The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein, Part 1
I’d like to share 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.
Excerpted from Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Notorious, The Damned
OCTOBER 2020
On a morning in early 2019, with Spring in the air, traffic was stalled on both Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue by half a dozen police cars idling near the Frick Museum and, across the street, the mansion home of Jeffrey Epstein.
“Did you figure out what happened, was there a bomb? Did you get caught?” Reid Weingarten, one of Epstein’s lawyers, asked Ehud Barak, the former Israeli general and prime minister as he arrived at the house. Standing in the triple-high foyer of Epstein’s massive home, Barak handed his coat to one of the familiar, cheerful young women in the house—ever a surprise that, considering the ongoing legal and public fury against the convicted sex offender, Epstein continued his way of life undaunted.
“I just assumed they were taking Jeffrey away,” said Barak, in his heavy accent, making the obvious joke, his eyebrows rising above his glasses. “But he is still here, so? We have nothing to worry about. The secrets are safe.”
“Would you like an omelet?” a houseman asked the former prime minister.
“Ehud! E-HUD!” called out Epstein, circling down the grand staircase in his sweatsuit loungewear and Palm Beach slippers. Barak was a small man, and, as Epstein often reminded him, “cuddly,” but Epstein credited the former Israeli general, one of his important confidants, with special tough-guy powers. Epstein, a germaphobe, knocked elbows with his guest.
“No. No omelet. No eggs. No cheese,” said Barak.
“You can have any kind,” encouraged the host, shepherding his guests into the dining room, where Epstein, quite like a talk show personality, spent most of his day at the head of the table. On the menu was almost anything you might want served at any time-a random feast.
“Thank you. I have had so many omelets here. Your kindness is mea-sured in omelets. Salmon,” he said to the houseman. “A little bit. With bread. And butter. Why not? And tea. Black tea. Very strong. And do you have a little bit of that caviar? One spoonful?”
“The caviar, the good stuff,” Epstein directed his houseman. “We keep it only for you,” he said to Barak. “To me it’s disgusting.”
“Each to his own,” replied gnomic Barak, shrugging, and comfortably settling in at the table, large enough to seat twenty-five.
Weingarten, who had already been here for several hours participating in a conference call with various other Epstein lawyers, was taking a dim view of Barak’s nonchalance. In Epstein’s house, with its men’s club bonhomie, and its thorough shutting out of the humdrum world, the seventy-seven-year-old Barak seemed ready to enjoy a few hours of relaxation. The former Labor prime minister-now, once again, contemplating a run against his longtime adversary Bibi Netanyahu was a frequent guest, almost a fixture, and loved expounding on world issues and sharing and seeking intelligence from whoever else might be at Epstein’s table. Weingarten, however, was seeking to apply some urgency today to the discussion of his friend and client’s predicament. This was an official summit of sorts, meant to address Epstein’s ever-mounting legal and media onslaught.
But that could be difficult. For Epstein himself this was just one more review of the legal quagmire that had engulfed him since 2004, sending him to prison on a prostitution charge in 2007 for thirteen months, spawning a cottage industry in the South Florida legal community of settlements and ongoing lawsuits, and continuing now as an epic crime-and-punishment tale. “A chronic illness,” Epstein believed, “it can’t be cured, but it won’t kill me.” Epstein’s response to the storm outside was just to distance himself further from it. He seldom left his home (other than to go to another of his homes); everybody came to him.
Today’s meeting wasn’t all that different from any other day at his Xanadu-vast bachelor’s quarters on East Seventy-First Street. Every day was a revolving door of friends, acquaintances, experts, visiting international dignitaries and despots, petitioners for contributions and investments, lawyers, and other holders of vast fortunes-a network of worldly influence and interest arguably as great as any in New York-who sat at Epstein’s dining-conference table, engaged in something that was part seminar, part gossip fest, part coffee klatch, part elite conspiracy.
Said Barak, seizing the conversation, “What I want to know from you all-knowing people is: Who is in charge, who is,” he said, putting on an American accent over his own often impenetrable Israeli one, “calling the shots?” This was a resumption of the reliable conversation around Epstein: the ludicrousness and vagaries of Donald Trump-once among Epstein’s closest friends. “Here is the question every government is asking. Trump is obviously not in charge because he is “
“A moron,” supplied Epstein about his old friend Trump. For nearly two decades Trump and Epstein had been playboy brothers in New York and Palm Beach, until, in 2004, they had quarreled about a real estate deal. “At the moment, Bill Barr is in charge,” said Epstein. Barr, the new attorney general, was overseeing the Mueller report, which was shortly to be issued and to which Trump’s fate seemed immediately tied. Epstein spoke, in distinct Brooklyn twang, with merriment and confidence, a dedicated ebullience—which, together with infinite and tolerant amusement of the fallibilities of the people he knew, was his outward character note. The public grilling that would shortly ensue about how any decent person could come to Epstein’s house had a simple answer: for the pleasure of it. The welcome. The ease. For a few hours outside the ordinary.
“It’s Donald’s pattern,” said Epstein, ever the explainer of his old playboy buddy, “he lets someone else be in charge, until other people realize that someone, other than him, is in charge. When that happens, you’re no longer in charge.”
“A certain management approach,” said Barak. “But let me ask you, why do you think this Barr took this job, knowing all this?”
“The motivation was simple: money,” said Epstein.
“I’m shocked,” said Weingarten.
“Barr believes he’ll get a big payday out of this,” said Epstein. “If he keeps Donald in office, manages to hold the Justice Department together, and help the Republican Party survive Donald, he thinks this is worth big money to him. I speak from direct knowledge. Extremely direct. Trust me.”
“Always describe your direct knowledge as indirect,” said Barak, with his salmon and caviar now in front of him.
“I have impeccable indirect knowledge,” said Epstein.
“How do you say ‘Fuck you’ on Wall Street?” said Barak, less concerned by his non sequitur than with his punch line: “... ‘trust me.”
“I thought that’s how you say it in Israel,” said Epstein, now dialing the phone. “Steve has a cold and stayed in D.C., Epstein explained about Steve Bannon, who had been expected.
Bannon was a new friend. They had been introduced in December.
“You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign,” said Bannon, laughing, when they met, meaning he believed Epstein knew dangerous secrets about Trump.
“As well you should have been,” replied Epstein.
Since then the two men-partly out of a shared incredulity about Donald Trump—had deeply bonded, ever reviewing the day’s events together. Or competing with each other to predict tomorrow’s news. Bannon was often astonished by what Epstein knew.
“Steve, Ehud and Reid are here.”
“Gents-”
“Steve,” said Barak, “how do you say ‘Fuck you’ on Wall Street?”
“Trust me. The same way you say it in Israel.”
“Hmm.”
“That’s my boy,” said Epstein.
“Hmm,” said Ehud, who had once overseen Israel’s vaunted intelligence operation, eyeing the room for cameras. “Ehud, sometimes everybody just knows the answers,” said Epstein. “Humph.”
“Reid,” said Epstein, suddenly, and reluctantly, businesslike, “can you give an overview?”
Weingarten was among a small circle of the most sought-after criminal defense lawyers in the country. But, if there yet existed a showman-style trial lawyer in the model of F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran, Gerry Spence, and Melvin Belli—”flamboyant” was once the term of art-Weingarten wasn’t one. After two generations of law-and-order politics, and the government’s conviction rate at well over 90 percent, Weingarten carried a heavy weight for his clients, his eyes thick and deep, his shoulders sagging. It was a protective fatalism.
“Yeah.” He put his hand on the table. Then he took a deep breath, run- ning his other hand back through his hair. “Okay. The situation is bad. Bad. Heart attack bad. I think it’s the fight of your life.”
“But how bad is it, really?” said Epstein.
However existential, it was hard to square the stakes with the circumstances here in one of the most sumptuous residences in Manhattan, with its procession of the best lawyers and most powerful and influential men in the land. Since his release from his jail sentence in 2009, Epstein had rehabilitated his life, not least of all by putting it into a bubble. He lived inside this house, almost never leaving it except to travel by private plane to his archipelago of other luxe residences in Paris, Palm Beach, and on several personal Caribbean islands and a vast ranch in New Mexico. He did not interact, except through lawyers, with the outer world. And he had so many lawyers that their reports were often an indistinct babble. That world might hate him with unrelieved ferocity. But here, at home, in his many homes, his life was wholly charmed.
“I think,” said Weingarten, trying to stay on point—digression was the meal most frequently served at Epstein’s table—“it’s in five different pieces. There’s a judge in Florida, Judge Marra, who is determined to hurt Jeffrey?” The conversation today would go back and forth between including Epstein and talking about him, regardless of his presence, in the third person. “He has prosecutors around the world who might look to prosecute him again. I think there is a Hill piece here—the calls for his head from both sides of the aisle don’t give us much cover. And then there’s what’s happening in civil court-hurtful things. And not least of all there is a public relations piece here. Every time I turn on the television and look for the Celtics score I see that my boy is a monster. Everybody’s favorite monster. The devil. Pedophile. Sex trafficker. Keeping little girls in the basement. Trump friend—”
“That would be the worst,” said Epstein.
“And there is no rejoinder. Ninety percent of what everyone is saying is horseshit. But there is no rejoinder. The New York Times has taken a sex scandal, the fact that Jeffrey has whatever tastes he has, and made it into a human rights tragedy—I am not a naïf, but I have never seen ...”
In absolute juxtaposition to the view in the outside world, the view among Epstein’s wide circle of loyal, devoted, and largely unquestioning friends was that Epstein was guilty only of venial sins, that he had more than paid for them with his plea to a prostitution charge in 2008, serving thirteen months in a Palm Beach jail, and that ever since, and with increasing zeal, he was being pursued by plaintiffs and their lawyers, all with a clear financial interest, and a media that, feeding off unchallenged and self-serving allegations, had found a handy personification of evil.
True, no one knew what had happened in his massage rooms between Epstein and the scores or even hundreds of young women. But the Epstein they know, however compartmentalized—no one could be sure they knew the Epstein someone else knew—was at incomprehensible odds with the media portrait and the testimony of young women, all seeking financial settlements, and none ever subject to cross-examination.
It was, for these power players, a power play. The cultural turn had given women, particularly young women, vast new media power. This then was being leveraged by other forces. David Boies, the nation’s most prominent litigator—and, in the legal and business community, quite among the most unpopular—had represented both the country’s most famous abuser, Harvey Weinstein, and Silicon’s Valley most famous fraudster, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Now, in some through-the-looking-glass reversal and effort at his own self-repair, he had aligned himself both with #MeToo politics and with a brigade of Florida contingency lawyers to represent Epstein victims. Epstein’s lawyers believed that Boies, a famous influence peddler, had become a significant voice urging the Justice Department to reopen the Epstein case—a lever to use in his settlement efforts. Then, too, Epstein’s circle saw their friend as a Trump proxy. Through Epstein—regardless of his own antipathy for the president—anti-Trump partisans and media had damaged Trump labor secretary Alexander Acosta, who, a decade before as a federal prosecutor, had handled the Epstein plea deal. Indeed, the federal investigation of Epstein that began in 2004 had, Epstein-ers theorized, been part of a Republican effort to ensnare Bill Clinton, to whom Epstein had, indiscreetly, linked his name and supplied his plane. Epstein then had been a Clinton proxy.
Epstein’s powerful circle saw him, an astute student of power and a collector of powerful friends, as, somehow, particularly unsuited to this power game. Too much the free spirit, too much the helpless bad boy, too heedless to properly protect himself. And they saw the outside world as a place increasingly hostile not just to Epstein, the easy fall guy, but to themselves as well.
Weingarten had met Epstein not long after his first conviction. The terms of Epstein’s 2008 deal with the federal government—now regarded by many as outrageously lenient—were, to Weingarten, outside any legal bargain that he had ever seen before. Among the terms: Epstein’s plea required him to pay the legal fees of those the government named as his victims, and not to contest their claims, nor to contest the bona fides of the victims themselves. Hence, the pile-on, which had cost Epstein tens of millions in settlements and created a clear financial reason for the continuing pursuit.
“Here is a man absent any—forget sympathy, forget skepticism, forget presumption of innocence—absent any humanity.”
“Yeah, we get it,” said Epstein. “Hitler.”
“Literally, it goes on, day after day, with no effort on anyone’s part, and not on our part, either, to look at the record, to question anybody’s motivations—”
“So where is the comms piece in this?” asked Bannon over the phone. “Who is handling it? Who’s on point? Are these your people, Reid?”
“Well—okay—in fact there really hasn’t been anything in place because largely the view has been let’s not call more attention to this or antagonize the judges this has been before, and not wanting to be seen attacking the victims, and so we haven’t—’
“Let me get this straight,” said Bannon. “I think I understand this, but it strains credulity—there’s nothing in place? There hasn’t been anything in place? No communications team? What was the response from Jeffrey’s side to the Florida story? Who engaged?”
In November 2018, the Miami Herald had published a multipart story recounting the earlier charges against Epstein, with further, devastating accounts from the victims, and directly impugning Acosta’s motivations in the plea deal. If every successive story about Epstein over the years had once more revived what might seem to have been a fading issue, in the new climate, and now directly tying figures in the Trump administration to Epstein, the Miami Herald story gave it rocket boosters.
“We didn’t engage,” said Epstein.
“Did we even know about it?” asked Weingarten.
“No. Roy Black’s office may have gotten a call, but we didn’t respond,” said Epstein. Black was another world-class criminal attorney who had been among the dream team that Epstein had assembled in his first case—a team whose warring egos Weingarten believed had a lot to do with the case’s peculiar and ever-unresolved outcome.
“I’m part of the problem here, I have to say?” Weingarten pulled on his face. “We just have felt, and maybe this was wrong-okay, wrong—that any effort to defend Jeffrey publicly stirs the pot and makes it more likely than not that people are going to come out of the woodwork.”
“This is crazy,” said Bannon.
“Well, yeah. True, it’s ninety percent bullshit, everything out there. But the problem is with what isn’t bullshit—people choke and I choke a little, too. He”—Epstein, at the head of the table, listened with detached interest— “leads the league in number of acts of prostitution.” In some accounts, Epstein had had as many as three girls a day come to his Palm Beach home to give him a topless massage with happy ending-going price $200. “Okay, fine. But in the history of man, prostitution has either been not a criminal act or a misdemeanor—even if it’s a thousand times.”
“Prostitution it seems is no longer called prostitution,” said Barak. “It is something else. Much worse.” Indeed, the crime had shifted. Where the case was about Epstein soliciting, that is paying, girls, some underage, for sexual acts, now it was about Epstein using his wealth to exploit vulnerable children.
“We are on the absolute other side of every cultural issue that has cur- rency right now,” said Weingarten.
“Reid and Steve, what kind of cover do we get from Kraft?” asked Epstein.
A month before, New England Patriots owner and Trump friend and supporter Robert Kraft had been arrested in a Palm Beach massage par- lor. Behind the scenes, in another chance power nexus, Epstein had been advising Kraft, as had, Epstein knew, Trump himself.
“Bob gets dinner out, I get take-in,” said Epstein with the flippancy that often exasperated the people trying to help defend him. “But otherwise there is no difference. I think there’s an opportunity to use Kraft as a way to talk about what prostitution is—that it is what it is.”
“You have the obvious point,” said Weingarten, “that the Kraft girls are prostitutes because they are Korean and take $200. Which is apparently different when you’re white and take $200 from Jeffrey Epstein, then you’re innocent and vulnerable. What I’ve always thought—and maybe this is just insane—that somebody who isn’t crazy, who writes for the Atlantic or the New Yorker...I mean wouldn’t they give their whatever to sit down with him. Some intelligent person has got to be able to understand this . .”
The traditional legal might that Epstein had assembled―more than seventy-five lawyers had circled through the team over the last ten years— seemed perpetually befuddled by how to deal with a righteous and weaponized media.
“Is there a friendly journalist?” asked Barak, seeming to imply that one might somewhere be found on the payroll.
“Nobody can do it. Nobody is going to be permitted to write this story now. A judicious look at Jeffrey Epstein is not publishable,” said Bannon, who seemed deeply impatient with the naïveté of the group.
“To me,” said Barak, “I believe that every raising of your profile in the public arena works against you and not for you. So you have to do the minimum necessary to protect you and not the maximum that could be done to expose you.” With some sideline irony, Epstein was otherwise concerned that Barak’s move into the Israeli prime minister’s race might expose their friendship and, as well, the financial support that Epstein had been providing the former prime minister.
“He probably can’t be hated any more,” said Bannon. “We’ve flatlined on this. He can’t get deader. While the chances of reviving him are remote, what’s the alternative?”
“Okay, so what about something like 60 Minutes or Gayle King?” said Weingarten.
“Worked very well for R. Kelly,” said Bannon, about King’s recent inter- view with the singer accused of sex abuse—a disaster for Kelly.
“I would have said no way, but now... Jeffrey just going. Laying every- thing out. It would be tough but—just to humanize him,” Weingarten continued.
“Would you want to do that?” asked a skeptical Barak of Epstein, seeming to suggest that humanizing was a kind of weakness.
“I don’t want to do it. But I would.”
“It would take a month of hard work to get ready,” said Weingarten. “A year,” said Bannon.
“What if we started with surrogates?” asked Epstein, brightly.
“What is that?” asked Barak.
“Advocates who speak for you. Would 60 Minutes take a surrogate?” asked Weingarten.
“Would 60 Minutes take a surrogate? Dude, come on,” said Bannon, with disbelief.
“Well, Rachel Maddow, then,” said Weingarten, grasping.
“Okay,” said Bannon. “You’re the Jeffrey surrogate sitting with Rachel Maddow and she’s going to say how many girls were there, were there ten, were there a hundred, a thousand. Now you’re on national television, what do you say? ‘I’m confident it’s less than a thousand? Was it?” said Bannon, turning to Epstein.
“Yes, less.”
“Actually, here is the first question,” said Bannon. “What’s the age of the youngest girl?“
“That would be good,” said Epstein, “because the answer to that ques- tion is that there was one girl who was fourteen years old and she told the police she lied about her age. She told everyone she was eighteen because she was afraid she would never be allowed into the house and never be invited back. That’s the only one.”
“That’s the only one who is under the age of eighteen?”
“No, the youngest one...”
Bannon snorted loudly over the phone. “All right, okay. So get to the issue, bang. He’s been branded a pedophile-while in fact these are not underage or barely underage. I’d rather have that discussion about what is a pedophile than for people just to assume he is one. To the extent that anybody was underage, it was slightly underage and they lied about it. None of them were acting under duress-there were no drugs, no coer- cion. And there was no trafficking-you were a consumer of sexual ser- vices and not a provider. Does the fourteen-year-old look close to eighteen or to fourteen?”
“Twenty-seven,” said Epstein.
“Really?”
“These girls, including the fourteen-year-old, worked in strip clubs, massage parlors, they had tattoos. Tattoos and piercings—which, in Flor- ida, require you to be eighteen.”
“That’s helpful. But you’re besmirching the victims. The line here is between having to respect the victims and having to show that they are bat-shit crazy or coldly in it for the money. Question: Are there any of these girls, girls who were over eighteen at the time, who would be willing to come forward and defend you... to give context, reasonable context, to what happened?”
“That could be a good idea,” said Weingarten. “I’m betting that for a lot of these girls the best thing they did in their day was to visit Jeffrey- compared to what they were doing in their miserable lives... but you can’t actually say that . . .”
“No, please,” said Bannon.
The divide between the sixty-six-year-old Epstein’s largely over-sixty pals, lawyers, and uber-connections, and the new language of cultural equipoise and class and race sensitivity, grew, as if by the hour, ever vaster. The right-wing Steve Bannon was, in Epstein’s house, the voice of cultural understanding.
“In fact, let me take it the other way,” said a concerned Bannon. “How comfortable are we, how confident that there isn’t a new girl out there who could come forward and be an incredible victim? Just asking. We’re good here? You’re absolutely confident? A credible girl won’t show up? That’s the kill shot if she does.”
“I’m not worried about new girls coming forward, I’m worried about fake girls. It’s the fake ones who know how to construct these stories, that you had to tell your roommate, that you need celebrity names.”
From a media point of view, Epstein’s most damaging accuser was Virginia Roberts, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, who had in the Daily Mail and in subsequent depositions described herself as a sex slave during her multiyear employment by Epstein, a sex slave made available to Epstein’s friends, the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew. Both men had categorically and aggressively denied these allegations. The otherwise ever-unconcerned Epstein could not control his exasperation as he frequently recited the provable falsehoods of Rob- erts’s story—including the presence of Al and Tipper Gore, whom Epstein claimed never to have met, on his plane.
“What about a woman surrogate—a woman who can make the case?” asked Epstein. It could sometimes seem as though Epstein’s inside world was just rising from a deep cultural slumber. “A serious woman.”
One of Epstein’s close friends was a woman and a lawyer with a significant profile-but he was trying to protect her from public exposure to him.
The discussion again seemed to drift off in the ethereal bubble of Epstein’s house, far, far removed from the present reality—aristocrats in the French Revolution-with the assumption that there were, somehow, somewhere, surrogates and public supporters available to him. Indeed, the long list of Epstein’s male lawyers had quickly dwindled to a rare few who might now publicly make his case.
Several other high-profile women litigators were named as potential hires, most discounted as unlikely, even for a big pay day, to step forward, and one, who might have done it, for being a drunk.
“What litigator isn’t?” said Barak.
“Well, I’m not,” said Weingarten. “I smoke a lot of pot. But I’m not a drunk.”
“Good,” said Barak. “I’m thinking about investing in a cannabis company?”
“I’ll invest with you,” said Weingarten.
“Put all your money in it,” said an enthusiastic Epstein. “It’s the best thing to do. It’s going to be wild. It hasn’t even begun yet. This is the beginning. There’s every different layer of things. There’s production. Distribution. Regulation.”
“It goes everywhere. Into beverages, even into dog food,” said Barak. “Dog food is gigantic... calms your dog down,” said Epstein. “But the science here is significant, too. Because pot is being genetically modified to deliver this variety of responses.”
“Never inhaled, never exhaled. Never haled,” said Barak.
“My two favorite investments,” said Epstein, pleased to turn from his legal troubles, “are cannabis and also new augmented reality. This is spookier than anything I’ve ever seen. You can now take a photograph and turn it into a 3D shape, and then put in some artificial intelligence so it can have a conversation... so where does this lead... you put on your glasses and see your father and mother sitting there shimmering . . . and ask your father a question and he responds it’s time for you to be serious about life... you want to talk to the dead... here you are...
“Guys,” called Bannon. “If you’re down this road, I’m going to sign off.” “Hold on,” said Epstein. “What about 60 Minutes?”
“What about 60 Minutes?”
“If it’s going to take a year to prepare, we better get started?”
It was hard to tell if Epstein might truly be focusing on the precariousness of his situation or if he just liked to spend time with Bannon.
“You want to start? You want to go on camera?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been on camera before.”
“If you’re game, dude. Maybe you’ll be great. Could be a game changer.”
“I could be the new Trump. Let’s see how much of a genius you really are.”
[Part two tomorrow—Steve Bannon preps Jeffrey Epstein for a 60 Minutes interview.]
God grant me not only the confidence, but the creative audacity, of this group of men considering Epstein appearances on Maddow and 60 Minutes. Thank you for witnessing, and writing this.
That seems plausible, Leslie. A dark subtext to this rather carefree conversation, as notated here. The banality of evil, 2019 edition.