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household infrastructure. One woman, on an afternoon when I was there, had just returned from an around-the-world honeymoon that Epstein had arranged for her. Some are, or may have been, his romantic interests. One former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a Swedish model and Miss Universe finalist whom Epstein has known for more than thirty years, became one of new yorks top doctors—Epstein helped finance her medical school education —She married hedge funder Glen Dubin. Together they financed the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Epstein will sometimes move a meeting in his dining room outside to Central park—his idea of going out to lunch is a Sabrett’s hot dog—with the various young women in the house acting as the accompanying entourage, as though something out of an 18th-century French court.
But the Hefnerian like attitude can also at the flash turn to sharply honed financial discussion. The highly poised young women in a mansion on the Upper East Side with various office responsibilities remind me of the various uptown art galleries in the surrounding neighborhood. They mingle freely with his hyper powerful guests, not so much as hostesses—or, in tabloid language, harem-like “sex slaves”—but as attentive colleagues (which, of course, might be regarded by some as having its own fetish-like attraction). Epstein explicitly denies , and is seconded by the group that there is no sexual quid pro quo. (“If you’re sleeping someone you work with they then believe they can come in late—that’s what Jimmy Goldsmith used to say.”) Still, the constant attendance of so many comely young women, seems so outside of conventional living or staffing or social or romantic relationships that it is hard to describe in a straightforward or non- smirky way. And while it has been said that it may be part of the appeal for the men who come to visit Epstein, it is as well a peculiarity for them that they merely put up with in order to spend time with him.
The Epstein house/office is, by careful design, exclusive and clubby, part hang out, part secret society. Along with the fact that, even after his jail term, the rich and powerful have continued to so eagerly solicit him, it’s also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to whose turf, that, when they want to see Epstein, they tend to come to him. He’s created a world and you enter it. Many arrive in weekend clothes. or as one world leader said , Ah here i can come in sweat clothes .
His conversations are less meeting-like—focused and agenda-driven—then narrative therapy . In effect: the outside world comes to Epstein’s and he eagerly solicits reports. It’s a real time newspaper, or the news you don’t read in a newspaper, market movements before they occur, geopolitics with the ultimate decision makers at the table, the health and personal eccentricities of some world leaders, discussions in hushed tones of the next high level government appointments soon to be announced.
It’s Sunday lunch—in his schedule from a week last fall—with Gates, Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and owner of the Daily News, and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor. That evening its Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister of Qatar. Hamad lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the same decorator. (Epstein, in his relaxed and amused manner, keeps prodding: “Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of that?”)
Next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining room by the lawyer Reid Weingarten, who’s represented, among other fat cats in trouble, Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein. Weingarten, hoarse with a cold, is still lamenting his failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. ( later to be overturned on appeal ) After a blow-by-blow of the trial, they discuss the Qatarian’s visit—Epstein served chocolate made with specialy chosen pistachios grown on the Sheikh’s farm—and speculate about who actually controls ISIS, with Weingarten arguing that the Turks are not getting enough scrutiny. Weingarten represents Gulen , the U.S. target of the Turks, There is, in Epstein’s dining room, always an alternative version of world events—“perception versus reality,” says Epstein, “not to imply that one necessarily has greater weight than the other.”
“Why,” I ask Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do so many people keep coming back here, everything considered.”
“Why we camp out here? I guess because there’s truly no other place like it.”
Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-room. It’s a young man named Brock Pierce, an active investor” in Bitcoin and the programmable currency space. Epsteins blackboard gets quickly filled with the details of the Bitcoin blockchain mathematics,
After a bit, Epstein invites his next appointment to join them: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and President of Harvard, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Sheikh Hamad chocolates, then focuses in on the Bitcoin investor.

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