What We’ve Learned From Recent Allegations Surrounding Jeffrey Epstein

In May, a slow trickle of reporting and new allegations have kept the Epstein saga alive, if no longer on the front page. At the beginning of the month, the Boston Globe reported that the convicted sex offender’s relationship with Harvard University was much more extensive than previously understood: Epstein had his own office at the school’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and had visited over 40 times between 2010 — when he was first released from custody — and 2018. According to the Globe, he was often accompanied on his visits by “young women who acted as his assistants.” (The practice sounded quite similar to his frequent check-ins at the M.I.T. Media Lab down the road in Cambridge, where an alumni coordinator recalled asking the assistants “on the off chance” if they weren’t there by choice.)

Toward the end of the month, two projects cast a wider net on the financier’s alleged sex trafficking ring: A Netflix special, Filthy Rich, and a book by reporters Alana Goodman and Daniel Harper, A Convenient Death. Below are the new allegations from the two works.

The power of the documentary comes from the experience of watching Epstein’s victims tell the story of their abuse without any obtrusion. But one of the most pressing interviews in Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich involves Steve Scully, the former IT contractor on Epstein’s private island, Little St. James. While Scully has detailed aspects of the island before, he made a new claim in the Netflix documentary, alleging that President Bill Clinton visited Little St. James at some point during Scully’s employment there from 1999 to 2005. “I saw Bill Clinton sitting with Jeffrey on the living room porch area, which was Jeffrey’s favorite spot,” Scully said. “I saw no other guests there at that time at all. I just thought, ‘Hey, wow, Jeffrey’s sitting with Bill Clinton.’”

In court documents, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre also recalled seeing the former president on the convicted sex offender’s island: “I remember having a dinner with Clinton. He was there, and I never saw him do anything improper … I wish, you know, he would just come clean about, like, ‘Yeah, I was there. So what? Who cares? I didn’t see anything going on.’” (According to a lawsuit filed in January by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands against Epstein’s estate, the financier had allegedly trafficked children as young as 11 to the island.)

A Clinton spokesperson denied such an appearance: “This was a lie the first time it was told, and it isn’t true today, no matter how many times it’s repeated,” said Angel Ureña. The two, however, were known to be friends prior to Epstein’s initial arrest in 2005, and Clinton flew on the financier’s private plane a total of 26 times, according to its flight logs.

Joseph Berlinger, the executive producer on Filthy Rich, told the Guardian that the project began in 2016 — prior to the Miami Herald’s pivotal reporting and the arrest of the financier in July — shortly after he read a copy of a book by the same name written by James Patterson, Epstein’s neighbor in Palm Beach. In another example of the close connections among the elite circles Epstein traveled in — and a potential conflict of interest for a documentary in which Patterson has an executive producer credit — Patterson is now writing his second political novel with Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton allegedly had an affair with Ghislaine Maxwell

In A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein, authors Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper report that the former president had an affair with Epstein’s alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell. “[Clinton] and Ghislaine were getting it on,” a source who witnessed the relationship told the authors. “That’s why he was around Epstein — to be with her.” A spokesperson for Clinton denied the allegation: “It’s a total lie today, it’s a total lie tomorrow, and it’ll be a total lie years from now,” said Angel Ureña. Allegations of presidential impropriety aren’t new for Halper: An editor at the Drudge Report, he has written critically about the Clintons in his first book, Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, in which he spoke with a source who alleged the former president was still cheating on his wife as of 2014.