At first I am afraid to enter the library. I have arrived at the US Department of Justice website because my attention got snagged by a random post on Bluesky, or possibly X, and I want to see whether it is real. The post showed an email thread between Jeffrey Epstein and a correspondent whose name has been redacted, which Epstein begins:
[redacted] said that she felt gods presence next to her when she was in bed.. she knows that jesus watches over her. and he helped save her life. Whoops.
The reply reads, “You should dress up as him when you see her.” “Of course,” Epstein quips. “The OH jesus Im coming trick.”
If Epstein were an ordinarily unpleasant man, this fragment would have been read once by the two people involved and abandoned as not worth deleting. No one would post it online so I could look at it in revulsion, wondering whether the person discussed had been one of his victims. Nor would anyone notice how a woman mocked for her naiveté is immediately described as a faker and purveyor of “tricks.” There is, on deeper scrutiny, very little about the exchange that is not odd. The woman’s belief that she was watched over brings to mind the rumor of Epstein’s surveillance cameras. God’s presence “next to her when she was in bed” makes us think of Epstein in the same position and of Steve Bannon asking him, in a taped interview, “Do you think you’re the Devil himself?” The image of a woman’s life saved by faith is replaced by one of a life destroyed.
While I stare at the disordered capitalization of “OH” and the blank space before “Whoops,” other people arrive at the library in order to cross-reference and make legible the black oblongs of the two redacted names. It is not publicly known how many people have used the search function here. We can assume the FBI, or its AI, has “read” all 3.5 million files the library holds, but since their release, compassing them has become the work of some maddened hive mind.
The website feels both official and illicit. I click to say that I am over eighteen. I can’t remember what I wanted to find out, consider the white gap of the search bar, and type in the word “girl.” The second item in the search is a legal brief written by the Manhattan district attorney that seems to be about Epstein’s status as a sex offender. It contains fifteen pages of statements from girls who provided massages to Epstein in Palm Beach. “Defendant asked if [redacted] liked that, and she said she did not.” The girls’ ages were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; they were served dinner by his personal chef, driven by his “houseman,” and “on some occasions” paid to have sex with his “female friend.” Epstein often masturbated in the presence of girls; like Harvey Weinstein, he was described as having an oddly shaped penis, one that was “deformed” when erect.
In an email thread on March 2 and 3, 2015, two women, Lesley and Amanda, discuss a request made by another, Eva (I later see this was Eva Dubin, a former girlfriend of Epstein’s), for an apartment needed by a “swedish girl” for ten days. Lesley says they can “accommodate this girl” in 11B, but “she will need to move to 8A…after the girl currently in there moves in the morning.” I wonder at the women’s cheery competency and how they sound so willing and nice.
On the second page of results for “girl” is an undated, context-free series of one hundred screenshots from pornography sites, one of which is called “Dirty Teen Clips.” Despite the black squares and rectangles placed over their faces, genitals, and chests, the girls’ lack of sexual development can be seen and assessed. The viewer’s focus is so skewed and intensified by the blocky redactions that I wonder whether they make the images not just seedier but also more pornographic. I have no idea how to answer this question but have no doubt that there are men in the same online space as me who are reading these files in order to become aroused. I feel it was a mistake to search for the word “girl.”
Most of the pages in the library are oddly dull, but even the most banal of Epstein’s communications seem to contain the whole story, now that we know what that story was. I wonder if I focus on a single day of Epstein’s life, perhaps the day he wrote the “OH jesus Im coming” email, I might capture the feeling of normalized perversion that I sense in his demotic, automated “Sorry for all the typos” tone. I decide to spend one day with him, to look at twenty-four hours of his correspondence, and then go offline.
On Tuesday, July 19, 2011, Epstein flew to his island Little St. James, in the Caribbean, with plans to return late on Wednesday the 20th. From first-class commercial flights booked the previous day we can guess that he traveled with an assistant, Sarah Kellen, who brought “fabric samples” for the house decor. It was two years since his release from jail in Florida, and five months after the Daily Mail published a widely read interview with Virginia Giuffre, who said that Epstein had introduced her to the then Prince Andrew when she was seventeen.
In the files, July 19, 2011, starts at midnight. Epstein is in his New York mansion, dealing with the builders on Little St. James who had made him furious the day before with a bad wall. (“We have discussed this over and over„ it is crazy.”) He asks for photos that he finds “even more confusing” when they arrive. There is a problem with night-lights. His island manager Brice Gordon suggests they focus them “more downward,” but Epstein snaps back, “not even close.” An invoice for plants from a landscape gardener is rejected because it is higher than a quote received in February: “Give her 25k for these.”
Epstein peppers his construction woes with quick, bleating inquiries to two or perhaps three redacted recipients: “Where are you two,” “call me,” “where are you?” At 12:55 AM he sends a cozy invitation to Jes Staley, then a chief executive at JP Morgan, of which he was a major client: “terje , will download his entire un security council presentation on the middle east to me one night next week,, want to come?” He is referring to the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, who along with his wife, Mona Juul, was instrumental in negotiating the 1993 Oslo Accords. These people have since withdrawn from public life, though only Staley has had allegations of rape (which he denies) aired in the press. At this point, I pause to consider that July 19, 2011, was not a special day in Epstein’s life, and that it is still not yet 1:00 AM.
Epstein’s personal plane will leave Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at 7:30 AM. Two hours before dawn, at 3:40 AM, his swatch-wielding assistant confirms that their commercial flights have been canceled. He is in the air when his brother replies to a picture sent the previous day: “Do I have to bail you out again?” The photo sent by Epstein is not available in the library, but from the response we can guess that it shows a woman who is, or looks, underage. Mark Epstein will joke about his brother’s conviction again the following March when Jeffrey tells him he is in “Paris with woody allen.” Mark quips, “For les pedophile convention?” Jeffrey counters, “i think pedophilee is the plural,” to which his brother responds, “Lol.”
Epstein may see his brother’s bail joke as the plane lands at St. Thomas Airport. At 11:17 AM he sends his first email of the office day: “Get a schmooze time from woodys asst.”
These bantering, randomly selected emails seem to show that Epstein wasn’t depraved, corrupt, or dodgy some of the time. He was depraved, corrupt, and proud of it all day long.
While he is in the air and throughout the day Epstein’s brightly facilitating female staff, Lesley, Sarah, Ann, and Lyn, among others, sort out his busy schedule. The correspondence weaves back and forth: “Will there be coffee?” “He will most definitely have coffee.”
Given the reputational damage people suffer from even a glancing association with Epstein, it seems unfair to list all the names mentioned on one day in July 2011, so I search elsewhere in the library to see who meets him multiple times. A computer scientist and writer sought out by Epstein and invited to breakfast on Thursday is rescheduled twice and ends up in Teterboro Airport the next evening, in part because Epstein wants to wait till after midnight to cross into New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they do not appear to meet again. A woman introduced to Epstein by the hedge fund manager Tancredi Marchiolo (who also sends a photo of “irina, valeria and masha”) finds that she has to fly unexpectedly to LA. Despite a nervy, jet-setting series of messages, they connect only fleetingly and her name disappears from the library.
“Heidi” will bring her father along on Thursday at 11:00, which makes me pause to consider the role of family relationships in Epstein’s social circle; to outsiders they may look disordered, but perhaps they felt dynastic and protective to those involved. Epstein left a lot of money in his will to his friends’ children, and it is possible they made him feel sentimental. An early August dinner is penciled in with Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi; the billionaire Leon Black wants a phone call. Sunday dinner will be with David Mitchell, a real estate investor who in 2019 offered, along with Mark Epstein, to post a bond for Jeffrey after his arrest.
Personal emails happen in a cluster at lunchtime. Epstein sends a YouTube video (the link long dead) and is answered, “Haha You and your little butter spray!!” Ghislaine Maxwell forwards him details of a Hawker jet for sale in case it catches his interest at $950,000. He considers a bill for plastering the island’s pool.
Epstein also chats by email with a female academic who has thanked him for “the lift.” (The subject heading is “727.”) She sends a YouTube video and writes, “Even if you can’t (and shouldn’t) live out all your fantasies, you’ll always have this one.” The word “fantasies” and the idea that the lost video might have been obscene stops me (and possibly Epstein, at the time) from seeing that “shouldn’t” is the key word in this flirt-and-run line. Epstein promptly chases with the offer of a haircut at Frédéric Fekkai (no less), “my treat, call my sec if you feel comfortable to accept.” Epstein was skillful at faintly criticizing a beautiful woman’s looks and then offering to fix the flaw with surgery or, in this case, a haircut. (What I linger over is his almost therapeutic use of the word “comfortable” here.) His canny target is neither insecure nor vain enough to accept, though she frames the rejection as self-criticism. Her problem, she writes, isn’t getting a haircut but “maintaining it. I am a hopeless investment in that sense.”
Midafternoon a woman sends a lovely note to thank Epstein for his donation to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, whose help researching the TNF-alpha blocking medicine “helps me so much today.” There are a few bits and pieces with his financial people. “Did we give Mthe laptop” he asks his accountant, Richard Kahn, who has been chasing receipts on Epstein’s behalf earlier in the day. At 4:39 Epstein responds to a request to call a man named James Condren, and they agree to speak at 5:15. Nine minutes later Jes Staley wants Epstein to know that “He is available on his cell for the next hour and then off to Asia.”
The “then off to Asia” line makes me irritated for no reason. There are forty-eight countries in Asia. Is he talking about a market or a place? Is Staley going rubber-tubing in Laos, or has he been tempted back to tiffin in Raffles of Singapore? In fact, this sequence of calls is part of a move within JP Morgan to “exit” Epstein as a client. James Condren is one of their company lawyers, and he will report the content of the call to a circle of his colleagues, which includes Epstein’s friend Staley (perhaps tucking his passport into a jacket pocket as his email arrives): “I just conveyed to Mr. Epstein our response to his proposal to settle his High Grade Fund and Bear stock claims together for $21 million.” After midnight Stephen Cutler, the firm’s general counsel, sends a group reply: “This is not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client.”
The next email Epstein writes is the one that first set me looking at this single day in July: “[redacted] said that she felt gods presence next to her when she was in bed.. she knows that jesus watches over her. and he helped save her life. Whoops.” Given all that preceded it, the email seems almost harmless: a small insight into a mutual acquaintance, a shared joke, a brief moment of human contact.
After dinner there is a message from an enthusiastic person with poor English—“I was wondering if you re-saved my email”—who is coming to NYC and wants a chance to “hug” him. His pilot Larry talks about repairs to the rear strut of a Mercedes and confirms that he also sent Epstein a bill for his daughter’s college fees: “Yes sir, it is a new request for Taylor’s tuition at Syracuse for fall session.” (In 2017 his daughter got married at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. Three days after Epstein was found dead in his prison cell, her wedding photographs were purloined and published by the Daily Mail.)
Late in the evening Epstein picks up on a chain started earlier in the day by Boris Nikolic, a senior adviser to Bill Gates. On the previous Sunday Boris had written to Epstein that he wanted to contact Staley’s brother, Peter, who became a leading AIDS activist after his own diagnosis in 1985: “I do need to talk to his brother few things,” Boris wrote, “including ACT UP for African epidemics. Also there is another issue (do not mention this)—I need to get David Geffen to a dinner with Bill. Will invite you and Jes as well—but need to get to Geffen first.” The thread seems to sum up how Epstein’s cohort used the goodness of others (and perhaps the love Jes Staley had for his brother) as powerful means of leverage.
“I am getting to geffen,,,” Epstein writes on the 19th. (There are no signs that he ever did, in fact, “get to” the billionaire Hollywood producer David Geffen.) “Your jon [job] is to tell dick to be extra nice to jes,, they have traded calls.” By “dick” he is referring to Richard Henriques, the CFO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and when Boris replies, “with bill at think tank all day,” he is talking about the AfricaSan conference, at which the foundation announced a significant expansion of their sanitation program for the world’s poor.
Something happened on my fourth or fifth time looking at the email about “gods presence next to her when she was in bed”: the redaction was thin enough to guess at the letters of the email address. It looked like a name, “Habla” or maybe “Nadia,” followed by four numbers. Perhaps thirty seconds after discerning this, I had the address of Nadia Marcinko, which matched it perfectly: Nadja2102@yahoo.com. Marcinko, I discovered, is a trained pilot and model, and a named co-conspirator in the Palm Beach case of 2008, in the course of which she was accused by a victim of engaging in sexual acts with an underage girl, with or for Epstein, sometimes using sex toys.
Her correspondence with him started in 2004, and in 2005 a flight she takes from Slovakia was discussed in an exchange that mentioned “Eva” and “JeanLuc.” (Jean-Luc Brunel is an alleged trafficker.) Epstein expected her to “play” or “watch” him with other girls, and she promised she would “try to find girls” whenever they were in New York. In May 2006 she wrote, “I would leave now but I am giving the little girl a modelling lesson in her bikini tomorrow ;-),” and he replied, “i miss you and love you now…” By 2009 they were bickering like a couple on the verge of a breakup: “you were dressed in a disgusting t shirt and jeans, the dinner was disgusting , inelegant, badly presented laughable. and totally your doing. its that simple.” In 2010 she spat back, “You need professional help,” but she continued to be dependent on him. “Jeffrey, please, I just need answers regarding my apartment, money, car.”
Nadia wrote that she loved him too much to be just a friend, but by 2011, when he wrote to her about “jesus,” they had reached some kind of equilibrium. Later that year she discussed his Christmas present with his assistant Sarah, asking whether a bowl made from a human skull is “too much?” to which Sarah answers, “Never too much with JE. He loves that shit.” As public pressure mounted on Epstein, Nadia bonded with him over his treatment in the press, but she also demanded compensation for the “lost opportunities and humiliating consequences” she would have to deal with “forever.”
In 2018 she told him that she wanted to freeze her eggs and he replied, “ill pay.” He also asked after her girlfriend: “Girlfriend is good, brings me flowers & wants to try a sex party on Sat.” In 2019 she wrote, “just finished therapy…very interesting” and he responded, “where is my birthday video?”
I find it hard to suppress a sense of melancholy about all of this. Then, I look at an exchange with Epstein from 2015: “I wasn’t planning to fly with him tmrw,” she wrote, “but if toys are involved, I may reconsider.” Epstein answered: “toys always available.” Later, when Epstein has to cancel, a redacted name responds, “Ok. I’ll stick with swiping for local toys.” I don’t know how someone might “swipe” for a toy. Perhaps I am naive, but it sounds more like a gesture made on a dating app. It occurs to me that “toys” here may be code for human beings. At this point I know it is time to get out of the library, confident in the knowledge that every abused, hurt, or simply poor and indebted person on the planet has another place online where they can have their worst fears confirmed.
July 19 winds down with a chat about the return flight with Larry, the pilot. But the night is not over for Epstein, who through the small hours talks with his staff about whether a stair runner he saw in Paris can be installed in the New York house. The emails roll into Wednesday: “You ok?” “are you awake?” “Where are you?” “She’ll be there at 8 am.” “I just landed in Ibiza with Prince!” Ghislaine Maxwell sends her latest travel itinerary: “Going toB st t and then mallorca rome sardinia lond Mustique barbados miami boston ny.” In the afternoon Epstein sends an appeal to the journalist Michael Wolff about Tina Brown, then the editor of the Daily Beast: “tina has asked Wayne Barrett to do an investgative piece. ? how do i appease her. this is crazy.” Wolff replies, “Let me think about Tina, she seems to have it in for you and there are lots of way to neutralize her.”
Turns out, there weren’t.
English (US) · 