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were witty, poised, helpful as well as powerfully alluring (as though stewardesses bygone times). At one point, sliding into the seat beside me, Geraldine Laybourne, then the head of the Nickelodeon network, whispered, with more awe than horror, “This could be the closest ve ever come to pure evil.” (One more thing about this trip: Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 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 put on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google bras with the Os as convenient cups.) 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. This 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 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), went down a rabbit hole of possible questionable contacts who might or might not have been the source or sources for Epstein’s wealth, seemed to get no closer to an answer, beyond confirming her own sense of dubiousness. Epstein, sensing that he might be exposing himself, tried to stop the process (Ward, well known for an operatic view about her reporting exploits, says he threatened her), called Carter and said he was having second thoughts about being a public figure. “Then you should live in a two bedroom apartment in Queens,” responded Carter. And then the troubles began. Epstein, in man-who-can-have-everything fashion, has, for many years, ordered up a daily massage following his workout sessions. “Often these were massage massages,” says Epstein matter of factly, “but sometimes these were happy ending massages, especially in Palm Beach, where there are many massage parlors—‘Jack Shacks,’ they’re called—that do outcalls. There was no sex. An often there was no happy HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022965