Billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was a monster hiding in plain sight, says GUY WALTERS

When Jeffrey Epstein first emerged into the public eye nearly 30 years ago, he was regarded as a man of mystery. In November 1992, he had been spotted travelling by Concorde from London to New York on the arm of Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell, who had died a year before.

Who exactly was this ‘greying, plumpish, middle-aged American businessman’, The Mail on Sunday asked at the time.

There were suggestions that Epstein worked for the CIA, or the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.

Some said that he was a concert pianist, or a corporate spy. Others thought him a school teacher or property developer.

Pictured, Jeffrey Epstein with British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, Donald Trump, and Mr Trump’s then future-wife Melania at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida in 2000

With his suicide yesterday in a Manhattan jail aged 66, we now know exactly who this man was – a predatory paedophile and a sex trafficker, a man who used his wealth and his friendships with some of the most powerful people on the planet to get away with the most repellent of crimes.

But in the darkest hours of the night, even the arrogant Epstein knew that neither cash nor connections were going to see him escape the reckoning for his abuse and actual enslavement of countless girls.

When a US federal court ordered the release of some 2,000 pages of documents from a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims against Ghislaine Maxwell – who was accused of procuring young girls for him – the financier knew that the only way to escape justice was with a self-administered noose.

The claims in the documents are lurid and deeply disturbing, involving allegations against figures including no less than Prince Andrew, who was a friend and had even invited Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to a weekend shooting party at the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

The documents show that hundreds of girls were cajoled, coerced and forced into having sex with Epstein. One of the most upsetting allegations concerns a ‘distraught’ 15-year-old girl from Sweden who was held hostage on Epstein’s Caribbean island of Little St James, her passport and phone confiscated, and then forced to have sex with him.

Despite the gloss of private jets, private islands, Manhattan apartments and luxury hotels, there is no difference between Epstein and Jimmy Savile and his sordid camper van with a stained mattress in the back.

Both men were serial rapists of young girls who used their position and wealth to get away with their evil for far too long.

Pictured, Prince Andrew with Ghislaine and Heidi Klum at Heidi's 'Hookers and Pimps'-themed Halloween party in 2000 at the Hudson Hotel in New York

Pictured, Prince Andrew with Ghislaine and Heidi Klum at Heidi’s ‘Hookers and Pimps’-themed Halloween party in 2000 at the Hudson Hotel in New York

For at the heart of both stories is not just gross moral failure, but also systematic failure in the legal system. These men have shown, to our shame, how society venerates wealth and allows it to mask the worst of abuses – even when it lies in plain sight.

While his body goes slowly rigid in a Manhattan morgue, we all need to know how a monster like Epstein came to be, and how he managed to get away with his crimes for so long. Indeed, there is much that we do not know about this man’s past and it is a particular mystery, for example, how he managed to become quite so rich.

What we do know is that he was born in 1953 in Brooklyn and raised in a modest home by his parents. His father was a gardener and his mother, when not running the home, helped out at the local school.

Despite being highly intelligent, Epstein’s educational record appears to have been patchy. He was bright enough to leave high school early, yet dropped out of two further institutions, including the prestigious Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences – affiliated with New York University.

Epstein knew enough mathematics to teach it, however, and in the early 1970s he taught maths and physics at the exclusive Dalton School in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, whose pupils have included the actress Claire Danes, comedian Chevy Chase and John Lennon’s son Sean.

Whether or not Epstein, by now in his early 20s, abused girls at Dalton we do not know, but what the school did offer him was a valuable connection – and one that would set him on his way to great riches.

One of the Dalton parents was Alan Greenberg, the chief executive officer of the now defunct investment bank Bear Stearns, and he was sufficiently impressed by Epstein to offer him a job there in 1976.

The college dropout excelled on Wall Street, and he rose rapidly from being a floor trader’s junior assistant to a limited partner in just four years, his role advising wealthy clients. However, in 1981, he left the company under a cloud, and set up his own firm – J. Epstein & Co.

As to what kind of cloud that was remains murky, but then Epstein spent his whole life in murkiness. He was generally described as a financier, but even that is far from clear. His wealth management firm – if that is was it was – was reputed only to accept clients worth at least $1 billion, and nobody seems to know who they were.

‘My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money-management firm,’ said one well-known investor in 2002, ‘though you won’t get a straight answer from him. He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I’ve also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It’s like looking at the Wizard of Oz – there may be less there than meets the eye.’

Pictured, Jeffrey Epstein with Bill Clinton. One of his biggest pals was Bill Clinton, who would use Epstein’s private jet repeatedly in 2002 and 2003

Pictured, Jeffrey Epstein with Bill Clinton. One of his biggest pals was Bill Clinton, who would use Epstein’s private jet repeatedly in 2002 and 2003

Whoever his clients were, and whatever they were truly worth, what is certain is Epstein was to become a very wealthy man – or at least have access to wealth.

He bought homes in Paris, Miami, New Mexico, and the entire island of Little St James in the US Virgin Islands.

In 1992, he was identified as the official owner of the largest private residence in Manhattan.

As well as buying himself countless properties, Epstein – like Savile – also acquired influence.

One of the best ways to do that in the United States has always been through philanthropy, and Epstein played the system as well as he was reputed to play the piano.

He set up his own foundation, which donated $30 million to Harvard University to establish an ‘evolutionary dynamics’ programme. (Evolutionary dynamics is based on mathematical principles as they relate to biology, particularly in fields such as genetics and evolution.)

This donation earned the praise of none other than celebrated legal mind and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz – later to represent Epstein when he was accused of sex crimes in 2007 – who described it as ‘brilliant’.

But Epstein was to garner far more stellar names than big-shot academic lawyers. One of his biggest pals was Bill Clinton, who would use Epstein’s private jet repeatedly in 2002 and 2003, and who flew to Africa with Epstein to tour AIDS projects along with the comedian Chris Tucker, and the now-disgraced actor Kevin Spacey – himself no stranger to accusations of sex crimes.

But others were to have their doubts about Epstein and exactly what his wealth amounted to.

‘He is this mysterious, Gatsbyesque figure,’ someone familiar with Epstein told New York Magazine in 2002. ‘He likes people to think that he is very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness. The whole thing is weird.’ In an interview in 2007 for the same publication, Michael Stroll, who sued Epstein over a failed deal, was still more withering.

‘Everybody who is his friend thinks he’s so darn brilliant because he’s so darn wealthy. I never saw any brilliance, I never saw him work. Anybody I know that is that wealthy works 26 hours a day. This guy plays 26 hours a day.’

Epstein’s story, as we now know, went well beyond financial impropriety. What made him a monster was his sexual predilection for forcing himself upon young girls, a taste that was acknowledged, no doubt inadvertently, by the current President of the United States.

‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years,’ said Donald Trump in an interview in 2002.

‘Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’

Perhaps believing his wealth and his connection made him somehow immune, Epstein was quite candid to a journalist about how he liked his women.

The person accused of helping to procure those girls was none other than Ghislaine Maxwell (right), who had dated Epstein after she moved to New York in the aftermath of her corrupt father’s death in 1991. Pictured with Carol Mack in 1995

The person accused of helping to procure those girls was none other than Ghislaine Maxwell (right), who had dated Epstein after she moved to New York in the aftermath of her corrupt father’s death in 1991. Pictured with Carol Mack in 1995

In 2007, Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff revealed how Epstein was followed on to his private plane ‘by – how shall I say this? – by three teenage girls not his daughters’ – who were ‘18, 19, 20’ and ‘model-like.’

‘He has never been secretive about the girls. At one point, when his troubles began, he was talking to me and said, “What can I say, I like young girls.” I said, ‘Maybe you should say, “I like young women,” ’suggested Wolff.

The person accused of helping to procure those girls was none other than Ghislaine Maxwell, who had dated Epstein after she moved to New York in the aftermath of her corrupt father’s death in 1991.

The documents released on Friday contain testimony that Maxwell and Epstein had fetishistic threesomes with girls – a claim that Maxwell denies.

But despite his wealth and VIP friends, not even the murky Epstein could withstand the years of allegations that had started to accrue. Finally, in 2005, detectives in Florida went to work on a tip from a woman who claimed that a wealthy man called ‘Jeff’ had molested her stepdaughter.

For a while, Epstein was able to keep justice at bay, and even when he was finally sent down, he only received a 13-month jail sentence, during which he was even allowed to work at his Palm Beach office.

Still more egregious – as if to prove there is one law for the rich and another for the poor – was the fact that Epstein was allowed to cut a deal granting him immunity from federal prosecution.

Ultimately, however, there was no escape from justice.

On July 6 this year, he was arrested and accused of arranging to have sex with dozens of underage girls at his homes in Florida and New York city between 2002 and 2005.

Not granted bail, Epstein also found himself facing charges of conspiracy and sex trafficking.

Had he been found guilty, he would have received a jail sentence of at least 45 years, and would almost certainly have died behind bars.

Just a few weeks ago, he tried to commit suicide for the first time, and he was taken to hospital.

The fact that he finally succeeded in escaping justice is surely a black mark for the New York prison system, as it cheats hundreds of young girls – most of whom are now women, scarred by their experiences with Epstein – of the justice they deserve.

By taking his own life, Epstein has committed one last act of violation against these women, revealing himself to be both vindictive and a coward.

He is gone. But we must still remind ourselves that there are others who should to be blamed for his crimes – those who helped him, and those who turned blind eyes and deaf ears to the anguish of so many distraught young girls. 

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk