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Case 1:19-cv-03377 Document 1-8 Filed 04/16/19 Page 5 of 16
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303
Here are some of the hard facts about Epstein—ones that he doesn’t mind people knowing: He
grew up middle-class in Brooklyn. His father worked for the city’s parks department. His parents
viewed education as “the way out” for him and his younger brother, Mark, now working in real
estate. Jeffrey started to play the piano—for which he maintains a passion—at five, and he went
to Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School. He was good at mathematics, and in his early 20s he got a
job teaching physics and math at Dalton, the elite Manhattan private school. While there he
began tutoring the son of Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg and was friendly with a
daughter of Greenberg’s. Soon he went to Bear Stearns, where, under the mentorship of both
Greenberg and current Bear Stearns C.E.O. James Cayne, he did well enough to become a
limited partner—a rung beneath full partner. He abruptly departed in 1981 because, he has said,
he wanted to run his own business.
Thereafter the details recede into shadow. A few of the handful of current friends who have
known him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a “bounty hunter,”
recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people. He has a license to
carry a firearm. For the last 15 years, he’s been running his business, J. Epstein & Co.
Since Leslie Wexner appeared in his life—Epstein has said this was in 1986; others say it was in
1989, at the earliest—he has gradually, in a way that has not generally made headlines, come to
be accepted by the Establishment. He’s a member of various commissions and councils: he is on
the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of
Sciences, and the Institute of International Education.
His current fan club extends to Cayne, Henry Rosovsky, the former dean of Harvard’s Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, and Larry Summers, Harvard’s current president. Harvard law professor Alan
Dershowitz says, “I’m on my 20th book.... The only person outside of my immediate family that
I send drafts to is Jeffrey.” Real-estate developer and philanthropist Marshall Rose, who has
worked with Epstein on projects in New Albany, Ohio, for Wexner, says, “He digests and
decodes the information very rapidly, which is to me terrific because we have shorter meetings.”
Also on the list of admirers are former senator George Mitchell and a gaggle of distinguished
scientists, most of whom Epstein has helped fund in recent years. They include Nobel Prize
winners Gerald Edelman and Murray Gell-Mann, and mathematical biologist Martin Nowak.
When these men describe Epstein, they talk about “energy” and “curiosity,” as well as a love for
theoretical physics that they don’t ordinarily find in laymen. Gell-Mann rather sweetly mentions
that “there are always pretty ladies around” when he goes to dinner chez Epstein, and he’s under
the impression that Epstein’s clients include the Queen of England. Both Nowak and Dershowitz
were thrilled to find themselves shaking the hand of a man named “Andrew” in Epstein’s house.
“Andrew” turned out to be Prince Andrew, who subsequently arranged to sit in the back of
Dershowitz’s law class.
Epstein gets annoyed when anyone suggests that Wexner “made him.” “I had really rich clients
before,” he has said. Yet he does not deny that he and Wexner have a special relationship.
Epstein sees it as a partnership of equals. “People have said it’s like we have one brain between
two of us: each has a side.”
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Document Details
| Filename | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017775.jpg |
| File Size | 0.0 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 85.0% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 3,642 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-04T16:33:00.648168 |