Nellie Bowles, wife of new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, appeared numerous times in the DOJ’s latest file release related to disgracer financer Jeffrey Epstein.
Based on 17 entries from the Department of Justice’s release of more than 3 million documents on Friday, Bowles appeared to have a meeting scheduled with Epstein for 11:00 am on Sept. 5, 2018, at his New York City home. The meeting was scheduled through Lesley Groff, who worked as an assistant to Epstein for over two decades.
In emails exchanged directly between Bowles and Epstein, the disgraced financier asked how a meeting between Bowles parents and Bowles’ partner went. Bowles began dating Weiss in 2018.
The scheduled September meeting came a decade after Epstein first went to jail in Florida for his sex crimes, and one year before he was indicted in federal court on sex trafficking charges.
It appears Masha Drokova, a Russian public relations specialist who worked for Epstein around this time, had originally pitched the meeting with Bowles to Epstein. The emails are dated in August 2018, about a week before Bowles and Epstein’s Sept. 5 meeting.
“I have a new friend who’s fun and smart. She’s New=York Times reporter,” Drokova, wrote, linking Bowles’ author profile at the Times. “She’s visiting NYC from SF. Let me know if you’d like to meet her. No agenda. Just for =un. I like her a lot.”
“happy to but not there till until evening o= 3rd . can skype anytime with anyone you choose or meet :)” Epstein responded.
Email correspondence also shows Bowles confirming her meeting with Epstein.
“Hello Nellie. Jeffrey will be in NY tomorrow and Wed….might you be around and available to come meet him? Masha believes,” a redacted name, whose title on the email said “Assistant to Jeffrey Epstein” wrote Bowles.
“Wednesday at 11 am is perfect! I’ll be there then!” Bowles responded.
The redacted name confirmed that Bowles would be there on the morning of the meeting.
“Good morning Nellie. Reconfirming you will come see Jeffrey today at 11am. Thanks!” they wrote.
Bowles responded: “Confirmed!”
Bowles’s emails, a junior reporter at the New York Times at the time, featured her position at the Times in her signature. She covered tech and internet culture at the outlet for about four years.
Groff confirmed that Bowles was there on the day of the meeting, writing to Epstein, “Nellie Bowles is here!”
One month after the scheduled meeting, an email exchange shows direct correspondence between Bowles and Epstein, in which Epstein asks her about how introducing her partner, Weiss, went. Weiss and Bowles reportedly met in 2017 when they both worked at the New York Times.
“how did it go introducting your partner to mom? even better than the good career move? :)” Epstein wrote.
“Ahahahaha I missed this and just figured out who you are. It actually went great!” Bowles responded ten days later.
“When ste [sic] you and your babe back in nyc,” Epstein said back.
The same day, Epstein wrote her in what appears to be correspondence about sex offender Bill Cosby. Cosby had been sentenced for his own sex crimes one month before this correspondence.
Bowles did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
On X, Bowles replied to a post sharing photos of the correspondence between Bowles and Epstein. Bowles wrote, “So secret that I wrote about the meeting and used the reporting from it …. twice … for the NYT” and linked two articles, one of which she wrote and one which states she “contributed reporting.
She wrote about it once, in Sep. 2019, in a first-person interview with Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, a defender of taking cash from Epstein, saying, “I was interested in reporting out a story connected to him…” Such a story does not appear to have been published.
She was also credited with having “contributed reporting” to a New York Times story describing the pedophile’s house after his arrest, which did not mention that she had interacted with Epstein.
Bowles and Weiss co-founded the news and opinion blog, The Free Press, in 2021. Last year, CBS News acquired the blog for $150 million and installed Weiss, who had no prior experience in TV news, as editor-in-chief.
Prior to these emails being released, Bowles wrote on the Free Press that the Epstein files are an “everyone thing.”
“I do think it’s funny that Dems are trying to make the Epstein files a Trump thing when the Epstein files are an everyone thing,” she wrote last November.
“And if we had to pick, this little piggy honestly seemed mostly to circulate in elite lib spaces (seemingly every professor at MIT and Harvard; heck, even I met him once right before the end, when he wanted an NYT profile),” she added.
Other journalists have appeared in the files, mostly named because of emails from Epstein’s inbox.
They include Michael Wolff, the co-host of the Daily Beast’s hit podcast, Inside Trump’s Head. Epstein asked him to write his biography, and after Epstein’s death, Wolff wrote a chapter about the sex offender in his 2021 book, Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned, then published recordings of their conversations about Donald Trump just before the 2024 election.
The New York Times journalist James Stewart wrote about meeting with Epstein two days after his death, revealing that he had contacted him to report on allegations he was advising Elon Musk on how to take Tesla private, which both vehemently denied; Musk, however, appears in the files begging to “let loose” at parties on Epstein’s island.
Also mentioned in the files is an infamous dinner party Epstein hosted for the then-Prince Andrew in 2010, after his conviction, which was attended by the journalists Katie Couric, at the time the CBS Evening News anchor; George Stephanopoulos, the Good Morning America anchor; and Charlie Rose, who is now disgraced but at the time was a CBS 60 Minutes contributor and PBS interviewer.
Only Couric has addressed it, claiming she did not know much about the convicted pedophile, and writing in her memoir, “I should have done a little more research… But a lot of the stuff about him hadn’t come out yet.”
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