Tina Brown, the co-founder of the Daily Beast, returns with a must-read account of what she learned about Jeffrey Epstein’s reaction to the Beast’s pioneering reporting in 2010 and 2011 about his crimes, and the chilling reaction of his associates. The riveting insight was first published on Fresh Hell, Brown’s must-read Substack.
I was just taking off on a plane after attending the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival when a friend messaged me, “You are all over the new Epstein dump. Seems you were being spied on by a woman called Peggy Siegal.” A moment of panic, seconds before losing my internet connection. Is it possible I could have forgotten a louche night in a bubble bath on Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little St. James, with the person formerly known as Prince Andrew, and now was about to face career ruination?
The Peggy Siegal reference was intriguing. As I reported in my 2022 book The Palace Papers, the haute couture PR warhorse Siegal had memorably phoned me in 2010, when I was editor of the Daily Beast, to ask me to a dinner for Andrew hosted by, yes, Jeffrey Epstein, at which the other guests included Charlie Rose and Woody Allen. “What the f— is this, Peggy?” I had screamed. “The pedophile’s ball?” She backed off with high-pitched gibbering about “all that Epstein stuff being so overblown.” This incensed me even more, given that I had proudly published multiple searing reports on Epstein’s predations by Conchita Sarnoff, a campaigner against human trafficking.
Sarnoff had broken the story in the Daily Beast of the appalling 2008 sweetheart deal between Epstein and Alex Acosta, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, that gave Epstein a laughable 18-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from just one underage girl, when, as Sarnoff’s reporting graphically revealed, Epstein was a longtime serial pedophile. She even had those now-infamous flight logs of the A-listers who flew with him on his private plane dubbed the Lolita Express.
After a fusillade of legal threats pre-publication, Epstein demanded a face-to-face meeting with me, but dropped that tactic when we insisted this could only happen if everything was on the record.
Fresh Hell readers may remember that I’ve written about the unsettling day when I returned to my Daily Beast office to find Epstein sitting there–I still don’t know how he got past security–and, with a menacing stare, he ordered me to “Just stop!” We did not. But our exposé failed to land with the bombshell impact of Julie Brown’s Miami Herald story in 2018. Back in 2010, Epstein did not have the mythic, dark aura he has assumed today. He was just another of New York’s rich, slippery creeps working the VIP crowd at the Clinton Global Initiative opening reception. He didn’t follow up on his legal threats to the Daily Beast, deciding, we assumed, that he would wait to see the fallout, which, in the pre-MeToo era, was soon eclipsed by the news cycle.
READ THE STORY THAT STARTED IT ALL:
But thanks to the latest Department of Justice doc deluge, I now know that, after the Daily Beast stories, Epstein was in a deep panic. And so was Siegal, who had sworn to me on the phone that Epstein was “just a friend she helped out sometimes with his dinners.” The files show the two of them were scheming about how to “neutralize” me. A sample:
12/10/2010, Siegal to Epstein
Subject line: Help!
“Why did you tell me to invite Tina Brown [to the infamous Prince Andrew dinner]! She is sending me hysterical emails! [I put my wrath in writing.] Call me asap! I just spoke to her!”
3/11/2011, [redact] to Epstein
“Peggy Siegal needs to speak with you as soon as possible. She is sitting in the audience of a panel discussion Tina Brown is holding, titled women in the world. The press is there and they are talking about you!”
Siegal was again in Epstein’s inbox on 3/2/2011 when she learned that Newsweek (where I also was also editor-in-chief at the time) was preparing a less-than-friendly Epstein piece by Alexandra Wolfe. “It’s all coming from Tina Brown and her fury about punishing you,” Siegal typed frantically. “How can you neutralize Tina?”
11/27/2012, Epstein to my friend, real estate billionaire and publisher Mort Zuckerman: “as a hanukah (sic) gift, could you ask tina brown to remove the sensationalist articles from the web that she had orchestrated I would greatly appreccaite (sic) it.” Zuckerman replied, “She would have the exact opposite reaction you would like alas.”
There’s a surprise one from Sarah, clearly Ferguson, then Duchess of York, to her PR guru James Henderson on 5/25/2011: “Jeffrey tells me he is getting death threats and a 200 strong women’s forum lead by Tina Brown has done massive damage to him, and he has lost 50 million dollars.” That brought a spring to my step.
At this point, who cares about any of this? I guess we still are obliged to be shocked by the new photos of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, grinning on all fours over a recumbent woman, that provide yet more evidence, as if we need it, that he’s a mendacious, priapic moron. While I am gratified to learn that I got under Epstein’s skin, just being mentioned at all feels like being splashed by the putrid wash of his venal world. My longtime fake friend Peggy Siegal was far from being the sole liar exposed by the files. Protesting big shots who said they had straight-up business associations with Epstein were sustaining friendships with him long after his first arrest:
Elon Musk on X, September 2025: “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED.”
November 2012, Musk to Epstein: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
December 2025, New York investor Andrew Farkas stated in the New York Times: “The basis of my relationship with Mr. Epstein was our business dealings.”
May 2018, one year before his second arrest, Farkas to Epstein: “As someone who considers himself to be amongst your best friends … I love you … Xoxo.”
Jan 30, 2026, NY Giants co-owner Steve Tisch: “I did not take him [Epstein] up on any of his invitations and never went to his island.” Apparently, he didn’t need to.
April 2013, Tisch to Epstein, about a woman named M: “Curious to know about M … pro or civilian?” Epstein replies that the woman is “civilian, but Russian, and rarely tells the full truth, but fun.” On the same thread, Epstein to Tisch: “Did you contact the great ass fake tit [name redacted] she’s a character, short term, has an older boyfriend going to acting school, a 10 ass.”
And Trump’s stonking rich commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who said in an interview last October that he and his wife had decided in 2005 to “never to be in the same room” as their “gross” former Upper East Side neighbor Epstein, is caught in the new emails inviting himself and his wife to the pedo’s Little St. James Island in 2012.
Other than making the rictus smiles of their wives and exes tauter than usual, pawing through these emails serves only to reinforce what we already know: that mega-wealth so often erodes a moral compass. Epstein’s appeal was an insidious gift of permission. Girls, tax evasion, private places to play. An underground railway of upper-echelon decadence.
Alas, the fact that we are all writing about this yet again shows how successful the latest Epstein email release has been for Donald Trump. He’s found another way to turn danger to himself into danger to others. Hunting for revelations about the occupant of the Oval Office in this email blizzard is a fool’s errand. Trump’s name attached to anything incriminating is redacted.
Of the 5,300 files with 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, or Mar-a-Lago, none are direct communications between Trump and Epstein. Deputy AG Todd Blanche has already said that the second half of the tranche—another two-and-a-half million pages—will never see the light of day.
The Venezuela raid was, in part, a massive kinetic distraction from MAGA’s fury at the DOJ’s stalling, but now, the release, six weeks late, of a tsunami of Epstein detritus is a typically Trumpian distraction from the abomination by ICE in Minneapolis. Trump no longer fears the Epstein files. While headlines explode with such red herrings as “Epstein’s Sex Empire Was ‘KGB Honeytrap,’” Trump’s Brown Shirts are still swarming the streets of Minneapolis.
Follow Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell on Substack, from which this article is reproduced with permission.
The post Opinion: How the Epstein Files Exposed His Fixer’s Plot to ‘Neutralize’ Me appeared first on The Daily Beast.
