Who was Jeffrey Epstein? A math teacher, investment banker, financial fraudster, sexual deviant, Israeli agent? The most common answer among ordinary Americans lately is the last option, although there are only a few clues to support it.
But how did he, without a college degree or any particular charisma, become the center of social life for the political and financial elites and high society in the United States, Britain, and even France? Questions like these are fertile ground for various conspiracy theories, the diversity of which ends with the range of alleged "culprits."
Mathematical brothers
Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Seymour, originally worked in the family business demolishing houses, later joining the city's Parks and Recreation Department as a gardener. His mother, Pauline, née Stolofsky, was a housewife and also worked as an assistant in the New York public school system.
As he later claimed, he and his brother grew up on the Coney Island peninsula in southwest Brooklyn. That would make sense, although he liked to omit the fact that it was specifically a closed community known as Sea Gate—a prominent Jewish community whose existence dates back to the beginning of the last century.
The entire Brooklyn area is historically known as the home of several Jewish communities, the most famous being Brownsville and Crown Heights, which were predominantly Jewish until the late 1960s. Epstein himself never made a secret of his origins and probably exploited them to some extent.
Brownsville is also infamous as the birthplace of the Murder, Inc. mafia syndicate, which organized the murders of nearly a thousand people between 1929 and 1941 on behalf of the Jewish and Italian mafia. One of its leaders was prominent labor unionist Louis "Lepke" Buchalter.
In 1916, the first abortion clinic in the US was opened in the same neighborhood. This was thanks to Margaret Sanger, founder of the abortion organization Planned Parenthood.
The Epstein brothers, Jeffrey and Mark (1954), showed exceptional talent for mathematics at a young age, with the older brother also playing the piano. Although the younger brother also has a background in the arts, both ended up in finance and investing.
Jeffrey Epstein graduated from Lafayette High School in 1969, which was an exceptional achievement, as he was only 16 at the time. As a teenager, he was accepted to the prestigious Cooper Union science college, but left after three years without a degree.
From there, he went to New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and although he showed exceptional talent, he left that school in 1974 without a degree. However, he was subsequently accepted without reservation as a mathematics and physics teacher at the Dalton School, a prominent institution attended by the children of wealthy New Yorkers.
Reaching the social stratosphere
Two years later, the father of the children he taught approached Epstein and offered him a job at his investment firm. The man's name was Alan Greensberg, and his company, Bear Stearns, was a prominent investment bank selling securities backed by multiple assets.
However, the bank was punished for trading in risky loans, which led to its collapse during the widespread financial crisis in 2008. This was after Epstein's first trial, and he had not worked at Bear Stearns since the early 1980s, when he was fired for violating federal securities trading regulations.
Between 1992 and 2007, he worked for the prominent Wexner Foundation, whose founder, Leslie Wexner, is one of the most prominent American Zionists. The foundation bearing his name "focuses on developing Jewish professional and volunteer leaders in North America and public leaders in Israel." .
In 1982, he bought the textile company Victoria's Secret, whose lingerie was worn by models in the Miss USA beauty pageant – thus connecting the lives of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, who had owned the pageant format since 1996. Wexner's world-famous company also acted as a sponsor of the pageant.
After leaving Bear Stearns in 1981, Epstein founded his own investment company called Intercontinental Assets Group (IAG), which was based in Wexner's apartment. Epstein bought this apartment in the prominent Upper East Side neighborhood from the philanthropist in the 1990s, after embezzling millions of dollars from the foundation.
At the Wexner Foundation, Epstein "showed no interest in philanthropy or the workings of the foundation," according to an internal report from his time there. Instead, he embezzled millions of dollars in financial donations, which he often invested in personal ventures – whether in the search for longevity (as evidenced by emails from the latest batch released) or in Israel's security.
At least $2.3 million went into the pocket of the then Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army and later Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The pair later founded a joint technology startup called Reporty Homeland Security, which was renamed Carbyne in 2018 and develops surveillance technology for the Unit 8200 intelligence unit.
In the late 1980s, Epstein allegedly got together with Ghislaine Maxwell, a well-known British socialite. Only a few scant details are known about her, and apart from founding a non-profit organization for ocean conservation, she has no known professional activities.
Maxwell, whose name refers to her birth in France, moved to the US in 1991 after the death of her father, the notorious double agent Robert Maxwell. He was allegedly born Jan Ludvík Hoch in Subcarpathian Rus in what was then Czechoslovakia and served in the British secret service MI5 during the war, for which he received a title.
After the war, he bought publishing houses such as Pergamon Press and Macmillan, which still publish textbooks today. However, he allegedly worked as a triple agent for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the Soviet KGB at the time. An indication of his service to Tel Aviv is his final resting place—the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where he was buried with state honors.
His youngest daughter, Ghislaine, probably inherited his connections and social influence, which earned her the label "socialite." This is an English term for a member of high society who often attends parties for the wealthy.
Both Maxwell and Epstein claimed that they met in 1991, when the daughter of the recently deceased spy and publisher moved to New York. After some time, however, former Israeli secret agent Ari Ben Menashe came out of his "quiet life on the sidelines" and claimed that it had happened ten years earlier.
What is provable is the 46 million dollars embezzled from the Wexner Foundation – which he returned in transfers to Wexner's wife Abigail.
However, he probably earned more, which was reflected in the purchase of an exceptionally large property in 1998 – the island of Little Saint James in the Virgin Islands archipelago of the United States. In addition to this island, Epstein owned an apartment in Manhattan, and both properties had advanced camera systems with memory installed. He had the same system in his beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, where his downfall began in 2005.
The year Epstein stopped being a "financier"
In March of that year, the mother of a 14-year-old Florida girl who allegedly massaged a wealthy man naked contacted the Palm Beach police, where Donald Trump also owned at least one house. According to the teenager's statement, she was taken there by an adult woman and her classmate, who was not there for the first time.
The following month, an investigation was launched, which included searching through trash from Epstein's house on El Brillo Street. In it, police found a small scrap of paper with the witness's name and the time she was there, according to her statement.
They also found other scraps of paper with the names of other girls in the trash, all of whom were between the ages of 14 and 16 at the time of the investigation. In October 2005, an unusual incident occurred when Epstein's assistant called to request the services of a girl during a police interrogation.
On October 20, police officers arrived at Epstein's house with a search warrant and questioned his assistants and domestic servants (butlers). In May 2006, the financier was charged with multiple counts of statutory rape.
Epstein's assistant, Haley Robson, was also charged with aiding and abetting illegal prostitution, but after two years of legal proceedings, the investor scored a minor victory when he entered into a plea bargain before a grand jury, serving only two years in prison.
The lawsuit was led by state prosecutor Alexander Acosta, who signed the controversial agreement. Although he originally sought a much harsher sentence for Epstein, he commented on the conclusion of the case as follows: "I was told that he was 'one of the insiders' and that I should leave it alone." He said these words to Donald Trump's team, who chose him as their nominee for Secretary of Labor.
"The United States also agrees not to prosecute any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including, but not limited to, Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadi Marcinková," the text of the agreement stated.
"The four women named allegedly helped recruit underage girls at Epstein's behest. However, the four-word phrase 'but not limited to' gave free rein to anyone who helped Epstein obtain or trade underage girls for sex," explained the opinion portal Mother Jones.
Another consequence of the agreement was that the victims were not to be informed of the findings of the investigation and all files were to be sealed, except in cases involving national security.
This recently backfired on current Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, at the urging of House Speaker Mike Johnson, requested the declassification of the Florida grand jury files. Federal Judge Robin Rosenberg denied the request, stating that it "does not meet any of the anticipated exceptions."
Epstein's victims have been fighting a legal battle since 2008—when he entered into custody, from which he had regular 12-hour outings each day and at the end of which he was registered on the sex offender list for a year—to declassify the plea agreement. However, in 2015, a new series of allegations began when Virginia Giuffre sued both Epstein and Maxwell.
According to her testimony, Virginia Roberts, née Virginia Roberts, became a victim of a sexually abusive circle of prominent figures who exploited her as a teenage prostitute. She claims that Maxwell taught her all the sexual "techniques." "The training started immediately," Giuffre described in an interview with the Miami Herald.
"It was everything from how to [orally] satisfy, how to be quiet, how to be submissive, how to give Jeffrey what he wanted," she continued. She pointed to at least two of Epstein's "clients" — Britain's Prince Andrew of York (who was recently stripped of his title and family name) and former President Bill Clinton (who was found in flight records to have visited Epstein's island at least 26 times).
Since 2015, at least four other victims have anonymously joined Giuffre, all of whom have identified Maxwell as Epstein's closest associate – which is why the British-French citizen has been indicted and convicted in at least five cases and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.
On August 1, 2025, the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons transferred Maxwell from a Florida prison in the capital Tallahassee to a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas. This was an indirect response to her April statement that she wanted to testify before Congress about Epstein's life.
Suspicious suicide
Jeffrey Epstein was awaiting another trial in 2019 at the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been sent to pretrial detention. Maxwell was named as an accomplice in the aforementioned cases, with Epstein allegedly being the head of an organization trafficking young girls.
It was the final phase of Trump's first term in office, and although the two men shared a history of admiring beautiful women and buying real estate, in 2005 they competed for the prominent Florida hacienda La Maison de L'Amitie. Trump bought it the following year at an exorbitant price and sold it two years later for even more to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev – it cost him $95 million. Rybolovlev is a peculiar person with high immunity, as he is not subject to EU, Monaco or US sanctions.
Trump wanted to distance himself from this shared history by any means necessary, even though he allegedly expelled Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago resort only in 2007. Five years earlier, he claimed that "Jeff," whom he had allegedly known for 15 years at the time, was "a wonderful guy."
"He's a lot of fun. It's even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are 'on the younger side'. There's no doubt that Jeffrey enjoys social life," he said at a party.
However, in the 2016 election, he ran as someone who would take aim at the "Washington swamp," the community of people who hold power in the US capital regardless of election results—unelected bureaucrats and career diplomats.
So when news spread on August 10, 2019, that Epstein had been found hanged in a cell under special supervision—which, paradoxically, was supposed to prevent his suicide—it shocked not only Trump but the whole of America. The coroner immediately ruled the death a suicide, which was supported by the New York Police Department with evidence such as a will he had written just two days earlier.
Almost immediately, however, theories spread that the infamous financier had been the victim of a murder coordinated from some "high places." Various theories propose different scenarios: either he was murdered by one of his seven fellow inmates or even by one of the guards.
However, it is not so easy to dismiss these theories out of hand as unfounded. The aforementioned brother Mark participated in the settlement of the estate, and immediately after the October hearing, he declared that it was not a suicide.
Mark Epstein also ordered his own examination of the body, which was performed by Dr. Michael Baden. He also suggested that Jeffrey was the victim of murder. However, representatives of the Department of Justice refused to comment on the circumstances of the pedophile's death at the meeting.
Baden's theory is based on his observation of the four-hour autopsy he attended. As a pathologist, he expressed his medical opinion that the injuries to the neck were not consistent with hanging, but rather strangulation.
In an interview with Business Insider in March 2023, Epstein Jr. confirmed his thesis that "it seems to him that it was murder," and although he is the sole survivor, he was unable to obtain certain medical records, including care reports filled out by paramedics examining his brother's body.
Three months after the interview, the Inspector General's Office released a report stating that there had been several errors, particularly in relation to the cameras outside Epstein's cell. The originally released 2019 footage, which was supposed to prove that no other person was present, came from a camera that did not capture his cell.
In 2024 and 2025, they re-released some of the material, with commentators noting that it was the same batch as in 2019.
Democratic congressmen from the House Oversight Committee released additional documents on November 12 this year, which again turned out to be the same ones – just three emails that were supposed to point to a connection between Trump and Epstein and "smear the president," as White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in response.
In one of the three emails, Epstein wrote that Trump "of course knew about the girls, as he repeatedly asked Ghislaine to stop."
Republicans on the committee did not give up and again released an extensive set of documents, including Epstein's email correspondence with Trump's first adviser Steve Bannon, former British ambassador Lord Peter Mandelson, and former UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajčák.
Supporters of the aforementioned theories about the "preventive liquidation" of Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly ran a blackmail operation against prominent political figures, economic magnates, and celebrities, thus received another gift from Congress—the New Yorker's contacts extended all the way to Slovak politics.
His assets during his lifetime were estimated at $577 million, but this amount decreased significantly after the sale of his private jet, known as the Lolita Express, and Little Saint James Island. However, Mark does not seem to be in need, as he is involved in asset management and real estate development.
It should be noted that after her father's funeral on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem—attended by Mossad officers, then-President Chaim Herzog, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—Maxwell also claimed that he did not commit suicide. His body was found near the Canary Islands, where he was anchored with a yacht named after his youngest daughter, Lady Ghislaine.
In February 1997, she told Hello magazine that her father "did not commit suicide because it was not in his character." "I think he was murdered," she added.
At least three pathologists could not agree on the cause of death, which they ultimately classified as "heart attack and subsequent drowning." Maxwell's colleague and Mirror photographer Ken Lennox was later bombarded with anonymous calls asking if the media mogul had a "hole behind his ear" — which would suggest assassination.
"But he had no marks, except for a scratch on his shoulder," he told the Guardian.
Jeffrey Epstein was not Maxwell's first mysterious suicide.