Maybe the only thing worse than being called a pedophile
is being called a hedge fund manager.
– Jeffrey, disgraced hedge fund manager
The latest status symbol of the ultra rich: a spectacular residence they purchase for millions, reconfigure with the world’s leading architects and interior designers for even more millions, then elect not to live in. Such was the fate of a stone mansion at 9 East 71st Street. Possessing some 21,000 square feet, the house was once the uninhabited domain of Leslie H. Wexner, the founding chairman of Limited Inc., a retailing company. Mr. Wexner bought the house in 1989 for $13.2 million, which was at the time the highest-ever sale price for a Manhattan townhouse, and lavished tens of millions on renovations, art, and furnishings, working with architect Thierry Despont and interior designer John Stefanidis to convert it from a private school to a private home. Those curious to see the princely accommodations Mr. Wexner abandoned need look no further than the cover of the December 1995 edition of Architectural Digest.
In the nearly ten years he owned the place, Mr. Wexner never spent more than two months in it. His protégé and one of his financial advisers, Jeffrey, purchased, or received, this Manhattan townhouse around 1998. There were no property records on Jeffrey’s townhouse-mansion transfer until 2011, when the company Wexner used to buy the place transferred it to a Jeffrey-owned company for $0. Jeffrey signed the document for both sides, and added his own touches to the already extensive interior design work.
Visitors describe a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack, supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink. The entrance hall to the townhouse-mansion is decorated with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, Jeffrey tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. On the desk in the office lies a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue. A stuffed black poodle stands atop a grand piano. There is also a painting of a woman cupping her bare breast, a mural of Jeffrey himself in a prison yard surrounded by officers (because “there is always the possibility that could be me again”), a painting of Bill Clinton wearing a blue dress and red heels, a mannequin of a woman in a wedding gown hanging from one of the ceilings, and a chessboard at the base of the stairwell in which the custom-made pieces are scantily-clad women modeled after Jeffrey’s staffers.
When authorities raided the house following Jeffrey’s arrest, they found “possibly thousands” of photos of underage girls in a safe. Law enforcement officers also found compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: “Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girls pics nude.”
Breaking ground at the beginning of the Great Depression, the house got off to what is in hindsight an ominous start. It was built by architect Horace Trumbauer for Herbert N. Straus, the son of Macy’s owners (and Titanic victims whose deaths are depicted in the movie) Isidor and Ida Straus. Antiques and fixtures were brought from Europe along with “entire eighteenth-century rooms” to be installed in the home. The younger Straus died in 1933 and never lived in the place himself; his heirs donated it to the Catholic Church in 1944, when work had still not been completed on it, and it became a hospital. The Birch Wathen School, a private academy that serves kindergarteners through twelfth-graders, bought the house in 1962, eventually selling it to Mr. Wexner. It is fifty feet wide, with a fifteen-foot-high oak door, huge arched windows, and nine floors, and is built from imported French limestone meticulously decorated with carvings, sculpture figures, and ornamental ironwork. The sidewalk outside is heated so snow doesn’t collect. It is said to be Manhattan’s largest private residence.
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Virginia, victim: “The first time I was taken to Jeffrey’s mansion, his motivations and actions were sexual, as were Ghislaine’s. My father was not allowed inside. I was brought up some stairs. There was a naked guy, Jeffrey, on the table in the room. Jeffrey and Ghislaine forced me into sexual activity. I was fifteen years old at the time. I was paid $200. Over the next few weeks, Jeffrey and Ghislaine trained me to do what they wanted, including sexual activities and the use of sexual toys. The training was in New York and Florida, at Jeffrey’s mansions. It was basically every day and was like going to school. I also had to have sex with Jeffrey many times. Speaking about himself, he said ‘I can get away’ with things. I was very scared. I was trained to be ‘everything a man wanted me to be.’ It wasn’t just sexual training—they wanted me to be able to cater to all the needs of the men they were going to send me to. Jeffrey specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would ‘owe him,’ they would ‘be in his pocket,’ and he would ‘have something on them.’ Ghislaine had large amounts of child pornography that she personally made. Many times she made me sleep with other girls, some of whom were very young, for purposes of taking sexual pictures. Alan Dershowitz was so comfortable with the sex that was going on that he would even come and chat with Jeffrey while I was giving oral sex. I had sex with Alan at least six times.
“One day, Jeffrey told me I was meeting a ‘major prince.’ Jeffrey told me ‘to exceed’ everything I had been taught. He emphasized that whatever Prince Andrew wanted, I was to make sure he got. Ghislaine said ‘guess how old she is.’ Prince Andrew guessed seventeen. I told Jeffrey about Andy’s sexual interests in feet. Jeffrey thought it was very funny. Jeffrey appeared to be collecting private information about Andy. The third time I had sex with Andy was in an orgy on Jeffrey’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was around eighteen at the time. Jeffrey, Andy, approximately eight other young girls, and I had sex together. The other girls all seemed to be under the age of eighteen and didn’t really speak English. Jeffrey laughed about the fact they couldn’t really communicate, saying that they are the ‘easiest’ girls to get along with. My assumption was that Jean-Luc Brunel got the girls from Eastern Europe (as he procured many young foreign girls for Jeffrey). Brunel ran some kind of modeling agency and appeared to have an arrangement with the U.S. Government where he could get passports or other travel documents for young girls. He would then bring these young girls (girls ranging in age from twelve to twenty-four) to the United States for sexual purposes and farm them out to his friends, including Jeffrey. Brunel would offer the girls ‘modeling’ jobs. A lot of the girls came from poor countries or poor backgrounds, and he lured them in with a promise of making good money. I had to have sex with Brunel at Little St. James (orgies), Palm Beach, New York City, New Mexico, Paris, the south of France, and California. He did not care about conversation, just sex. Jeffrey has told me that he has slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls.”
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Jeffrey’s scheme first began to unravel in March 2005, when the parents of a fourteen-year-old girl told Palm Beach police that she had been molested by Jeffrey at his mansion. The girl reluctantly confessed that she had been brought there by two other girls, and those girls pointed to two more girls who had been there. Soon there were dozens.
The lead Palm Beach police detective on the case, Joseph Recarey, realized Jeffrey’s operation worked like a sexual pyramid scheme. During the massage sessions, Jeffrey would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral sex and intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls. The police report shows how uncannily consistent the girls’ stories were—right down to their detailed descriptions of Jeffrey’s genitalia. Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: they had parents and friends who’d committed suicide, mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends, fathers who molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her eight-year-old stepbrother, according to court records.
They would be met by Jeffrey, clad in a towel. He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie face-down on a massage table, instruct girls to strip partially or fully, and direct them to massage his feet and backside. Then he would turn over and have them massage his chest, often instructing them to pinch his nipples, while he masturbated, according to the police report. At times, if emboldened, he would try to penetrate them with his fingers or use a vibrator on them. He would go as far as the girls were willing to let him, even as far as intercourse. Sometimes he would instruct a young woman he described as his Yugoslavian sex slave, Nadia Marcinkova, who was over eighteen, to join in. Jeffrey often took photographs of the girls having sex and displayed them around the house. Once sexually gratified, Jeffrey would take a shower in his massive bathroom, which the girls described as having a large shower and a hot pink and mint green sofa.
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Ghislaine, Jeffrey’s associate: “You, again, are completely mischaracterizing the situation. I can categorically state, absolutely one hundred percent, that she did not have any type of sexual relations as described by your court papers. The basis of this entire horrible story that you have put out is based on this first appalling story that was written, repeated, multiplied by the press that lied about her age, lied about the first time she came, lied about and mischaracterized the entire first time. I have been so absolutely appalled by her story and appalled by the entire characterization of it and I apologize sincerely for my banging on the table earlier. I hope you accept my apology. It’s borne out of years of feeling the pressure of this entire lie that she has perpetrated from our first time and whilst I recognize that was—I hope you forgive me sincerely because it was just the length of time that that terrible story has been told and retold and rehashed when I know it to be one hundred percent false.
“I don’t know what that means, ‘masseuse obligation,’ I don’t know what you are referring to. Would you like to ask the question properly? I have no recollection of doing anything of that nature. He would either book the massage himself or one of his other assistants would do that. Typically it was somebody else’s responsibility. I never ever at any single time at any point ever at all participated in anything with Virginia and Jeffrey. I can only testify for when I was present with him and I cannot say what she did when I wasn’t present with him. I was in the house very limited times, very few times. I have no idea of the arrangements that Virginia made with Jeffrey. I don’t recollect her being in New York and I have no idea where she slept. And for the record, she is an absolute total liar and you all know she lied on multiple things and that is just another disgusting thing she added. I barely would remember her, if not for all of this rubbish. I probably wouldn’t remember her at all, except she did come from time to time, but I don’t recollect her coming as often as she portrayed herself. It’s absurd and her entire story is one giant tissue of lies. This is a defamation suit. You are trying to trap me. I will not be trapped. I told you no. I have no recollection of that conversation. I totally resent it and find it disgusting that you use the word ‘recruit.’ I already told you I don’t know what you are saying and your implication is repulsive. I don’t know what exactly Jeffrey was convicted of. I know he spent time in jail. I only know he went to jail for—it was alleged that he hired—had an underage prostitute. I am not refusing the question. I cannot testify to what I believe about Jeffrey. You are asking me to speculate and I cannot speculate. I’m a very loyal person and Jeffrey was very good to me when my father passed away and I believe that you need to be a good friend in people’s hour of need.”
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Sitting on his patio on “Little St. Jeff ’s” in the Virgin Islands as his legal troubles deepened, Jeffrey gazed at the azure sea and the lush hills of St. Thomas in the distance, poked at a lunch of crab and rare steak prepared by his personal chef, and tried explain how his life had taken such a turn. He likened himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput. “Gulliver’s playfulness had unintended consequences,” Jeffrey said. “That is what happens with wealth. There are unexpected burdens.”
In 2008, federal prosecutors in Miami—led by former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta—drafted a fifty-three-page indictment against Jeffrey, including charges that could have put him in prison for life. Prior to this, Acosta had attended a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington D.C. attorney Jay Lefkowitz, to discuss the recent accusations against Lefkowitz’s client in a police report from the Town of Palm Beach. The report accused Jeffrey of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent mansion as often as three times a day. At the breakfast meeting, however, Acosta and Lefkowitz struck a deal known as a “non-prosecution agreement.” Jeffrey would admit to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was fourteen, well under the eighteen years of the age of consent in Florida. Jeffrey’s conviction on a charge of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl would thereafter require him to register as a sex offender. In exchange for submitting to this, Jeffrey and four of his named accomplices would receive immunity from all federal criminal charges. Even more unusually, the agreement included wording that extended immunity to “any potential co-conspirators” who were also involved in Jeffrey’s crimes and, despite a federal law to the contrary, Acosta would not disclose the nature of the agreement to the victims.
A decade later, when interviewed for his job as United States Secretary of Labor, Acosta said he’d cut the deal with one of Jeffrey’s attorneys because he’d “been told” to back off: Jeffrey was above his pay grade. “I was told Jeffrey ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he revealed to his interviewers in the Trump transition. They evidently thought his answer was sufficient and went ahead and hired him. Afterwards, when pressed on this matter, the Department of Labor offered no comment.
In the event, Jeffrey served just thirteen months behind bars. Instead of being sent to state prison, he was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office gave him work release privileges, allowing him to leave jail six days a week, twelve hours a day, to go to a comfortable office he’d set up in West Palm Beach. These privileges were granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.
Spencer Kuvin, an attorney representing three of Jeffrey’s victims, told the Palm Beach Post: “In the litigation itself we were never able to get him to produce verified financial information. The ‘nine figures’ came by negotiation. It kept going up and up and up. They started at zero—they wouldn’t tell us at all.” So little is known about Jeffrey’s current business or clients that the only things that can be valued with any certainty are his properties. According to a document submitted in advance of his bail hearing, his Manhattan townhouse was estimated to be worth around $77 million. Then there are the properties in New Mexico—a 7,500-acre ranch worth $18 million—and in Paris, as well as the seventy-acre island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, a helicopter, a Boeing 727, a fleet of fifteen cars, and a Palm Beach compound estimated at $12 million. “He’s supposed to run an enormous foreign-exchange trading firm,” said Enrique Diaz-Alvarez, chief risk officer at Ebury. “But I never once heard of him or his firm or anyone who worked or traded with him.”
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Jeffrey set up the J. Epstein & Co. money-management business in 1982. He had a $1 billion entry fee. He charged a flat fee on the assets entrusted to him, anywhere from $25 million to $100 million, but didn’t collect any portion of the profits. The company reportedly had around 150 employees based in Manhattan, in New Albany, Ohio, and on St. Thomas. But these employees were all said to be “administrative.” He reportedly employed no analysts, portfolio managers, or traders. All of the investment decisions were said to be made by Jeffrey himself.
As Jeffrey explained it, he provided a specialized form of superelite financial advice. He counseled people on everything from taxes and trusts to prenuptial agreements and paternity suits, and even provided interior decorating tips for private jets. There were no SEC filings disclosing his holdings. Not one. It’s hard to see how he could have been managing billions without ever tripping a disclosure trigger, unless he avoided the stock market altogether and only invested in private deals. His only known client was Mr. Wexner, who reportedly ditched Jeffrey before 2009 and later said he embezzled at least $46 million from him.
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Julie, old friend: “Wexner was this super-successful guy who didn’t really have any life, and Jeff described him to me as completely socially inept. I remember sitting in on a meeting between Leslie and Jeff at a cafe, early in Jeff and Leslie’s relationship, not long after the two had been introduced by insurance tycoon Robert Meister. All Leslie did was eat peanuts out of the little peanut tray. And I remember, just to try and make him feel comfortable, I ate the peanuts with him. It was so incredibly awkward. But looking back now, I can see why Jeff had been so excited about cozying up to Leslie. Jeffrey told me, ‘This guy has everything in the world, but he doesn’t have anyone to share it with,’ and Jeffrey knew all the girls in the world. That was Jeffrey’s MO. He’d take some rich guy and introduce him to a girl. Jeffrey wasn’t just a money manager. He was a personal assistant. If Leslie had a problem with his yacht, he was there. Leslie handed over huge swaths of his finances to Jeffrey, sold a plane and a mansion to trusts that Jeffrey controlled, and to the surprise of his friends and colleagues, went so far as to hand Jeffrey his power of attorney in 1991. I wasn’t that surprised, though. I remember Jeff saying to me, ‘This guy has no life, and I’m going to give him a life.’ It was that simple.
“I once asked Jeff why he was like this, and he said to me to read some book. He told me it influenced him to become wealthy. The book was The Man From O.R.G.Y., a 1965 James Bond rip-off. It’s about a con man who travels the world under the guise of being a ‘sex researcher’ in order to spy for the US government. It’s violent and pornographic, containing toddler brothels and details of children and infants being ceremonially raped and trained into sex slavery. The protagonist gets custody of such a slave from the US embassy, and the girl tells him about being penetrated and beaten multiple times a day since age three as training for a life of sex slavery. She tells him that girls enjoy being raped. The man gawks at and participates in this sexual mayhem, all the while using his cover as a ‘sex researcher’ to spy on Syrian sheikhs, steal Soviet launch codes, and eventually bring on the downfall of Nikita Khrushchev. He said to me, ‘Read this book, and that will help you understand.’ It was one of the last things we talked about.
“A huge, huge change occurred in Jeffrey’s personality after his relationship with Leslie began to solidify, and particularly after he had started amassing his mysterious fortune. In my mind, three people were responsible for the changes I saw in my friend. There was Les Wexner. Less directly, there was Bill Clinton, who I think connected with Jeffrey through the Clinton Foundation. Seeing a powerful guy like Clinton get away with what he got away with, well, I think it just emboldened him to think he could do whatever he wanted. But above all, there was Ghislaine Maxwell. The Ghislaine thing I think is key.”
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Ghislaine Maxwell was born on Christmas Day 1961. Three days later, a car carrying her fifteen-year-old brother Michael crashed into a lorry along a foggy Oxfordshire road. Michael Maxwell would spend the remaining seven years of his life in a coma. Although she had been born into material abundance, by every account, Ghislaine’s earliest years were disfigured by emotional neglect. Betty, her mother, later admitted in her memoir that after Michael’s accident the baby “was hardly given a glance” by her devastated parents. One day in 1965, according to Betty, three-year-old Ghislaine stood in front of her and declared: “Mummy, I exist.” Betty also believed the toddler developed anorexia. To compensate, from this point both parents went to the opposite extreme and began lavishing affection on their youngest child. Still, her father raised her in a “draconian” household, beating his children with regularity.
Robert Maxwell had risen from extreme poverty in a Czechoslovak Jewish settlement—most of his family were murdered in the Holocaust—to become a British Army war hero, then an academic publishing magnate, a Labour MP, and eventually owner of the Daily Mirror, one of the UK’s highest-selling newspapers. His criminal activities began early in his career, culminating when the collapse of the Eastern Bloc set the stage for a feeding frenzy of fraud, deceit, and theft of state assets. KGB and other Eastern Bloc intelligence agents, with whom Robert already had established contacts, moved into the business world following the break-up of the Soviet empire. Robert helped himself to a hefty fifteen-to-twenty percent cut of their profits as he laundered their money through Bulgaria and Western banks. Soon enough, he had links to criminals who dealt in illegal arms, prostitution, money laundering, drugs, and contract killings. His business would grow into one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world, embracing the Russian mafia as well as those in New York, Hong Kong, and Japan. All the companies he formed would eventually be brought together under one name—Mirror Group—which controlled a significant percentage of global profits from gas, telecommunications, oil, gambling, and dubious financial services.
In November 1991, Robert vanished from the deck of the Lady Ghislaine off the Canary Islands. His body was later found afloat at sea. In the wake of his death, reports emerged that he had raided the Mirror Group’s pension fund of approximately £440 million ($768 million) as part of a scheme to artificially inflate the company’s share price at the expense of 32,000 employees. As the fall-out from the pension scandal made the UK a less-than-welcoming place for Ghislaine, she moved to New York in November 1992. There she met Jeffrey and their relationship became mutually beneficial. She could introduce him to her powerful friends; he in turn had the capital to fund the kind of lifestyle she’d grown up to expect. She needed to be essential for him. Recruitment was how she kept her place. Her value depended on running his house and maintaining control of the girls. A housekeeper testified that Ghislaine issued staff a fifty-eight-page instruction manual and ordered them to speak only when spoken to, avoiding eye contact with Jeffrey. Ghislaine, who had learned early on to appease the whims of her capricious, bullying father, began to apply those same skills in her interactions with Jeffrey.
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Jeffrey was born in Coney Island, New York, in 1953. His father worked for the city’s parks department. His parents viewed education as “the way out” for him and his younger brother, Mark, now working in real estate. Jeffrey attended Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School, where he proved adept at mathematics. He dropped out of Cooper Union and NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences before finding a job teaching calculus and physics at the Dalton School in the mid-1970s. While there he began tutoring the son of Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg. In 1976, he joined Bear as a floor trader’s assistant, making partner in a mere four years. By 1981, he was out after he was discovered executing “illegal operations.” Steven Hoffenberg then brought him onboard as a consultant for Towers Financial, paying him $25,000 per month for his work. In 1997, Towers Financial was convicted of running one of the largest pre-Madoff Ponzi schemes in U.S. history, and Hoffenberg was given a twenty-year sentence for bilking investors out of more than $450 million. Jeffrey ditched the company before the scheme collapsed; Hoffenberg later declared him an “uncharged co-conspirator” and accused him of stealing millions from the company as seed capital for his own hedge fund.
Officials in the Virgin Islands, the United States territory where Jeffrey set up most of his businesses, approved a license for him in 2014 to run one of the territory’s first international banking entities: a specialized bank that would do business only with offshore clients. The approval was unusual, given Jeffrey’s status as a convicted sex offender. Most bank operators doing business in the United States are required to undergo rigorous background checks, and most banking institutions are subject to oversight by the arm of the Treasury that investigates suspicious financial transactions. Neither of these procedures were required to be initiated by the Virgin Islands when Jeffrey submitted his application. Southern Trust—Jeffrey’s Virgin Islands bank—generated about $300 million in profit in six years, and Jeffrey paid an effective tax rate of about 3.9 percent. The source of Southern Trust’s revenue is not clear; the bare-bones corporate filings made by the company in the Virgin Islands do not list any clients.
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Foucault: “Power’s condition of possibility must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And “Power,” insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the overall effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”
The urge to make Jeffrey’s power sophisticated and complex serves a similar purpose to the elites’ insistence on his genius. Both are ways of squaring the evident smallness of the man himself with the vastness of the world he built and the seemingly outsized influence he possessed. Both betray a collective lack of imagination when it comes to just how ludicrously rewarded dumbasses can be in this country. Jeffrey didn’t have to be anything special to become a key player in an evil conspiracy. He had to be rich, and he had to be useful to people richer and more powerful than he was. The very real possibility is that Jeffrey was both a rich dumbass and a key player in an evil conspiracy, because evil conspiracies require nothing more.
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After a decade of legal efforts by many of his victims—and increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the media—Jeffrey faced prosecution by the notoriously tough Southern District of New York for sex trafficking of minors, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of forty years in prison. On the afternoon of Saturday, July 6, 2019, Jeffrey was arrested and taken into federal custody at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where he had just returned in his private jet after a few weeks in Paris. He was then transferred to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center to await his arraignment in federal court in New York on Monday, July 8. Federal agents also executed search warrants for his Manhattan home on the evening of his arrest, breaking down the door of his Upper East Side townhouse, according to witnesses. Federal agents appear not to have raided his other three homes, however, and it’s not clear why.
The dark carnival that is Jeffrey’s case ended with his mysterious death while awaiting trial in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. According to the New York City medical examiner, Jeffrey hanged himself with his bedsheet either on the night of August 9, 2019, or early in the morning of August 10, which if true, would make his death the first acknowledged suicide in fourteen years at the institution. The cause of his death and the circumstances around it are widely contested: around half of Americans believe he was murdered. A medical examiner hired by Jeffrey’s brother ruled the death a homicide by strangulation, citing Jeffrey’s broken hyoid bone, a small u-shaped bone just above the Adam’s apple that rarely fractures in instances other than strangulation. The wounds on his neck, which drew blood, were not under the mandibles, as is usual with hanging victims, but instead around the middle of the neck, which is consistent with strangulation. The wound was also thin and wirelike, much thinner than a bedsheet, and photos of Jeffrey’s cell show the bedsheet itself was not bloody. While this is certainly a curious set of circumstances, none provides a smoking gun in and of itself. But there are more, even stranger details around what former Attorney General William Barr has described as “a perfect storm of screwups.” Jeffrey had been placed into a Special Housing Unit after an earlier suicide attempt and was to have a cellmate and wellness check every thirty minutes, neither of which protocol was in place on the night of his death. The two guards on duty were accused of falling asleep at their desks and were later charged for falsifying the necessary records. The three cameras with views of Jeffrey’s cell simultaneously malfunctioned—two had died, and one had produced footage that was deemed “unusable.”
Ghislaine was on the move for almost a year after Jeffrey’s mysterious death. She was eventually arrested in New Hampshire and tried in the Southern District of New York. In December 2021, a jury found her guilty of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor. She has been sentenced to twenty years in jail. Her sentencing is said to provide “closure” to the victims.
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Stuart, art collector, scientist, and founder of the New York Academy of Art: “Jeffrey was my best pal for decades. I knew Jeffrey before he was Jeffrey. I adored him. I saw all the incredible, wonderful things he did for science, which nobody’s managed to have the intellect to understand. If Jeffrey was found guilty of fooling around with one sixteen-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention. The trouble is, what he did was quantitative and not qualitative. He did stuff with underage girls who knew what the hell they were doing. By the hundreds. If he only did one, no one would pay attention. Nor, on the other hand, did he actually rape any of them or anything like that, which happens, you know. If you want to make a list of, let us say, in the past several years, of the kind of stuff going on of sexual abuse of children and what-the-hell-not—you want to compare that with what Jeffrey did? What Jeffrey did in comparison with the kind of stuff which gets exposed every day of people who are abusing children left and right and all kinds of institutions? Jeffrey never did anything like that. Everything he had to do with these girls was complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again. And if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed—except he made an industry out of it. And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. He was in a position financially to yield to it, big time. But nevertheless, he could not help himself. I’ve seen him do things which he couldn’t—couldn’t help himself, he was afflicted with it. If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much? What he did to Maria was inexcusable, of course. He locked her up, and she couldn’t get away, and her father had to come and rescue her. And, of course, that’s the least of what she told me. Forget that, her little sister, for Christ’s sake, the guy actually brought her to his place and did those kinds of things, which, of course, is inexcusable, but he couldn’t help himself. Jeffrey was so perverse. ‘Perverse,’ that word, haha. You have to use it. What is perversion? You might want to examine that.”
In 2015, Gawker published Jeffrey’s “little black book,” which had surfaced in court proceedings after a former employee took it from Jeffrey’s home around 2005 and later tried to sell it. He said that the book had been created by people who worked for Jeffrey and that it contained the names and phone numbers of more than a hundred victims, plus hundreds of social contacts. To list just some of them:
Alec Baldwin: Actor.
Alan Dershowitz: Accused pedophile and rapist.
Andrea Bonomi: Italian businessman.
Andrew Cuomo: Former Governor of New York.
Bill Berkman: New York businessman.
Bill Clinton: Former US President.
Bill Cosby: Convicted rapist, decision later overturned.
Candace Bushnell: Columnist who inspired Sex and the City.
Charles Althorp: Princess Diana’s brother.
Carter Graydon: Former editor of Vanity Fair.
Charlie Rose: Television journalist charged with sexual assault.
Chuck Schumer: New York’s senior Senator, current Senate Minority Leader.
Conrad Black: Media mogul.
David Blaine: Magician.
David Koch: Plutocrat.
Donald Barr: Dalton Headmaster.
Donald Trump: US President.
Doug Band: Bill Clinton’s all-purpose gatekeeper.
Edgar Bronfman Jr.: Former Warner Music Group CEO.
Flavio Briatore: Italian millionaire businessman.
George Mitchell: Former Senate Majority Leader.
Griffin Dunne: Joan Didion’s nephew.
Hassanal Bolkiah: Sultan of Brunei.
Jean-Luc Brunel: Child sex trafficker.
John Kerry: Former Secretary of State.
Lawrence Krauss: Disgraced cosmologist.
Leon Black: Private equity tycoon.
Mark Getty: Co-founder and Chairman of Getty Images.
Marvin Minsky: MIT professor and pioneer of artificial intelligence.
Michael Bloomberg: Billionaire, former Mayor of New York City.
Nicolas Berggruen: Billionaire investor.
Phil Collins: Musician.
Prince Andrew: Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite son.
Ralph Fiennes: Actor.
Richard Branson: Founder of Virgin Group.
Rupert Murdoch: Media mogul.
Sandy Beger: National security advisor for Bill Clinton.
Sarah Ferguson: Duchess of York.
Steve Bannon: Former White House chief strategist.
Steve Forbes: Chairman and editor in chief of Forbes.
Ted Kennedy: Former Senator.
Tom Barrack: Trump advisor.
Tom Ford: Designer.
Vittorio Assaf: Restaurateur.
Woody Allen: Director.
How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Jeffrey, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: they got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne ‘Lolita Express,’ some other form of monetary largesse, entry into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.
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Sontag: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do—but who is that “we”?—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse. People don’t become inured to what they are shown—if that’s the right way to describe what happens—because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. But if we consider what emotions would be desirable, it seems too simple to elect sympathy. The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers—seen close-up on the television screen— and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”
In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places, what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work? How did they make possible these kinds of discourses, and conversely, how were these discourses used to support power relations? How was the action of these power relations modified by their very exercise, entailing a strengthening of some terms and a weakening of others, with effects of resistance and counter investments, so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for all? How were these power relations linked to one another according to the logic of a great strategy, which in retrospect takes on the aspect of a unitary and voluntarist politics of sex?
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Today the neighbors pass by without looking up at the limestone, which is what neighbors on the Upper East Side have learned to do. The doors, too, remain impassive. They suggest what wealth can do: it can close a door.
This is what we tell ourselves about places like this: that they belong only to a certain New York, a New York of discrete transactions and brass plaques reading “Jeffrey E. Epstein Corporation.” Twenty-eight thousand square feet in Manhattan rise into air that costs more per breath than most Americans earn in a year. The building announced itself as a residence, except it wasn’t, not exactly. It played at being an office, when it wasn’t that either.
Consider the careful performance of legitimacy: the pediment (neoclassical, suggesting old money), the curtains (silk, suggesting domesticity), the cameras (suggesting security, though one might ask: for whom?). Consider how power operates not through concealment but through this theatre of respectability. Consider how many people walked past those doors, looked up at those windows, noticed something wrong, and told themselves they had not.
Prince Andrew paid a reported £12 million to Virginia Giuffre. Jeffrey’s Manhattan mansion was sold to former Goldman Sachs executive Michael Daffey for $51 million, which will directly benefit the restitution fund providing compensation for his victims. Jeffrey’s estate agreed to pay the Virgin Islands $105 million in cash and half of the proceeds from the sale of Little St. James island, where he owned a home and where authorities allege many of his crimes took place. The estate also will pay $450,000 to repair environmental damage on Great St. James, another island he owned, where, authorities say, he removed the ruins of colonial-era structures built by slave labor. Money moves in familiar patterns here. Consider what we tell ourselves about justice: that it can be denominated in dollars, that restitution arrives in wire transfers, that the willful destruction of historical artefacts can be fixed for a precise sum. As if systemic failures can be resolved through a series of transactions. As if an act of exploitation can be settled like a real estate deal.
In August 2019, Jeffrey’s bank, designed to manage offshore affairs, possessed a little under $700,000 in assets; in December, the estate transferred in $15.5 million. All the funds, save for $500,000, were withdrawn before the end of the year. The documents filed by the estate do not give a reason for the transfers. It’s also not clear what was done with that money. The estate has told officials in the Virgin Islands that it does not intend to renew the bank’s license.
“Jeffrey also trafficked me for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including politicians and business executives,” Virginia said. “Jeffrey required me to describe the sexual events that I had with these men, presumably so that he could potentially blackmail them. I am still very fearful of these men today.” This is what power, like the townhouse, understands: that we will accept the performance of justice if it wears the right suit, speaks in the right language, moves the right sums between the right accounts. That we will let ourselves believe that evil can be contained to individuals. That we will look away, again.
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