In a recent Wall Street Journal article it was revealed that a number of high-profile figures had contact, were associates, or met with convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein, years after his crimes were outed. Young female companions are mentioned present a number of these occasions, always being in Epstein’s entourage or in his service as house staff or employees. The schedule makes note in some cases to limit exposure of contacts of Epstein to them or how many they see. The meetings dated are all years after Epstein was publicly accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14-years-old in Florida in 2006, pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution, and avoiding federal charges with only a 13 month work-release program. While at the time number of his associates cut ties, many did not. Epstein’s crimes would continue and so would uncovered cases of his victims being brought to light in the years coming before his his mysterious death while in law enforcement holding while under trial for more sex crimes. Notably these people below did not appear in Epstein’s infamous “black book” of contacts or in the public flight jets of his passengers on his “Lolita” jet. Multiple meetings took placed with all of them after he had served jail time, the documents include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, previously unreported.
Information was uncovered from a trove of documents, including Epstein’s private calendar. Such people include Williams Burns, current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who scheduled and attended three meetings in 2014 with Epstein when Burns was secretary of state in Washington and at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan. Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House counsel under President Obama, met with Epstein dozens of times after her time at the White House, before she became a high-ranking lawyer at Goldman Sachs, with more trips found planned for Paris and Epstein’s island in the Caribbean in 2015 and 2017. President of Bard College, Leon Botstein, welcomed Epstein to his campus, who brought reportedly young female guests. Linguistics professor, author, and activist Noam Chomsky also had scheduled to fly with Epstein to the Manhattan townhouse in 2015 for dinner. Chomsky also reportedly flew with Epstein, Woody Allen, and his wife, Soon Yi Previn, in 2015. Ariane de Rothschild, CEO of Swiss private bank Rothschild Group, met with Epstein over a dozen times. Former board member of Starbucks and FedEx, Joshua Cooper Camo, then co-CEO of Henry Kissinger’s corpo consultant firm met with Epstein more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2017. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was a regular guest at Epstein’s townhouse as well reports WSJ.
(AP) This also comes as it has been announced that JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon must undergo up to two days of questioning by lawyers handling lawsuits over whether the bank can be held liable in financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls and women, a federal judge said on April 18th. The New York bank, the nation’s largest, has been sued by the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands and two women, both identified as Jane Doe, who say they were abused by Epstein. The lawsuits contend JPMorgan should have seen evidence of Epstein’s sex trafficking and avoided profiting from it. The bank, besides denying the allegations, has sued one of its former executives, saying the man hid Epstein’s decades of sex abuse and trafficking to keep Epstein as a client reports.
The nature of these meetings, with such a wide range of individuals, varied greatly according to the documents and from testimonials given by the individuals Epstein met with. The townhouse mentioned as a meeting spot for many, “is where Epstein sexually abused female victims for years, many underage, and that he paid some of them to recruit their friends to engage in sexual activity, [prosecutors alleged in 2019].” Some for business, others to thank or ask for philanthropic donations, a number were apparently networking meetings with Epstein being the matchmaker, sometimes apparently just to facilitate geopolitical conversations. Epstein reportedly asked for advice and help for some, offering positions to others. For instance:
“Ms. Ruemmler first met Epstein after he called her to ask if she would be interested in representing Mr. Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Goldman Sachs spokesman said… A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said Epstein never worked for Mr. Gates, misrepresented their relationship, and that Mr. Gates regrets ever meeting with him. Epstein and his staff discussed whether Ms. Ruemmler, now 52, would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women who worked as assistants and staffers at the townhouse, the documents show. Women emailed Epstein on two occasions to ask if they should avoid the home while Ms. Ruemmler was there. Epstein told one of the women he didn’t want her around, and another that it wasn’t a problem, the documents show. Ms. Ruemmler didn’t see anything that would lead her to be concerned at the townhouse and didn’t express any concern, the Goldman spokesman said. “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein,” Ruemmler told the paper.”
“[Epstein] sought [Ariane Rothschild] help with staffing and furnishings as well as discussed business deals with her, according to the documents… In September 2013, Epstein asked Mrs. de Rothschild in an email for help finding a new assistant, “female…multilingual, organized.” “I’ll ask around,” Mrs. de Rothschild emailed back. She bought nearly $1 million worth of auction items on Epstein’s behalf in 2014 and 2015, the documents show. Mrs. de Rothschild was named chairwoman of the bank in January 2015. That October, she and Epstein negotiated a $25 million contract for Epstein’s Southern Trust Co. to provide “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms” for the bank, according to a proposal reviewed by the Journal. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, the bank said that Mrs. de Rothschild never met with Epstein and it had no business links with him.”
“Mr. Barak said he often met with Epstein on trips to New York and was introduced to people such as Mr. Ramo and Mr. Chomsky to discuss geopolitics or other topics. “He often brought other interesting persons, from art or culture, law or science, finance, diplomacy or philanthropy,” Mr. Barak said.”
“In March 2015, Epstein scheduled a gathering with Mr. Chomsky and Harvard University professor Martin Nowak and other academics, according to the documents. Mr. Chomsky said they had several meetings at Mr. Nowak’s research institute to discuss neuroscience and other topics… Epstein donated at least $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, and more than $9.1 million to Harvard from 1998 to 2008, the schools have said. In 2021, Harvard said it was sanctioning Mr. Nowak for violating university policies in his dealings with Epstein, and was shutting a research center he ran that Epstein had funded. MIT said it was inappropriate to accept Epstein’s gifts, and that it later donated $850,000 to nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse. In a 2020 interview with the “dunc tank” podcast, Mr. Chomsky said that people he considered worse than Epstein had donated to MIT. He didn’t mention any of his meetings with Epstein. Mr. Chomsky told the Journal that at the time of his meetings “what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
“Mr. Botstein, 76, president of Bard College since 1975, had about two dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein over about four years, which were mostly visits to the townhouse. “I was an unsuccessful fundraiser and actually the object of a little bit of sadism on his part in dangling philanthropic support,” said Mr. Botstein. “That was my relationship with him.” Mr. Botstein said he first visited Epstein’s townhouse in 2012 to thank him for unsolicited donations to Bard’s high schools, then he returned over several years in an attempt to get more donations. In 2015, Epstein donated 66 laptops, the documents show. “We looked him up, and he was a convicted felon for a sex crime,” he said. Bard has a large program providing education to prisoners, he said. “We believe in rehabilitation.” Mr. Botstein, also the longtime music director for the American Symphony Orchestra, invited Epstein to an opera at Bard in 2013, then a concert at the college in 2016, the documents indicate. Epstein planned each time to bring some of his young female assistants and arrive by helicopter. Mr. Botstein said he was expecting Epstein to support classical music causes and that the school took precautions when he visited. “Because of his previous record, we had security ready,” he said. “He did not have any free access to anybody.” At Epstein’s home, Mr. Botstein was led to a dining room where they discussed classical music and other causes, he said. “He presented himself as a billionaire, a really, really rich person,” he said. “I found him odd and arrogant. And what I finally came to believe, which is why we stopped contact with him, is that he was simply stringing us along.” Despite all his meetings, Mr. Botstein said, Epstein never made another donation to Bard. “It was a blessing in disguise,” he said, “that we never got any [more] money.”
