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…in part three, Epstein meets at his Paris mansion with artful British PR men who have a plan to save him..in part four, the final part of "The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein," Epstein makes an ill-advised trip—among the most ill-advised trips in history—back from Paris to the U.S., where fate and the FBI are waiting for him on the airport tarmac in New Jersey...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.
Incredible and genuinely fascinating work. I arrived here after reading through a substantial portion of the released Epstein emails and text messages, and had an unsettling reaction given what I thought I had believed up till this time after getting caught up in the 2020 hysteria. The public Epstein narrative feels both overdetermined and, paradoxically, incomplete.
Reading his private communications alongside your writing, Epstein comes across less as a singular “operator” running a coherent scheme and more as a collector—obsessively accumulating people, favors, access, information, and optionality. He appears strikingly unmoored: not clearly loyal to a state, ideology, or even a single patron. In that sense, he feels like a freelance node embedded across multiple elite systems. All roads lead to Epstein because he was untethered, but he is not the puppet master.
It feels there is far more to the Epstein–Trump connection and what is hiding beneath, and how it affects our politics today which is clearly in a very precarious and concerning spot regardless of your affiliation.
I’m fascinated by the timeline surrounding the 2004 Palm Beach real-estate dispute, and to go deeper, the broader 1990s ecosystem that preceded it.
Epstein and Trump’s paths overlapped during that period amid real estate, nightlife, pageantry, and model management and the modeling and pageant world functioned as a gray zone between legitimate fashion, promotion, escorting, and capital laundering. An ecosystem that naturally intersected with casinos, post-Soviet money, New York and Florida real estate, and political aspirants.
The 2002 Elite Model Management lawsuit— with David Boies representing the plaintiffs, who surfaces again in the Epstein story—appears to be another key inflection point. The fragmentation that followed gave rise to parallel or competing entities: Trump Model Management and Miss Universe, Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 orbit with Epstein adjacent via his Wexner/Victorias secret connection, amongst the other agencies that popped up. From a distance, it resembles a splintering into factions with competing foreign connections, sources of talent and money flows. For Epstein this ultimately culminates in the Palm Beach real estate rupture, knowledge of possible oligarch money laundering connection and perhaps even a business competitor, and then Epstein’s arrest.
I feel there is so much more to that, that also explains Trumps rise in the 2010s— his opaque financial connections, the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, the Epstein story resurfacing in 2015, murmurs about Trump’s connections to Russia when he took office in 2016, the battles with the DNC— for how and why the Epstein story exploded, rewritten, and weaponized.
It’s striking how certain figures get to recede once Epstein becomes the gravitational center of the story. The behaviors later attributed uniquely to him—sexualized access, recruitment via modeling pipelines, transactional relationships framed as “mentorship”—were already normalized in adjacent elite circles and far worse. Once Epstein is fixed as the grotesque center, others fade conveniently from scrutiny.
Many of trumps foreign connections during that time period and even during his first term were legitimately found to be trafficking women in Europe and those stories had no traction.
Ironically, when reading Epstein’s own words and thoughts, I’m struck by how comparatively restrained and even self-conscious his language about women appears, when contrasted with the openly crude, an well documented rhetoric of figures like Trump.
None of this absolves Epstein of less than moral behaviors, but it complicates the caricature that has hardened around him. And we should question “what is being covered up.” I don’t think it’s the “Epstein list,” it’s circles of people a power far removed from him.
As Bannon was maybe touching on in Part II, Epstein feels less like the cause than the container—a figure onto whom a far messier web of power, money, ambition, and vulnerability could be projected, weaponized, and ultimately buried.
This is very uncomfortable -- I find myself feeling bad for Epstein. He had to pay people to be his friend, and those friends all bailed on him in the end, with the possible exception of Weingarten, who is described as "grieving." (No one else is.) I know Epstein isn't deserving of our sympathy, but it's a sign of how well written this article is that I do feel a little bit of sorrow at his ending.
Hoisted by his own petard — and other disgusting parts.
What's with him paying for the girlfriends for medical and dental achool. Did the Belarusian girlfriend usurp Ghislaine? I think she was left money in his will.
And ha ha ha ha…that “shithole” Serbia is where Jared Kushner is planning that luxury property in Belgrade No extradition? Probably planning for their escape.
Excellent reportage. Michael, you mentioned the media take on how JE made his money - blackmailing etc - but is there more to say? A lot, most likely. Obviously it’s difficult and there are very much graver issues that rightly dominate the story, but still it is a mystery that requires more illumination than his asides about higher maths provide. How did this guy make the stupendous wealth that enabled him to behave as he did? It is an astonishing riddle.
Fascinating coverage. As always, I wonder what, exactly, Epstein did to amass such wealth. Here we learn that he provided financial advice to people from around the globe, including Africa and the Middle East.
Who was he advising, exactly, and what was he advising them to do that required such secrecy? Where are his accounting documents?
I keep feeling that the answers to these questions are the real reason that "the files" can't be released.
Fascinating four-part series. I’m intrigued as to Bannon’s efforts to assist Epstein in 2019. I understand that they had never met until after the 2016 election. Do we know how the Bannon-Epstein relationship grew from 2016 - 2019? What was the motivating factor in Bannon’s efforts to help Epstein as the noose began to tighten? (Was it in service of protecting the then-President? Or to carry information back to the President?) What were the ways in which a relationship with Epstein benefitted Bannon?
While I can’t see the Hitler connection, he does seem very much like the mobsters in the underground criminal world.
To me, he is very much like a Brooklyn Jewish mobster with an existential bend the potentially hates himself for certain things and compensates for that loneliness and emptiness through this luxury.
I’m not saying all Jewish people are in the mob…… just the mobsters that happened to also be Jewish.
It appears he didn't care enough about himself to speak out, perhaps his fatal flaw. And today the U.S. (and maybe the U.K.) is getting bogged down by an old story he never bothered to tell his side of for years and when he finally wanted to it was too late.
Great reporting. Thank you for this. This needs to be on everyone’s reading list.
Incredible and genuinely fascinating work. I arrived here after reading through a substantial portion of the released Epstein emails and text messages, and had an unsettling reaction given what I thought I had believed up till this time after getting caught up in the 2020 hysteria. The public Epstein narrative feels both overdetermined and, paradoxically, incomplete.
Reading his private communications alongside your writing, Epstein comes across less as a singular “operator” running a coherent scheme and more as a collector—obsessively accumulating people, favors, access, information, and optionality. He appears strikingly unmoored: not clearly loyal to a state, ideology, or even a single patron. In that sense, he feels like a freelance node embedded across multiple elite systems. All roads lead to Epstein because he was untethered, but he is not the puppet master.
It feels there is far more to the Epstein–Trump connection and what is hiding beneath, and how it affects our politics today which is clearly in a very precarious and concerning spot regardless of your affiliation.
I’m fascinated by the timeline surrounding the 2004 Palm Beach real-estate dispute, and to go deeper, the broader 1990s ecosystem that preceded it.
Epstein and Trump’s paths overlapped during that period amid real estate, nightlife, pageantry, and model management and the modeling and pageant world functioned as a gray zone between legitimate fashion, promotion, escorting, and capital laundering. An ecosystem that naturally intersected with casinos, post-Soviet money, New York and Florida real estate, and political aspirants.
The 2002 Elite Model Management lawsuit— with David Boies representing the plaintiffs, who surfaces again in the Epstein story—appears to be another key inflection point. The fragmentation that followed gave rise to parallel or competing entities: Trump Model Management and Miss Universe, Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 orbit with Epstein adjacent via his Wexner/Victorias secret connection, amongst the other agencies that popped up. From a distance, it resembles a splintering into factions with competing foreign connections, sources of talent and money flows. For Epstein this ultimately culminates in the Palm Beach real estate rupture, knowledge of possible oligarch money laundering connection and perhaps even a business competitor, and then Epstein’s arrest.
I feel there is so much more to that, that also explains Trumps rise in the 2010s— his opaque financial connections, the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, the Epstein story resurfacing in 2015, murmurs about Trump’s connections to Russia when he took office in 2016, the battles with the DNC— for how and why the Epstein story exploded, rewritten, and weaponized.
It’s striking how certain figures get to recede once Epstein becomes the gravitational center of the story. The behaviors later attributed uniquely to him—sexualized access, recruitment via modeling pipelines, transactional relationships framed as “mentorship”—were already normalized in adjacent elite circles and far worse. Once Epstein is fixed as the grotesque center, others fade conveniently from scrutiny.
Many of trumps foreign connections during that time period and even during his first term were legitimately found to be trafficking women in Europe and those stories had no traction.
Ironically, when reading Epstein’s own words and thoughts, I’m struck by how comparatively restrained and even self-conscious his language about women appears, when contrasted with the openly crude, an well documented rhetoric of figures like Trump.
None of this absolves Epstein of less than moral behaviors, but it complicates the caricature that has hardened around him. And we should question “what is being covered up.” I don’t think it’s the “Epstein list,” it’s circles of people a power far removed from him.
As Bannon was maybe touching on in Part II, Epstein feels less like the cause than the container—a figure onto whom a far messier web of power, money, ambition, and vulnerability could be projected, weaponized, and ultimately buried.
This is very uncomfortable -- I find myself feeling bad for Epstein. He had to pay people to be his friend, and those friends all bailed on him in the end, with the possible exception of Weingarten, who is described as "grieving." (No one else is.) I know Epstein isn't deserving of our sympathy, but it's a sign of how well written this article is that I do feel a little bit of sorrow at his ending.
Back to back reading 1 thru 4...couldn't stop! Brilliant! 🔥 💯 ‼️
Wow. What a story Michael.
Hoisted by his own petard — and other disgusting parts.
What's with him paying for the girlfriends for medical and dental achool. Did the Belarusian girlfriend usurp Ghislaine? I think she was left money in his will.
And ha ha ha ha…that “shithole” Serbia is where Jared Kushner is planning that luxury property in Belgrade No extradition? Probably planning for their escape.
Excellent reportage. Michael, you mentioned the media take on how JE made his money - blackmailing etc - but is there more to say? A lot, most likely. Obviously it’s difficult and there are very much graver issues that rightly dominate the story, but still it is a mystery that requires more illumination than his asides about higher maths provide. How did this guy make the stupendous wealth that enabled him to behave as he did? It is an astonishing riddle.
Fascinating coverage. As always, I wonder what, exactly, Epstein did to amass such wealth. Here we learn that he provided financial advice to people from around the globe, including Africa and the Middle East.
Who was he advising, exactly, and what was he advising them to do that required such secrecy? Where are his accounting documents?
I keep feeling that the answers to these questions are the real reason that "the files" can't be released.
Hire security, 24/7
Utterly gripping! These reports on Epstein’s final days are worth the price of subscription alone!
Brilliant writing
Has anyone seen part one? Or does part four refer to how it was listed elsewhere?
Part 1, 2, 3…are available here on Substack under posts for HOWL
Thoroughly worth reading right from the beginning.
Fascinating four-part series. I’m intrigued as to Bannon’s efforts to assist Epstein in 2019. I understand that they had never met until after the 2016 election. Do we know how the Bannon-Epstein relationship grew from 2016 - 2019? What was the motivating factor in Bannon’s efforts to help Epstein as the noose began to tighten? (Was it in service of protecting the then-President? Or to carry information back to the President?) What were the ways in which a relationship with Epstein benefitted Bannon?
While I can’t see the Hitler connection, he does seem very much like the mobsters in the underground criminal world.
To me, he is very much like a Brooklyn Jewish mobster with an existential bend the potentially hates himself for certain things and compensates for that loneliness and emptiness through this luxury.
I’m not saying all Jewish people are in the mob…… just the mobsters that happened to also be Jewish.
Fascinating
It appears he didn't care enough about himself to speak out, perhaps his fatal flaw. And today the U.S. (and maybe the U.K.) is getting bogged down by an old story he never bothered to tell his side of for years and when he finally wanted to it was too late.