It's outrageous': inside an infuriating Netflix series on Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein was an American money manager and registered sex offender. In August 2019, he died in jail, which was ruled a suicide.

 

 

 

Who Was Jeffrey Epstein?

Jeffrey Epstein was a New York-based financier with high-profile ties to the world's ultra-wealthy and powerful. Accused of sexually abusing many underage girls, Epstein was finally caught and charged for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida in 2008 and became a registered sex offender. Of his 18-month prison sentence, he served 13 months. In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again — this time on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors. While awaiting trial, he was found dead in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. The medical examiner concluded his death was by suicide, but a separate investigation prompted by Epstein's family suggests he may have been murdered.

Early Life

Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Pauline, worked part-time as a school aide, and his father, Seymour, was a groundskeeper for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Epstein, along with his younger brother Mark, was raised in a middle-class environment.
Remarkably bright, Epstein skipped two grades and graduated from Brooklyn's Lafayette High School at the age of 16. Although he enrolled at Cooper Union and later at New York University in the early 1970s, he never received degrees at either school.

Still, Epstein got a job teaching calculus and physics at the Dalton School, an Upper East Side prep school, in 1974. However, his employment was short-lived — he was fired two years later for "poor performance."

Finance Career

Before Epstein left his teaching job at the Dalton School, he was able to make an important connection with one of his student's parents, Alan Greenberg, the CEO of Bear Stearns. Impressed by Epstein's acuity with numbers, Greenberg gave him an assistant job at Bear Stearns in 1976 and from there, Epstein quickly climbed the ladder, eventually advising some of the company's wealthiest clients.
In 1981 Epstein left Bear Stearns and established his own financial consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group Inc (IAG) in which he helped clients recover embezzled money and also assisted clients who were embezzlers. It was around this time, he began telling friends and colleagues that he worked as an intelligence agent, a claim that has never been verified. However, his association with powerful businessmen who did deals with a variety of governments, as well as his extensive travels overseas in the mid-1980s, all pointed to the possibility that his claim could be true.

In 1987 Epstein began consulting for a collection agency called Tower Financial Corporation, which ended up being a half a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Epstein was said to be one of the masterminds behind the scheme, but he ended up getting away unscathed, leaving Tower a few years before it fell apart in 1993.
In 1988 Epstein set up J. Epstein & Company (which would later be renamed Financial Trust Company), a financial management firm that purportedly only served billionaires. It was during this time he became the financial advisor to billionaire Leslie Wexner, who was the CEO of L Brands and Victoria's Secret. Starting in the mid-1990s, he moved his company to the U.S. Virgin Islands to avoid paying taxes.
In the early 2000s, Epstein expanded his portfolio to include financing media companies, developing securities funding and investing in hedge funds and startups. He also created his own nonprofit, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, to donate millions to institutions like Harvard University. To this day, no one has uncovered the various sources of his exceptional wealth.

Famous Friends

With his net worth being touted in the billions (Forbes disputes this), Epstein lived a jet setter's life and mingled with the world's elite, which included President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Kevin Spacey, Alan Dershowitz, President Donald Trump and Prince Andrew — the last of whom has been mired in controversy ever since a young woman (who was procured by Epstein) told the media she was forced to have sexual relations multiple times with the prince when she was a teenager, starting in 1999.
Epstein had reportedly provided underage girls and young women to his powerful friends and installed vast surveillance systems throughout his properties in New York, Palm Beach, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to record their sexual activities as a means of blackmail.

Island

With his business operations set up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Epstein bought an adjacent 72-acre island called Little St. James for just shy of $8 million in 1998. It is alleged that this is where he operated his sex trafficking activities and where most of his pedophilic acts occurred. Some of the youngest girls who were trafficked onto the island were said to be 12 years old.

Baby Ranch

A believer in eugenics and transhumanism, Epstein bought a ranch near Stanley, New Mexico, where he intended to "seed the human race with his DNA" by inseminating at least 20 women, so reported an August 2019 article in the New York Times.