David Ross had already withdrawn from the art world, resigned from his job and issued a series of public apologies about being “mortified” and “ashamed” before the latest email landed in his inbox. He sat next to his wife, Peggy, in the quiet comfort of their home in Beacon, N.Y., far from the circles of power where he’d spent much of his life. But even here, each new message carried the possibility of another disaster.
“Regarding correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, I have the following questions,” the email began.
Ross, 77, scanned through the message as his stomach dropped. He noticed that the sender was not a lawyer or a prosecutor but his neighbor, a community blogger who lived a few blocks away. She wanted to know about a flight he’d taken to New Mexico in the 1990s. She wanted to know if he was still volunteering on a city tax board or serving as chairman at a local nine-hole golf course.
“This mess is swallowing every little corner of our lives,” Peggy said. “What does the golf course have to do with anything?”
“Because I’m tainted,” he said. “I’m in the files.”
When the Justice Department released millions of pages of Epstein files earlier this year, it exposed a web of abuse that stretched across decades and continents. But the files also revealed something subtler and more endemic: a vast circle of billionaires, academics and fund-raisers like Ross who had never been accused of participating in Epstein’s crimes or visiting his island but had nonetheless helped sustain him by cashing his checks, hosting him at galas and laundering his reputation with their own.
As the public reckoned with the weight of their silence, Ross had spent the last months conducting his own accounting. How many times had the two of them had dinner? How many phone calls, galas and dollars raised? He was trying to make sense of not only his relationship to Epstein but also his place inside what others in his life had begun calling the Epstein Class: a global circle of money, power, ego and ambition.
Ross had orbited around its edges more than 100 nights each year in one of the tuxedos he was given by Miuccia Prada, raising hundreds of millions of dollars as director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and later the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was a world where a benefactor could cut a check for $4 million on a whim; where a celebratory dinner in New York could become an impromptu private flight for dessert in Las Vegas; where a special tour of the Sistine Chapel was arranged after hours, so billionaires could lie on the floor and stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling.
Ross had become a master at catering to ego, facilitating deals and making a class of people feel important. Now he’d begun to wonder if the skills that made him exceptional at his job had also made him in some ways complicit.
“The best thing to do is to call up the golf course and resign,” he said.
“You’re guilty of poor judgment,” Peggy said. “You never saw any girls. You never witnessed any crimes.”
“But it’s the way it looks,” he said, and now he was thinking again about his emails, a few hundred words of back and forth with Epstein that had been part of the latest release of files. They had written to each other only a few dozen times in the last decade of Epstein’s life — generic holiday cards, fund-raising attempts and typo-littered notes sent by phone from across continents.
“are you in NYC or somewhere delightful?” Ross had written in 2011.
“caribean,” Epstein responded.
“sweet,” Ross replied.
After Epstein was first arrested on charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2006, Epstein had told Ross that he was the victim of trumped-up charges brought as political revenge for his befriending of President Bill Clinton. Rather than look into the charges for himself, Ross, a lifelong Democrat, had simply chosen to believe Epstein. Even as evidence of Epstein’s crimes continued to mount, Ross had continued to flatter and excuse him while he tried to raise money for his various art ventures.
“Damn, this is not what you needed or deserved,” Ross wrote to him once, in 2009, after Epstein had pleaded guilty, and video of his deposition leaked into the press.
“It was an undeserved punishment foisted on you by jealous creeps,” Ross wrote, in another message.
“I’m still proud to call you a friend,” he wrote, in 2015, when Epstein was under scrutiny again, this time on suspicion of sex trafficking.
And then there was the email exchange that now troubled him most of all, from 2009, when Epstein wrote to propose an idea. “I might want to fund an exhibition entitled statutory,” he wrote. “girls and boys ages 14-25 where they look nothing like their true ages. Juvenile mug shots, photo shop, make up. Some people go to prison because they can’t tell true age. Controversial. Fun. Maybe it should be a web page, with hits, tallied.”
“You are incredible,” Ross had written back. “This would be a very owerful and freaky book.”
Ross told Epstein the idea reminded him of the famous piece of art by Richard Prince that included a naked photograph of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields. “This should be a web-based exhibition — totally global,” he wrote. The idea had gone nowhere, forgotten as soon as the email exchange ended. But now it had been excavated, and Ross could see in his response a reflection of the person he had become.
“I blew smoke at people to raise money,” he said. “I buttered them up and told them they were great. It took years for my lips to heal.”
Peggy had assumed Ross had cut ties with Epstein after he retired from full-time museum work in the early 2000s. She hadn’t known about the emails until the files were released, because Ross never thought they were worth mentioning to her. There were at least 100 people he emailed more frequently.
Peggy kept reminding herself that they would weather this. They had their house, their savings, each other. But she had spent the last few weeks trying to square the man in the files with her husband of 48 years.
“Sometimes I still wonder what you were thinking,” she said.
“I should have been more skeptical,” he said. “Why couldn’t I see it?”
Ross left the house and retreated into his backyard studio, where he often went searching for answers as he tried to make some meaning from the fallout of the last months. The floor was crowded with guitars and recording equipment that he used to write folk songs about art and legacy. His journal was on the computer, and his file cabinet was filled with artifacts from his career. He sifted through a few dozen black-and-white photographs of people in ball gowns and tuxedos.
“There’s me with Mrs. Bush outside of the Whitney,” he said.
“There’s me with David Geffen and Jann Wenner.”
He’d grown up in a house with no art as the son of a dentist on Long Island, and he’d risen quickly through the modern art world as an ambitious outsider: provocative, restless, and enthusiastic in his embrace of digital and video art. By the time he was in his early 40s, he was being recruited to run the Whitney, one of America’s most influential museums for modern and contemporary art. He interviewed over dinner at the Upper East Side home of the Goldman Sachs partner Robert Mnuchin, where paintings by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning hung on the walls. Ross stared up at $50 million worth of art in the living room and agreed to take the position.
His job was to manage about 300 employees at the Whitney and raise $40 million or $50 million each year for the nonprofit museum, which meant helping to recruit dozens of wealthy donors to serve on volunteer committees. There was one for sculpture, for drawing, for print, for photography and for video. Ross had a breakfast table reserved each morning at the Mark Hotel to meet with prospective donors, and he quickly learned that many of them weren’t particularly interested in art. “Being associated with the museum was a status symbol,” he said. “It becomes a showcase for power and wealth, and who is cooler than whom. I had to become a master of that world.”
He spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard and raised millions each year on the golf course. He got his cologne from the cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder, a Whitney trustee, and some of his clothes from Donna Karan, another museum donor. He flew in private jets with Wall Street bankers, the president of Sony and the governor of West Virginia. He acquired Magrittes and Mondrians on behalf of the museum and later went to visit the artist Robert Rauschenberg hoping to buy his personal collection for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He remembered asking Rauschenberg to write down any price. The artist scrawled $22 million on a piece of paper, and Ross agreed without haggling and closed the deal.
“That’s me with Skip Gates and Cornel West,” he said, as he flipped through more photos.
“That’s me with Yoko Ono.”
“That’s Lynn Forester, who became Lady de Rothschild.”
It was Forester, he said, who first introduced him to Epstein as a potential donor in the mid-1990s. One night Ross went to Epstein’s seven-story townhouse for dinner, and seated around the table he recognized David Rockefeller Sr., the former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, the billionaire investor Leon Black and the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. There was enough accumulated net worth at that table to fund every art museum in the United States for a decade. Epstein told Ross he was more interested in furniture than art, but Ross wasn’t concerned with his expertise. Epstein was rich and well-connected, so Ross recruited him as a donor and invited him onto the museum’s Drawing Committee.
Ross remembered him coming to one committee meeting at the museum, and afterward sending little silver trinkets from Tiffany’s to the low-level assistants and museum staff members who had helped facilitate the meeting. “It was charming,” Ross said. “Nobody did that. I thought he was a rich playboy, but exceptionally mannered.”
Ross told Epstein that he was planning a trip to New Mexico to visit a sculptor and another museum trustee, the art collector Emily Fisher Landau. Epstein owned a ranch a few miles away from Landau, an 8,000-acre property with a private airstrip, and he offered Ross a ride on his plane. Ross didn’t remember seeing girls or anything else unusual on board. He sat with Epstein and listened to him tell stories about being a concert pianist, a math prodigy and a classmate of the Unabomber, much of which turned out to be apocryphal.
Over the next several years, Ross saw Epstein maybe a dozen times, mostly at galas attended by several of the richest people in the world. Ross remembered seeing Epstein with both Ghislaine Maxwell and Eva Andersson-Dubin, a doctor and the former Miss Sweden. Sometimes, Ross and Epstein made small talk. Mostly, they orbited from group to group, floating between conversations with the C.E.O.s of Philip Morris, Hearst and Sotheby’s, working the room and hustling for connections, each man in his element.
“I thought of myself as a hunter-gatherer,” Ross said, as he set down the black-and-white photos and looked out the window, where it was beginning to snow. “Some donors were great, wonderful people who became friends — people who cared deeply about art. Some were horrible assholes with just unbelievably troglodyte points of view, and I was the karma wash.”
He put on his coat and went outside to walk along the Hudson River. It had been well over a decade since he and Peggy moved to Beacon, where they bought a Queen Anne Victorian and hung some of their daughters’ childhood drawings on the wall. For years after he retired from museum work in the early 2000s, Ross had tried to maintain his place in the art world, working with a gallery, raising pension funds for artists and serving as editor-at-large of an art magazine. But as some of his opportunities started to dwindle, he found himself settling into a slower routine in Beacon. He had begun volunteering in local politics and formed a folk band.
Now he turned toward the waterfront and walked onto Main Street, a gentrified strip of galleries, coffee shops and bars where his band had sometimes played free concerts. He’d found it humbling to write songs and fit himself into a band with other talented musicians. “It’s taken years to shrink my ego down to size,” he said. “I’ve made progress, but I’m still trying to get there.”
Ross had also taken a job in 2010 directing a master’s program at the School of Visual Arts, traveling by train into Manhattan once each week to teach. Many of his students were still amateurs who hadn’t sold any art, but their creativity made Ross feel as though he was getting back to something elemental as he learned alongside them. He had survived cancer four times, and he found himself reflecting on his career and writing about legacy. “There’s more integrity in making something that nobody will ever see than in trying to hustle and blow smoke,” he said.
It had become one of the most rewarding chapters of his career until the latest Epstein files were released at the end of January and his emails started showing up on fliers around the S.V.A. campus. He had decided to resign days later before he could be fired.
He walked past the train station and continued down the hill toward Dia Beacon, a contemporary art museum in a converted factory on the water, thinking about the field trips he used to take with his students. Each year he had led them to an abstract expressionist painting by Barnett Newman at the Museum of Modern Art, a piece called “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.” It was a red rectangle that measured about eight feet tall and 18 feet wide, and he told them to sit in front of it for an hour. What looked at first glance like a uniform sea of red gradually shifted in the light to become textured, shaded, vibrational, alive.
“You don’t come to a museum to race through and see 100 things,” he told them. “You take a deep breath. You have an experience with a work of art that is going to outlast you. You look at it. You let it look back at you. You slow the hell down.”
Ross had tried to acquire a Newman painting once when he was at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. He had called up donors and exhausted his Rolodex, failing to raise the necessary $21 million in what he considered one of the great disappointments of his career. But each passing year in front of the “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” was a reminder that he didn’t need to own Newman’s work so much as be owned by it — to give himself over to the red until his field of vision blurred and he could feel the weight of the paint on his shoulders. By the time the hour ended, he was inside the painting, disoriented, lost in the red.
Lately he awoke each morning to more Epstein fallout in the news, more names. For at least a decade after his first arrest, Epstein had continued to host fancy dinners, sometimes with an ankle monitor hidden under his pants, his reputation cushioned by his mansion, by his handlers, by his money, by his art, by his gift giving, by his famous friends, by his high-society manners, by his ties to politicians and foundations and universities and museums.
“Everybody wanted a check,” Ross said, one morning, as he sat with Peggy in the living room. “The whole system depended on that kind of money. He fit right into that whole world. It’s not like there were obvious red flags.”
“Oh, I could tell something was off,” Peggy said.
“Right from the beginning?” he asked, and she nodded.
“It was both him and Ghislaine,” she said. “They were creepy. I wanted nothing to do with them.”
She remembered going with them to an exhibit at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach in the mid-1990s and watching the way they belittled some of the people around them. She remembered being seated with them at a table during a fund-raising gala, one of the many events that had felt to her in some ways like an obligation. She was busy enough with her own work — raising two daughters and helping to run a major nonprofit program with the New York City schools — but she still borrowed designer dresses and forced herself into heels to accompany her husband to events at the Whitney. She still hosted dinners for museum donors in their home, preparing and cooking every dish for people who were used to being served by their own professional staffs.
She believed in her husband and in the value of his work, introducing great art to the public and improving the culture of America’s cities. Over their nearly five decades of marriage, she had never doubted his decency or worried for a second that he’d had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes. But she also knew her husband to be credulous, especially in the thrall of money, whereas she could lean back from a table of billionaires and evaluate them with clearer eyes.
“We sat next to Jeffrey and Ghislaine at the same table for two hours, and they made it clear they had no use for me,” she said. “I was furniture. They looked over my shoulder to see who was more important to talk to.”
“I’m sorry,” Ross said. “That’s gross. I guess I was busy trying to be the entertainment.”
“We were the help,” she said.
“I became my job, and I lost track of myself,” he said. “I was probably insufferable sometimes. I started to think I was important.”
“You have to puff yourself up a little bit to succeed in those situations,” she said.
“Sure. But if it’s all puffery, then what’s inside?”
He sat for a moment in the living room and thought about Hans Haacke, a German visual artist who had sometimes refused to show his work at museums that depended on money from Philip Morris. Haacke made art about the ways institutions laundered the reputations of powerful men. Ross had always admired his principles, even as he rationalized some of his own choices. He was working for the public good. He was building strong, nonprofit institutions. He was bringing art to the American people.
“Sometimes, I chose to be willfully oblivious,” he told Peggy, and what he regretted most was his failure to adhere to the great lesson of his own career.
“I didn’t look,” he said.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Eli Saslow writes in-depth stories about the impact of major national issues on people’s lives.
The post ‘I’m Tainted. I’m in the Files.’ appeared first on New York Times.
