Filthy Rich

CHAPTER 31

Mc2 Model Management’s NYC branch is looking for “highly motivated and energetic” interns to assist their agents part-time or full-time. If you’re thinking to yourself, who?, it’s the agency founded by Jean-Luc Brunel, the guy who first signed Christy Turlington when she was just fourteen. Responsibilities include scanning pictures, answering phones, assisting with updating models’ portfolios, and working in Photoshop, Word and Excel (so you have to already know what you’re doing in those). You Must: Be interested in the fashion, modeling and photography industries, outgoing, well spoken, and able to keep cool while five different people demand Starbucks / copies / phone calls / etc. This is a great opportunity to get hands-on experience at a smaller agency, plus they can offer a stipend and a Metrocard as well as school credit if needed. Send your resume to intern@mc2mm.com Good luck!

– Julia Hermanns, Fashionista, January 30, 2009

Jean-Luc Brunel: 2005

For Jeffrey Epstein, Leslie Wexner is more than a mentor. More than the last in a line of older men-father figures-whom Epstein cultivated while making his way in the world.

Wexner is also a steady, if indirect, source of beautiful women.

After all, Wexner is the man in charge of Victoria’s Secret, part of the Limited family of companies and-better yet-in charge of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. What this means for Epstein is models galore. In fact, like a fox that’s gotten hold of the lease to a henhouse, Epstein, according to evidence collected in a later lawsuit brought by Epstein victims, eventually provided financial support for a modeling agency, and provided support for models employed by that agency, in New York City.

This story begins with a Frenchman-a playboy modeling agent named Jean-Luc Brunel-who was an owner of the Karin modeling agency.

Brunel had been working as a modeling agent since the seventies. He claimed to have launched the careers of Monica Bellucci, Estelle, Jerry Hall, Rachel Hunter, Milla Jovovich, Rebecca Romijn, Kristina Semenovskaya, Sharon Stone, and Estella Warren, as well as Christy Turlington and other well-known cover girls. Brunel had also been a subject of a 60 Minutes investigation, broadcast in 1988, into sexual exploitation in the modeling industry. That exposé had caused Eileen Ford of the elite Ford modeling agency to sever her ties with the playboy. (Brunel’s activities were also chronicled in a 1995 book about the fashion industry-Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, by Michael Gross.)

But Brunel’s reputation did not prevent Jeffrey Epstein from getting involved in his business.

According to a summary judgment court filing by Bradley Edwards, a victims’ lawyer defending against a lawsuit by Jeffrey Epstein alleging fabrication of sexual assault cases against him, Epstein had provided support for Brunel’s agency, which changed its name, in 2005, from Karin to MC2-as in E = mc².

As a scout for MC2, Brunel traveled the world in search of undiscovered talent, favoring Scandinavia, Israel, central Europe, the former Soviet republics, and South America, setting up modeling competitions and negotiating with other international modeling agents and agencies.

But according to the court filing, in which Edwards detailed the information he had gathered in support of victims, Epstein and Brunel had used the agency to bring underage girls from foreign countries into the United States by promising them modeling contracts. These girls were then housed in condominiums belonging to Epstein. “Epstein and Brunel would then obtain a visa for these girls,” the document states, “then charge the underage girls rent, presumably to live as underage prostitutes in the condos.”

“I strongly deny having participated, neither directly nor indirectly, in the actions Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of,” Brunel would say. “I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager. I have exercised with the utmost ethical standard for almost forty years.”

According to Brunel, his association with Jeffrey Epstein ended up having a strong negative impact on his reputation and business. Several photographers refused to work with him. Other agencies, such as Modilinos Model Management, curtailed their relationships with Brunel. And in 2015, Brunel filed his own civil lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein, denying that he had any role in Epstein’s illegal activities, alleging that Epstein had obstructed justice by telling him to avoid having his deposition taken in the criminal case the Palm Beach PD had built against Epstein, and claiming that false allegations of Brunel’s links to Epstein’s activities had harmed his reputation and cost him a great deal of business.

In his filing, Brunel included several e-mails from industry contacts who expressed their doubts about placing models with his agency. “Parents don’t want their daughters coming to us because [when] they google your name and the agency name the only things they see is ‘Sex Trafficking’!!!” one correspondent had written.

CHAPTER 32

Nadia Marcinkova: circa 2000

MC2 has offices in New York City. But Jeffrey’s always in motion-flying to his homes in New Mexico and the Virgin Islands. Often to Palm Beach. Sometimes to Paris. And when he comes home to New York he hosts parties where important people-corporate titans, real estate tycoons, university presidents, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, princes, ex-presidents, and heads of state-mingle with beautiful women.

Some guests marvel in public: Who are these women? Where do they come from?

Nadia Marcinkova comes from Slovakia. She looks like a model. But Nadia’s done very little modeling, if any. Instead she’s become another of Epstein’s girlfriends.

According to statements given to the Palm Beach police, she’s also served as a willing accomplice in Epstein’s sexual assaults on underage females.

Epstein prefers diminutive women, but Nadia is tall. She’s rail-thin and blond like the sun, with glowing skin, a wide smile, and sky-high cheekbones.

On a good day, she could pass for a Bond girl-a woman caught up in a web of crime and intrigue. But of course, that’s exactly what she is.

In certain circles, the academics and the women in Epstein’s orbit are almost a joke. In a 2003 profile of him, New York magazine quotes Harvard professors (“He is amazing”), Princeton professors (“He changed my life”), MIT professors (“If I had acted upon the investment advice he has given me over the years, I’d be calling you from my Gulfstream right now”), and other luminaries, up to and including Bill Clinton.

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” says Donald Trump. “Terrific guy; he’s a lot of fun to be with.”

No one knew then that someday Trump would run for president. (When he does, he’ll attack Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton’s own entanglements with Epstein.) But Trump’s already ahead of the curve in that he ends up severing his ties to Epstein well before the police or the media get wind of Epstein’s penchant for underage girls.

He does this because he finds out that in their endless hunt for “masseuses,” Epstein’s procurers have been prowling around Trump’s estate in Palm Beach.

CHAPTER 33

Virginia Roberts: 1999

Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, had once belonged to the fabulously wealthy heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. It sits on twenty perfectly manicured acres less than two miles away from Jeffrey Epstein’s home on El Brillo Way. It’s home to the exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club, which has a spa, tennis courts, and a very posh restaurant.

Donald Trump had fought the town council for decades as they blocked all his efforts to turn the place into a private resort. Other clubs on the island-those with a history of excluding blacks and Jews-had never faced such restrictions, Trump had argued. At one point he sent copies of two movies to every member of the town council: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier confronts his girlfriend’s racist parents, and Gentleman’s Agreement, in which a journalist confronts anti-Semitism in Connecticut and New York City.

“Whether they love me or not, everyone agrees the greatest and most important place in Palm Beach is Mar-a-Lago,” Trump told the Washington Post after winning his battle. “I took this ultimate place and made it incredible and opened it, essentially, to the people of Palm Beach. The fact that I owned it made it a lot easier to get along with the Palm Beach establishment.”

The Breakers hotel, Trump explained, “gets the [island’s] leftovers.”

It cost $100,000 to join the club. Members paid $14,000 yearly in dues. And although Epstein had never properly joined the club, Trump’s friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell gave Epstein unlimited use of the facilities.

This arrangement ended when a member’s young daughter complained to her wealthy father: while relaxing at Mar-a-Lago, she’d been approached and invited out to Epstein’s house.

The girl said that she had gone and that Epstein had tried to get her to undress.

The girl’s father had gone directly to Trump, who-in no uncertain terms-told Epstein that he was barred from Mar-a-Lago.

Because no complaint was filed, the police had taken no action. But years later, a woman named Virginia Roberts would say that, as a young girl, she’d had an identical encounter at Mar-a-Lago.

According to a court document Virginia filed in her civil lawsuit against Epstein, she was a changing-room assistant at Mar-a-Lago, earning about nine dollars an hour, when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her. Maxwell asked Virginia if she was interested in learning to be a massage therapist-which, it turned out, she was. Like the other girl, Virginia told her father, who was also employed at Mar-a-Lago as a maintenance manager. But Virginia’s father saw nothing wrong with the offer, and he drove her, later that day, to Epstein’s house on El Brillo Way.

There, according to the document, Maxwell assured Virginia’s father that Ms. Maxwell would provide transportation home for his teenage daughter. Then she led Virginia upstairs, to a spa room equipped with a shower and a massage table. Jeffrey Epstein was lying, naked, on the table.

Virginia was shocked, she says in the filing, but, with no experience with massages, thought this could be massage therapy protocol. “Ms. Maxwell then took off her own shirt and left on her underwear and started rubbing her breasts across [Jeffrey’s] body, impliedly showing [Virginia] what she was expected to do,” the filing continues. “Ms. Maxwell then told [Virginia] to take off her clothes. The minor girl was apprehensive about doing this, but, in fear, proceeded to follow Ms. Maxwell by removing everything but her underwear. She was then ordered to remove her underwear and straddle [Epstein]. The encounter escalated, with [Jeffrey] and Ms. Maxwell sexually assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing [Virginia] in various ways and in various locations, including the steam room and the shower. At the end of this sexually exploitive abuse, [Epstein] and Ms. Maxwell giddily told [Virginia] to return the following day and told her she had ‘lots of potential.’ [Epstein] paid [Virginia] hundreds of dollars, told her it was for two hours of work, and directed one of her employees to drive her home.”

At the time, Virginia was fifteen years old.

CHAPTER 34

Declaration of Virginia Roberts Giuffre: January 19, 2015, filed on January 19, 2015 by attorneys representing Jeffrey Epstein’s victims

1. My name is Virginia Giuffre and I was born in August, 1983.

2. I am currently 31 years old.

3. I grew up in Palm Beach, Florida. When I was little, I loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. But my life took a very different turn when adults-including Jeffrey Epstein and his close friend Alan Dershowitz-began to be interested in having sex with me.

4. In approximately 1999, when I was 15 years old, I met Ghislaine Maxwell. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who had been a wealthy publisher in Britain. Maxwell asked that I come with her to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion for the purposes of teaching me how to perform “massages” and to train me personally in that area. Soon after that I went to Epstein’s home in Palm Beach on El Brillo Way.

5. From the first time I was taken to Epstein’s mansion that day, his motivations and actions were sexual, as were Maxwell’s. My father was not allowed inside. I was brought up some stairs. There was a naked guy, Epstein, on the table in the room. Epstein and Maxwell forced me into sexual activity with Epstein. I was 15 years old at the time. He seemed to be in his 40s or 50s. I was paid $200. I was driven home by one of Epstein’s employees.

6. I came back for several days following and did the same sorts of sexual things for Epstein.

7. After I did those things for Epstein, he and Maxwell said they were going to have me travel and were going to get an education for me. They were promising me the world, that I would travel with Epstein on his private jet and have a well-paid profession. Epstein said he would eventually match me up with a wealthy person so that I would be “set up” for life.

8. So I started “working” exclusively for Epstein. He took me to New York on his big, private jet. We went to his mansion in New York City. I was shown to my room, a very luxurious room. The mansion was huge. I was very young and I got scared because it was so big. Epstein brought me to a room with a massage parlor. Epstein made me engage [in] sexual activities with him there.

9. You can see how young I looked in the photograph below [see insert page 3].

10. Epstein took me on a ferry boat on one of the trips to New York City and there he took the picture above. I was approximately 15 or 16 years old at the time.

11. Over the next few weeks, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell trained me to do what they wanted, including sexual activities. The training was in New York and Florida, at Epstein’s mansion. It was basically every day and it was like going to school. I also had to have sex with Epstein many times.

12. 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. They said that they loved that I was very compliant and knew how to keep my mouth shut about what they expected me to do.

13. Epstein and Maxwell also told me that they wanted me to produce information for them in addition to performing sex on the men. They told me to pay attention to the details about what the men wanted, so I could report back to them.

14. While I had juvenile hopes of bettering my life, from very early on I was also afraid of Epstein. Epstein told me he was a billionaire. I told my mother that I was working for this rich guy, and she said “go, go far away.” Epstein had promised me a lot, and I knew if I left I would be in big trouble. I was witness to a lot of illegal and bad behavior by Epstein and his friends. If I left Epstein, he knew all kinds of powerful people. He could have had me killed or abducted, and I knew he was capable of that if I did not obey him. He let me know that he knew many people in high places. Speaking about himself, he said “I can get away” with things. Even as a teenager, I understood what this meant and it scared me, as I believe he intended.

15. I visited and traveled with Jeffrey Epstein from 1999 through the summer of 2002, and during that time I stayed with him for sexual activities at each of his houses (or mansions) in locations including New York City, New York; the area of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Palm Beach, Florida; an island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and Paris, France. I had sex with him often in these places and also with the various people he demanded that I have sex with. Epstein paid me for many of these sexual encounters. Looking back, I realize that my only purposes for Epstein, Maxwell, and their friends was to be used for sex.

16. To illustrate my connection to these places, I include four photographs taken of me in New Mexico [see insert page 3 for one of the photographs mentioned]. The first one is a museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We had gone sightseeing for the day. Epstein took this picture of me. I was approximately 17 at the time, judging from the looks of it. At the end of the day we returned to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. The second picture is me on one of Epstein’s horses on the ranch in New Mexico. The following two are from wintertime in New Mexico.

17. When I was with him, Epstein had sex with underage girls on a daily basis. His interest in this kind of sex was obvious to the people around him. The activities were so obvious and bold that anyone spending any significant time at one of Epstein’s residences would have clearly been aware of what was going on.

18. Epstein’s code word for sexual encounters was that it was a “massage.” At times the interaction between Epstein and the girls would start in the massage room setting, but it was always a sexual encounter and never just a massage.

19. In addition to constantly finding underage girls to satisfy their personal desires, Epstein and Maxwell also got girls for Epstein’s friends and acquaintances. Epstein 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.” I understood that Epstein thought he could get leniency if he was ever caught doing anything illegal, or that he could escape trouble altogether.

Roberts submitted her declaration in support of a motion to be added as a plaintiff in a suit (ongoing, as of this writing) that sought to overturn a non-prosecution agreement that Jeffrey Epstein would reach with the government. Roberts was seeking to join a case brought against the government by two other victims, but a judge denied her motion in April of 2015, explaining that the case had already been pending for several years, and it was unneccesary to add an additional plaintiff.

Roberts’s declaration, which goes on for another eight pages, and makes twenty-four additional points, was stricken from the record-the judge explained that the “lurid” and “unnecessary details” involving “non-parties” to the lawsuit against the government, were “immaterial and impertinent” to the proceedings.

Through a representative, Ghislaine Maxwell called the allegations against her “obvious lies,” after which Roberts filed a defamation suit against Maxwell. In an answer filed in the suit, Maxwell elaborated that Roberts’s “story of abuse at the hands of Ms. Maxwell” was “fabricated” for financial gain.

CHAPTER 35

Alicia: May 20, 1997

Donald Trump’s instincts regarding Jeffrey Epstein were solid. But if the reporters who were beginning to look into Epstein’s mysterious background had dug a bit further, there’s a chance they would have hit pay dirt as well-and not just in Palm Beach.

In California, for instance, a paper trail already stretched from the Santa Monica Police Department to Epstein’s front door.

In the spring-almost the summer-of 1997, a call came in to the police. The young woman who placed it-a young actress who’d appeared on Baywatch and General Hospital-said she’d been sexually assaulted at a trendy hotel called Shutters on the Beach.

The officer who took the call knew the woman’s name-Alicia*-and her voice. A week earlier, she’d told him about an encounter with Epstein. The woman had not wanted to make a formal complaint at the time. But she had taken the cop’s card, and now he was happy to hear that she’d changed her mind.

In a shaky voice, Alicia described Epstein as a tallish man-five feet eleven or six feet in height was her guess-with gray hair and brown eyes. He was the owner of a large black four-door Mercedes and was a regular at Shutters on the Beach, which was the kind of place that cost one thousand dollars a night and was frequented by actors, agents, and other Hollywood types.

Alicia told the cop that she was a model and actress herself. She’d known Epstein for about a month. They had a friend in common, and she’d sent him her head shots.

Then, through an assistant, Epstein had invited her to meet in his room at the hotel.

Alicia said she was having reservations, the officer wrote in his report, because generally interviews are not conducted in hotel rooms.

According to her, things turned frightening quickly.

She was unsure she was safe because although she wanted to land the job as a ‘Victoria’s Secret’ catalog model she felt as though Epstein was attempting to get her to act in an unprofessional manner for a model.

Epstein wore navy blue sweatpants and a white T-shirt, she recalled. The T-shirt had the letters USA printed on it in patriotic red, white, and blue.

Epstein told her to undress and actually assisted her to do so while saying ‘let me manhandle you for a second.’

Then, Alicia told the cop, Epstein groped her buttocks against her will while acting as though he was evaluating her body. Alicia had stopped Epstein, and left the room, but couldn’t get over the incident.

At the top of his crime report, the officer wrote “Sexual Battery.” But Epstein was never charged in the incident. “The Santa Monica Police Department discounted every one of [Alicia’s] allegations of improper conduct by Jeffrey Epstein and they took no action on this 1997 complaint,” Epstein’s West Palm Beach attorney, Jack Goldberger, told the Palm Beach Post in 2010.

“The cops said it’d be my word against his,” Alicia told the paper. “And since he had a lot of money, I let it go. I hadn’t thought much about it since, until I saw his picture online. And now, I want everybody to know how much of a creep he’s always been.”

CHAPTER 36

Graydon Carter: December 2002

Graydon Carter, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair, likes to get to his office early, well before the rest of his staff files in.

Most monthly magazines operate at a leisurely pace-three weeks of coming up with ideas, assigning articles, and shooting the shit in the corporate kitchen followed by one frantic week when all the actual editing gets done. But this isn’t the case at Vanity Fair, which runs hard-hitting investigative pieces alongside its glitzy celebrity profiles. There are also parties to plan and host-incredibly glamorous parties, including the annual Oscar-night bash, which is more fun and far more exclusive than the Academy Awards ceremony itself. Vanity Fair is an old, famous brand. But Carter is its public face, just as Anna Wintour is the face of Condé Nast’s iconic fashion magazine, Vogue.

One cover of Vanity Fair can turn a minor celebrity into a superstar. And a single thoroughly researched story can bring down a corporate overlord.

Carter’s easy to recognize: the pompadour of white hair, like a lion’s mane. The Santa Claus body stuffed into an impeccably tailored bespoke suit. He wears his fame lightly. But he could not be more serious about his responsibilities, which are weighing heavily on him this month. Months earlier, he’d assigned a piece to Vicky Ward, an Englishwoman who wrote frequently for Vanity Fair. He’d meant for it to be an easy assignment: Ward was pregnant with twins. She wasn’t allowed to fly. But here was a story right on her doorstep. A nice, easy profile of Jeffrey Epstein. Who was he, really? Carter knew he threw fabulous parties attended by academics, billionaires, and beautiful women. Recently he’d flown Bill Clinton to Africa. But no one seemed to know how he had made his fortune. Epstein’s story reminded the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Carter himself could have stepped out of a novel-though in his case, the author would be Horatio Alger. A Canadian college dropout who’d worked as a railroad lineman, he arrived in New York in his late twenties and commenced an astonishingly quick rise up the social and media ladders. But where Carter was open and outgoing, Epstein really was Gatsby-like-very little about him was known. Maybe, Carter thought, Ward could find out. What did Epstein do, exactly, for money? Why was he so secretive? Why were so many brilliant and powerful men drawn to him? And where did those beautiful women come from?

Almost immediately, Epstein began a campaign to discredit Ward. He prevailed upon Conrad Black, the press baron and Epstein’s Palm Beach neighbor-who was also a step-uncle of Vicky Ward’s husband-to ask Ward to drop the story. But Ward was tenacious, and what she came back with was dynamite. More interesting and much more salacious than anything Carter had imagined.

Now Carter’s staff was putting in the hours it would take to confirm all the things she’d uncovered, picking the ones they could publish and laying them all out in a narrative that would be no less explosive than the facts it contained.

CHAPTER 37

Vicky Ward: October 2002

Epstein went out of his way to spin the Vanity Fair story to his own ends, and soon after she got the assignment, Vicky Ward’s phone began to ring off the hook: calls from Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, the current head of Bear Stearns; from Les Wexner; from academics, scientists, and movers and shakers who counted Epstein among their friends.

Then there were the calls from Epstein himself. He wouldn’t go on the record, but despite the rumors he’d spread behind Ward’s back, he was happy to talk informally, even give her a tour of his Manhattan mansion and trot out stories that he had dined out on for years. By most accounts, Epstein could be extremely charming-even if it had taken Ghislaine to teach him which forks to use when-and he did his best to charm Vicky Ward. But she was not easily seduced, and she turned out to have a keen eye for Epstein’s missteps.

Over tea in his town house, she noticed, Epstein ate all the finger food that had been put out for both of them. She found it odd that the only book this supposedly brilliant man had left for her to see was a paperback by the Marquis de Sade. And then there was the call afterward from one of Epstein’s assistants-a woman Ward did not know-who told her, “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty.”

Ward is pretty, with fine English features and flowing blond hair. She was also very pregnant then, with a bad case of morning sickness. She threw up often, sometimes in public, and these clumsy advances on Epstein’s part only added to her ever-present nausea. For a man who was supposedly brilliant, he’d struck her, oddly, as not very smart.

“Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes,” she wrote. “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.”

The testimonials Epstein’s friends gave were glowing: “I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” Les Wexner told her. “Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are not in investment strategy, and, as everyone who knows Jeffrey knows, his are not in fashion and design. We frequently discuss world trends as each of us sees them.”

“I’m on my 20th book,” said Alan Dershowitz, who’d met Epstein in 1997. “The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey.”

But Ward also talked to other sources, who had their own questions and qualms about Jeffrey Epstein. Some were involved in lawsuits against him. Others had served on prestigious boards with him. One who had witnessed Epstein’s aborted stint on the board of Rockefeller University called him arrogant.

One powerful investment manager wondered about Epstein’s conspicuous absence from New York’s trading floors. “The trading desks don’t seem to know him,” he says. “It’s unusual for animals that big to not leave any footprints in the snow.”

Ward uncovered legal documents, including Epstein’s interview with the SEC, given in the wake of his departure from Bear Stearns. She visited a federal prison in Massachusetts and spoke at length with Steven Hoffenberg, who told her that Epstein had made a major mistake in taking Bill Clinton to Africa. “I always told him to stay below the radar,” Hoffenberg said. He made other accusations, about Epstein’s financial practices, which Epstein denied-and Ward knew that Hoffenberg, the Ponzi-scheme mastermind, was not to be trusted. But she did find it strange that throughout the reporting process Epstein was much less openly concerned with what she’d found out about his finances than with what she’d uncovered about his dealings with women.

Time and again, he would call and ask her: “What do you have on the girls?”

One young woman Ward talked to had been invited by Ghislaine Maxwell to attend a party at Epstein’s town house. There, the woman had noticed, female guests far outnumbered the male guests. “These were not women you’d see at Upper East Side dinners,” the woman had said. “Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.”

“This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models,” Ward wrote. “‘Some of the guests were horrified,’ the woman says.”

Another source, one who had worked with Epstein, said, “He’s reckless, and he’s gotten more so. Money does that to you. He’s breaking the oath he made to himself-that he would never do anything that would expose him in the media. Right now, in the wake of the publicity following his trip with Clinton, he must be in a very difficult place.”

CHAPTER 38

Vicky Ward: November 2002

What I had ‘on the girls,’” Ward explained in a Daily Beast article published after Epstein’s arrest, “were some remarkably brave first-person accounts. Three on-the-record stories from a family: a mother and her daughters who came from Phoenix. The oldest daughter, an artist whose character was vouchsafed to me by several sources, including the artist Eric Fischl, had told me, weeping as she sat in my living room, of how Epstein had attempted to seduce both her and, separately, her younger sister, then only 16.”

Ward had written it all down in her notes. She had crossed the t’s, dotted the i’s.

But when she called Epstein to get his response, he denied the allegations completely.

“Just the mention of a 16-year-old girl,” Epstein told her, “carries the wrong impression. I don’t see what it adds to the piece. And that makes me unhappy.”

If some sort of criminal investigation had taken place, that would have been one thing. But, at that time, no criminal investigation into Epstein’s affairs had been launched. And in the absence of an investigation, the rumors of Epstein’s dealings with very young women seemed to be just that-rumors.

Graydon Carter consulted his lawyers, his editors, and his fact-checkers. And then something odd and disturbing happened at the Condé Nast building, then in Times Square.

As usual, Carter had come into the office early. He swiped his key card in the lobby, pressed the elevator button, and arrived in the hallway outside the reception area on the twenty-first floor.

It would have been a perfect time to review Ward’s story.

Her description of Epstein’s town house-which is said to have been the largest private residence in New York City at the time-was priceless: “Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu,” she’d written. “This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet…but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior.”

The journalist had confirmed that several prominent names-Mort Zuckerman, the famous real estate mogul and publisher; Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold; and Donald Trump among them-had dined at the residence. She’d interviewed several of Epstein’s friends and ex-friends: Nobel Prize-winning scientists, financiers who worked with Epstein at Bear Stearns. She’d handled Steven Hoffenberg with aplomb. And, working with Vanity Fair’s editors, she’d figured out ways to slip even more information between the lines, in ways that would allow readers to form their own questions about Epstein’s finances.

In that respect, she’d fulfilled her original assignment perfectly.

What Carter needed to figure out was what to do with the artist, her sister, and their mother’s story. But before he could swipe his key card to let himself into the magazine’s offices, Carter saw a man standing in the reception area.

The man was motionless. He’d been waiting for Carter.

It was Jeffrey Epstein. Nonplussed, Carter invited him into his office.

Epstein denied the claims involving underage women. No criminal charges had been filed. And so Vanity Fair decided not to include the claims in Ward’s article. But, according to Ward, when her editor Doug Stumpf called her, she cried.

She’d worked so hard on the piece, gotten so stressed out that one of her twins had begun to grow more slowly than the other. On doctor’s orders, she’d been put on bed rest.

“Why?” she asked when she got to speak to Carter directly.

“He’s sensitive about the young women. And we still get to run most of the piece.”

In her notebook, Ward wrote down the rest of what Carter had said: “I believe him,” he told her. “I’m Canadian.”

But the piece that came out, in the March issue, still created a sensation. It was called “The Talented Mr. Epstein” in a sly reference to Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated suspense novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. The film adaptation, by Anthony Minghella, was still fresh in the minds of Vanity Fair’s readers. For Graydon Carter, just posing the question Is Epstein some sort of scam artist, like Ripley? had been question enough. And throughout the piece, there were ironies readers wouldn’t miss as they drew their own conclusions about Epstein’s life story. It came through clearly in the first line of the last paragraph of Ward’s 7,500-word story: “Many people comment there is something innocent, almost childlike about Jeffrey Epstein.”

In context, the word innocent was rather ironic-so much so that it almost became its own opposite.

CHAPTER 39

Todd Meister: June 2015

Harry Cipriani, on Fifth Avenue, is a New York institution. The restaurant began its life as an American outpost of Harry’s Bar-which was itself a famous American outpost in Venice. Located inside the Sherry-Netherland hotel, it’s a theme restaurant-the theme being money. And today, a hedge-fund manager named Todd Meister is talking about a very wealthy man-Jeffrey Epstein-whom he knows through his father, Epstein’s sometime friend Bob Meister.

“I’ve known Jeffrey since I was nineteen,” Meister says. “So let me tell you what I know-whatever everyone knows and everybody else says. First off, he’s no billionaire. Second off-and here’s why-he has no clue how to invest. He has people do that for him.”

Meister knows how to invest. He does it for other people and, as the son of a superrich father, for himself. He also knows about the good life. Parties in Vegas; weekends in the Hamptons; affairs with beautiful women that end up getting splashed all over the tabloids.

It makes sense that, once upon a time, he and Epstein would have gotten along.

“As for the girls,” Meister says, “that was just business. He’d seat them strategically at client dinners. When he went to the movies, he’d take three or four girls with him. They’d take turns massaging his back, arms, and legs.”

According to Meister, Epstein used to boast that he “liked to go into insane asylums because he liked to fuck crazy women.”

“Who knows if it’s true?” Meister adds. “But I’m telling you, he used to say it.”

From time to time, Epstein’s friends and acquaintances would see sides of Epstein that he’d grown much less shy about sharing.

Epstein encouraged Alan Dershowitz to invest with a prominent hedge-fund manager named Orin Kramer. Dershowitz did, and he made a lot of money at first. But in 2008, the fund Dershowitz had invested in lost a substantial amount. Afterward, according to a former associate of Epstein’s, Epstein appeared in Kramer’s midtown Manhattan office. There, sources say, he told Kramer: “It’s very much in your interest to make Alan Dershowitz whole.”

Epstein’s intervention worked, and Dershowitz recovered his money.

To people who’d known Epstein back in the 1980s, this kind of behavior was out of character. But the thing about Epstein was that you never could figure him out. One minute he was charming. The most charming man you’d ever meet. The next he was snarl, threat, and bluster. Something didn’t add up. So you’d run the numbers: this many parties, that many women. Even with the connection to Victoria’s Secret, the women didn’t add up, either.

Throw in the modeling agency, it makes more sense. Then you plug in the parties. The scene brings Eyes Wide Shut to mind. But the thing is, Eyes Wide Shut only works in the shadows. For Epstein, getting on that plane with Clinton was more like a moment in Caddyshack-the one in which the groundhog peeks out from his hole in the golf course. From there on in, Jeffrey Epstein was like the mole in a game of whack-a-mole. It was only a matter of time before he’d be caught. But the question you had to ask yourself was, are people like Epstein born without morals? Or are their morals like snakeskin-just something they shed (along with all the other basic, day-to-day concerns that everyday working people have) as they make their way into that Eyes Wide Shut world?

Todd Meister, who was married to Nicky Hilton and stole the heiress Samantha Boardman away from Condé Nast’s former editorial director James Truman, should know. He wonders out loud:

“How does a yutz like Epstein get beautiful women?”

At Harry Cipriani, the question lingers in the air.