Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery | NEW YORK MAGAZINE | PAGE 1 | PAGE 2 | PAGE 3 | PAGE 4
He’s pals with a passel of Nobel Prize–winning scientists, CEOs like Leslie Wexner of the Limited, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, even Donald Trump. But it wasn’t until he flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa on his private Boeing 727 that the world began to wonder who he is.
He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world. Ever since the Post’s “Page Six” ran an item about the president’s late-September visit to Africa with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker — on his new benefactor’s customized Boeing 727 — the question of the day has been: Who in the world is Jeffrey Epstein?
It’s a life full of question marks. Epstein is said to run $15 billion for wealthy clients, yet aside from Limited founder Leslie Wexner, his client list is a closely held secret. A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists yet possesses no bachelor’s degree. For more than ten years, he’s been linked to Manhattan-London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert Maxwell, yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes as he scours the world for investment opportunities. He owns what is said to be Manhattan’s largest private house yet runs his business from a 100-acre private island in St. Thomas.
Power on Wall Street has generally accrued to those who have made their open bids for it. Soros. Wasserstein. Kravis. Weill. The Sturm und Drang of their successes and failures has been played out in public. Epstein breaks the mold. Most everyone on the Street has heard of him, but nobody seems to know what the hell he is up to. Which is just the way he likes it.
“My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money-management firm, though you won’t get a straight answer from him,” says one well-known investor. “He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I’ve also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It’s like looking at the Wizard of Oz — there may be less there than meets the eye.”
Says another prominent Wall Streeter: “He is this mysterious, Gatsbyesque figure. He likes people to think that he is very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness. The whole thing is weird.”
The wizard that meets the eye is spare and fit; with a long jaw and a carefully coiffed head of silver hair, he looks like a taller, younger Ralph Lauren. A raspy Brooklyn accent betrays his Coney Island origins. He spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day doing advanced yoga with his personal instructor, who travels with him wherever he goes. He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
He dresses casually — jeans, open-necked shirts, and sneakers — and is rarely seen in a tie. Indeed, those close to him say the reason he quit his board seat at the Rockefeller Institute was that he hated wearing a suit. “It feels like a dress,” he told one friend.
Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president. In his eyes, Clinton as a species represents the highest evolutionary form of the political animal. To be up close to him, as he was during the African journey, is akin to seeing the rarest of beasts on a safari. As he put it to a friend upon his return from Africa, “If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician.”
“Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science,” Clinton says through a spokesman. “I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.”
Before Clinton, Epstein’s rare appearances in the gossip columns tended to be speculation as to the true nature of his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. While they are still friends, the English tabloids have postulated that Maxwell has longed for a more permanent pairing and that for undetermined reasons Epstein has not reciprocated in kind. “It’s a mysterious relationship that they have,” says society journalist David Patrick Columbia. “In one way, they are soul mates, yet they are hardly companions anymore. It’s a nice conventional relationship, where they serve each other’s purposes.”
Friends of the two say that Maxwell, whose social life has always been higher-octane than Epstein’s, lent a little pizzazz to the lower-profile Epstein. Indeed, at a party at Maxwell’s house, her friends say, one is just as apt to see Russian ladies of the night as one is to see Prince Andrew. The Oxford-educated Maxwell, described by many as a man-eater (she flies her own helicopter and was recently seen dining with Clinton at Nello’s on Madison Avenue), lives in her own townhouse a few blocks away. Epstein is frequently seen around town with a bevy of comely young women but there has been no boldfaced name to replace Maxwell. “You may read about Jeffrey in the social columns, but there is much more to him than that,” says Jeffrey T. Leeds of the private equity firm Leeds Weld & Co. “He’s a talented money manager and an extremely hardworking person with broad interests. Most unusual, though, is that in this media-obsessed age he is not in any sense a self-promoter.”
Born in 1953 and raised in Coney Island, Epstein went to Lafayette High School. According to his bio, he took some classes in physics at Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971. He left Cooper Union in 1971 and attended NYU’s Courant Institute, where he took courses in mathematical physiology of the heart, leaving that school, too, without a degree. Between 1973 and 1975, Epstein taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School.
By most accounts, he was something of a Robin Williams–in–Dead Poets Society type of figure, wowing his high-school classes with passionate mathematical riffs. So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point-blank: “What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street — why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call.”
Epstein was in many respects the perfect candidate for Greenberg’s consideration. Greenberg, a senior partner at Bear Stearns at the time and a legendary trader in his own right, has long made it clear that it’s the hungry, brilliant guys lacking the fancy degrees that he favors at Bear. They even have an acronym: PSDs — poor, smart, and a deep desire to be rich. It was a description that fit Epstein to a T. He was a Brooklyn guy with a motor for a brain, and while he did love teaching, this close-up view of the rarefied Upper East Side life of his students’ gave him a taste for the big time.
So in 1976, he dropped everything and reported to work at Bear Stearns, where he started off as a junior assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. His ascent was rapid.
At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off. To trade options, one had to value them, and to value them, one needed to be able to master such abstruse mathematical confections as the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. For Epstein, breaking down such models was pure sport, and within just a few years he had his own stable of clients. “He was not your conventional broker saying ‘Buy IBM’ or ‘Sell Xerox,’ ” says Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. “Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special-products division, where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions. He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well.”
In 1980, Epstein made partner, but he had left the firm by 1981. Working in a bureaucracy was not for him; what’s more, in rubbing up against ever greater sums of money during his time at Bear, he began to feel the need to grab his own piece of the action.
In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos — just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.
His firm would be different, too. He was not here just to offer investment advice; he saw himself as the financial architect of every aspect of his client’s wealth — from investments to philanthropy to tax planning to security to assuaging the guilt and burdens that large sums of inherited wealth can bring on. “I want people to understand the power, the responsibility, and the burden of their money,” he said to a colleague at the time.
As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge; at Bear, he had come to the realization that, counterintuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious you became. For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn’t make sense.
From the get-go, his business was successful. But the conditions for investing with Epstein were steep: He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client’s financial cause. And he remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.
It’s nice work if you can get it. Epstein runs a lean operation, and those close to him say that his actual staff — based here in Manhattan at the Villard House (home to Le Cirque); New Albany, Ohio; and St. Thomas, where he reincorporated his company seven years ago (now called Financial Trust Co.) — numbers around 150 and is purely administrative. When it comes to putting these billions to work in the markets, it is Epstein himself making all the investment calls — there are no analysts or portfolio managers, just twenty accountants to keep the wheels greased and a bevy of assistants — many of them conspicuously attractive young women — to organize his hectic life. So assuming, conservatively, a fee of .5 percent (he takes no commissions or percentages) on $15 billion, that makes for a management fee of $75 million a year straight into Jeff Epstein’s pocket. Nice work indeed.
It has been rumored that Linda Wachner and David Rockefeller have been clients, too, but both parties deny any such relationship. What’s more, who ever heard of a financial adviser turning down $500 million accounts? All the speculation and mystery has proved fertile ground for some alternative Jeffrey Epstein stories — the most bizarre of which has him playing the piano (he is classically trained) for high rollers in a Manhattan piano bar in the mid-eighties.
Another focus of curiosity is the relationship that Epstein has with his patron and mentor Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of the Columbus, Ohio–based Limited chain of women’s-clothing stores. Wexner, who is said to be worth more than $2.5 billion by Forbes, became an Epstein client in 1987. “It’s a weird relationship,” says another Wall Streeter who knows Epstein. “It’s just not typical for someone of such enormous wealth to all of a sudden give his money to some guy most people have never heard of.” The Wexner-Epstein relationship is indeed a multifaceted one.
Given the secrecy that envelops Epstein’s client list, some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein’s lavish life — but friends leap to his defense. “Let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients,” says noted m&a lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. “I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn’t take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that’s Jeffrey.”
Epstein’ s current residence in Manhattan — a 45,000-square-foot eight-story mansion on East 71st Street — was originally bought by Wexner for $13 million in 1989. Wexner poured many millions into a full gut renovation, then turned it over to Epstein in 1995 after he got married. One story has Epstein paying only a dollar for it, though others say he paid full market price, which would have been in the neighborhood of $20 million. Epstein then undertook his own $10 million gut renovation (special features: closed-circuit TV and a heated sidewalk in front of the house for melting snow), saying to friends: “I don’t want to live in another person’s house.”
There are other houses as well, including a sweeping villa in Palm Beach and a custom-built 51,000-square-foot castle in Santa Fe. Said to be the largest house in the state, the latter sits atop a hill on a 45,000-acre ranch. He had it built because of the month or so he found himself spending there, talking elementary particle physics with his friend Murray Gell-Man, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and co-chair of the science board at the Santa Fe Institute.
Epstein also owned a grand house (he has since sold it) near Wexner’s opulent manse at the center of the Limited magnate’s high-end housing development in New Albany, Ohio. New Albany was a lush sprawl of farmland on the outskirts of Columbus that Wexner, starting in 1988, turned into a rich village of multimillion-dollar Georgian homes surrounding a Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course. It was a massive development project, financed largely by Wexner himself. Epstein was a general partner in the real-estate holding company, called New Albany Property, despite putting only a few million dollars of capital into the project.
“Before Epstein came along in 1988, the financial preparations and groundwork for the New Albany development were a total mess,” says Bob Fitrakis, a Columbus-based investigative journalist who has written extensively on Wexner and his finances. “Epstein cleaned everything up, as well as serving Wexner in other capacities — such as facilitating visits to Wexner’s home of the crew from Cats and organizing a Tony Randall song-and-dance show put on in Columbus.” Wexner declines to talk about his relationship with Epstein, but it is clearly one that continues to this day. Not that it helped Epstein in any way to land Clinton. Wexner is a staunch Republican donor, and Epstein, aside from a small contribution to the president’s legal-defense fund, has given more to the likes of former senator Al D’Amato.
What attracted Clinton to Epstein was quite simple: He had a plane (he has a couple, in fact — the Boeing 727, in which he took Clinton to Africa, and, for shorter jaunts, a black Gulfstream, a Cessna 421, and a helicopter to ferry him from his island to St. Thomas). Clinton had organized a weeklong tour of South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Mozambique to do what Clinton does. So when the president’s advance man Doug Band pitched the idea to Epstein, he said sure. As an added bonus, Kevin Spacey, a close friend of Clinton’s, and actor Chris Tucker came along for the ride.
While Epstein got an intellectual kick out of engaging African finance ministers in theoretical chitchat about economic development, the real payoff for him was observing Clinton in his métier: talking HIV/aids policy with African leaders and soaking up the love from Cape Town to Lagos.
Epstein brings a trophy-hunter’s zeal to his collection of scientists and politicians. But the real charge for him is in seeing these guys work it. Like former Democratic Senate leader George Mitchell, for example. In Epstein’s mind, Mitchell is the world’s greatest negotiator, based on his work in Ireland and the Middle East. So he wrote the senator a bunch of checks. Says Mitchell: “He has supported some philanthropic projects of mine and organized a fund-raiser for me once. I would certainly call him a friend and a supporter.
But it is his covey of scientists that inspires Epstein’s true rapture. Epstein spends $20 million a year on them — encouraging them to engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy. They are, of course, quite lavish in their praise in return. Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. “Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations,” says Edelman. “He came to see us recently. He is concerned with this basic question: Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.”
Then there is Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard. Epstein flew up to Kosslyn’s laboratory in Cambridge this year to witness an experiment that Kosslyn was conducting and Epstein was funding. Namely: Is it true that certain Tibetan monks are capable of holding a distinct mental image in their minds for twenty minutes straight? “We disproved the thesis,” says Kosslyn. “Jeff was on his cell phone most of the time — he actually wanted to short the Tibetan market, because he thought the monk was so stupid. He is amazing. Like a honeybee — he talks to all these different people and cross-pollinates. Just two months ago, I was talking to him about a new alternative to evolutionary psychology. He got excited and sent me a check.”
Epstein has a particularly close relationship with Martin Nowak, an Austrian biology and mathematics professor who heads the theoretical-biology program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Nowak is examining how game theory can be used to answer some of the basic evolutionary questions — e.g., why, in our Darwinian society, does altruistic behavior exist? Epstein talks to Nowak about once a week and flies him around the country to his various homes to deliver impromptu lectures. Over the past three years, he has written $500,000 worth of checks to fund Nowak’s research. This past February, Epstein had Nowak over for dinner at the 71st Street townhouse. It was just the two of them (not including the wait staff), and Nowak, making use of a blackboard in the formal dining room, delivered a two-hour highly mathematical description of how language works.
After dinner, Epstein asked if Nowak wanted to meet up with his new friend President Clinton, and off they went to a nearby deli, where Clinton regaled the starstruck former Oxford professor with tales from his own Oxford days. “Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist. It’s like talking to a colleague in your field,” says Nowak. “Sometimes he applies what we talk about to his investments. Sometimes it’s for his own curiosity. He has changed my life. Because of his support, I feel I can do anything I want.”
Danny Hillis, an MIT-educated computer scientist whose company, Thinking Machines, was at the forefront of the supercomputing world in the eighties, and who used to run R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, thinks Epstein is actually using scientific knowledge to beat the markets. “We talk about currency trading — the euro, the real, the yen,” he says. “He has something a physicist would call physical intuition. He knows when to use the math and when to throw it away. If I had acted upon all the investment advice he has been giving me over the years, I’d be calling you from my Gulfstream right now.”
On the 727 these days, he has been reading a book by E. O. Wilson, the eminent scientist and originator of the field of sociobiology, called Consilience, which makes the case that the boundaries between scientific disciplines are in the process of breaking down. It’s a view Epstein himself holds. He wrote recently to a scientist friend of his: “The behavior of termites, together with ants and bees, is a precursor to trust because they have an extraordinary ability to form relationships and sophisticated social structures based on mutual altruism even though individually they are fundamentally dumb. Money itself is a derivative of trust. If we can figure out how termites come together, then we may be able to better understand the underlying principles of market behavior — and make big money.
So how do termite grouping patterns fare as an investment strategy? Again, facts are hard to come by. A working day for Epstein starts at 5 a.m., when he gets up and scours the world markets on his Bloomberg screen — each of his houses, in New York, St. Thomas, Palm Beach, and New Mexico, as well as the 727, is equipped with the necessary hardware for him to wake up, roll out of bed, and start trading. He will put some calls in to his private banker at JPMorgan to get a reading as to how wealthy investors — the best gauge of market sentiment, he believes — are reacting to the market’s movements. Then he will call currency traders in Europe. On a given day, he will spend ten hours or so on the phone — after all, he is running $15 billion essentially by himself.
Strangely enough, given his scientific obsessions, he is a computer-phobe and does not use e-mail. “I like to hear voices and see faces when I interact,” he has said. Given the huge sums he has to invest, he focuses on assets with extremely high liquidity, like currencies — though he dabbles in commodities and real estate as well. Those who know him say he is an impulsive, quick-to-change-his-mind trader, still governed by Ace Greenberg’s trader’s maxim: If the stock is down 10 percent, sell it. He has been on the short side of the Brazilian real, and those close to him say bets there have paid off in spades. He recently took a long position on the euro before its rebound on the basis that Europeans were too proud to see their currency sink any lower against the dollar. His next targets: an across-the-board short of the German stock exchange and a possible attack on the Hong Kong dollar peg in light of the recent disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.
None of this is investment rocket science, but getting the direction and the timing right, no matter how conventional the investment idea, can spin large money for an investor. Before taking a big position, Epstein will usually fly to the country in question. He recently spent a week in Germany meeting with various government officials and financial types, and he has a trip to Brazil coming up in the next few weeks. On all of these trips, he flies alone in his commercial-jet-size 727.
Friends of Epstein say he is horrified at the recent swell of media attention around him (Vanity Fair is preparing a megaprofile, and the Villard House office has had a barrage of calls from other media outlets). He has never granted a formal interview, and did not offer one to this magazine, nor has his picture appeared in any publication. Yet for one so obsessive about his privacy, one wonders — didn’t he realize that flying Clinton and Spacey around Africa was going to blow his cover? As he said to a friend: “If my ultimate goal was to stay private, traveling with Clinton was a bad move on the chessboard. I recognize that now. But you know what? Even Kasparov makes them. You move on.”
Ghislaine Maxwell: Press baron’s daughter and Epstein’s former lover | THE GUARDIAN | MAR 6, 2011
The reappearance of Ghislaine Maxwell, socialite daughter of a disgraced former press baron, in Prince Andrew’s private life has darkened suspicions about his ability to fulfil the role of Britain’s trade ambassador.
A decade ago, the fourth in line to the throne was reported to have accompanied her to a “hookers and pimps” themed party in New York – one of series of trips that led to questions being asked about his selection for such a sensitive international position.
Ghislaine Maxwell, 49, is the youngest daughter of Robert Maxwell, the former Daily Mirror proprietor whose death exposed a financial black hole at the heart of the newspaper group – and the fact he had been using pension fund assets to support the company’s share price.
The Czech-born businessman and former MP slipped overboard from his private yacht, – named the Lady Ghislaine after his favourite daughter – off the Canary Islands in 1991.
The 68-year-old’s body was found floating in the Atlantic; the verdict was death by accidental drowning though media speculation ranged from suicide to murder. Following her father’s death, Ghislaine moved, in self-imposed exile, to the US where she joined the Manhattan party circuit and met the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein.
She became his celebrity guest at social functions and eventually his girlfriend. Despite the relationship cooling, they remained close.
Prince Andrew was reported to have holidayed with them in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2000. Another time, Epstein and Ghislaine stayed at Sandringham as the Duke of York’s guests.
Maxwell seemed well integrated into the life of US plutocracy – in 2000 she went to the infamous 60th birthday party of another former press mogul, Lord Black, where she shared a table with dress designer Oscar de la Renta.
But Epstein became a source of social embarrassment for Ghislaine and the Duke of York after the financier was jailed for sex offences including soliciting teenage girls into prostitution.
Ghislaine is in the background of the recently-released picture showing Andrew in 2001 with his arm around the waist of Virginia Roberts, then 17, who claims she worked for Epstein as an erotic masseuse. Ghislaine is reported to have said she has never been contacted by any law enforcement agency in connection with any allegations against Epstein.
Jeffrey and Ghislaine: Notes on New York’s Oddest Alliance | VANITY FAIR | MAR 8, 2011
“I’ve got a story idea for you. The rebuilding of Indonesia. Or New Orleans. Or both. Go there. I’ve just been. You will never think the same way about anything again.”
So spoke not Bill or Melinda Gates, but Ghislaine Maxwell, the 48-year-old woman being written up everywhere at the moment as the alleged “procurer” of young women for billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, 57, is the financier who spent a year in jail on charges of soliciting prostitutes—and now there is talk of another investigation because various women, now in their 20s and 30s, have come forward with allegations that he molested them when they were under-age. The allegations first surfaced in British newspapers, which have zeroed in on Epstein’s friendship with Prince Andrew, who has recently tried to publicly disassociate himself from his old pal.I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in 2003 called “The Talented Mr. Epstein.” It was largely a business piece that focused on his mysterious exit from Bear Stearns in 1981 and on his close relationships with Jimmy Cayne, Les Wexner, the chairman of Limited Brands, and, above all, the man who claimed to be his mentor, Steven Jude Hoffenberg, who is currently serving a 20-year-jail sentence for bilking investors in Towers Financial out of $450 million.
The piece alluded to Epstein’s great friendship with Maxwell, and how she introduced him to young women with whom he had sexual relationships. But, in the end, the story didn’t really go there, focusing instead on the issue that remains a mystery—how Jeffrey made his money, and how Ghislaine made hers.
This is not to say I didn’t hear stories about the girls. I did. But, not knowing quite whom to believe, I concentrated on the intriguing financial mystery instead. But now the women have come back. Not the same ones, different ones. And their stories are bone-chilling. Journalists from England have phoned—and, in one case, flown—to ask me about Epstein and Maxwell. Who is he? And the British, especially, want to know: Who is she? At this point, I am so bored of repeating myself to others—it was, after all, my 2003 Vanity Fair story that really brought him into the limelight—that I have decided to write about this myself.
Bizarrely, perhaps, I have gotten to know Jeffrey and Ghislaine far better after my piece than before it. I kept running into both of them, separately, at parties. Jeffrey is not a social animal, so he usually has a couple of young women with him who stand two feet behind him, as if serving a monarch. “Do they speak?” I remember asking him once, nodding at his lookalike blondes. He laughed. “Not like you, Vicky,” was his riposte.
I remembered that when we’d once discussed math—in particular, an isosceles triangle—and I revealed I hadn’t studied it since I was 14 (such is, or was, the way of the British educational system), I received a package at home via messenger. It was a book: “Math for idiots.”
So he is not without humor, even though he doesn’t drink or smoke, and hates restaurants.
“Jeffrey knows a good deal about most subjects,” newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman told me last week. He was certainly preaching to the converted. The truth is, Epstein does know a lot about a lot of things. Just a few moments in his company and you know this to be true.
When I saw pictures of Prince Andrew walking in Central Park with Jeffrey, my immediate thought was that “Andy”—as Jeffrey calls him—is probably asking for help with his role as British trade envoy, or whatever his strange title is. Because if one thing’s for sure: when it comes to international business, Jeffrey knows what he’s talking about far more than “Andy” does. Which is why Leon Black, Mort Zuckerman, and a few other financiers hang out with him.
Prince Andrew ‘categorically denies’ claims he sexually abused teenager | THE TELEGRAPH | JAN 2, 2015
Prince Andrew has “categorically” denied allegations made in US court papers that he sexually abused a 17-year-old girl who claims she was used as a sex slave.
The accusations against the Duke of York – which also include claims that he took part in an orgy with other underage girls – are contained in a motion filed in a Florida court by a woman who claims that Jeffrey Epstein, an American investment banker, loaned her to rich and powerful friends.
Epstein, who served 13 months of an 18-month jail sentence for soliciting paid sex with a minor, is a former friend of the Duke. Epstein is accused in the court papers of loaning out the girls so he could later blackmail their abusers.
The Duke, according to the court papers, made “efforts on his behalf” to lobby prosecutors for a favourable plea arrangement.
The unnamed litigant, now aged 30, claims she was forced to have “sexual relations” with the Duke at a flat in London, at a Caribbean island and an undisclosed location in New York.
REVEALED: The woman at the centre of the Prince Andrew scandal…Ghislaine Maxwell | EXPRESS UK | JAN 6, 2015
SHE left Britain devastated by father Robert Maxwell’s death and rebuilt her life in New York. Now Ghislaine is at the heart of the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew
Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him, and All the Justice that Money Can Buy – The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein | JAMES PATTERSON | OCT 10, 2016
Ghislaine Maxwell
Trying to put her troubles with Epstein behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell took up a new calling.
“She’s doing something to save the oceans now,” a socialite says over the din of cocktail-party chatter at a private Palm Beach Club.
Maxwell’s nonprofit, the TerraMar Project, describes itself as “a platform for citizenship and transformation of the high seas.” Its focus is on cleaning up the eight million metric tons of plastic debris—garbage— that are dumped into the world’s oceans each year. (Sources say that an earlier enterprise, the Seed Media Group, was funded by Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 to the tune of two million dollars.)
“Is anybody here staying awake at night because they’re frightened about the ocean?” she asks in 2014 at a TEDx talk in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Are you scared about what could happen? Are you trying to think about what could you do that would help the ocean and all its myriad of troubles?”
But although her efforts on behalf of the environment are sincere and articulate, Ghislaine still appears in the society pages.
In 2010, she attends Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in Rhinebeck, New York.
In 2014, New York journalist Richard Johnson reports that she’s newly back from running in an Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska. “It’s hard to top Ghislaine Maxwell in the globe-trotting department,” he writes.
Upon her return, the president of the China Arts Foundation International hosts Maxwell at a dinner cooked by the former chef for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Sources say that Maxwell still maintains her warm relationship with the Clintons. She was never charged with a crime. And Maxwell has repeatedly denied all allegations made by Virginia Roberts—and continues to do so today. Through her lawyer, Maxwell says she’s had no connection to any criminal misconduct involving Virginia Roberts (or any other young woman) and Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that Virginia’s story about her experience as a “sex slave” has changed, significantly, over time—that with each telling, Virginia adds salacious details and names new public figures. Nevertheless, legal troubles for Maxwell
recently began.
In 2015, Virginia Roberts filed a defamation suit against the woman she says recruited her to work at Epstein’s house on El Brillo Way. In January of 2016, Roberts filed additional papers, claiming that a defamation suit filed against Bill Cosby, another alleged sexual predator, was directly relevant to her case against Maxwell. In March, Maxwell filed an answer in court denying all of Roberts’s allegations and accusing Roberts of fabricating them for financial gain.
As of this writing, the suit is ongoing.
Prince Andrew
In January of 2016, Sunninghill Park—the twelve-bedroom estate that Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew once shared in the English county of Berkshire—was bulldozed.
Prince Andrew had long since sold the home, which he and Sarah had received as a gift after their 1986 wedding. He got into hot water when it was revealed that the buyer, a Kazakh billionaire named Timur Kulibayev, had paid three million pounds more than the home’s asking price.
….
That spring, Prince Andrew got a rare break: a federal judge in South Florida ordered that the allegations Roberts made be stricken from civil court records. “At this juncture in the proceedings, these lurid details are unnecessary,” the judge concluded. Once again, Buckingham Palace vehemently denied the prince’s involvement in any activities, sexual or otherwise, pertaining to Roberts. But that same year, reports leaked that the BBC program Panorama was working on an in-depth investigation into the prince’s dealings with Epstein and Roberts.
EXCLUSIVE: Bill Clinton pictured with Jeffrey Epstein’s social fixer at Chelsea’s wedding AFTER severing links with disgraced pedophile | DAILY MAIL | JAN 13, 2015
This is the society fixer alleged to have helped find underage girls for pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein – helping Bill Clinton celebrate his daughter’s marriage.
Ghislaine Maxwell was photographed at the former First Daughter’s glittering July 2010 wedding to Marc Mezvinsky – despite Epstein having been convicted of soliciting underage girls.
Clinton had cut ties to Epstein after his arrest over allegations of sex with girls as young as 14.
Ghislaine Maxwell | WALKER’S RESEARCH | JAN 3, 2015
Board Dir. – Seed Media Group LLC
Company Name : Seed Media Group LLC
Company Website : www.seedmediagroup.com
Ghislaine Maxwell Biography :
Ghislaine Maxwell is a venture capitalist with a record of successful investment in start-up and growing small-cap companies engaged in a variety of international businesses, including publishing, health care, cosmetics, restaurants, public relations, technologies, and web-based services, among others.
Ms. Maxwell holds a B.A – M.A. from Oxford University.
Ms. Maxwell is a former Director of Oxford United FC and a former Business Development Manager for the newspaper, “The European”.
Her diverse philanthropic activities include board memberships on a number of private charitable foundations, and participation in funding efforts benefiting programs ranging from scientific research programs to social welfare programs.
Ghislaine Maxwell Colleagues : Adam Bly, Dean Daniels, Fabien Savenay, Irina Golub, Anna Herceg
Seed Media Group | HOME PAGE | JAN 18, 2006
Seed Media Group | ABOUT US | FEB 28, 2006
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Adam Bly, Chairman
President and Chief Executive Officer, Seed Media Group
Joseph Gantz
General Partner, The Walnut Group
James M. Gould
Managing General Partner, The Walnut Group
R. Neil Raymond
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Innovium Capital
MANAGEMENT
Dean Daniels
Chief Operating Officer
Lindsay Borthwick
Director of Content Development
Anna Herceg
Vice President, Advertising
Irina Golub, CPA
Controller
Fabien Savenay
Managing Director, International
Michael Tive
General Manager, Seed Digital Networks
ADVISORY BOARD
James D. Watson
Nobel Prize Winner; Chancellor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Clinton Foundation Donations | WASHINGTON POST | MAR 18, 2015
Seed Media Group $25,001 – $50,000
Ghislaine Maxwell | WIKIVISUALLY | MAY 4, 2017
Ghislaine Maxwell (born 25 December 1961)[1] is a British socialite and the youngest child of publisher Robert Maxwell. Maxwell moved to the United States after her father’s death and has become an advocate for the ocean as the founder of The TerraMar Project.
Maxwell moved to the United States after her father’s death, and has since become a prominent socialite in New York City. After moving to America, Maxwell and the billionaire American financier Jeffrey Epstein had a romantic relationship, and Maxwell remained close to him after their break-up.[10] Maxwell has attracted press coverage for her friendship with Prince Andrew, Duke of York, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, who has attended social functions with her in New York.[11] Maxwell introduced Epstein to Andrew and the three of them have socialised together on several occasions including attending a weekend pheasant shoot at Sandringham House.[12] In 2008 Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution and served 13 months of an 18-month jail sentence. In an American court case that was made public in January 2015, a woman identified as ‘Jane Doe 3’ said she was approached by Maxwell in 1999, and claimed that Maxwell procured under-age girls to have sex with Epstein. Maxwell has always denied any involvement in Epstein’s crimes.[10] In a 2015 statement Maxwell rejected allegations that she has acted as a “madame for Epstein” and “facilitated Prince Andrew’s acts of sexual abuse”. Maxwell’s spokesperson said that “the allegations made against Ghislaine Maxwell are untrue” and that she “strongly denies allegations of an unsavoury nature, which have appeared in the British press and elsewhere and reserves her right to seek redress at the repetition of such old defamatory claims.”[12][13]
The TerraMar Project | WIKIVISUALLY | MAY 5, 2017
The TerraMar Project, based in New York, New York, is an environmentalist non-profit organization involved in protecting the world’s oceans.[1]
TerraMar was founded in September 26, 2012 at the Blue Ocean Film Festival and Conservation Conference in Monterey, California, and focuses on the 64% of the ocean that lies outside any single country’s jurisdiction.[2] Their mission is to create a “global ocean community” based around the idea of shared ownership of the global commons, also known as the high seas or international waters.[citation needed]
Bill Clinton jumped aboard disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’ plane for junkets 26 TIMES in just three years | DAILY MAIL | MAY 13, 2016
Bill Clinton spent enough time aboard disgraced Wall Street mogul Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’ airplane that he should be eligible for frequent flyer miles, according to a shocking new report that reveals how often the former U.S. president road along with with the convicted sex offender.
Flight logs reviewed by Fox News show Clinton took 26 trips aboard Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet, more than double the 11 flights previously known.
Epstein’s jet was reportedly set up with a bed where guests had group sex with young girls.
One of them, Virginia Giuffre, has claimed she was lured into joining Epstein’s harem when she was just 15 years old and was then known as Virginia Roberts.
The former teen prostitute has said she was used as a ‘sex slave.’
Roberts, 32, has claimed she saw Clinton in 2002 on an Epstein junket to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
But according to Fox, flight logs don’t show the former president aboard a flight headed there. St. Thomas has a landing strip long enough to accommodate the jet.
The logs do show the former president jetting to such exotic locales as Brunei, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, the Azores, Africa, Belgium, China, New York, and Belgium – all on Epstein’s plane.
Traveling with Epstein was New York socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Roberts has accused of pimping her out.
If nothing else, Clinton brought protection.
Flight logs filed with the Federal Aviation Administration show Clinton brought as many as 10 U.S. Secret Service agents along with him on some trips.
But a journey to Asia in 2002 didn’t list any Secret Service protection. As a former president, Clinton still gets a taxpayer-funded security detail for life.
The cable network reported that Clinton would have been required to file an official form to leave his protective forces behind, although the Secret Service hasn’t responded to formal document requests.
Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008, and served just 18 months in jail for the offense despite outrage from victims advocates.
Others reported to have spent time with Epstein include Great Britain’s Prince Andrew and legal eagle Alan Dershowitz.
Robert Maxwell | WIKIPEDIA | MAR 20, 2009
Ian Robert Maxwell MC (10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovakian-born British media proprietor and former Member of Parliament (MP), who rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire, which collapsed after his death due to the fraudulent transactions Maxwell had committed to support his business empire, including illegal use of pension funds.[1]
Elisabeth Maxwell | WIKIPEDIA | JAN 7, 2015
Dr Elisabeth “Betty” Maxwell (11 March 1921 – 7 August 2013) was a French born researcher into The Holocaust who established the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 1987. She was the widow of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell.[1]
Betty Maxwell: Widow of media tycoon who became a respected Holocaust scholar | THE INDEPENDENT | AUG 11, 2013
Betty Maxwell was the rock of stability that lay behind the Maxwell family for more than half a century and, even in the face of overwhelming anger and hostility towards the family following the untimely death in 1991 of her husband, the multi-millionaire media magnate and fraudster Robert Maxwell, she remained publicly loyal insisting that he was “not the degenerate monster” many claimed he was. She went on to have a successful career as a genealogist and Holocaust scholar promoting Jewish-Christian relations through conferences, lectures and books.
Married for 46 years, Betty witnessed the evolution of her husband from a displaced refugee fighting in the British Army to publishing mogul, and experienced at first hand his “Jekyll and Hyde” character. It was a roller-coaster life but she remained fiercely devoted in the face of her husband’s frequently appalling treatment of herself and their children, and refused to speak out against him when he died, baffling many around her. Although she did once say when considering an afterlife, “God forbid that I should run into him again.”
Betty had run the family home at Headington Hill Hall, Oxford, like a hotel for her husband’s business interests, been on hand at short notice for events, curated his press cuttings, helped him start and build Pergamon Press, a science publishing house that grew to such proportion it was sold in 1991 for £440m, and even in the last decade of his life, as her husband’s behaviour grew progressively more eccentric and cruel, she remained steadfast in the face of his prolonged absences, infidelities and repeated threats of a legal separation.
Robert Maxwell died in mysterious circumstances while sailing off the Canary Islands; his body was later found floating in the Atlantic Ocean, though autopsies proved inconclusive about the cause of death. An outspoken and, financially, a generous supporter of Israel, Maxwell was buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives and eulogised by then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Within a matter of weeks of his death, it emerged that there were huge discrepancies in his companies’ finances, including the Mirror Group pension fund, which Maxwell, the newspaper’s owner, had fraudulently misappropriated to the tune of £600m. Thousands of Maxwell’s employees either lost their pensions or saw them significantly reduced.
In the meantime, Betty, who is understood to have known nothing of the fraud, was left almost penniless as insurance companies believed that Maxwell had committed suicide and so refused to pay out, leaving her reliant on the goodwill of friends. In 1994, she published an autobiography, A Mind of my Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, a frank account of their marriage.
Born near Saint-Alban-de-Roche, south-east of Lyon, France, in 1921, Elisabeth Jenny Jeanne Meynard was the daughter of prosperous silk producers Paul and Colombe, both of whom had fought in the First World War and received the Croix de Guerre avec Palme. Her father was Protestant, her mother, originally Catholic, had been excommunicated on her marriage.
Educated for a short time in England at a convent school near Birmingham, Betty returned to France in 1932 and attended a number of schools, in Lyon and St Omer and finally the Lycée Sévigné in Paris. She then attended the Sorbonne University to read classics and philosophy but this was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War. Much later – and perhaps in response to her husband’s taunts about her ignorance – she took a modern languages degree at St Hugh’s College, Oxford before gaining a doctorate in philosophy, aged 60. Her thesis, The Art of Letter Writing, 1789-1830, used her aristocratic French Protestant family background as source material.
Having completed her family’s genealogy, Betty was inspired to do the same for her husband’s and was shocked to discover that “some 300 of his immediate and extended family had been murdered by the Nazis” during the Holocaust. Maxwell referred to his wife as “the keeper of my Jewish soul.”
Betty met her future husband shortly after the Liberation of Paris in August 1944. He had been born Jan Ludwig Hoch into a poor Jewish family in pre-war Czechoslovakia, but was by then known as Sergeant Ivan du Maurier, serving in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army. They met at the French welcome committee, where Allied troops could socialise with French civilians. For him it was love at first sight. “The minute I saw her, I wanted her for my wife,” he later wrote. For her part, she was grateful he treated her respectfully: “He was the first member of the Allies I met who didn’t try to pounce on me.”
The couple got engaged and he duly changed his name to Robert Maxwell. After some initial misgivings from her parents about the handsome but lowly British-Jewish soldier, the couple married in March 1945. At their wedding Maxwell made three promises: he would win the Military Cross for heroism, would make a fortune, and would become British prime minister. Within six week, he received the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery. He eventually made a fortune. His political career, on the other hand, got no further than six years in Parliament as Labour MP for Buckingham from 1964 until he lost to the Conservative William Benyon. In 1945, he received a commission and was promoted to Captain; he was posted to Berlin for two years, during which time Betty gave birth to the first of their nine children, two of whom died young.
In 1987, Betty started the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The following year she organised a conference called “Remembering for the Future”, the first of three, which drew academics and survivors from around the world to discuss issues posed by and following the Holocaust. Each yielded several books of essays. The New Statesman magazine called the three volumes from the 2000 meeting “frankly awesome”. In 2005, the Cambridge-based Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations held a celebratory dinner to honour Betty’s “outstanding contribution” to Holocaust studies.
Betty edited two books on Holocaust memorials and was an honorary fellow of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, which promotes the study of relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Elisabeth Jenny Jeanne Meynard, genealogist and Holocaust scholar: born La Grive, Saint Alban de Roche, France 11 March 1921; married 1945 Robert Maxwell (deceased 1991; three sons, four daughters, one son deceased and one daughter deceased), died Dordogne 7 August 2013
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