A guided tour of the presidents, pundits, CEOs, cosmologists, and cosmopolites captured in Jeffrey Epstein’s “little black book”
Epstein in his townhouse in 2015. Photo: Christopher Anderson for New York Magazine Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity.
This project is meant to catalogue how Epstein’s secure footing in elite spheres helped hide his crimes. It includes influential names listed in his black book, people he flew, funded, and schmoozed, along with others whose connections to him have drawn renewed attention. Certainly, not everyone cited here knew of everything he was up to; Malcolm Gladwell told New York, “I don’t remember much except being baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.
Bannon, Steve: Former White House chief strategist. In August 2018, the New York Post reported that Bannon had been seen entering Epstein’s townhouse.
Bolkiah, Hassanal: Sultan of Brunei. Epstein had at least one meeting with the sultan when he traveled to Brunei in 2002 with Bill Clinton. Bolkiah and his brother are famous for their lavish spending, including a collection of 2,500 cars and a $1.5 billion palace. Bolkiah was once sued by Miss USA 1997, who claimed she had been held as a sex slave. The suit was dismissed on the grounds that Bolkiah had sovereign immunity. Bonomi, Andrea: Italian businessman. Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Epstein was a regular contributor, and his plane — to judge from the photographs, at least — was an especially appealing way for other contributors to get to ted. They could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance ateliers.
Burkle, Ron: Supermarket magnate. Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log. Carter, Graydon: Former editor of Vanity Fair. According to journalist Vicky Ward, he killed portions of a 2003 story that accused Epstein of pedophilia after an office visit from Epstein. “I didn’t invent the system. I just lived by the system,” he said when The New York Times Magazine questioned him about the story last week.Allegedly the former girlfriend of Prince Andrew.Has hosted Prince William and Kate Middleton at his villa in Mustique.
We know, of course, because the shadow of Clinton’s sexual history and his associations with other men who have terrible legacies of sexually inappropriate-to-criminal behavior have for decades hung like a greasy and unscrubbable film over the Democratic Party he once led. Clinton palled around not just with Epstein but with Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein and Trump himself.
Meanwhile, how much energy and time have been spent circling round this man and how we’ve felt about him, when in fact his behaviors were symptomatic of far broader and more damaging assumptions about men, power, and access to — as Trump has so memorably voiced it — pussies? I try sometimes to imagine a contemporary Democratic Party without Bill Clinton in its recent past — yes, of course, from a policy perspective, but also simply from a personal one.
Couric, Katie: Journalist. Among those who attended a dinner at Epstein’s townhouse for Prince Andrew in 2010. d’Arenberg, Prince Pierre: Royal. Name found in Epstein’s black book. Dershowitz visited Epstein’s mansions in New York and Palm Beach and occasionally accompanied him on his private plane. He says these trips were family oriented. Once, Epstein lent him the Palm Beach home so he could attend a granddaughter’s soccer tournament. Another time, he and his nephew flew down to watch a space launch with another Epstein connection, a top NASA official.
Today, Dershowitz claims he and Epstein were never really even friends, despite their proximity. “He was an acquaintance,” he says. “In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t taken the case, but I didn’t see a problem with taking the case. We didn’t have a close personal relationship.” —Andrew Rice Dickinson, Janice: Model, actress, TV personality. Name found in Epstein’s black book.
Fekkai, Frédéric: Celebrity hairstylist. Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log. Once a lawyer in the Clinton White House, Ginsberg joined George, then News Corp., then Time Warner. He has also done pro bono speechwriting for Benjamin Netanyahu and now works for SoftBank, a Japanese investment company with close ties to the Saudi government.
Haskell, Nikki: Socialite. Epstein dated Haskell, one of Donald Trump’s closest friends. “Jeffrey didn’t talk about his past, although he claimed to have been a concert pianist,” Haskell told the Daily Mail in 1992. “He told me he was a spy hired by corporations to find major amounts of money which had been embezzled.”
Hoffenberg still owes his victims some $1 billion in restitution, and in 2016 he sued Epstein to recover some of the money. Last year, two victims brought a suit against Epstein making the same claims as Hoffenberg but voluntarily dismissed the suit two months later. In a world where most women still work for men, and where their jobs are overwhelmingly in the “service” or “caring” professions, it should surprise no one that Epstein’s procurers, schedulers, fixers, and enablers were female.
Khashoggi, Adnan: Saudi Arabian man of mystery. To bolster their argument that private-jet owner Epstein is a massive flight risk, SDNY prosecutors produced an expired Austrian passport under an alias that listed Saudi Arabia as Epstein’s primary country of residence. His lawyers claim the fake ID was for the “personal protection” of “an affluent member of the Jewish faith” traveling in the Middle East, but it could also point to one of his more secretive income sources.
Kissinger, Nancy: Philanthropist. Epstein and Kissinger served on the Rockefeller University board alongside Nobel laureate Joseph Goldstein, socialite Brooke Astor, and Texas billionaire Robert Bass. Lefkowitz, Jay: Attorney for Epstein Lefkowitz negotiated the terms of Epstein’s negligently lenient plea deal with his former Kirkland & Ellis colleague Alexander Acosta. Now at Columbia Law, he served in both Bush administrations, as director of Cabinet affairs for H.W. and deputy executive secretary to the Domestic Policy Council and special envoy for human rights in North Korea for W. —Matt Stieb Maxwell, Ghislaine: Epstein’s ex turned right-hand woman.
“Every pretty girl in New York, in those days, Ghislaine would invite to Jeffrey’s,” said Euan Rellie, an investment banker and social fixture who has known Maxwell for years and who, along with his wife, the author and socialite Lucy Sykes, was a fellow guest at a dinner for Prince Andrew at Epstein’s townhouse in the early aughts. Maxwell and Epstein had been attached, but she was “now an employee of his, as I understood it,” Rellie said.
Maxwell arrived in New York in the early ’90s, on the cusp of her 30th birthday. English-born and poshly educated, she was the favorite daughter of Robert Maxwell, the English media mogul, whose holdings included newspapers, notably the tabloid Daily Mirror in London, and the Macmillan publishing house in the U.S.
From the New York social world, she has vanished. “I have not seen her in a zillion years,” one acquaintance said. The party photos dried up in 2016. Her 65th Street townhouse was sold for just over $15 million that year. Where is she now? One social-watcher guessed the islands; others think Europe. She incorporated a company — Ellmax, a play on her name — in the U.K., and TerraMar’s last two years of tax filings listed the address of an accounting firm near Boston.
Pastrana Arango, Andrés: Former Colombian president. Name found in Epstein’s black book and on Epstein’s private jet log. Perelman, Ronald: Revlon chairman. Name found in Epstein’s black book. Former business partner of Marc Rich , with whom he paired on deals in the Soviet Union before the fall of communism.
You learn things answering phones, and in the spring of 2005, answering Charlie Rose’s phone at his PBS show, you would learn that his friend Jeffrey Epstein had some recommendations to make for whom Rose ought to hire as his next assistant. Written call logs from 2005 and 2006 show Epstein and his own assistant calling dozens of times, making plans for lunch and tea in Manhattan or to try to meet up in Paris. Epstein also called with a total of five women’s names and phone numbers.
It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo. —Jonathan Chait
It’s not just the denial in the face of evidence that, yes, he really did hang out with the guy that makes this set of film so classically Trumpian. The tape distills Trump to a certain essence: In this frame, he dances, snapping his fingers and spinning, surrounded by women — but profoundly alone, backing off and avoiding eye contact the second a woman moves in to dance with him. In another frame, he smiles with self-satisfaction as a crowd of women chants his name.
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