A childhood neighbor of Jeffrey Epstein has published a searing account of growing up in the gated Sea Gate community in Brooklyn during the 1960s, revealing that she lived on the same street as the convicted sex trafficker and exploring what may have shaped his capacity for exploitation.
Writer and poet Gabrielle Glancy discovered the connection after the Epstein files were released in January. “Following the RELEASE of the Epstein files in January, I began to notice a lot of posts about him on the ‘I Grew Up in Sea Gate’ Facebook group,” she writes in Rolling Stone. “Someone posted a class picture with Epstein standing in the back row among a bunch of awkward-looking pre-teens at Mark Twain Junior High, where my mother taught English during the years he was a student there.”
Glancy’s essay reveals a deeply disturbing portrait of Sea Gate—an isolated, gated community described as “an island on an island”—where she claims pervasive sexual abuse flourished largely unchecked.
Speaking with a childhood acquaintance called “Paula” after the Epstein scandal broke, Glancy was confronted with a startling claim: “There were seven pedophiles on our street alone,” Paula told her. “A neighbor named Litsky, she said, ‘was f——both boys and girls.’”
Paula then raised a disturbing possibility about Glancy’s own grandfather: “Did your grandfather molest Jeffrey Epstein, too? I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t doubt it.”
Glancy’s essay is a novel account of multigenerational abuse within her own family. She reveals that she herself was molested by her grandfather from early childhood until age seven, and that her mother made the inexplicable decision to place young Gabrielle in a bed with her abuser.
“Whatever the reasons, my grandfather and I were relegated to a pickle-green pullout couch in the living room of the tiny house my grandfather had built up against the fence in Sea Gate, Coney Island, where he rubbed himself against me every night until I was seven and aged out of his affection,” Glancy writes.
Glancy speculates about what forces may have shaped Epstein into the predator he became. While she acknowledges uncertainty, she explores the possibility that he, too, may have been victimized in the abuse-saturated environment they shared.
“I have wondered, in light of all that has come out about him, if Jeffrey Epstein felt on the poor side of that great divide and sought to right that wrong,” she writes, noting that Epstein’s family was economically lower-status than many Sea Gate residents. “The Epsteins, on the other hand, rented a second-floor apartment at the end of our street in a house that, like many of the old mansions, had been divided up and turned into rentals.”
She adds: “That he used sexual exploitation as some sort of bargaining chip, for that piece of the puzzle, there must have been other factors at play. Was one of those factors my grandfather? Did my grandfather molest Jeffrey Epstein, as it seems he did many of the other kids in the neighborhood?”
Glancy ultimately frames the Sea Gate abuse scandal not as aberrational but as symptomatic of broader patterns. “Was Sea Gate A HOTBED for pedophiles? A breeding ground, as it were? Probably no more than most places. History, and especially current events, has shown us that exploitation by the rich, powerful, and privileged is everywhere.”
The essay ends with a devastating discovery: after her mother’s death, Glancy found a final entry in her mother’s journal, a single sentence written in trembling handwriting when her mother was 92 years old: “Sexual abuse by my father.”
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