Jeffrey Epstein

1953-2019

Who Was Jeffrey Epstein?

Jeffrey Epstein was a New York-based financier with high-profile ties to the world’s ultra-wealthy and powerful. Accused of sexually abusing many underage girls, Epstein was finally caught and charged for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida in 2008 and became a registered sex offender. Of his 18-month prison sentence, he served 13 months. In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again—this time on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors. While awaiting trial, he was found dead in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. The medical examiner concluded his death was by suicide, but a separate investigation prompted by Epstein’s family suggests he may have been murdered.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Jeffrey Epstein
BORN: January 20, 1953
DIED: August 10, 2019
BIRTHPLACE: Brooklyn, New York
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Early Life

Jeffrey Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Pauline, worked part-time as a school aide, and his father, Seymour, was a groundskeeper for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Epstein, along with his younger brother Mark, were raised in a middle-class environment.

Remarkably bright, Epstein skipped two grades and graduated from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School at the age of 16. Although he enrolled at Cooper Union and later at New York University in the early 1970s, he never received degrees at either school.

Still, Epstein got a job teaching calculus and physics at the Dalton School, an Upper East Side prep school, in 1974. However, his employment was short-lived—he was fired two years later for “poor performance.”

Finance Career

Before Epstein left his teaching job at the Dalton School, he was able to make an important connection with one of his student’s parents: Alan Greenberg, the CEO of Bear Stearns. Impressed by Epstein’s acuity with numbers, Greenberg gave him an assistant job at Bear Stearns in 1976, and from there, Epstein quickly climbed the ladder, eventually advising some of the company’s wealthiest clients.

In 1981, Epstein left Bear Stearns and established his own financial consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group Inc., in which he helped clients recover embezzled money and also assisted clients who were embezzlers. It was around this time, he began telling friends and colleagues that he worked as an intelligence agent, a claim that has never been verified. However, his association with powerful businessmen who did deals with a variety of governments, as well as his extensive travels overseas in the mid-1980s, all pointed to the possibility that his claim could be true.

In 1987, Epstein began consulting for a collection agency called Tower Financial Corporation, which ended up being a half a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Epstein was said to be one of the masterminds behind the scheme, but he ended up getting away unscathed, leaving Tower a few years before it fell apart in 1993.

In 1988, Epstein set up J. Epstein & Company (which would later be renamed Financial Trust Company), a financial management firm that purportedly only served billionaires. It was during this time he became the financial advisor to billionaire Leslie Wexner, who was the CEO of L Brands and Victoria’s Secret. Starting in the mid-1990s, he moved his company to the U.S. Virgin Islands to avoid paying taxes.

In the early 2000s, Epstein expanded his portfolio to include financing media companies, developing securities funding, and investing in hedge funds and startups. He also created his own nonprofit, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, to donate millions to institutions like Harvard University. To this day, no one has uncovered the various sources of his exceptional wealth.

Net Worth and Famous Friends

With his net worth being touted in the billions (Forbes disputes this), Epstein lived a jet setter’s life and mingled with the world’s elite, which included former Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, actor Kevin Spacey, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew—the last of whom was mired in controversy for years after a young woman (who was procured by Epstein) told the media she was forced to have sexual relations multiple times with the prince when she was a teenager, starting in 1999. Andrew, who stepped back from royal duties in 2019, paid a settlement to his accuser in 2022.

Epstein had reportedly provided underage girls and young women to his powerful friends and installed vast surveillance systems throughout his properties in New York, Palm Beach, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to record their sexual activities as a means of blackmail.

Island

With his business operations set up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Epstein bought an adjacent 72-acre island called Little St. James for just shy of $8 million in 1998. It is alleged that this is where he operated his sex trafficking activities and where most of his pedophilic acts occurred. Some of the youngest girls who were trafficked onto the island were said to be 12 years old.

Baby Ranch

A believer in eugenics and transhumanism, Epstein bought a ranch near Stanley, New Mexico, where he intended to “seed the human race with his DNA” by inseminating at least 20 women, so reported by an August 2019 article in the New York Times.

Other unconventional ideas Epstein adopted included his desire to freeze his head and penis, believing that genetic technology could bring them back to life someday.

Conviction and Arrests

In 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl told authorities in Palm Beach, Florida, that Epstein had sexually abused their daughter. Although the investigation eventually uncovered dozens of young women and minors who had allegedly been sexually abused by Epstein, he was ultimately charged on just two counts: soliciting a minor for prostitution and procuring minors for prostitution.

Cutting a “sweetheart deal” with Florida authorities, Epstein agreed to plead guilty to the felony prostitution charges. In 2008, he served 13 months of his 18-month sentence in prison with a generous work release and was ordered to pay three dozen of his victims in restitution and register his name on the sex offender rolls.

It was later revealed that Alexander Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida at the time, felt he had no choice but to offer the lenient deal to Epstein, because according to Acosta, he was told the financier was secretly working for the government.

However, Epstein wasn’t untouchable. His luck ran out in July 2019 when authorities in Florida arrested him for suspicion of sex trafficking minors. Pleading not guilty, he was denied bail and sent to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City to await trial.

Death and Investigations

On July 23, 2019, Epstein was discovered with neck injuries in his cell and was placed on suicide watch. Less than three weeks later, Epstein’s body was discovered in his jail cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center on the morning of August 10, 2019.

The circumstances surrounding his death were arguably suspicious: The guards had reportedly fallen asleep while on duty and failed to check on Epstein at the appointed times, and the cameras monitoring his jail cell were not working.

The New York City medical examiner concluded Epstein died by suicide from hanging. Autopsy results showed that various neck bones were broken and among them, the hyoid bone, which is more commonly broken in homicidal strangulation cases.

Dissatisfied with the circumstances that led to the medical examiner’s conclusion, Esptein’s family hired their own pathologist who believed the evidence suggested he was more likely murdered. However, according to a June 2023 report, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General didn’t find any evidence of foul play in Epstein’s death, though it did conclude the prison staff’s “numerous and serious failures” included neglecting safety protocols that left Epstein unmonitored for hours beginning the evening before he was found dead. An FBI investigation also didn’t turn up any evidence that Epstein’s death was a crime.

Relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in March 2005

Although Epstein was never married, he had a longtime relationship with British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. On July 2, 2020, the FBI arrested Maxwell in Bradford, New Hampshire. She was charged with six counts including transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and perjury. “Maxwell enticed minor girls, got them to trust her, then delivered them into the trap that she and Epstein had set for them,” Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said. She pleaded not guilty and was denied bail later that month.

In December 2021, a jury unanimously found Maxwell guilty on five of the six counts. She is currently serving a 20-year sentence in Tallahassee, Florida and was fined $750,000.

Documentaries: “Filthy Rich” and “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein”

In May 2020, Netflix released the four-hour documentary series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which examines the lengthy list of alleged misdeeds and conspiracy theories surrounding the financier and features interviews with many of his accusers. According to director Lisa Bryant, filming began in 2018, with the project taking on additional urgency following Epstein’s arrest and death the following summer.

“It really exposes how the American justice system is broken, and it was really built for power and political gain,” Bryant told EW. “We wanted people to see that and be angry about it, and hopefully that can provoke change.”

Three months later, in August 2020, Lifetime’s two-night special Surviving Jeffrey Epstein investigated the billionaire New York financier alleged to have used his connections to the rich and famous to shield his predatory behavior with young girls. Revealing how Epstein set up a pseudo-sexual Ponzi scheme to bring in underaged girls, the doc delved into the aftermath the survivors are experiencing with no justice to be served.

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