A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  Traveling with Clinton gave Epstein both joy and frustration. In some ways they shared personality traits. Neither had the capacity to form truly close friendships, according to those who knew them. They also tended to use other people as a means to an end.

  As one New York journalist told the author Carol Felsenthal about Epstein, “He’s truly a brilliant autodidact, but sort of crippled in a personal sense and who does that remind you of?”9

  The answer to that rhetorical question was obvious—Bill Clinton. The similarities were very real. Both had an impressive and innate ability to wow their audiences, with little preparation. They were both also highly motivated by sex.

  * * *

  —

  Although the closeness of various politicos and Epstein remains something of a mystery to this day—Bill Richardson, for instance, is not keen to divulge the details of his Epstein relationship—one thing was always central in nearly all of Epstein’s relationships: money. Epstein had it; the politicians wanted it.

  But what the politicians could offer was legitimacy. Public statements of praise from a well-respected politician can help private-sector businessmen ingratiate themselves with clients or other well-heeled moneymen throughout the world.

  Which is perhaps why Bill Clinton offered his own public praise for his then friend—after going on a free trip to Africa in the early 2000s. “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science. I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS,” Clinton would tell New York magazine.10

  But the secret was, Epstein did not actually like Clinton. Nor did Clinton like Epstein. There were signs of tension from their first trip to Europe in 2002. Epstein’s pilot David Rodgers said the flight crew had barely checked into the hotel when he “got word from Secret Service that President Clinton wanted to leave that night.”

  “When we went there we thought we were going to be there for likely probably at least a couple of nights. But it didn’t turn out—we didn’t even spend one night there,” Rodgers said in a videotaped deposition.

  It’s unclear why Clinton felt such an urgency to leave London. Epstein continued to take the former president on other overseas plane trips, but Clinton’s personality soon started to grate on him.

  Upon returning from the trip to Africa, Epstein further confided in one good friend, “Boy, that was a mistake.”

  “Why?” asked the friend.

  “I don’t like the guy,” Epstein told him at the time.

  Epstein claimed he did not like Clinton because he did not think he was a good person, the friend recounted. “He just didn’t respect him; he was all over how horrible of a person he was,” the friend recalled in an interview.

  But in truth the verdict might have been more mixed. “If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician,” he reportedly told another friend.11

  Despite Epstein’s apparent mixed views of Clinton, the relationship continued after the Africa sojourn. Epstein seemed to have the president’s ear whenever he wanted it, according to confidants.

  Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard professor and criminal defense attorney, vividly remembers a summer dinner at Caroline Kennedy’s Martha’s Vineyard home in the late 1990s with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

  “Before dinner we were standing around having cocktails. A Secret Service agent came over to President Clinton and gave him the phone and said someone wants to talk to you,” Dershowitz recalled in an interview.

  “[Clinton] went off for five, maybe ten minutes, had a conversation. Then he came back and said, ‘Alan, somebody wants to talk to you.’ He gave me his phone, and it was Jeffrey Epstein. I said, ‘What are you doing on the phone?’ He said ‘Oh, I’m talking to Bill.’ That was it. Of course, there’s no question he had a friendship with Bill Clinton,” said Dershowitz.

  The Africa trip would also prove to be a fatal mistake for Epstein. The public praise would, in the long run, be to his detriment. The question is, what reason did he have for keeping Clinton around in the meanwhile? And what was Clinton getting out of Epstein?

  * * *

  —

  Clinton was allegedly carrying on an affair with at least one woman in Epstein’s orbit, but she was well over the age of consent.

  Ghislaine Maxwell, a constant presence at the ex-president’s side during these trips, was the primary reason Clinton let Epstein ferry him around the world.

  “[Bill] and Ghislaine were getting it on,” a source who witnessed the relationship said in an interview. “That’s why he was around Epstein—to be with her.”

  The source explained that reporters have been missing the point about the Clinton-Epstein relationship by focusing on Epstein’s sex crimes. “[Clinton’s] stupid but not an idiot,” the source says, dismissing the idea that the ex-president was sexually involved with children.

  Clinton’s primary interest in Epstein was the woman he once dated and who allegedly helped procure her ex-boyfriend’s future victims.

  “You couldn’t hang out with her without being with him,” the source said of the Epstein-Clinton relationship.

  “Clinton just used him like everything else,” the source explains. In this case, Epstein was being used as an alibi while he hooked up with Maxwell.

  The relationship between Clinton and Maxwell was not confined to these overseas junkets. It continued in New York City, where Clinton on multiple occasions visited Maxwell’s own private townhome at 116 East Sixty-fifth Street, an $11 million pad that runs a touch below seven thousand square feet, much more modest than Epstein’s palatial townhome a few blocks north. (Maxwell purchased it in 2000 for a mere $4.95 million.)

  The coziness between the former president and the charming British socialite drew notice in New York social circles. Clinton and Maxwell were spotted dining together at the Madison Avenue Italian mainstay Nello, according to a 2002 New York magazine article, which described Maxwell as a “man-eater” in the same paragraph. When Clinton went stag to a New York education charity gala in late 2001—Hillary declined to attend—Maxwell was reportedly at his side.

  The relationship also carried over to the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation. Maxwell became somewhat of a fixture at these events. It was there where she was even served court papers about her participation in Epstein’s abuse.

  On July 31, 2010 Maxwell was among the few guests to attend Chelsea Clinton’s wedding at the former Astor estate in Rhinebeck, New York. This auspicious event followed an embarrassing incident for Maxwell.

  “Only a few months earlier, while attending the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, at the end of an Indian summer, in September 2009, a process server walked through the packed lobby of the Sheraton Hotel on Eighth Avenue . . . and served Ghislaine Maxwell papers for a deposition,” the journalist Conchita Sarnoff recalls.

  “Maxwell . . . was huddled in a small group talking to other guests” as the server approached her. He “called out her name and . . . with so many people surrounding her, Maxwell was unsuspecting. She confirmed her identity and he served her notice. The deposition was in relation to Epstein’s sexual abuse case. The server left at once,” Sarnoff writes in her book, TrafficKing.12

  “Ironically, photographs of Maxwell taken by a private investigator who accompanied the process server showed Maxwell receiving notice while standing beneath a human trafficking banner. Human trafficking was the Conference’s theme at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative,” she writes.

  “Maxwell never appeared at the deposition claiming, the day prior to he
r testimony she had to immediately return to England to care for her dying mother. At the time of that trip, . . . the elder Mrs. Maxwell was not gravely ill. Not long after the deposition was scheduled, Maxwell was spotted again in New York. As a British subject there was nothing the attorneys could do to force her to take the deposition.”

  Clinton, though he has a long history of being accused of sexual misconduct, has never been accused of engaging with an underage female with Epstein. Despite rampant speculation, in fact Clinton’s appetite was being fed by someone else entirely.

  “I have seen reports saying or implying that I had sex with former president Bill Clinton on Little Saint James Island,” Giuffre has said in court documents. “Former president Bill Clinton was present on the island at a time when I was also present on the island, but I have never had sexual relations with Clinton, nor have I ever claimed to have such relations. I have never seen him have sexual relations with anyone.”

  This apparently wasn’t for lack of trying by Epstein. After returning from his trip to Asia with Bill Clinton, Epstein boasted that he had tried to rope Clinton into a hotel room orgy with him, a bevy of young women, and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

  “He said that he flew with Clinton,” said Dershowitz in an interview. “When they landed in Asia . . . Mick Jagger had a party in his room with lots of young women and lots of sex, like an orgy.

  “Epstein was there, and Clinton walked in and saw what was going on, immediately said, ‘No, no, no, this is not my thing,’ and walked out. Epstein told me that story,” said Dershowitz. “Obviously, there were lots of people there, and whatever Clinton did, he didn’t do it in public.”

  But involvement with Maxwell herself raises serious questions. After all, Maxwell isn’t just a former lover of Epstein’s. She is an alleged co-conspirator in Epstein’s sex crimes.

  During the same time period when she was close with Clinton, Maxwell was allegedly recruiting underage women to engage in paid sex acts with Epstein, according to court testimony from multiple alleged victims.

  “Maxwell was heavily involved in the illegal sex,” Giuffre has also said in court documents. “I understood her to be a very powerful person. She used Epstein’s money and he used her name and connections to gain power and prestige.”

  Additionally, Giuffre has said in legal documents, “One way to describe Maxwell’s role was as the ‘madame.’ She assumed a position of trust for all the girls, including me. She got me to trust her and Epstein. It turned out that Maxwell was all about sex all the time. She had sex with underaged girls virtually every day when I was around her, and she was very forceful.”

  Giuffre has detailed their sexual interactions at the Palm Beach mansion, the Virgin Islands residence, the New Mexico ranch, the New York townhome, France, and “many other locations.” The victim has said, “I also observed Maxwell have sex with dozens of underage girls.”

  Johanna Sjoberg, a woman who says Maxwell recruited her when she was a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University, claimed the British media heiress punished her for failing to make Epstein reach orgasm during one session.

  “[Ghislaine] called me after I had left and said, I have the camera [I bought] for you, but you cannot receive it yet because you came here and didn’t finish your job and I had to finish it for you,” said Sjoberg. “She was implying that I did not get Jeffrey off, and so she had to do it.”13

  In one of the most disturbing accounts, Maxwell allegedly confiscated the passport and cell phone of a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl who was pressured to have sex with Maxwell on Epstein’s private island, according to court testimony from a former house manager for Epstein’s friends Eva and Glenn Dubin.

  Rinaldo Rizzo, the former house manager for Epstein’s friends Eva and Glenn Dubin, has said he saw indications that something was off when he visited Epstein’s house for a pool party.

  “As I’m walking to the bathroom, what caught my eye, and I had to take a double look, there were pictures of naked women, half-dressed girls,” said Rizzo in a deposition. “I leaned over and started looking at these pictures for a brief minute, and it was just so coincidental that as I did that, Ms. Maxwell enters, and she immediately says to me that Jeffrey would like for me to rejoin the party immediately.”

  * * *

  —

  Alfredo Rodriguez, a former butler for Epstein, also said Maxwell kept nude photographs of young girls on her computer that appeared to be surreptitiously taken.

  “I don’t think they knew they were being photographed,” said Rodriguez in a court deposition.

  But never mind the accusations. They did not appear to bother the Clintons. In fact, even after the court documents detailing the worst of her alleged crimes, the former first family was still keen to have Maxwell hang around.

  She vacationed with Chelsea Clinton. And she was at Chelsea’s wedding to the son of the ex-congressman Edward Mezvinsky and ex-congresswoman Marjorie Margolies, Marc Mezvinsky.

  A source with knowledge of the situation says that Chelsea Clinton’s connection continually brought Maxwell closer to the former first family.

  “Chelsea vacationed with her and kept her around the foundation,” the source said in an interview. “She went to her wedding!”

  Other reporters have touched on the same detail. “Ghislaine was the contact between Epstein and Clinton,” Politico quoted a source as saying. “She ended up being close to the family because she and Chelsea ended up becoming close.”

  Chelsea Clinton’s chief of staff, Bari Lurie, has denied the coziness of the relationship. “It wasn’t until 2015 that Chelsea and (her husband) Marc became aware of the horrific allegations against Ghislaine Maxwell and hope that all the victims find justice,” Lurie said to Politico in a statement. “Chelsea and Marc were friendly with her because of her relationship with a dear friend of theirs. When that relationship ended, Chelsea and Marc’s friendship with her ended as well.”14

  All this despite the volumes of legal documents filed against Epstein and his alleged madam, Maxwell.

  And her parents have also denied having knowledge of Epstein’s alleged sex crimes, beyond what’s been published in news reports.

  “President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York,” his spokesman Angel Ureña said in a statement shortly after Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

  “In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane: one to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation. Staff, supporters of the Foundation, and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg of every trip. He had one meeting with Epstein in his Harlem office in 2002, and around the same time made one brief visit to Epstein’s New York apartment with a staff member and his security detail. He’s not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade, and has never been to Little St. James Island, Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida.”15

  The last known flight Clinton took aboard Epstein’s jet was November 4, 2003, flying from Brussels to Oslo, for an HIV/AIDS project, and then flying to Hong Kong, Siberia, and Beijing.

  * * *

  —

  After Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes in 2008, Maxwell had to strike out on her own. Much like Clinton, who had left the White House under a dark cloud, she had to hatch a plan to be welcomed back to polite society. And she did it with the assistance of none other than the Clintons.

  Maxwell did what conscientious liberals do and in 2012 built a charitable organization around a do-gooder pet cause. She created the TerraMar Project, a nonprofit focusing on conserving the world’s oceans. She credited her interest in the project with once finding a plastic hanger on the ocean floor, but her love of yachting might have been just as important.r />
  For Maxwell, big boats—and access to them—were a status symbol she appeared to relish. She would reportedly brag about Jeffrey Epstein’s client Les Wexner’s yacht as though it were her own.

  “Ghislaine would always call me and say, ‘I’m coming down to use the boat with some friends.’ I would always tell her, ‘I have to call the owner. I can’t just let you on the boat.’ And she would never show up,” the former captain of Wexner’s yacht, Craig Tafoya, told The New York Times. “She did that half a dozen times. And in talking to a guy who worked for [the yacht’s designer], he said, ‘She does that all the time. She does it when she’s in front of all her girlfriends and wants to brag that she can go use someone’s yacht.’”16

  Whatever had prompted her to start it, the TerraMar Project gave Maxwell an avenue to re-ingratiate herself into polite society. She began giving interviews, making public speeches, and of course making pitches at charitable gatherings, like the Clinton Global Initiative.

  At a 2013 Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City, the TerraMar Project was able to secure commitments from participants to help “mobilize the international community and the public at large on the importance of the Oceans and the Seas.”17 Of course, four years earlier Maxwell had been subpoenaed for alleged participation in Epstein’s sex crimes at that very same conference.

  But reports indicate that Epstein was the original funder of the Clinton Global Initiative. Though the Clintons have not confirmed this, it’s been written that Epstein gave Bill Clinton’s pet project $4 million to get off the ground.