Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been temporarily absent on here of late, for which I apologise.
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.
