The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein, Part 2

I’m sharing an article that I wrote in 2021 which offers a glimpse of the kind of conversation and gatherings that went on in Epstein’s house. I hesitated to publish it then for all the reasons that it continues to remain difficult to write about Epstein with any particularity—why give Epstein a voice? It’s not his story; it’s his victims’ story (perhaps valid—but you learn a lot less). And yet I was too pleased with the accuracy of this view inside Epstein’s house not to publish it. My semi-cowardly solution was to make it the last chapter in a collection of old articles and essay’s that I was then publishing, a book called “Too Famous.” Collections are notoriously unread—I was, in effect, a writer looking to escape my readers. Well…the piece, “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein,” yet remains, IMHO, the only thing written about Epstein that offers any sense of how he got to be who he was and about the nature of this person who often seems only slight less omnipresent and monstrous than his old friend, Donald Trump. Anyway, several years after the fact, thanks for reading.

In part one, a group of advisors, including Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, gathered at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in New York to help him figure out how he might escape the legal noose tightening around his neck…in part two Steve Bannon takes up Epstein’s defense…

Excerpted from Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Notorious, The Damned

Two weeks later, as Bannon’s video crew was setting up in Epstein’s baronial study—more than forty feet long with double-high ceilings—Bannon found himself arguing with another of Epstein’s lawyers.

“Really, tell me, are you crazy?” asked the incredulous lawyer. “We can’t have him recorded.”

“Nobody knows that we’re recording him. He doesn’t actually know. We may not be. If he’s asked, he can say he doesn’t know.”

“You think that’s a good answer?”

“I think it’s the best bad answer that I have.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“What the fuck am I talking about? You know where we are. Metasta- sizing. We all know this. This is life support. We may not have more than one shot to slow this down. I have no idea if we can. But at any point he might find himself in front of a camera. This is just the most basic media training we can offer.”

And yet, again, the imperturbability of Epstein’s house, and the authority of the people around him, and the silent staff with its 24/7 menu, dulled even the intellectual appreciation of his peril. If Epstein was up against it, it yet seemed that he had time and opportunity to tweak a way out—and that finding a way would be an amusing brain tease for all those helping him.

“I’m not opposed to media training, I just don’t want a videotape out there.”

“He’s got to sit there and watch the tape all the time, that’s how you learn. This is like preparing for a deposition, except this is preparing for the court of public opinion.”

“That’s my point, he never had to prepare for a deposition because he just takes the fifth. Now you’re setting him up to answer questions he can’t answer. And, certainly, if he answers them they’re not going to rehabilitate him. ‘She was only sixteen, but full of tattoos. So sixteen, but not like a good person who’s sixteen.”

“Really,” continued Bannon, “there has got to be a way to answer that in an acceptable way. I don’t know what the answer is, but you have got to figure out the basic positioning—which should have been done fifteen years ago. We’re trying to show remorse of whatever we’re trying to show. However we get there, we’ve got to get this to the point on Gayle King so that the big reveal is that he’s not a monster . . .he’s human, ashamed, mortified . . .”

Epstein rolled his eyes and made the gesture of the noose above his head.

“You see,” said Bannon, rolling his eyes too, “media training. Emergency media training.”

“Who’d going to play me on Saturday Night Live?” asked Epstein.

“There’s a process here of getting him on camera and of having him study it like you study NFL films—like Tom Brady.”

“And you think he can actually do this, even studying?”

“I’m here by the way guys . . .grandpa’s up in the attic . . .he’s still here . . .” said a shrugging Epstein.

“Do you really think you can do this?”

“It’s beyond that. He has to do it. He has to bare his chest—”

“Not sure you want that.” The lawyer laughed.

“He has to show the world he’s not a monster—that’s a process. Listen, we weren’t going to tough stuff today anyway. This is easy, background stuff, his story, who he is, background questions. Nothing incriminating.”

“No girls? No case? No sex?”

“No girls. No Case. No sex.”

“I mean it.”

“We can talk about Steve’s sex life,” said Epstein.

“I have no problem with that,” said the lawyer.

***

“Is that light necessary, right in my face,” said Epstein, sitting in the simple straight-backed chair that had been exchanged for the throne affair that Epstein had favored. The ground rules were that they would go straight through without stopping, with a remorseless Bannon hitting as hard as he could.

“Interrogation lights,” said Bannon. “And, by the way, count on it, you will be fucked with. I was on Anderson Cooper the other night. It was pitch black. I was standing outside. I couldn’t even see the camera. If you’re not looking directly in the camera in one of these shots, you look like a retard. I’m saying where’s the camera and they wouldn’t even tell me. That’s pay dirt for them, the retard look. They’ll fuck with you in a second. Do you have to wear your glasses? I think you look better without your glasses.”

“I think he looks more intellectual with them,” said the camera guy. “Disarming.”

“I think he looks more like a dirty old man.”

“Ready . . .”

“Okay. This is game time. You’re Tom Brady. All you’re going to do is watch yourself and just get better.”

***

SB: Jeffrey, thanks for joining us here. . .um. . .what is a hedge fund manager?

JE: Are you asking me this question because you think I’m a hedge fund manager? I’d much rather be called a pedophile than a hedge fund manager.

SB: You’ve never been a hedge fund manager?

JE: Never.

SB: You’ve been called the international man of mystery, the talented Mr. Epstein . . .but nobody can put their finger on how you actually make a living. How do you make a living?

JE: I give people advice on what to do with their money.

SB: Who are your clients?

JE: I don’t talk about my clients.

SB: I assume extremely wealthy individuals? When you say you give them advice? On investments? On—”

JE: Taxes. Security. Philanthropy. Estate planning.

SB: So . . .everything. Yacht buying?

JE: At this level of wealth we’re talking about, yachts are usually built to specifications. But let me explain. At a certain level of wealth, probably above $200 million, but let’s say above $1 billion, you are going to encounter a range of issues never before encountered by human beings. In short, you can’t spend your money, you can’t give it to your children, you can’t give it to charity. Instead of money solving all manner of problems, it creates all manner of problems.

SB: Hmmm. You realize how that sounds. Do you work for Third World dictators? Do you know where this money that you manage comes from? Was it taken by corrupt means or worse?

JE: The scale of money that I’m dealing with is usually such that—

SB: You have clients in sub-Saharan Africa—

JE: I have clients in varied parts of the world.

SB: The Persian Gulf? Do you represent the Gulf Emirates? The Saudis? The Qataris? Everybody? Emirs? Sheikhs? Princes? The particular prince that took the reporter, the columnist from the Washington Post, Khashoggi, and butchered him, you represent people like that?

JE: I don’t discuss my clients.

SB: You’re laughing. Do you think it’s funny what happened to Khashoggi?

JE: It’s horrible. But I’m not political.

SB: Is that why dictators and despots come to you, because you’re not political? Because you’ll look the other way? Actually, why do they come to you? Again, it is the big question. Who are you? Where do you come from? Why would people trust you? You don’t even have a college degree. Somehow, you’ve been able to accomplish things in life without seeming to need to do the things everyone has to do. You don’t have a college degree but you were a teacher of math and physics at one of the top private schools in the country. So how did someone with no college degree end up becoming a teacher in an elite private school, and how did a high school math teacher end up as a top money manager? All before you were twenty-five.

JE: In part I was lucky.

SB: Lucky? Many people say you were in the right place at the right time because you went out of the way to put yourself there, that you have insinuated yourself by exploiting social—

JE: I don’t socialize.

SB: No? Everything I read say’s there’s a nonstop flying orgy wherever you go.

JE: I really don’t socialize.

SB: You’re hanging out with guys like Clinton, Trump, Ron Burkle, Prince Andrew, at all the top nightclubs in the world, with all these beautiful women—all this is because you don’t socialize? I’m not supposed to believe my lying eyes?

JE: What you read is in fact inaccurate.

SB: A thousand pictures of you at the hottest nightspots? With the most beautiful women, with the most powerful people of the moment.

JE: One picture, not showing what you think it shows, reprinted a thousand times. You should not believe them.

SB: I should not believe them?

JE: They do not exist?

SB: They don’t exist?

JE: I know there is an echo in this room, but they do not exist.

SB: So you’re saying—

JE: I don’t party. I have never partied. I had a Yom Kippur dinner here twelve years ago. And three science conferences.

SB: So all those stories are false?

JE: Yes.

SB: If they were false, why didn’t you say so? Ask for a correction?

JE: I don’t respond to the tabloids.

SB: Why?

JE: It doesn’t affect my life.

SB: It didn’t affect your reputation as a money manager?

JE: No.

SB: At all?

JE: No.

SB: So clients weren’t put off by someone who appeared to be a playboy?

JE: No.

SB: You’re not a playboy?

JE: I am a playboy.

SB: How can you be a playboy and not be social?

JE: I didn’t say I was a hermit. I don’t go out. I meet people in different ways. I go to specialized professional gatherings—

SB: Is that a euphemism?

JE: —where I meet people who I find interesting. Or interesting people seek me out and come to my home.

SB: Are these men or women?

JE: Both. But if the question is do I like women, the answer is yes.

SB: How old were the girls you taught at the Dalton School? Middle school?

JE: No, seventeen or eighteen.

SB: Are you sure?

JE: I always asked to see IDs.

SB: Any problems at Dalton.

JE: Zero.

SB: Do you enjoy teaching math?

JE: Yes. Most people are afraid of mathematics. As most people are afraid of money. As most people are afraid of numbers. Girls more than boys.

SB: Girls are afraid of math? Young men were not afraid of math?

JE: This is not a revelation. If you go back and look at standardized tests, there is a dramatic discrepancy between make and female performance.

SB: Why is that?

JE: Fear, in part.

SB: How did you dispel this fear?

JE: I made things friendly.

SB: You would focus on the females versus the males.

JE: Yes. To the extent that I had something more to give them.

SB: What?

JE: As I said, a friendlier view of math world.

SB: You understand how that might sound creepy.

JE: That I don’t know. It doesn’t sound creepy to me now, and I don’t think it seemed creepy to anyone then. I also tutored young black men. I volunteered for an organization that did this.

SB: Why?

JE: Because I thought they had many of the same issues. They were handicapped in their abilities to deal with math.

SB: Genetically?

JE: Educationally.

SB: Is there a relationship?

JE: Between genetics and education? That’s complicated.

SB: But you think there is a connection.

JE: Yes. There are many different variables that affect how we learn.

SB: Because of their lower intelligence, are you saying?

JE: I didn’t say lower. I said different.

SB: They can play basketball, but they can’t do math.

JE: No, they can do great mathematics, they just have to be playing basketball at the same time. Seriously, when Blacks learn. . .one of the nice things about basketball is that they are moving around. Blacks learn really well when they are moving around. And in American schools you tell Blacks to sit in their chairs.

SB: Seriously? Seriously? Okay. . . overnight you go from teaching girls high school math to a partner in one of the leading houses on Wall Street. You do understand that this is difficult to understand, no less believe? You were the youngest partner in Bear Stearns history, yes?

JE: Yes.

SB: The youngest partner in history of the firm, and, correct me if I’m wrong, most of the other partners are from Ivy League backgrounds, many with advance finance and business degrees?

JE: Yes.

SB: How does this work?

JE: In the same way that people picked stocks on the basis of reputation, investment banks hired on the basis of reputation, what schools you went to, who you knew. But in the same way that shifted for buying stocks as a function of numbers, hiring changed to focus on people who understood numbers. I met a parent at Dalton who knew that I was or had heard that I was a talented math person and he asked if I had ever thought about working on Wall Street.

SB: A girl student or boy student?

JE: Girl.

SB: A seventeen-year-old coed was moved enough by you to tell her parents about what a math genius you were?

JE: In some manner, yes.

SB: So what did the girl’s father do for you?

JE: He said he had a friend who worked on Wall Street and would I like to go see him.

SB: And?

JE: And this person called me and this turned out to be the senior partner at Bear Stearns.

SB: Is that—?

JE: Ace Greenberg, yes.

SB: So one of the most famous people on Wall Street takes it upon himself to call up a high school math teacher?

JE: Yes. Because I was a math teacher. At that moment in time, recognizing that even though Wall Street was about money, it wasn’t, up until then, about math, certainly not complicated math. Simple arithmetic would have been adequate for a superior Wall Street career. But now this suddenly changed. The new Wall Street wasn’t going to be about relationships with clients, or blue-chip companies, or who you knew in the social world, it was just going to be about your ability to see numbers in a three-dimensional sense.

SB: So how does a guy who comes walking out of an uptown private school into a Wall Street trading floor get people to trust him enough to do millions of dollars in transactions?

JE: Billions. Because Wall Street has always had a language, it used to be the Racket Club and the River Club and Fishers Island and now it was math, which is what I could speak.

SB: How did it feel to be suddenly making—how much did you make at Dalton?

JE: Eight thousand dollars a year.

SB: And now you’re making six figures?

JE: More.

SB: Seven figures. How did that feel?

JE: In fact, money didn’t interest me.

SB: Money didn’t interest you? You have houses across the globe, jets, art, women? Money doesn’t interest you?

JE: No.

SB: How can that possibly be? Your whole life is dedicated to the accumulation of wealth—and, I might add, the depravity that it affords. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, why don’t you give it away?

JE: Putting aside that I do give a lot of it away, you’re conflating how I live with how I feel about money. I have no interest in money for money’s sake, I am not here counting my money. I am in fact often using money in a counterproductive sense, not maximizing its value but limiting its value in the way I use it to give me the life I want to lead.

SB: Jets and parties and—

JE: As I said, I don’t go to parties and jets are a means.

SB: A means?

JE: A means of getting more out of life, of shortening the time between what you’re getting.

SB: Tell me, what does a mathematician see in Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Mick Jagger, and—Princess Diana? You went out with Princess Diana?

JE: I escorted her on occasion.

SB: Are you like the math nerd that just wants to hang out with the cool guys? You’re the captain of the math team who actually wants to hang out with the captain of the football team?

JE: Mathematics, higher mathematics, is about thinking differently. Often men and women who achieve some distinction are people who think differently. That’s what I like.

SB: So you’re saying money buys you a high caliber of friends?

JE: I’m saying money can be a currency of ideas.

SB: And babes?

JE: Of a conducive life, however you define it.

SB: Conducive to?

JE: Higher levels of thought and productivity.

CAMERAMAN: Need a break.

SB: “Oh my god,” said Bannon. “You’ve fallen into the worst trap you can fall into. You are actually answering the questions. You’re thinking you’re being funny or ironic, but everything that you think is wry and clever they are going to cut to make you look unfeeling, cruel, weird, grotesque. We’ll cut this to show you how bad you can truly be made to look—”

Epstein exhaled heavily and for a moment, just for a moment, seemed to feel the weight of all this.

“You see that bird at the window”—a tawny little creature, whose head swiveled in some approximation of curiosity and interest “that’s the same bird that comes the first week of April every year. It’s the craziest thing. This morning I heard the bird knocking, I thought right on time.”

“NEVER, NEVER answer the question,” said Bannon, running his hand through his hair. “They are going to come in here, they are going to shoot two or three hours of tape, and they are going to use six minutes. You’re going on, blah blah blah, but they are going to be looking for those precise moments when you happen to say what most conforms to the view they have of you. They are not here to learn who you are, they are here to get you to illustrate who they think you are. And they do not think you are a prince.”

“And African Americans, not Blacks,” said the cameraman.

“But having said that,” said Bannon, “you were good.”

“Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln,” said Epstein, “how was the show?”

“Seriously you’re engaging, you’re not threatening, you’re natural, you’re friendly, you don’t look at all creepy, you’re a sympathetic figure, and this is what seventy-five percent of the battle is, I’m totally impressed. We just have to cut the content down,” said Bannon.

“Anything you say, anything, about African Americans and women they will use to discredit you,” said the cameraman.

“Destroy you,” said Bannon.

“You give me the rules, I can follow rules.”

“Says the man who is here today precisely for not following the rules.”

“I can follow the little rules.”

“But what we know is that you’re not a stiff, seventy-five percent of the battle, more maybe. Your answers suck, but we can identify ninety-five percent of the questions, so we can get this right.”

“Give me twenty minutes,” said Epstein. “What do you guys want, omelets, club sandwiches, Monte Cristo, sushi, shrimp cocktail, anything, I’ll send somebody up . . .”

“Man,” said Bannon to the cameraman, as Epstein left, “different script he’s a star.”

“Kind of amazing. Natural. Artless,” said the cameraman.

“I almost think he could pull this off. You want to get to know him. Just the words that are a complete fucking disaster. The problem is, he’s honest. And he wants to be honest. He wants people to understand who he really is. Every answer raises more questions.”

“At the same time, it all sounds pretty fishy,” said the cameraman. “Come on, dude. This is a stinking fish.” Bannon laughed heartily. “God, it’s all such bullshit. Nothing makes any sense in this story. Which is what makes it so fucking compelling.”

The men sat in the gilded room, reflecting, satisfied in some unexpected way.

“Fuck it,” said Bannon when the houseman appeared. “I’ll have the Monte Cristo.”

***

SB: What do you think of the old adage that behind every great fortune is a great crime?

JE: I don’t think it has to necessarily be a great crime.

SB: What does that mean?

JE: The accumulation of money is often, even invariably, contentious. Many fortunes involve disputes which one side will regard as unfair.

SB: Okay, if you are saying there is a less-than-crooked status, then there is also probably a more-than-just-crooked status. You, for instance, represent figures near to or involved with the political leadership of the Persian Gulf. These people have in addition to looting the wealth of their countries, these people have tortured and murdered people. Let me submit that essentially your business is the management of ill- gotten gains.

JE: Money, at the level we are talking about, has an independent life. In some sense nobody, no one person, controls it. It’s part of the world’s capital. It has to be managed. It has to be deployed. And by the way, it’s going to keep growing. You can’t stop it from growing. Even assuming one person or one group of people may have taken it from another, the money itself does what it would do no matter who has the most con- trol of it. Yes, perhaps some more or less unworthy person might get a large yacht out of it, but principally this money is part of the world’s capital flow.

SB: I’m not even sure I know what that means.

JE: It means money is infrastructure. No matter who uses that infrastruc- ture, saints or sinners, we need it to work. We need governors, and contractors, and bond issuers to see that it keeps working. And it is the management of that capital that has resulted in the greatest epoch of social justice, literacy, the free flow of information, and, just in the last generation, the raising of a billion people in China out of poverty and into a middle class.

SB: You believe that?

JE: It’s incontrovertible.

SB: What seems incontrovertible is that you have no moral or ethical standard.

JE: I try to advise people on how to use their wealth in positive ways, positive waysfor themselves, positive ways for their families, positive ways for their communities. To grow their wealth so there is more of it to do more positive things, to structure it so it doesn’t become a negative factor to their offspring and to their offspring-great wealth can be a debilitating circumstance—and to give it away in the most productive capacity. And remember, in the end, all wealth has to be given away. You can’t keep it.

SB: Why can’t you keep it?

JE: Because what would you do with it? You can’t spend it. That’s humanly and economically impossible. You can invest it, just producing more of it. And investing it just becomes a way for someone else to use it. And in the end you’re just going to shift the burden to future genera- tions, who will have to give it away.

SB: So you’re just a philanthropist?

JE: I am one of the people involved in the philanthropic economy, one of the largest and fastest-growing parts of the world economy.

SB: How many houses do you have?

JE: I don’t know.

SB: You don’t know?

JE: It’s easier than you think. I have large properties and they each have many houses. I have a ranch that’s twenty square miles, for instance. And I put money into homes, real estate, that I don’t use.

SB: This house we’re in must have cost forty million dollars.

JE: Twenty million dollars.

SB: Has to be worth one hundred million dollars today.

JE: Two hundred and fifty million dollars.

SB: And how did you pay for this house?

JE: I made mini-me dolls and sold them on the street.

SB: Are you the world’s greatest money launderer?

JE: My business—

SB: Isn’t that your business, hiding money for Third World dictators? What you actually do is launder money for the worst people in the world.

JE: What is money laundering?

SB: Money laundering is to take money that can’t get into the world’s formal banking and investment system-you take money from oligarchs, or guys in the Persian Gulf, or Yemen, or Africa. You take their money, which can’t get into the system because it’s ill-gotten gains, and, how- ever you do it, you get into the system so now they’ve got it in Switzer- land or the United States or in real estate or art or maybe this house that you live in. Is this house actually owned by you or owned by one of your “clients”? Is this house owned by some dictator in sub-Saharan Africa?

JE: I own the house, and anything I do is transparent. Everything I do is audited by one of the big five accounting firms.

SB: The same firms that did the auditing for the companies and banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis. You don’t think that everyone believes you can outflank any accounting firm?

JE: That’s probably true. I probably can.

SB: Not probably true, it is true. That’s your talent. That’s your business.

JE: My business is giving people decent advice on what they should do with their money.

CAMERAMAN: That’s it.

***

“Dude,” said Bannon, “I don’t know who the fuck you are”-he slapped the table-”but this is a great story?”

“And we haven’t even gotten to the girls,” said Epstein.

“The story is unbelievable even without the main event-actually you’ve distracted from the main event?”

“I understand the story is crazy,” said Epstein, happily abstracting him- self from the tale.

“The arc is the arc of our time. The money, the class overthrow, the excess-the freedom, the sex,” continued Bannon. “The entitlement, the rich, the rape of every decent value,” Bannon added operatically, “getting everything you want because you wanted it, Clinton, the tech people, we didn’t even get to you and the fucking tech, and everything fucking else until Me Too. My god. And Trump!”

“I told you, crazy,” said Epstein, admiringly.

“And all this other shit,” said Bannon, pointing to Epstein’s framed pic- ture gallery of friends-Epstein with the pope, three presidents, Castro, Bill Gates, various members of the royal family, Noam Chomsky, the Dalai Lama, Woody Allen, and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

“Do you know why he’s laughing?” Epstein pointed to the picture of the Crown Prince.

“Because he just cut up Khashoggi?” said Bannon.

“No, because I just told him I smuggled girls into the kingdom dressed as airline stewardesses-the penalty for which is-” Epstein brought an imaginary saber down.

“When can we keep going?”

“I’m leaving for Paris tonight. I’ll let you know.”