Power, secrets and lies: The making of Epstein

0:02The Telegraph.

0:30Camilla: How did Jeffrey Epstein go from very humble beginnings to becoming the world's most prolific sex offender? We unpack the web of lies and manipulation that saw Epstein sacked as a schoolteacher and turn himself into a Wall Street dynamo. And we examine how he cultivated the rich and famous and got away with his crimes for so long with our reporters Mick Brown and Robert Mendick. They've written a definitive piece headlined Epstein, the making of a monster. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tominy.

1:12Camilla: The Epstein Files, two Eiffel Towers full of information and the two Telegraph journalists that have had the lucky task of going through them all and constructing the most extraordinary nearly 12 ,000 word piece trying to answer the question of who was Epstein, what motivated him and how on earth did he get away with it. Our Rob Mendick, our chief reporter and our interviewer and feature writer extraordinaire, Mick Brown. Welcome both of you. Thank you. When I was a cub reporter, I remember being handed the Rolodex, a copy of the Rolodex, Rob, we all were. Everyone in Fleet Street had this Rolodex, who would have thought that all these years on we are still talking about this bloke?

1:57Camilla: And what I find staggering is as you have both traced him from cradle to grave, we do see very interesting patterns emerging very early on in his very ordinary life that perhaps does give us some indication as to the monster he became. But can we go back to a young Geoffrey and what's so startling about his humble beginnings is just how ordinary they are. Mick, what did you discover? You're absolutely right, Camilla. I mean, the most extraordinary thing is just how nondescript this guy was and how nondescript his background was and how he ended up as the person he became and that we've become so fascinated and appalled by.

2:43His grandparents were Jewish immigrants, and they settled in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Coney Island is a predominantly Jewish and Italian-American neighborhood. Isaac Bashevis Singer lived in Coney Island and wrote about it. His father was a manual laborer, manual worker, for the Municipal Parks Department of New York. So a very modest upbringing. They lived in a clabbered house that accommodated three families. I can't emphasise enough how ordinary the background was, but also how quiet, respectable, no sense of any family unhappiness or family turbulence.

3:29Camilla: I was going to say, loving family, Rob. Yeah, there's no trauma there that we can see. And so when one looks for that sort of rosebud moment, which is what we set out to do in a way of trying to find out Was there something in his early childhood, something in his deep, dark past that prompted him to become the sort of monster we all sort of talk about now? Well, we failed in that sense because we found nothing. And in fact, the opposite. I mean, childhood friends talk about mum being the most loving mum out and this being the happiest of families with Geoffrey and his brother Mark. It is a curious thing about how this man, from the most humble and boring of backgrounds in many ways, and the most ordinary backgrounds, and Mick uses the word chutzpah in the piece, really did have that sort of amazing kind of chutzpah to go on and become, A, fantastically rich, B, a terrible, terrible sex offender and see a collector of the world's most famous people without ever showing any sign of remorse or guilt.

4:28or awfulness about what he'd done. In fact, the opposite. He never really recognised anything of what he'd done.

4:36Camilla: Just a quick note on the mother, by the way. She didn't live to see him convicted. She dies before he's even... She certainly dies before she's ever aware he's under investigation and certainly dies before he's convicted or charged or arraigned. She thinks her son's the great hero. There's something slightly special about him in the sense that he's very good at maths and he's quite prodigious on the piano. Yeah, he's a very clever boy. Going back to his sort of character study, I mean, he was a Boy Scout and achieved the, I'm not familiar with the ranking system in American Boy Scouts, but he got the tenderfoot badge when he was 10.

5:17Tenderfoot, but not the wandering hands. Exactly. Which is probably a relief. You know, a bunch of friends, photographs. in that Ghislaine Maxwell put together this birthday book for his 50th birthday.

5:29Camilla: The famous birthday book. Which is really, really interesting and has lots of photographs of him as a boy and of his hanging out with his friends as a boy. And you can see he's not a solitary boy. He's very gregarious, very social. They're all there back slapping and teasing each other. But he always had his eye on the main chance. And we see this from when he goes through through high school and then into university. And he starts to lie. And once he gets away with the lie, then he lies again and he lies again. And so in a sense, lying becomes the foundation, the scaffolding of his entire life.

6:11So he lived a lie. He was a con man supreme. Somebody in the piece describes him as the con man who could out-con all the con men. liar con man eye on the main chance somebody who was motivated by greed but above all i think motivated by the power that he held over people and the way in which he could leverage that power that he held over people and his melipidative skills the way he could leverage all of that to make himself rich and to satisfy his sexual appetites which were considerable and perverse as we know. But coming back to it, there's nothing in his childhood. Not in his childhood. I mean, he finishes high school two years early.

6:52He's a prodigy in that sense. And so there's nothing in that other than he's sort of model pupils, probably a bit far ahead of his time. And I'm guessing having left school at 16, it's possible he was sort of twiddling his thumbs a bit. Possibly.

7:07Camilla: Although twiddling his thumbs to the extent that he then has to build a web of deceit, right? So he manages to get this teaching job at Dalton School in 1974, having falsely claimed degrees in physics and mathematics. In fact, he only had a high school diploma. Yes. So he goes to college, but doesn't complete it. And I wonder now, thinking back on it, whether he's so clever that actually college is almost beneath him and he moves on from that. But one only hypothesises, but he's probably a bit bored, I suspect. Well, his job is beneath him, right? You report that he is dismissed due to absenteeism, teaching complaints, ignoring the dress code.

7:46Camilla: Students remembered him wandering the halls in a fur coat, gold chains and an open shirt that exposed his chest. I mean, this paints the picture of someone who literally thinks most other people are beneath him. Well, he looks as if he's auditioning for a place in the group Kiss, you know, some sort of glam rock group from that period. He also had a special fondness for the girl students, I think. Yeah, although it said that he liked the girl students, but he never did anything improper. Nobody ever says that he ever did anything improper. Not at that point. Not at that point. He then leaves that job and, facing dismissal, secures a role at Bear Stearns.

8:25Camilla: Now, that's a big Wall Street financial firm. There's a CEO there called Ace Greenberg. He hired him on the basis that he was poor, smart, and with a deep desire to become rich. Now, I suppose that's a great profile if you're looking for somebody to make other people money. But again, that's built on a web of lies, isn't it? I mean, this apparently was the topmost criterion in Ace Greenberg's estimation about people he should employ rather than having an MBA in business studies or whatever. Lied to get into Bear Stearns. On his CV, he puts one of his boyhood friends, Terry Johnny Boy Kafka, who was a cab driver, And he gives a commendation and he's suddenly elevated to the position of Dr.

9:10Kafka.

9:11Camilla: Oh, my goodness. Another guy that Epstein had done work with, another friend who ran a roofing company, he suddenly becomes professor. And then the third referee on his CV is Epstein's own girlfriend. And it's only when this is found out that he's called to account and asked to explain this. You know, what's this about? And basically, he's able to talk his way out of it. And the guy who interviews him on this and calls him on this, Michael Tenenbaum, he goes on to describe him as the best salesman he ever knew. Yes. So he's got the gift of the gab, Rob. He's so thick skinned that even when exposed, he just decides to double down.

9:49Camilla: I mean, I think it's interesting just to look at that period in his life. I mean, it speaks to something, doesn't it? It speaks to someone who doesn't think that the rules apply to them. But I think it also speaks probably to a culture in which if he's making money for people and making money for Bear Stearns and bringing in business for Bear Stearns, which he clearly is able to do. He's very good at cultivating clients as we know. He's very good at cultivating contacts as we know. That's one of his great gifts, of course. So of course you're going to overlook those issues in those days when corporate governance may or may not have been a thing, because the guy's making money for you and he's making money for your clients.

10:28So yeah, fine he's got an indiscretion but there's it's also a certain in those days you know don't look at this through the prism of is he a terrible sexual predator and all the rest of it and a groomer of young girls but if you take that away at the time and you look through at the prism of this is a young lad prepared to make us a lot of money on the make with a sort of slight wide boy demeanor um why wouldn't you keep him on if if you looked at it that way that's true we have to

10:58Camilla: Sometimes people look at the sexual abuse and try and see it in the context of the time. Is this just how high net worth individuals behaved in the 80s and 90s? And we'll get onto that in just a minute. But we do have to be conscious that this is the era of Gordon Gekko. Greed is good. Let's stick on the red braces. Let's make everyone as filthy rich as possible and turn a blind eye to any nefarious activity. As long as we're all cashing in. Yeah, and I'm not sure how different that would be today. I mean, you know, he's doing well for everyone. He's not just doing well for himself. Before we get on to his quite extraordinary relationship with Leslie Wexner, who is the man who almost puts rocket fuel under his career as a friend to the billionaires of America and beyond, a psychologist for Epstein's first underage victims profiled him as a, quote, narcissistic master of puppets, incapable of empathy.

11:53Camilla: We do witness that a bit early on, don't we? There's a very interesting letter in this birthday book where Terry, Johnny Boy Kafka, talks about the younger Epstein getting the job at Dalton School. And here we need to emphasise the fact that, of course, Epstein and his friends come from a very working class neighbourhood, Coney Island. So it wouldn't have been a neighbourhood where they would rub shoulders with the rich and the wealthy of Madison Avenue and the Upper East Side. And one of the reasons that Epstein chooses to apply to Dortmund School is that he reads it's one of the top private schools in America.

12:30Camilla: Yes. And he sees that as an opportunity to actually inveigle his way into that world. And in his letter, Johnny Boy Kafka says, it was fantastic when you got that job. You came back to us and it was just fantastic. that we could see, you could see that girls and people were schmucks. Yes. And I think that is a phrase that kept ringing in my mind as I was writing this, that girls and people are schmucks. And that was his philosophy in life. Girls and people are schmucks. They're there to be taken. And that's what he set out to do. Well, let's move on to, I mean, I don't want to call Leslie Wexner, let's move on to then Leslie Wexner, who I don't want to call a schmuck, Rob.

13:15Camilla: This is a multi-billionaire businessman with a massive clothing empire, including Victoria's Secret, famous for its quite raunchy catwalk model shows and barely there underwear. Let's put it like that, Rob, because that is interesting for context. He basically meets Wexner in 87 and by 91 has completely overtaken this guy's life. yeah and what he's offering to wexner is sorting out his financial affairs and making it very tax efficient to say the least so he's earning leslie wexner a lot of money he's sorting out a lot of his problems uh even to the extent of things like wexner wants to see cats the musical and epstein not only is his financial conciliarism it calls him but also arranges for the for the cats people to come and perform it privately for Wexner at his house.

14:09I mean, you know, so he's going a long way into Leslie Wexner's life. And you've got to bear in mind at this point, by the way, he's had to quit Bear Stearns because he's been caught fiddling his expenses.

14:22Camilla: What did he do? Well, one of the things he does is he goes to the Caribbean, isn't he? Goes to the Caribbean on a conference, yeah. And he takes his girlfriend. Takes his girlfriend and puts about$12 ,000 worth of Bear Stearns expenditure and buys her gifts and things like that. And then there's a little bit of insider trading and so on. There's a bit of insider dealing going on. And he gets caught out for this, gets suspended by Bear Stearns. And instead of going, oh, crikey, I better not do that again, says, no, this isn't for me. I'm not going to get punished for something that I think obviously has no sense of right or wrong, I think, in many ways.

14:57And this is a good example of that, actually. Instead of saying that, says, I'm not going to take the hit for this. I'm going to quit. I'm going to take some of my clients with me. I'm going to set up on my own. He starts to make a really start to earn decent money at that point. And he's sort of living the life at that point already. And he's hitting Studio 54 and all the rest of it, isn't he? Not drinking, not taking drugs. That's right, isn't it? He's pretty clean living. He was even spending a lot of time in Studio 54, which at that point was the most fashionable discotheque probably in the world.

15:29Party place of Mick Jagger, Bianca Jagger, every pop star, Lisa Minnelli, everybody. And there's Epstein rejoicing in the fact of being a bachelor. One of the things that he subsequently goes on to say is that one of the things he wanted all his life that he set out to achieve was, I wanted to be free. And sexual freedom is part of that. I wanted to be free of constraints. I wanted to be free and free to make as much money as I wanted to make. But he also recognised that earning a lot of money gave him freedom, right? Exactly. Money was the key to freedom. I absolutely understood that. And so he's already doing very well when he meets Wexner.

16:06But Wexner, you're absolutely right, is the rocket fuel. It's the thing that propels him into the Super League. It's the thing that's invailing his way into Wexner's knife. And clearly Wexner, for whatever reason, given the success of the guy, and I don't understand this and I can't begin to understand this. Mick may have a bit more insight than me, but I don't quite understand why Wexner would say, fill your boots son you know take everything and go and do whatever you want to the extent that Wexner pretty much didn't quite gift him it but but certainly to start with lets him live in what is the finest house in New York yes that Leslie works from that becomes key to the whole Epstein

16:42Camilla: circle in the end you know this is where Mandelson stays this is where Prince Andrew stays this is the Manhattan townhouse to beat all townhouses this is the house where the dinner parties are off the charts. I mean, this is where you get Woody Allen, Prince Andrew, all sorts of people around the dinner party table, turning up to the court of Epstein. When we wind the clock forward, we see all this happening. So just to clarify, Wexner, within four years of meeting Epstein, has devolved all financial responsibility to him, to the extent that Epstein has power of attorney over him. Meanwhile, he's pushed aside the former financial advisor who later goes on to claim that Epstein has ruined his life because Epstein spread rumours about him around Wall Street, that he was in some way guilty of impropriety.

17:26Camilla: What's actually happening, according to Wexner, much, much later on, is that Epstein is stealing a lot of his millions. And by 1995, he's installed in this billionaire's New York mansion. Yeah, it is. It is extraordinary. And Wexner subsequently, many years later on, says, this guy conned me. You know, this guy was evil. And I almost, I can't believe that I allow myself to be deceived in this way. But I think you have to remember that one of the things about Epstein is that he had something larger than money. He had power. And he had this power over the people that he was working with and who became his clients in some cases or became his associates.

18:09In inveigling his way into these people's lives, He had their secrets. And now we don't know to what extent that affected his relationship with Wexner. There have been rumors, completely uncorroborated, but there have been rumors that Wexner was bisexual and that Epstein knew that Wexner was bisexual. And that would have been a power that he held over him. I think we can see that pattern. We don't know what the vices of other people were, But this was clearly one of Epstein's skills, that in invading his way into these people's lives, he came to know not only about their money, their lifestyles, but he came to know their secrets.

18:51Yes. And if we roll on a little bit further, because as a man who has lots of secrets himself, who has deviant behavior, in being able to find that key in other people, they felt they could confide in him because whatever their secrets were, his were worse.

19:10Camilla: Yes. And that gave them a sort of sense of comfort in a way. Well, it's a false sense of security. A false sense of security or a sense of commonality. Here's a guy who's into the same thing that I am, and this is interesting, and Wexner could use that. I think as far as his relationship with Wexner was concerned, he wasn't only his financial advisor. He was a clean-up man. So if there were things that Wexner needed done but Wexner didn't necessarily want to do it himself, Epstein was the guy to do it. So as much as he was his financial advisor, he was his consigliere. and what we find is that when he eventually leaves Wexner and sets up in Wexner's house, by this stage he's beginning to draw a much larger group of people around him, making all these connections, leveraging all these connections.

19:58He doesn't go out so much anymore. People come to him. He's gone from being the consigliere to becoming the godfather and there he sits in this enormous mansion. As Rob says, Prince Andrew's coming to dinner tonight. Why don't you come? What big financial big doesn't want to meet Prince Andrew? So, Rob, we have this guy who, I mean, is obsessed with making money, obsessed with social networking, but also he is a collector of people, isn't he? No, no. I mean, that's entirely his modus operandi. I mean, it's all about collecting people, and it's all about collecting people from different spheres.

20:34So there's no point in him only collecting people from the financial sphere. He can take whoever it is from J.P. Morgan, which he does, That's his private bank. That's where his wealth is. And so, you know, he has friends at J.P. Morgan. But if you've got J.P. Morgan on tap, you don't necessarily need another investment bank, right? But he does need a prince, Prince Andrew. Happy days. He'll take Peter Mandelson from the Labour government. Happy days. He'll take Bill Clinton. That's a president. Box ticked. So he'll take Noam Chomsky. That's the intellectual left ticked. he'll take a leading scientist from eugenics, which was one of the things that really interested him.

21:13So he'll take all these different people and he'll say, one of the real skills when we talk to people about this, because we didn't just go through the files, we talked to people who knew him and so on and so forth, was what they said to me was, he would work out what it is you needed and what you wanted to get out of your friendship with Jeffrey Epstein or your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. So it might be that you wanted a bit of investment advice. It might be you wanted something else. It might be you just wanted to meet a prince. And he could provide these amazing, it is a sort of, it's a fantastic service he was offering in a way that was all things to all people, mainly to men, of course.

21:53But it was all things to all men, let's say. And he had people like Guilherme Maxwell who could introduce him to people. She was a very useful facilitator for this, let's not forget. Yes, it's much more than a hobby and it's much more than a pastime. It's his entire life and that allows him to do the other things he gets onto which is the sexual deviance. I think that's a really interesting point about Ghislaine Maxwell because Epstein had money but he didn't have class and Ghislaine Maxwell is the person that brings him a sort of veneer of class because she has all the social connections.

22:26Camilla: Yes. She also of course has a financial connection not directly but subsequently through her father Robert Maxwell who Epstein knew. But she has the Rolodex. She has the address book. So you'll see when we first started taking note of who Epstein actually was and the famous black book was published, the address book, that was really Ghislaine Maxwell's address book, which is why so many of those names were familiar to us as celebrities, film stars, socialites. These were people who she knew and so her arrival in his life in New York in 1991 she brings that element of New York life to the party for him.

23:07Camilla: Also as you reveal in your piece he isn't the most sophisticated of dinner party hosts. He likes to talk a good game when it comes to his knowledge of science for instance and then as somebody points out actually his knowledge felt rather short and And then he resorted to, and this takes us on to the sexual deviance and the lack of respect for women in general, I think, that if he doesn't know what anyone at the table is talking about, he then comes out with the line, what's that got to do with pussy? So the whole time, if he's uncomfortable, he reverts back to this extremely strange relationship he seems to have with the opposite sex.

23:49Camilla: Let's get into that. That's his comfort zone. What is this all about? I'm going to pose something here and it's not necessarily discussed in the piece but it's come up time and time again and I'm just going to put it to you as we're using uncomfortable phraseology. This guy apparently has a quote egg-shaped penis and there appears to be a degree of sexual dysfunction about him and he then becomes embroiled in a world where he's bringing post-pubescent but pre-adult girls in to touch him, to massage him. All of this abuse seems to be non-penetrative. What's going on? Is this guy impotent? What do we know of this?

24:31I don't know if it is non-penetrative. I think it is. In fact, if you look at websites around, we're sort of vaguely touching it a bit. There are suggestions of Epstein children all over the place.

24:43Camilla: Let's get on to that in a moment. So it's not straightforward. Actually, I think there's a bit of a germaphobe about him, I think, which I suspect was one of the reasons that it's not always penetrative, frankly. He's an odd. He's odd. I mean, I don't know how to put it really. I mean, it's power, it's money. By the time we're getting to that stage, he can pretty much do what he likes. He's got a ton of money. He's got a ton of contacts. He's pretty much protected. I mean, in a way, the question isn't really why wasn't he ever sort of brought to book. Actually, even more extraordinary in a sense is that he was ever brought to book at all for that sort of minor conviction in 2006, 2007 or whatever it is.

25:36Camilla: Mick, talk us through the modus operandi. This is about spotting girls in different countries, checking them out. Yeah, he had a network of associates who would contact him from Ukraine or wherever and say, I found a girl, I can send her over, send the details over. And he might say yes or no, she's too old for me. So he did build up this extensive sex trafficking operation, sex trafficking for his own ends. And interestingly, the FBI, some of the documents that are there in the Epstein files, they investigated whether he was sex trafficking on behalf of other men. Yes. And they couldn't find evidence that that was happening.

26:15Which is not to say that he wasn't introducing men to girls as favors, so to speak, rather than as a financial operation. But I think there's something very interesting about Epstein's sexual behavior. And it goes back to when he was 14 years of age. He was very accomplished at the piano. and his piano teacher recommended for him to go to Interlochen, which is this arts and creative centre in Michigan, and they do summer camps, and Epstein spent a summer at the summer camp there. And Terry Johnny Boy Kafka writes in his birthday letter about Epstein at Interlochen, and there's a suggestion that that may have been where he lost his virginity.

26:59Kafka talks about Epstein going to London shortly after that when he's 17, 18, 19, bringing back a girl from London to this home in Coney Island. And Kafka says, you know, this blew us away. This was the first time I'd ever seen a blue-eyed blonde girl because all the girls we knew were Jewish or Italian-American. Roll on. When he's making big money from Wexner and he gets his private jet, one of the first places he flies with Ghislaine Maxwell is to Interlochen. And by this point, he's donating quite a large sum of money to Interlochen. He's even donating money for the Jeffrey Epstein Lodge, which is for the use of visitors and which he has the right to visit to use two weeks of the year.

27:47They approach a girl who is sitting in the grounds there at a picnic table having a sandwich. They go up to her and they explain to her that we're here looking to give scholarships to young students to enhance their lives in the arts and creative pursuits. She says to Maxwell, why have you chosen me? And she says, because Geoffrey likes your beautiful blue eyes. And when I read the court report about that, it really rang a bell with what Terry Johnny Boy Kafka had written in his birthday letter about the appeal of the beautiful blonde girl to the Jewish boy in Coney Island. and interestingly, horrifyingly, that 14-year-old girl, she happens to live in Palm Beach, which is where Epstein, of course, has his home.

28:39When they get back and she comes down to Palm Beach, he calls her, develops a relationship with her, starts to groom her, and she, at the age of 14, 15, is his first underage sexual abuse victim. Yes. Later when girls turn up And they're obviously coming Quite large numbers to the Palm Beach house There is evidence in the files of him Turning away black girls Really? Yeah

29:06Camilla: Are we saying anything as well In relation to his obsession with eugenics here? I think there is an odd bit of racism going on And there is a very odd Racial theory thing going on Amongst all the other messing With his head, I think That is in there And it's in the files And actual paedophilic tendencies I mean, there is some really just absolutely disgusting correspondence involving 14 and 15 year olds and whether they're old enough or young enough. And extremely misogynistic comments being made to other girls about whether or not they're ugly, what their noses are like, whether they need liposuction.

29:45Camilla: I mean, does he hate women? I don't think he ever accepted it was a crime to sleep with 14-year-olds as long as they were post-pubescent, actually. I don't think in his head. And I think that's the kind of thing he was telling Peter Mandelson at the time, that I've done nothing wrong here and I've been trapped by these girls or whatever, which is obviously a lie. But I think in his own head, I don't think anything post-pubescent. And we know that actually, not least, because back in the day when we were first doing Epstein 2009, 2010, so this has been going on for hundreds of years for me, we at the Telegraph got a letter from his lawyers saying please stop calling me a paedophile please stop calling Jeffrey Epstein a paedophile cease and desist it was a threatening legal letter procurer of minors for prostitution what he said was they're not paedophiles because the Greek definition says that paedophiles are prepubescent and he's very clearly only sleeping or having sexual relations with with post-pubescent girls so I just think in his head and you can see it in the messages actually.

30:46He doesn't think he's ever done anything wrong and he's sort of appalled at the newspaper reporting of his case and you can see that in the Epstein files too. He bangs on about it like he's being mistreated by us when we call him a sexual deviant or a sexual offender or a paedophile. He gets really cross about this. You can see that in the correspondence.

31:06Camilla: It's the same with the exchange with Fergie, you know, where he makes Hannibal Lector's style calls to her after she says that he's a disgusting bideaval, although we know what subsequently happened and let's not go down that route. But this is a man who is obsessing over Nabokov's book Lolita. He's getting young girls to pose up on beds scantily dressed. Yeah, so he's a cultural desert. I mean, despite the fact that Woody Allen, well, maybe because Woody Allen comes for tea, I don't know, but he's a cultural desert was one of the intriguing things about this so although he's an accomplished pianist an accomplished organist and has this very expensive cello as one of the few things in his possessions um he has very little art actually for a billionaire or a multi-millionaire all his artworks are basically of nudes yes and they're all fairly provocative i mean he's just a bit of a pervert and his books are sort of taste yeah his library seems to consist of uh the memoirs of casanova uh books about sex slaves yeah uh and lots of copies of Lolita.

32:04There's this lovely bit, sorry, where he goes to the theatre, he does finally go to the theatre and goes to see Hamilton, the musical, and he's so appalled he walks out.

32:11Camilla: But that could be a sign of his racism as well. No, I think that's just... It's a theatre about black people. I just think he's culturally bereft and he's not interested at all. But that in itself is intriguing, isn't it? Because as you talk about the sort of, you know, the terrible dinner party chat, and then that raises serious questions about why are all these people still flocking there when it's not very comfortable... Well, let's get onto the complicity of others in just a minute, but just one final thought. The other thing that we need to bear in mind is procuring girls from Ukraine and Russia and promising young girls that he'll get the modelling contracts, or in other cases picking off university students and suggesting that he'll pay their fees.

32:49Camilla: I mean, it is... Well, he's grooming. Yeah, he's a predator. He's a predator. He's a predator. And also a lot of these girls, as we know with Virginia Giffray, now deceased, they're vulnerable. Some of these girls have been abuse victims. before they even meet Epstein. Gillian's there picking them off. It's also transactional. He's always careful, pretty much always careful, as far as we can see, to pay them$200 a time. So he's always got that ready-made excuse that this is just transactional. And I think actually it's all business for Jeffrey Epstein across the board. Everything is business and everything is a business relationship.

33:24So although these people like Peter Mandelson or Prince Andrew would consider him a friend, And actually, there's lots of evidence in the emails where he doesn't consider them a friend at all. He'll happily turn on them. And you'll see a sort of really wicked turn of phrase at times where someone might be being a bit grasping in his eyes or someone's just pushing it a little bit hard. He's like, oh, for heaven's sake, you know, stronger than that. But he really at times really turns and you can see this really nasty edge at times, which is fascinating. I think he had a contempt for women. And if we look back, I mean, when he's in his sort of late teens, early 20s, when he starts making money, he's there going to Studio 54.

34:05He sees himself as a player. So he's introduced to Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, and he's actually named Cosmo's Man of the Month at one point, which seems extraordinary. Obviously very narcissistic. And he had girlfriends. At that point, we don't know whether he was interested in young girls, but he certainly had girlfriends and quite longstanding girlfriends. But at some point that begins to turn. As to his contempt for women, I think it's very interesting at that period where everybody is coming to him and where he's building up this network of connections. They're all men.

34:41He's not interested in having a relationship, a platonic relationship or a business relationship with a powerful woman or a successful woman. It's all men. And the only women who seem to be in his life at that point are working for him or they're decorative or they're victims. There's an extraordinary one which I might read out to you, but you'll probably have to bleep a lot of it. And our colleague Poppy Wood fan has brilliantly gone through many of these emails, but there's a section where he sends emails to himself, so these are his own deepest thoughts. And I think the most telling is the wife of a friend.

35:20So the wife of a client. So this is not a young girl. This is just a woman he's talking about and a very eminent wealthy woman, I think. And we don't know who she is and I don't even want to surmise it. But I think what it tells you is that in his own emails to himself, he's really letting rip. And these are his inner thoughts, if you like. And so really telling. And in this one, he says he's talking about the wife of a client. and he describes as one wrinkly old hag. Just because she is rich, she thinks she can talk down to everyone. Five towns nouveau, a real piece of ****, dumb as a rock. Everyone knows her husband is **** young Russians.

35:56Everyone except her nasty ****, this is all going to have to be bleeped, has some use service entrance, bags of cottage cheese in her pants, but she wears lipstick, bitter old Jew. I mean, and I think that gives you an insight into his mindset that we collectively have uncovered that I think is quite jaw-dropping beyond, you know, that really does show contempt for women, as Mick says, beyond.

36:25Camilla: And exposes his just inner, innate nastiness. He's just a nasty piece of work. Really nasty. The other thing that distressed me, there were two different elements that really distressed me. First of all, it's the women who are complicit. And there's one email from a woman somewhere saying that she has found pussy in Russia. And I just think for another woman to refer to a woman with the P word like that is disgraceful. It's all money and it's all business. That's the language that he was dealing with. That's the vocabulary he was dealing with. And then we have, and I must caveat this by saying that we have interviewed Mark Epstein, his brother, on this podcast.

37:00Camilla: and he agreed to do the interview a little bit like when you approached him for comment about this story by saying I will only speak about his death in prison. He claims that when we quote from emails and messages and things that he sent his brother back in the day they can very easily be taken out of context. There is a theme of sort of in the birthday book and in the correspondence this idea that the people around Epstein were very much well Jeffrey's just Jeffrey and there are jokes about Jeffrey being Jeffrey and Jeffrey thinking that women are disposable. And in one email exchange in December 2012, Mark Epstein asks his brother for the name of the gynaecology he used to send his, quote, victims to.

37:44Camilla: And Epstein hints links to multiple gynaecologists asking, N-Y? And Mark replies, oh, well, in N-Y, that doctor is being kept in business single-handedly by you. So it's sort of a joke about that. There's another joke Mark Epstein makes to his brother about him sexually abusing a, quote, homeless waif while drafting a university reference for a young woman. OK, these could have been taken out of context. And to be perfectly honest, some of the bans that we have with our siblings is probably grotesquely inappropriate at the best of times. Speak for yourself. Well, you've not met my brothers, Rob.

38:17Camilla: But my point is, there's a theme throughout the whole thing of not just turning a blind eye to Epstein's behaviour, but sort of encouraging it, indulging it, making jokes about it, drawing pictures of naked women on cards. But on the other hand, they always claim they never saw anything, by the way. I mean, you know, Peter Mandelson, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, no one ever saw anything. I mean, it's just amazing. that, isn't it? I mean, it's misogyny writ large. That's the point, isn't it? It's misogyny writ large. I just think it's money. And one of the things that this has exposed is the way in which some men do talk to each other about women.

38:57Camilla: Yes. But I think it's about money too. I just think that everyone turns a blind eye. No one sees anything because guess what? I needed a two-week holiday on these US Virgin Islands. Blummin' lovely house with everything laid on. But it's amazing what people would do for a free ride, right? Well, a free ride in a private jet, correct. Let's move on to talking about Christopher Steele, the former senior MI6 officer. He resolutely believes Epstein was a Russian agent. What do you two think? Well, Christopher Steele ran MI6's Russia desk for three years in 2006 to 2009. So he knows better than me.

39:31And I went to Christopher Steele because I've worked with him. I've spoken to Christopher Steele for some years now and known him. Look, he thinks it, and who am I to disagree is all I would say. that there's lots of evidence of Epstein doing business in Russia and meeting Russians and so on and so forth. I mean, he would be, it's definitely fair to say, a really useful Russian asset, right? I mean, that's like...

39:54Camilla: What, compromise on high net worth American and other individuals, members of the royal family? Oh, my God. Foreign prime ministers. Oh, joy. I mean, he's golden. He's golden. And so Christopher Steele claims not only is he a Russian asset, but that at some point the Americans and the Israelis switch on to the fact of what a useful asset he is and turn him themselves. So he might have been Mossad too, it's suggested, Mick. I mean, Robert Maxwell, it was always suggested, may have been a Mossad agent. And we know that he did a lot to fund Israeli defence forces back in the day, right? Rob knows much more about this than I do.

40:28But I would ask for what motive? I mean, there's no ideological motive for him to be working for Mossad. I mean, it's not as if he's a committed Zionist, for example. No.

40:38Camilla: Although he is spotted in an IDF jumper. And there's no financial motive for him to be working for the Russians. He's already rich beyond the dreams of Greece. But maybe he loves the connections. I mean, there's this extraordinary... Well, I think that's probably true. There's this demand to meet with Putin, but only if Putin will give him three hours of his time. Which is comically absurd, and comically absurd. And, of course, there's no evidence that he ever met with Putin. And why would Putin... And if he was working for the Russians as an asset, it seems highly unlikely that he and Putin would be sitting down publicly and talking about it.

41:10I think there's money in being an agent, actually. I think there's money in knowledge, we know that, there's money in power, and it doesn't do him any harm. My theory, and I bow to Rob's greater wisdom on this, is that he might well have been useful to the Russians. But I don't know if he was, so to speak, working for them. But I think in the course of those relationships, the Russians that he knew would have come to have the knowledge and the power and the compromise that we're talking about.

41:40Camilla: Also, maybe it was useful to know Russians in high places to get girls in on visas. He liked his Russian girls. He's very fond of his Russian girls indeed. To conclude, because you have chronicled this guy from cradle to grave, let's move on to him being in prison. Now, you quote a Federal Bureau of Prison document in which Epstein apparently tells a jailhouse psychologist that he is a coward who dislikes pain and has, quote, no interest in killing himself. And yet, shortly afterwards, he's found dead in his cell, age 66, and the autopsy concludes suicide by hanging. Now, to bring Mark Epstein back into this, Mark Epstein questions that.

42:27Camilla: He says that other people came in and did early oral trepsies that absolutely concluded the opposite, that his neck had been broken in three different places. It suggested strangulation. Mark Epstein wants a new investigation. He's merely saying if it was homicide, not suicide, we need to know. And there's every chance that it's not state sponsored. It's just a fellow inmate who finds him reprehensible and just wants to do away with him. What's your verdict on Epstein's death, Vic, first of all? We don't go into this simply because I think it would have required another 3 ,000 words. I'm sure that by the time anybody has finished reading this piece, they'll have had just about enough of Jeffrey Epstein.

43:07Camilla: I know, but you have studied his character. We have studied his character. I mean, I think it's clearly there's a possibility that he was murdered. But then again, I can see why Jeffrey Epstein would kill himself. that he's in a bind, the game is over, as we put it in the piece. He's deprived of his money. He's deprived of his sexual opportunities. He's deprived of everything. He's deprived of his contacts. He's deprived of his laptop and his phone. His laptop and his phone are like blood transfusion for him. I mean, he lives on his laptop and his phone. There is nothing for him to live for anymore.

43:41And I think, coward or not, I think in the depth of the night, in the darkness of his soul, he decides to take that way out. I mean, the question that I ponder is what was going through his mind at that time in his cell. Was there any regret? Was there any remorse?

44:02Camilla: Seems unlikely. Was there any sense of conscience? And I tend to think there wasn't. Rob? If you were to press me, given the fact that he never thought he did anything wrong and had none of that empathy for victims and had none of that sense of wrongdoing or seemed to have any kind of moral bone in his body. I would question the suicide, actually. I remember we spoke to his butler back in, his Paris butler who was absolutely adamant he would never kill himself. I love the conspiracy theory, if I'm being honest. And why wouldn't you at the point at which this guy is going to spill the beans on everything?

44:34Camilla: Yes, but he's in, okay, I completely understand what you're saying. He's in prison, but he's still so powerful because of the secrets that he has collected over the years. Precisely why I love the conspiracy theory. He is in a position to bring down not just one, potentially, but two presidents. He can blow the lid on everything to do with the likes of Andrew and Mandelson. If he existed to gather all this compromat and he's at a pivotal moment in the release of such information, why would he choose to kill himself then? He's at the peak of his powers with that, albeit behind a prison prison bars and with no access to the outside.

45:14He just pleads the First Amendment. He doesn't need to do that unless they offer him the ultimate reward.

45:22Camilla: Doesn't he want all of the cameras trained on him in a show trial to meet all show trials where he can lay bare this intricate web that he has woven over the course of the past 40 years? It's not just that, is it? It's the millions of emails. I mean, all that might come out in a court case, right? I mean, we've seen a chunk of it, but a lot of it redacted. It hasn't come out so far. Yeah, because it's redacted. Well, we don't know, do we? That's the beauty of it, isn't it? Say if we're looking at the Eiffel Towers of files, and you've gone through a great many of them, where are we at with these revelations?

45:56Camilla: Are we at the first floor where you get off and have a champagne and a croissant? Are we at the top of the first tower? I think we've filled a tower's worth, haven't we? If you're saying there's two Eiffel Towers, I think we've done one tower. I don't think we've done the second one. It's not what is at the top of the tower, it's what's buried down in the basement. Oh, very good, mate. Very good. Gosh, mate. And that's why you are the doyenne of writers. You're both doyennes in your own way. Stop it. He's a bigger doyenne than I am. No, no, no, I'm not a bigger doyenne. Oh, yes, indeed. The estate.

46:24Camilla: Yes. Now, you make the point in the piece that some were surprised that he didn't amass a greater fortune than around half a billion quid. Sounds like quite a generous estate to leave behind, but there you have it. People have said, well, why don't he have two billion or three billion? What's happened to that half a billion? Well, I think that, I mean, that was one of the things we spoke to sources about, as well as looking through the messaging. So, yeah, half a billion estate. One of our sources who knew him well and was sort of financially involved in him said, actually, given he had sort of two, three hundred million or whatever point it was when he sort of takes from the waxness, really at death, he should have had one to two billion.

47:02You know, just investing it in a normal way. And this chap said he wasn't a great investor and didn't think he was a truly great investor in many ways, which is always an oddity. I don't understand it, other than I think that he probably spent quite a lot of money on acquiring things like the jets cost money to run, the girls.

47:23Camilla: Giving money to Harvard. Giving money to Sarah Ferguson. Running his own private island, running a huge ranch. I mean, his property costs are monumental. but equally the money should have grown actually. I think there was a lot of payoffs by then because he'd already been convicted in 2006, 2007 so there was a lot of money spent. The victims have ended up with some money from the estate. Well quite a lot of money in fact. So it's not clear why he didn't have more in some respects but I wonder whether his overheads were just enormous. Although there's no great art collection, there's no great jewellery collection, there's none of those sort of things that billionaires like to collect like fabulous works of art.

48:04He wasn't interested as we know. And the money isn't huge, huge in those terms, in terms of him attracting all these incredible people. But he always had enough to help people out. He had enough to provide the island, he had enough to provide the private jets for Bill Clinton or whoever it might be who needed a quick ride in a hurry. And he didn't mind, I guess in the way, he subsidises a lot of that stuff to collect these friends. So he's showing this largesse and he's collecting names. He hasn't got any children, of course. Well, has he? Sorry, he hasn't got any children who are owed a legacy.

48:36Camilla: Yeah, but has he got children? Well, as we talk about that gynaecology thing, I mean, these are the hints that there are children out there. And there's also one image of a young boy, we think, in a photograph, redacted, we don't know. There's no telling whether that is his son or just another child, could be a child of somebody who works for him. And part of the problem of the Epstein files being redacted in the way they've been redacted is it often, we've tried to answer a lot of the questions but it often leaves questions unanswered um which is you know goes back to this death in the cell is uh you know there's a lot of questions there's a lot of things buried with the burial of jeffrey epstein another thing he didn't spend money on was designer clothes and one of the most intriguing flip remarks about him is somebody we spoke to uh who talks about that he would always hold court dressed in a tracksuit yes and he says like Jimmy Savile.

49:30Camilla: Like Jimmy Savile. On that note, Rob Mendick, Mick Brown, thank you very, very much indeed for taking us through your immensely detailed and indeed eminently readable opus, which we will link to the show notes of this podcast. Thank you for having us. We'll be back on Monday, 5pm.

50:00Thank you.