Jeffrey Epstein used his extravagant Manhattan mansion to dazzle the rich and powerful. But when journalist Michael Wolff was invited inside, he says Epstein made an offhand remark about his den that now reads like a quiet confession.
Wolff tells Joanna Coles in a new episode of The Daily Beast Podcast that he first met Epstein around 2000 and was soon invited over to his Upper East Side townhouse. Wolff says he was immediately struck by the $51 million property’s palatial appearance.
“It’s hard to describe the effect that it has on you,” he says. “It reminds you of the kind of baronial rich man’s house that you might see in a movie about a rich man in New York. And I said something—I mean you have to say something—I said, ‘Wow! This is an incredible place.’”
That’s when Epstein made a comment that now seems to foreshadow the unraveling of his carefully constructed persona.
“He took his knuckle, rapped on the wall, and he said, ‘Fake! It’s all fake,” Wolff recalls.
“Through hindsight, what a prophetic comment,” Coles adds.
In another anecdote that carries new weight knowing Epstein’s later conviction as a child sex offender, Wolff recalls the financier passing by a kids’ art exhibition, buying a painting, and having it expensively framed: “He proudly displayed this and then would point it out to people, ‘You like this? Twenty-five dollars it cost me, an 11-year-old.’”
Wolff says there was something “hugely suspicious” about “every aspect” of Epstein’s life, even though “there are many people who are suspicious in New York.”
“The difference with Epstein is that he was a show-off about this. He did exactly the kinds of things that were going to call attention to issues which ultimately brought him down,” he says.
Epstein, raised in lower-middle-class Brooklyn, struck Wolff as “very much in Gatsby mode.”
A stuffed tiger and a who’s who of framed photo-ops—Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Pope John Paul II—adorned his home, as seen in new pictures uncovered by The New York Times. A corpse-like sculpture of a bride dangled from the ceiling of the central atrium.
The tiger was apparently not the only exotic trophy in Epstein’s collection. According to Wolff, the living room of Epstein’s Paris flat contained a stuffed baby elephant.
“Epstein’s decor was… let’s take a whole house and just fill it with—what we used to call in New Jersey, conversation pieces,” Wolff says.
Epstein boasted that his Manhattan home—handed down to him in 1995 by billionaire Les Wexner—spanned 55,000 square feet, Wolff said. Reports put it at half that size.
The mansion was also allegedly the site of some of his sexual abuse.
Starting in the mid-2000s, multiple underage girls accused Epstein of recruiting them for sexual massages at his Palm Beach, Florida estate.
But in a controversial 2008 non-prosecution deal, Epstein pleaded guilty to two state-level prostitution charges, one involving a minor, and served just 13 months in county jail, avoiding federal charges.
After getting out of jail, Wolff says, Epstein managed to reenter elite circles, maintaining ties with high-profile figures like Prince Andrew.
When the scope of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation came under renewed scrutiny, he was arrested on federal charges in 2019. He died in jail while awaiting trial. His death was ruled a suicide.
