The Epstein Diaries #5: The House in Palm Beach Where the Trump-Epstein Fallout Starts

Real estate makes—and breaks—the man

Photo illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast

Here, in the fifth installment of the Epstein Diaries, as Jeffrey Epstein reaches a pinnacle of wealth and social standing, he confronts his friend and Palm Beach neighbor Donald Trump—an altercation that may well have set in motion events that will come to haunt both men, mortally so for Epstein, and ongoing to this day for Trump.

Context is everything. Revisit where we left off in the previous installment, The Epstein Diaries #4: Epstein and Trump— Everything Was Permissible.

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Palm Beach is about many things: society; privacy; a certain order of class and taste; state taxes (none in Florida), and bankruptcy rules (they can’t take your house in Florida). But it is also about—perhaps mostly about—real estate. Real estate is a principal interest of rich men because a good property represents high status, and Palm Beach is certainly a status-obsessed place. It is an asset class, too, one that, particularly in an enclave of the rich, has a high safety threshold. And, because real estate, in a largely unregulated market, is a good way to hide money.

But, even beyond all this, it is really hard to fully express how much emotion and identity are vested by the rich in their real estate.

For Jeffrey Epstein, his homes—in Manhattan, Paris, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the Caribbean—were the stage set of his life, the personification of all he had achieved and how far he had come. Indeed, Ghislaine Maxwell, the closest relationship he would ever have and the closest he would ever get to having a wife, was much more of a house manager than a wife (or prospective wife). Real estate is intimacy.

For Donald Trump, real estate was no less important, but it was more transactional, and ultimately fungible.

It was these two sensibilities that collided in 2004.