In the next episode, episode 5 (out on Tuesday), I’ll be exposing, for the first time, the honeypot scandal involving one of Epstein’s girlfriends. It is a scandal involving cocaine, a beautiful Brit, and the downfall of the son of the Queen of the United Kingdom.

FULL TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE FOUR

Welcome to part four of the life and death of Jeff.

In case you missed the first three episodes, you can listen to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. As I touched upon in the last episode, Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s romance certainly wasn’t lifted from the pages of a fairy tale.

“Epstein told me that he had a heart condition,” she told Todd Blanche, “which meant that he didn’t have Intercourse a lot, which I didn’t mind, because I actually do have a medical condition which prevents me having a lot of intercourse.

“He liked other forms of sexual acts. He told me he didn’t - he couldn’t get a full erection. And I believed him.”

“When you said he said that, do you mean he regularly told you that?” Blanche asked.

“Because when I didn’t have sex with him after the first time, I asked him, ‘was it me?’ And he told me it was him. And so I also know now, which I didn’t know at the time, was that he saw lots of other women.”

Jeffrey’s claim that he suffered from erectile dysfunction wasn’t a lie. Interviews I’ve conducted with his former sexual partners and countless records I’ve spent 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 were filled with pornography and happy endings.

“But I had no keys to his house,” Ghislaine continued. “I had no free access to his house. And in the entire time that he lived there, which was, I believe, until the beginning of 1996, I never slept a single night in that house. Ever. Not once. I did travel with him. I would go to his houses in Palm Beach. He only had that house, actually. No, that’s not true. He had the house in Palm Beach and he had a house in Ohio. He had the house in Ohio because of Leslie Wexner.”

She confirmed that she was a paid employee of Jeffrey at this time, earning $25,000 a year to begin with, this eventually significantly increasing.

“My responsibilities increased with each acquisition that he put on and each new project. So I believe the first thing that he purchased after was the ranch in New Mexico.”

Ghislaine had introduced Jeffrey to the area and helped arrange the sale, taking him to view different properties across America, none quite suiting Jeffrey’s taste, until they arrived in Santa Fe and viewed the ranch.

“And I arranged for us to go to New Mexico, and he just loved New Mexico. And then, I don’t remember how the ranch happened, I don’t remember that, now it’s lost. And he ended up buying the ranch, and I think In February, it came from the Kings who named him the governor and bought the ranch. And then I had to deal with that. And dealing with that was extensive. I mean, the way that I think of myself and the way that I think is the best way to explain probably my role was as a general manager. Because each property to me was like a hotel. So the ranch was very challenging because not only that, but it had BLM land. So to maintain your BLM, you have to have cattle. And I love animals. And so the first thing are horses. If you’re going to have a ranch, I like authenticity.

Jeffrey’s new property, which he named the Zorro Ranch after one of his favourite fictional characters, lay in the high desert of central New Mexico, about 30 miles southeast of Santa Fe, surrounded by endless horizons of sagebrush, juniper and low sunburned mesas.

He bought the property in 1993 from former New Mexico Governor Bruce King, acquiring it through a web of trust entities that kept his direct involvement largely concealed for years.

Though Ghislaine had found it for him, he claimed to have had long shown an interest in the area. In a 2019 interview conducted by Steve Bannon, he stated that he became interested in New Mexico as an investor after 1990, when he learned that many scientists who had previously worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory were working at private spin-off firms doing pure and applied research, such as the Santa Fe Institute. Jeffrey controlled the property through a shell company called Zorro Trust, later renamed Cypress Inc. It spanned thousands of acres, making it a domain unto itself. And, eventually, at its heart stood a vast, hacienda-style mansion, often cited as being between 26,000 and 30,000 square feet. Built in the stucco and adobe tradition of the region, its cream-coloured walls and terracotta roofs rose in sharp relief against the open blue sky.

The main house, not completed until later 1999-early 2000, formed a wide U-shape around inner courtyards with shaded porticos, fountains and terraces that looked out toward distant mountain ridges. From above, the estate seemed less like a single dwelling than a small compound, a deliberate echo of the Spanish colonial architecture that still defines much of northern New Mexico.

It had guest houses, staff quarters, a fire station and a sprawling heated garage with multiple bays. There was a short private air strip and hangar, a large swimming pool, stables and fenced pasture land dotted with cattle. But that was after he’d had it renovated. Before then, in the early years, Jeffrey and his guests, including Ghislaine, would often resort to using static buildings set up on the dusty landscape and even a small converted railroad train, a caboose that doubled as a makeshift dining room.

It was at the ranch, before its development was complete, that one of the earliest allegations in the Epstein-Maxwell saga began.

The allegation was made by the Farmer Sisters.

Maria Farmer was born in 1969 or 1970 in Paducah, Kentucky to Frank Farmer and Janice Swain. She has two younger brothers and two younger sisters.

The family lived for a time in Phoenix, Arizona, before Maria studied at the Santa Clara University and then moved to New York, earning her master’s degree from the New York Academy of Art in 1995. She attended a postgraduate workshop at the Santa Fe Art Institute the same year.

At her graduate exhibition in 1995, the school’s dean, Eileen Guggenheim, introduced Farmer to Jeffrey, who served as a board member at the Academy from 1987 to 1994, and to Guyland. Although Maria claims she’d already sold one of her paintings for $12,000 to a German buyer, Jeffrey reportedly voiced his desire to purchase it for half the price, and Guggenheim urged Maria to cut him a deal as it was beneficial to the Academy.

Jeffrey had made numerous large donations to the Academy. In the summer of 1995, Maria was one of four artists chosen to attend an all-expenses-paid trip to Santa Fe. Several of the artists confirmed that they attended a dinner party at Jeffrey’s Zorro Ranch, at which it was allegedly promised that one of them would be rewarded with a major commissioned artwork for Jeffrey’s New Mexico property. However, no commission materialised. Back in New York, Maria was hired to work for Jeffrey, first allegedly as his art advisor, where she oversaw the acquisition of artwork by Chuck Bowdish and Damien Loeb. She continued to work for him at the front desk of his New York mansion, signing in tradesmen, decorators and friends. In the summer of 1996, she was commissioned to create two artworks for the film set of the Jack Nicholson film, As Good As It Gets. At the time, Maria was living in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, but Jeffrey offered her more space to create the artwork as an artist in residence at a 10,600-square-foot guest home on Leslie Wexner’s property in New Albany, Ohio.

Excited, Maria travelled there in a rental truck loaded with art materials and supplies.

“During that same summer of 1996, when I was working on my art project at Wexner’s Mansion, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein came to Wexner’s Mansion,” she would later claim. “They asked me to come into a bathroom with them and then proceeded to sexually assault me against my will. I fled from the room and called the Sheriff’s Office but did not get any response. The Wexner’s security staff refused to let me leave the property. I pleaded with them and my father drove up from Kentucky to Ohio to help me. I was held against my will for approximately 12 hours until I was ultimately allowed to leave with my father. Upon my return to New York, I went to the New York 6th Precinct Police Department for help, and they counselled me to contact the FBI to make a report about the assault in Ohio. I called the FBI and made the report, but to my knowledge, the FBI did not take any action against Epstein or Maxwell.”

In October 2019, a Wexner family spokesperson said, “Mr and Mrs Wexner had no knowledge of her, never met her, never spoke with her. The Epstein house, where Maria claims to have stayed, was not a Wexner guest house.”

This claim is corroborated in property records which show that the guest house in question was deeded to Epstein in 1992.

A driving licence reviewed by the Washington Post corroborates Maria’s claim that she stayed at the property. In an October 2019 interview, Maria claimed she was told by security staff that she was not allowed to leave the grounds of the property, adding, “where I stayed that summer, in that house and working in that garage, all of it was within view of the Wexner house.”

But this has been disputed by a former member of Wexner’s security staff who, remaining anonymous, told the Washington Post that the house was effectively the guest house and that the two houses were half a mile apart.

This is also confirmed in property records and by viewing the two properties on Google Maps. The Epstein house was not on land owned by the Wexners and was nearly half a mile away from the Wexner home, the former member of Wexner’s security staff added. The entrance to the Epstein residence was not through the Wexner gate.

The art collector Stuart Pivar confirmed, however, that he learned of Maria’s experience shortly after it occurred. Artist Eric Fischel also corroborated her account and confirmed being contacted by her. Later that summer, Maria Farmer claimed she learned that her younger sister Annie had also been assaulted by Epstein when Annie had visited him at his Zorro ranch in April 1996. Maria claimed she called the New York City Police Department and the FBI on August 26th, 1996 and reported the assault.

Maria herself was the person who had introduced her sister Annie to Jeffrey. Annie later claimed that on one occasion Jeffrey and Ghislaine took her to see the film Twelve Monkeys in 1996, recording the event in her diary. However, this cannot possibly be correct. The film was only available to watch in cinemas the year before, leading some to speculate that Annie’s diary entry must have been written many years later in an attempt to deceive readers.

Annie and Maria Farmer filed a complaint against Ghislaine and the executors of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in late 2019, almost 25 years after the alleged incident, accusing the pair of false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress under New York law. However, multiple contradictions exist in Maria’s story, including her claim that, in 1996, she had filed a police report about Jeffrey’s alleged abuse. The police report, which I managed to obtain many years ago, clearly relates to an accusation that Jeffrey had stolen photographs of her underage sister and had threatened to burn Maria’s home down if she told police. The contemporary report suspiciously made no allegation of sexual abuse, lending one to believe that her abuse allegations were a later invention.

It is important to also note that in her report to the police, Maria made no mention of Ghislaine Maxwell.

When making their true crime series, Epstein Filthy Rich, Professor Alan Dershowitz informed Netflix of various contradictions and rabid antisemitism in Maria Farmer’s statements.

But he was ultimately ignored, with none of his concerns about her being shown in the subsequent series. In an article for Newsmax, Dershowitz wrote:

The central witness in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, the person relied on by Netflix in its documentary series Jeffrey Epstein, Filthy Rich, is a 50-year-old woman named Maria Farmer.

It now turns out that she may have been motivated by the anti-Semitic attitudes she has long harboured to falsely accuse prominent Jews of sexual misconduct. This is some of the bigotry Maria Farmer spewed during a recorded two-hour interview that can be heard online, such as... “I had a hard time with all Jewish people. I think it’s all the Jews. They think Jewish DNA is better than the rest of us. These people truly believe they are chosen, every one of them. All the Jewish people I met are paedophiles that run the world economy. They are Jewish supremacists, and they are all connected through a mysterious organisation called MEGA, which is run by Leslie Wexner, who is the head of the snake.”

Farmer claimed to have evidence that the Israeli Mossad hired Jeffrey Epstein to videotape prominent American political leaders committing acts of paedophilia so that Israel could blackmail them into doing their bidding and that the entire conspiracy was under the protection and direction of the Rothschilds.

These anti-Semitic canards sound like they could have come directly from the protocols of the Elders of Zion and other classic anti-Semitic forgeries and screeds, but all of this and more come from the bigoted brain and malicious mouth of Maria Farmer. Although she hadn’t accused me directly of any wrongdoing, she has provided a sworn affidavit claiming the following.

“Alan Dershowitz was an individual who came to visit Epstein at his New York mansion a number of times when I was working for Epstein. Dershowitz was very comfortable at the home and would come in and walk upstairs. On a number of occasions I witnessed Dershowitz at the NY mansion going upstairs at the same time there were young girls under the age of 18 who were present upstairs in the house.”

The problem is that Farmer acknowledges that she terminated her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in early summer of 1996, after she was allegedly raped by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on Leslie Wexner’s premises.

She never entered Epstein’s New York home after that, but I didn’t meet Epstein until well after that, as I can prove. She couldn’t possibly have ever seen me in Epstein’s house because I was never in his house at any time that she could possibly have been there.

So, it’s impossible for her to have ever seen me there during the time period she knew him. Moreover, on the few occasions when I was in Epstein’s New York house, well after Pharma was long gone, I never went into the private areas of that home.

I was generally with my wife or other lawyers or academics in the public areas, dining room, living room, den. And I never saw any young girls around. I’ll dive deeper into Professor Dershowitz’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and the false allegations levelled against him in a later episode of this series, including video recordings of my interviews with him.

After submitting her lawsuit in 2019, defence lawyers requested envelopes that Maria had claimed, while speaking in a podcast, were still in her possession and that, in her words, still have the touch DNA and fingerprints of Jeffrey and Ghislaine. She claimed she had offered them to the FBI. However, to date Maria has not provided any such envelopes and no evidence has been presented to prove that they even exist. By now he owned his huge art-filled home in New York, a mansion in West Palm Beach and a sprawling ranch in New Mexico. He and Ghislaine continued to fly between each property, stopping to socialise.

Lady Victoria Hervey, an outspoken defender of Prince Andrew, whom I’d later meet for the first time in a hotel restaurant near Hyde Park, recalled those early days of the relationship vividly. “She was definitely a flirtatious character for sure,” she said in an interview with Netflix. “She exuded this mysterious air about her and whenever you saw Ghislaine, it was Jeffrey this and Jeffrey that and all she spoke about was him. You got this feeling like she was just so loyal to him.”

The pair also rubbed shoulders with some of the world’s most influential individuals, most notably Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much and I think it should be said that he also very much liked Ivana because she was also from Czechoslovakia,” Ghislaine told Blanche. “I just want to say for my relationship with President Trump, Relationship’s a big word. But I just want to say that I met him, or I believe I may have, because of my father in the 90s. So my father liked him very much, and he really liked his wife as well, because they were both Czechoslovakian. And as far as I’m concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I admire his extraordinary achievements. In becoming the president now. And I like him. And I’ve always liked him. So that is the sum substance of my entire relationship with him.”

“What about Mr. Epstein’s relationship with him?” asked Blanche.

“I don’t know how they met,” Ghislaine replied. “And I don’t know how they became friends. I certainly saw them together. And I remember the few times I observed them together that they were friendly I mean, they seemed friendly.”

“Was that in social settings or was that in private settings?” asked Blanche. “I believe I only ever saw them in social settings. I don’t recall any private settings.”

“Have you ever been to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach?” Blanche asked.

“I have.”

“In what time period are you thinking about when you say yes?”

“I don’t remember when the president purchased Mar-a-Lago. So from whenever it turned into a club, I went there and loved going there.”

“Did you go there alone or with Mr. Epstein?”

“Mostly alone. Many times I went there, I was for an event maybe once or twice.”

“And do you know whether Mr. Epstein ever went there?”

“I believe he did, but again... We really were... He didn’t... Take me with him all the time, so he would go and... Oh, right. He never... I never... Well, he did from time to time, but he would go alone. I think he would maybe go himself to the spa. I certainly did.”

“Did you ever observe President Trump receive a massage?”

“Never.”

“Did you ever observe - You said that you were, I mean, have you seen, there’s photographs, public photographs of Mr. Epstein and President Trump together.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s photographs of, I think you’re in some of the photographs as well. Those all appear to be social settings.”

“Yes. That’s my memory. There were social settings. I don’t know Epstein’s, if he had, whatever the nature of the president’s friendship, if you will, or however you want to define that with Epstein, I was never witness. I think they were friendly, like people are in social settings. I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the president in any of... I don’t recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance. I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody.”

Described by an acquaintance as being tight and each other’s wingman, Trump and Jeffrey sparked up a friendship that would last from the mid-90s well into the 2000s. The rich duo, along with investor Thomas Barrack, were regulars on the social scenes of New York City and Palm Beach, where both Jeffrey and Donald owned large homes.

Their friendship, which entailed dinner parties, and even the pair reportedly holding a private party-come-makeshift beauty contest with a throng of models, was remarkably captured on camera, with video footage shot in 1992 and since widely circulated, showing them together at Donald’s private members club, Mar-a-Lago.

In a profile of Epstein in New York Magazine, Trump remarked, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side, no doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

But by 2007, their friendship had soured, with Trump reportedly abruptly banning Jeffrey from Mar-a-Lago following a bitter battle over real estate. Three years earlier, when Maison de l’Amitié, translated ironically as the House of Friendship, a beautiful oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, described by Trump as the finest piece of land in Florida and probably the US, came up for grabs.

Both men were both keen to get their hands on it, not least of all for the millions it would make for its new owner if quickly renovated and flipped. A bidding war ensued between the two parties and their legal teams, once social friends, now business enemies.

“It was something like Donald saying, ‘you don’t want to do a deal with him, he doesn’t have the money’,” Joseph Luzinski, the trustee in the case later recalled, “while Epstein was saying, ‘Donald is all talk, he doesn’t have the money’, they both really wanted it.”

Ultimately, Trump won the bid, securing the property for $41.35 million and selling it four years later to a Russian businessman for more than double the price.

Their friendship well and truly over, Trump and Epstein were never seen out in public together again.

During one of my interviews with Professor Dershowitz, he casually told me a little anecdote. In the middle of the 1990s, Alan was at a dinner party hosted by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President Kennedy, at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. Around the table sat Alan’s wife, Caroline, two of his friends and a small gathering of VIPs taking a day off. Across the table was Bill Clinton, then America’s charismatic president, and his wife, the famous politician Hillary. Suddenly, the Secret Service pulled President Clinton away, Alan recalled.

An important telephone call was on hold, important enough to warrant the President of the United States to excuse himself from the dinner party guests and withdraw to a separate room. He would sit there alone on a secure phone for 15 minutes. “I thought maybe he was speaking to, you know, Angela Merkel, maybe Tony Blair,” Alan told me.

But then Clinton strolled back into the dining room, still grasping the telephone, the caller lingering on the line. He held the handset towards Alan. Alan, a friend of yours wants to talk to you, the President told him with a smile. Alan took the phone from his outstretched hand, bemused at who might be so bold as to request that the Commander-in-Chief end their chinwag and convert into a PA. He raised the receiver to his ear. ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice echoed four words back down the line. ‘Hey Alan, it’s Jeff’.

How Jeffrey and Bill Clinton first met remains unclear, as no publicly available record identifies the exact date, place or person responsible for introducing them. Clinton himself has stated that he does not specifically recall when he first met Epstein.

What is known is that Jeffrey began moving within democratic donor and political circles during the early 1990s, around the time of Clinton’s rise to the presidency.

Jeffrey was accumulating so much cash that he didn’t know what to do with it. So he turned to philanthropy. “I invest in people,” he said in 2003, “be it politics or science, it’s what I do”. At the time of making that statement, he had already donated over $139,000 to the Democratic Party, to federal candidates and committees, and over $18,000 to Republican Party candidates and groups. He contributed $50,000 to Democrat Bill Richardson’s successful campaign for Governor of New Mexico, a territory in which Jeffrey built a spacious ranch, and the same amount again for his successful run for re-election in 2006.

His generous donations courted favour from all sides of the political spectrum, including from Bill and Hillary Clinton after donating tens of thousands of dollars to the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation. A spokesman for Bill Clinton lauded Jeffrey as a committed philanthropist with insights and generosity, with the President inviting him to events at the White House at least four times.

Bill flew with Jeffrey too.

Flight logs show the pair journeyed on Jeffrey’s private Boeing 727, later nicknamed the Lolita Express, multiple times, with Clinton’s spokesperson saying in 2019, In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane, one to Europe, one to Asia and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton, the spokesperson confirmed, “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York”.

On one particular trip with Jeffrey, Clinton appeared in a photograph that has since become infamous, despite it merely depicting an innocent encounter.

That encounter was with one of Jeffrey’s many young assistant slash sexual interests, Chauntae Davies. Chauntae was a 21-year-old trainee masseuse living in L.A. when she was hired by Jeffrey. Her guru, simply known as Gypsy, who was teaching her massage, invited her to come with him to Beverly Hills. It was there, at the Four Seasons Hotel, that Gypsy allegedly provided Ghislaine with a massage, after which Ghislaine, spotting a potential new masseuse for Jeffrey, allegedly offered her a private plane trip to meet him in Florida, an offer she accepted. Chauntae claims that during the first massage she gave to Jeffrey, he began masturbating, but that she chose to continue working for him and travelling with him as one of his masseuses, working for him for several years until 2005.

The now infamous photograph shows that she provided Clinton with a massage in 2002, but she told the Daily Mail, “although the image looks bizarre, President Clinton was a perfect gentleman during the trip and I saw absolutely no foul play involving him. He turned his back to me and I reached up and I started to rub out the kink in our former president’s neck and shoulder.”

She said they had stopped over for the jet to refuel and, “while we were in the terminal the ex-president was complaining of stiffness from falling asleep in his chair. Ghislaine chimed in to be funny and said that I could give him a massage.”

Chauntae enjoyed her role with Jeffrey so much that she eventually introduced her sister Teala to him.

After numerous women began seeking compensation from Jeffrey, however, Davies joined them in 2019, changing her story and claiming that Jeffrey had raped her during the years he employed her.

Massages had become a firm fixture in Jeffrey’s daily routine. Most of them were purely just that, massages, but some of them were not.

“Whereas in the past, in the early nineties, I don’t remember travelling so much with other people,” Ghislaine said. “There would be a masseuse or a yoga person, but now he started to travel with more, always a masseuse. Whereas in the past, it wasn’t always a masseuse or always an instructor. There was now starting to be always an individual or a friend or whatever. There’s always a, like maybe the word would be, entourage. But these were always people in their twenties, late twenties, early thirties.”

Ghislaine bought her own Manhattan townhouse at 116 East 65th Street in 2000 for approximately $5 million. Property records show that the buyer was an anonymous limited liability company, but the transaction was handled by Darren Indyke, Jeffrey’s long-time lawyer, and the LLC used an address associated with J. Epstein and Co.

“By 1999, our relationship had founded,” Ghislaine said. “We were never sleeping together again, so we stopped having sexual relations in 1999. Not full sex, sorry. To be clear, it didn’t mean that we didn’t still share a bedroom or something, but he had another girlfriend.

“I definitively knew that it was over after 9-11, actually, because we were both from New York. And I don’t know, were you in New York? I mean, 9-11. And it was a scary time if you were in New York. You didn’t know. I didn’t know. Nobody knew what was going on. And he was in 71st Street and I was in 65th Street, my house. And he wouldn’t see me. At all. I asked me, his mum, everyone very close to, who’s in the hospital at Lenox Hill, just asked me to look after her. And then I knew As anyone did at that time, you’re not going to be there for someone of 9-11, you’re never going to be there. So for me, that was the line set. I wanted to get married and have children. And Epstein had encouraged me to believe that that, I don’t know about them, certainly by the late 90s, I mean, the marriage part was never going to happen. I had believed that maybe. In 96, 97, 98 maybe, but then I realised it wasn’t that. But I did think that we might have a child, which is what I had proved. So we stopped having physicality. I mean, that doesn’t mean we weren’t friends. I certainly did stay sometimes in his room. I mean, friends with benefits, it’s a lot, just not sex. And he had another English girlfriend, actually.”

Though conveniently left out of all media reports, the girlfriend whom Ghislaine referred to was Shelley Lewis.

Shelley Anne Lewis is a British-born art specialist and entrepreneur. Born in 1976, Shelley was 23 years old when she met Jeffrey in 1999 after having moved from England to New York to work in the contemporary art department at Christie’s Auction House.

It was through Jeffrey’s many close dealings with Christie’s that he met her. Flight records place Shelley aboard Epstein’s private aircraft on multiple occasions and later correspondence suggests they maintained a close relationship, with Ghislaine even communicating her warmly through email. Though Shelley was his main girlfriend, Jeffrey still couldn’t help but continue with his playboy lifestyle, regularly meeting with other women.

One of them, one of many, was Sarah Kellan. Kellan, who had essentially run away from a Mormon cult in her late teens, had met Jeffrey in the belief that he might have been able to help her get into modelling. Instead, the pair began engaging in sexual activity, but Sarah soon realised that she was not the only female Jeffrey was interested in. Instead, as with Ghislaine, she quickly slipped into an employee/friends-with-benefits role, though largely took over most of the handling of his day-to-day affairs.

Feeling somewhat rejected, Ghislaine remained Jeffrey’s friend with benefits and employee, but tension was never far away.

“Their relationship was strange,” Rina Oh told me. “They were constantly arguing or snapping at each other, and he’d start laughing and she’d start laughing too, but like a sarcastic, bitter laugh that filled the room with tension. I never knew if they loved each other or hated each other.”

“It’d be true to say that Jeffrey tried very hard to keep working for him,” said Ghislaine. “Because, I mean, this is a complex operator. I’m not talking about anything. I’m talking about just the sheer size of the projects. I’m talking about construction projects, the houses, the staff. It’s a really significant job. And I ran all the properties, the staff in the properties, the management of the properties, and all the construction.”

Jeffrey also employed butlers, assistants, house managers, and, of course, lots of masseuses.

“He would have a masseuse, right?” Ghislaine continued. “And he did. Male and female, by the way, in the 90s. It’s never been discussed. Both in yoga and everything, there were men as well as women. And so if he would travel, and I can show them to you, I highlighted them on the flight record so you could see that there really were men that He would say, ‘would you like to do yoga with Tito?’ Or ‘would you like a massage with this one?’ But they would be in their late 20s and professional masseuses.

“So if you were staying with him and you had a massage, he would often travel with a masseuse. He would say, ‘hey, would you like a massage?’ And he did do that. In the entire time I was with him or friends with him or had anyone, no one ever reported to me or came to me and said that Anything inappropriate happened or was upset, but I never saw tears. I never saw ever any of them.”

“He asked me to find masseuses for him,” she continued. “And I did do that. So the first person I believe that I introduced him to as a masseuse was somebody called [redacted]. She was, I don’t know, mid to late 20s, a professional masseuse.”

“Was this something that happened early on in your relationship?” asked Blanche.

“So in terms of massage, I have a lot of injuries. I do a lot of dangerous sports and have had multiple serious accidents and walk without any Lameness because of physical therapy and massage. That to me is a very, it’s medicinal for me. So Epstein, whatever his massage situation, whatever, he loved massage. And if I met somebody who I thought was a good masseuse or masseur, I introduced them.

“I guess there’s been a ton of testimony as well, but also... public reporting about how the recruiting was a very aggressive effort that you were a part of and that he was a part of and others to try to find more and more masseuses,” Blanche interrupted her. “Is that true and what role did you have in that?”

“That is partially true,” Ghislaine replied. “So it is true that I found masseuses and he became more insistent. He liked new all the time. He got bored. So he would be bored with that masseuse and he would say, find me a new masseuse. I am the entire opposite. If I find someone that I like, I stay with them. I’m like, I don’t want new. He would drive for new. So that is true. And in my effort to find them, I would go to massage spas, like legitimate spas. We’re not talking funky ones. If I got a massage from somebody in a spa that I liked, I asked them if they would do home visits. If they said yes, I would ask them to come to the house and he would see if he liked them or not. But these were people who worked in spas. I never, ever checked their age and I never checked their credentials. I never asked for a certificate.”

“But just to be clear, you never thought anybody was underage?” one of her lawyers asked.

“I never, no, that was never my, that was never a drive,” she confirmed.

“I’m sure that he didn’t suddenly start having relations with masseuses in 2002,” Ghislaine continued. “I’m sure he must have had relations with masseuses who knows when.”

“But you’re saying as far as you, I use the word abuse, you’re saying that as far as you sit here today, you would describe that more as consensual, meaning the masseuse did this willingly?” Blanche asked.

“I saw him with lots of masseuses,” she replied. “I never saw a single masseuse ever look unhappy or not come back or whatever. So based on my observation, I don’t think that if you are being raped, as now he’s saying, this prolific, I just can’t imagine why you would return.”

“Again, I know we’re talking about a decade-long period, but during the period we’re talking about, In a seven-day week, how often would Mr. Epstein get a massage?” Blanche asked.

“In the 90s, when we’re talking, he would get one every day,” Ghislaine answered. “I think as that time progressed, he would get one maybe twice a day. I do want to say that there was maybe a reason that things altered or morphed or And it is maybe part of the reason also that he and I, our relationship, or however somebody wants to call it, altered. And he started doing testosterone, and that altered his character. And I believe that started in the late 90s. And I believe that the FBI has his medical records and you may see that on his medical records.”

“So you believe that he started taking testosterone in the 90s and when you say that altered his behavior, you’re saying it made him get more massages or that was just one part of what changed about him?” asked Blanche.

“Well he became more aggressive,” said Ghislaine. “And I think that he may be - well, now I’m just imagining that the testosterone altered his desires or something.”

“And so, given what you’ve said the past couple hours about his kind of progression or change, let’s focus on that time period,” Blanche said. “So more towards the late 90s, 96, 97, 98, when you’ve said that he changed. Did you know flat out that he was having sex or otherwise some sort of sexual conduct with masseuses regularly?”

“Flat out, no,” she replied. “I denied that. I couldn’t imagine that he would. But I think, looking back now, that... I did not. But I started to suspect that he was not faithful.”

Ghislaine was then asked by Blanche if she had known that some of the females massaging Jeffrey did so topless at Jeffrey’s request. She denied that she had, insisting that she believed the topless massages were introduced later by a now famous Epstein accuser whom I’ll be exposing extensively in an imminent episode of this series.

The evidence suggests beyond any reasonable doubt that over time some, if not perhaps a large percentage of those massages would involve sexual activity, with Jeffrey, it has been said by several witnesses, reportedly needing to orgasm at least three times a day.

It is also worth recalling at this point what Stuart Pivar claimed when talking to Mother Jones that Jeffrey had the disease of satiriasis, the male equivalent of nymphomania.

“Nor, on the other hand, did he actually rape any of them or anything like that,” he said. “If you want to make a list of, let us say in the past several years, of the kind of stuff going on of sexual abuse of children and what the hell not, Jeffrey never did anything like that. Everything he had to do with these girls was complicit and it was just interesting to the rest of the world who don’t understand that Jeffrey was a very sick man.

“A nymphomaniac is a girl who is insatiable in her sexual appetite. There are men who are like that and it’s a disease. It’s called satiriasis and Jeffrey was afflicted with that. He couldn’t help himself, but he didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it big time.

“There are plenty of people with satiriasis, like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls.”

My subsequent interviews with numerous key witnesses and, indeed, accusers of Jeffrey over the years would largely corroborate the notion. A startling fact, startling in that it contradicts the established narrative surrounding the scandal, is that the vast majority of Jeffrey’s masseuses were well over the legal age of consent.

What is even more surprising to learn is that those who weren’t of legal age, the evidence, including victim statements found in official police reports, confirms were told to lie to Jeffrey about their age so that he would believe them to be of the legal age to give him messages and provide sexual services in exchange for money.

The omission of this vital facet of the case from any news report you will come across is curious, to say the least.

The following was written by Jeffrey himself in a draft statement in 2011:

“The girls, who were brought to my house by their close friends, worked in local massage parlours. West Palm Beach has scores of massage parlours, happy ending places that routinely advertise in the same local papers that have chastised my behaviour or strip clubs.

I am, and have always been, a bachelor. I have used massage parlour girls, licensed massage therapists, and girls with no massage experience. I have never ever used force, coercion, or in fact had intercourse with any of these girls. I am a pleasure seeker, a hedonist. I chose not to lead a convention, monogamous, domestic life.

I have also frequently paid for sex.”

Either way, throughout the late 90s, things seemed to be ticking along nicely in Jeffrey’s hedonistic world.

His wealth continued to soar.

He was travelling the world.

He had a throng of women, mostly prostitutes acting as masseuses (though he did in fact pay for some of them to be trained in massage) filtering in and out of his home each day, providing him with happy endings.

Life for Jeffrey was rosy.

But scandal was just around the corner.

Thanks for listening to part four of The Life and Death of Jeff.

In next week’s instalment we’ll be taking another deep dive, this time into Jeffrey’s infamous island, his other relationships, and a curious honey trap cocaine scandal involving an Epstein accuser and the son of the Queen of England.

This episode contains audio footage of Ghislaine herself, and also clips from my in…

Read more

We’ll be listening to my interview with Ghislaine’s brother, Ian, to recordings of Ghislaine herself, and will be able to obtain a better understanding of Maxwell before we move on to the story’s seedier developments.

Please remember to subscribe, share on social media, and feel free to message me with any questions.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE TWO

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 Ghislain 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. 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 L.A. film producer.

“I was living and working in L.A. 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, Elizabeth Maxwell, née Maynard, 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 Elizabeth 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 birth name was Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hock. Throughout the war he went by numerous aliases, including Ivan de Maurya, 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 15, 1945. Living in Maison Lafitte, part of the affluent outer suburbs of north-western Paris, the children would soon fill the expanding family’s household, most of them delivered by Elizabeth’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 that we were originally nine children in this family,” Ian Maxwell, a rather friendly and likeable man of 68, told me. “There was an eldest brother, Michael, and there was a little girl, Karine, and they died young. Kareem died in 1957, age three, from leukemia, and Michael, who was the eldest son, was in a terrible car crash. That didn’t kill him but left him in a coma for eight years. And he never recovered and died.

“And so what that meant is that the little girl was exactly between me and my twin sisters. And so instead of having a natural bridge, the family in a sense split into two because the age gap between me and my twin sisters is six years. And therefore Kevin and I and Ghislaine were very close.

“As children and my four elder brothers and sisters were very close. And obviously, as we grew up in age, we became equally close. But in terms of our childhood, Kevin and I and Ghislaine were closest in age. I’m six years older than her or five and a bit and three years older than my brother.

“And so we spent quite a bit of time together, although we were educated separately. And so I’ve got pretty clear memories of childhood with Ghislaine. She was a funny little thing. She was very funny. That’s a key thing. Ghislaine’s always been quite funny. She had a very good sense of humor.

“And in terms of things that we did together, you know, we gathered about. She was in the same bedroom as Kevin and I for at least the first three years of our life. There’s one anecdote that sticks in my mind, is that we, 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 hole. 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 she’s held in the arms of my mother, my father’s next to her and some Worthy Oxford College head turns up and says, ‘and who is this adorable little thing?’, to which Ghislaine said, ‘piss off!’.

“It was a hell of a - my father didn’t know where to go. Anyway, so she’s always had a sense of humour. She always, even as a young child, loved animals. She had dogs and dogs. Then cat and some budgies, an hamster and the pony. My father was rich and could afford to give her these things. I thought she was perhaps a little spoiled because that’s what happens when you’re the youngest of the family. And also because the day of her birth, which was Christmas Day 1961, was only two days before my brother Michael’s car accident. This traumatised the whole family desperately. My parents didn’t know where to go. They were lost in grief. And Ghislaine was, in some sense, ignored, really, in the very early months of her life, even the first year or two.

“And there’s another story told about her that at one point, age, I think, some two and a half, three, something like this, she stood in front of our mother, legs apart, and said, Mommy, I exist. An amazing idea for a child. So there may have been some compensation on the part of my parents. They may have felt guilty about that.”

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 mum 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 Morrell. 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. During the war years, Headington Hill Hall had been transformed into a Red Cross rehabilitation centre for injured servicemen, and by 1959 it had been unoccupied for 15 years, so it was very dilapidated.

“My parents got permission to build new modern headquarters for Dad’s Pergamon Press on the site, so that went up at the same time. I remember that the house, when we first saw it, was frog green on the outside sills and window frames and pale yellow in all the rooms. There were giant radiators everywhere.

“It took Mum a good year of living by herself in the one habitable room while architects and contractors repaired and recreated the original plan of the house. Once complete, the house would serve as a magical playground for the Maxwell children. We spent hours and hours exploring the house and the cellars it had and old tunnels that we thought would lead all the way down to Oxford if we dared crawl through incredibly narrow places, Isabel said. For kids, it was a wonderful place to explore and play, that’s for sure. Every weekend our father would have a string of guests for meals, either from the constituency when he was in Parliament [Robert Maxwell became an elected Labour MP in 1964] or from science and business across the world. And often guests would stay over, and we would be expected to entertain them and be present at all the meals too, take them for walks, or visit Oxford or whatever they wanted, whatever was required.

“We learned a lot, and this developed our social skills for sure, as well as a knowledge about the world and different cultures. That was endlessly fascinating and important for understanding differences in the world too.”

As it had under previous tenants, many important people would be welcomed into Triple H’s walls while the Maxwells lived there. As Wired Magazine records, “Isabel might come home from school to find Sir Robert Robinson, the Nobel Laureate in Organic Chemistry at the dinner table, or Mrs Pandit Nehru, the wife of the Prime Minister of India, or Professor Murray Gelman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the quark. Politicians too, like former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Like her father, the dinner guests were of heroic stature. There was no place for dilly-dallying in a life of this scale. Over every mistake, every mishap, her father would demand, what did you learn from that, he made her think. Why did you say that, he would insist, pushing for clarity. He berated people for what he called mental laziness and for stumbling, vague conversation.

“My father had boundless confidence,” Isabel told me, “but over time his manner became authoritarian. He could dress you down pretty rotten. I can tell you that from the time our eldest brother was all but killed in a car accident, the night of December 27th, 1961, all our lives were shattered. The next two years from that time remain utterly like a grey fog. I remember going to school and babysitting our little sister Ghislaine from time to time, but everything was full of grief. We could barely go anywhere, and if our request was to be taken somewhere in a car, the answer would be no.

Ian has similar recollections of this melancholy period, when his father, often flying into Triple H in his helicopter, would arrive with a stern disposition, though never failing to treat his children, particularly Galen, with luxury, if not with physical affection.

“She was, I think she was quite protected by my father. And, you know, who was very aware that, you know, she was quite a young thing and a girl with it. And following the accent of our brother, all of my older brothers and sisters were kind of corralled.

“They couldn’t go anywhere from, you know, they had to be escorted everywhere. My parents were really just so worried I’m going to lose another child in some horrible way. So Guillaume was in some senses quite protected. She went to quite a few schools, boarding schools and day schools.

“But she grew up pretty independent, able to think for herself, do her own stuff. My father really lived for work. He was, I’m just a workaholic, it’s not quite the right word, but he didn’t have any small chat. This wasn’t a man interested in the minutiae, you know, because I meant what football team was winning or he was interested in work and in matters of consequence and of substance. And we were brought up in this way. We had lots of advantages because he could afford to give us those advantages, the most important of which was a damn good education. And he took the view, if I give you this education and I give you other things to make your life comfortable, you owe society something back for that. In other words, this wasn’t just a question of take, take, take. You’ve got to give something back. And he therefore taught us From very, very young, the responsibilities associated with having wealth and opportunity. And as a result of his professional life, which was both political and business, there wasn’t a Sunday in our childhood where we didn’t have some big shots for lunch. I mean, there won’t be much to you now, but these were some very serious scientists and maybe some Labour government figures from the 60s. And the children were expected To have something to say for themselves, know what was going on in the world, make speeches at the drop of a hat, entertain our father’s guests and so on. That was standard. And actually, it was exhausting because we would want to come home on a weekend from school and chill and just have a nice time. And he was not in the let’s have a nice time business. I’ve got here the deputy leader of the Labour Party. You’re going to sit with him and have a drink. So it was a bit - it was quite pressured.”

Repercussions awaited any of the Maxwell children who failed to meet their father’s high expectations.

“If we displeased him in some way, and that was very easy, we brought back bad results, we ummed and erred instead of giving a straight answer to a straight question, we didn’t have any programme to keep ourselves occupied, bang, you were in trouble. And, you know, sometimes it was serious.

“If we lied to him and we discovered that I was belted and Guylain would have been smacked. Not that often, but that’s the way he was brought up. And that’s the way that the kind of stuff that we had to deal with. So it was pretty it was pretty heavy, I would say. But at the same time, he loved us. I was never an only dad of my father’s love, and nor was my sister. He had lost everything in his life as a young man. His parents were killed in the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were put in the gas chambers. So his entire family was wiped out. He had nothing, nothing. And he ended up having to fight his way across Europe, join the British Army, had a good war. But he built everything from scratch. So family meant a hell of a lot to him. In fact, it was the only thing that didn’t mean anything really to him. And he never let us forget it.

“And so I would say it was a good childhood. We had lots of presents, holidays, nice time. But it was... You were never in any doubt that life was more important than having a good time. One incident I remember, like, yesterday, and that is I’d gone on to university at Oxford. We lived in Oxford.

“That was where our family home was, and so it was down the road for me. And one Sunday afternoon, I guess Gilliam would have been 16, 17 years old. The telephone rings in my parents’ home. I was about to get the phone and I noticed that my father picked it up and the conversation went something like this: ‘Who are you? Jones. How old are you? Yes. You want to speak to my sister? To my daughter? You’re too old for my daughter.’ That was the end of that. She ended up going to spend quite a few months in Spain in her year off between She always had a lot of good friends, mostly girls, mostly a lot of very strong, close girlfriends whom she has remained friends with to this day.”

Ghislaine was sent to Marlborough College, where she threw herself into her A-levels before going on to earn a degree in modern history with languages from Balliol College, Oxford. It was during this time that Ghislaine met Prince Andrew. They’d first been introduced during her days at Oxford University in the 80s, with sources telling ITV that they grew so close that Buckingham Palace staff believed they dated. Their friendship grew stronger throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, their outings together on the New York and London social scenes regularly being splashed across front pages. Speaking to ITV, Paul Page, a former Royal Protection Officer, said that he first met Ghislaine in 2001 and that Buckingham Palace staff suspected that she and Andrew were involved in an intimate relationship.

“From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace, at will, we realised, suspected that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew,” Page said. “A colleague of mine remembered her coming in four times in one day from the morning till the evening. She kept coming in and out, in and out. I got the sense that Prince Andrew and Ghislaine had probably been girlfriend and boyfriend in the past, Maxwell’s friend Euan Rellie later recalled. They had an easy warmth around each other.

Though her father was understandably keen to filter his daughter’s potential love interests, at least two suitors managed to make the cut. For a while, Ghislaine dated David Faber, the grandson of former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Both met as undergraduates at Balliol in the early 1980s. Multiple accounts describe him as her first serious boyfriend.

They were regularly photographed together at fashionable London venues such as Annabelle’s and the Chelsea Arts Club. The relationship was short-lived, however, with Faber going on to marry television presenter Sally Gilbert in 1988 and becoming a Conservative MP.

Then there was another man who occupied a central place in Ghislaine’s world, Count Gianfranco Cicconia Mazzoni, the wealthy Italian aristocrat whose relationship with her lasted for several years. Two met in the late 1980s through the privileged social circles in which they both moved. At the time, Ghislaine was a prominent figure among London’s so-called Sloan set, a fixture at society events, exclusive clubs and charity functions. Siconia, meanwhile, was already well known in European high society as a member of one of Italy’s most distinguished families. Born into Italian nobility in 1962, Count Mazzoni inherited not only an aristocratic title, but also membership of a family whose influence extended deep into Italian business and finance. The Siconia family was closely connected to the Kiger Empire, the luxury hotel group that owned some of Europe’s most prestigious properties and served wealthy international travellers for decades. His family connections reached even further back. Ciccogna was a descendant of Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, one of the most influential Italian businessmen and politicians of the 20th century. Volpi helped shape modern Italian industry, played a major role in the development of Venice’s industrial port and accumulated enormous wealth through banking, infrastructure and hospitality ventures. By the time Gianfranco inherited his title following his father’s death, he belonged to a lineage that had long occupied the highest levels of European society. Educated in Britain, Siconia attended Millfield School, one of the country’s best known independent schools. He later studied economics and developed a reputation as an intelligent and highly accomplished businessman. Unlike many aristocrats who simply lived off inherited wealth, he pursued an active professional career. Among his early roles was a position at Credit Suisse First Boston, one of the world’s leading investment banks.

Colleagues and acquaintances described him as sophisticated, cosmopolitan and ambitious. Over time, he built a career that ranged across finance, telecommunications and international business. Yet wealth and status were only part of his appeal. Those who knew Siconia frequently remarked upon his charm. He spoke multiple languages, travelled extensively and cultivated a range of interests that included skiing, aviation, scuba diving and motorsport. He projected the image of a modern European aristocrat, equally comfortable at a business meeting in London, a ski resort in the Alps or a society gathering in Venice. He seemed the perfect match for Ghislaine, whose own background and business acumen and attributes were respected and indeed accepted by Sikonya’s circle.

Their relationship quickly became serious. Friends and observers later described Sikonya as Ghislaine’s first love. The couple were frequently seen together at society events in London and on the wider European social circuit. For several years, they appeared to be one of the most glamorous young couples in elite international society.

For years there had been speculation that Robert Maxwell hoped Ghislaine would marry into aristocratic or political circles. A union with an Italian count from a wealthy and influential family would certainly have satisfied those aspirations. Accounts from friends suggest that Ghislaine herself viewed the relationship as serious, with it being reported that she hoped to marry Chikonya and become a contessa. Whether an engagement was ever formally discussed remains unclear, but the relationship endured for approximately four years and was widely regarded as more than a mere casual romance. But a future together, one that would have seen Ghislaine’s life projected onto a completely different path than the one she later found herself on, wasn’t to be. And their relationship ultimately fizzled out and ended in either 1990 or 1991. The precise reason for the breakup has never been publicly established. Neither Maxwell nor Seconia appears to have discussed it in detail. However, multiple accounts agree that for Ghislaine, the separation was painful.

Timing also made the situation particularly significant. The relationship ended just as her father’s business empire was collapsing. Meanwhile, Sikonya moved on and continued building his career. He became particularly prominent in South Africa, where he established business interests and earned recognition within the aviation community. Flying became one of his greatest passions.

But, long after his relationship with Ghislaine had ended, that passion ultimately led to his death. On June 30th, 2012, Sikogna was participating in the Clarksdorp Air Show in South Africa. He was flying an Aero L-39 Albatross, a high-performance, Czech-built military jet trainer that had become popular among experienced civilian pilots.

During a formation display with fellow pilot Charles Urban, something went terribly wrong. Witnesses reported seeing Seconia’s aircraft fall out of formation while flying at low altitude. The jet appeared to tilt before entering a steep dive. Seconds later, it slammed into the ground in front of thousands of spectators and exploded in a fireball. The impact was catastrophic.

Seconia was killed instantly. He was just 49 years old. Throughout her early life, Ghislaine would form a close bond with her father to the extent of being trusted to get involved in some of his many business affairs.

But Robert Maxwell’s illustrious career couldn’t and wouldn’t last forever.

“Father had had an interest in the press since the war,” Ian said. “He was the Allied press officer in Berlin during the working for the control commission. After the war, this was the administrative administration that Britain set up to run Germany, the occupied part of Germany, that it was responsible for post-war.

“My father was in charge of press relations, so he had an early exposure to the press. And then he met some of Germany’s publishers and then learned very quickly about the importance of science and then of science publishing and made his way in the world. And then he had a number of cracks at buying newspapers in Britain, News of the World, Sun, losing on each occasion to Rupert Murdoch. And... Eventually, he gets the mirror in 1984. But during the whole of our childhood, he was an MP from 1964 to 1970. And there was this brilliant period of his life, really up until about 1968, I would say.

“Pergamon had been taken, that was a scientific publishing business, had been taken public. He was a very, very wealthy man, multimillionaire. He was a Labour MP. He was somebody who was a coming man. And then he made a disastrous, absolutely disastrous sale of the bulk of his shares to an American financier, which then caused the whole of that takeover to be scrutinized, the very first public company takeover by the then new takeover mergers panel. He was excoriated. And a famous judgment was passed on him that he was a man not fit and proper to be steward of a public company which dogged him to the end of his life.”

The business headache Ian was referring to took place in 1969, before his father’s acquisition of the Daily Mirror. In that year, Saul Steinberg, head of Lisco Data Processing Corporation, was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable.

But at the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969, and dealing in Pergamon shares was suspended on the London Stock Exchange. Maxwell subsequently lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from the board in October of that year. Steinberg purchased Pergamon. An inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry was conducted, resulting in a widely published report that, much to Robert’s embarrassment, concluded, We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not, in our opinion, a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company. It was also concluded that Maxwell had contrived to inflate Pergamon’s share price through transactions between his private family companies. However, at the same time, the United States Congress was investigating Liasco’s takeover practices. Judge Thane Forbes was critical of the inquiry that had damned Ian’s father and launched what was perceived to be a public smear campaign fuelled by the press.

“Life was not so rosy anymore,” Ian said. “I remember my parents were thinking they should take me out of school because the press was so bad. So if you like, the good press, bad press, it goes back a long way in my life, certainly to 1970. And my father was always very, not quite easy come, easy go, but he had a clear understanding that if you’ve got to go ahead in the world, the press is on your side. Choose to fight them. It was a famous phrase when he was running a newspaper and somebody wanted to have a pop at him. He said, ‘be careful what you’re doing, taking on a newspaper owner, because I buy ink by the barrel and I will have the last word’. And he often did. But it meant that we were quite scarred by some of this negative publicity. And it was very, very bad. And then he went on to have a very, he had a really a renaissance of his business life and went on to achieve some very great things, including the purchase of the Mirror and purchase of Macmillan in the United States and football clubs and certainly bought lots of things. But he was quite protective of us, notwithstanding all of that. And I knew from the word go that I didn’t really want to be in this limelight. I didn’t seek anything. I know Ghislaine didn’t either, and we felt really kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, and it’s not for us, and so on. So, I mean, I was a bit ambivalent about it, although I thought my father was on the rough end of a lot of attacks, and some of which I think were anti-Semitic, looking back on it, which were very unpleasant. But eventually, he had one saying, which was, you know, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And so he had an astonishing hide of a rhinoceros and he would ride that out. And, you know, if you’re young and easily influenced, it’s not so obvious how you ride it out and you take these things to heart. He may have done, but he didn’t show it.”

But Maxwell was far from beaten. In 1974, with Pergamon largely failing under Steinberg’s ownership, he borrowed funds and bought the company back. The judge’s initial assessment and the subsequent smears, however, had a profound impact. Leaving education in the 1980s, Galen had exploded onto London’s vibrant social scene, her father’s connections helping her rise as somewhat of an it girl. She founded the Kit Kat Club, a women’s club inspired by the 18th century politician-filled club of the same name. She was also made a director of Oxford United FC, owned at the time by her father. As father and daughter grew closer, she was given a position at Robert’s publication, The European, until after Robert purchased the New York Daily News in January 1991, he sent her to America to act as his emissary, the pair arriving in New York in May. She would continue to fly back and forth between America and England, sometimes for work, other times to catch up with family. Years earlier, in 1986, she had attended the naming in her honour of her father’s new multi-million pound yacht, aboard which she would continue, when she could, to spend a large portion of her time indulging in the vessel’s ample facilities, not least of all its jacuzzi, sauna and well-stocked gym. Aboard his boat, along with other family members, friends and associates, Robert would take many voyages, including his last. After purchasing the struggling New York Daily News, further adding to his debts, Maxwell was forced to sell a 49% stake in the Mirror Group.

Meanwhile, other cracks were forming beneath the surface of the Maxwell Empire. A BBC Panorama documentary on his business dealings had revealed allegations of financial irregularities. The Mirror’s finance director, Lawrence Guest, was chasing him about the disappearance of millions from the company’s pension funds. Maxwell assured him the money would be restored. But the pressure must have been overwhelming.

In November 1991, while back home, London analysts were busy predicting the breakup of his business empire under the pressure of multi-billion pound debts. Robert flew to Gibraltar before boarding his 164 foot yacht and sailing away from a financial scandal that was just days away from being made public.

It appeared to be the perfect break, one spent in his typical flamboyant and extravagant fashion, stopping off to play roulette at a local casino, whining and dining and swimming in the cool waters of the Canary Islands. And while bonfires were being lit in the UK for Guy Fawkes’ night, he headed back on board his boat and went to bed, reportedly stirring in the early hours of the morning. The last time he was seen alive was 4.25am. At around 9am, as the boat arrived at Los Cristianos, a crew member strolled down the corridor and tapped on Robert’s door to try to wake him. There was no reply.

A call was made to his cabin at around 11am, but Robert didn’t answer. At around 1pm, the alarm was raised by a satellite telex via Norway. Panicking, the Lady Ghislaine’s captain then notified the Spanish authorities of Robert’s mysterious disappearance, sparking an air and sea search. Soon after, a fisherman peered over the bow of his small boat and spotted Maxwell’s naked body bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean. A helicopter quickly joined them, winching Robert from the water.

Elizabeth and her son Philip immediately flew out to Gando Air Base in Gran Canaria, where they had the grim task of identifying his body. At a hastily improvised midnight press conference at Reina Sofia Airport in the south of Tenerife, the island’s civil governor, Angel Delgado, said the Lady Ghislaine left Santa Cruz in the north of the island at 10pm on Monday and put into Puerto de los Cristianos at 9am. But, he said, Robert’s body was found 19 to 20 miles from Gando on the other side of the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria - more than 100 miles from the obvious route between the points of departure and arrival.

Ghislaaine flew to Tenerife, where an inquiry was set to be held.

On Sunday, November 10th, she and her family attended a funeral put on for her father in Jerusalem, where Robert was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives.

Alongside Israeli intelligence figures, President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir were in attendance, the latter of whom delivered a warm eulogy. It was said that Robert, with a sense of there being no way out of his vast financial woes, rose from his bed, headed up on deck and threw himself into the ocean.

But although a verdict of death by accidental drowning was recorded, Ghislaine wasn’t having it, later commenting in 1997, “He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered.”

Following his death, Robert’s empire quickly began to unravel. He was found to have fraudulently appropriated the pension assets of Mirror Group newspaper to support its share price. Pension funds in excess of £400 million were said to be missing, with around 32,000 people affected.

Kevin, the heir to the Mirror Group, became Britain’s biggest bankrupt after he was left with Maxwell’s $764 million in debt. And while still grieving over their immeasurable loss, both he and his brother Ian found themselves in a courtroom, accused of taking part in the fraud.

“Following my father’s death and the explosion of our business, and then Kevin and I, my younger brother, were arrested and charged with conspiracies as a fraud. We had a long, long fight to get to trial. It lasted three or four years of preparation and so on.

“And then an eight-month trial and we were exonerated at the end of it. During that entire time, all of our family were highly supportive and remained so and are so to this day. We don’t know any other way than to support each other. When you’ve had an alpha male like Bob Maxwell is your father. In some senses, there’s an old Arabic proverb that says, ‘I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousins, my brother and I and our cousins against the world’. So it’s another way of saying blood is thicker than water. So yes, we have remained close at all times.

“And we don’t need to be living in the same country or even the same town to remain close. We were broadly aware of the important things going on in each other’s lives, if not the detail. We know you’re going out with X or you’re living in Y or you’re doing X or Z or whatever it is. That’s fine. So long as you’re not hearing anything bad, it’s probably good. I guess the period 91 to 96, Kevin and I were knocked out. We were on trial for our lives. The passports were taken, couldn’t travel anywhere, and it was a very dark time.

“Ghislaine was getting on with her own life, mostly up until then had been in London. She had a lot of friends and knocked around in town. But then somewhere towards the end of 1990, she goes to America. My father had a lot of business over there. She started to help with various... some specific tasks, mostly to do with the newspapers over there. And then the business blows up. And Kevin and I said to her, ‘stay in America. Don’t come home because this is not a place for a Maxwell to be happy right now’. England just turned on us big time, which I get, but there was no reason why I should turn on my sister. So we said ‘stay in America, get on with your life, do whatever you’re doing. And, you know, we’ll just fight our battle the best we know how’.”

That said, life, at least financially, took a downward spiral for most of the Maxwells following the death of their father, particularly, her mother said, for Ghislaine. “Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” Elizabeth, better known as Betty, told Vanity Fair in the weeks following her husband’s death. “The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed and it will be very difficult for her to continue.”

“I’m in great financial difficulty,” she added. “My husband’s will is impounded. I haven’t salted away anything because I never for a minute believed that he’d leave me destitute.”

Ghislaine denied claims that a secret fortune had been hidden away.

By 1992, she had moved to an apartment of an Iranian friend overlooking Central Park. By now she was working at a real estate office on Madison Avenue, began eating out and partying with celebrities and quickly rose to wider prominence as a New York City socialite. Of the Maxwell’s troubles and her own, she told Vanity Fair, “I’m surviving, just, but I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.”

And she was right.

As their father had during the early years of his business career, the Maxwell’s bounced back. They carved out their own way in the world, including Christine going into publishing and producing a spelling dictionary to teach people how to spell, and Isabel embarking on a successful career in television and film production. The twins later joined forces and created the early online search engine Magellan.

“I met Ghislaine in November 1989,” Christopher Mason, one of her former friends, said in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein, Filthy Rich. “At the time she was visiting New York from London, I was going to a nightclub and having dinner with some friends who had been at Oxford with her. She was the life of every party, knew absolutely everyone, was extremely popular, had a vivacious personality. I remember she told a lot of very funny, dirty jokes.

“That night I went home and wrote in my diary, ‘Met Ghislaine Maxwell, hilarious sense of humour, incredibly good fun, she’s a real live wire, and I hope I get to see her again’. Striking up a friendship, Mason recalled visiting her apartment on the Upper East Side.

“She was suddenly out of money,” he said. “Robert Maxwell had left his family in the lurch. It was as if she was bravely weathering this challenge, the mysterious death of her beloved father.”

Another friend, Ewan Relly, also first met her in New York.

“We had a fair number of friends in common, a couple of people I knew had dated her, and she was a connector. She was gregarious and quite glamorous, and a bit raunchy and quite wild. Her father had set her up in this life which allowed her to be at the fulcrum of New York society. She was like the sparkling debutante.”

Another former associate backed up Ghislaine’s alleged raunchy side, as have others whom I’ve interviewed.

Nicola Glucksmann claims that during a party at Headington Hill Hall in 1991, Ghislaine encouraged guests to get involved in a harmless, but certainly raunchy, game whereby the women in attendance removed their tops and bras and the men were blindfolded and felt their bare breasts before trying to guess who each pair belonged to.

“I’m extremely sad that my father is no longer here, Ghislaine said during a 1991 interview, sitting on a bench in Central Park. “But I don’t feel in any way smaller or lesser than what I was before. The future’s the future. You just get on and do whatever you can do.

“If I have a wish for myself, it’s to do something positive with my life.”

Living her new life in America, her wealth and social standing rose rapidly.

Already she had been introduced to a rich local financier, a man who could provide her with the money and lifestyle she was accustomed to, whose circle of contacts would nestle neatly into her own, yet who would ultimately lead to her life being turned entirely upside down.

He had dark, greying hair and Ted Danson-like features.

He had unimaginable wealth and mansions and apartments across the world.

And his name was Jeffrey Epstein.

Thanks for listening to episode two of The Life and Death of Jeff. In the next episode, I’ll continue the story with an exclusive interview with Ian Maxwell, who will talk about how his sister really met Jeff, and will be following the murky journey of Epstein’s rise to riches, serious allegations, and ultimately, a prison cell.

In the meantime, have a fantastic week.

I realised long ago that global press and media coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has been so disorganised, so chaotic and polluted with disinformation ad sensationalism, that I wanted to take a pause from pumping out interviews and solo articles, and to focus on what I truly believe is needed: The entire scandal explained, from start to finish, in chronological order.

There’s a reason why the media hasn’t done this.

They want to keep the public confused, for during this state of perpetual confusion and conspiracy, when no-one quite knows what is true and what isn’t, newspapers can continue to produce lucrative clickbait, social media influencers and commentators can keep profiting from lies, political agents can keep the heat on the politicians they despise, and lawyers can ensure that the multi-million-dollar compensation gravy train keeps rolling.

The Epstein scandal has become a moral panic, outgrowing in scale the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the early 1990s, that continues to defame and destroy innocent lives.

When it comes to the life of that seedy, salt and pepper-haired billionaire from West Palm Beach, you have never been told the full truth about what really happened. That much is a fact.

During my six-year investigation into the Epstein scandal, travelling the world to interview key witnesses, accusers and the accused, I’ve not only unearthed the facts behind the fiction, but have come to realise that this case is the most extraordinary example of media manipulation, corruption, extortion, blackmail, and erosion of basic journalistic integrity that we will likely ever see.

But the truth is what you deserve. To that end, I’ve created a podcast, The Life and Death of Jeff.

Consisting of over twenty episodes, and containing all of my interviews - from Donald Trump’s lawyer and Ghislaine Maxwell’s siblings, to Epstein’s brother, Epstein’s accusers and former girlfriends - it constitutes a masterclass of sorts. By the end of listening to it (though you can also watch it, for each episode contains relevant images and video footage), you’ll without doubt be more educated on the entire scandal than 99.9% of the general public… and 100% of the press and media.

I do need your help to get the truth out, however. Though the first four episodes (which essentially give background and set up ‘the story’ to come) are all being released today, future episodes will be released individually, once a week, to give people time to digest what they are learning.

Episode one is free and can be listened to/watched by anyone. After that, as we dive into the seedier story, episodes will only be available for paid subscribers. The reason for this is simple: By carrying out my investigation over the past six years, and for refusing to stay quiet and hide the truth from people, I was sacked from my job as a news editor. To continue getting the truth out (for surely that’s what journalists should always strive to do, yet sadly seldom ever aim for these days) I have to ask that you kindly sign up for just a few dollars a month.

It’s more than worth it: You will be able to watch countless exclusive interviews and see evidence that you won’t find anywhere else.

If you aren’t already signed up, please do so by clicking the button below - it takes just a minute to get access to the truth that the media has intentionally been hiding from you.

I’ll also continue producing a free fortnightly newsletter covering all latest Epstein scandal developments and my coverage of other cases.

The Life and Death of Jeff is a podcast not for the fainthearted or easily offended.

It will take you on a journey from the births of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, through their childhoods, early relationships, how they met, who accused them and why, and will forensically examine the scandal of the century without care for who the evidence and conclusions upsets.

Episode one covers Jeffrey’s curious childhood and his murky rise to riches. Moving away from the media’s typical one-dimensional coverage, you will see his human side, his ambitions, his relationships, his early financial crimes, and how his insatiable addiction to sexual gratification shaped his future.

I look forward to any feedback on this, and will be holding a ‘Crime over Coffee’ live chat at the end of each month where we can all discuss the scandal, the podcast, and recent developments, and I’ll answer any questions you might have.

In the meantime, thanks for sticking around - I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

All the very best,

Jay.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE ONE

Welcome to episode one 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.

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.

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 and onto 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 No. 9, a brooding French neoclassical townhouse shaded by an equidistant row of calorie 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. Described by former Vanity Fair journalist Vicki Ward as the crown jewel of the city’s residential townhouses, almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-storey neighbours, and seeming more like an institution than a house, the decadent Herbert N.

Strauss House was completed in 1932, reportedly the largest private residence in Manhattan. Strauss, the sixth son of the co-owners of RH Macy and Company, 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. 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 facade, 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.

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 lion skin, draping down from one of its walls. Though Jeffrey, a teetotaler 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 20th, 1953, his parents Pauline Paula Stolowski 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.

Seagate has had a significant Jewish presence for almost 100 years, with Epstein’s parents, both practising Jews, regular visitors to nieces 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 Epsteins 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 family home. Bear for Jeffrey, Puggy 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% 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 mathematics classes at the private Cooper Union College and enrolment 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 look-alike 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.

It was not the only Barr-Epstein connection to be highlighted. Donald’s son, William Bill Barr, would go on to serve as US Attorney General, his nomination proudly announced by President Trump, another close friend of Jeffrey’s. At his confirmation hearing, Barr was questioned as to whether or not he would investigate the handling of Jeffrey’s decade-old plea deal, signed off in Florida and with the involvement of his former law firm and with Alex Acosta, the former US attorney in Miami, who served in Trump’s cabinet and whom Barr would work alongside.

The US Attorney General said that he would not, recusing himself from anything related to Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, though refusing to recuse himself from the later case in 2019. He did, however, initially voice his suspicions that Jeffrey’s death was not a suicide, eventually towing the official line, leading to Mark Epstein accusing him of helping to orchestrate a cover-up. Three months after Barr’s departure from Dalton, a fuzzy-haired Jeffrey packed his briefcase and arrived at the school to begin his first day as a modestly paid teacher. There he quickly became known for having a charismatic personality and for treating the teenagers in his classroom more as friends than pupils. This friendship, it has been alleged, would cross the line on multiple occasions, with former students claiming he exhibited inappropriate behaviour towards underage female pupils under his care, paying them constant attention, and once showing up to a party where young people were drinking.

Other former students alleged they also often saw him flirting with females in their class. Predictably, his teaching career would be short-lived. A chance encounter with Alan Greenberg, the then Chief Executive Officer of Bear Stearns, a successful investment bank, securities trading and brokerage firm, and the father of two of Jeffrey’s pupils, would undoubtedly provide the big break that would set him on a path to immeasurable wealth and influence.

In June 1976, when Epstein was dismissed from his position as a teacher at Dalton for poor performance, Greenberg, perhaps beguiled by Jeffrey’s mathematical talent, hastily offered him a job. Though starting out as one of Bear Stearns’ low-level junior assistants to a floor trader, Jeffrey proved himself to be a sponge, soaking up every piece of knowledge about the industry and swiftly moving up to become an options trader before advising some of the bank’s wealthiest clients on tax migration strategies. So rapid was his rise, and so well regarded were the skills he brought to the table, that in 1981, just four years after joining the firm, he was made a limited partner. It was a promotion that stunned those who understood the firm’s rigid hierarchies. Some colleagues later suggested he had a peculiar gift for structuring trades and identifying arbitrage. Others said his real talent lay in cultivating wealthy clients and in manipulating his way into their confidence. But there was another, more obvious reason for Jeffrey’s sudden rise within the company. Greenberg quickly came to see the young recruit as something of a protégé. Not long after Epstein arrived at the firm, Greenberg invited him to dinner at his home and placed him beside his 20-year-old daughter Lynn.

She later said she suspected the seating arrangement was deliberate. The two connected immediately and began a relationship. News that the newcomer was dating the boss’s daughter travelled fast through the office and with it came an unspoken understanding. Epstein now occupied a privileged position inside the firm. Before long, Jeffrey was reporting directly to Michael Tenenbaum, one of Bear Stearns’ senior executives. “He showed real promise,” Tenenbaum recalled. But that impression was jolted in late 1976 when Tenenbaum received an unsettling call from Bear Stearns’ personnel department. Someone had finally bothered to check Jeffrey’s resume, which claimed degrees from two California universities. “You may want to sit down,” the HR executive said, before informing him that neither institution had ever heard of him. Unsure how to proceed, Tenenbaum raised the issue with Greenberg. The guidance he received, Tenenbaum later said, was to handle Jeffrey no differently than any other employee, a directive that quietly underscored the opposite reality: Jeffrey was anything but ordinary within the firm’s hierarchy.

Tenenbaum called Jeffrey into his office and confronted him directly. He told him that his educational background was false and that he’d lied on his application. But Jeffrey did not flinch. Yes, that’s true, he said evenly. He had never completed college. Tenenbaum later reflected that the candour itself was disarming. Years afterwards, he would see the exchange as an early demonstration of Epstein’s talent for controlling the dynamics of an encounter. Pressed on why he had fabricated his credentials, Jeffrey offered a simple explanation. Without prestigious degrees, he said, “No one would ever give me an opportunity.”

The answer struck a chord.

Tenenbaum, who had himself benefited from second chances, decided to extend one to Jeffrey. He would be allowed to stay to continue his work, though his rise paused for the time being. But Epstein had little interest in slow conventional advancement. In 1980, he attended a conference in the Caribbean at the firm’s expense. While there, he spent more than $10,000 on jewellery and clothing for a new girlfriend and billed the purchases to Bear Stearns. The charges caught the attention of the accounting department, which escalated them to the firm’s financial controller. The controller determined that the expenses were inappropriate and reported the matter to Greenberg, who by then was chief executive. As before, nothing happened, but the following year Jeffrey would set off into the financial world alone, and although his departure wasn’t voluntary, he was dismissed according to his own testimony for being guilty of a regulation violation, reportedly having lent a friend $20,000 to buy stock.

He remained close to Greenberg and a client of Bear Stearns until its eventual collapse in 2008. He did not depart with millions, but he left with something far more valuable, contacts. By now, Jeffrey had polished up his image. His chiselled face now resembling that of a young Ted Danson, he was photographed in black suit and tie and well-groomed dark hair, staring confidently into the lens for a glossy advert in the July 1980 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine in which, named the Bachelor of the Month, he was described as a New York dynamo seeking a cute Texas girl. Going it alone, he announced the founding of his own consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group, Inc., and would make a crust assisting wealthy clients in recovering stolen cash from fraudulent lawyers and brokers. Describing his role as akin to being a high-level bounty hunter, he reportedly bragged that he only spoke to people who earned over a million dollars a year.

His clients ranged from the Spanish actress and heiress Ana Obregon, whom he helped to recover her father’s millions in lost investments, to billionaire Leslie Wexner, who would open doors for him that no other client possibly could. With the latter, it appears that a relationship developed that was more than just business.

The same might be said for his other acquaintances in the world of finance. By this time, he had begun dating Patricia Schmidt, an employee at Bear Stearns, but she soon discovered she wasn’t the only romantic interest in his life. 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. 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 Anderson.

Jeffrey had met Eva Anderson in the late 1980s when she was a Swedish-born model moving through New York’s upper social tiers and he was beginning to harden into a discreet but powerful financial presence. Friends from that period described their connection as unusually intense for Epstein, less transactional than many of his later relationships. Anderson Dubin was intelligent, socially polished and emotionally steady, someone who could move easily between fashion, philanthropy and high society. Those close to Epstein would later say that for a time she grounded him and more than one friend referred to her as the love of his life. Unlike many women who passed briefly through his orbit, she was treated with a level of respect and permanence that stood out. They were seen together frequently and Epstein appeared unusually open about the relationship. Local newspapers reported that they had gotten engaged. Even after their romantic involvement ended, the bond did not dissolve into estrangement. Instead, it softened into something resembling family.

Their separation was not marked by scandal or hostility, but by a quiet recalibration of roles, from partners to lifelong confidants. That closeness endured. Anderson later married billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, yet Epstein remained embedded in her life. He maintained regular contact with her and her family and was trusted deeply enough that he became the godfather of one of her children. You were staying on 79th Street. “I picked you up in my Rolls Royce,” he recalled in an email sent to Eva many years later. “You were wearing cowboy boots. You told me that your English was not very good. You came from a little fishing village and you enjoyed playing cards with your grandparents. The rest is history.”

In 1987, Stephen Hoffenberg, the founder, CEO, president and chairman of Towers Financial Corporation, a debt collection agency, set up offices for Jeffrey in the sought-after property of Villiard House in Madison Avenue.

Hoffenberg’s corporation was later revealed to be a Ponzi scheme. Swindling at least $475 million from his unwitting clients, the fraudster rescued the New York Post from imminent bankruptcy and hired Jeffrey to help run the day-to-day operations of the fraudulent corporation, paying him a generous $25,000 a month salary and giving him a whopping $2 million loan that Jeffrey would end up never having to pay back. The two quickly became friends, frequently travelling together on Hoffman’s private jet. With suspicious timing, Jeffrey parted ways with Hoffenberg shortly before Towers Financial’s inevitable collapse. Hoffenberg, who was subsequently sentenced to 20 years behind bars, stated in court documents that Jeffrey was intimately involved in the Ponzi scheme, going as far as to claim his former pal was the architect of the scam. Never charged in relation to the massive fraud described by the US Securities and Exchange Commission as one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history,

Jeffrey was not only a free man, but now a multi-millionaire. In July 2019, following Jeffrey’s arrest, Hoffenberg again claimed that Jeffrey was his uncharged co-conspirator in the Ponzi scheme. Former Towers investors made similar allegations in a lawsuit filed in August 2018, alleging that the millions in stolen investments were the seed capital for Jeffrey’s hedge fund, which it valued, evidently excessively and incorrectly, at $50 billion.

In 1988, while Epstein was still consulting for Hoffenberg, he founded his financial management firm, Jay Epstein & Company, later changing its name to the Financial Trust Company. How Jeffrey met Hoffenberg to begin with is another point of intrigue.

His introduction to the fraudster came via former US Attorney General John Mitchell and a British defence contractor by the name of Douglas Lees. This has led to many an investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist tumbling down rabbit holes, mainly because, according to former associates, Jeffrey Epstein had claimed he also held contracts with governments and secretly worked in intelligence.

It is a fact that, during the 1980s, Jeffrey possessed an Austrian passport containing his photograph, but with a false name. Curiously, the passport recorded his place of residence as Saudi Arabia. Jeffrey, yet to form the jaw-dropping connections he’d later managed to cultivate, was unable to completely escape justice for his financial crimes relating to the Hoffenberg scandal.

In 1993, he and two other defendants were charged in federal court with three counts of postal larceny and theft and one count of property theft. Epstein pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiring to steal US Treasury checks from residential mailboxes and received five years’ probation. The remaining charges were dropped.

None of this stopped him from partying hard and working his way through a string of sexual relationships. By now, his fortunes had already pivoted decisively toward Leslie Wexner. Wexner, the only child of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States with little money and a practical understanding of retail.

His parents ran a modest women’s clothing shop called Leslie’s. It was functional rather than aspirational, fluorescent lights, practical dresses, slow seasonal turnover. The store was not a dream. It was a ledger. From an early age Wexner absorbed the meaning of margins, unsold stock and supply a risk.

Victoria’s Secret, a small California lingerie chain founded by Roy Raymond, was losing money. Its vaguely British boudoir aesthetic appealed to novelty buyers but could not sustain scale. Wexner bought it in 1982 and rebuilt it completely. He shifted the customer from male gift buyers to female self-purchasers. He standardized stores, refined catalogues, and sold lingerie as everyday apparel wrapped in aspiration. The product was repositioned as both functional and idealised. The stores became brighter, sleeker, more uniform. The catalogue became a nationwide distribution tool. What followed was one of the most aggressive brand engineering exercises in modern retail history. Victoria’s Secret was transformed from a dying niche novelty into a vertically integrated global lingerie empire. Advertising was no longer quiet suggestion but spectacle.

In the 1990s, the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show became an international broadcast event. It was at the height of this expansion that he met Jeffrey. The circumstances of their meeting were never clearly explained in public. What is known is that by the late 1980s, Jeffrey had positioned himself as a private financial advisor to a tiny circle of ultra-wealthy individuals.

Remarkably, and for reasons still not fully understood, Wexner placed almost immediate extraordinary confidence in him. That trust was formalised in 1991 when Wexner granted him a sweeping power of attorney, giving him control over cheques, loans, property transfers and asset restructuring across Wexner’s personal and corporate empire. Epstein became in practice the financial steward of billions. The documents granted him authority over nearly every aspect of Wexner’s personal financial life. He could transfer funds, open and close accounts, buy and sell securities, establish trusts, direct charitable donations and negotiate with banks in Wexner’s name without individual approval for each transaction. It was not advisory authority. It was operational control. Epstein, in effect, ran Wexner’s private financial world. One journalist at the time said, “he’s Wexner’s Mr Fix-It. He has the spook connections and pulls the strings worldwide. He handles all the logistics and moves the portfolio around for him.

“Mr Epstein is linked to several controversial land deals in rural America where farming land has been quietly acquired by interlinked companies. Then developed at vast profit, he is currently listed as owning huge tracts of land in Dutchess County, New York.”

Through a network of entities, Jeffrey created an opaque financial lattice around Wexner’s wealth.

Trusts fed into advisory companies. Advisory companies fed into offshore registrations. Central to the structure was the US Virgin Islands. Under the Territory’s Economic Development Commission programme, qualifying companies could receive corporate income tax reductions of up to 90%, exemptions from certain local taxes, and rebates on withholding taxes. Jeffrey registered multiple advisory firms under this regime, allowing income booked as consulting or services to be taxed at a fraction of mainland rates while remaining technically within US jurisdiction. Jeffrey used to say he invested in people. Not companies, not public offerings, but flesh and blood access. Billionaires, officials, scientists, heads of universities...

Men who chaired boards.

Men who drafted policy.

Men who could change tax codes with a phone call.

Men who had so much money that it came with incredibly high tax bills. Bills they didn’t want to pay, at least not in full, if they didn’t have to. That’s where Jeffrey came in. Fees paid to him by Wexner and Black could be booked through entities in the US Virgin Islands, transforming tens of millions that would once have been taxed in the continental United States into lightly taxed Caribbean revenue. In other words, he could get richer and richer. And he did. There is no public evidence that Jeffrey was some sort of trading genius delivering spectacular returns.

What the record shows instead is that his value lay in discretion and structure. He built and tended opaque vehicles that let clients reduce their tax bills, move money offshore and keep assets hard to trace. Here and there you see the same logic applied to his own wealth. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, his personal fortune appeared to have exploded far beyond what could be explained by consulting fees. When he bought his properties, the transactions were routed through offshore entities that permanently obscured the origin of the capital. It was during this period that he aggressively began leveraging his proximity to Victoria’s Secret and its owner as a recruitment tool.

The most documented early allegation came in 1997 from model Alicia Arden in Santa Monica. She told police that Jeffrey contacted her, claiming he was a Victoria’s Secret scouting executive. When she agreed to meet him at a hotel for what she believed was a professional opportunity, she later stated that the encounter turned predatory.

In her criminal complaint, Arden said, “He asked me to take off my top. I said no. He began to manhandle me, grabbing my breasts and my buttocks. I was fearful he was going to rape me. I ran out of the room.”

Police classified the case as sexual battery. Jeffrey was questioned but never charged. Decades later, Arden said she was discouraged at the time and ultimately chose not to press charges. The case quietly died. It would later be viewed as one of the earliest missed warnings about how Jeffrey was allegedly using the credibility of major brands and billionaires to access attractive women. When I briefly spoke to Arden a couple of years ago, since her brief encounter with Jeffrey, she has starred in TV shows such as Baywatch, as well as multiple adult entertainment films. I had no reason to doubt her allegations, and I still don’t. They are backed up by a contemporary police report. I did, however, question the motivation behind her fairly recent insertion into the Epstein scandal media circus, particularly after she sent me email after email demanding that I pay her large sums of money to include photographs of her in my book, Naked Lies, and then getting rather angry when I declined.

The incident left Jeffrey unscathed. Soon, the one-time math teacher would own a private jet and multiple residential properties.

His name echoed throughout executive offices and VIP circles in New York and across America. As the new man about town, he often attended Victoria’s secret fashion shows and even hosted the company’s models at his newly acquired, via Wexner, New York townhouse. Osser Properties, which is owned by Jeffrey’s brother Mark, purchased numerous additional buildings in the 1990s, including a complex from Wexner.

At 11 East 71st Street, Jeffrey housed his girlfriend, Eva Anderson, now married to his former hedge fund friend, Glenn Dubin, with Jeffrey and Eva still remaining friends. The building was also used to provide accommodation for the MC2 Models founder, Jean-Luc Brunel. We’ll cover Brunel in a later episode, who would later commit suicide after being accused of running a sex trafficking operation and, on occasions, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Put simply, the boy from Coney Island was now dripping in dough. Apart from his shady former dealings and alleged involvement in a Ponzi scheme, the truth behind how he got his hands on the bulk of his fortune enough to make these extravagant purchases seems far more straightforward than the many theories conjectured over the years.

He stole it.

Wexner claimed that whilst Jeffrey was controlling his financial affairs, he swindled him out of at least $46 million.

His allegations focus on $46 million of investments in a Wexner charitable fund controlled by Jeffrey. Wexner said that when he severed their relationship, he discovered Jeffrey had returned only a portion of the money in the fund. He declined to say if he had reported the loss to authorities.

We discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family, Wexner said. This was frankly a tremendous shock, even though it clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now. Now a man renowned for his wealth, mystery and charisma. Anyone who was anyone wanted to be a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

But despite being thrust into New York’s elite social scene, he remained the introvert from his youth. He preferred eating at home, referring to dining out being similar to eating in the subway. He liked to be alone, and when he was in the mood to not be alone, he enjoyed the company of attractive females.

That, and engaging in borderline batty projects, predominantly related to his unusual interest in science, sometimes even merging the two. Stuart Peaver is a controversial scientist, art collector, and former friend of Jeffrey. “One day in the early 1970s, a friend of mine brought me to Sir James Jimmy Goldsmith’s mansion on the east side,” he told Mother Jones, “and I walked in, and there in the grandiose lobby was a grand piano, and there was somebody playing the piano with great virtuosity, and it was Jeffrey Epstein. That’s how I met him. We became friends for a very long time, daily pals.” The allegations against Jeffrey, whom Pivar broke away from when they came to light, “are very severe, they’re very alarming, but they’re totally, totally, totally misunderstood.” Jeffrey, he claims, “was with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years they went, came there time and time and time again, and if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed except he made an industry out of it. And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. A nymphomaniac is a girl who is insatiable in her sexual appetite. There are men who are like that and it’s a disease.

“It’s called satirisis and Jeffrey was afflicted with that. He couldn’t help himself. But he didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it. Big time. There are plenty of people with satirisis, like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls.”

His attempt at an explanation is controversial, to say the least. He does, however, acknowledge that some of Jeffrey’s behaviour was completely unacceptable.

“I was a sort of an art consultant for him,” he said, recalling one particularly troubling incident that took place at the art gallery of famous dealer Ruth Blumka. “I was furnishing his numerous houses and at one point I took him to a very prominent art dealer to buy furniture and what have you. I brought along an assistant I had who was a very attractive young girl and there we were in those precincts of art and renaissance furniture and he grabbed her up from behind and lifted her up and squeezed the hell out of her and she screamed. I said, ‘Jeffrey, put her down. What are you doing?’ And the three or four of us who were watching were horrified. And he put her down.

“He was out of control.”

In 2000, Jeffrey established the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, an endeavour to fund scientific research and education. Stephen Hawking visited the island with his entourage. So too did Bill Gates, whose relationship with Jeffrey began in 2011, a few years after Jeffrey’s conviction.

In August 2021, Gates said the reason he had meetings with Epstein was because he’d hoped Epstein could provide money for philanthropic work, though nothing came of the idea. It was a huge mistake to spend time with him, to give him the credibility of being there, he added.

“I’m a scientist,” said Pivar, “and I saw all the incredible, wonderful things he did for science, which nobody’s managed to have the intellect to understand. I observed that Jeffrey Epstein was a very important person in the scientific world. He brought to science something which nobody else did. He brought together scientists for the sake of trying to inculcate some kind of a higher level of scientific thought, even though he himself has no compunction about approaching Scientists like Steven Gould, like Pinker, like all of those people, and myself even, at dinners, and would propose interesting, naive ideas. He would say, ‘oh, what is gravity?’, which of course is an unanswerable thing to present at a dinner to a bunch of scientists, and because he was Jeffrey, they would listen to him and try to give answers. He was attempting somehow, in his ignorant and scientifically naive state, to do something scientifically important. He had no compunctions about inviting people, and since he had money, they would listen.

“He would promise money to people, so people would come to his dinners, including myself. Jeffrey brought these people together and thought that he was causing basic thought processes to happen, which he sort of was, even though they were sort of irrelevant."

“We began to realise he didn’t know what he was talking about,” Pivar continued. “Then, after a couple of minutes - Jeffrey had no attention span whatsoever - he would interrupt the conversation and change it and say things like, ‘what does that got to do with pussy?’ That was his favourite expression. It was a subject changer. And it revealed what was really in his mind.

“Of course, that was the only thing that was going on in his mind. Jeffrey had lots and lots and lots of dough. Scientists are always looking for lots and lots of dough because most scientists spend most of their time writing grant proposals to raise money. Jeffrey didn’t require a grant proposal.

“Jeffrey would promise money and so they crowded around. And he also was an extremely personable, amusing kind of person to talk to. He was full of incredible ideas. He was charming in the extreme and that’s why everyone paid attention to him. He came up with some fascinating ideas.”

Some of these scientific ideas, however, would seemingly be a petri dish of genuine curiosity mixed with his own sexual proclivities. According to various sources, beginning in the early 2000s he developed a strong interest in improving the human race through genetic engineering and artificial intelligence including using his own sperm. He addressed the scientific community at various events and occasions promoting his unhealthy fascination with eugenics. He had, according to reports in 2019, planned to seed the human race with his own DNA by impregnating up to 20 women at a time using his vast property in New Mexico as a baby ranch where mothers would give birth to his offspring.

Walking away from Jeffrey’s townhouse, I was suddenly conscious of the time. I glanced at my watch. It was now well past midday and I had a very important interview to conduct in New Jersey. I caught a graffiti-riddled train from Penn Station, then a taxi driven by a chirpy Lithuanian man chain-smoking menthol cigarettes.

I watched his smoke coil out the window, dispersing into the fresh air as we speedily passed through one of the projects, rows and rows of terraced houses. Many of them were empty, an abandoned shanty town haunted by its former residents who had either moved on or been moved along. Like many other worn-down areas, they’d soon see the wrecking ball replaced by more upmarket apartment blocks and bistros. But all in all, this side of the city maintains a great deal of charm. And, compared to the relentless noise of New York, New Jersey is a peaceful affair. Racing down the highway, buckling in my seatbelt, we reach the forest-straddled other side of it, a place oozing in wealth. Huge houses, sporadically placed amidst Chinese elms and picked straight from the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines, stood perched on artificial mounds broken by clean cobblestone driveways bordered by pristine groomed lawns and low shrubs.

Past them, beyond the suburbs and re-entering the city, we reached an industrial park beside a railway line and rolled to a stop in front of an ominous lump of a building. I headed inside, finding myself in a vast open foyer. I walked into a freight elevator and pressed the floor number my interviewee sent to me moments earlier. It glided upwards and then groaned to a halt.

The doors opened. I strolled down a maze of wide corridors, floor-to-ceiling doors donning names of various artists. If it weren’t for the few large display cabinets filled with both bizarre and brilliant exhibits, I’d have sworn I was in a somewhat creepy abandoned factory. No one was around. But then, someone...

The tapping of her high heels echoes down the hallway. An attractive, smiling woman came into view. She was a former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, a woman both burdened by unsubstantiated accusations levelled against her and a need to make the world hear the truth. And regarding this entire murky scandal, the explosive story she was about to tell me would change my view on everything.

Thanks for listening to episode one of The Life and Death of Jeff. In the next episode, I’ll continue the story with a deep dive into Ghislaine Maxwell and her time in Epstein’s orbit, including exclusive comments from Ghislaine’s sister Isabel and an exclusive interview with her brother Ian. Until then, I hope you have a wonderful week.