A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  It’d take more time for more of the story to trickle out.

  15

  The Media

  How Epstein Played the Press

  Those who have the gold, rule.

  PEGGY SIEGAL

  For years Jeffrey Epstein was welcomed and heralded by the media. He was mythologized from the moment he came across their radar, turning this Brooklyn-born nobody into a patron of the poor who traveled on his own dime to Africa to fight one of society’s biggest scourges—HIV/AIDS. Media even spent years misreporting the very size of Epstein’s wealth, reporting that he was a billionaire, despite there never being a single shred of evidence to confirm his achievement of this feat.

  The relationship created problems—for the media. Could we ever trust the people who kept up fawning coverage of this monster for years to tell us what “really happened” in the last moments of his life?

  Candace Bushnell, the Sex and the City writer who would famously be played by Sarah Jessica Parker in the television series of the same name, began investigating Epstein rumors in 1994. The subject was just her forte; she was after all a sex columnist for The New York Observer.

  “There was a rogues’ gallery of men who there were shady rumors [about], and he was one of those guys,” Bushnell recalled in a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter shortly before Epstein died.1

  So Bushnell put on her high heels to do a little shoe leather reporting. “I went to his apartment when a mutual friend got me invited to a cocktail party at his house,” she recalls, claiming the town house was “bland” and “hotel-ish.”

  It wasn’t as if she walked into the “models” and “parties on the plane” scenes she had been hearing about. The scene was boring.

  So she started asking those milling around about “all kinds of rumors” she had heard. She wanted to know where the private plane was kept and how he got his money. “I was getting information, and then the door flies in and a bodyguard-type [person] walks in asking why I want to know about the plane,” she recalled.

  And that’s about the time her visit to Epstein’s ended. She left. The next day she received a call. “This is his lawyer, there’s nothing to investigate. Don’t investigate him. Don’t look into his activities. Don’t go up to him at parties. Don’t ask questions about him,” the person on the phone told Bushnell.

  The intimidation and threats worked, Bushnell admits. “You know, I’d like to live,” she said.

  “It takes a particular kind of reporter to do that kind of story, and it’s just not me,” she would recall years later.

  The sex columnist would not be the only person he would try to intimidate.

  * * *

  —

  The strange thing about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors, countless sexual assaults, and alleged rapes is that it’s easy to see how, of all things, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States led to his arrest. And that’s not because Trump did anything at all to stop his former friend.

  On the contrary, he along with every other famous person in Epstein’s orbit (Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Leslie Wexner, money managers, media titans) either accepted the wealthy predator as one of their own or quietly rejected him.

  Many witnessed Epstein’s crimes; some even participated in them. But until his first guilty plea in Florida in 2008, Epstein operated with impunity. Even then, he received an extremely light punishment.

  After he served his time, so to speak, Epstein seems to have picked up where he left off. Prosecutors in the U.S. Virgin Islands found evidence that suggests he continued trafficking women and assaulting underage girls, using his financial means and political power to continue the very activities that got him in trouble in the first place.

  And yet, no further criminal proceedings followed him for more than a decade, even though he was a known predator of crimes that have extremely high rates of recidivism.

  Between arrests, perhaps the only thing that did change was that Epstein finally understood that operating so openly and with such a great media profile could be harmful. So he assumed at least a slightly lower profile than he had before. Gatherings at his home with journalists and newsreaders were more hush-hush. His political donations, which under law would have to be publicly disclosed, were no longer welcome.

  But those slight tweaks were reflective of a singular fact: everyone knew that Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator whose victims were children. His sweetheart plea deal was known. His association with politicians, academics, and elites was known.

  Yet had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, one can easily imagine Epstein never facing the renewed scrutiny he began to receive in 2018 when the Miami Herald began running its “Perversion of Justice” series. Because the whole reason for that series—or at least one of the rationales for running it—was that the man who cut the sweetheart deal for the feds, the prosecutor Alex Acosta, had been made labor secretary by Trump.

  With the election of Trump, many reporters rediscovered a sense of weight and urgency, a new sense of holding the powerful accountable. That’s a trait they should always possess, of course. But it seems to be forgotten when liberals are sworn into power, only to be rediscovered four or eight years later.

  It is remarkable that it is true both that so much is known about Epstein because of the media and that he was able to operate for so many years because of the media.

  He first played the media, using the power of the press to inflate his image (a billionaire, a generous philanthropist, a money manager). And then he hid from it, which was easy enough because no one was looking for him.

  Playing the media was an old game for Epstein. In the 1980s, when he began to make waves, New York journalist Jesse Kornbluth became friendly with him and considered writing a book about him.

  The moneyman apparently appreciated the attention from Kornbluth. But one episode in 1987 left the writer with nothing but contempt for him.

  “My wife-to-be was then a military historian, with a book about to be published. Interview Magazine photographed her in a buttoned-up military shirt, with a taut khaki tie. A witty photo of an attractive woman. But not a sexy look. Jeffrey Epstein had chatted her up at a few parties. The military look fooled him not at all,” Kornbluth recalled in a reflection upon Epstein’s 2019 arrest in an article in Salon.2

  The eve of their wedding, Epstein called up Kornbluth’s fiancée. “It’s your last free night,” Epstein said on the phone. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”

  “That was how . . . Epstein became dead to me,” Kornbluth wrote.

  Nevertheless, Epstein was not really dead to Kornbluth—or to many other journalists.

  Peggy Siegal, a well-connected, hard-charging PR guru, traded favors with Epstein over the years and consequently found herself in the middle of the media storm when her acquaintance would finally face the music in 2019. (In a terse email exchange, she insisted that she had never been on payroll. “Epstein was never my client,” she wrote.) Her tale is a cautionary one—a reminder that professionals are often judged by their clients, even if money is never exchanged for their services.

  Siegal’s bustling business would quickly go kaput, leaving her to lay off eight employees and lose nearly every single one of her paying customers, clients like Netflix, Annapurna Pictures, and FX.

  The Peggy Siegal Company had specialized in attracting high-social-net-worth individuals to be interested in films. It had helped pioneer the budding field of Oscar campaigning, a specialized Hollywood field to influence members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote her clients for the most prestigious award in the business. She had poured her life into building up from nothing, but in 2020 it was barely hanging on by a thread.

  In a profile in Vanity Fair, which she appears to have agreed to as a last-ditch attempt to pour a bucket of water on her burning reput
ation, Siegal claimed to have no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. “I had no idea about the underage girls,” she told the glossy, pleading ignorance to knowing why precisely he faced criminal charges in Florida in 2008.3

  But then, apparently suddenly, she remembered gently admonishing him. “I’m sure I had said something like, ‘You better change your ways,’” Siegal told the magazine. “I mean, I knew him, but I didn’t know much about him. Yeah, I spoke to him on the phone. He came to some screenings. I was never privy to his private life. I knew nothing about the girls. Nothing at all.”

  Which seems particularly strange when one considers that Siegal, who to this day claims that Epstein was no client of hers, arranged the infamous 2010 dinner at Epstein’s home with the star guest Prince Andrew that featured the media stars George Stephanopoulos, Katie Couric, Woody Allen, and Chelsea Handler.

  The New York Post would cover that visit from Prince Andrew on the front page—under the in-your-face-headline “PRINCE & PERV,” with the perhaps less subtle subhead “1st Photos: Randy Andy with NYC Sex Creep.”4

  Siegal now claims, “It’s so much easier in hindsight, 10 years later, to digest all this information and say, ‘Well, of course they knew that’ . . . The times have changed so much, in the past five years, that [which] was normal bad behavior between genders is completely out of the realm of possibility today.”5

  But perhaps the most revealing moment in the interview is when Siegal asks the Vanity Fair writer, “You know about the golden rule?”

  “Do unto others?” the writer suggests.

  “No. Those who have the gold, rule,” Siegal explains.

  * * *

  —

  Reporting the story of Jeffrey Epstein is difficult. He was for years a powerful, rich, and politically connected man who was not afraid to do whatever necessary to get his way. Many in his orbit share those traits.

  Even now, a call to his former friends and associates rarely receives even an acknowledgment of receipt. Those who know don’t want to say. Those who socialized with him, partied with him, and were perhaps even aware of his most evil vices have no incentive to discuss it.

  As one reporter who has extensively covered Epstein sarcastically put it, joking how elites who have refused to speak until now might receive a call, “Yeah, thanks for calling. I’m really glad. I’ve been waiting to tell everybody about this. And now’s my chance. I was afraid that it was going to go away with Epstein’s death. But now that you came along, now I can tell you.”

  Asked what threats he’s faced while reporting about Epstein, the reporter in an interview retells his struggle to report on basic information, with firsthand sourcing, because of publishers’ fear of aggressive lawyers.

  “I had spoken to a billionaire’s pilot who was on the record,” the reporter said in an interview, “and who was an occasional substitute pilot for Epstein’s plane. So he saw a lot of things . . . And even having something on the record was not good enough.

  “The letters would come—threatening letters,” the reporter said. At which point the publication he worked for would cave. “Hey, you can write things that are less controversial, but you can’t write what’s really going on,” he said, apparently mimicking his editor. “Magazines or newspapers, they just fold the tent as soon as the nasty letter comes from the lawyers. That’s the MO nowadays.”

  The reporter also outlined how the PR professionals who are supposed to help facilitate contact with their wealthy clients and the press are, in fact, really just operating as the first line of offense for lawyers. After a conversation with the PR team, the letters begin to flow from legal, using the language from the media request. “They’re just a conduit to the lawyer,” he explained.

  To say this is unusual is an understatement. It is not normal for reporters to receive legal threats at all. And it’s downright rare to receive ones before publication—based on interview requests alone.

  “He’s dead. But the people you’re writing about who interacted with him are very much alive and very rich and very lawyered up. They’re like on high alert for this,” the reporter added.

  Calling one billionaire “evil incarnate” and “ready to strike back,” the reporter recalled his run-in and his publication’s decision to back down in the face of threats. “One great story I had that they wouldn’t let me run was Epstein and Ghislaine having sex in the back of a [billionaire’s] plane with [him] sitting there in the passengers’ section.” But the billionaire’s lawyers intervened aggressively with his publisher and killed the story. “They don’t want to have anything, you know, even remotely associated with [Epstein].”

  Speaking more broadly about the entire media industry caving to the demands of lawyers, the journalist observed, “I think the whole industry’s become, post-Gawker, much more risk averse and they don’t have the financials to back it up anymore. You know, the financial performance. So they’re all like hanging by a thread, the last thing they need is to spend $2 million defending a lawsuit against a billionaire.”

  Which is why reporting on this subject is so difficult and why the Epstein story is as much a media story as it is one about politics, power, and money. For years, Epstein used the press to his advantage, playing willful scribes and tepid publishers.

  * * *

  —

  With so much known about Epstein, it is almost unbelievable to imagine that for years he was able to get a pass from the media. So how did he do it? He paid for it. Literally.

  On October 2, 2013, well after he had been publicly humiliated as a child sex predator, the financial magazine and website Forbes wrote a hagiographical item about him—mentioning none of his follies.

  The piece was titled “Science Funder Jeffrey Epstein Launches Radical Emotional Software for the Gaming Industry” and detailed an artificial intelligence group behind changing game programming through new emotive software.6 The first two-thirds of the article was semi-technical fluff, in praise of the company doing the work with Hong Kong researchers and government support. Then came the praise.

  “Over the last ten years, Jeffrey Epstein has become one of the largest backers of cutting edge science around the world,” claimed the article. The financier, the article continued, “has donated up to $200 million a year to eminent scientists.” The statistic was falsely attributed to New York magazine. (It’s unlikely he ever donated that much money in his lifetime, let alone on an annual basis.) Epstein’s ties to Harvard were mentioned, then more highly inflated claims about his generosity.

  The interesting thing about the supposed journalistic look at cutting-edge video game technology was that it was written by Epstein or his PR team. The author, Drew Hendricks, would admit in 2019 in an interview with The New York Times that he had received $600 to publish the article, which had been written for him.

  And Forbes was not the only publication to fall for the ruse. Similar articles had appeared in National Review and HuffPost. The offending articles would be removed only after reporter inquiries in 2019.

  It was all part of Epstein’s plan: by throwing his money around, he could get his way. Just as he had in so many other avenues of his life.

  * * *

  —

  In 2002, Vanity Fair reporter Vicky Ward would set out to examine Epstein’s rise as a supposed money manager and political player following his trip to Africa with Bill Clinton. Ward’s piece, published in 2003, would be important; it would frame Epstein as a major player, a man of mystery, and a confidence man.

  But, according to Ward, she was not able to tell the whole story. She had information on “the girls.” Not nearly the full extent that is known today, but enough that publication would have severely damaged the predator just as he was getting his wings.

  Ward detailed the accusations she had in a 2015 Daily Beast article recalling how it all went down.7 “Three on-the-record stories from a family: a mother and h
er daughters who came from Phoenix. The oldest daughter, an artist whose character was vouchsafed to me by several sources, including the artist Eric Fischl, had told me, weeping as she sat in my living room, of how Epstein had attempted to seduce both her and, separately, her younger sister, then only 16,” she wrote.

  The subject of her profile inquired about what she knew, and when he discovered the truth, he went ballistic. “Just the mention of a 16-year-old girl . . . carries the wrong impression. I don’t see what it adds to the piece. And that makes me unhappy,” Epstein told Ward.

  He also called the powerful editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, who held final say over what was published in his magazine. Then he started sending “fabricated fakes” supposedly debunking the on-the-record accusations. And finally he visited the offices of Vanity Fair, while Ward was away on maternity leave. “By now everyone at the magazine was completely spooked,” Ward recalls more than a decade and a half later.

  Just before it was time for publication, Ward’s direct editor delivered the message: “Graydon’s taking out the women from the piece.” Ward was in tears and furious.

  “I began to cry. It was so wrong,” Ward wrote later. “The family had been so brave.”

  She went to Carter to plead her case. “Why?”

  “He’s sensitive about the young women,” Graydon Carter allegedly replied. “And we still get to run most of the piece.”

  Ward recalls, “It came down to my sources’ word against Epstein’s . . . and at the time Graydon believed Epstein. In my notebook I have him saying, ‘I believe him.’”

  In a statement responding to Ward’s allegations, Carter said, “Epstein denied the charges at the time and since the claims were unsubstantiated and no criminal investigation had been initiated, we decided not to include them in what was a financial story.”