Jeffrey Epstein
- Died:
- August 10, 2019, Manhattan (aged 66)
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Jeffrey Epstein (born January 20, 1953, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died August 10, 2019, Manhattan) was an American serial sex trafficker, pedophile, and financier. Through his successful financial career, Epstein became a multimillionaire and developed a social circle that included extremely wealthy individuals, prominent politicians, and even royalty. He was eventually accused of running a vast human-trafficking operation in which he and coconspirators procured women and girls for sex with himself and his elite associates. Epstein died while jailed and awaiting a federal sex-trafficking trial. Although his death was officially ruled a suicide, the circumstances surrounding it have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories.
Epstein was the first of two children born to Paula Epstein (née Stolofsky) and Seymour Epstein, who were themselves children of Jewish immigrants. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked as a groundskeeper and gardener for the New York City Parks Department. The family lived in a middle-class neighborhood of Brooklyn known as Sea Gate, situated on the western shore of Coney Island. Epstein was a talented student who excelled in mathematics. He was also a skilled pianist. He attended Lafayette High School in Gravesend, Brooklyn, whose student body was mostly Italian American. It is thought that Epstein may have faced some anti-Semitism during his time there. He graduated in 1969, having skipped two grades. Later that year he enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he studied until 1971, when he transferred to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU). He studied at NYU for three years but did not graduate.
In 1974, despite not having received a degree, Epstein began teaching physics and mathematics at the private Dalton School in Manhattan, many of whose students belonged to some of the wealthiest families in the country. During his tenure at Dalton, Epstein behaved inappropriately, according to some former students. For example, he allegedly appeared at a party for high-school students, where he was overattentive toward females—though he was not accused of sexual abuse at the time. During a parent-teacher conference in 1976 Epstein so impressed a student’s father with his intelligence that the parent referred Epstein to Alan (“Ace”) Greenberg, then the CEO of the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns and also a Dalton parent. Following the 1975–76 school year, Epstein was dismissed from his position at Dalton after an evaluation found that his teaching skills had not improved. He began working at Bear Stearns soon afterward.
In 1980, four years after joining Bear Stearns, Epstein was made a limited partner. In 1981, however, he left the company in order to run his own business. About this time, Epstein’s personal financial situation, as well as his business practices, became increasingly murky. Some of his associates during the 1980s stated that he referred to himself as a “bounty hunter” who recovered stolen money for the ultra-wealthy. In 1987 Epstein began working with Towers Financial Corporation executive Steven J. Hoffenberg. The two attempted—but mostly failed—in their attempts at corporate takeovers. In 1988 Epstein founded J. Epstein & Company, a consulting firm that provided money-management services to individuals with a net worth of more than $1 billion. His major client for some 20 years was the billionaire retail magnate Leslie H. Wexner. Epstein came to manage much of Wexner’s holdings and benefited enormously as a result.
In the 1990s Epstein began running his business from the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands—a tax haven—where he owned the nearby small island of Little St. James. (He later purchased another island in the same vicinity, Great St. James.) He also owned what was then the largest private mansion in Manhattan, as well as properties in Palm Beach, Florida; Paris; and New Mexico. It was said that Epstein used hidden cameras at his Manhattan residence to record sex acts performed by his wealthy associates, probably for blackmail purposes. He also kept a log of those who traveled on his private jet, which locals in the Virgin Islands referred to as the “Lolita Express” (in reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita [1955], whose antihero is a middle-aged man who obsessively lusts after very young girls). Among the persons listed were former U.S. president Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, the prominent attorney and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew, duke of York, who was eventually accused of repeatedly having sex with one of Epstein’s underage victims.
In Palm Beach in 2005 Epstein was first accused of sexual abuse. Police were alerted by a woman who claimed that her stepdaughter had been abused by a wealthy man named Jeff. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was soon involved. Further accusations began to surface, and, by the time U.S. attorney (and later secretary of labor under President Trump) Alexander Acosta began to put together a criminal case, the number of alleged victims had reached about 40. Eventually, despite a wealth of evidence, the government entered a plea deal in 2008 that saw Epstein serve only 13 months in prison with a provision allowing him to work in his Palm Beach office six days a week. Acosta later stated that the deal was lenient because intelligence officials had told him to “back off” Epstein at the time, signaling that the money manager was of some importance to another federal case. A number of civil claims against Epstein were filed in the years after the plea deal. In 2023 the banks JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank AG were accused in civil suits of knowingly enabling Epstein to commit sex crimes.
In 2018 an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald identified some 80 survivors of sexual abuse by Epstein or his associates. The exposé led to renewed examinations of the sex-crime allegations against Epstein. In 2019 a second criminal case was brought against him. He was arrested in July in New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport on charges of sex trafficking and held without bail. Later that month Epstein was found in his Manhattan jail cell with injuries consistent with attempted suicide by hanging. Less than a week later, however, he was taken off suicide watch. On the eve of Epstein’s death, his cellmate was removed but not replaced, and for approximately three hours Epstein was not checked on by guards, in violation of the jail’s protocol. In addition, cameras outside the cell apparently malfunctioned.
Although the official state autopsy ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, the disgraced magnate’s lawyers have argued that evidence points to murder. His death and the circumstances surrounding it have been the subject of much conjecture. In the aftermath of his death, his long-term partner Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of aiding Epstein in the procurement and sexual abuse of young girls.