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Coney Island, Zelig-like silver haired financier.
In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles was on television acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein was sitting with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Galley in London (Diana wearing her “revenge” dress that evening). Graydon Carter, in his second year as editor of Vanity Fair, was also at the dinner. Epstein’s rise and Carter’s rise are not, with a little critical interpretation, that different. Both are a function of the age of new money, both are helped by strategic relationships with the exceptionally wealthy, both have made themselves up. To say that Epstein, in the company of the Princess, stuck in Carter’s craw would be an understatement. Epstein became one of the “what do you know about him” figures in Carter’s gossip trail—a story waiting to happen. Carter once advised me not to go to Epstein’s house or accept a ride in his car least I risk being put under his spell, . (“For what?” I asked Carter. “You can’t even begin to imagine,” said Carter.)
He joined the board of Rockefeller University. And then he was suddenly on the Trilateral commission, that cabal of business people who are fancied by some conspiracy buffs, as the group running the world. He bought, from his client Limited Founder Les Wexner, the largest private house in Manhattan. He bought an airplane. Then another. He expanded his holdings in New Mexico. He began a Xanadu-like refurbishment of his Caribbean Island and then bought the neighboring island for guests.
He befriended Bill Clinton in his new after-office life—and that would prove to be quite the fatal pairing.
The post-Monica Clinton, now having pardoned the on-the-lam financier Marc Rich—at this point, before his own rehabilitation, Clinton was considered the world’s ultimate sleaze ball—was suddenly being ferried around in the jet of…who exactly? The New York Post was the first to take formal media note of the Clinton-Epstein connection, hinting at a sex and money bromance. “I suppose travel with Clinton changed the arc of my life,” Epstein tells me. “There were, I knew, lots of obvious reasons not to do it, but having the ability to spend 100 hours with a former president just doesn’t happen to many people.”
I met Epstein around this time, on the flight out to TED. Not long after this trip, Epstein’s assistant called to invite me for tea at his house in New York, where Epstein, with what seemed to me a dearth of understanding of the subject, began to ask me about detailed and focused questions re media—the upside, downside, and nature of media coverage. (Epstein’s very brief flirtation with the media would result in his backing an unsuccessful effort, of which I was a part, to buy New York Magazine in 2004.)
New York magazine was then soliciting him for a profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British tabloid journalist, Vicki Ward, to the job. Both profiles—New York’s by Landon Thomas—pivot on the Clinton connection and detail the same quandary, how a man without clear institutional bona fides nevertheless achieved such magnificent wealth and substainal influence. Epstein, sensing that he might be exposing himself, called Carter and said he was having second thoughts about being a public figure.
“Then you should have lived in a two bedroom apartment in Queens,” responded Carter.
And then the real troubles began. Epstein had a prodigious massage parlor outcall habit especially in Palm Beach with its many “Jack Shacks.” After Epstein’s round of publicity and widely touted association with Clinton, the stepmother of one of the massage parlor girls who went to Epstein’s house called the police. The police interviewed the girl—who was TK at the time, but whose website identified her as 18—and the girl supplied the names of other girls, some of whom were also younger than 18.
In the end, the police tracked down 18 girls—nine of whom were under 18; the others were in their 20s and 30s (one woman was in her 60s)—a number of whom gave statements describing happy-ending massages. (Although the nature of the allegations will dramatically grow into threesomes and forced sexual encounters, nobody at this point alleged anything more than this.)
Epstein called in Dershowitz, who flew into Palm Beach to put the local authorities in their place—alienating Palm Beach officialdom—and, further amping up the profile of the case, also brought in Roy Black, the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach.
The release by the Palm Beach authorities of the depositions by the 18 girls describing the incremental details of the sex acts, the timing of the charges coming just after Rush Limbaugh’s high profile Palm Beach drug bust, the Clinton connection and then with the sudden interest of the Bush FBI in the case, moved the case from solicitation to scandal, and a plea deal with a sentence of 18 months.
He got out of jail in 2010, serving 13 months, of incarceration and then 12 months of house arrest and moved mostly seamlessly back into his life, to the shock-shock of tabloids whenever they are reminded of his existence (notably, when Epstein’s payment of Fergie’s debts slipped out, likely leaked by Fergie herself).

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