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You think a guy with connections like his and doing shady deals like that has no big money hidden?
Epstein Thread: His brother says Barr cover up; Scumbag Alan Dershowitz asked Trump to pardon Maxwell; Epstein commits suicide! :damn:
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https://nypost.com/2019/07/14/inside-the-victorias-secret-pipeline-to-jeffrey-epstein/
Inside the Victoria’s Secret pipeline to Jeffrey Epstein
By Isabel Vincent
In 2004, Elisabetta Tai was a 21-year-old Italian model with big dreams.
A month after arriving in Manhattan, her booker gave her an Upper East Side address and told her he had set up a meeting with the man who would be able to get her a gig modeling for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.
“He told me this is one of the most important people in modeling,” Tai told The Post. “He said that this man is in charge of Victoria’s Secret and he’s going to change your life.”
Jeffrey Epstein did end up changing Tai’s life — but not in the way she expected, she said.
Epstein, 66, a convicted pedophile, was arrested last week for sexually abusing “dozens” of minor girls at his Upper East Side mansion and his residence in Palm Beach, Fla. The arrest stems from incidents between 2002 and 2005.
“I rang the doorbell of this incredible mansion, and a butler answered the door,” said Tai, who hails from Padova, a small town near Venice. “It was astonishing. It was a very beautiful house, and I saw about five models walking around as soon as I walked in. I was so excited.”
deed was transferred in 2011 to Epstein’s Virgin Islands LLC.
The woman with the short hair introduced Tai to Epstein, who was dressed casually in a shirt and jeans, she said. As Epstein started to ask her questions about her background, she noticed a massage table near his desk.
She said she didn’t think anything of it, and reached for her portfolio to show Epstein her previous modeling work in Italy. Tai had done a few modeling jobs in her native country, “but nothing big, nothing like I imagined I could do in America,” she told The Post.
As Tai talked about her experience in halting English, she said Epstein moved to the massage table and began to remove his clothes.
“I thought he was preparing to have a massage, and that someone was about to come in to the room and give him a massage,” she said.
But Tai said she panicked when Epstein lay down naked on the table and told her to approach.
He then handed her a vibrator, she said.
“I froze,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.
“I just grabbed the vibrator and threw it at his head,” she said.
“I mean, I don’t know where it landed, I just blacked out and then I ran as fast as I could out of the room.”
She was so frightened she didn’t know where to turn to find the front door in the massive house. At one point she said she encountered the woman with the short black hair, who grabbed her and asked her what she was doing.
“She told me that I couldn’t just leave,” said Tai. “She said that this man is important, that he is a friend of President Clinton.”
Tai never told her booker what had happened at Epstein’s mansion.
“I was too scared to tell anyone,” she said. “I was too shy and scared that someone would come after me to blackmail me or maybe worse.”
Epstein, who was an investor in a Manhattan modeling venture, has been accused by prosecutors of using his connections to the modeling company to “audition” girls to give him massages that often ended up in sexual abuse.
“Over the years, it seems Epstein relied on …[the] modeling business to source underage girls for sex,” writes Conchita Sarnoff, an investigative reporter, in her book “Trafficking.”
A former Manhattan-based model agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also alleged an Epstein-Victoria’s Secret pimp pipeline.
“He [Epstein] portrayed himself as the back door to get a girl into Victoria’s Secret. Some of those girls got in,” he said.
He promised the catalog and ad-campaign jobs, not the supermodel fashion-show gigs, he added.
“It was still significant cash for a young model doing the catalog,” said the agent. “They weren’t making hundreds of thousands but they could make about $5,000 a week modeling for the campaigns or the catalog. Not all the girls sent to him got jobs, but a lot of them did.”
Another Manhattan model entrepreneur told The Post that Maxwell was a constant fixture at Victoria’s Secret events.
Enlarge Image
Jeffrey EpsteinAP
“They were always these really trashy shows full of rich men in the audience,” he said. “Ghislaine acted as the kind of Nazi guard, telling everyone where they were sitting in the audience and that she had new ‘pop tarts’ which is what she called the young models.”
Epstein’s lawyer, L Brands and Maxwell’s attorney did not return messages seeking comment.
Tai said she was so frightened that she returned to Italy, although she did continue to take on a handful of modeling jobs. She said she never went to the police because she feared reprisals and worried that filing a report would ruin her fledgling career.
Tai told The Post she wanted to tell her story now because of the recent reports of Epstein’s abuse of girls.
“I think it’s terrible,” she said. “I think it’s awful what he did to me, and what he did to those girls. It’s just not right, especially in a young girl.”
Her own run-in had severe consequences.
“It changed me for life,” she said. “I thought I lived in a hateful world. It was shocking to realize that if I wanted to be a model in America, I was expected to work as a prostitute.”
Thats just 1 institution, and we dont know if it includes real estate
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YOU READY, B?
YOU READY, B?
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article232658477.html
Epstein scandal explodes in Israel as ties to former prime minister under scrutiny
July 14, 2019 10:07 AM, Updated 48 minutes ago
Barak, 77, served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001. This month he formed a new party to run for prime minister against Netanyahu, who called for new elections in September. Once political allies, Barak and Netanyahu have been sparring on social media, with Netanyahu producing a video raising Barak’s relationship to the multimillionaire New York financier, and Ohio billionaire Les Wexner, who has given money to Barak, the Times of Israel reported.
Speaking on Israel TV’s “Meet the Press,” Saturday, Barak stated he had no idea that Epstein’s charges related to molesting underage girls and defended his business relationship with Epstein.
Years later, Epstein’s victims discuss the lasting impact of sexual abuse
Victims of Jeffery Epstein share the emotional toll that sexual abuse has taken on them — even years after the abuse occurred. Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown interviewed the young women, most speaking for the first time about Epstein.
“He’d served his sentence for soliciting prostitution — the indictment didn’t say she was a minor,” Barak said, adding that he wasn’t the only person who kept his friendship with Epstein after his arrest. Epstein’s circle of associates included the presidents of leading U.S. universities, philanthropists, Nobel-prize-winning scientists and politicians from both American political parties, Barak said.
“The American system itself did not label him as a persona non grata…the secretary who just resigned in the Trump administration was the prosecutor and he said he’d been negligent — so you expect me to have noticed [anything wrong]?” Barak said on the program.
Barak was referring to Alexander Acosta, President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, who resigned Friday amid a drumbeat of questions over his decision to grant Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators federal immunity on sex trafficking charges in 2008. Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to two solicitation charges involving a 17-year-old girl he had molested at his waterfront home in Palm Beach in 2006.
However, by 2011, it was widely known that Epstein’s crimes were far more serious than what he pleaded guilty to. Stories were written around the world about Epstein’s exploitation of underage girls and women, and part of the sensational coverage included reports of trips that celebrities and other wealthy, politically connected people like former president Bill Clinton took on Epstein’s private jet, which was nicknamed “The Lolita Express.’’
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who was among those underage girls recruited by Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, has said that she was trafficked for sex to “academics and world leaders.’’ She has named Prince Andrew and Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, as among those Epstein directed her to have sex with. Both have denied her allegation. Dershowitz was one of Epstein’s attorneys during his criminal investigation in 2006-2008.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces elections in April — and charges of corruption. Abir SultanGetty Images
Last week, the case drew renewed global media attention when federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment against Epstein, who owns homes in Manhattan, New Mexico, Palm Beach, Paris and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Unsealing of the indictment followed the arrest of Epstein, which came eight months after the Miami Herald published Perversion of Justice, an investigation of the lenient treatment afforded Epstein despite allegations that he molested three dozen underage girls.
New York U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, at a news conference, appealed for new victims and witnesses to come forward to New York authorities.
Israeli media have been closely watching the case and, in particular, waiting for the upcoming release of documents in a 2015 civil lawsuit that was brought by Giuffre against Maxwell. A federal appeals court in New York earlier this month ruled that sealed documents must be made public in that case. Those documents could reveal names of other prominent people who were involved in Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking operation.
Barak has been linked to Epstein for years, and questions have lingered over how much he knew, if anything, of Epstein’s possible underage sex trafficking network. Giuffre has said that Epstein had recruiters all over the world, and that she was often forced to lure young girls to have sex with Epstein when they traveled in other countries.
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested a week ago Saturday, July 6, 2019, when he arrived at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on his private jet.
Barak initially declined to confirm the report of the 2015 investment to Haaretz, saying he would not disclose the identities of private investors who worked with him.
“I saw a business opportunity and registered a partnership under my control in Israel,” Barak told Haaretz in comments published Thursday. “A small number of people I know are invested in it, in a commercial deal that benefited everyone. Since these were private investments, it would be inappropriate and wrong for me to reveal the identities of the investing parties.”
Netanyahu took to social media, writing: “Investigate Ehud Barak immediately.”
Barak responded on Twitter: “You don’t have to investigate — I confess. I gave a second chance, both to Epstein and to Bibi [Netanyahu]. Both are now neck-deep in criminality. I expect both to recuse themselves until the truth is ascertained.”
Netanyahu is at the center of three criminal investigations into alleged corruption, which he denies.
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US judge unseals files in case of girl, 17, ‘forced to have sex with Prince Andrew’
US judge unseals files in case of girl, 17, ‘forced to have sex with Prince Andrew’
US judge unseals files in case of girl, 17, ‘forced to have sex with Prince Andrew’
July 14 2019, 12:01am,
Documents from a 2015 libel suit linked to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of the prince, are to be made public
Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts, then 17, in 2001. He denies they had sex
Prince Andrew faces further embarrassment from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal after a judge ordered thousands of secret documents relating to an alleged “sex slave” of the tyc00n to be released.
About 2,000 files from a defamation case involving Virginia Roberts, an alleged trafficking victim, are due to be unsealed following a ruling by the US court of appeal this month. Roberts claims she was forced by Epstein to have sex with the Duke of York in London, New York and the Caribbean. Prince Andrew has strongly denied the claims.
In 2015 Roberts, now 35 and a mother of three, claimed she had been recruited as a “sex slave” by Epstein, a billionaire financier who was charged last week with trafficking girls as young as 14. Roberts alleged that she had been “procured for sexual activities” by Ghislaine Maxwell, who worked as a personal aide to Epstein and had been a friend of the duke.
In 2001 Roberts, then aged 17, was photographed in Maxwell’s London flat with Andrew’s arm around her waist. A judge later threw out her allegations against Andrew because they were “immaterial and impertinent to the central claim” against Epstein.
Maxwell gave an interview in 2015 calling Roberts a “liar”. Roberts then sued Maxwell for defamation in the US and the case was settled. Most of the court documents remained under seal following legal representations from Maxwell, who is a daughter of the late disgraced media tyc00n Robert Maxwell.
In a ruling this month, Jose Cabranes, a US appeals judge, said the public’s right to know outweighed the privacy rights of people who wanted to keep secrets. Days later Epstein, 66, was charged in New York with trafficking a “vast network of underage victims” between his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. Epstein denies the charges.
Last weekend FBI agents found thousands of graphic photos, many of underage girls, and a safe filled with CDs labelled “nude girls” during a raid on Epstein’s £60m Manhattan house.
The charges have raised questions about how Epstein avoided prosecution before. In 2008 he negotiated a secret plea on similar accusations in a separate case in Florida. The Sunday Times later revealed that the deal, which allowed Epstein to avoid sex-trafficking charges, had also handed his associates immunity from prosecution.
Alexander Acosta, a former federal prosecutor in Florida, negotiated the deal. On Friday he resigned as Donald Trump’s labour secretary amid criticism of his handling of the case.
Andrew is not the only illustrious acquaintance to be embarrassed. Trump described Epstein as a friend in 2002, adding: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Bill and Hillary Clinton are also known to have been associates.
However, none of the investment banker’s friendships has raised more eyebrows than his relationship with Andrew. Epstein attended the Queen’s birthday party in 2000 and visited Sandringham, Balmoral and Windsor Castle.
Andrew’s ex-wife, the Duchess of York, accepted £15,000 from Epstein in 2010 to help her pay off debts. She later apologised. By that time, Epstein was a convicted sex offender. Yet the same year Epstein and Andrew were photographed walking through New York’s Central Park together. The duke was later dropped as UK trade ambassador.
Prince Andrew and Epstein in 2010
When Roberts made her claims in 2015, the duke issued a strong denial, with Buckingham Palace saying “any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue”.
Roberts claimed that she had been “forced” by Epstein to have sex with the duke in London, in Epstein’s New York mansion and on Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands.
Public records and flight logs for the black Gulfstream jet owned by Epstein, obtained by this newspaper, suggest Andrew was in the same place as Roberts on the three occasions she claims they had sex. Roberts went on a six-day tour of Europe before reaching London on March 9, 2001. The photograph of Roberts with the duke is dated March 2001.
One month later, on April 9, the court circular records that Andrew began an official visit to the US. The same day Roberts flew from Palm Beach to New Jersey. According to Roberts, it was around this time that she was ordered to Epstein’s mansion in New York where she allegedly had sex with Andrew on a massage table. Flight logs show that Roberts and Epstein left New York on April 11 for St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.
Roberts alleges that she had sex with Andrew on Epstein’s island. Gwendolyn Beck, a financial adviser who knew Epstein and Andrew, said Andrew spent two nights on the island at that time. “He was in the bungalow next to me,” she said. Andrew arrived in the Bahamas on April 15 to join a holiday with his ex-wife and their daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, then aged 12 and 11.
The palace said yesterday: “It is emphatically denied that [Andrew] had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts. Any claim to the contrary is false.”
The furore is bad timing for Andrew, who is due to attend the cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand at Lord’s today. He will present the trophy on behalf of the Queen.
The US prosecution is being handled by New York’s public corruption unit. Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney, said: “It seems unusual to me that the public corruption unit would be investigating this case. That unit typically handles cases involving public officials. If Epstein were protecting any potential co-conspirators during his negotiations with Acosta, the public corruption prosecutors now have the leverage to find out.”
A troubling friendship
2001 Virginia Roberts, an alleged “sex slave” of Jeffrey Epstein, is pictured with the billionaire financier’s friend Prince Andrew in London aged 17
2005 Florida police uncover multiple allegations of child sexual abuse involving Epstein
2008 Epstein agrees a deal with prosecutors. He avoids federal charges, pleads guilty to prostitution offences and serves 13 months
2010 Andrew is pictured with Epstein in New York
2015 Roberts alleges that Epstein groomed her from the age of 15 and that she was on three occasions forced to have sex with Andrew — which he denies
2018 Investigation by the Miami Herald reignites interest in the case
2019 Epstein is charged in New York with running a child trafficking network. Judge orders the unsealing of documents relating to the Roberts defamation claim.
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Don’t worry yall I’ve received word that she’s already working this case underground 
The phrase "federal prosecutors unseal or outline" has become like a haunting phrase, for the last few years, every new flurry of indictments, some dude I know socially just ended up front page on the Southern District of New York with Geoff Berman doing a press release, it's getting surreal.
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Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.
Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.
By Jodi Kantor, Mike McIntire and Vanessa Friedman
July 13, 2019
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sex crime involving a teenage girl. Some elites shunned him, but others embraced him.Uma Sanghvi/The Palm Beach Post, via ZUMA Press
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sex crime involving a teenage girl. Some elites shunned him, but others embraced him.Uma Sanghvi/The Palm Beach Post, via ZUMA Press
A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise.
In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida jail, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal. The next year, Mr. Epstein was photographed at a “billionaire’s dinner” attended by tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. A page popped up on Harvard University’s website lauding his accomplishments, and superlative-filled news releases described his lofty ambitions as he dedicated $10 million to charitable causes.
Powerful female friends served as social guarantors: Peggy Siegal, a gatekeeper for A-list events, included him in movie screenings, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a champion of women’s health, maintained a friendship that some felt gave him credibility. Mr. Epstein put up a website showing Stephen Hawking and other luminaries at a science gathering he had organized.
“If you looked up Jeffrey Epstein online in 2012, you would see what we all saw,” Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, said in an interview. He seemed “like an ex-con who had done well on Wall Street,” who was close to the Clintons and gave money to academic pursuits, Dr. Botstein said. That was why, he noted, Bard accepted an unsolicited $50,000 in 2011 for its high schools, followed later that year and in 2012 by another $75,000 in donations.
Over a decade ago, when Mr. Epstein was very publicly accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14, he minimized the legal consequences with high-powered lawyers, monetary settlements that silenced complaints, and a plea deal that short-circuited an F.B.I. investigation and led to the resignation announcement on Friday of a Trump cabinet official who had overseen the case as a prosecutor. Socially, Mr. Epstein carried out a parallel effort, trying to preserve his reputation as a financier, philanthropist and thinker.
Some of the respect Mr. Epstein, 66, drew on was manufactured, the accomplishments recycled. The gathering with Dr. Hawking had taken place back in 2006. The positive online notices appeared to have been paid for by Mr. Epstein: A writer employed by his foundation churned out the news releases, and Drew Hendricks, the supposed author of a Forbes story calling Mr. Epstein “one of the largest backers of cutting edge science,” conceded in an interview that he was given $600 to post the pre-written article under his own name. (Forbes removed the piece after The New York Times published its article.)
Though some institutions and prominent people, including Donald J. Trump, said they shunned him, Mr. Epstein’s tactics largely worked. Over the past week, as the scope of his alleged offenses, involving dozens of victims in the early 2000s, became clearer after a new indictment in New York, the story of Mr. Epstein and his social circles shows how some people were willing to welcome back — or at least give a pass to — a handsome rich man who had been convicted of a crime involving a minor.
Mr. Epstein’s social strategy proceeded from his legal one. The lenient agreement he reached with prosecutors — his plea involved one girl and the crime was prostitution, which made it look like the teenager was in part to blame — gave others a reason to dismiss his wrongdoing, decide he had already paid his penalty or not question what had happened.
At the top of New York society, plenty of people have “weird chitchat attached to their name,” said Candace Bushnell, the “Sex and the City” writer. She said in an interview that she looked into rumors about Mr. Epstein for The New York Observer in 1994 but stopped reporting after she was thrown out of his townhouse and threatened.
For years to come, people brushed such stories aside. “You’d think, ‘It couldn’t possibly be true,’” she said.
A Renaissance Man
In March 2006, a year after allegations of sexual misconduct were first reported to the police in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Epstein underwrote the kind of elite event he prized.
Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard, it became a recurring theme in his self-styled image. He made donations and mingled with its faculty, including the law professor Alan Dershowitz, right.Rick Friedman/Corbis, via Getty Images
It was a five-day gathering in the Caribbean of some of the world’s top scientists, including Dr. Hawking, to share ideas about gravity and cosmology, with scuba and catamaran excursions on the side. One evening, the participants had dinner on the beach at Mr. Epstein’s private island.
Some of the scientists noticed that Mr. Epstein “was always followed by a group of something like three or four young women,” as Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it in an email to The Times, but they did not probe further.
Over a decade later, after Mr. Epstein was released from the Palm Beach County jail, he employed a similar strategy. He surrounded himself with prestige and counted on others to look past what he had done.
“I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender,’ Mr. Epstein told The New York Post in 2011. “It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”
Ms. Siegal recalled, “He said he’d served his time and assured me that he changed his ways.”
For someone purported to have vast resources at his disposal, Mr. Epstein’s early endeavors to improve his image were oddly unpolished. In 2010 he created the first of at least a half-dozen websites, with names like JeffreyEpsteinScience.com and JeffreyEpsteinEducation.com, dedicated to extolling his philanthropy and fashioning himself a patron of technology and medicine.
The websites looked amateurish, the photos of him meeting with top scientists dated to years before his time in jail, and the name of the Harvard professor who led a research center Mr. Epstein had funded, Martin A. Nowak, was often misspelled.
At the same time, Mr. Epstein launched a public-relations campaign composed of a blizzard of news releases, along with canned write-ups designed to resemble news stories. For the most part, the announcements, which circulated from 2012 to 2014, were recycled accounts of donations he had made in the early 2000s and did not reflect new charitable giving. The earliest releases listed Mr. Epstein’s personal contact information, though later ones had the name of a media consultant. Some of the ersatz news stories found their way onto sites like Forbes and The Huffington Post.
Of all the names Mr. Epstein dropped, perhaps the most frequent was Harvard’s.
Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard or even got a college degree, the university has been a recurring theme in his self-styled image as a Renaissance man of finance and science. He found Harvard’s doors open to him once he opened his wallet, with donations starting in the early 1990s that eventually totaled at least $7.5 million.
He took to wearing Harvard sweatshirts, gravitated to mingling with celebrity scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and developed friendships with the former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who later helped defend him. (In civil suits, Mr. Dershowitz has been accused of having sex with two of Mr. Epstein’s accusers; he has denied the allegations and accused their lawyers of malfeasance.) Mr. Epstein, a former math teacher, even popped up for lunchtime discussions among scientists at a Harvard cafeteria, Dr. Pinker said in an interview, adding, “He weighted his own opinions as much as scholarly literature.”
By 2014, a page appeared on the website for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the initiative Mr. Epstein had financed 11 years earlier with a $6.5 million donation (and a pledge of $23.5 million more that never came), featuring a studio portrait, his résumé and links to his websites. “He is one of the largest supporters of individual scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Seth Lloyd and Nobel Laureates Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek,” the Harvard bio said, in what appears to be an exaggerated claim.
Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.
Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.
By Jodi Kantor, Mike McIntire and Vanessa Friedman
July 13, 2019
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sex crime involving a teenage girl. Some elites shunned him, but others embraced him.Uma Sanghvi/The Palm Beach Post, via ZUMA Press
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sex crime involving a teenage girl. Some elites shunned him, but others embraced him.Uma Sanghvi/The Palm Beach Post, via ZUMA Press
A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise.
In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida jail, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal. The next year, Mr. Epstein was photographed at a “billionaire’s dinner” attended by tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. A page popped up on Harvard University’s website lauding his accomplishments, and superlative-filled news releases described his lofty ambitions as he dedicated $10 million to charitable causes.
Powerful female friends served as social guarantors: Peggy Siegal, a gatekeeper for A-list events, included him in movie screenings, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a champion of women’s health, maintained a friendship that some felt gave him credibility. Mr. Epstein put up a website showing Stephen Hawking and other luminaries at a science gathering he had organized.
“If you looked up Jeffrey Epstein online in 2012, you would see what we all saw,” Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, said in an interview. He seemed “like an ex-con who had done well on Wall Street,” who was close to the Clintons and gave money to academic pursuits, Dr. Botstein said. That was why, he noted, Bard accepted an unsolicited $50,000 in 2011 for its high schools, followed later that year and in 2012 by another $75,000 in donations.
Over a decade ago, when Mr. Epstein was very publicly accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14, he minimized the legal consequences with high-powered lawyers, monetary settlements that silenced complaints, and a plea deal that short-circuited an F.B.I. investigation and led to the resignation announcement on Friday of a Trump cabinet official who had overseen the case as a prosecutor. Socially, Mr. Epstein carried out a parallel effort, trying to preserve his reputation as a financier, philanthropist and thinker.
Some of the respect Mr. Epstein, 66, drew on was manufactured, the accomplishments recycled. The gathering with Dr. Hawking had taken place back in 2006. The positive online notices appeared to have been paid for by Mr. Epstein: A writer employed by his foundation churned out the news releases, and Drew Hendricks, the supposed author of a Forbes story calling Mr. Epstein “one of the largest backers of cutting edge science,” conceded in an interview that he was given $600 to post the pre-written article under his own name. (Forbes removed the piece after The New York Times published its article.)
Though some institutions and prominent people, including Donald J. Trump, said they shunned him, Mr. Epstein’s tactics largely worked. Over the past week, as the scope of his alleged offenses, involving dozens of victims in the early 2000s, became clearer after a new indictment in New York, the story of Mr. Epstein and his social circles shows how some people were willing to welcome back — or at least give a pass to — a handsome rich man who had been convicted of a crime involving a minor.
Mr. Epstein’s social strategy proceeded from his legal one. The lenient agreement he reached with prosecutors — his plea involved one girl and the crime was prostitution, which made it look like the teenager was in part to blame — gave others a reason to dismiss his wrongdoing, decide he had already paid his penalty or not question what had happened.
At the top of New York society, plenty of people have “weird chitchat attached to their name,” said Candace Bushnell, the “Sex and the City” writer. She said in an interview that she looked into rumors about Mr. Epstein for The New York Observer in 1994 but stopped reporting after she was thrown out of his townhouse and threatened.
For years to come, people brushed such stories aside. “You’d think, ‘It couldn’t possibly be true,’” she said.
A Renaissance Man
In March 2006, a year after allegations of sexual misconduct were first reported to the police in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Epstein underwrote the kind of elite event he prized.
Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard, it became a recurring theme in his self-styled image. He made donations and mingled with its faculty, including the law professor Alan Dershowitz, right.Rick Friedman/Corbis, via Getty Images
It was a five-day gathering in the Caribbean of some of the world’s top scientists, including Dr. Hawking, to share ideas about gravity and cosmology, with scuba and catamaran excursions on the side. One evening, the participants had dinner on the beach at Mr. Epstein’s private island.
Some of the scientists noticed that Mr. Epstein “was always followed by a group of something like three or four young women,” as Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it in an email to The Times, but they did not probe further.
Over a decade later, after Mr. Epstein was released from the Palm Beach County jail, he employed a similar strategy. He surrounded himself with prestige and counted on others to look past what he had done.
“I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender,’ Mr. Epstein told The New York Post in 2011. “It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”
Ms. Siegal recalled, “He said he’d served his time and assured me that he changed his ways.”
For someone purported to have vast resources at his disposal, Mr. Epstein’s early endeavors to improve his image were oddly unpolished. In 2010 he created the first of at least a half-dozen websites, with names like JeffreyEpsteinScience.com and JeffreyEpsteinEducation.com, dedicated to extolling his philanthropy and fashioning himself a patron of technology and medicine.
The websites looked amateurish, the photos of him meeting with top scientists dated to years before his time in jail, and the name of the Harvard professor who led a research center Mr. Epstein had funded, Martin A. Nowak, was often misspelled.
At the same time, Mr. Epstein launched a public-relations campaign composed of a blizzard of news releases, along with canned write-ups designed to resemble news stories. For the most part, the announcements, which circulated from 2012 to 2014, were recycled accounts of donations he had made in the early 2000s and did not reflect new charitable giving. The earliest releases listed Mr. Epstein’s personal contact information, though later ones had the name of a media consultant. Some of the ersatz news stories found their way onto sites like Forbes and The Huffington Post.
Of all the names Mr. Epstein dropped, perhaps the most frequent was Harvard’s.
Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard or even got a college degree, the university has been a recurring theme in his self-styled image as a Renaissance man of finance and science. He found Harvard’s doors open to him once he opened his wallet, with donations starting in the early 1990s that eventually totaled at least $7.5 million.
He took to wearing Harvard sweatshirts, gravitated to mingling with celebrity scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and developed friendships with the former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who later helped defend him. (In civil suits, Mr. Dershowitz has been accused of having sex with two of Mr. Epstein’s accusers; he has denied the allegations and accused their lawyers of malfeasance.) Mr. Epstein, a former math teacher, even popped up for lunchtime discussions among scientists at a Harvard cafeteria, Dr. Pinker said in an interview, adding, “He weighted his own opinions as much as scholarly literature.”
By 2014, a page appeared on the website for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the initiative Mr. Epstein had financed 11 years earlier with a $6.5 million donation (and a pledge of $23.5 million more that never came), featuring a studio portrait, his résumé and links to his websites. “He is one of the largest supporters of individual scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Seth Lloyd and Nobel Laureates Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek,” the Harvard bio said, in what appears to be an exaggerated claim.
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PART 2:
A Harvard spokesman said he did not know who was responsible for the page, which has since been removed.
A registered sex offender known for his lavish lifestyle and high-profile connections to the rich and powerful, the financier Jeffrey Epstein is facing new charges that he exploited dozens of young girls for sex acts.Rick Friedman/Corbis, via Getty Images
That same year, Mr. Epstein resurfaced at a prestigious science conference. Dr. Pinker, who sat at the same table as Mr. Epstein, said he was treated as an important donor to be wooed.
A Brand-New Start of It
Although he was often described as a billionaire, Mr. Epstein did not come close in his philanthropy to other superrich people. His charitable foundations rarely gave away more than $1 million a year during the 2000s, according to tax records, and much of it was money others had given him.
In 2015, a new foundation Mr. Epstein created, Gratitude America, received a $10 million infusion and started making donations. The source of the money is something of a mystery. Like his earlier giving, which was financed largely by $21 million in donations to his foundation from a close friend and business associate, the retail magnate Leslie H. Wexner, the 2015 money did not appear to have come from Mr. Epstein.
Tax records show the $10 million donation came from a limited liability company located at a 22-story building on Park Avenue in Manhattan that also houses the family foundation of Leon Black, a billionaire investor and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. He has known Mr. Epstein for years. In 1999, Mr. Black gave $166,000 to another of Mr. Epstein’s charities, and Mr. Epstein once served on the board of Mr. Black’s own foundation. The two men also appear in photos at a 2007 meeting with scientists at Harvard.
It could not be determined whether Mr. Black was responsible for the $10 million donation. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, founder of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai, gave Mr. Epstein another form of currency.
The physician, who served for many years as an in-house doctor of NBC, is a breast cancer survivor who used her experience as inspiration for a holistic treatment approach. A former model and Miss Sweden, she is the wife of Glenn Dubin, a founder of Highbridge Capital Management who is No. 1168 on the Forbes billionaires list. The two are known for their philanthropy, and in 2006 they bought Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s former apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, a symbol of their standing in the city.
Dr. Andersson-Dubin also has a long history with Mr. Epstein, and has remained loyal to him since the 1980s.
At that time, she was putting herself through medical school. She became his girlfriend and, with his encouragement, put modeling aside to focus on her studies. They remained close after she married in 1994. After Mr. Epstein’s release from jail, she continued to socialize with him; those in her circle were aware of their continued friendship.
Despite longstanding news reports about Mr. Epstein’s behavior, Dr. Andersson-Dubin said through a spokeswoman that she was shocked by the recent news. “She’s a very loyal friend and didn’t abandon him after 2008, but the frequency of their contact was less,” the spokeswoman said. The new allegations “are completely counter to the person she is familiar with.”
Their relationship went a long way toward dispersing the cloud around him, according to some observers. If Mr. Epstein had Dr. Andersson-Dubin’s friendship, it suggested to others that perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt.
The publicist Peggy Siegal, left, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin supported Mr. Epstein after his release from jail. Leon Black, the chairman of MoMA, donated to his foundation in 1999.Presley Ann Slack/Patrick McMullan; Rob Kim/FilmMagic; Dimitrios Kambouris/Museum of Modern Art via Getty Images
The publicist Peggy Siegal, left, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin supported Mr. Epstein after his release from jail. Leon Black, the chairman of MoMA, donated to his foundation in 1999.Presley Ann Slack/Patrick McMullan; Rob Kim/FilmMagic; Dimitrios Kambouris/Museum of Modern Art via Getty Images
Ms. Siegal, perhaps the city’s most prominent professional hostess, took a more active role, using her gate-keeping powers to usher Mr. Epstein, a friend, into screenings and events.
In an interview, she said that her relationship with Mr. Epstein was not a paid one: They had developed a rapport over the years, with him often quizzing her about films and other topics. “I was a kind of plugged-in girl around town who knew a lot of people,” she said. “And I think that’s what he wanted from me, a kind of social goings-on about New York.”
After he left jail, she had no trouble continuing the friendship. She knew other people who had served time and then resurrected their lives, she said. “The culture before #MeToo was — ‘You’ve done your time, now you’re forgiven.’”
At screenings, Mr. Epstein would shuffle in at the last minute, sit in the back, speak to no one and leave before the party, Ms. Siegal said. He had no ambitions for New York’s party circuit, she and others said, and preferred to entertain people in his own space.
But her invitations helped. In 2010, just after Mr. Epstein left jail, he attended a screening of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Soon a flattering blind itemappeared in The New York Post about how he was “greeted warmly by guests.”
“It was the first time he has been out in two years, but nobody blinked he was there,” an anonymous source told the newspaper.
A few months later, Ms. Siegal threw the dinner party at Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion for Prince Andrew, giving Ms. Couric, Mr. Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler and others a chance to speak to a member of the royal family a few months before the much-anticipated wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
“It was just one of those strange nights,” Ms. Handler said in an interview. Ms. Siegal had not emphasized who was hosting, several guests recalled. “The invitation was positioned as, ‘Do you want to have dinner with Prince Andrew?’” Ms. Siegal said. Mr. Epstein did not speak much. Dr. Andersson-Dubin was there, but others said they barely knew who Mr. Epstein was or what he had been convicted of.
Two of the other guests have also been accused of sexual misconduct, then or since: the television host Charlie Rose and Woody Allen, who attended along with his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. (“So how did the two of you meet?” Ms. Handler recalled asking the couple.) Soon after, outraged headlines appeared about Prince Andrew’s associating with Mr. Epstein, a sex offender.
In a recent email, Mr. Stephanopoulos said he regretted attending. “That dinner was the first and last time I’ve seen him,” he said, referring to Mr. Epstein. “I should have done more due diligence. It was a mistake to go.”
After the #MeToo era dawned in 2017, others were starting to feel less comfortable with Mr. Epstein. The Miami Herald published an investigation that spurred new interest in the case. Ms. Siegal began to distance herself. It was obvious that he was going to face renewed scrutiny, she said, but “he was in complete denial.”
Others echoed that description. Just three months ago, as federal prosecutors were closing in with new charges, Mr. Epstein had a conversation with R. Couri Hay, a publicist, about continuing to improve his reputation. Mr. Epstein asserted that what he was convicted of did not constitute pedophilia, said Mr. Hay, who declined to represent him.
The girls he had sex with were “tweens and teens,” Mr. Epstein told him.:shakingdamn:
Reporting was contributed by Jacob Bernstein, Dennis Overbye, Sarah Maslin Nir and Megan Twohey.
A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2019, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Upon Release as a Sex Offender, Epstein Sought to Mend Image. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@DonKnock @dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @Cali_livin @NY's #1 Draft Pick
A Harvard spokesman said he did not know who was responsible for the page, which has since been removed.
A registered sex offender known for his lavish lifestyle and high-profile connections to the rich and powerful, the financier Jeffrey Epstein is facing new charges that he exploited dozens of young girls for sex acts.Rick Friedman/Corbis, via Getty Images
That same year, Mr. Epstein resurfaced at a prestigious science conference. Dr. Pinker, who sat at the same table as Mr. Epstein, said he was treated as an important donor to be wooed.
A Brand-New Start of It
Although he was often described as a billionaire, Mr. Epstein did not come close in his philanthropy to other superrich people. His charitable foundations rarely gave away more than $1 million a year during the 2000s, according to tax records, and much of it was money others had given him.
In 2015, a new foundation Mr. Epstein created, Gratitude America, received a $10 million infusion and started making donations. The source of the money is something of a mystery. Like his earlier giving, which was financed largely by $21 million in donations to his foundation from a close friend and business associate, the retail magnate Leslie H. Wexner, the 2015 money did not appear to have come from Mr. Epstein.
Tax records show the $10 million donation came from a limited liability company located at a 22-story building on Park Avenue in Manhattan that also houses the family foundation of Leon Black, a billionaire investor and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. He has known Mr. Epstein for years. In 1999, Mr. Black gave $166,000 to another of Mr. Epstein’s charities, and Mr. Epstein once served on the board of Mr. Black’s own foundation. The two men also appear in photos at a 2007 meeting with scientists at Harvard.
It could not be determined whether Mr. Black was responsible for the $10 million donation. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, founder of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai, gave Mr. Epstein another form of currency.
The physician, who served for many years as an in-house doctor of NBC, is a breast cancer survivor who used her experience as inspiration for a holistic treatment approach. A former model and Miss Sweden, she is the wife of Glenn Dubin, a founder of Highbridge Capital Management who is No. 1168 on the Forbes billionaires list. The two are known for their philanthropy, and in 2006 they bought Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s former apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, a symbol of their standing in the city.
Dr. Andersson-Dubin also has a long history with Mr. Epstein, and has remained loyal to him since the 1980s.
At that time, she was putting herself through medical school. She became his girlfriend and, with his encouragement, put modeling aside to focus on her studies. They remained close after she married in 1994. After Mr. Epstein’s release from jail, she continued to socialize with him; those in her circle were aware of their continued friendship.
Despite longstanding news reports about Mr. Epstein’s behavior, Dr. Andersson-Dubin said through a spokeswoman that she was shocked by the recent news. “She’s a very loyal friend and didn’t abandon him after 2008, but the frequency of their contact was less,” the spokeswoman said. The new allegations “are completely counter to the person she is familiar with.”
Their relationship went a long way toward dispersing the cloud around him, according to some observers. If Mr. Epstein had Dr. Andersson-Dubin’s friendship, it suggested to others that perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt.
The publicist Peggy Siegal, left, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin supported Mr. Epstein after his release from jail. Leon Black, the chairman of MoMA, donated to his foundation in 1999.Presley Ann Slack/Patrick McMullan; Rob Kim/FilmMagic; Dimitrios Kambouris/Museum of Modern Art via Getty Images
The publicist Peggy Siegal, left, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin supported Mr. Epstein after his release from jail. Leon Black, the chairman of MoMA, donated to his foundation in 1999.Presley Ann Slack/Patrick McMullan; Rob Kim/FilmMagic; Dimitrios Kambouris/Museum of Modern Art via Getty Images
Ms. Siegal, perhaps the city’s most prominent professional hostess, took a more active role, using her gate-keeping powers to usher Mr. Epstein, a friend, into screenings and events.
In an interview, she said that her relationship with Mr. Epstein was not a paid one: They had developed a rapport over the years, with him often quizzing her about films and other topics. “I was a kind of plugged-in girl around town who knew a lot of people,” she said. “And I think that’s what he wanted from me, a kind of social goings-on about New York.”
After he left jail, she had no trouble continuing the friendship. She knew other people who had served time and then resurrected their lives, she said. “The culture before #MeToo was — ‘You’ve done your time, now you’re forgiven.’”
At screenings, Mr. Epstein would shuffle in at the last minute, sit in the back, speak to no one and leave before the party, Ms. Siegal said. He had no ambitions for New York’s party circuit, she and others said, and preferred to entertain people in his own space.
But her invitations helped. In 2010, just after Mr. Epstein left jail, he attended a screening of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Soon a flattering blind itemappeared in The New York Post about how he was “greeted warmly by guests.”
“It was the first time he has been out in two years, but nobody blinked he was there,” an anonymous source told the newspaper.
A few months later, Ms. Siegal threw the dinner party at Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion for Prince Andrew, giving Ms. Couric, Mr. Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler and others a chance to speak to a member of the royal family a few months before the much-anticipated wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
“It was just one of those strange nights,” Ms. Handler said in an interview. Ms. Siegal had not emphasized who was hosting, several guests recalled. “The invitation was positioned as, ‘Do you want to have dinner with Prince Andrew?’” Ms. Siegal said. Mr. Epstein did not speak much. Dr. Andersson-Dubin was there, but others said they barely knew who Mr. Epstein was or what he had been convicted of.
Two of the other guests have also been accused of sexual misconduct, then or since: the television host Charlie Rose and Woody Allen, who attended along with his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. (“So how did the two of you meet?” Ms. Handler recalled asking the couple.) Soon after, outraged headlines appeared about Prince Andrew’s associating with Mr. Epstein, a sex offender.
In a recent email, Mr. Stephanopoulos said he regretted attending. “That dinner was the first and last time I’ve seen him,” he said, referring to Mr. Epstein. “I should have done more due diligence. It was a mistake to go.”
After the #MeToo era dawned in 2017, others were starting to feel less comfortable with Mr. Epstein. The Miami Herald published an investigation that spurred new interest in the case. Ms. Siegal began to distance herself. It was obvious that he was going to face renewed scrutiny, she said, but “he was in complete denial.”
Others echoed that description. Just three months ago, as federal prosecutors were closing in with new charges, Mr. Epstein had a conversation with R. Couri Hay, a publicist, about continuing to improve his reputation. Mr. Epstein asserted that what he was convicted of did not constitute pedophilia, said Mr. Hay, who declined to represent him.
The girls he had sex with were “tweens and teens,” Mr. Epstein told him.:shakingdamn:
Reporting was contributed by Jacob Bernstein, Dennis Overbye, Sarah Maslin Nir and Megan Twohey.
A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2019, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Upon Release as a Sex Offender, Epstein Sought to Mend Image. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@DonKnock @dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @Cali_livin @NY's #1 Draft Pick
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https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article232658477.html
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak
The Victim list...
NZA
LOL
i never forgot about his attacks on keith ellison's character. dersh is trash