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million to Harvard for a theoretical physics research center—and in 2002 he was taking a small group of scientists out to the TED conference in Monterey. The TED organizers invited various other TED participants, including me, to join the flight. A small group assembled at the private plane terminal, most of us unfamiliar with our benefactor, and as we headed in the direction of the discrete private plans we were gently pointed to our ride: Epstein’s 727. It is some thoroughly updated drawing room set-up, all of us nervously ensconced in this luxury plane, waiting for our unknown host to arrive—and soon he does, tanned, relaxed, with wide open smile, accompanied by three young women. It would be unlikely, outside of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life, that you could locate this in reality. Epstein’s attentions, taking time with each of his passengers, seemed impossible to account for. The quiet of the plane, engineered into acoustic perfection, seemed spooky. Epstein’s three companions were witty, poised, helpful as well as powerfully alluring—as though stewardesses of bygone times. (One more thing about this trip: Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company still in its infancy, came out to see the plane and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whopping from one end of the plan to the other. Then they described for Epstein, in what I can not now remember as a put on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google bras with the Os as convenient cups. In fact, the name Google, they said, was invented out of the belief that men would focus on a word with two Os in it.) Not long after this trip, Epstein’s assistant called to invite me for tea at his house in New York, where Epstein, with what seemed to me little understanding of the subject, began to ask me about media—the upside, downside, and nature of media coverage. New York magazine was then soliciting him for a profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British tabloid reporter, Vicki Ward, to the job. Both profiles, New York’s by Landon Thomas, pivot on the Clinton connection and detail the same quandary, how a man without clear institutional bona fides nevertheless achieves wealth and influence. Ward—who would more recently assert in the Daily Beast, that she was barred by Vanity Fair from writing about under-age sex evidence (a fact that could be read the other way: Vanity Fair, even looking to take down Epstein, did not find the evidence credible)—follows a rabbit hole of questionable contacts who might or might not have been the source or sources for HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022720