Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein, Part Three: As If In A Labyrinth
The third installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, featuring new Oversight photos, Russians, scientists, lawyers, bankers, properties—and, perhaps, an heir apparent
I sold the Renoir and the TV set.
Don’t want to be around when this gets out.
—Duran Duran, “The Reflex”
Previously on Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein…
You were going to tell me what could possibly be worse—hypothetically speaking—than the rapes, the history of sexual assault, the Putin puppetry, the mob ties, the felony conviction, and Donald Trump’s long relationship with the world’s most notorious child sex traffickers.
I was, and I will. But we have a lot more to cover before we get there. More than I thought.
Dude, we’re 14,500 words into this. Are you just jerking me around? Is this going to be like Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault?
No.
For one thing, Al Capone’s vault did not contain a creepy dental chair with weird rubber masks adorning sterile walls. For another, the FBI did not pay a thousand agents a million dollars in overtime to remove stuff from the vault before Geraldo could open it.
Geraldo blocked me on Twitter, by the way. One of my better celebrity blocks.
Why did Geraldo Rivera block you?
I don’t remember. Probably I called him a traitor—he was fluffing Trump pretty hard, back in the first term—and brought up the empty vault.
I’ve since reconsidered. What we don’t give Rivera enough credit for is, before the unfortunate and embarrassing anticlimax, he managed to get millions of people to watch a long exposé on Al Capone’s arrest. That was probably the first time most Americans became aware of money laundering. So maybe I was being a bit too harsh about the empty vault business.1 Although he totally deserved to be called out for whatever stupid thing he said about Trump.
We’re already off track. Is this a cop-out? Are you deflecting?
No! The truth is, I intended to have this be a three-part series, but just the part where I answer the “what’s worse” question already runs to 3,000 words. So I’m covering that in Part Four. Part Four will only be that. I promise.
Very well. Since we last spoke, the House Oversight Committee has released a new tranche of photos collected from the Epstein estate.
Indeed. They are in a Dropbox, here.
What’s your take on the tranche?
More than half the photos are weird shots of, like, Epstein’s hot water heater and the framework on a patio on his island. Not sure why we need to see that.
There are a few photos of Trump with young women and girls—including a blonde in a shoulder-padded blazer whose identity is concealed.
Bill Clinton is there, because there is a little-known Newtonian law of motion that states that for every mention of Trump there must be an equal and opposite mention of Bill Clinton.
There’s also a funny picture of the credibly accused pedophile formerly known as Prince Andrew, looking like he just sniffed a fart, standing next to Bill Gates. There’s also a bunch of shots of Epstein with the leprous Steve Bannon.
But I’m more interested in the other people in the photos.
How so?
I wonder why the Oversight Committee chose to release the material it did. For example, why so many of Woody Allen? Those are relatively recent shots—Allen is there with Bannon, which means it was probably around 2016 or 2017. Noam Chomsky, a known Epstein associate, is in another photo, making Bannon laugh.
Not Chomsky!
Alas, yes. His association with the odious Epstein gives new, and disturbing, meaning to the title of his famous book, Manufacturing Consent.
And there are images of people I didn’t immediately recognize. One photo shows Allen, Larry Summers, and his wife, Elisa New, on a private jet; New’s “Poetry in America” show was scuttled by PBS almost immediately after the photo was released. (Well done, PBS!)
In another, a grinning Epstein is walking behind the Segway inventor Dean Kamen and Virgin Airlines rich guy Richard Branson, who proudly displays a spiral notebook page. I enhanced the image, like in Blade Runner, and see that it’s large numbers and the words “million dollars” written in cursive:
Kamen subsequently issued a statement: “I have been a guest of Richard Branson on his Necker Island a number of times for conferences and fundraisers. I believe this photo must have been taken during one of those events many years ago. I have no knowledge of any of the horrific actions of Jeffrey Epstein other than what I have learned from news reports.” Okay, fine, but—if he’s not otherwise involved, why show this picture at all?2
My favorite image, from a Victoria’s Secret public event, shows a submissive-looking Trump trailing behind Epstein, while the Belgian model Ingrid Seynhaeve laughs. I like to think she’s laughing at Donald.
How is any of that interesting?
I just wonder if there’s some larger strategy at work here—if these are “shots across the bow,” intended to get people to talk.
For example: In one of the photos, a blonde woman, whose face is obscured, sits at a table—draped, incidentally, with one of the most hideous tablecloths I’ve ever seen—between Jeffrey and Woody. Who is she? Is she a victim? Is this a ploy to get her to cooperate? Or has she already cooperated, and that’s why she’s redacted—so the others know she’s cooperating?3
Is this 3D chess? Or just random?
Why do you think so many intelligent people stayed close to Epstein, well after the truth came out?
Intelligent people or intelligence people?
Both, I guess?
I’m just kidding. I think.
No, it’s true. In the recently-released pictures alone, we see Gates, Kamen, Chomsky, Woody Allen, Alan Dershowitz, Summers, New, Bill Clinton—a lot of brain power there.
Don’t forget about Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They were both meeting with Epstein, too.
You said intelligent people.
Ha!
But seriously, it’s a good question. Epstein knew any number of academics, scientists, tinkerers, tech pioneers, and so on. Why on earth did these presumptive geniuses stick around?
Philip Weiss probed this question in a 2007 piece for New York Magazine. This excerpt is one answer possible to the query:
“His mind goes through a cross section of descriptions,” says Joe Pagano, a financier. “He can go from mathematics to psychology to biology. He takes the smallest amount of information and gets the correct answer in the shortest period of time. That’s my definition of IQ.”
A Columbia University geneticist says Epstein has that insight in science, too. “He has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make,” says Richard Axel, a Nobel Prize winner. “He is extremely smart and probing. He can very quickly acquire information to think about a problem and also to identify biological problems without having all the data that a scientist would have … He also has an extremely short attention span. Why?—it’s not that he’s bored. He has enough information after fifteen minutes so that you can see his mind thrashing about, as if in a labyrinth. And even to doubt an expert’s statements.”
What is the sound of one mind thrashing?
No doubt Epstein was smart enough to talk to them on something approaching their level. Which, if you’re one of these brainiacs, is probably a welcome development.
These were scientists and researchers from, like, MIT and Harvard. I’m sure there were plenty of other people even smarter than Jeffrey Epstein who could talk on their level—or even above it.
True, true. There’s more to it than that. And as you might imagine, it all comes down to money.
As Weiss also points out, “Epstein has been a munificent supporter of cutting-edge research.”
You don’t bite the hand that feeds you—even if that hand looks like this:
Dude, I just ate breakfast.
Sorry.
And then there’s the girls. However brilliant these men might have been, they’re also…how shall I put this?…let’s just say that on the Venn diagram of human social groups, there is significant overlap between the cohort of tech and science guys Epstein courted and the incel community. In what other reality is, say, Marvin Minsky going to have a young woman who looks like a runway model fawn over him?
I don’t necessarily trust the journalist Michael Wolff—Ellie Leonard wrote a great piece over at Blue Amp on him—but I’m sure the quote from him in Weiss’s piece is an accurate summation of how a charming sex trafficker wooed smart, sexually frustrated men:
Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff met him in the Internet bubble, in the late nineties, when Epstein invited him and a group of scientists and media types to fly to a conference on the West Coast in his beautiful 727.
“It was all a little giddy,” Wolff says. “There’s a little food out, lovely hors d’oeuvre. And then after fifteen to twenty minutes, Jeffrey arrives. This guy comes onboard: He was my age, late forties, and he had a kind of Ralph Lauren look to him, a good-looking Jewish guy in casual attire. Jeans, no socks, loafers, a button-down shirt, shirttails out. And he was followed onto the plane by—how shall I say this?—by three teenage girls not his daughters. Not adolescent girls. These are young, 18, 19, 20, who knows? They were model-like. They towered over Jeffrey. And they immediately began serving things. You didn’t know what to make of this … Who is this man with this very large airplane and these very tall girls?”
For a lot of those dorks, that’s, like, a sexual fantasy come to life.
You said last time that Epstein had Eastern European girls “in his orbit.” Who were they?
One of them was Nadia Marcinkova. She was a model from Slovakia.4 Epstein reportedly referred to her as his “sex slave.” He is alleged to have said that he “bought” her from her parents in “Yugoslavia” when she was still a teenager—a claim he later denied making. (Slovakia was never part of Yugoslavia, although there is a country whose name sounds like “Slovakia,” and that was part of Yugoslavia, and whose most famous countryman—Luka Dončić excepted—is a key figure in the Russian novel that is the Epstein story; maybe he got them mixed up?)
Tara Palmieri wrote a fantastic piece for POLITICO five years ago that details the many women who worked for Epstein. I encourage you to read the whole thing. Of Epstein’s Slovakian “assistant,” she writes,
Police reports have stated that another “assistant” of Epstein’s, Marcinkova, now 36, engaged in sex acts with Epstein’s victims nearly two decades ago. After Epstein was jailed in Florida, she visited him at least 54 times, according to media reports. In a statement to POLITICO, her lawyer said that Marcinkova, too, was victimized by Epstein. According to a Palm Beach police report, Epstein once told a victim that he had purchased Marcinkova at age 15 from her family in Yugoslavia to be his sex slave. “Nadia wants to speak out about her victimization and help Epstein’s other survivors,” the lawyer’s statement said. “Unfortunately, she is not yet able to comment publicly.” The lawyer would not say whether Marcinkova has applied for victims’ compensation.
Marcinkova, who has a pilot’s license—Virginia Heffernan wrote a nice piece about the “Global Girl” right after Epstein croaked—had been holed up in an apartment on the Upper East Side but fled New York right around the time the first batch of Epstein files were released in January 2024. There was some concern that she’d followed Jeffrey to the sweet hereafter, but the intrepid reporter Amber Woods tracked her down to an undisclosed White Lotus Season Three-style Buddhist retreat.
Another “assistant,” Adriana Ross, née Mucinska, came to Florida from Poland when she was 19, where she hooked up with Epstein in Palm Beach. Holly Baltz of the Palm Beach Post notes that Ross
has been the most silent among Epstein’s ‘potential co-conspirators’ named in his 2007 non-prosecution agreement….
Asked during civil litigation about Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, Ross, now 41, repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She flew alongside Clinton in Epstein’s jet.
She is reportedly living in Miami.
Wait—aren’t those two of the four “unindicted co-conspirators” named in Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement?
Correct. Sarah Keller and Leslie Groff, both American-born, are the other two.
Wasn’t there a Russian woman who did PR work for Epstein?
That would be Masha Bucher, née Mariia Drokova, usually known in the press as Masha Drokova. And there’s a lot of press about her: Byline Times, TechCrunch, Kyiv Insider, WaPo. Which makes sense, because her job was literally to get press.
Bucher rose to prominence as the face of Nashi, a pro-Putin youth group—there’s a documentary about her, even, called Putin’s Kiss—but subsequently repudiated Putin, publicly, while still in Russia, after learning about how he treats dissident journalists. She came to the United States on an “Einstein” visa, with referrals from former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and tech analyst extraordinaire Esther Dyson. Per Wapo:
McFaul said while he hadn’t followed her career in the United States, her “defection from Nashi, which was when I was serving in Moscow, generated attention — good attention in my view — about the Kremlin’s role in sponsoring Nashi.”
“I liked her and thought she deserved a chance to live in the U.S.,” Dyson told The Post.
Once here, Bucher set up a PR company, leveraged every contact she could find—including the Russian investor and Singapore resident Serg Bell, whom she met on Twitter—and moved from that to venture capital.
And yes, for a year or so, she did PR work for Epstein.
Why would she get an Einstein visa? Aren’t those for extraordinary ability?
Go click the links, read those articles about her, and then come back here and tell me again that she doesn’t have extraordinary ability.
A Putin Youth girl turned anti-Putin California-based entrepreneur? With ties to questionable Russian capital? Come on, dude. That’s straight out of The Americans.
Is it?
I think it’s really hard for us soft, pampered Americans to appreciate how lousy it was to grow up in a Communist country in the 80s—or Russia under Vladimir the Puny in the 2000s. The contrast between, say, Prešov, ČSSR, and New York, New York is profound—even if you come from a family of some means, as Nadia Marcinkova did (her father is a prominent architect).
And not every person born in Russia is a Kremlin operative. In the case of Drokova/Bucher, I mean, what else was she supposed to do? She was in Nashi as a teenager, but so what? We happily embrace MAGA youth who see the light—we’re in the process of welcoming Marjorie Taylor Greene into polite society, ffs; how is that any different?
Bucher stood up to Putin while still in Russia. She networked like crazy. She navigated the move to the U.S.—and the fraught situation with Russian capital after the invasion of Ukraine—and now has a successful investment business. She’s done really well for herself.
But Masha worked for Epstein!
Yeah, for a year and half. When she first got here. Before she knew any better. Because that’s where her networks led her.
And then, once she realized the deal, she distanced herself from him. Which is more than I can say about Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Woody Allen, Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky, Jes Staley, and the list goes on. And those are men of means, with actual power.
I just think there’s a lot of hypocrisy regarding who we condemn and who we let off the hook. So I’m giving Masha Bucher the benefit of the doubt.
Her sister, Victoria, was also in Epstein’s orbit.
Yes, she was. She was business partners with Svetlana Pozhidaeva. But mostly she works for oligarchs, as Byline Times reports:
Much of Victoria’s business career consists of work for entities closely connected to Russian oligarchs and former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich. According to her Facebook account, she previously worked for a Russian investment advisory firm named Invest AG, which manages the money of Alexander Abramov and Alexander Frolov. Those two own Russia’s largest steel company Evraz, and have been known to be close associates of Abramovich. Both were sanctioned by the UK in November 2022.
Financial activity was substantial. Leaked Russian banking records show nearly $60 million moved through three brokerage accounts held by Victoria in 2020-2021. Russian property files list her residence in an elite Moscow complex valued at $1 million.
The thing is, half of London worked for Abramovich at one point, including every player on Chelsea, the football team he owned.
Who is Svetlana “Lana” Pozhidaeva?
Epstein’s more recent “assistant.” The Dossier Center explains her significance:
Pozhidaeva is a Russian national, who has a long history of business relations with Epstein. According to her, after graduating from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) she was working as a financial analyst when she made it to the final round of a beauty contest run by the Maxim men’s magazine, signed a contract with the Elite Models modeling agency and moved to Europe. How exactly she met Epstein is unknown—a Daily Mail source claimed that the billionaire offered her an opportunity to study and “attend conferences with academics.“ In December 2010, she was photographed for the first time leaving Epstein’s mansion while Prince Andrew, the British prince later accused of sexual assault, was staying there. Pozhidaeva denied that she was the woman in the photograph, although, as the Daily Mail pointed out, the woman’s bag had a Russian airline Aeroflot tag with her name on it. Pozhidaeva then became President of the Education Advance organization, with some of the donations made by Epstein. In a conversation with The Daily Beast, Pozhidaeva’s boyfriend claimed she knew almost nothing about Epstein’s criminal activities and promised to return Epstein’s donation.
In 2018, Svetlana launched the WE Talks: the Women’s Empowerment project to support female entrepreneurs. Epstein’s lawyer Darren Indyke filed the paperwork to register the WE Talks trademark, and the address entered on the application form was the same as that of the Epstein Foundation. After the billionaire’s death, Pozhidaeva changed her lawyer.
Darren Indyke. That name comes up a lot in those Epstein emails.
One hundred twenty seven times, according to a database search I just did. Atticus Johnson of the Cornell Daily Sun, the student paper at Indyke’s alma mater, explains that the attorney
worked in Palm Beach as Epstein’s personal lawyer, representing him in court in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was sued along with Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, in 2024, by two of Epstein’s victims for sending payments from Epstein’s accounts to victims and knowingly benefitting from participating in Epstein’s sex crimes, among six other charges, but he denied wrongdoing in the case.
The case is still ongoing.
The Cornell Law grad, who has been described as a “staple of every [Epstein] event” by a lawyer for Epstein’s victims, handled press inquiries for Epstein and frequently forwarded him news articles regarding legal cases against him, according to the released emails. Indyke now works for Parlatore Law, a D.C.-based firm with strong ties to Trump and represents current U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Yikes.
Another Epstein lawyer, Reid Weingarten, also went to law school in Ithaca. The Daily Sun explains:
Weingarten, an anti-corruption prosecutor turned white collar defense attorney, maintained close ties with Epstein. He was mentioned 109 times in the trove of released emails, where his correspondences reveal a decade-long personal relationship with Epstein beyond legal representation….After Trump was elected president, the two traded thoughts about politics until Epstein’s death.
Almost as embarrassing for Cornell as Leonard Leo being an alumnus.5
Half the emails involve Epstein talking to lawyers, it seems like.
Well, I mean, he was a fucking criminal, so it tracks. But yes. Indyke, Weingarten, Alan Dershowitz, Kathryn Ruemmler—attorneys all.
I know that Epstein was their client. But still. Is it just me, or is it icky?
It’s a bedrock principle of the American legal system that everyone is entitled to legal representation. As we all know from Hollywood, the state even provides an attorney, if someone under arrest cannot afford one.
But those attorneys knew damn well what Jeffrey Epstein was. They knew more than anyone. Because he could tell them whatever he wanted, and they couldn’t say shit. It’s all attorney-client-privileged information. That’s why the press doesn’t press them.
With that said, this isn’t Soviet Russia. Indyke and Weingarten were under no obligation to represent Jeffrey Epstein. They chose to do so. And not only to work for him, but extend the relationship into what, from the emails, seems to have transcended the attorney-client dynamic. They were friends—or so it appears.
In the case of Weingarten, as the emails show, Epstein wasn’t even paying his firm’s legal bills—so he had a ready-made excuse to ghost the sex trafficking scumbag. But Weingarten stuck around until the bitter end.
“Icky” is the most generous adjective I can think of to describe them.
Why did so many women stand by Epstein?
If you think of Epstein as a cult leader, it’s a little easier to understand. Men like that prey on troubled women and girls, weaponizing their trauma against them. They know how to fuck with their brains so much that they don’t want to leave.
Plus, Epstein was a collector. He collected people. Once you were in his orbit, you tended to remain. He seemed to make a distinction between his victims, the girls he and Ghislaine viewed as disposable, and adult women like the attorney Kathryn Ruemmler. He was generally on good terms with his ex-girlfriends, most notably GMax and Eva Andersson-Dubin.
Finally, we have to bear in mind that, as we’ve seen with Indyke and Weingarten, it wasn’t just the women who stood by him.
The men did, too.
By and large, yes. Including Donald Trump. Trump and Epstein were in communication well after their little spat about the Florida property that even Epstein said was a way for Russia to shovel money to Trump.
The emails suggest that the two of them stayed in touch pretty much up until the point where Trump became president, and then things cooled. Epstein appeared to have exquisite intelligence on the inner workings of the Trump White House—even after Bannon’s West Wing departure.
But Trump and Epstein did have a falling out.
It seemed like Epstein had been promised something—a Cabinet position, perhaps, although the idea that Epstein would sit for questions at a Senate confirmation hearing is far-fetched—only to have Trump dick him over somehow.
My friend and co-host Stephanie Koff suggested that the Bannon-Epstein bromance was borne of a mutual anti-Trump grievance. A sort of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of deal.
Is there any legitimacy to the new $310 million lawsuit accusing Trump, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk of running an “Epstein-identical trafficking and exploitation venture?”
The complaint was filed in Palm Beach County, Florida, on November 24. There are two plaintiffs. One is a minor. The other is a woman who claims to be the inventor of “SAFE cybersecurity platform and Abrahamic Accords defense architecture” and also [checks notes] some sort of prophylactic gel?
I found this hard to wrap my head around even before the sudden modulation into first person at the sixth bullet point:
Defendant Elon Musk, acting in concert with the Trump administration via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has used Plaintiff’s SAFE cybersecurity platform and Abrahamic Accords defense architecture to secure Elon Musk over $580 billion in federal contracts while refusing to compensate Plaintiff or procure her technology via mandatory sole-source FAR provisions.
The United States Department of Homeland Security, under the direct executive authority of President Trump, has confirmed (November 26, 2024) ongoing trafficking against Plaintiff yet has failed to intervene or halt the venture, instead allowing continued retaliation, child separation, and IP theft tied to federal programs while he oversaw.
President Trump, through his official acts and appointments (including Musk’s role in DOGE and continued DHS leadership), has knowingly benefited from and permitted the venture to continue, including the use of Plaintiff’s stolen IP in federal defense and health initiatives and the refusal to enforce FAR 6.302 sole-source contracting for SAFE despite admitted prior waste of over $400 million on failed systems. He has been supporting foreign attacks instead of American defense from Hamas, Russia, China, and India through Stargate, the suppression of the FBI, and the suppression of DHS.
Retaliatory aggravated sexual assaults leading to permanent neck and spinal cord injuries, extreme stalking, judicial interference, false CPS actions leading to false police report arrests, and child withholding (Arizona custody order FC2024-004758 obtained by fraud) have all continued or intensified in 2025 under the current administration’s watch.
Trump bypassed Congress to send over $30 billion in direct military aid to Israel through suppressing their defense of Israel in 2025 while simultaneously endorsing the “Gaza takeover” plan. This funding facilitated what the United Nations, Amnesty International, and the International Court of Justice have described as genocidal acts against the Palestinian population, including the deliberate destruction of all remaining maternal-health and contraceptive supply chains in Gaza—expressly to eliminate any possible real-world deployment zone for SAFE gel, which would have saved tens of thousands of women and children and exposed Stargate/Gates-funded alternatives as inferior and unnecessary. The Gates Foundation’s simultaneous $2.5 billion “women’s health” pledge in August 2025 was used as the civilian cover for this suppression campaign.
Terrorism for fear installation including facilitating the Baltimore Bridge attack on the day my daughter was born March 26th using my ex James Cook, a violent rape right before she was born to sabotage the birth as well, and then a russian cyberattack on the airports using my competitors at Microsoft through the Crowdstrike attack, while taking my home from me in DC and trying to force me to fly home to Nebraska during that time where he shortly after had me arrested to prevent me from filing any police reports as confirmed by arresting police investigators of his actors.
Defendants and their agents have attempted to murdered ###### no fewer than five (5) separate occasions between 2023 and November 2025, including but not limited to poisoning, vehicular assaults, and orchestrated physical attacks designed to appear accidental. Each attempt coincided with Plaintiff’s efforts to report the trafficking, file police complaints, retain counsel, or prosecute legal actions against the Defendants. Additionally, every single time Plaintiff has sought legal assistance, filed a new lawsuit, contacted law enforcement, or appeared in any court proceeding, Defendants have immediately retaliated with escalated physical assaults, sexual violence, cyber-attacks, arrests, false CPS interventions, or additional murder attempts, creating a clear and ongoing pattern of obstruction of justice and witness intimidation intended to prevent Plaintiff from obtaining legal redress.”
I have not read the whole thing carefully, but I did not find a reference to an attorney for the plaintiff in the complaint, the story at Boca News Now, or anywhere else. If there’s no attorney, that suggests that not a single lawyer in Florida, even the ambulance-chasing Saul Goodmans on the billboards, thought the plaintiffs had a snowball’s chance of even settling with two of the wealthiest men in the world, let alone winning a judgment.
Let’s just say that if the plaintiff winds up being awarded $310 million, I will be very surprised.
How was Epstein connected to the Kremlin?
He’d been liaising on some level with the Russian intelligence services since his arms-dealer days with Douglas Leese. Perhaps his closest Kremlin contact was Vitaly Churkin, the child actor turned diplomat. There’s numerous references to Churkin in the Epstein emails—and he seemed to be scurrying around to find a new Kremlin intermediary to replace Churkin after his death in 2017.
As the indispensable Dave Troy points out at America 2.0, Churkin helped plan and manage Trump’s first visit to Moscow in 1987. So all of these people have known each other for decades:
From a historical perspective, it would be difficult to find four people closer to the Russian worldview and the KGB’s long-term projects than [former KGB head] Kryuchkov, [legendary KGB operative] Borovik, Churkin, and Trump — and that’s exactly the circle in which Epstein was operating. Churkin, who first met Trump in 1986, died February 20, 2017, reportedly from a heart attack — just a day before his sixty-fifth birthday.
Was Epstein ever in Russia?
We know Epstein visited Россия at least once. In April 1998. With the aforementioned tech journalist and Internet champion Esther Dyson—whose influential book, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, had come out the year before. He was photographed in front of the home of the late Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in the closed city of Arzamas-16 (now Sarov).
The photo is still up on her Flickr page, with this caption: “Esthr, Jeffery Epstein, Pavel Oleynikov. Sarov is a (former) Soviet ‘closed city’ where they developed bombs.”
As Dave Troy reports at America 2.0:
Dyson, who has had a decades-long association with Russia, resigned from the board of Yandex, a Russian search engine company, in protest of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. She had this to say about her own passing association with Epstein:
…I did meet Epstein myself in Russia courtesy of Nathan Myhrvold, whom I was traveling with around Russia in 1998, to “save Soviet science.” Nathan said a Wall Street/finance friend of his would be passing through Sarov at the same time as us, and there’s a Flickr photo taken by a friend, of Epstein and me in front of Sakharov’s house. ... Also, I met him again later through John Brockman, who was both my father’s and my brother’s agent.
Dyson asserted that she was not traveling with Epstein that day her widely-shared photo in front of Sakharov’s house was taken, but that he had essentially dropped in unannounced on Myhrvold when Dyson happened to be present. Myhrvold (who had been suggested by Epstein to Sergei Belyakov as a potential participant in the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum), was at the time a prominent Microsoft executive and interested in the state of Soviet science, as was Epstein — like Robert Maxwell before him.
During the late 90s, Epstein was actively working to penetrate Silicon Valley, and established many there contacts, especially at Microsoft—hence his bromance with Nathan Myhrvold.
Why does that name sound familiar?
From the “birthday book.” Myhrvold was the “friend” who sent photographs of wild animals getting busy. He is listed, by the way, in the “friends” section and not the “science” section of that book.
Gross. And Sergei Belyakov?
The crack investigative team at the Dossier Center
uncovered [Jeffrey Epstein’s] close contacts with Sergei Belyakov, then Deputy Minister of Economic Development and later head of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum Foundation, which runs the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). It has become the norm for female escorts from all over Russia to be present at the Forum.
Belyakov is a graduate of the FSB Academy which prepares Russian intelligence officers. As the Dossier Center discovered, he helped Epstein to deal with a Russian model who was blackmailing American businessmen, as well as proposing to arrange meetings with Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak and Central Bank Deputy Chairman Alexei Simanovsky. For his part, Epstein advised Belyakov on saving the Russian economy amid imposed sanctions, while also recruiting high-profile guests for SPIEF.
Basically, Epstein was treasoning with this guy.
Who is John Brockman?
A big-wheel literary agent for, basically, the type of scientists and other big brains whose friendship Epstein was cultivating.
As an author and an editor, Brockman has produced such notable books as Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite; My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World’s Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy; The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution; and We Are So Much Smarter Than You, You Drooling Peasant. (I’m pretty sure I made the last one up.) He also headed up The Edge Foundation—“The Edge” as in “the cutting edge,” not the guitarist for U2—and hosted “billionaire dinners,” where his clients hobnobbed with the über wealthy.
Evgeny Morozov over at the New Republic, himself a client of the literary agency, reports that Brockman is “no mere literary agent; he is a true ‘organic intellectual’ of the digital revolution, shaping trends rather than responding to them.” In his TNR piece—titled “Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler”—Morozov explains:
Epstein participated in the Edge Foundation’s annual questions, and attended its “billionaires’ dinners.” Brockman may also be the reason why so many prominent academics—from Steven Pinker to Daniel Dennett—have found themselves answering awkward questions about their associations with Epstein; they are clients of Brockman’s. Marvin Minsky, the prominent MIT scientist who surfaced as one of Epstein’s island buddies? A client of Brockman’s. Joi Ito, the director of the elite research facility MIT Media Lab, who has recently acknowledged extensive ties to Epstein? Also, a client of Brockman’s.
Brockman tried, it appears, to lure Morozov into the Epstein spider’s web. In the article, Morozov reproduces an entire email Brockman sent him—in 2013, long after the truth was well known to anyone curious enough to find out. It’s a remarkable piece of correspondence from an American agent to his Belarusian client:
Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire science philanthropist showed up at this weekend’s event by helicopter (with his beautiful young assistant from Belarus). He’ll be in Cambridge in a couple of weeks asked me who he should meet. You are one of the people I suggested and I told him I would send some links.
He’s the guy who gave Harvard #30m to set up Martin Nowak. He’s been extremely generous in funding projects of many of our friends and clients. He also got into trouble and spent a year in jail in Florida.
If he contacts you it’s probably worth your time to meet him as he’s extremely bright and interesting.
Last time I visited his house (the largest private residence in NYC), I walked in to find him in a sweatsuit and a British guy in a suit with suspenders, getting foot massages from two young well-dressed Russian women. After grilling me for a while about cyber-security, the Brit, named Andy, was commenting on the Swedish authorities and the charges against Julian Assange.
“We think they’re liberal in Sweden, but its more like Northern England as opposed to Southern Europe,” he said. “In Monaco, Albert works 12 hours a day but at 9pm, when he goes out, he does whatever he wants, and nobody cares. But, if I do it, I’m in big trouble.” At that point I realized that the recipient of Irina’s foot massage was his Royal Highness, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.
Indeed, a week later, on a slow news day, the cover of the NYpost had a full-page photo of Jeffrey and Andrew walking in Central Park under the headline: “The Prince and the Perv.” (That was the end of Andrew’s role at the UK trade ambassador.)
Wow. That has the tone of a high school freshman who desperately wants the upperclassmen to think he’s cool because he goes to parties on the local college campus.
Or the other way around—an old guy past his prime trying to impress the kids.
But Morozov isn’t done with him. Behold the kill shot:
A close analysis of Edge Foundation’s (publicly available) financial statements suggests that, between 2001 and 2015, it has received $638,000 from Epstein’s various foundations. In many of those years, Epstein was Edge’s sole donor. Yet, how many of Edge’s contributors—let alone readers—knew Epstein played so large a role in the organization?
So: yeah. Intellectual enabler.
In The Third Culture, Brockman writes, “Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody,” which I guess explains why none of these eggheads seriously thought that Jeffrey Epstein was a bad dude.
Did Epstein in any way facilitate Russian interference in the 2016 election?
It’s certainly possible, although that remains to be seen. Epstein was reportedly in possession of kompromat on Trump. Putin is reportedly in possession of kompromat on Trump. Maybe they were in a support group?
But seriously—remember that at the time of his 2016 election victory, Donald was in debt to the tune of $300 million. His son-in-law and shadow president, Jared Kushner, was also in dire financial straits because of his idiotic decision to overpay for 666 Fifth Avenue five minutes before the real estate market collapsed. Handing the nuclear codes to two near bankrupts, needless to say, was ill-advised.
Epstein was likely in a position to know about—if not help facilitate—whatever underhanded financial hijinks Trump was up to at that time.
Was Epstein working for the Russians?
Jeffrey Epstein worked with the Russians, for sure. He wasn’t working for them. He also worked with the Israelis—specifically AMAN, the military intelligence unit once headed by his old chum Ehud Barak. But he wasn’t working for them. Nor was he working for MI6, or the Saudis, or the CIA (despite what he was telling women back in the 80s). I don’t think he had any allegiance to any one country, intelligence service, or person—other than himself.
Jeffrey Epstein was working for Jeffrey Epstein, just like Robert Maxwell was working for Robert Maxwell.
What’s the deal with Epstein’s properties? Isn’t there, like, a whole other island next to Little St. James that no one knows about?
There is: Great St. James. I’d never heard of this island until Amber Woods, an investigative journalist with contacts with the survivors, wrote about it on her Substack:
The island has underwater utilities carved into the coastline, a solar array big enough to power something far larger than a cottage, and a structure described—casually, almost innocently—as a “pool and underwater office.”
We don’t know the full footprint of that “office” or its use.
But from looking at the (low quality) satellite imagery: whatever it is, it likely lives beneath that deceptively small “pool” with a thick concrete base. This is likely an entry point to an underground facility of some kind.
The purchase was shrouded in secrecy:
Great St. James was acquired in 2016 through a shell structure designed to conceal true ownership. The community didn’t want Epstein (by then, a convicted sex offender) to own it. Residents protested. Local officials hesitated. But the purchase went through anyway. Strangely, under a name that wasn’t his. He used the name of an associate and Dubai businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.
Weird shit is going on on that island, Woods suggests. Same thing at Zorro Ranch.
Zorro Ranch?
Epstein’s property in New Mexico. Also super strange. Woods covers this as well:
The question that sits at the top of every page of this investigation still has no real answer: how did a convicted sex offender obtain a thousands-acre fortress inside one of the most politically connected families’ land holdings in New Mexico?
The King family sold him land deep inside their own property.
The State Land Office leased him another thousand acres.
Everyone involved knew who he was. And they gave him a territory so remote and insulated that it virtually erased the outside world.
I will add that the manager at Zorro Ranch, Brice Gordon, and his wife, Karen, have gone to ground. That happened right after Epstein’s death.
I shudder to think what all of this means. But what it suggests, to me, is that whatever diabolical shit Epstein was up to in the Virgin Islands and in the desert continues apace.
I wondered about that. If Epstein filled the Robert Maxwell void after Robert Maxwell’s suspicious death, is there someone filling the Jeffrey Epstein void after Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death?
“obsessively secretive”
“knows everyone.”
“the sort of guy who will turn up behind you on a flight to Rio”
“a real man of mystery”
“unbelievably connected”
“our modern version of a homeless billionaire…constantly working, constantly traveling”
“Rolodex off the charts for someone so young”
“collects people”
“a Zelig-like quality”
Sounds like Epstein, right? But those quotes are from a Financial Times article on the press-averse, secrecy-obsessed British billionaire Ian Osborne.
Like Epstein, Osborne emerged out of nowhere, with zero practical experience in the field. Like Epstein, he immediately Tom Ripley’d himself into the good graces of a billionaire—Mike Bloomberg, in his case. Like Epstein, he operates in the shadows. Like Epstein, he knows everyone.
“It sounds an easy thing to do but connecting people is a rare talent,” one rich guy told FT. “Dozens of people around the world that Mike [Bloomberg] and I have good relationships with were introduced by Ian. Global business leaders never meet without a go-between. There is no Yellow Pages for that.”
And like Epstein, the source of Osborne’s wealth comes from his knowledge of an obscure corner of finance: special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.
SPACs?
As I understand it, these are vast pools of investment capital that wait around to buy up stuff. Investopedia explains:
Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have no commercial operations. They are formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) that it can then use to acquire or merge with another company. After a period of relative obscurity—they were most popular in the lead-up to the 2007–2009 financial crisis—SPACs had a remarkable resurgence in the early 2020s, with a record-breaking number of SPAC IPOs and mergers, before quieting down in the mid-2020s.1
Experts say reasons for this renewed popularity include increased market volatility, a desire for faster and potentially less costly public listings, and the involvement of high-profile sponsors and investors. SPACs also gained mainstream attention with the highly publicized 2024 merger that took then-former President Donald Trump’s media company public under the ticker symbol DJT.
I have no idea what any of this means, but I’m reasonably certain SPACs will be responsible for a global financial crisis at some point in the not-too-distant future.
MEGO, dude! My eyes glazeth over!
MEGO indeed.
Is Osborne a child sex trafficker?
No! Sorry, I should have made that clear up front. No, Ian Osborne is not a sex trafficker, child or otherwise. That’s not the Epstein vacuum he appears to be filling.
But was Osborne connected to Epstein?
Does the Pope wear a funny hat?
The Pope wears a Chicago White Sox hat.
It’s just an expression.
Yes, Epstein and Osborne were connected. Covertly. The two of them joined forces on a 2012 mission to install their mutual banking buddy Jes Staley as CEO of Barclays.
I’ve talked about Staley extensively at PREVAIL. He’s the JPMorgan Chase wealth management guy who wrote to Epstein: “The strength of a Greek army was that its core held shoulder to shoulder, and would not flee or break, no matter the threat. That is us.”
Epstein and Osborne even had a name for the mission. They called it—drumroll, please—“Project Jes.”
How creative.
This is from the Kalyeena Makortoff story in the Guardian:
Evidence presented to the upper tribunal in London showed that Epstein began emailing a man named Ian Osborne in summer 2012 with the subject heading “Project Jes”, seemingly in an effort to promote Staley’s prospects of becoming the chief executive of Barclays. Barclays was searching for a replacement for Bob Diamond, who had been forced out by the Libor fixing scandal.
One of the emails sent by Ian Osborne—who ran a press relations and business development consultancy—to Epstein claimed he had access to the then chancellor, George Osborne, and hoped to influence top-level officials at the Bank of England.
“Let me know how you want to proceed and I will get on it, calls can happen anytime and I can see people back in London after Tuesday,” the email said. “Rupert and George are both very close to Mervyn King and top BoE [Bank of England] staff. I am seeing the chancellor anyway next Thursday.”
Previous evidence outlined by the FCA showed that Epstein and Ian Osborne also discussed contacting the Barclays deputy chair Mike Rake as part of their efforts. “I won’t do anything before hearing back from you but I’m ready to go into bat for our friend,” Ian Osborne said.
Are we sure Osborne’s not a sex trafficker?
Again: he is absolutely not! Please don’t get that idea!
Part of me feels bad, putting him in this Epstein Q&A. But here’s the thing: If Ian Osborne didn’t want to be associated with the most notorious child sex trafficker in recent memory, Ian Osborne should not have associated himself with the most notorious child sex trafficker in recent memory.
Also, his company is called Hedosophia, which we’re told derives from the Greek words for pleasure and knowledge smashed together. But it’s also one letter away from “Pedosophia,” which would mean “knowledge of pedophiles.”
Was that intentional?
No. But still. If he hired Masha Bucher to do his PR, she’d have come up with a better name.
Ha!
And now, somehow, we’re once again approaching 8,000 words, so we have to wind this up.
Please join us next week, for the Season Finale of Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein.
Geraldo, unblock me, you coward!
Kamen’s house sounds like the sort of thing Epstein would dig—although there’s no evidence that he ever went there.
Can one “redact” a face? Is that the right verb?
Her actual modeling career is the subject of some dispute, but Marcinkova certainly looks like she could have been a model.
Sorry, Lisa.
Thanks Greg for peeling the onion. Await chapter 4, maybe by then some of this will make sense and we shall get to the nub. I shall repeat my comment from last week. As horrific as the child trafficking and abuse is, for the Oval Office Imbecile the biggest fear is the disclosure of long standing ties to the Kremlin and Putin, the whole Manchurian candidate bit. I am beginning to believe that there is a cabal consisting of Democrats, Republicans, executives from the financial, tech and Silicon Valley worlds who want us to focus on trafficking and sexual abuse while keeping secret the Russia take over the world angle. Khanna and Massie, the heroes of the discharge petition led the effort to deflect from intelligence community and Russia to the more emotional trafficking and abuse, serving their masters well.
My conspiracy theory for today. Power and greed, the drivers of the evils of life are the drivers of the real Epstein cover up, the Trump angle the tidbit that distracts us. Will the cabal throw him to the wolves? This is his biggest fear as that may be the salve which keeps the cabal's true secret away from the world.
Force release of the financial crimes of Trump-Epstein. Thousands of transactions there