Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born January 20, 1953 in Coney Island, New York) is an American financier. He served 13 months in jail of an 18-month sentence as a convicted sex offender in the state of Florida for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. He is a registered sex offender, and remains under investigation by the FBI over allegations of involvement with underage girls and for money laundering.
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Epstein was raised in a Jewish family on Coney Island and attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, New York. He attended classes at Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971 and then at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, leaving without a degree. From 1973 to 1975 he taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School. He then became a trader at Bear Stearns. In 1982 he founded his own financial management firm, J. Epstein and Co., later called Financial Trust Co., located on his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He reportedly only takes billionaire clients; one of his clients was mentor and friend Les Wexner who recently hired Dennis Hersch to replace Epstein. Since all but one of his clients are anonymous, it has been speculated that much of Epstein's lavish lifestyle may be financed by Wexner. In September 2002 he flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa in his private Boeing 727, to promote the former president's anti-AIDS efforts.
Epstein is a friend and supporter of theoretical biologist Martin Nowak. He funded Nowak's research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and in 2003 pledged $30 million to Harvard University to fund the newly created Program for Evolutionary Dynamics there which Nowak directs.
He is a former board member of Rockefeller University, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a visiting fellow at Harvard University. He has also funded microbiology experiments in Bangladesh, particle physics in South Africa and M-theory in India and was a founding member of the Scholar Rescue Fund.
Epstein is a former trustee of the International Institute for Education, the parent organization of the Fulbright Program. He has held conferences on artificial intelligence, cosmology and the origin of life with prominent scientists.
In addition to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands (Little St. James Island), Epstein owns a townhouse in Manhattan that was formerly owned by Les Wexner, a villa in Palm Beach, Florida and a fortress on a ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He is often accompanied on his trips and at his mansions by his close friend Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late British publisher Robert Maxwell.
In March 2005, a woman contacted Palm Beach police, concerned that her 14-year-old step-daughter had been taken to Epstein’s mansion by an older girl and been paid $300 after stripping to her panties and massaging the man while he masturbated. She had told him that she was 18 years old. She undressed but had left on her underwear. By 2011 at least 40 girls aged 13 to 17 had come forward with similar stories, some saying Epstein sexually assaulted them during the massage.
Police started an 11-month undercover investigation of Epstein, followed by a search of his home. Subsequently, they alleged that Epstein had paid several escorts to perform sexual acts on him. Interviews with five alleged victims and 17 witnesses under oath, phone messages, a high school transcript and other items they found in Mr. Epstein's trash and home allegedly show that some girls were under 18, although some maintained to him at the time that they were of proper age. A search of Epstein's home found numerous photos of girls throughout the house, some of whom had been interviewed earlier by the police. He had set up a system of young women recruiting other women for his massage services. Two housekeepers stated to the police that Epstein would receive massages every day whenever he stayed in Palm Beach. In May 2006, Palm Beach police filed a probable cause affidavit saying that Epstein should be charged with four counts of unlawful sex with minors and one molestation count. His team of lawyers included Gerald B. Lefcourt, Alan Dershowitz and later also Kenneth Starr. Epstein passed a lie detector test in which he was asked whether he knew of the under-age status of the girls. They also questioned the credibility of the teenage accusers, based in part on their MySpace postings and information obtained by private investigators.
Instead of following the recommendation of the police, the prosecutors considered the evidence weak and presented it to a grand jury, an uncommon procedure in non-capital cases. The grand jury returned only a single charge of felony solicitation of prostitution, to which Epstein pleaded not guilty in August 2006.
In June, 2008, after pleading to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution, Epstein began serving an 18-month sentence. Following his release he was required to register as a sex offender
After the accusations became public, several parties returned donations they had received from Epstein, including Eliot L. Spitzer, Mark A. Green, Bill Richardson, and the Palm Beach Police Department. Harvard announced that it would not return any money.
On June 18, 2010, Epstein's former butler, Alfredo Rodriguez, was sentenced to 18 months in jail for trying to sell a journal that recorded Epstein's activities.
An unusual part of Epstein's ‘plea bargain’ with prosecutors was that Epstein’s alleged victims were allowed to bring civil proceedings against him.
On February 6, 2008, an anonymous Virginia woman filed a $50 million civil lawsuit in federal court against Epstein, alleging that when she was a 16-year-old minor in 2004-2005, she was "recruited to give Epstein a massage." After being brought to his Palm Beach mansion, she claims that he exposed himself and had sexual intercourse with her, and paid her $200 immediately afterward. A similar $50 million suit was filed by a different woman in March 2008 who was represented by the same lawyer. Several of these lawsuits were dismissed and all other lawsuits were settled out of court. He has so far made 17 out-of-court settlements, and some cases are ongoing.
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