Juleanna Glover is the CEO of Ridgely Walsh, a corporate consultancy.
Last week, Politico published an article about me under a headline saying I “courted” Jeffrey Epstein. I sure as heck did.
Writer Michael Wolff asked me during the 2016 presidential primary season if I could spur reporters to ask Donald Trump about his relationship with Epstein. I was well aware that Epstein had been convicted in 2008 in Florida for soliciting prostitution, including from someone underage, amid allegations that he had sexually abused teenage girls. Wolff intimated that Epstein might say something in response that would seriously complicate Trump’s election prospects.
That was more than enough for me.
I had closely followed Trump’s political rise — reading every book on him as he rose in the polls — and it had become clear to me that if Trump ever occupied the Oval Office, the ramifications for the country would be grim. Although I did know Wolff in my profession as a public relations adviser, I think he first approached me because I had argued often against Trump’s candidacy in various news outlets. The Justice Department’s recently released Epstein files include an email from Wolff to Epstein on Dec. 15, 2015, in which he writes, “I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship [with] you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.” I had worked to seed those questions.
Ultimately, no questions were asked. That’s probably because Epstein wasn’t a major figure at the time, and it wasn’t evident that Trump’s relationship with him would be news. I didn’t know what Epstein would have to say, in any event, so I didn’t push the issue.
Fast forward to the spring of 2017: Wolff, as he told Politico, suggested that I meet with Epstein, and I agreed. My intent was to see if he would talk to a reporter about whatever he knew about Trump. This outreach prompted two in-person meetings, three phone calls and 31 emails to Epstein over the next 15 months. In all of those interactions, I aimed to impress Epstein so he would take my advice. I wanted him to talk to a serious journalist who would be well equipped to pry out of him whatever Trump stories he might have to tell.
It should be noted that Trump and Epstein were friends but long ago had a falling out, the president denies knowing about Epstein’s criminal activities, and no evidence has suggested otherwise.
At that first May 2017 meeting, after listening to Epstein — in his braggadocious, insecure, preening but perniciously intelligent way — I was struck with the thought that James B. Stewart, the bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer, one of the best journalists of his generation, would be a great match. Stewart, I knew, had a patient, disarmingly extractive way of conducting interviews. I remember telling Epstein to go back and read Stewart’s “Den of Thieves,” about the insider-trading prosecutions of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and others from the late 1980s. I vaguely recall sending the book to him, but am not certain that I did.
At this meeting, Epstein and I discussed his charitable giving. He complained no one would take his money, for obvious reasons. I suggested he donate to the pro-democracy movement in Russia then coalescing around the activist Alexei Navalny. This was just days after Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey in retaliation for investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. There was an ironic symmetry to the idea: Russia was undermining America’s democracy, so Epstein could fund the strengthening of Russia’s democracy. I asked a nonprofit executive to talk to Epstein about suitable Russian and European democracy advocates for such a plan. Nothing came of it, but here, again, I was trying to flex some semblance of ingenuity and street smarts so Epstein would take my advice. I didn’t care that he couldn’t actually launder his reputation through a campaign of charitable giving.
When Epstein never followed up on these ideas, I dropped the matter. Then I received an email from a BBC reporter in February 2018 asking me to put him in touch with Wolff to discuss Epstein. How this reporter knew to reach out to me, I have no idea, but the government files show Wolff forwarded the note to Epstein, who asked Wolff to find out more.
This revived my interest in facilitating an Epstein story that might be revealing about Trump. I eventually met with Epstein a second time, in July 2018. In that meeting, we touched on third-party presidential candidates who might prevail against Trump in 2020, and I sent to him a New York Times op-ed and a recent memo I had written on the subject. I did so not because I wanted Epstein’s help or advice, but because I wanted him to have faith in my strategic recommendations. (Wolff explained his relationship with Epstein in an email to the Atlantic magazine last year, writing, “You ingratiate yourself so that people — your subject — will talk to you.”)
In both of these meetings, Epstein boasted about how close he was to Mohammed bin Salman, even suggesting that he was a financial adviser to the de facto Saudi Arabian ruler. Three weeks after my second meeting with Epstein, Elon Musk, for whom I was a PR consultant at the time, caused an uproar by tweeting that he was planning to take Tesla private — intending to delist the company from the stock market on what he thought was a funding commitment by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. I contacted Epstein and urged him to advise bin Salman to stick with Musk. Epstein offered me advice on Tesla and suggested board members for the company.
It was a strange response to my one-way request that he weigh in with the Saudis. But I tolerated the back and forth while the deal was still alive. Musk never knew about my outreach, and there is no evidence Epstein had any influence with Riyadh. Even during these interactions about Tesla, I remained focused on trying to get Epstein together with Stewart. The Epstein files show I twice directed Epstein to Stewart during this timeframe.
I didn’t learn that I might have come excruciatingly close to my ultimate objective until after Epstein died in 2019. A couple of days following his death, Stewart wrote a Times article headlined “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People.” Stewart had contacted Epstein and was invited to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in August 2018. Stewart had heard rumors that Epstein “was advising Tesla’s embattled chief executive, Elon Musk.”
I never actually connected Epstein to Stewart, but Stewart recently told me that he had heard Epstein had asked to talk to him (the Justice Department files show another Times reporter communicating with Epstein at the same time). In Stewart’s Times article, he wrote that, after the initial meeting, Epstein tried to recruit him to write his biography, an assignment the journalist declined. Then came Epstein’s arrest and suicide. “I’m left to wonder,” Stewart wrote. “What might he have told me?”
I almost got it done. I almost got Epstein to tell his story to a formidable reporter, one not likely to let Epstein slither away from revealing what he knew about “powerful people.” My efforts, episodic but serious, over the course of more than a year, foreshadowed what has become a national obsession: What did Jeffrey Epstein know about Donald Trump?
So, yes, I “courted” an execrable person, and I did so hoping that it might get Trump out of the White House, or stop him from returning. I never knew what Epstein had to say, but I had a plan to find out — and it almost worked.
The post Yes, I ‘courted’ Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s why. appeared first on Washington Post.
