A plastic surgeon from Mount Sinai closed a young woman’s head wound with 35 stitches on Jeffrey Epstein’s dining room table.
An internist in West Palm Beach ordered a blood test for another woman, then reported the abnormal results back to Mr. Epstein.
A dentist at Columbia University asked Mr. Epstein how much work he wanted done on a “girl” with severe tooth decay.
These providers were part of a small stable of loyal medical specialists cultivated and rewarded by Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender and financier who died in a jail cell in 2019. He often tapped their expertise for his own ailments, firing off questions about his bad back, high cholesterol and erectile dysfunction drugs. Sometimes, he connected them with his powerful friends in business and politics, even arranging one lawyer’s mammogram.
But Mr. Epstein also used the doctors to manipulate young women from overseas who were having sex with him, according to a tranche of Epstein-related documents released by the government in January.
He directed women to get pelvic exams, liposuction and mole removals, and paid for a range of specialty treatments, from $800-an-hour psychiatric therapy to a root canal. Sometimes, he abruptly cut off the women’s care: An assistant once forwarded him a plea from a woman asking for $600 to refill her prescription for acne medicine. “Ignore,” Mr. Epstein replied.
It’s unsurprising that someone with Mr. Epstein’s wealth and elite connections would receive white-glove service from concierge doctors and V.I.P. treatment at major hospitals. But the new documents reveal how some of his doctors bent or broke the ethical rules of their profession.
One sent Mr. Epstein’s sexual partners elsewhere for gonorrhea treatment so that when their cases were reported to public health authorities, they wouldn’t be tied to Mr. Epstein. Some doctors also shared patients’ private health information with him, disclosures that at least one woman was unhappy about.
“All the doctors you pay directly keep you well informed about my ‘treatments,’” the woman wrote to Mr. Epstein. She did not want the same to happen with a “shrink” she was planning to see.
Mr. Epstein dismissed her concerns. The doctors, he told her, “take the time to make sure im happy.”
Mr. Epstein rewarded his preferred doctors with hefty payments, Apple Watches, introductions to celebrities and vacations on his private island and his New Mexico ranch. One cash-strapped dermatologist asked the sexual predator to co-sign his car lease.
Mr. Epstein wrote large checks for some doctors’ research projects and charity work. And he donated more than $375,000 to Mount Sinai, much of it to a breast cancer center at the hospital run by Dr. Eva Dubin, who dated him for many years in the 1980s.
Dr. Dubin became Mr. Epstein’s conduit to Mount Sinai, connecting him, his friends and women in his orbit with doctors there. She also arranged positions at the hospital for at least two young women at Mr. Epstein’s request.
In a statement to The New York Times, a representative for Dr. Dubin said that over the course of her career, she had provided hundreds of referrals to medical specialists for colleagues, friends and acquaintances, including Mr. Epstein. “Each referral was made in good faith and without any awareness of wrongdoing,” the statement said. She “never witnessed, suspected or had any knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s criminal conduct,” it said.
A Mount Sinai spokeswoman would not comment on individual patient cases, but said the hospital has formed a committee to investigate its ties to Mr. Epstein. “We will continue to take any and all appropriate actions,” she said.
A Mount Sinai Connection
The Times reviewed more than 15,000 documents from the Epstein files — including text messages, emails, lab results and financial records — showing Mr. Epstein’s interactions with more than a dozen doctors from 2009 to 2019. Although the names of the women involved are largely redacted, The Times reached out to those who could be identified.
The doctor Mr. Epstein was closest to was Dr. Dubin, founder of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai. A former Miss Sweden, she had dated Mr. Epstein while she was in medical school and remained his close confidante after marrying the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin.
Over the years, Mr. Epstein turned to his well-connected friend for medical requests of all kinds.
In 2012, a young Russian woman wrote to Mr. Epstein to ask if he would mind if she had sex with another man if they used a condom. “You must first go to the gyno,” he replied, saying that Dr. Dubin would call her. In a subsequent message, he said Dr. Dubin would coordinate the referral: “Eva will organize pussy doctor.” The woman later reported back that Dr. Dubin had given her phone numbers for two doctors.
Around the same time, Dr. Dubin also arranged for the young woman, identified in emails as an undergraduate, to get a volunteer position at the reception desk of the Dubin Breast Center. Though the hospital’s union resisted using an unpaid worker, the gig was approved after Dr. Dubin appealed to the hospital’s president.
“I told them she will only sit there and look pretty,” Dr. Dubin told Mr. Epstein after it was official.
Several months later, Mr. Epstein emailed Dr. Dubin with an urgent problem: He and the Russian student were flying to New York from his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She had fallen off an A.T.V., Mr. Epstein wrote, leaving a large gash across her forehead that needed attention. “Can you organize thanks,” he wrote.
Dr. Dubin responded that one of Mount Sinai’s plastic surgeons, Dr. Jess Ting, was “standing by” and added that she herself would join them. The next day, Mr. Epstein recounted to an assistant that Dr. Ting had given the woman 35 stitches while she was “laid out on the dinng room table.”
A photo that appeared to capture the scene — with faces redacted — was included in the government’s initial release of Epstein files, The Times found, but has since been removed. A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice declined to comment on this photo, but said that files were generally removed to correct redaction errors.
An email sent two days after the incident refers to antibiotics that Dr. Dubin gave to the woman on the night of the procedure.
Dr. Margaret Moon, a physician and expert in medical ethics at Johns Hopkins University, told The Times that the incident was “breathtaking.” With such a serious wound, she said, the woman should have been treated in an emergency room equipped to handle any complications.
Stitching her up on Mr. Epstein’s dining table was “a choice made not in the patient’s best interest but in, it sounds to me, a friend’s best interest,” Dr. Moon said. “That is very difficult to justify.”
Months later, Dr. Ting successfully solicited a $50,000 donation from Mr. Epstein for his breast cancer research. Soon after, Dr. Ting, his girlfriend and her children visited Mr. Epstein’s island.
Dr. Ting made more house calls for Mr. Epstein, consulting with a woman about a nose job and removing a fatty cyst from Mr. Epstein’s shoulder. Before the cyst appointment, the doctor said that the chairman of his department at the hospital had warned him not to do the procedure at a patient’s home.
The chairman “said if I did it there I would be sanctioned! Ridiculous,” Dr. Ting said, according to a message he sent to one of Mr. Epstein’s assistants.
In a statement to The Times, Dr. Ting said: “In my treatment of these adult patients, I never knew, witnessed, or had any knowledge of any illegal or potentially illegal activities.” He also said he was not in the photo showing the apparent medical treatment in Mr. Epstein’s dining room.
“Mr. Epstein represents the very worst of human nature, and I deeply regret having had any association with him,” Dr. Ting said.
Mr. Epstein frequently donated to Mount Sinai, which offered him “24/7” access to V.I.P. services at the hospital, emails show. In 2013, Dr. Dubin pitched him on a $5 million new project: a postoperative cancer floor for female patients that would offer yoga, hair care and mental health services.
If Mr. Epstein gave financial support, she said, there could be a naming opportunity: “The Epstein Floor for Women, if so desired,” she suggested. The documents do not include a response.
Dr. Dubin also connected doctors to Mr. Epstein’s powerful friends.
In March 2015, at Mr. Epstein’s request, she arranged an appointment at the Dubin Breast Center for Kathryn Ruemmler, a former lawyer for the Obama White House. The next month, he asked the doctor about Ms. Ruemmler’s results. (Dr. Dubin responded that she would need the patient’s permission to share them.)
Two years later, Mr. Epstein wrote to Dr. Dubin and Ms. Ruemmler with a reminder: “Kathy mamogram time,” he said.
A representative for Ms. Ruemmler told The Times that “Ms. Ruemmler received referrals for New York City physicians from several people.” She resigned from her role as general counsel of Goldman Sachs this month after the government’s document release revealed her close relationship with Mr. Epstein.
S.T.D. Secrets
In Florida, where Mr. Epstein had a mansion in Palm Beach, he often relied on his longtime personal physician, Dr. Bruce Moskowitz, whom Mr. Epstein once referred to as “internist to the worlds wealthy.”
While on jaunts with women around the world, Mr. Epstein turned to Dr. Moskowitz for quick gynecologist referrals in New Mexico, Britain and Poland.
At home in Florida, Mr. Epstein consulted with the doctor on the health of young women. In a series of emails in 2018, for example, the men discussed one woman’s abnormal white blood cell count and her eligibility for a strictly regulated acne treatment.
Also in 2018, Dr. Moskowitz helped Mr. Epstein and two women get treatment for gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted bacterial infection that is treated with an antibiotic injection.
“I think to be safe my two friends should get shot by you tomorrow or send them somewhere close,” Mr. Epstein wrote.
Dr. Moskowitz texted back, offering treatment to Mr. Epstein but recommending an emergency room in West Palm Beach for the women. “That way I do not have to report the cases to health department including contacts,” he said. (The Florida Department of Health requires doctors treating gonorrhea cases to report the names of people who test positive.)
The next day, Mr. Epstein texted Dr. Moskowitz to ask if the women had revealed the source of their infections.
Dr. Moskowitz assured him they had not. “They say a friend overseas,” he said. It’s unclear how he knew what the woman had disclosed at the E.R.
Dr. Moskowitz did not respond to emails, text messages or phone calls to his cellphone and office.
From 2014 through 2017, Mr. Epstein donated at least $225,000 to foundations linked to Dr. Moskowitz and his wife, Marsha Moskowitz, the documents show. He also agreed to invest “a couple of million” in a venture by their son, and put the doctor up at his New Mexico ranch.
Dr. Moskowitz, in turn, remained loyal to Mr. Epstein, even as investigations by The Miami Herald revealed the scope of his abuse of underage girls a decade earlier.
In November 2018, after one of the articles was published, Dr. Moskowitz emailed Mr. Epstein with the subject line “Marsha and I are there for you.” His wife, he said, “was livid with the press she almost punched her ipad!”
Epstein the Customer
Again and again in the new trove of documents, Mr. Epstein inserts himself into the medical decisions of young women. It’s unclear whether they gave him permission to do so. Under federal law, doctors are not allowed to disclose private medical information to third parties without a patient’s consent.
When asked by The Times about some of the situations described in the emails, one expert questioned whether the women would have been able to give legal consent, given Mr. Epstein’s power over them.
“They’re being forced to have this treatment by a doctor not of their choice,” said Barry R. Furrow, the director of the Health Law Program at Drexel University. “I don’t think you can even talk about consent in this.”
The doctors often acted as if Mr. Epstein, rather than the women, was their primary concern.
In 2013, someone on Mr. Epstein’s staff relayed a message from a dentist who was on the faculty at Columbia University, Dr. Thomas Magnani. He had examined a patient sent by Mr. Epstein and found she had serious problems, including two “black teeth” in the front of her mouth and a hole in one incisor. She needed a root canal, 11 fillings and braces, the assistant told Mr. Epstein. But the dentist was unsure which services his client was willing to pay for.
“He doesn’t know how much work you want done on this girl,” the assistant wrote. The records show Mr. Epstein agreed to pay for a root canal.
Dr. Magnani did not respond to requests for comment. On Feb. 16, Columbia University terminated his faculty appointment, after other files showed he had helped Mr. Epstein’s girlfriend bypass the normal process to be admitted to the dental school. The records show Mr. Epstein gave Columbia’s dental school at least $50,000 in response to pleas from Dr. Magnani.
When Mr. Epstein enrolled several women in a members-only emergency room in New York in 2016, he didn’t even have to give their names.
The co-founder of the concierge E.R. was Dr. Bernard Kruger, a longtime doctor to Mr. Epstein. He and Mr. Epstein’s staff settled on a fee of $15,000 for a year of access for Mr. Epstein and five “girls.”
An accountant later emailed Mr. Epstein to say that Dr. Kruger’s team did not require him to name the women covered by the plan. They would be listed only as “assistants 1-5 without using names,” he said, “which i think gives you more flexibility.” A spokeswoman for the E.R., now called Sollis Health, said women’s names were added to the accounts later.
In at least one case, Dr. Kruger’s private medical office in Manhattan also did not use the names of women associated with Mr. Epstein when making their appointments. In 2018, the office contacted Mr. Epstein’s staff to say that “Jeffrey’s assistant” needed to reschedule her appointment — but Mr. Epstein’s office could not figure out which assistant it was. (Subsequent emails show that the appointment was actually for Ms. Ruemmler, the former White House counsel.)
Mark Botnick, a spokesman for Dr. Kruger, said Dr. Kruger did not recall that incident and believed it must have been a clerical error.
“The fact that Mr. Epstein was later revealed to be a serial predator does not implicate the physicians who cared for him,” Mr. Botnick said.
Another doctor provided services for women that seemed to be part of complicated financial horse-trading with Mr. Epstein.
Dr. Steven Victor, a dermatologist in Manhattan, often performed mole removals and other procedures for women referred by Mr. Epstein. In 2006, the records indicate, Mr. Epstein lent $100,000 to Dr. Victor’s beauty-product company.
But by 2009, Dr. Victor was fed up with the financier. He wrote him an angry note pointing out that he had not charged Mr. Epstein’s “girl friends” for their medical care. And he had been “loyal,” he said, by refusing to speak to the many reporters who had asked him about Mr. Epstein.
“I have lived up to my bargain as I promised,” Dr. Victor wrote. And yet Mr. Epstein had repeatedly declined to invest in the doctor’s business ventures and sent him too many patients to treat free of charge. “You can NOT just send friends and expect me to bear the costs,” Dr. Victor wrote.
Mr. Epstein responded by saying that Dr. Victor had still not paid him back what he was owed from past transactions. He also said that if Dr. Victor had ever talked to reporters, that would be “something that i would have never forgiven.”
Dr. Victor, now based in Dubai, said in a phone interview that Mr. Epstein was only one of many wealthy patients whom he had solicited for loans or investments: “He is not unusual. It basically was not a big relationship.”
The doctor said he never felt that Mr. Epstein had leverage over him, and he always put patients first. He said he had not noticed any sign of duress among the women Mr. Epstein sent him. “Most of them were young, but of age,” he said. “Nobody complained. Everybody was happy.”
After the angry email exchange, Dr. Victor continued to treat women sent by Mr. Epstein. “Call and see dr victor re breasts,” Mr. Epstein ordered a woman in one email. When she asked what kind of doctor he was, Mr. Epstein replied: “He will send you to his partner that takes fat from your ass and puts in your breasts.”
And the doctor continued to ask Mr. Epstein for money, sometimes in desperate terms. “Will get evicted from office etc if I do not come up with funds. HELP!” he wrote in late 2009. The next year, he asked Mr. Epstein to co-sign a car lease.
“Email me full paperwork,” Mr. Epstein wrote. (Dr. Victor said that Mr. Epstein did not co-sign the lease.) Later that year, Mr. Epstein replied to the same email thread, asking Dr. Victor to see another woman.
Julie Tate and Urvashi Uberoy contributed reporting.
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
The post Elite Doctors Served Jeffrey Epstein While Treating His ‘Girls’ appeared first on New York Times.
