Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein (born January 20, 1953, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died August 10, 2019, Manhattan) was an American financier and convicted sex offender who was accused of serial sex trafficking of women and girls. Through his successful financial career, Epstein became a multimillionaire and developed a social circle that included extremely wealthy individuals, prominent politicians, and even royalty. While jailed and awaiting a federal sex-trafficking trial, Epstein killed himself by hanging.

In the wake of his 2019 death, the content of the so-called Epstein files—including who is named in them and in what context—became a topic that roiled both sides of the political aisle. During the second administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, the call for the files to be made public became a national conversation, and the eventual release of thousands of documents only deepened the controversy around Epstein’s actions and his connections to powerful figures.

What Are the Epstein Files: A Timeline

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Ghislaine Maxwell: Association with Jeffrey Epstein

Early life

Epstein was the first of two children born to Paula Epstein (née Stolofsky) and Seymour Epstein, who were themselves children of Jewish immigrants. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked as a groundskeeper and gardener for the New York City Parks Department. The family lived in a middle-class neighborhood of Brooklyn known as Sea Gate, situated on the western shore of Coney Island. Epstein was a talented student who excelled in mathematics. He was also a skilled pianist. He attended Lafayette High School in Gravesend, Brooklyn, whose student body was mostly Italian American. It is thought that Epstein may have faced some antisemitism during his time there. He graduated in 1969, having skipped two grades. Later that year he enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he studied until 1971, when he transferred to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU). He studied at NYU for three years but did not graduate.

Where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money?

In 1974, despite not having a degree, Epstein began teaching physics and mathematics at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan, New York, many of whose students belonged to some of the wealthiest families in the country. Alumni include Anderson Cooper, comedian Chevy Chase, and actress Claire Danes. During his tenure at Dalton, Epstein was described by students as both a charismatic teacher and someone who did not adhere to normal student-teacher conventions. The New York Times reported that he was the only teacher to attend a party for high-school students at which they were drinking. Still, during a parent-teacher conference in 1976 Epstein so impressed a student’s father with his intelligence that the parent referred Epstein to Alan (“Ace”) Greenberg, then the CEO of the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns and also a Dalton parent. Following the 1975–76 school year, Epstein was dismissed from his position at Dalton after an evaluation found that his teaching skills were lacking. He began working at Bear Stearns soon afterward.

Career in finance and connections to the rich and powerful

Even as he was climbing the ladder at Bear Stearns and mingling with some of New York’s, and the world’s, wealthiest movers and shakers, there were warning signs of inappropriate behavior. According to The New York Times, on multiple occasions Bear Stearns questioned Epstein’s actions, including lying about his education on his résumé and charging expensive jewelry purchased for a girlfriend to the company. Still, in 1980 Epstein’s profile was riding high. He was 27 years old when Cosmopolitan magazine featured him as a “Bachelor of the Month” and Bear Stearns named him a limited partner. The next year, however, the company conducted an internal investigation to determine whether Epstein’s actions had violated Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. He was suspended and fined but denied wrongdoing, said he was “deeply offended” by the investigation, and ultimately quit the firm.

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Throughout the early 1980s Epstein seems to have been what some associates described as a “bounty hunter” who recovered stolen money for the ultra-wealthy. It proved to be a lucrative enterprise, and by 1984 Epstein had become a millionaire. He was now a client of Bear Stearns and not one of its brokers. Throughout this time Epstein’s charisma continued to charm New York circles. New York art collector Stuart Pivar told The New York Times that Epstein’s “magnetism,” particularly when turned on the “beautiful daughters of famous, powerful men,” was inescapable. In 1987 Epstein joined the board of the New York Academy of Art founded by Pivar and Andy Warhol. He was moving in the circles of the very famous and about to land a client who would cement his personal fortune. In 1988 Epstein founded J. Epstein & Company, a consulting firm that provided money-management services to individuals with a net worth of more than $1 billion. His major client for some 20 years was the billionaire retail magnate Leslie H. Wexner, who founded a conglomerate that at various times owned retail companies including Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Lane Bryant. Epstein came to manage much of Wexner’s holdings and benefited enormously as a result.

In the 1990s Epstein began running his business from the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands—a tax haven—where he owned the nearby small island of Little St. James. (He later purchased another island in the same vicinity, Great St. James.) He also owned what was then the largest private mansion in Manhattan, which he purchased from Wexner, as well as properties in Palm Beach, Florida; Paris; and New Mexico. Testimony from an Epstein accuser and subsequent photographs revealed hidden cameras at the Manhattan residence, although their purpose has never fully been understood.

It was during this time that Epstein began using his growing wealth to further expand his relationships with the rich and powerful. Over the years he developed friendships with the likes of Michael Jackson, Bill Gates, Harvard professors Alan Dershowitz and Larry Summers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a prince whose titles were stripped by the British royal family in 2025 following revelations of his ties to Epstein and accusations that he participated in abuse of minors.

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Perhaps the two most prominent relationships Epstein cultivated were with the U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Epstein and Trump’s relationship dates back to the late 1980s, and many have described the men as each other’s “best friend.” Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell attended a 1993 White House event and were photographed with Clinton. Both men signed a 2003 book for Epstein’s 50th birthday, and flight logs show that both traveled several times on Epstein’s plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express” for Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel about a pedophile who repeatedly abuses his stepdaughter.

In a 2002 New York magazine profile, Trump said of Epstein:

I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. 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.

Trump and Epstein had a falling out shortly after that, however. Maxwell recruited 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who would later become one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where she was working as a spa attendant. It was a move that angered Trump. “He hired help….He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata,” Trump said of Epstein in 2025.

Other reports suggest the relationship fractured after Trump and Epstein battled over a $41 million Palm Beach property. (Trump won.)

Conviction, sex-crime allegations, and death

Epstein was first accused of sexually abusing girls in Palm Beach in 2005. Police were alerted by a woman who claimed that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been molested by a wealthy man named Jeff. The FBI was soon involved. Further accusations began to surface, and, by the time the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida (and later secretary of labor during the first term of President Trump) Alexander Acosta began to put together a criminal case, the number of alleged victims had reached about 40. In 2008 the federal government entered a plea deal in which Epstein was not charged with federal crimes but pleaded guilty to two counts of violating state laws against soliciting prostitution and soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Epstein served 13 months in prison with a provision that allowed him to spend six days a week in his Palm Beach office. It was reported that Acosta said that the deal was lenient because intelligence officials had told him to “back off” Epstein at the time, signaling that the money manager was of some importance to another federal case. But Acosta denied ever saying that as part of a government investigation that found he used “poor judgment” in the Epstein case. A number of civil claims against Epstein were filed in the years after the plea deal. In 2023 the banks JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank AG were accused in civil suits of knowingly enabling Epstein to commit sex crimes.

In 2018 Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, identified some 80 alleged survivors of sexual abuse by Epstein or his associates. The report led to renewed examinations of sex-crime allegations against Epstein, and in 2019 a new federal criminal case was brought against him. He was arrested in July in New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport on charges of sex trafficking and held without bail. Later that month Epstein was found in his Manhattan jail cell with injuries indicating that he had attempted to kill himself by hanging. Less than a week later, however, he was taken off the jail’s suicide watch. On August 9, the day before Epstein’s death, his cellmate was removed but not replaced, and for approximately three hours that night Epstein was not checked on by guards, in violation of the jail’s protocol. In addition, cameras outside the cell malfunctioned. On the morning of August 10, Epstein was found dead in his cell after killing himself by hanging.

The Epstein files

After Epstein’s death the so-called Epstein files, or documents related to the investigations into him, emerged as a topic of interest and became a talking point in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump, en route to his second election victory, ambivalently said in a Fox News interview that he would release the Epstein files. “I guess I would,” he said, before saying that he would not want people’s lives disrupted by “phony stuff in there.” He then ended with “but I think I would [release them].”

The Epstein files in photos: The people and places that define a scandal

If Trump was half-hearted in his support of their release, other Republicans, including some who would serve in his administration, expressed more conviction in their calls. Dan Bongino, who served as deputy director of the FBI in Trump’s second term, said in September 2024 that the Epstein cache “speaks to an enormous problem we have in this country. It is that there is a connected class of insiders that feel that they can get away with anything, because they can.”

However, once in office, Trump was slow to take action on the release of the files. Despite Attorney General Pam Bondi saying in early 2025 that she was in possession of Epstein-related files, Trump balked at ordering their release. His hesitancy led to mounting pressure throughout the summer from Epstein survivors, leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties, and even his own supporters. “Release the Epstein files” became a rallying cry on social media, as people across the political spectrum demanded transparency from the government.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2025, the call from survivors of Epstein’s abuse, estimated to number more than 1,000 girls and young women, to release the files also gained momentum. The publication of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl in October led King Charles to strip Andrew of his prince title. Other survivors of Epstein’s abuse went public in appearances on television, in Washington, D.C., and in a public service announcement in which they held photographs of themselves at the time of their abuse. The media barrage served to squelch the argument that releasing the files would harm the survivors.

In November 2025 Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee released a set of emails written by or sent to Epstein and obtained through a subpoena of Epstein’s estate in August. Some of the emails indicated that Trump may have known about Epstein’s sex trafficking, and in one of them Epstein stated that Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Epstein’s victims. About two hours after the email release, Republican members of the committee made public some 20,000 documents also received from Epstein’s estate. Soon afterward, Trump publicly reversed his opposition to the passage of a bill called the Epstein Files Transparency Act by the House of Representatives that required the release of all of the Justice Department’s Epstein files, with exceptions for ongoing investigations, national security, and the protection of survivors’ identities. The bill was passed by the House and Senate on November 18 and signed into law by Trump the next day.

The transparency act called for a release of documents by December 19, and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were released on that day. They included never-before-seen photographs of Bill Clinton as well as other celebrities, including Michael Jackson. They also included some previously released material and hundreds of pages that were completely black, having been redacted. Almost immediately, some lawmakers and Epstein survivors decried the release as incomplete.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the legislators who wrote the transparency act, said the release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged that the Justice Department had not completed its review of the files, saying he expected that review would take several more weeks.

On December 23, 2025, the Justice Department released another 30,000 pages of documents, including correspondence between Maxwell and then-Prince Andrew. Also included was a 2020 email from a prosecutor in New York to an unknown recipient noting that recently obtained flight records “reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware).” As part of the release the Justice Department put out a statement saying, “Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump.”

On January 30, 2026, Deputy Attorney General Blanche announced what he described as the last material release of items from the files. It was the largest release to date, including some 3,000,000 pages, 2,000 videos, and about 180,000 images. U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, the bipartisan authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, formally requested to review all the unredacted files to ensure that the government was in compliance with the law.

Epstein survivors expressed outrage and frustration at the latest release. In a statement a group of 18 women said: “Once again, survivors are having their names and identifying information exposed, while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected.”

The release again included prominent names in the world of business, politics, and society. Being named in the documents does not imply wrongdoing. Some of those featured in the latest release include:

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor: The former prince is shown in new photographs kneeling over a fully clothed woman who is lying on the ground. Her face has been obscured to protect her identity. The latest revelation led to the highly unusual act of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling on Mountbatten-Windsor to appear before Congress. The release also included exchanges with Epstein that indicate Mountbatten-Windsor shared confidential documents related to his role as a British trade envoy and led to his subsequent arrest on suspicion of misusing his public office.
• U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick: The files show that Lutnick, who has been associated with Epstein before, had planned a visit to Epstein’s island in 2012. Previously, Lutnick said that he had no contact with Epstein after about 2005. However, he admitted in congressional testimony that he had lunch with Epstein on the island in 2012 with his wife and four children.
• Former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler: The files include emails from Ruemmler, now an attorney at Goldman Sachs, thanking “Uncle Jeffrey” for gifts, including a $9,000 purse.
• New York Giants co-owner Steven Tisch: The release shows email exchanges between Tisch and Epstein in 2013. In a statement Tisch acknowledged that they sometimes discussed “adult women.”
• Federal Reserve chair nominee Kevin Warsh: Warsh’s name appears on a guest list for an event titled “St. Barth’s Christmas 2010.”
• Google cofounder Sergey Brin: The documents show Brin, one of the richest men in the world, corresponding with Ghislaine Maxwell. Multiple people had previously claimed that Brin had visited Epstein’s island.

Earlier in January Bill and Hillary Clinton refused to testify before the House Oversight Committee about what they knew about Epstein. The Clintons sent an eight-page letter to the committee chair, Republican Rep. James Comer, saying that they considered the subpoenas “invalid and legally unenforceable.”

 The committee voted to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress. Then, in early February, just days before the full House would have voted to hold them in contempt, the Clintons relented and agreed to testify. In the days after the Clintons’ testimony, Commerce Secretary Lutnick agreed to testify about his relationship with Epstein. The committee also in March 2026 subpoenaed Attorney General Bondi to testify in a vote that saw five Republicans side with Democrats. Later in March the Department of Justice made public a number of previously unreleased documents in which an unidentified woman made unsubstantiated claims to the FBI after Epstein’s 2019 arrest that she was sexually abused as a young teenager by Epstein and Trump. The president has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong as part of his long-standing friendship with Epstein. In April 2026, Trump fired Bondi and she said she would not testify because she was no longer the attorney general. Nonetheless, in May, she agreed to sit for a behind-closed-doors interview with members of the House Oversight Committee. According to news reports, she denied she played an integral role in the management of the release of the Epstein files, instead saying that various aspects were handled by her deputy, Blanche, who is now the acting attorney general, and FBI director Kash Patel.

The summer of 2026 saw high profile business leaders appear before the Oversight Committee, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who acknowledged he sought money from Epstein for his foundation even after Epstein’s conviction. Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Capital Management, who reportedly paid Epstein some $170 million in financial planning fees, also testified saying he knew nothing of Epstein’s alleged abuse.

Conspiracy theories around Epstein’s death

In the wake of Epstein’s suicide, his family questioned New York state’s official autopsy, suggesting instead that he had been murdered. Their speculation drew public attention and resulted in widespread conspiracy theories—especially among members of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, the most ardent supporters of Trump. MAGA members believed that Epstein’s death was related to his connections with billionaires and elite public figures and that Epstein had kept a secret “client list” of men for whom he had trafficked young women and girls.

These suspicions often dovetailed with other far-right conspiracy theories, including the Pizzagate case, in which allegations that a popular Washington, D.C., pizza parlor was being used to traffic children led a man to open fire there with a high-powered rifle.

Regarding the murder accusation, however, no credible evidence was ever produced. To the contrary, later in August 2019 it was reported that Epstein had signed a redrafted final will and testament two days before his death. In June 2023 a report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice agreed with the state’s autopsy and noted that the OIG’s investigators “did not uncover evidence contradicting…the absence of criminality in connection with how Epstein died.”

In May 2026 a federal judge released what was purported to be a suicide note written by Epstein before a July 2019 failed suicide attempt. It had not previously been made public. While it was not immediately authenticated as being written by Epstein, it read in part: “They investigated me for months—FOUND NOTHING!!! … It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.”

In June 2026 The New York Times published a 10,000-word investigation into Epstein’s death. Among the key findings were:

• In addition to the suicide note, there is evidence of perhaps as many as three attempts by Epstein to kill himself.
• Given the risk of suicide, corrections officials failed to follow appropriate protocols—including leaving Epstein alone and unsupervised. That failure contributed to his death.
• The mishandling of evidence in the immediate aftermath of his death—including confusion over which noose was actually used—added to conspiracy theories.
• Forensics experts who examined autopsy photos said it would be close to impossible to conclusively determine the manner of death, either suicide or homicide.

In the end—after poring over thousands of pages of documents, creating a 3-D model of Epstein’s cell, and interviewing people never before talked to, including a former cellmate—The Times’ conclusion is:

The picture drawn most clearly by this new information is not the elaborate conspiracy that his murder would have required; rather, it is an unfortunate though not improbable convergence of longstanding institutional failures, human errors and chance events, which created an opportunity for Epstein to act on what was by then a well-established desire that he had already tried and failed to realize.

Learn more

Timeline of the Epstein Files

Ghislaine Maxwell, Partner in Crime

Who Was Virginia Giuffre?

Where Did Epstein Get His Money?

The Fallout: Firings, Resignations, Arrests

Julie K. Brown: The Reporter Who Gave Victims a Voice