There’s a Lot We Still Don’t Know About Jeffrey Epstein – Mother Jones

Donald Trump, his then-girlfriend (and future wife) Melania Knauss, financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at Mar-a-Lago on February 12, 2000. Davidoff Studios/Getty Images

“I want every email from Epstein,” declared MAGA activist, self-styled journalist, former men’s rights advocate, former Pizzagate promoter, and former juicing evangelist Mike Cernovich recently, speaking to MAGA-world figure and disgraced BuzzFeed plagiarist Benny Johnson. “It might embarrass people, I don’t care. We’re done.”

In the decades since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal began, it has attracted a lot of attention from very strange and distinctly unsavory people, each drawn to the case for their own reasons. Cernovich, for instance, got involved in his capacity as a quasi-journalist and promoter of conspiracy theories involving wealthy and powerful cabals of sexual abusers. He was one of the people who sued to unseal documents in the civil case of Victoria Giuffre, a woman who alleged that Epstein trafficked her to numerous wealthy and powerful men.

But these days even the frequent disinformation peddlers like Cernovich have a reasonable point: There is a disturbing amount that we still don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein.

The basic facts are clear, of course: Epstein was a billionaire pedophile and friend to the world’s wealthy and powerful who, in all likelihood and according to every piece of available evidence, died by suicide in 2019 while incarcerated and facing sex trafficking charges. But from the time Epstein’s crimes first began to attract notice from the police and press in the early 2000s to the scandal and chaos that ensued this month after Trump’s FBI and Department of Justice tried to quietly close the book on the case, there have been loose ends, unanswered questions, unreleased documents, and an endless amount of fodder for future conspiracy theories.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich. In a 2019 story, the New York Times attempted to answer that question, noting that in the 1980s, Epstein befriended Victoria’s Secret founder Lex Wexner, quickly becoming his personal money manager. Epstein had worked for two years as a math and physics teacher at the elite Dalton School and then as an options trader for Bear Stearns before being dismissed in 1981. From there, he founded his own money management firm for billionaire clients. That business was an immediate, almost baffling, success. As New York magazine wrote in 2002, “There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos—just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.”

Among those clients—central among them, as far as anyone can tell—was Wexner of Victoria’s Secret. Those around the executive also couldn’t understand why Epstein had so quickly assumed a position of trust in his financial life. “Virtually from the moment in the 1980s that Mr. Epstein arrived on the scene in Columbus, Ohio, where L Brands was based,” the Times wrote in its 2019 story, “Mr. Wexner’s friends and colleagues were mystified as to why a renowned businessman in the prime of his career would place such trust in an outsider with a thin résumé and scant financial experience.” And it was through his association with Wexner’s companies that Epstein began trying to expand his access to young women, the Times wrote, “trying to involve himself in the recruitment of lingerie models for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.”

(While Wexner didn’t speak to the Times after Epstein’s second arrest, he told his employees in a 2019 letter acquired by the paper that he was “NEVER aware of the illegal activity charged in the indictment.”)

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym.”

“There are many women in his life, mostly young,” Ward wrote, in a line that now sounds incredibly ominous. “But there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit.”

By the early 2000s, Epstein was living in a Palm Beach mansion. There, he and his accomplices, including ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, hired teenage girls to massage him; during these sessions, Epstein would sexually abuse them. (Maxwell was not charged or convicted until 2002; she’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges.)

Epstein was finally indicted in 2006, but as journalist Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald has meticulously documented for years, he was almost immediately handed an extraordinarily, scandalously gentle plea deal. Epstein pleaded guilty to just two felony prostitution charges, and he and his accomplices received a federal non-prosecution agreement where he wasn’t charged for sex trafficking. Top federal prosecutor Alex Acosta was directly involved in brokering the deal; years later, while serving as Donald Trump’s labor secretary, renewed criticism of his role in the Epstein deal led him to resign. Epstein served just 13 months in county jail, where he spent most of his time at his office on what was dubbed work release. A jail supervisor wrote in a memo that his jail cell should be left unlocked “for the time being” and he should be given “liberal access to the attorney room where a TV will be installed.” It would take until 2019 before furor over the non-prosecution agreement reached a fever pitch and Epstein was indicted again in New York, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2oo2 to “at least 2005.”

Besides the mystery of Epstein’s wealth and his exceptionally soft-handed treatment by the justice system, there’s also a mountain of unreleased material attached to the many civil and two criminal cases filed against him. As Brown outlined in March, material from numerous cases has never been released, including discovery documents for a civil case filed in 2008 against the FBI by Epstein’s alleged victims. There’s also unreleased evidence relating to Epstein’s properties in the US Virgin Islands, Little Saint James and Greater Saint James.

(After weeks of criticism, Trump recently called for the release of grand jury records from Epstein’s Florida and New York cases; since grand jury records are usually secret, the process of releasing those records could take a very long time. “I have asked the Justice Department to release all Grand Jury testimony with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, subject only to Court Approval,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial on Saturday morning. “With that being said, and even if the Court gave its full and unwavering approval, nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request. It will always be more, more, more. MAGA!”)

Besides all the unreleased court records and the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, there is, of course, the question of why the FBI and DOJ released an unsigned memo declaring the case closed. And just this week, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois alleged that the FBI was told to “flag” any Epstein files relating to Trump. The implications of that allegation, however, are not yet fully clear.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Durbin wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

One of the less compelling allegations in the Epstein saga is the idea that a Deep State assassin snuck into his Manhattan jail cell in 2019. In all likelihood, Epstein died alone, facing something approaching a real consequence for the first time in his sordid life. But it’s absolutely true that it’s still not fully clear who aided his rise, bolstered his fortune, and possibly helped him evade responsibility for his crimes, nor is the extent of those crimes or the infrastructure of wealth, power, and coercion that made them possible. In a rare moment of unity for the American public during an impossibly fractured time, that, at least, is something we can all agree on.