Redacted: The Real Epstein List
A survey of the rich & powerful individuals who elevated Jeffrey Epstein, hired him, funded him, enabled him, befriended him, and/or partook of his services.
Jeffrey Epstein was not a self-made man. His success, especially in the early days, depended on the largesse of the rich and powerful men and women with whom he curried favor. He was an opportunist. His genius, if we can call it that, lay in cultivating and leveraging relationships with important people, both in the United States and around the world. He made himself indispensable to these individuals.
Along the way, he invented his own mythology. Epstein the genius. Epstein the intellectually curious. Epstein the financial wizard. All carefully crafted mythos. All bullshit.
Below is the real “Epstein list.” Not the men accused of raping and sexually abusing the girls trafficked by him and Ghislaine Maxwell—although there may well be a significant overlap on that odious Venn diagram. Here is a list, long but hardly exhaustive, of the individuals who elevated him, who hired him, who funded him, who enabled him, who befriended him, who partook of his services, and, in some cases, were his partners in crime.
Let me be clear, right up front, that the inclusion of the names below DOES NOT imply guilt of rape or sexual abuse or any other crime, and should not be construed as such.
With that said, it strains credulity to believe that all of these very smart, very successful, very well-connected people had no inkling of Epstein’s ephebophiliac predilections. Anyone who set foot in his mansion in New York or his house in Palm Beach could see it in the décor. And, like, he called his private jet the “Lolita Express!” None of these Ivy League graduates were familiar with Nabokov?
Epstein hid what he was doing, sure—but not so well that, when he pleaded guilty in 2008, those who knew him were not much surprised. One of his friends even wrote, in the “birthday book” Maxwell put together for his 50th birthday in 2003, a limerick on the subject: “Jeffrey at half a century / with credentials plenipotentiary / though up to no good / whenever he could / has avoided the penitentiary.” That’s nothing but a rhyming version of the old lewd joke that “15 will get you 20.”
How could they not have known? Really—how?
As Annie Farmer, one of Jeffrey’s first known victims, said at the Lawmakers and Epstein Survivors Press Conference last week, “For so many years, it felt like Epstein’s criminal behavior was an open secret. Not only did many others participate in the abuse, it is clear that many were aware of his interest in girls and very young women and chose to look the other way because it benefited them to do so. They wanted access to his circle and his money.”
Eternal shame on everyone who participated in this evil—or who looked the other way.
He was the Tom Ripley of child sex trafficking and kompromat collection. That’s the source of his infamy. But Jeffrey Epstein first made his name in the world of high finance because he was willing and able to move money around to avoid taxes.
“The myth that he had in his heyday, when everybody was flocking to him—and by ‘everybody,’ I mean these very powerful people from academia to politics, across the board, business leaders—flocking to this guy…who is not very sophisticated, not very well educated, none of those things,” Stephanie Koff explained on The Five 8 last month, was that “he’s magic. ‘Give your money to Jeffrey, he’s magic.’ The whole promise of him, the myth of him, was that he could take all of your money and manage it in such a way that you didn’t have to pay taxes.”
Koff discovered this ten years ago, when she was doing research for The World Beneath, her podcast about the intersection of organized crime and the intelligence services. She was following the money.
After he was fired from his teaching job at the Dalton School, the 23-year-old Jeffrey Epstein was plucked from obscurity by…
Alan C. “Ace” Greenberg (1927-2014)
. . . the head of Bear Stearns, the now-defunct investment bank, and a key figure in the rise of Jeffrey Epstein—much more so than Donald Barr, Bill Barr’s father, former OSS operative and the headmaster at Dalton School, who may have hired Epstein initially. By the time Epstein showed up at Dalton, Barr was already gone; they were never in the same place at the same time. Greenberg, by contrast, kept Epstein close at hand.
“Here’s Ace Greenberg, top of the Bear Stearns, and Epstein was slid in right underneath him,” Koff explains. “Did he work his way up? Did he matriculate through the Bear Stearns hierarchy? Did he put in his time? No. He was a teacher and a tutor at the school where Ace Greenberg’s kids went.”
I won’t get into the details now, but I have heard stories myself, from a very well-placed source, suggesting that Greenberg was not exactly a paragon of ethics when he was running Bear Sterns. Ace wasn’t above some shady shit. Maybe he recognized some of that same unscrupulousness in his youthful protégé.
Whatever Greenberg’s reason, Epstein was entrusted with managing the money of one of the firm’s most important clients...
Edgar M. Bronfman, Sr. (1929-2013)
. . . chairman of the Canadian outfit Seagram Company, Ltd. and its American subsidiary, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc.
“This is a fortune,” Koff explains. “This was the Seagram’s empire. Now, Samuel Bronfman, who founded Seagram’s Liquor, was business partners with Meyer Lansky, who created offshore money laundering. All of that was created by Lansky and some Swiss banks. And that was a reaction to Al Capone being popped.”
In 1976, the Bronfman family fortune was something like $7 billion—$40 billion in today’s dollars. Real money, as the saying goes. That’s the enormous pile of coin that Epstein was tasked with managing.
Epstein wound up playing fast and loose with SEC regulations on a deal involving Seagram’s, and Greenberg was under enormous pressure to let him go. But he didn’t. Ace apparently needed an ace of his own up his sleeve.
Epstein “just moved into doing offshore tax havens with two other big Bear Stearns executives,” Koff explains. “So they set up all of these offshore accounts. It’s there in the Panama Papers. It came out in that and [the] Bahama leaks—all of those things show you Jeffrey Epstein’s offshores and how they’re connected.”
Financier? Money manager ne plus ultra? Not exactly.
“So that’s the magical, mystical wizardry of Jeffrey Epstein,” she says. “He literally just did offshore tax havens for people.”
Given the heinousness of Epstein’s subsequent crimes, I should make clear that while Epstein certainly devised “tax mitigation strategies” for Bronfman, neither the Seagram’s head nor his namesake son are mentioned in the “black book,” and there is no evidence to suggest he had much interaction with Epstein at all after Jeffrey left Bear Stearns to work for…
Sir Douglas Leese (ca. 1930-2011)
. . . a British businessman and defense contractor with ties to MI6 who was also, as he himself put it in a Florida court filing dug up by Vicky Ward, “involved with various highly confidential business enterprises including business in the United States, some of which involved governmentally-involved or other highly confidential business projects.” While working for Leese, Epstein busied himself facilitating and managing various shady arms deals, accumulating wealth, and sucking up to the British aristocracy.
Leese turned him loose after busting him charging Concorde flights and five-star hotel stays to the company card. Epstein’s “moral compass was broken,” is what he told…
Steven Hoffenberg (1945-2022)
. . . whom the New York Times described in his 2022 obituary as a “debt baron who ran a vast fraud.” Hoffenberg was the CEO of Towers Financial, where he and Epstein, whom he’d hired on Leese’s recommendation in 1987, ran one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history.
Epstein reportedly enriched himself working for Towers, skimming off the top, but avoided prosecution because his boss took the fall and refused to implicate him. Hoffenberg served 18 years in federal prison and spent the last years of his life after his release trying to make good by telling the truth about his former employee—who, he says, was the real mastermind behind the Towers Ponzi scheme—and helping Epstein’s rape victims.
Epstein was allegedly mixed up in Iran/Contra, the biggest arms deal of all: the CIA using organized crime to help ship arms to Iran and money to Nicaragua. According to former Israeli Military Intelligence spy Ari Ben-Menashe, in his book Profits of War, the CIA set up a slush fund—$800 million from the U.S., $800 million from Israel—to run the arms. When the operation was shut down, the Agency parked its leftover cash in Iran, fearing that bringing it back to the U.S. would raise a red flag. Somehow, Hoffenberg says, Epstein got a hold of a big chunk of that money: the actual source of his fortune.
Speaking of arms deals, another notorious figure involved with the crooked Towers Financial in some capacity, per Hoffenberg, was…
Adnan Khashoggi (1935-2017)
The Saudi arms dealer was in the middle of all kinds of unseemly shit in the 80s and 90s, when Epstein was operating in that world. He was tied to former Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly clients Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, whose plundered fortune he tried to safeguard after the disgraced couple fled the Philippines. He was also the uncle of Jamal Khashoggi, and once sold a yacht on the cheap to Donald Trump.
Prince Andrew (1960-)
If we believe survivor Virginia Guiffre, and the telecom guy on Little St. James from the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, and that incriminating photo snapped by Epstein at Ghislaine Maxwell’s flat that “Randy Andy” claimed never to have set foot in, and the reference in the Woody Allen letter to Epstein run by the New York Times that mentioned “royalty” at his dinner parties, and the photos of the two men chummily strolling through the park, and the way the royal family cut him off from official duties, and the plethora of other available evidence, Prince Andrew was 1) close friends with Epstein and 2) shared his predilections for young girls. But that’s only if we believe all of those things and not the Duke of York’s adamant denials.
Certainly he knew his Mum’s friend…
Robert Maxwell (1923-1991)
. . . born Jan Hoch in rural Czechoslovakia, and the ultimate “Man in the Middle.” After the war, in which most of his family died in the Holocaust, he rose to shadowy power in his adopted country of Great Britain, amassing a fortune, befriending the Queen, and becoming active in politics both in the UK and in the fledgling state of Israel.
For decades, he plied his dark trade, facilitating deals between intelligence agencies, liaising with mobsters (Semion Mogilevich, the longtime head of the Russian mob, was allegedly a business partner), moving around money, gobbling up media properties, and bilking investors.
According to both Hoffenberg and Ari Ben-Menashe, Epstein spent years at Maxwell’s feet, learning the ins and outs of the business. Epstein allegedly took over Maxwell’s operation completely after Maxwell died under mysterious circumstances on his yacht off the coast of Grand Canary Island in 1991.
Ben-Menashe claimed that Maxwell was killed by the Israelis, an allegation corroborated by Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas in their 2003 book ROBERT MAXWELL, ISRAEL’S SUPERSPY: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul; the authors write that Mossad operatives “whacked” him.
Epstein was also connected with Israel via…
Ehud Barak (1942-)
. . . the former defense minister and PM, who reportedly visited Epstein in New York, Florida, and the Virgin Islands more than two dozen times. Epstein was a big investor in Carbyne, Barak’s tech company that provides real-time video, location, and data transmission.
Through Epstein, Barak met with Peter Thiel, another HNWI interested in surveillance tech. Thiel, the Sauron-like backer of JD Vance, Curtis Yarvin, and other Dark Enlightenment weirdos, now runs Palantir, the secretive and ominous data collection outfit with enormous federal contracts.
Virginia Guiffre accused Barak of sexual assault. She also accused…
Alan Dershowitz (1938-)
. . . Epstein’s attorney, although that case was finally settled after he sued Guiffre for defamation of character. As part of the settlement, she retracted the accusation and apologized (although Dershowitz remains a pariah in Martha’s Vineyard).
His uncomely face has been on TV screens for so many years, I’d forgotten that he became famous for being a defense attorney for the nation’s most notorious criminals: O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and—more relevant to the topic at hand—Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy.
Who was it, one wonders, that recommended to Epstein that he retain Dershowitz’s legal services?
As Epstein’s attorney, Dershowitz negotiated the notorious sweetheart deal with U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta that gave his child-sex-trafficking client a slap on the wrist—and granted immunity, for many years, to…
Ghislaine Maxwell (1961-)
. . . the youngest daughter of Robert Maxwell. Ghislaine (pronounced “zhee-LEN” by Europeans and “Jill N” by flat-accented Americans, and not “Jizz Lane” as I originally believed) was Epstein’s girlfriend, partner in crime, pimp, and enforcer. It is important to note that many of the Epstein survivors report that Maxwell was not just a facilitator to the rapes, but an active participant. Virginia Guiffre went so far as to say that Ghislaine was worse than Jeffrey.
In violation of a prohibition on moving sex offenders to loosey-goosey facilities, Maxwell was recently moved to a minimum-security prison in Texas. Trump would likely have pardoned her by now, if he thought he could get away with it politically.
The official story is that Ghislaine Maxwell first met Epstein after the death of her father in 1991—but if Hoffenberg and Ben-Menashe are right about Epstein’s apprenticeship with Robert Maxwell, she almost certainly knew him before that.
From what I can gather, it was Ghislaine Maxwell who brought into Epstein’s orbit the 42nd President of the United States…
Bill Clinton (1946-)
I have not seen any charges that the former president availed himself of the girls in Epstein’s entourage—the Filthy Rich documentary makes no such allegations; to the contrary. On the other hand, Clinton wasn’t just on the “Lolita Express” for that humanitarian trip to Africa—he flew on Epstein’s private jet a lot. And he claims never to have visited Little St. James, but the telecom worker interviewed in the documentary insists that he saw Clinton on Epstein’s island.
But even if Clinton didn’t do anything illegal, he was certainly witness to some inappropriate behavior. At last week’s Lawmakers and Epstein Survivors Press Conference, one of the survivors, Chauntae Davies, said, “I was even taken on a trip to Africa with former President Bill Clinton and other notable figures. In those moments, I realized how powerless I was. If I spoke out, who would believe me, who would protect me? Epstein surrounded himself with the most powerful leaders of our country and the world….He bragged about his powerful friends, including our current president, Donald Trump.”
(The New York Post published photographs five years ago showing Clinton receiving a neck massage from Davies, who made it clear that Clinton “was a perfect gentleman during the trip, and I saw absolutely no foul play involving him.”)
At the very least, Clinton allowed himself to be used as a sort of implicit character reference—after all, if a former president was hanging around with Epstein, one might safely assume that the “financier” was carefully vetted, right?—and, as Davies intimates, a prop: a trophy friend whose presence conveyed to the trafficked girls just how powerful, and how untouchable, Jeffrey Epstein was.
There were other prominent Democrats in Epstein’s inner circle, too, most notably his friend…
Bill Richardson (1947-2023)
. . . the former governor of New Mexico. Unlike the other Bill, Richardson was explicitly named by Epstein survivor Virginia Guiffre as one of the prominent figures she was ordered to have sex with.
An expert in international relations who worked with Henry Kissinger both before and after his days as an elected official, Richardson was frequently tasked by the government with negotiating with some of the world’s worst strongmen to hammer out nuclear arms agreements or arrange for the release of political prisoners. He also served as a DNC chairman, as an ambassador to the United Nations, and, perhaps most importantly, as Clinton’s Energy Secretary—or, in other words, the head of the agency that oversees the country’s nuclear weapons program.
Richardson often escapes notice in matters related to Epstein, perhaps because he’s been dead since 2023. But I somehow doubt it’s coincidental that, of all the places in the United States to buy a sprawling piece of property on which to build his ranch, Epstein chose Stanley, New Mexico—a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the Los Alamos National Laboratory—and then proceeded to cultivate a relationship with the New Mexican politician running the Department of Energy.
Speaking of prominent Democrats…
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (1954-)
. . . knew Epstein well enough that he traveled with him and Ghislaine Maxwell, on the “Lolita Express,” to the Dakotas, on a hunt for dinosaur bones—as one does.
RFK, Jr. has made no secret of his association with Epstein, and photos have circulated of the two men at various fundraisers and other events.
There are also plenty of photos of Epstein with…
Leon Black (1951-)
. . . the private equity billionaire and former head of Apollo Financial Management, who availed himself of Epstein’s “estate planning, tax and philanthropic advice” to reportedly save over a billion dollars on his tax bill. For the child sex trafficker and Ponzi schemer’s sage tax avoidance expertise, Black paid Epstein $170 million—a sizable chunk of change, yes, but with an enormous ROI.
Black’s name came up in Senator Ron Wyden’s three-year investigation into Epstein’s finances. Wyden, a Democrat who is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, summarized his findings last week in a press release:
Continuing his investigation of billionaire financier Leon Black’s extensive and unexplained financial ties with Jeffrey Epstein, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter yesterday to the Department of Justice, Treasury and FBI referring information obtained through his investigation and requesting documents that would shed light on the financing of Epstein’s activities.
Wyden is also releasing the $62 million settlement between Leon Black and the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, which provided Black immunity from criminal prosecution in the USVI for his financial support of Jeffrey Epstein. Black’s settlement with the USVI explosively acknowledges that “Jeffrey Epstein used the money Black paid him to partially fund his operations in the Virgin Islands.” As part of the settlement, Black paid $62 million to obtain criminal immunity from Epstein matters not just for himself, but also for his attorneys and individuals acting as his agents.
Wyden referred the following findings of his investigation to the DOJ and Treasury:
The Finance Committee obtained evidence that payments from Black to Epstein were used to fund Epstein’s operations.
The Finance Committee discovered documents stating that the true amount Black paid to Epstein totaled $170 million, $12 million higher than previously identified by the Apollo board’s investigation. There has been no explanation why the Apollo board’s investigation failed to identify these payments.
The Finance Committee found that a major U.S. bank waited seven years to report Black’s payments to Epstein to the Treasury Department, potentially violating federal money laundering laws in the process.
Other grotesquely wealthy financiers who were tight with Epstein include: the hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, as well as his wife Eva Andersson-Dubin (the former was named by Guiffre; the latter was Epstein’s longtime former girlfriend); the hedge fund manager and deep-pocketed GOP donor John Paulson, whose name was revealed this week by Rep. Thomas Massie; key executives at JPMorgan, most notably Jamie Dimon, who, per the New York Times, chose to ignore the many financial red flags that Epstein was up to no good; and…
Jes Staley (1956-)
. . . the banker I talked about in my ramble a few weeks ago:
He worked at JPMorgan Chase. He was in charge of—some sort of wealth, the department of the bank that you and I don’t know exists, right? The high rollers, the whales, the people with real money bank with this guy, okay, at JPMorgan. And one of the people at JPMorgan, Sandy Warner, introduced Jes Staley to Jeffrey Epstein, I think in like around 1999, saying, “This is a guy you should know, he knows a lot of people,” whatever.
Well, Staley and Epstein become very close. And you can read about this. There’s a great article in The Guardian about it. All of the nauseatingly sycophantic emails and texts and things that he says to Jeffrey, you know, basically kissing his ass. But it got to the point where Staley was going to Jeffrey Epstein’s island while Epstein was in prison so that he could avail himself of the amenities. He and his family, his daughters, availing himself of the amenities at Jeffrey’s private island.
And then what happened was, he was made CEO of Barclays, which is the British bank. And to become the CEO of Barclays, there was some lobbying going on behind the scenes by Jeffrey Epstein, apparently. So he, meaning Staley, had to talk to the board to get this job, because I think the regulations in Britain are that way. And he was like, “I didn’t know anything about what Epstein was doing. We’re really not that close. He was the coffee guy,” whatever he said. And then come to find out, you’re reading these emails that were written over years of time and they’re clearly close friends. A couple of months ago, he admitted to having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s employees. Not one of the girls, I should say; one of the grown-up women employees of Jeffrey Epstein. So he was around.
At one point Staley wrote, this is a quote, “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.” He wrote that to Jeffrey. Also, Staley was one of the four people that Epstein wrote when he got out of prison. So these guys were obviously very close.
The powers that be in Britain found that they’d been misled. Maybe not lied to, maybe misled. And basically Staley had to leave his job. They fined him a little bit. And he’s no longer the CEO of Barclays. And what happened in the last month is that he tried to appeal the decision of the Financial Conduct Authority, and he lost the appeal. So he’s not allowed to work again in the financial sector in London.
Epstein reportedly banked $15 million brokering the sale of his friend Glenn Dubin’s Highbridge Capital to JPMorganChase.
There was another financier—this one from Putin’s Russia—whom Epstein helped more recently…
Sergei Belyakov (ca. 1976?-)
. . . an old FSB hand, a deputy minister of economic development and head of the organization that runs the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
According to a report by The Dossier Center, Putin antagonist Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s non-profit outfit that promotes “the formation of a legal state and civil society in Russia,” Belyakov
had been in contact with Jeffrey Epstein since at least 2014….
Belyakov clearly valued Epstein, as he offered his support even after Russia annexed Crimea and faced international sanctions. Following one of their meetings in the spring of 2014, Belyakov wrote to Epstein that few people “can open new horizons and prospects” [like him], and then thanked him for the ‘nice gift’. What kind of gift Belyakov received from Epstein is not known, but during their exchanges, Epstein repeatedly suggested that Belyakov ‘relax’ and ‘have fun’. In addition, Epstein assured Belyakov of his faith in Russia’s great ideas and suggested various innovative solutions.
One of these was the so-called ‘new Bank’ that “could be modeled after a capitalistic commercial bank, lending 9 times its reserves NOT the world bank, those models are antiquated”, he proposed. Epstein also suggested launching an alternative to bitcoin known as BRIC and the possibility of providing loans worth ‘500 billion’ (though he did not specify the currency). Moreover, Epstein believed that Russia could create new currencies pegged to oil or develop ‘smart contracts’ regulated by computers….
Epstein also offered Belyakov his help with securing guests for SPIEF, as many refused to come in light of the sanctions imposed on Russia following the annexation of Crimea….In turn, in July 2014, Belyakov helped with Epstein’s application for a Russian visa and was planning to set up meetings for him with the Deputy Finance Minister, Sergei Storchak, and the Central Bank Deputy Chairman, Alexei Simanovsky (or the Minister for Economic Development, Alexei Ulyukayev). Whether this visit by Epstein actually took place is unknown.
TL;DR: Epstein was working with the Kremlin—after the occupation of Crimea.
So, in addition to the child sex trafficking operation, the serial rapes and sexual abuse, the Ponzi scheme, the tax avoidance, and all the rest of it, Epstein was also a traitor to his country.
Les Wexner (1937-)
The Filthy Rich documentary implies that Epstein straight-up seduced Wexner, the billionaire owner of The Limited, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Finch, and other fashion concerns. Certainly Jeffrey was a charming guy, as malignant narcissists can often be.
For his part, Wexner provided Epstein with 1) cash—he famously gifted him the fancy Manhattan townhouse next door to Howard Lutnick’s place and a short walk from Woody Allen’s; 2) an alibi for where his fortune came from; 3) an “in” with teenage girls who wanted to be models. It’s unclear if Wexner was aware of what his friend was up to, although Jeffrey routinely traded on the Victoria’s Secret name to woo his victims.
Another big macher in the world of fashion modeling was Epstein’s friend…
Jean-Luc Brunel (1946-2022)
The Frenchman owned the MC2 modeling agency (funded in part by Epstein) and was a notorious creep, with a reputation for sexually abusing would-be models. Here is one such account, by a model from New Zealand named Zoë Brock—someone I actually know a little IRL.
Small wonder Brunel and Epstein were chummy.
Brunel was named by Guiffre in her civil suit against Ghislaine Maxwell. He committed suicide in 2022.
Another creep who owned a modeling agency and shares Epstein’s yen for underage girls is…
Donald Trump (1946-)
. . . who is now, somehow, the President of the United States.
Again.
The nude drawing Trump made for Epstein’s “birthday book” looks more like an adolescent girl than a grown woman. And “enigma,” as I’m not the first to point out, is an anagram of “gamine,” or young girl:
And this is where we come full circle.
When Jeffrey Epstein was recruited by…
Ace Greenberg
. . . in 1976, the Bear Stearns CEO was so busy running the company that he’d only retained a single private client. Just one special guy, whose money he managed exclusively.
“The only person that Ace Greenberg was privately managing at that time,” Stephanie Koff says, “was Donald Trump.”
“I put my children’s accounts with him,” Trump once said of Greenberg. “That should tell you how much I trust him.” Donald trusted Ace because of his investment acumen, to be sure. But there was more to it than that. As Sarah Bartlett explains in her 1989 New York Times feature on Greenberg, “Where the Ace is King”:
For a client like Donald Trump, one of Greenberg’s most admirable traits is his ability to keep a secret. “If Alan represents me on something,” says Trump, “nobody else is going to know about it. He’s extremely closemouthed.” Within the firm, a Greenberg client is identified as a numbered account. Only two other people know what buy and sell orders Greenberg has placed for whom: an assistant who sits beside him and the head of the firm’s compliance department. After receiving the confirmation tickets, Greenberg personally puts them in envelopes, seals and addresses them and places them in the outgoing-mail basket.
In camouflaging his activities, Greenberg has a crucial advantage.
Keep the timeline in mind: Epstein started up at Bear Stearns in 1976; he became a limited partner in 1980, the same year that Cosmopolitan magazine named him “Bachelor of the Month” for July. In the context of the Trump/Epstein nexus, the Carter Administration was ancient history: before Trump’s cultivation by the Kremlin, before Epstein’s descent into odious depravity.
“This is years before Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach. This was even before Jeffrey Epstein was…the wizard of wizardry,” Koff says. It was way back then—almost a full half century ago—that Ace Greenberg was (exclusively) managing Trump’s money.
“I’m bringing this all up because it’s very, very likely that Donald and Jeffrey knew each other years before” they are reported to have first met, “and were possibly collaborating,” Koff suggests. “Ace was underwriting and taking extreme risks for Donald, and no one knows why, with these sort of weird [financial] instruments he was creating out of Bear Stearns—and with Bear Stearns’ money. So it’s impossible to conceive that the offshores Jeffrey was doing weren’t somehow integral in those instruments, and in what was happening between Ace and Donald.”
In camouflaging his activities, Greenberg has a crucial advantage.
“It could be that they were not,” Koff qualifies, “but I’m just saying: Do not forget the money. And when you go back into the money trail—all of the lies about who introduced who to who, who met who, when did they meet, what were they doing—you realize all of that.”
How many times has Donald Trump changed his tune about his old buddy and wingman Jeffrey Epstein? Why is this so?
“The reason why the story keeps changing is, it’s all garbage. It’s all garbage. No one can keep track of how many different ways they’ve told some fantasy of how they know one another,” Koff says. “And maybe the reason everybody has to not talk about it is: we don’t know where that fucking money was coming from.”
We don’t know where the money was coming from. What we do know is that, on the altar of Mammon, scores, if not hundreds, of fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old girls were sacrificed. For decades, this was an open secret—and with rare exceptions, no one did a damned thing about it.
“Accountability is what makes a society civilized,” Anouska DiGiorgio said at the Lawmakers and Epstein Survivors Press Conference. “Consequences are not about punishment alone. They exist to deter future harm, to protect vulnerable, and to set a standard of justice.”
Donald Trump must—must—face the consequences for whatever he did with Jeffrey Epstein—whatever shameful acts he’s moving heaven and earth to hide.
Release the files. Reveal the truth. Hold the guilty to account.
To quote Melania Trump, in her letter to Vladimir Putin: “It’s time.”
Photo credit: House Oversight Committee. The photos here are all extracted from the “birthday book,” a scrapbook put together by Ghislaine Maxwell on the occasion of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.
Thanks, insightful. Gives new meaning to accepted terms and phrases like networking, circles within circles and plausible deniability. In your article Greg you give credence in particular to the latter term when you assert that you are not accusing or otherwise trying to state as fact certain allegations. Clearly you must protect yourself but the irony is that by protecting your good name, inadvertently a form of protection is afforded those whose guilt in the nefarious is obvious to any discerning and not so discerning reader, however loathsome this may be.
Bringing into play clandestine organizations such as CIA, MI6, Mossad and various Soviet initials such as KGB and FSB means for me the rich and powerful will remain untouchable. Strangely each organization is not an island unto themselves. Buckingham Palace and the beloved Queen must have felt protecting Prince Andrew was in the national interest, effectively fuck the "survivors", do your job MI6. Barack and Joe must have been aware of the Epstein files but in the national interest fuck the "survivors", do your job CIA. For the Isrealis the national interest was protected, perhaps justified by eliminating Maxwell and who knows Epstein, maybe a form of vindication for the "survivors, fuck them anyway. The Soviets, they strongly believe protecting their national interest is best served by the destruction of the West's prominent democracies, besides watching them, to use a British expression "getting their knickers in a twist" over Epstein provides a good laugh.
My point. There is another list, names I would consider good and honorable folks, Elizabeth, Joe, Barack who must have known of the Epstein et al atrocities who convinced themselves they acted in that very amorphous term "national interest". It's new meaning "fuck the survivors". This situation is so much bigger than Trump, should it lead to his downfall and JD's ascending to the Oval, new meaning "fuck all of us, each and everyone".
SO SAD!!!!!
It’s TUESDAY🎉Looking forward to future additions to The List.👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻