‘He used people’: Jeffrey Epstein scandal rolls on as new names emerge

Like a Hollywood zombie, the scandal surrounding the late sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is resurfacing to infect the reputations of the living, as names once again emerge from legal documents amid fresh details of his daily itinerary of meetings with prominent government, financial and cultural figures.

The latest boldface names to emerge from a series of Wall Street Journal reports include the director of CIA, Williams Burns, and Kathryn Ruemmler, White House counsel under Barack Obama, alongside lesser figures including the leftwing professor and activist Noam Chomsky, billionaire venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and Lawrence Summers, former Harvard president and director of the National Economic Council under Obama.

And then there were the figures from arts and letters. Woody Allen was scheduled to visit the studio of Jeff Koons with Epstein. Another was Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist of human behavior. She was invited to speak to his staff.

The names shed light on what Epstein - who killed himself in a New York jail cell in 2019 - was trying to achieve when he returned to New York after home detention in Florida in the wake of his sex crime conviction. Far from laying low, Epstein resumed his movements in global high society with a dizzying schedule of meetings, dinners, more meetings and gatherings, often at his now-infamous townhouse in Manhattan.

But Epstein was careful to keep the concentric circles that made up his professional and personal lives separated. "He wanted to be accepted in society and he wanted his reputation cleansed," says one person familiar with the post-Florida conviction period. "He wanted to continue to do business and continue to have this underground network of girls.

"He was not a changed man, he paid off everybody for the sentence he got. He thought he'd outsmarted everybody. But what he did do was increase his security, with cameras installed and bodyguards, so you couldn't get in or out without security. But you need to understand that in his mind he thought he'd done nothing wrong and he was entitled to behave anyway he wanted to if he had the money to pull it off."

The girls, the source says, were just to provide added value. "If you invested money with him, he'd get you laid. They were young pretty girls with no contacts, who they had no ability to meet. It was like a dating service and the girls were like the candy on a stick."