of my visit.

The present owners are understandably keen to maintain their privacy. Understandable, that is, owing to the identity of the previous homeowner. In 1995, when his life was approaching the peak of its ominous wealth and success, a 42-year-old Jeffrey Epstein proudly strolled into Number Nine and claimed it as his own. Although ownership was initially registered through a trust connected to both Wexner and himself, this was officially changed in 2011 to a trust controlled solely by Jeffrey, as Wexner had long since married and moved to Ohio.

Standing alone outside its façade, I was left to imagine the rest of its sprawling interior, eventually extended to more than 50,000 square feet – though I can rely on the accounts of others, including Vicky Ward, who visited Jeffrey at the house when writing her 2003 profile piece titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.” Upon entering the house, “you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu,” she recounted. “This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.”

Adorning the entrance hall walls were rows of individually framed prosthetic eyeballs manufactured for injured English soldiers during the First World. They were accompanied by a “twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior”. A nearby room, described then simply as the “leather room,” came dressed in cordovan-coloured fabric and leopard-print chairs, a large “oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin” draping down from one of its walls. Though Jeffrey, a teetotaller who abstained even from smoking tobacco, was neither a fan nor partaker of drugs, his taste in furnishings, particularly art, seemed intentionally to present itself as an unsubtle nod to a free, almost Bacchanalian mindset.

Beneath a flight of stairs, tucked away from prying eyes, a bathroom lined in lead came accompanied with closed-circuit televisions and a phone, both concealed in a cabinet under the sink, and both the source of much speculation, now connected to claims, including from Jeffrey’s own brother, that Jeffrey had intentionally gathered “dirt” on some of the house’s most prominent visitors, not least of all, allegedly, Donald Trump and the Clintons.

To this day, Jeffrey’s acquisition of the property and the precise means behind his sultan-style wealth remain shrouded in mystery. He hadn’t always lived in such luxury. Far from it, in fact.

Although Epstein had lived in several extravagant homes, including a former Iranian government building on 34 East 69th Street and a mansion outside Columbus, Ohio, close to Wexner’s own residence, he came from humble beginnings. And though we might never fully ascertain what his early life was like (his brother, Mark, told me that he might write a book about it himself one day), a skeletal biography can be gleaned from personal, financial, and business records.

Born in Brooklyn on January 20, 1953, his parents, Pauline “Paula” Stolofsky and Seymour George Epstein, married when Paula was in the late stages of pregnancy. She was a school aide and homemaker, and Seymour a groundskeeper and gardener for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the pair brought home a modest income, just enough to raise Jeffrey and his future younger brother in working-to-middle-class, relative comfort in an apartment nestled in the middle of a three-story house in Sea Gate, a private gated community in salt-sprayed Coney Island, a pebble’s throw away from the area’s iconic lighthouse.

Sea Gate has had a significant Jewish presence for almost 100 years, with Epstein’s parents, both practising Jews, regular visitors to Kneses Israel, the neighbourhood’s oldest synagogue situated just across the street. Like many of the local townsfolk, Jeffrey was the child of European immigrants. And, like most of his neighbours who had harrowing tales of extended family members being brutally murdered during the Holocaust, Seymour and Paula had their own, often unspeakable family history that was steeped in persecution. Faith was the cornerstone of the Epstein family life.

By all accounts, the Epstein’s were doting parents, with neighbours later describing them as “the most gentle people, the most simple people in the world”. Both affectionately gave their two children nicknames within the walls of their small family home: “Bear” for Jeffrey, “Puggie” for Mark. “He was a little nerdy boy,” a former neighbour who grew up on the same block recalled, detailing how she and Jeffrey would play punchball in front of his house and in the schoolyard. “He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling,” she added. “There was absolutely no indication at that time of the vile, disturbed man that he was to become.”

Encouraged to learn the piano from five-years-old, Jeffrey was regarded by friends, most of whom lived in the same vibrant neighbourhood, as a talented budding musician. Both boys attended public schools, then a junior high school where Jeffrey, a model student, earned extra pocket money by helping fellow students in their studies, before heading off to Lafayette High School in Gravesend. “Pictures of Jeffrey in high school don’t feature the smug smile seen in photos from the past 20 years; his features are softer and calmer,” The Forward newspaper, formerly known as The Jewish Daily, reported.

Consisting predominantly of Italians, Jews and African-Americans, Jewish students often faced anti-Semitism at the school and in South Brooklyn in general. ”There was a lot of volatility at Lafayette,” one graduate told The Forward. “It was a blue-collar area that was, at one time, 90 percent Italian. Then a small number of Jews moved in, and there was anti-Semitism. The Italians didn’t want the Jews to be there.”  One classmate, Beverly Donatelli, said that she and a curly-haired Jeffrey were sweethearts for a time, but that Jeffrey was notably shy.

His shyness didn’t last long. Letters to Jeffrey, and contemporary photographs, detail that, from a late teen onwards, he was popular, often got into mischief with his friends, and had countless sexual encounters, one-night stands, and more serious relationships. He graduated from Lafayette in 1969 shortly after his 16th birthday, skipping two grades due to his evidently advanced intellect, far excelling his peers. Of particular interest to him was mathematics, a subject at which he was abnormally adept. Numbers and equations seemed to play like tunes before him, as though lifted from his many collected music sheets.  

Advanced math classes at the private Cooper Union college, and enrollment at New York University soon followed, where the teenager studied mathematical physiology. Strangely, however, he left in the summer of 1974 without receiving a degree. Even stranger was his subsequent hiring, devoid of any qualifications, as a physics and mathematics teacher for teens at Dalton School, a prestigious, private and progressive establishment on the Upper East Side. “I’m teaching a bunch of little brats next year,” Jeffrey had sarcastically scribbled in his yearbook.  

The school’s eccentric headmaster, Donald Barr, had made several unconventional staff recruitments in the run-up to the new term, the appointment of 21-year-old Ralph Lauren-lookalike Jeffrey onto the faculty rumoured to be one of them. Just one year prior, Barr wrote and published Space Relations, a heavily criticised science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. Described by Kirkus Reviews as “a coruscatingly literate tale for grown-ups,” and derided by reporter Becky Ferreira as “highly unsettling” due to its depiction of the rape of enslaved teenage girls. The book would, understandably, be scrutinised further in the months and years after Jeffrey’s death, with parallels drawn between the book’s plot and the grim accusations made against him.

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