EPISODE FOUR: The Presidents, the prostitutes, and Epstein's secret girlfriend

Get ready to take another deep dive as we continue our journey through the true, troubling story of Jeffrey Epstein.

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

THE DEBUTANTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: When was that?

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

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

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: Did you have any sort of professional or social relationship with John F. 16 Kennedy, Jr.?

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

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

“YOU CAN SEE HIM. HE’S SAFE”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Epstein leased the former Iranian diplomatic townhouse at 34 East 69th Street in Manhattan from the U.S. State Department in the early 1990s. The property had been seized by the U.S. government following the 1979 Iranian revolution

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey and Leslie Wexner

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

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

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

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

“Epstein told me that he had a heart condition which meant that he didn’t have intercourse a lot, which suited me fine, because I actually do have a medical condition, which precludes me having a lot of intercourse.

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

Jeffrey’s claim that he suffered from erectile disfunction wasn’t a lie. Interviews I’ve conducted with his former sexual partners, and countless records I’ve scoured through, 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 resorted to the ‘other forms of sexual activities’ that Ghislaine referred to - handjobs by prostitutes at local massage parlours and, predominantly, masturbation.

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

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