The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein, Part 3

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…in part three, Epstein meets ay his Paris mansion with artful British PR men who have a plan to save him..

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

Epstein greeted the entourage arriving in early May at his apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement on Avenue Foch like something out of a musical comedy—a dramatic, joyful entrance into the grand stone foyer. “My salvation!” he said, nearly on one foot as he rushed into the room, his hands in a wide embrace.

One effect of Epstein’s decision to live his life without attention to the outside world, ignoring, since his release from prison, all the processes of public recompense and rehabilitation-indeed, living as quite an insult to it—was that, by the spring of 2019, he found himself so publicly vilified and demonized that he was unable to find a U.S. PR firm to finally try to help him publicly defend himself. There could hardly be a more ominous indication of his predicament than that some of the most vaunted crisis managers, those specialists in ruined reputations, had refused his business. He was way too ruined.

His supporters had now identified a London-based firm, known for representing dictators and despots, willing to come to Paris for a discussion.

Epstein’s Parisian life was meant to somehow align himself with a European style—a libertine way of life, if you will, free of American moral shackles. But it was hard to find someone less European. He spoke no languages other than English (Brooklyn English); he was impatient with Parisian pretense and food; his Paris apartment was 21,000 square feet, a nineteenth-century patrician lodging, but wholly renovated to maximum American temperature controls and plumbing standards. Reid Weingar- ten had once stayed in the Paris apartment and then tagged along with Epstein to visit another property Epstein was considering buying—one of the largest residences in Paris, next door to the Rodin Museum. Epstein’s primary concern, appalling the Parisian agents and lawyers gathered to represent the potential sale, was whether he could install a pool on the historic property.

Epstein was in Paris usually a week out of every three or four with his Avenue Foch home as the center of his Gulf region activities. Confounding almost everyone with any knowledge of the region, Epstein seemed to function as an ex officio NGO, entertaining seemingly all sides in all Gulf State disputes—the Saudis and the UAE, the Qataris, the Yemenis.

His cynical but cheerful analysis was that, in the end, in the Gulf there was no real issue other than money, making it, hiding it, protecting it, making more of it. In his telling, all these disparate figures came to see him pre- cisely because of his ignominy. “One virtue of disgrace,” he explained, “is that I’m shunned by establishment institutions. Therefore people can be reasonably sure I’m not in the pocket of a government, bank, or any other firm or institution with its own interests.”

His was expounding on this view and the nature of his Paris life for the benefit of the British PR team as he showed them into one of the grand receiving rooms. Upholstered settees or chesterfields were set around a long, low table. In the corner, occupying considerable space, but, yet, proportional to the size of the room, there was a stuffed, actual, baby elephant—that is, the proverbial elephant in the room.

As in New York, there was the house staff and then, additionally, the coterie of young women-assistants, organizers, curators. There instantly appeared a rainbow variety of vegetable and fish maki and hand rolls. For the benefit of his guests, Epstein was now on to his latest view of how Trump would act—what, pressed to the limit, his old friend might do.

“He is never going to allow himself to be hung out to dry or to be defeated. That’s an absolute. I have always known this. But I have finally figured out the fail-safe move, the point behind which no one can go because the world ends. The president of the United States has the unilateral power to declassify anything. He can disclose anything to anyone. All information is his to do with as he pleases. He literally controls the secrets,” said Epstein with rising excitement. “This is a man who is aroused by nothing so much as a loophole. For a while I thought it would be his pardon power—he would merely say for the good of the country, I’m pardoning everyone. And he still might. But now I think the secrets are more powerful, because they are a kind of doomsday threat. Back off or cut me a deal or assure me immunity for my family and wealth or I’ll—I’ll tell the Daily Mail we have two agents in the offices next to Putin. Or here are the files on Bill Clinton... or... enough to ...”

He seemed delighted by his formulation, as delighted as if he had had such power for himself. It clearly satisfied him, too, that he had, at last, matched what he knew about the president’s character with the president’s powers. The British PR myrmidons—a senior myrmidon and two junior myrmidons—murmured appreciatively.

Epstein’s cell phone rang. “Call me back in an hour,” he said and hung up. He laughed and shook his head. “That’s a man from the Middle East. Not just the Middle East, Yemen. Yemen! He wants my advice on money. I refused to give it to him. Just let me come talk to you, he pleaded. I said no—this is not someone...So he just arrived here and we had to tell him, no, go away. This was three years ago. Then, a few months later, there is a knock on the upstairs door here. And it’s him. I said how did you get in—this building has great security. He said, I bought an apartment in the building so now you have to see me. He’s never moved in, the apartment is empty. But now I can’t escape him.”

The PR man, florid and baby faced, sighed, apparently sympathetic to the problem.

Epstein put a piece of a maki roll into his mouth like a bonbon, crossed his legs, and summarized: “I’m rich, I’m a guy, and the girl issue—if you need to be angry at somebody, I fit the bill. Even broader, if your view of the world is that it is controlled by insidious secret forces, that the elites are screwing you and anyone else they want to, that even pussy is a conspiracy and Ponzi scheme.”

“The Madoff of pussy,” said the PR man, respectfully, likewise plopping a maki bite into his mouth. “May I make an observation,” said the PR man, with pregnant pause and putting his fingertips together.

“Please.”

“You are caught in the middle of a tabloid story. That’s a situation that has been painful to many people before. But there is a further twist now, because there are fewer and fewer tabloids. In the past, your story would have been barely touched by the respectable press. Your story would have existed in a world wherein respectable people, even if they found it necessary to shun you, would have also understood that you were a tabloid victim—the product of tabloid exaggeration and glee. There but for the grace of God…But now, the respectable press, not least of all the New York Times, itself desperately trying to survive, and now pursuing, as tabloids have always done, single-copy sales in the form of online clicks, have grabbed the tabloid stories, but turned them into earnest issues. Your”— the PR man gestured to indicate the full sweep of Epstein’s loucheness—“now becomes a seminal morality tale. That’s the basis on which the New York Times justifies writing about it.”

“That’s smart,” said Epstein.

“It is part of a larger mix-up of course with the president, the quintessential tabloid figure, now having to be a subject of deep and nuanced consideration. The New York Times finds itself out of its depth covering the shallowest issues. In this instance, to your great cost. Let me ask perhaps an unfair question.”

“There are no unfair questions.”

“Have you had bad advice, or did you fail in the past to take good advice?”

“Both.”

The PR man’s eyebrows rose dramatically. “I am not sure I’ve ever seen such a one-sided, entirely negative, absolutely despicable—”

“And depraved-”

“And depraved public portrait of a human being, outside of the leadership of the Third Reich. Tell me why you decided to take the original deal you took and not fight it? I understand the desire to put it behind you... but..”

“Okay... the original charges were in Florida, in Palm Beach. Suddenly I’m under investigation, the police outside my house—I thought they were offering extra security, that my contributions to the various police funds were paying off.”

“Do you know why they started to investigate?”

“I believe I do, yes. Another involved story.”

Epstein’s criminal origin story involved, he believed, his breakup with Donald Trump. Epstein had bid on a Palm Beach mansion and taken his friend Trump to advise him on how to move the swimming pool. Days later, Trump jumped in and bid on the house himself. Epstein understood that the always cash-strapped Trump was likely fronting for a buyer who needed anonymity and Epstein threatened to reveal as much in a lawsuit. At that point Epstein’s legal troubles began. Hence, he concluded, Trump, ever cultivating the Palm Beach police, and, as a frequent visitor to Epstein’s house, well aware of his friend’s proclivities, turned him in.

“I was charged with girls coming to my house, local strippers and massage parlor girls. Soliciting prostitutes. I had never been in any kind of trouble before. So I called my friend Alan Dershowitz—”

“The most famous lawyer in America,” said the PR man for the benefit of his junior associates.

“And he says, ‘Shocking, appalling, I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. And he gets on a plane, comes to Palm Beach, and shits all over the Palm Beach police department. So instead of pleading guilty to a variety of misdemeanor charges with small fines I’m suddenly before a grand jury and now it transpires that one of the girls is two weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday-”

“I thought there were other younger ones.”

“Later. We’re in the land of fake IDs. You have girls who not only lied to me about their ages, they lied to the police. Which is why the police had a difficult case—the witnesses are liars. Anyway, the grand jury suddenly comes up with an indictment that involves three third-degree misdemeanors with the possibility of three months of jail time. Dershowitz goes crazy and we hire Roy Black, a major Florida trial lawyer—”

“Famous. William Kennedy Smith, the Kennedy nephew rape case,” explained the PR man.

“Yes. Major overkill, in hindsight.”

“It would seem.”

“At this point, because of infighting in the Sheriff’s Department, or possibly other nefarious interference, there’s a complaint to the Justice Department. This is to the Bush DOJ. Ashcroft is the attorney general and the allegation is that there’s a sex case in Palm Beach that might involve Bill Clinton. At that point, in what little press I had had, it was all connected to my friendship with Bill. So... the feds are now involved. And they are re-interviewing the girls, and it’s now the FBI, and the girls are threatened with... god knows if they lie. So now you have a bunch of girls who are younger than eighteen.”

“As young as?“

“The youngest is fourteen. But you have a variety of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. But the federal government, having gotten itself involved, suddenly found itself stuck on how to move this quintessentially local crime, prostitution, to a federal level,” said Epstein, the practiced narrator of his own legal travails. “By the way, they couldn’t find a girl who would link Clinton to any of this. But now they have an open investiga- tion. There’s been press coverage. They need to save face. So... they try an interstate commerce claim because my assistant in New York used the telephone to make appointments with the girls in Palm Beach. But this is weak. The chance this gets bounced is at least fifty-fifty in a DOJ that likes its win rate at ninety-five percent. But because of my airplanes they are suddenly threatening to make me out as a sex trafficker, an incredibly vague, bad-guy catchall. Under this statute, you can, because you are a trafficker—a kind of mafioso by any other name—reasonably be denied bail. So suddenly the feds had their pitch: we will keep you in jail for a year before your trial, unless you go back to the state of Florida and let them put you in jail for eighteen months. So I could go to jail in Florida for eighteen months, or the feds would keep me in jail for a year to face a fifty-fifty chance in a trial which could put me in jail for forty-five years. That was my choice.”

The junior members of the PR team took careful notes. The purpose here for the PR team was of course not to judge Epstein’s crimes but to weigh, and ultimately improve on, his story about the crime.

“But since then, you decided not to tell your story in this way—or in any way?”

“You have to understand, I have never really cared about the public. I don’t make my money from the public. I’m not someone who depends on votes or selling a product, or, even, keeping my job. My life is fine.”

“Except if an angry mob storms your walls.”

“Exactly. And the natives are restless. It’s an accretion—my story pops up, dies down, pops up again. Every time it pops up it grows another head.” “Mmmm,” said the PR man, who seemed as interested in the food. “My problem is not with men, but with their wives—”

“Mothers and daughters and feminist journalists on the Upper East Side of Manhattan storming your walls.”

“The more immediate problem is that the wives say to their husband, ‘You can’t go to Jeffrey’s house’... so if you’re a senior partner at a law firm,” he trailed off, then added, “Everybody comes to my house.”

“Why? Can I ask?”

“People find it valuable. But now they can only come before it gets light, so breakfast has to start at like four-thirty. Or they come after dark. You see the problem. I get no sleep.”

“Mmmm.”

“Of course, there’s a group of people asking, ‘Why do world leaders show up at that big house? It can’t be economic advice because he never graduated from college. It can’t be because of his financial expertise because there are lots of smarter people on Wall Street. So the only reason guys would have for going to his house must be something sinister ... or girl related . . .”

“From a business perspective, are you managing your own money? Are you helping other people?”

“I manage my own money and give advice to others.”

“Is there a business transaction attached to that or is it friendly advice?” “Both. Anybody who is the least bit funky, I take no money from them, but that doesn’t mean I might not give them advice.”

“Mmmm. And have you noticed a drop-off in people seeking your advice?”

“Well, for instance, in the paper last week someone put out a list of charities that I give money to, anonymously. You might think people would say ‘decent guy, but instead I’m doing something illicit in the dead of night, secretly giving money away, for shame. They called each charity and said, ‘How do you feel taking money from a sex criminal?”“

“Indeed,” said the PR man. “We happen to have several clients who are part of a giving community, generous donors with, let’s say, a kind of 1970s style. They would get together, kicking up an enormous amount of money for good causes, and then have an orgy in a hotel suite afterward.” He offered an understanding gesture.

Sneaking a look at his watch, the PR man began to draw the meeting to its point, clearing his voice. “Within the context of understanding your goals, which I think involves several more conversations”—that is, likely, conversations on the billing clock—”we would look to create a one-year plan and timeline as well as a five-year view. I think I have a better idea of that outline now.” He looked to his colleagues, who murmured their assent. “But the immediate task, I believe, is to try to return to a baseline.

You are at present a man without a defense, explanation, rationale, or personal story.”

Epstein seemed like a man listening to the outline of a complicated medical treatment program.

“To recover that, I think in the immediate turn, we concentrate wholly on process.”

“Which is?”

“I think thirty to sixty days, we build a book. Here is our narrative, absolutely consistent, factual, on the merits, easily accessible on every question and on every allegation. For this, of course, we will need an extensive download from all of your lawyers. But the point is nothing goes unanswered. Press calls are supplied with a comprehensive dump of information. Press is made to deal with every point. If they don’t, then there are follow-up letters demanding to know why. You have to create a situation of responsibility to the facts. Right now you have a situation which is so complex, anybody can represent it to mean anything. You have to engage on each point, make each issue a negotiation. This is all block and tackle.”

“Sounds right.”

“We’d be running a war room, with an ample staff. There’s nothing that we don’t respond to. Within four to six months we’d hope to be generating stories that go from Dr. Evil to here are the issues in a complicated legal proceeding. We have to give people the opportunity to see that there are many questions here.”

“What about—should I be out there?”

“You?” The British PR man seemed momentarily startled. “Not quite yet. Ultimately. But groundwork has to be laid. We will get to that. One more question.”

“Yes?”

“Your relationship with the president. Is he a threat or an advantage?”

“He doesn’t have the conscious ability to be either.”

“Is he afraid of you?”

“He doesn’t have the sense to acknowledge fear.”

“Okay, a wild card.”

The PR man now pointedly looked at his watch. “What we will do is return to you in the next seventy-two hours with a fleshed-out proposal and a structure for how we might work together.”

“I would look forward to that. This is encouraging. I appreciate it.”

“My pleasure. Our pleasure. Totally fascinating.” The PR man took a final maki before rising. “And I genuinely believe that the needle can be moved here. Really.”

Epstein agilely avoided a germ-prone handshake.

The proposal for comprehensive communications services, which Epstein received from the British firm a few days later, included a retainer of $3 million a month. For the moment, Epstein tabled his decision to go forward.