This Is My Jeffrey Epstein Story

Join me as I tell it.

Photo illustration: Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast

The fog of war was once meant to describe battlefield conditions wherein limited, contradictory, and inaccurate information compromised a commander’s decision-making capabilities. But then the fog was extended. It was not just the battlefield that lacked reliable accounts. Reality itself was in a constant state of confusion and uncertainty, clouded by competing political agendas, a fractured and untrustworthy media, a flattening and conflating of all sources, the miasma of social media, and the promotion of anyone who declared their expertise.

Hence, now, the fog of Epstein—a story that has been shaped to fit almost everybody’s view, right-wing or left, of what has gone wrong with our time, and to confirm the depravity of virtually anybody you don’t like.

What’s Actually in the Epstein Pictures?

A pederast at the school yard whose sexual license took him to places of unimagined degeneracy. A pimp to the elite. A con man who extracted fortunes from billionaires and ensnared them in his web of influence. A sexual blackmailer exploiting the perverted compulsions of the world’s most powerful men. An intelligence asset operating at the highest levels of deep state command and control. A key player at the center of the ever-lurking worldwide Jewish conspiracy—and, indeed, of many other conspiracies. A BFF to the corrupt and amoral president. A man who knew too much, hence, who had to be eliminated. Or, it might surely seem possible, an escape artist who cheated accountability by faking his own death.

An anomaly of this story is that anyone who had an up-close view of his life has every reason not to want to share it—and, overwhelmingly, they haven’t. To relate their experience of it, other than as a forced confession, would implicate them. Everyone, therefore, becomes part of the cover-up; and part of the conspiracy that, because it’s being covered up, it must surely be. It is a story, therefore, left largely to be told by accusers and by people who don’t know it.

Photo credit: Anadolu via Getty Images

In some sense, this complements the way Epstein lived. He was always crafting his own legend, largely out of the mysteries and half-truths that surrounded him, the more outré and enigmatic the better. He was his own fictional creature: Bond villain, Gatsby without the romance, Hugh Hefner without the magazine.

Banacek, the 1970s television series with George Peppard as the suave, infinitely wealthy bachelor, a bounty hunter for fortunes lost by insurance companies well-adorned with beautiful women, a big house, and a loyal houseman, was one of Epstein’s regular references (he maintained he too was such a bounty hunter).

The Blacklist with James Spader, was his more up-to-date model—Spader as Raymond Reddington with vast fortune and loyal retainer, a master criminal whose personal reach and vast intelligence network extend so deep in the world that the government is forced to rely on him. (Epstein often suggested the government was confiding in him and many conspiracists have come to believe it.)

In the Room with Jeffrey Epstein

To have been on hand to actually see Epstein in a way that so many millions of people have come to believe they have intimate knowledge of, and expertise in, is surely one of the more peculiar disconnects of a lifetime. I have often found myself in unexpected places, but to have known the devil in real life—top that.

So…. what I am going to try to do is tell the story as I have been privy to it. All battles for truth seem to end up creating even greater fog. My intention is not to engage with the battle, but to offer a personal version of the story—I will tell it only according to what I have seen.

Photo credit: U.S. Justice Department/Handout via REUTERS

This is a story I inadvertently walked into. In the beginning, it did not appear much different from other stories of grandiosity, wealth, and opportunity that seemed to regularly present themselves in Manhattan. I stayed, in part, because the story seemed to unfold as a heightened, purer version of that tale of life in the city during the years of its greatest avarice.

Indeed, an aspect of this story is why, in the decades it was unfolding, it was never quite told—by prosecutors, journalists, his victims, or his friends. Part of the answer, beyond the explanation that he used his powers to control the story, goes to its nature: it seemed no more unique than any other story, an unlimited number of them, of greed and aggrandizement and entitlement; what’s more, Epstein, like his friend Trump, was too vulgar, excessive, and not of our class, to take seriously.

Hence, in the manner of most conspiracies, it began to tell itself.

I hope I can offer a more particular version of it.

My plan is to do this in something like 19^th century magazine form, as a weekly Trollope-like story of wealth, society, greed, depravity, and comeuppance, and of how we have lived in an era whose time may well be passing—serializing, in regular installments, every Monday (I hope) here on HOWL, what I saw in more than 25 years of, on occasion, being a witness to Epstein’s world.

I will begin on Monday, March 23, with my first meeting with Epstein—a ride on what was not yet known as the Lolita Express. I hope you’ll join me.

Read more: This Is Why I Am Releasing The Epstein-Trump Tapes