2rafa
1d ago
Because there certainly was enough evidence to convict him of interstate trafficking of a minor for sex (with himself), which is the killer charge in all of these cases and which Epstein’s lawyers would have told him guaranteed he was going to die in jail given the salacious public attention to the case, the fact that federal sentences don’t have more than a small reduction for good behavior / parole, and grandstanding by the prosecutors on the case.
He had lived like a billionaire for 30 years, private jets, satisfying his sex addiction with teenage models, doing whatever he wanted, and now faced not merely the prospect but the certainty of spending the rest of his life in jail - and not only in jail but in jail as a chomo, the worst of the worst, where (like Derek Chauvin) it was inevitable at some point that the guards would turn a blind eye and he’d get beaten, stabbed and so on (maybe even sexually violated) by other inmates.
Many people would kill themselves in that circumstance. It’s one of the least suspicious cases of suicidal tendency imaginable. If someone in that circumstance told me they were thinking of killing themselves I would literally think “yeah, that’s unsurprising”. It’s common for people facing charges like this who are out on bail to kill themselves. As for how he did it, he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.
I have a hard time believing there's any actually damning evidence against Trump or really anyone, or else someone would have leaked something by now. It's been a big issue for years, multiple administrations.
The common retort is that there’s stuff on Bill Clinton as well as Trump so they can’t. But this is a bad argument because
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They could just have published the Trump stuff and conveniently redacted the Bill Clinton stuff if they had wanted to.
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I really don’t think Bill’s grip on the party is so strong that they wouldn’t throw him under the bus to attack Trump if necessary.
2rafa
1d ago
If it was Maxwell and the lynchpin of so many online conspiracy theories, why can’t the powers that be (which surely have access to Reddit or - at worst - Ghislaine’s recovery email) just log in as her and post something?
And besides, you again ignore the entire point. In one of the most expensive intelligence operations in modern history, the most banal, easiest, entry level bulk reposting of links (which would have been botted even back then) was supposedly manually done by a middle aged ultra-rich heiress who knew many of the most powerful people in the world and who was moonlighting as a Reddit powermod and farming karma by reposting (in 99.9% of cases) uncontroversial news stories, the kind of thing any third world teen on a gig work site would have done for $3 an hour and which, in the most sensitive cases, would have been done by 22 year old junior intelligence analysts on their first job.
“Sorry, Your Royal Highness, I’m going to have to interrupt our drinks so I can repost an article about an avalanche in Spain on Reddit for 500 karma because the huge intelligence operation I work for values me not for my contacts and charisma but because I can press submit on m.reddit.com several dozen times a day, a skill nobody else you have access to can do”?
2rafa
1d ago
It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.
This is incorrect, Epstein joined Dalton 3-4 months after Barr left (which I believe may even have been before Epstein dropped out of NYU) and there’s no evidence Barr would have had anything to do with his hiring.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
Hoffenberg was quoting Epstein, whom he knew since this would have been in late 1992 / early 1993 before the Towers Financial collapse. Your friend asks who how you’re dating an infamous tycoon and press baron’s daughter, saying that her father told you to look after her before his mysterious death is peak Epstein, peak drama, peak bullshit, just like telling them you were personally centrally involved in Iran Contra which he was also known to do.
Ghislaine’s friends at the time, not to mention her brothers (who were very close to her and to their father, and to whom he had actually entrusted her care) first heard of Jeffrey after she moved to NYC full-time and introduced him as her new man. Epstein’s narrative that Maxwell senior introduced him (a sleazy New York conman less rich, less influential, less powerful and less well connected than countless other rich and influential friends he had) to her as her ‘protector’ doesn’t make sense.
2rafa
1d ago
We are talking about an immensely wealthy and connected woman, who according to this allegation was personally spending hours each day manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma. This while being a socialite and running an ocean conservation foundation and falling in love (twice) with younger men and staying close to her family and doing various other things - including hanging out with Epstein.
Yes, it is implausible. If it was a Mossad or other intelligence operation she (a socialite who knew many powerful people, the ‘face’) wouldn’t be anywhere near the online cyber-ops people running online influence operations. Many people knew her during the relevant period, has anybody remarked that she was on Reddit every 5 minutes? Would Mossad have her set up her account under her real last name? It’s not tenuous at all, even if it’s so stupid as to be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion (which of course it did anyway) there would be no reason to do it.
All of which is to say that if she was behind the account (which I consider extremely unlikely but not impossible) it was not an intelligence operation but a weird hobby for a middle aged woman. The linked post discussing the sharing of links about case-related things is also extremely disingenuous given how prolific a poster the account was.
Rich New Yorkers (WASP or Jewish) in the mid-1970s with daughters at Dalton were under no impression their daughters were certainly virgins whatsoever. That’s a ridiculous suggestion and would have been questionable even 20 years earlier (which would have been before it went co-ed lol).
Dalton was the most classically progressive of the old NYC prep schools (and still is), only outflanked to the left by the mid-late 20th century hippie outfits. It was explicitly built on the model of early 20th century progressive English schools that wanted to overturn the orthodoxy of the classical English public (private) school education.
2rafa
5d ago
I think among the under-25s beards are less cool again (admittedly, I’m not really tuned in to late zoomer discourse) and have certain “millennial soy” connotations for the more online crowd.
Long hair for men comes in and out every few years, it shifts within generations. The early age of millennial cultural ascension (2006-2010ish) often had the men in quite close cropped hair, see early Glee for examples, or alternately the Justin Bieber / emo origin flop across the eyes. By the early 2010s that had largely been replaced by either the side part or the man-bun, which surely counts as long hair. Even the zoomers have already had multiple male hairstyle trends, including the ‘90s DiCaprio center part, the mullet etc.
Some of it, it’s fine but relies on a lot of the hearsay (quite a bit of it traced back to Epstein’s own bullshitting laundered through people he spoke to and then others who heard it second or third hand) I discuss in my comment. Especially discussions of when Epstein originally met Ghislaine Maxwell, speculation about what he was doing in the 1980s and so on is a weakpoint with little critical analysis. For example, every suggestion that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell (and this isn’t concrete evidence that he didn’t by the way, it’s just interesting) can be traced back to Epstein personally, who used to tell people in New York that Robert had personally asked him to look after his daughter, which was ludicrous and ridiculed as such by his sons, whom he had actually groomed to takeover his business and look after their sister and who, unlike Ghislaine, actually knew about his various business and personal affairs, including connections in Israel. That’s before we get to Khashoggi and the many, many people (almost everyone) he knew, none of whom heard of Epstein before the mid-late 1990s post-Wexner fortune grab.
Epstein was unemployed, living off savings and scrounged money in a 1 bed apartment in NYC (much cheaper back then than it is today, of course) before he met Wexner. The suggestion that he was a well connected shady international businessman with close and profitable Khashoggi ties doesn’t track.
2rafa
5d ago
Chinese online / younger nationalists are mostly over the hatred for much of the eight nation alliance. They have it, but it isn’t central to their mythos as their hatred for the Japanese and general dislike for the Koreans.
I don’t think they really have an ethnic hatred for Europeans, which is something you see more of in niche diaspora CCP-fan migrant communities in the West where complaints about, say, white men dating Chinese women are more central. The CCP teaches every Chinese child that Marx and Engels were some of the greatest people in history, has statues of them, murals of them and so on.
The thing is, I think your argument is completely plausible and I allow for it in (2). Epstein exploited Wexner, but Wexner was and is a committed Zionist and was long close to the WJC and Lauder, who in turn were and are clearly very well connected in Israel, particularly the center and center left. If someone in Wexner, Lauder or Barak’s orbit (including Israeli intelligence) asked for a favor, an introduction, or information Epstein had acquired, there is every chance Epstein would have done it as you say on an ad-hoc basis, probably not for money but for influence and favor trading (useful given his sexual proclivities had put him under investigation from the mid-1990s).
It’s also obviously, clearly true that Epstein had powerful friends who ensured he was given a sweetheart deal in the early 2000s. They may have been ‘intelligence’, they may just have been very well connected Wall Street people who were close to the Bush administration for whom ‘belongs to intelligence’ was a convenient smoke screen for more naked corruption and favor trading (I think this is more likely; telling Acosta Epstein is intelligence is more likely to stop an investigation than telling him a top donor is friends with him). You don’t need Mossad to frustrate an investigation if you’re friends with a former president and very close to leading GOP donors, which Epstein was.
But crucially, this is all very different to the allegation, made explicitly by Tucker, that Israel and Mossad were behind his immense wealth and also behind a sex-trafficking elite kompromat operation. It is more likely that Epstein was a pervert who preyed on teenage girls (often from poorer backgrounds, in NYC, West Palm Beach, and via modelling world connections he had made through Wexner and the 1980s New York fashion scene from Eastern Europe, and before that his former and before that current students) his whole adult life. As he grew in wealth and power, he sometimes offered girls he was seeing to business associates, not as kompromat but as sweeteners for deals and friendship (Meister, Wexner’s ex-insurance man who introduced Epstein to him and regrets it, explicitly says that Epstein showed up to his house once with models and offered them to him).
Eventually, he used his seduction (likely romantic) of Wexner to catapult himself into the top echelon of NYC wealth, met Maxwell, fresh into exile after the scandal around the collapse of her father’s business, and joined the global elite. At this point he began to attract the attention of people for whom knowing what that elite is doing and thinking was and is important, and as he became aware of his victims reporting him more as the 1990s went on (before then, between ~1965 and 1990 or so no cops would have taken it seriously at all, but the early 90s saw the emergence of third-wave consent based feminism, modern workplace harassment guidance and law) he may have played those connections to try to stay clear of jail.
But no, I don’t think Mossad got a failed high school teacher a job at Bear Stearns. I don’t think they gave a billion dollars to a washed up, fired trader who was unhireable by any legitimate Wall Street firm because he violated securities law in the hope that he would Gatsby his way into the world’s elite and set up a sex trafficking blackmail operation.
2rafa
1d ago
Apparently Epstein was able to set up a meeting between some JP Morgan execs and Netenyahu? That sounds like deeper connections than you described:
Not at all, in fact it’s explained if you read my piece. Staley and Dimon were not particularly well connected in Israel. Epstein was close to Lauder and Wexner and could easily have asked either of them to raise the request with Netanyahu, for whom in any case it wouldn’t have been unusual to meet with senior figures at the most important Wall Street bank. That is most of what Epstein did in his later years, namely send emails to people in his Rolodex whom he had met in his decade of relentless socializing pestering them to do minor things that he could trade in for other things.
There's also the possibility that the operation was tied to a non-Mossad Israeli intelligence operation that pertained to internal divisions in Israeli politics.
It’s possible, and there is nowhere I disagree that Epstein may have played politics for Barak during the slow emergence of the modern Israeli security state in the early 2000s. But again, that was after he acquired fame and fortune and long after the sex stuff started, during which time he would have been a nobody to anyone in Israel.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the primary beneficiary of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was himself and maybe a small handful of actual friends, who he probably didn’t care to blackmail but may or may not have kept kompromat on. Separate to that was his love of the game and of impressing successful and powerful people, which he enjoyed doing his whole life, regardless of whether or not they shared his sexual proclivities. In the course of the latter he may have traded in secrets, although it was never close to being his main line of work.
2rafa
6d ago
Chasidic views on interracial marriage (and therefore conversion into Judaism, really) are less exclusive than you might expect. All ultra orthodox accept sincere religious conversion as an inherent part of Judaism and there are occasional ethnic minorities.
As with the Amish, though, an extremely high native birth rate means the majority of the population will probably always be of the original stock.
2rafa
1d ago
He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here.
He was still convicted in the early 2000s, though, he just got a sweetheart deal. This time there were more witnesses and more credible witnesses, more victims and more medium to high quality testimony from his own former employees. In addition, he was already a convicted criminal, which would affect sentencing and make a second sweetheart deal less likely in any case (regardless of offense or offender). The Florida cases were localized, the New York case had a much greater emphasis on interstate and international movement which meant a much longer sentence in a real prison was inevitable if convicted. As the Ghislaine sentence (and there was much less direct evidence of a lot of her involvement shows), Epstein wasn’t making it out in his lifetime and there is every chance he knew it. It wasn’t embarrassment, it was someone realizing he wasn’t going to get to do any of the things (or people) he wanted ever again.
The Israelis are already among the top 3, if not higher, countries in the world that target the United States most aggressively for spying operations. So the "why would they collected blackmail on allies" would be "for the same reason they do all their other spying operations on their allies."
Spying on the Mormons at the CIA and the hippies at State is very different to blackmailing Alan Dershowitz into becoming a more fervent Zionist. Israeli intelligence in the US is largely about acquiring intelligence Mossad can’t get directly about Israel’s enemies because the US has sources and deals with Qatar, Lebanon, Bahrain, with Iran via Russia and sometimes directly, intercepts intelligence from other countries that might deal with anti-Israel groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah, has some channels with the IRGC. For example, there was a big Israeli effort to get more information about conversations between the Assadist Syrian and Russian governments, and it’s possible that the US might be able to intercept more than Israel, and it has access to shared Five Eyes intelligence that Israel doesn’t. That makes strategic sense and is much cheaper than running a blackmail op on rich Zionist Wall Street tycoons who already attend the friends of the IDF annual fundraiser for free (or indeed, for a significant donation).
“he really charmed his way into getting a job at Bear Sterns”
As I explained, in the Wall Street of the 1970s it really wouldnt have been unusual for a really smart Brooklyn kid to drop out of a math degree at NYU and still end up in finance on the trading floor. At that time, many new traders were working class and didn’t necessarily have college degrees. Everyone who met Epstein said he was insanely charismatic.
2rafa
5d ago
It’s possible this was the final straw, but it doesn’t seem like a radically new kind of scandal for them.
2rafa
6d ago
I disagree, there were various leftist justice reform DAs that won big in NYC, Philly etc. De Blasio was on the progressive wing of the party; he wasn't Chesa tier but effectively welcomed that movement into office.
2rafa
5d ago
With enough lobbying they can pass laws that say things like “for each half hour spent in court, x lawyers based in local city who passed the state bar must have y billable hours attached to them”.
Lest that sound farfetched, Hollywood writers just got this kind of deal and the studios are far more equipped to play hardball than state congressmen.
2rafa
3hr ago
As I already said, Hoffenberg was a gullible fool who believed every word that Epstein said and later got got for astounding idiocy in his Ponzi scheme.
Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s
Yes, exactly. Epstein’s dealings in the arms world of the 1980s, in which nobody in the booming arms industry of the age ever remembered him, no record of him exists, and during which he was living in a 1-bed in Manhattan begging people to give him money to invest after being fired from Bear Stearns. Those dealings.
It is astounding the extent to which claims of Epstein’s work ‘in intelligence’ ultimately trace back to Epstein himself and his own bullshit to make himself seem more interesting, influential and important than he was at that time.
There are some billionaire Jews who are unaligned with Zionism. I recall reading the Wikipedia of a Hollywood talent management owner who had no confirmed philanthropy whatsoever, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name, and there’s also Zuckerberg whose donations to Jewish causes are a pittance relative to his philanthropy.
Certainly, but Wexner’s social circle that Epstein adopted and embraced was comprised primarily of Zionists, not apolitical tech billionaires or those Hollywood types (obviously not all) who didn’t really care about the whole Israel thing.
The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.
I’m not sure that Gates is the only ‘confirmed’ victim, given that unlike the Dubins or Leon Black (the latter being what I would consider the only truly likely implicit victim of a blackmail scheme given that he directly paid Epstein a huge amount of money for nothing, something even Les Wexner didn’t knowingly do) he didn’t give him a fortune.
This is actually further evidence against the agent theory, since in this one case (where I think blackmail was quite probably involved), the money all went to Epstein directly, not to his supposed paymasters.
Despite having connections to Israel, none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish.
There’s no evidence of this. Only a handful of victims have come forward publicly out of high hundreds or thousands of teenagers. Epstein didn’t spend much time in Israel, he mainly procured girls where he lived most of the time (NYC and Palm Beach).
If Epstein’s circle was Jewish supremacist, this would explain his link to Mossad.
Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t Jewish by the standards of any hardcore Jewish chauvinist, her mother is a French Christian and she never converted. Farmer bought into a lot of dumb things - and was pursued by a lot of open WNs online, over Facebook etc - and unfortunately in grief over a lost life has made numerous flawed claims (most unrelating to Judaism, to be clear) that rendered her a notoriously unreliable witness.
You are forgetting that Wexner was linked to Mossad by way of the Mega Group, and Epstein’s connections were throughout the Mega Group.
On the contrary, I discuss this in my comment when I make direct reference to Lauder etc. Israel’s billionaire supporters supporting Israel is a completely opposite direction of travel to Israel funding Epstein‘s activities in the United States (which mainly included spending huge amounts of money). In addition, the presence of ‘they do it for free’ groups like Mega further casts doubts on the Mossad agent theory. Consider that if Israeli intelligence wants access to the elite of American politics, Hollywood, finance and so on, they don’t and didn’t need Jeffrey Epstein to facilitate it, blackmail or not.
2rafa
6hr ago
He was personal friends with Bill Clinton and close to a number of top Bush donors.
2rafa
12hr ago
It’s not necessarily smart to do that even if you have evidence of internal plots, because the same usual external plots / random crazies also still exist and people outside the secret service have much less experience identifying or defending against them.
2rafa
3hr ago
If you read the original documents and reporting from the Palm Beach case it was almost all poor, often Hispanic girls from deprived areas of West Palm Beach.
2rafa
5hr ago
I don’t think my claim was that Jews don’t blackmail Jews (which would be rather disproven by the Israeli criminal underworld and countless other examples), but that specifically blackmailing Zionist Jews who contribute large amounts of money to that cause into supporting Israel would be pointless at best and counterintuitive at worst.
Balkany was just trying to extort Steve Cohen for money (funneled via his school, as he noted), the most mundane and commonplace motive for blackmail.
Epstein's Unanswered Questions
In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.
In this comment, I will suggest
(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth
(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?
Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.
He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.
In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.
Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.
As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).
Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.
Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.
In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.
Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.
My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.
The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.
That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:
Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.
In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.
The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.
Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.
Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?
It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.
It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:
The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.
Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.
Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.
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