HUH: Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune May Be More Illusion Than Fact.
Mr. Epstein is routinely described as a billionaire and brilliant financier, and he rubbed elbows with the powerful, including former and future presidents. Even after his 2008 guilty plea in a prostitution case in Florida, he promoted himself as a financial wizard who used arcane mathematical models, and he often dropped the names of Nobel Prize-winning friends. He told potential clients that they had to invest a minimum of $1 billion. At his peak in the early 2000s, a magazine profile said he employed 150 people, some working out of the historic Villard Houses on Madison Avenue.
Much of that appears to be an illusion, and there is little evidence that Mr. Epstein is a billionaire.
Mr. Epstein’s wealth may have depended less on his math acumen than his connections to two men — Steven J. Hoffenberg, a onetime owner of The New York Post and a notorious fraudster later convicted of running a $460 million Ponzi scheme, and Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire founder of retail chains including The Limited and the chief executive of the company that owns Victoria’s Secret.
ALSO FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: Jeffrey Epstein Was a ‘Terrific Guy,’ Donald Trump Once Said. Now He’s ‘Not a Fan.’
“Now?”
Trump reportedly kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago more than 15 years ago, long before his recent legal troubles, or even those of 11 years ago:
President Trump has not said much about the arrest of his former friend Jeffrey Epstein, but court documents suggest that he made his opinion of the convicted pedophile well known years ago.
An ongoing lawsuit between Epstein and Bradley Edwards, who represented multiple underage victims in their civil suits against the convicted pedophile, reveals that President Trump banned Epstein from his private club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago.
The reason for that, according to the filing, was that Epstein had ‘sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club.’
That “now” story was a truly shitty attempt at a hit job from the NYT’s Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, but nothing unexpected.