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Case 1:19-cv-03377 Document 1-8 Filed 04/16/19 Page 3 of 16
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303

hangs a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling
lionskin. Under her gaze, plates of finger sandwiches are delivered to Epstein and guests by the
menservants in white gloves.

Upstairs, to the right of a spiral staircase, is the “office,” an enormous gallery spanning the width
of the house. Strangely, it holds no computer. Computers belong in the “computer room” (a
smaller room at the back of the house), Epstein has been known to say. The office features a
gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P. Morgan), 18th-century black
lacquered Portuguese cabinets, and a nine-foot ebony Steinway “D” grand. On the desk, a
paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted.
Covering the floor, Epstein has explained, “is the largest Persian rug you’ll ever see in a private
home—so big, it must have come from a mosque.” Amid such splendor, much of which reflects
the work of the French decorator Alberto Pinto, who has worked for Jacques Chirac and the
royal families of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there is one particularly startling oddity: a stuffed
black poodle, standing atop the grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that,”
Epstein brags to visitors. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.” People can’t
help but feel it’s Epstein’s way of saying that he always has the last word.

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In addition to the town house, Epstein lives in what is reputed to be the largest private dwelling
in New Mexico, on an $18 million, 7,500-acre ranch which he named “Zorro.” “It makes the
town house look like a shack,” Epstein has said. He also owns Little St. James, a 70-acre island
in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the main house is currently being renovated by Edward Tuttle,
a designer of the Amanresorts. There is also a $6.8 million house in Palm Beach, Florida, and a
fleet of aircraft: a Gulfstream IV, a helicopter, and a Boeing 727, replete with trading room, on
which Epstein recently flew President Clinton, actors Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey,
supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, Lew Wasserman’s grandson, Casey Wasserman, and a few
others, on a mission to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development in Africa.

Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and
calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. “Let’s play
chess,” he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. “You be white. You get
the first move.” It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no
matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know
him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully
engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s
moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.

“He’s very enigmatic,” says Rosa Monckton, the former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K. and
a close friend since the early 1980s. “You think you know him and then you peel off another ring
of the onion skin and there’s something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his
hand…. He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get.”

Even acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy: Yes, he lives like a “modern maharaja,” as Leah
Kleman, one of his art dealers, puts it. Yet he is fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists

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