https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/22e66979d8552f97
How Epstein ensnared the world’s elite: Flatter, connect, reward, repeat
The financier and paedophile ran two networks: powerful men he courted, and women and girls he raped
Memphis BarkerSenior Foreign Correspondent
Memphis Barker is a Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Telegraph and its former Foreign Editor.
07 February 2026
On Oct 11, 2013, Thorbjorn Jagland strode through the mahogany doors of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and stepped up to the podium.
In front of an array of television cameras, the chairman of the committee announced the winner of that year’s peace medal.
There was something “beautiful” in the work of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), he said, hoping it could nudge the war in Syria closer to an end. There was a banquet, then a torchlit procession.
Then, after a few days’ rest, on Oct 14, the former Norwegian prime minister emailed Jeffrey Epstein to ask whether he could visit Little St James, the palm-fringed island in the Caribbean where the financier sexually abused underage girls for more than 20 years.
“I can arrange tickets,” Epstein happily replied. “Xmans [sic] present.”
In total, the Epstein files now number more than six million documents, images and videos. Managed by Donald Trump’s department of justice, the release has largely spared the US president.
But – perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not – it has torn through the globe-trotting Davos elite with the force of an earthquake.
Much has been redacted. Thin, black boxes obscure the names of potential co-conspirators in sex-trafficking operations commanded by Epstein, who died in prison in 2019.
But from the files we can see with unprecedented clarity how the Coney Island-born maths teacher built two separate, if allegedly overlapping, networks: one of young girls, the other of the world’s richest, brightest and most powerful men.
Some time in 2014, Epstein held a cocktail party at his 50,000 sq ft Manhattan townhouse, reputedly the largest in the city.
By then, the host was a convicted sex offender, released on July 22, 2009, from a light 13-month sentence for soliciting a minor, when he emailed Lord Mandelson that freedom felt “fresh, firm and creamy”.
Lord Mandelson is among the big names ensnared in Epstein’s web
Before long, the New York limestone mansion became, once again, the scene of intellectual tête-à-têtes and bewildering conversations over lunch.
Guests willing to brave the paparazzi often included Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and early investors in cryptocurrency. Conversation could whip from Mars to missiles, blockchain technology to the big bang.
“I guess there’s nowhere quite like it,” said Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire newspaper owner, according to an unpublished profile of Epstein by the journalist Michael Wolff, who was invited as a fly-on-the-wall.
Surrounding the guests were hints of Epstein’s predilection. Copies of Nabokov’s Lolita left on the table; in his Paris mansion, a literal (stuffed) elephant in the room.
And ever present, according to Wolff, a coterie of “comely young women” who would attend Epstein on his rare walks in the park “like something out of an 18th-century French court”.
Also present that night was Mr Jagland, the handsome, white-haired diplomat who still led the Nobel Peace Prize panel and had in 2009 been appointed secretary-general of the Council of Europe, the Continent’s top human rights body, which oversees the European Court of Human Rights.
Thorbjorn Jagland is a former prime minister of Norway and chairman of the committee which appoints the Nobel Peace Prize Credit: Ragnar Singsaas/Getty
The father of two gave a “scathing critique” of American foreign policy, Wolff wrote, defended his 2009 decision to award the Nobel prize to Barack Obama, then was offered a flight back to Europe on Epstein’s private jet, the so-called “Lolita Express”.
How Epstein afforded such an outrageous lifestyle remains unclear. In his own telling, he was a financial mastermind.
When banking evolved in the 1980s to depend on complex equations, the super-wealthy turned to him to manage their affairs, he often said.
But according to a lengthy investigation by the New York Times, Epstein was also an inveterate conman and thief who latched on to wealthy clients with his natural charisma and dated their daughters while bleeding them dry.
In 1981, at the age of 28, he quit Bear Stearns instead of serving a suspension for insider trading. He ran up vast expense accounts while working for Douglas Leese, the British defence magnate, who sent him away in disgrace from his countryside manor.
Some of Epstein’s guests are believed to have turned a blind eye to his paedophilia
Several small investors found that their money had disappeared. But he kept the bigger fish on the hook as long as he could.
Between them, Lesley Wexner and Leon Black, the billionaire founders of Victoria’s Secret and the private equity fund Apollo Global Management, are estimated to have paid (or, in the case of the former, allegedly lost by theft) hundreds of millions of dollars.
Over several days trawling through Epstein’s correspondence, The Telegraph found comparatively little discussion of the financial markets.
Instead, there are endless efforts to arrange his two diaries – one for the glitterati, the other for women between the ages of 15 and 17.
For the latter, he would use teenage models to recruit their friends. It was a similar trick with the former: constantly leveraging one acquaintance to gain another, bigger prize.
“I collect people, I own people, I can damage people,” Epstein told one ex-girlfriend, according to a report in Vanity Fair. Another described him as a “sociopath” who could “feel energy very clearly” and “manipulate that for his own ends”.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, was one of Epstein’s contacts Credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg
The collection of Mr Jagland began in the spring of 2012, when he was hunting for work to top up the roughly £180,000 he earned at the Council of Europe and his nominal remuneration from the Nobel panel.
In May, he asked Epstein for advice on a US agent who could help him secure gigs on the lavishly paid speaking circuit. In a flash, Epstein ran through his notorious black book.
By May 25 of that year, according to emails in the Epstein files, a call had been arranged with Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico (where Epstein was the largest landowner) and founder of the Washington Speakers Bureau.
Jeffrey Epstein died in prison in 2019 Credit: Reuters
Mr Jagland’s job demanded constant travel. In a week, he could fly from meetings with Emmanuel Macron in Paris to sit-downs with Vladimir Putin in Sochi.
Over time, he came to rely on access to Epstein’s spectacular properties in the French capital, New York and – allegedly – the Caribbean.
The two men also bonded about women. “I have been in Tirana [Albania] extraordinary girls,” the Norwegian wrote in May 2012. Eight months later, on Jan 9, 2013, he said he was celebrating the 60th birthday of his wife, Hanne, adding: “I can’t keep it going only with young women as you know.”
Within weeks, Epstein was boasting widely of his “great friendship” with the “head of the human rights court in Strasbourg” and “Nobel prize chairman”.
Between 2012 and 2018, he dropped Mr Jagland’s name into invitations to at least a dozen luminaries, including Bill Gates, Todd Pritzker, the billionaire, the president of the Maldives, and Kathy Ruemmler, the former White House chief counsel.
In June, 2015, Epstein asked Noam Chomsky, the philosopher, to dinner with Mr Jagland. Like a salesman in a market, he rattled off a menu of conversation topics: “Drones. Solitary confinement, death penalty (Europe does not have one…) tribalism, mafia, Syria, Ukraine, Saudi, Egypt, Libya.”
The self-styled intellectual polyglot told Mr Chomsky that a mutual exchange of ideas underpinned the relationship: “I give him his financial ABCs class, he gives me my lessons in pragmatic politics.”
But the financial ledger leaned only one way. A few months before the dinner, Mr Jagland asked Epstein for help in raising £800,000 towards the purchase of a flat in Oslo.
“I don’t want to have much debt when I retire. So a joint investment which you talked about would be interesting,” he wrote. (Mr Jagland told Norwegian media he never took any money from Epstein for the flat.)
The diplomat did provide scraps from the political high table. Terse updates litter his correspondence (“I’m fine but the situation in Ukraine is catastrophic”; “Everything is uncertain now because of the refugee/migration crisis in Europe”; “Very difficult situation with the Russians and the Turks”.)
He does not appear to have delivered his benefactor’s grandest ambition: a connection to Vladimir Putin, to whom Epstein wished to pitch insights on Mr Trump and Western financial markets.
All we can see in the emails is a promise to “suggest” the matter to the assistant of Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. (To some, the failed connection undermines the theory that Epstein was a KGB agent who would already have had a direct line to the Kremlin.)
Epstein (right) with Noam Chomsky, the philosopher, to whom he suggested a dinner with Thorbjorn Jagland Credit: AP
Perhaps of more value to Epstein was an offer to look into the case of his friend Karim Wade, the son of Senegal’s president who was jailed in March 2015 for illegally amassing a $238m fortune in offshore bank accounts.
A cable from the American ambassador described the scion as “Mr 15 per cent”, but a UN panel criticised the sentence.
On July 18, 2015, Epstein asked Mr Jagland to look into the case in the European court. “Do you think the fact that Karim Wade has a French passport would enable him to file a suit in your court?” he wrote.
A week later, Mr Jagland wrote back. “All of a sudden I discovered that I haven’t replied. Yes, given the fact that Karim has a French passport, it should be possible... Tell me more.”
No case was ever filed at the court. In 2016, Mr Wade fled to Qatar after he was pardoned in exchange for a $230m (£169m) fine.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, was among Jeffrey Epstein’s famous associates and was pictured in the files released by the US justice department Credit: NYT
That year, Mr Jagland also sought out Epstein for advice on Mr Trump, who was barrelling towards the White House. “If Trump wins in US I’ll settle on your island,” he despaired on June 26. “You can settle even if John Kerry wins,” Epstein quipped.
In a statement to Norwegian media, Mr Jagland denied ever having visited the “much-discussed” island, and said he only stayed in Epstein’s properties with his wife.
But Epstein’s emails contain booking information for tickets, worth $2,800 (£2,056) each, for Mr Jagland and his wife to travel from Frankfurt to Little St Thomas, the island neighbouring Little St James.
It has been rumoured Epstein was a Russian agent but the released files show him failing to arrange a meeting with Vladimir Putin
The long-discussed trip, including Mr Jagland’s children, may not have taken place. But on April 15, 2017, Mr Jagland wrote to his host from an unspecified, sun-soaked destination apparently in the United States.
“Everything is fantastic, really too much. How can we thank you. Right now I’m in the sun listening to Bob Marley. America is great again.”
Epstein had written to his assistant that Mr Jagland would stay “at my house” for a week; customs and border control data from the time place him on Little St James, a US territory.
In spring, the temperature on the island hovers at a balmy 30C. Grass covers the hills above sandy beaches lapped by crystal-clear sea.
Little St James, Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, was the scene of many of his crimes against womenCredit: Marco Bello/Reuters
Guests could take trips on Epstein’s boats, or in the case of Stephen Hawking, a rented submarine (in 2017, Epstein wrote to a friend that “when Hawking told me it was his dream to go diving, I duct taped his head to a high chair and loaded him into a private sub”.)
But for Epstein’s other network, the 75-acre oasis nicknamed “paedophile island” was a place of nightmare.
In June 2017, Epstein organised a trip for “two girls” via his assistant Lesley Groff. Testimony gathered by the US Virgin Islands, with which the Epstein estate settled a litany of abuse claims for $105m, provides some insight into life for the teenage girls who were housed in apartments on Little St James.
“I was put on a low-calorie diet and starved because Epstein insisted that I reach an unachievable weight,” one said.
“My passport was taken away and the sexual abuse began... Epstein raped me daily and sometimes up to three times a day.” At one point, she tried to escape the island by swimming.
Epstein entertained guests on his private island of Little St James
If Epstein enjoyed intellectual, bawdy banter with his elite network, his tone often turned threatening to women. “You owe me two girls,” he wrote to one model contact.
Possible candidates were scornfully cast aside: too fat, too ugly, too old. A Russian recruiter, Kira Dikhtyar, promises “30 girls” in one email; in another, she claims to have a “FANTASTIC” girl from Minsk, but adds that the “problem” is “she is 18 on Sep 29.”
With his profound appetite for paedophilic sex, Epstein referred to girls in terms of food. They were like “shrimp”, he wrote to Olivier Colomb, an ex-adviser to Nicholas Sarkozy, the former French president: “You throw away the head and keep the body.”
Like a spider, Epstein seems to have constructed a web. On the fringes were men such as Mr Jagland, Deepak Chopra, the new age guru, and Bill Gates, who, at least, overlooked his paedophilia.
Tangled up, they might attract further prey. But on the inner rings were those with darker, more expensive ties.
Sometime in 2015, Epstein drafted a garbled letter to Mr Wexner, his former benefactor-in-chief.
Epstein had been sacked by the family after the lingerie tycoon’s wife, Abigail, found him to have “misappropriated” large sums of money in a 2007 investigation spurred by his arrest.
While promising silence, the unsent letter reminds Mr Wexner that he owed a “great debt” to his erstwhile tax adviser. “You and I had ‘gang stuff’ for over 15 years.”
At roughly the same time as he wrote the ominous letter, Epstein sent a furious email to Mr Black demanding payment of the “usual 40 million per year”.
Several women have accused Mr Black of rape – allegations he firmly denies.
In 2023, the former hedge fund executive paid $65m to avoid litigation arising from the US Virgin Islands investigation into Epstein.
One woman, whose lawsuit is still going through court, claims he bit her agonisingly on the clitoris in a violent sexual assault.
This “specific sexual act” matches other claims she could not have known about, a lawyer wrote to the New York district attorney’s office last year.
Both Mr Black and Mr Wexner have denied any knowledge of or participation in Epstein’s crimes in comments through their lawyers.
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, was among those pictured in the Epstein files released by the US department of justice Credit: Reuters
This weekend, the dominoes have started to fall in Epstein’s circle.
On Thursday, Norway launched an investigation into Mr Jagland for “aggravated corruption”, which will examine any gifts, loans or travel he received in the period covered by the emails.
Earlier this week, the statesman said he had only met Epstein as part of “normal diplomatic activity”. His lawyers said he never had any “dealings with young girls”.
Also implicated in the scandal, if not worse, are Lord Mandelson, Caroline Lang, the actress and political scion who leaked information on France’s Macron government to Epstein, and a host of other dignitaries.
In the eyes of Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Mr Obama, the Epstein files have rung the death knell for the style of “21st-century” do-gooding practised at climate summits, UN general assemblies and Davos.
One day, the elite talked of ending violence against women and girls, he wrote on Substack. The next they “caught a ride on Epstein’s private jet or visited his private island”.
What remains in question is how many more dominoes will fall, and how close they will land to the centre of Epstein’s malevolent, barely hidden world.