[NYT...] Epstein Emails Reveal a Lost New York

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/style/epstein-emails-reveal-a-lost-new
-york.html 

Washington went nuts — and the White House went on the defensive — after
lawmakers dumped more than 20,000 emails belonging to Jeffrey Epstein
into the public domain on Wednesday. The central intrigue was the late
financier’s relationship with the president, but there were other
stories buried in the mass of documents. 

The emails are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene. Mr.
Epstein’s inbox was larded with boldface names — many of them now faded
or forgotten — that once meant everything to status-obsessed New
Yorkers. It was the world that Donald Trump came out of, and the one
that Mr. Epstein had so effectively beguiled after having grown up in a
middle-class household in Coney Island. 

As the emails stretch through the years, they show how that protected
realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces
of the internet and the #MeToo movement. Mr. Epstein and some of his
male correspondents seem to squirm as they notice society changing
around them. 

The bulk of the documents come from an email address
([email protected]) that was set up around 2009, when Mr. Epstein
was released from the Palm Beach County jail after having served 13
months of an 18-month sentence on a reduced charge of soliciting
prostitution. It wasn’t exactly hard time: Florida officials allowed him
to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week, outside the facility. 

The newly available emails continue into the summer of 2019, when Mr.
Epstein was arrested and imprisoned after federal prosecutors charged
him with sex trafficking. (He was found dead in his cell at Metropolitan
Correctional Center in Manhattan on Aug. 10, 2019.) 

The earliest documents in the collection depict the twilight of an old
guard made up of Wall Street billionaires, media-industry heavyweights,
politicians and old-money socialites, many of whom gathered at Mr.
Epstein’s seven-story townhouse on the Upper East Side — a mansion that
one guest, Woody Allen, compared to Dracula’s castle. 

In those days, print newspapers and magazines still held sway, and Mr.
Epstein had close ties to many key players in the news media and
adjacent industries. He exchanged emails with a number of insiders,
including the real estate magnate Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who was then
the owner of The New York Daily News. Along with the journalist Michael
Wolff, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Epstein had been part of a group that made
an unsuccessful bid for New York Magazine in 2003. Mr. Zuckerman and Mr.
Epstein were at it again the next year, when they tried to buy Radar
magazine. 

The cache of emails includes exchanges about going to dinner at Rao’s,
the uptown Italian restaurant where it was famously hard to get a table,
and an invitation for Mr. Epstein to the 25th anniversary party for The
New York Observer (it was a weekly paper, printed on salmon-colored
newsprint and read by the city’s elite) at the Four Seasons restaurant
(where the elite once power-lunched; it’s now closed) co-hosted by
Michael Bloomberg (he was the mayor) and Jared Kushner (who owned The
Observer). The guest list included Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein.
You’ve probably heard about what happened with them. 

“The celebration is going to be one of those quintessential New York
nights,” read the party invitation, which was sent by the publicist
Peggy Siegal, who was one of the city’s social gatekeepers until her
reputation was tarnished by her association with Mr. Epstein. 

Ms. Siegal is all over his inbox, and her emails carry with them the
atmosphere of a New York that no longer exists. She would send Mr.
Epstein articles she had written for Avenue Magazine (a society
publication one would encounter in the lobbies of doorman buildings on
the Upper East Side) and dispatches from her nights out at The Monkey
Bar, back when that restaurant was co-owned by Graydon Carter, then the
editor of Vanity Fair. 

The emails show how the clubby nature of the old media suited Mr.
Epstein. R. Couri Hay, a well-connected press agent, was another of Mr.
Epstein’s correspondents. In 2011, Mr. Hay sent an email to warn that
Tina Brown (the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who was
in charge of Newsweek and The Daily Beast at the time) had assigned a
story on Mr. Epstein to the writer Alexandra Wolfe (whose father was Tom
Wolfe). 

“This is for Newsweek, the magazine that is on the stands, not the
website,” Mr. Hay explained. 

He offered to help. He told Mr. Epstein that the planned article was to
be about his “reemergence in New York” after “your previous problems.”
He suggested providing “names and numbers of pro Jeffery power brokers
for Alexandra to call.” Mr. Hay went on to note that the reporter had
already checked in with a few people in Mr. Epstein’s orbit: the private
equity titan Leon Black, the Victoria’s Secret billionaire Leslie Wexner
and Mr. Trump. 

Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Hay insisted that he had never ended up
doing any publicity work for Mr. Epstein. He added that he had only
contacted the financier at the behest of a mutual friend, Jonathan
Farkas, a department-store heir who is included in the email dump. 

By the time Mr. Hay reached out, Mr. Epstein was a registered sex
offender. He also faced a number of lawsuits and was under investigation
by the F.B.I. 

Mr. Hay said that, like others who moved among Manhattan’s elite in
those days, he was not fully aware of how “heinous” Mr. Epstein was,
adding that he felt bamboozled by his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. 

“I admit that I, too, along the way, had been blinded a little bit by
the glamorous facade that Jeffrey and Ghislaine put on in social circles
in New York and in Palm Beach,” he said. 

In his attempts to improve his public image in 2011, Mr. Epstein also
emailed with Ms. Siegal, trying to get her to lean on Arianna Huffington
to publish some pro-Jeffrey content in The Huffington Post. “If you
rewrite your last email in better grammar,” Ms. Siegal wrote, “I can cut
and paste and send it to Arianna Huffington from me.” 

Ms. Siegal said Friday that she never did forward that email to Ms.
Huffington. So then why did she tell Mr. Epstein she would? “People say
things just to get people off the phone,” Ms. Siegal said. 

“I was never contacted,” said Ms. Huffington, who co-founded The
Huffington Post (now HuffPost) in 2005 and stayed on through 2016. 

Mr. Epstein was also in contact with Landon Thomas Jr., a reporter at
The New York Times from 2002 to 2019. Mr. Thomas, who wrote a feature
story on Mr. Epstein for New York Magazine in 2002, left The Times after
“his failure to abide by our ethical standards,” according to a Times
spokeswoman. The lapse came when Mr. Thomas was found to have solicited
a donation from Mr. Epstein for a cultural center in Harlem. 

As print began to fade, Mr. Epstein hired a digital consultant to try to
squelch negative articles about himself from search results, but it
didn’t seem to work. Mr. Epstein sent a series of screenshots to the
consultant in 2014 showing that, when he searched his name from a new
computer in the Virgin Islands, the results remained the same. 

Mr. Wolff popped into Mr. Epstein’s inbox often to brainstorm about how
to shape his media coverage, suggesting publications that might accept
an opinion piece, or a reporter who could prove sympathetic. 

Mr. Wolff also offered up his own column inches to help his friend. He
had joined USA Today as a freelance columnist; and he mentioned in 2015
that he could use New York Magazine. In 2016, Mr. Wolff advised Mr.
Epstein to try to do some reputational repair work with an appearance on
Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show. 

Mr. Rose would lose that show, not to mention his anchor job at CBS, in
2017, when multiple allegations of sexual harassment were made against
him at the height of the #MeToo movement. From the vantage point of Mr.
Epstein’s inbox, the revelations concerning the abusive behavior of men
in power played out like a psychological thriller. 

Mr. Epstein wrote to one confidant: “so many guys caught in the me too
reaching out to me asking when does the madness stop.” To another, he
wrote: “brett ratner now. Oy.” 

Mr. Epstein was referring to the film director and producer, who had
stepped away from a $450 million deal with Warner Bros. after The Los
Angeles Times reported on allegations made against him by six women. Mr.
Ratner has since resurfaced as the director of “Melania,” a
soon-to-be-released Amazon Prime documentary about Melania Trump, which
the first lady is producing. 

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Wolff also emailed about another director whose
reputation had sagged, their mutual friend Mr. Allen. Mr. Epstein
fretted to Mr. Wolff that Mr. Allen’s “brain trust” wasn’t savvy enough
to help him fight back in the digital era. “They are all old thinkers,”
Mr. Epstein wrote, adding: “no social media strategy.” 

In 2018, someone forwarded to Mr. Epstein that year’s program for Ms.
Brown’s Women in the World Summit, which boasted a “power packed agenda
of remarkable female newsmakers sharing their stories of male
misbehavior.” 

“Let’s do a men of the world conference,” wrote Lawrence Krauss, a
prominent theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, who would
soon depart the university after being accused by several women of
sexual misconduct. His proposed summit, he wrote, would include Kevin
Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Mr. Allen. 

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Epstein expressed amazement about the
sudden cultural shift in an email to Joi Ito, who ran the media lab at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until he resigned in 2019 over
his connection to the befouled financier. In addition to losing his
M.I.T. post, Mr. Ito stepped down from board positions at the MacArthur
Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The New York
Times Company. 

“With all these guys getting busted for harassment, i have moved
slightly up the reputation ladder and have been asked everyday for
advice etc,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Mr. Ito. 

So many of the people whose names appear in the recently released emails
have now left the public stage. But not the man occupying the Oval
Office. 

“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem,” Mr. Trump
wrote in a social media post on Friday. 

He then set his sights on the former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers
and the venture capitalist and Democratic political donor Reid Hoffman:
“Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they
know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a country
to run!” 


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.