Back in the early 2000s, Jeffrey Epstein and his famous friends were having a blast. Businessmen, politicians, celebrities, and even academics were caught up in the hedonism of Epstein's life. Epstein was a giver, who freely shared his lavish lifestyle with his pals. He flew friends to his island in St. Thomas, threw decadent dinner parties at his Manhattan townhouse, and spared no expense or indulgence. His friends included Leslie Wexner of The Limited, Kevin Spacey, Prince Andrew, a group of Nobel Prize winning scientists, and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
Epstein is a native New Yorker who taught calculus and physics at Manhattan's elite Dalton School before becoming an options trader in 1976. In 1982, Epstein founded his own financial management firm, J. Epstein & Co., managing the assets of clients with more than a billion dollars in net worth. When a famous or wealthy (or both) person was invited to one of Epstein's parties, they were served elaborate gourmet meals prepared by celebrity chefs, like Rocco DiSpirito. These parties also always the featured roving packs of very young model types with which Epstein would surround himself.
Photo via Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department/Wikimedia Creative Commons/Public Domain
In the mid-aughts, Epstein posted his two rules for living in an online forum:
-"Epstein's First Law," he wrote, "Know when you are winning."
-"Epstein's Second Law: The key question is not what can I gain but what do I have to lose."
As it turned out, Epstein had a lot to lose. He was living a double life. Between the years 1998 and 2007, Epstein ran a perverted pyramid scheme of sorts where he paid underage girls about $200 per session to perform daily sexual massages. The girls he hired told police that Epstein instructed them to get undressed and he would then penetrate them.
Epstein was arrested in Palm Beach County, Florida in 2008. By that time, the police had spent months monitoring his comings and goings, examining his garbage, and interviewing the victims and witnesses to his perversion. They had enough evidence to charge him with several felonies: lewd and lascivious molestation and four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor.
In 2008, Epstein quietly paid out settlements to a number of victims who claimed the financier molested them on several occasions. Surely, Epstein hoped that would be the end of it. However, the girls kept coming out of the woodwork with the same story again and again. So he did what the very wealthy and very famous do in situations like this. He hired a dream team of star attorneys to – pardon the pun – get him off. In Epstein's case, his team of Gerald Lefcourt and Alan Dershowitz managed to get him a deal for limited jail time despite more than a decade of alleged serial sexual abuse and rape of an unknown number of girls.
Officially, Epstein was charged with a single count of soliciting a minor. He was sentenced to 18 months in a Palm Beach jail. During that time, he was allowed to leave six days a week for "work release." He served 13 months of his sentence. He has been a free man, albeit with the tag of sex offender tied to him for life, since 2009.
Then, in 2013, a young woman filed a lawsuit claiming that Epstein used her as a sex slave for his wealthy friends. That woman claimed she'd been at parties with Bill Clinton.
Now, we all know this election cycle is pretty strange and awfully ugly. So when it surfaced that Bill Clinton was a fairly frequent passenger on Epstein's private jet – flying at least 26 times from 2001 to 2003 according to the flight logs – everyone expected Donald Trump to run with that news.
Except just recently, a woman filed a lawsuit alleging that both Epstein and Donald Trump repeatedly raped her at a series of sex parties. The woman says she attended several parties at Epstein's mansion, and had sexual contact with Donald Trump at four of them. The fourth and final time she attended a party with Trump, she alleges he tied her to a bed, raped her, then beat her and threatened to kill her and her family if she told a soul. She was 13 years old at the time.
The Clintons have not addressed their affiliation with Epstein. Trump has denied the claims against him and said he barely knew Epstein, however a quick search of New York media in the 90s will show you his comings-and-goings at Epstein's Upper East Side home – but denial is what one does in these cases, right?
It is ironic, then, that the billionaire pedophile who could bring down BOTH presidential campaigns won't, because both sides have ties to him. Epstein has become a serious liability for both campaigns, and as such, ends up not being a real liabilty for either, as they both have things to lose.
