New York’s elite are starting to regret fawning over Epstein after he was exposed as a paedophile as cache of documents reveal hundreds of meetings, glittering invitations and flights on private jet
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When Jeffrey Epstein visited Bard College in Red Hook, New York state, he insisted on doing so in style. His helicopter would land at the prestigious university overlooking the Hudson River and he’d disembark surrounded by an entourage of attractive young women.
And perhaps that was just as well for the largely female student population — although the College president, Leon Botstein, insists they had ‘security ready . . . he did not have any free access to anybody’.
Mr Botstein, a celebrated Swiss-American conductor who invited Epstein to a classical concert and an opera at Bard, has now been named in a shocking new trove of emails and documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal — along with other top academics, world leaders, diplomats, business tycoons, Oscar-winning directors and even the current head of the CIA.
These papers, which include Epstein’s diary schedules, reveal the astonishing extent to which America’s great and good cynically continued to fawn over the paedophile in the years after he had admitted sex offences involving a child and had been publicly accused of abusing scores more girls as young as 14 years old.
How on earth, one might ask, could Mr Botstein invite such a man as his guest of honour?
New York’s elite are starting to regret fawning over Jeffery Epstein after he was exposed as a paedophile as cache of documents reveal hundreds of meetings
At Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011, from left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers;Mr. Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder; and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science advise
These papers, which include Epstein’s diary schedules, reveal the astonishing extent to which America’s great and good cynically continued to fawn over the paedophile in the years after he had admitted sex offences involving a child
He had also been publicly accused of abusing scores more girls as young as 14 years old
‘We believe in rehabilitation,’ he has explained. Like many others, it might be added, he also believed in the power of the chequebook and hoped for sizeable donations to boost the college coffers.
Unfortunately for Bard College though, the super-wealthy financier, whom Mr Botstein now says he found ‘odd and arrogant’, was also ‘sadistic’ — prone to dangling the promise of cash that he never ended up donating.
That may have been particularly disappointing for the college president who invested a lot of time in Epstein. In addition to the two visits to the campus, the pair had around two dozen meetings over four years, mostly at Epstein’s New York mansion — reputedly the biggest private home in the city — following his donation of 66 laptops to New York high schools run by Bard College.
As the new documents show, Mr Botstein is hardly alone in deeply regretting his connection with America’s most notorious sex offender during the years he sought to launder his soiled reputation in U.S. high society, by fostering a reputation as a philanthropist and sponsor of the arts and sciences.
Far from being shunned in disgrace, Epstein was so successful that on a single day in September 2014, the new documents show, he was scheduled to meet with four of America’s richest men, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Also meeting Epstein separately that day were the former chief lawyer in Barack Obama’s White House, a leading billionaire philanthrophy expert and Bard’s Mr Botstein.
This was eight years after Epstein was first publicly accused of abusing children, immediately prompting several politicians to return donations from him. And six years after he admitted soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in Palm Beach, Florida in a scandalously lenient deal that involved his spending just 13 months in a work-release programme.
Even Virginia Giuffre’s shattering allegations that Epstein had farmed her out for underage sex to Prince Andrew (accusations he denies) were three years old by then.
Was it really too much to expect of the rich, influential and well-connected types who flocked around Epstein to go elsewhere for the cash, counsel and company they sought from him?
Far from being shunned in disgrace, Epstein was so successful that on a single day in September 2014, the new documents show, he was scheduled to meet with four of America’s richest men, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates
Even Virginia Giuffre’s shattering allegations that Epstein had farmed her out for underage sex to Prince Andrew (accusations he denies) were three years old by then
Apparently so. The people associating with him regularly in the years running up to 2019, when he was arrested in New York on sex-trafficking charges, range from actor and director Woody Allen, a regular dinner guest and film-going companion, to Larry Summers, Barack Obama’s ex-Treasury Secretary and the former President of Harvard University.
The documents reveal that even the supposedly high-minded academic Noam Chomsky, scourge of capitalism and intellectual darling of the Left, was meeting Epstein for dinner and other meetings, and was offered a seat on the paedophile’s notorious private jet, nicknamed the ‘Lolita Express’. There is no suggestion that Chomsky was involved in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.
In fact, embarrassingly for the US. Left — which is already smarting from Epstein’s history as a generous Democrat party donor — nearly everyone who still swarmed enthusiastically around Epstein hailed from that side of America’s political divide.
Others now squirming with embarrassment over their Epstein links are billionaire media baron Mort Zuckerman, tech entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and, perhaps most astonishingly, the current director of the CIA, William Burns. There was also ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack.
Former Barclays boss Jes Staley has already joined Prince Andrew in seeing his career and reputation destroyed by his long association with Epstein,
Nearly four years after Epstein died by his own hand in a New York jail cell, the feeling persists that the scandal is far from over — though many of those named will wish that it were.
There may be even more to be revealed about the high-powered friends he flew on his private jet and invited to his various multi-million-dollar homes, where the discovery of secret recording devices suggests he may have been blackmailing some of them.
Former Barclays boss Jes Staley has already joined Prince Andrew in seeing his career and reputation destroyed by his long association with Epstein, while Bill Gates’s friendship with Epstein was reportedly a factor in his wife Melinda’s decision to divorce him in 2021.
Last week a New York judge ruled that allegations Staley was aware of Epstein’s sexual offences could support a claim for damages by the latter’s alleged victims against JPMorgan, the US bank where he Staley worked and which bankrolled Epstein for years as a prized customer. Staley has himself now been accused of sexually abusing a young woman at Epstein’s Virgin Islands retreat. (Staley and JPMorgan deny any wrongdoing).
Will others soon follow Staley?
Woody Allen is among those long known to have been a friend of Epstein in those final years. He has himself been dogged by allegations (which he denies and which never resulted in charges) that he molested his seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan.
Allen was identified in 2010 as one of a group of celebrities who went to Epstein’s New York home to help celebrate Prince Andrew’s birthday. In 2013, the financier and the film-maker, who lived near each other in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, were photographed out walking together, a witness describing Epstein as ‘hugging him and talking close to his ear’.
That apparent intimacy is reflected in the new documents which show they were scheduled to get together nearly every month in 2014 and 2015. Epstein invited Allen to ‘dozens’ of dinners at his New York mansion. Always a punctilious host to those he wanted to impress, Epstein had his staff order flourless chocolate cakes and Beck’s beer specially for Allen.
In late 2012, Allen’s assistant sent a note to an Epstein minion saying: ‘Woody was wondering if Jeffrey would be interested in watching his new film either today or tomorrow?’
Two years later, Allen was scheduled to give lessons on film editing chez Epstein to a group of guests invited to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The pair also arranged visits to the studio of artist Jeff Koons in 2013 and Sotheby’s New York auction house in 2017.
Woody Allen is among those long known to have been a friend of Epstein in those final years
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers was another who remained friends with Epstein long after others decided to give him a wide berth
A spokesman for Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, admitted they were ‘often’ invited for dinner with Epstein but stressed that there were always other guests. ‘Woody never had a business meeting with Epstein and not once spent time with him without Soon-Yi also being present,’ the spokesman added.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers was another who remained friends with Epstein long after others decided to give him a wide berth. Epstein, who liked people to think he attended America’s most famous university, donated millions of dollars to Harvard when Summers was its president from 2001 to 2006. But following his conviction in 2008, the university decided to stop accepting any more donations.
Summers, who would later become Barack Obama’s top economic expert, had no such reservations and continued to meet Epstein for dinner, even asking for financial advice when he was trying to raise $1 million so that his wife, Elisa New, could make a TV series about teacher training. Emails show they agreed to discuss the matter over dinner at a small restaurant near Harvard. Two years later, a charity linked to Epstein donated $110,000 to Ms New’s charity.
Summers, who caused outrage in 2005 by suggesting women were innately inferior to men in maths and science, was hardly the only senior Washington insider to court Epstein.
William Burns, now Director of the CIA, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014 alone when he was Deputy Secretary of State, documents show. One of the get-togethers took place at Epstein’s Manhattan home.
Burns may now run America’s main intelligence agency but his own information-gathering appears to have been abysmal: a CIA spokesman told the Journal that Burns ‘did not know anything about [Epstein] other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector’.
Burns says he approached Epstein for advice on finding a job in the private sector. ‘They had no relationship,’ according to the CIA spokesman.
READ MORE: Retired cop who once shared cell with Jeffrey Epstein and alerted guards to his failed suicide attempt in July 2019 – weeks before he killed himself – is convicted of murdering four men
Others can hardly make the same claim, having been sufficiently well-known to Epstein that he could alert his staff to their food preferences. Terje Rod-Larsen, a Norwegian diplomat who helped negotiate the 1990s Arab-Israeli peace process known as the Oslo Accords, was one of the guests for Woody Allen’s masterclass on Psycho in 2014. When he visited Epstein’s New York home, staff always had cucumbers to hand for his gin.
The litany of distinguished visitors is too extensive to name them all here. But among them was Kathryn Reummler, once Barack Obama’s chief White House lawyer, who Epstein minions knew had a liking for avocado sushi rolls.
She had at least three dozen meetings with Epstein in the years after she left the White House in 2014. Records show that Epstein visited apartments she was considering buying and once asked an assistant to try to upgrade her airline ticket to first class.
Ms Reummler, 52, is one of the very few women to feature in the new documents. And while Epstein’s male associates have insisted they saw nothing untoward between him and his legion of young female assistants, Epstein was certainly worried about what Ms Reummler would think of them. He and his staff discussed whether she would be ‘uncomfortable’ with their presence and he told at least one of them to stay away.
Ms Reummler, who ironically now oversees ‘reputational risk’ at bankers Goldman Sachs, said through the bank that she had a ‘professional relationship’ with Epstein and many of their meetings were about a mutual client.
Then there was Ariane de Rothschild, a senior member of the famous banking dynasty. She insists she was completely in the dark about his notoriety.
She says she met Epstein during the course of her normal duties at the bank, which paid one of his companies $25 million for business services. However, the newly-discovered papers show she also helped him find a new assistant and bought nearly $1 million worth of auction items on his behalf in 2014 and 2015.
Epstein didn’t just entertain in New York. Tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, co-founder of social media service LinkedIn, stayed at Epstein’s notorious Caribbean home, dubbed ‘paedophile island’, in 2014 but insisted he went because he was trying to raise funds for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
‘It gnaws me that, by lending my association, I helped his reputation, and thus delayed justice for his survivors,’ he now frets.
Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, met Epstein in 2003 through Israeli statesman Shimon Peres. According to the Journal, he visited Epstein about 30 times between 2013 and 2017 at his homes in New York and Palm Beach, and used Epstein’s private jet with his wife at least twice. From December 2015, they met every month for nearly a year.
Despite the widely known accusations against him, Epstein appears to have succeeded in gaining for his New York mansion a reputation as an intellectual salon. Barak said he met interesting people there, and they would discuss politics and other topics. ‘In retrospect, [Epstein] seems to be a terrible version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but at the time seemed to be an intelligent person, socially well-connected and of wide areas of interest, from science to geopolitics,’ he said.
‘I never participated in any party or any other improper event around [Epstein], and never met him with girls or minors, or even adult women in improper context or behaviour.’
Another regular was Barnaby Marsh, who advises the rich on philanthropy and met Epstein around two dozen times, often at breakfasts. He said Epstein would freely discuss his time in jail. ‘So many of these billionaires knew him. Nobody ever said ‘Watch out for him’,’ he told the Journal.
Academic and author Noam Chomsky turned defensive when asked by the Journal about his relationship with Epstein: his first response was that ‘it is none of your business’.
He later admitted they met ‘occasionally’ to discuss issues such as Palestine and neuroscience. Epstein donated at least $850,000 to Chomsky’s university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2002 and 2017, and — records show — in 2015, had planned to fly Chomsky and his wife down to New York for dinner with him and Woody Allen.
Chomsky, now 94, said that at the time of his meetings ‘what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.’
A cynical response, maybe — but an honest one at least. Those others now expressing regret at having feted an appalling sexual predator seem mainly sorry for themselves.
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