The extraordinary scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s desperate battle to silence the Daily Beast has been laid bare in documents released by the Department of Justice.
He fought for years with every tool at his disposal—elite lawyers, shady internet operators, even raw intimidation—to stop the Beast from 16 years, and counting, of reporting on his crimes.
We were the first outlet to report the appalling details of Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal in Florida, which spared him a long prison sentence despite extensive evidence of his abuse and trafficking of young girls.
That arrangement was revealed as part of a groundbreaking series of articles by the writer Conchita Sarnoff, who was commissioned by the Beast’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, Tina Brown.
Epstein’s fury over our reporting has now been exposed in the 3 million new files released by the Department of Justice. The documents were finally forced into the open when even Republicans defied President Donald Trump, forcing him to sign a law exposing his former close friend’s secrets.
Emails and texts between Epstein and his associates show how he used friends and backers, along with his vast fortune, in a protracted but failed bid to silence our stories. The files also provide a window onto the threats journalists face in uncovering what the rich and powerful want buried—practices that did not die with Epstein.
Sarnoff’s very first article, in July 2010, exposed how Epstein had entered into an astonishingly lenient plea deal that secured him minimal jail time and day release conditions when he allegedly continued offending, despite investigators knowing he committed serial sexual abuse and sex trafficking of minors. It detailed how he drew on a coordinated network of enablers who helped procure his victims. The deal was granted in 2008 by Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Acosta left that office in 2009 and became Trump’s labor secretary in 2017.
Epstein was furious at our revelation and appears to have put the word out among his associates to discourage them from speaking to our journalists.
“Having the foresight to disconnect my phones and leave no trace, I have made sure that reporters cannot find me for their stories. Pretty clever, eh?” one person, identified in the documents only by the initials SRA, wrote in a July 2010 message with the subject line: “the daily beast.”
Astonishingly, Epstein then confronted Brown in person. Brown spoke to The Daily Beast Podcast about how, in the summer of 2010, the pedophile turned up at our offices in New York to threaten her over our reporting, and how she faced down the monster who had snuck in while she was at lunch.
“I stood by the door, and I said to him, ‘Jeffrey… what are you doing here?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘Just stop.’ And he looked at me with this kind of snake eyes, cold, and it was menacing. It was really menacing. And he pointed his finger and he said, ‘Just stop.’”
Documents published by the Justice Department show Epstein had his attorney Jay Lefkowitz at Kirkland & Ellis write a threatening letter to the Beast in September 2010. A top white shoe law firm, Kirkland & Ellis also agreed in 2025 to provide Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to avoid revenge for representing his enemies in the past.
Lefkowitz tried to smear Sarnoff, and absurdly claimed that Epstein had not been investigated for sex trafficking—then made the sinister threat: “As I’m sure you are aware, the publication of false allegations of criminal conduct is defamatory per se. The Daily Beast should proceed carefully before publishing or republishing such allegations.” We ignored the bare-knuckled threat that Epstein would sue, and the files make a nonsense of Lefkowitz’s three-page screed.
Lefkowitz wrote that Sarnoff’s first report, along with two more about the financier’s crimes we published over that summer, had “done significant damage to Mr. Epstein.” He demanded that we “delay publishing any further articles” until we had reviewed their complaints, and that the Beast “proceed carefully before publishing or republishing such allegations.”
He also bombarded the Beast and our parent company IAC with letters, to no effect.
Other files show that Lefkowitz, who brokered Epstein’s deal with Acosta after a career in George W. Bush’s White House, maintained a close relationship with the pedophile. He took flights on Epstein’s private helicopter and invited the pervert to his son’s bar mitzvah. He remains employed as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis and as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.
As we continued to publish our stories, Epstein also resorted to a secret campaign to try to protect his online footprint from us. He received help with those efforts from his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s brother-in-law Al Seckel, an eccentric writer and scientific skeptic who was married to her sister Isabel Maxwell. He died in 2015.
“Should we attempt a front door assault. ?” Epstein wrote in one November 2010 exchange with Seckel about the Beast’s reporting. “back door assault seems more appropriate if you catch my drift,” Seckel replied.
Their assault took the form of gaming search engine algorithms to get our stories about the sordid details of Epstein’s private life to appear lower in results, and to promote his fake humanitarian achievements with bogus articles on sites seemingly run by Seckel.
“Obviously, one has to replace (or in truth move down and away) the negative articles with the positive articles,” Seckel wrote in another November 2010 exchange. “That’s why we need to build the way we do, as the negative material is already very well established, has strong powerful links and placements, such as the Huffington Post, Forbes, and Daily Beast.”
By December of that year, they had gained some modest traction. “Google suggests has gotten rid of two negatives jeffrey epstein jail and one jeffrey epstein pedophile,” another message from Seckel reads. “Also, the daily beast is now number 9. we’re close to bumping it off the radar.”
They were not close to hiding the truth, and so Epstein explored other avenues in his bid to limit our reach. He appears to have begun carefully coaching or otherwise convening with friends on what to tell our reporters.
“I would respond that lloyd, my mother passed away this week.. Jeffrey has stood by me, and has been a terriffic friend , through what was for me, a very difficult time,” he wrote in February 2011 to veteran publicist Peggy Siegal. She’d asked how to respond to queries from Lloyd Grove, our editor at large. The Beast has contacted her for comment.
Siegal was a close friend of Epstein’s, facilitating his access to elite social circles and burnishing his image in the media as the allegations against him mounted. Brown wrote for the Beast last week, describing how emails between Epstein and Siegal show how the pair plotted to “neutralize” our then-editor-in-chief in February 2011.
“I’m so proud of the way Beast has roared all through the Epstein coverage,” Brown said.
Sometime after March 2011, Epstein appears to have begun compiling notes on what he regarded as defamatory claims in at least four Beast stories, possibly with a view toward suing us, though he never brought any legal action.
A list of items he took issue with includes us accurately describing him as a “pedophile” and a “child molester,” our revelations that he kept “framed photos of nude young girls,” and our assertion that his crimes had done immeasurable “damage to hundreds of underage girls.”
Lefkowitz wrote to us again in June 2011 after learning we planned to publish more stories about Epstein. “I am very concerned that these forthcoming articles may contain inaccurate and libelous information about Mr. Epstein,” he said, asking again to “check and/or correct any facts about Mr. Epstein in advance of publication.”
He then followed up with an almost verbatim copy of that letter the following month, this time to the general counsel of IAC, the Beast’s parent company. He insisted “there have been no allegations of improper conduct since the fall of 2005,” and that Epstein had since “returned to his life as a philanthropist and financial adviser.”
Almost a year and a half after Sarnoff first broke news of Epstein’s plea deal, the pedophile boasted in a September 2011 exchange that his intimidation tactics had scared off The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News.
But the Beast continued to infuriate him. “Tina Brown /newsweek/daily beast, is the one left standing, not the post, or the news or times will bother me,” he wrote in an email to Jes Staley, then a JP Morgan executive and later CEO of the British bank Barclays. The Beast and Newsweek had merged at the time, with Brown overseeing both publications from the same office in New York.
Staley is now disgraced after revelations about how he reveled in helping Epstein despite concerns the pedophile was using his bank accounts for illicit activities, and an allegation that Staley had sex with one of Epstein’s victims.
Around November 2011, Kirkland & Ellis billed Epstein a total of $4,387.50 for the help it had provided in writing letters to the Beast on his behalf—which had achieved nothing. By the following year, he appears to have been put off confronting us directly.
“Sorry, no to contacting daily beast,” he wrote in a September 2012 message to a redacted recipient who had suggested asking us to remove parts of our articles where we had correctly referred to him as a pedophile.
The Justice Department’s files also show that in 2013, Epstein made efforts to have several publications take down his mugshot from their websites. One of those that folded under the pressure was Business Insider, whose founder Henry Blodget used editorial and technical staff to remove the image and have it deleted from Google results. Blodget has been contacted for comment. His surrender was first reported by Semafor.
The Beast, however, kept featuring the mugshot prominently in our stories.
Epstein’s furtive efforts to bury our articles online continued long after his exchange with Staley. One email shows an unidentified individual messaging him about continued attempts to make Daily Beast articles less prominent in Google search results in 2014.
Lawrence Krauss, a Canadian theoretical physicist who played a key role defending Epstein over the crimes we reported on, also shared notes with the financier on dealing with the Beast’s reporters.
“I will call him back now and expand upon your interst and support of science, ideas, education,” Krauss wrote to Epstein in January 2015 after our senior writer M.L. Nestel got in touch. “Some of the questions were stupid and I told him so,” said Krauss, who was forced out of Arizona State University in 2019 over multiple allegations of sexual harassment. The Daily Beast has contacted Krauss for comment.
In 2018, the Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown’s series of stories on Epstein turned the sweetheart deal the Beast first revealed in 2010 into a scandal, and prompted the FBI to re-investigate Epstein.
The Epstein files show the financier continued to obsess over our coverage until the end, with one of our reports sent his way by Trump adviser Steve Bannon just weeks before the cops closed in.
“Daily Beast has had the story in lead position ALL DAY — I’ve never seen that ever,” Bannon wrote. He was referring to a piece the Beast ran about how one of Epstein’s victims came forward to accuse him of assaulting her and her underage sister in the 1990s. Those allegations formed part of Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Epstein’s lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Harvard law professor and celebrity attorney whom she accused of having sex with her when she was still a minor. He has long denied those claims.
In July 2019, it was the Beast’s Harry Siegel, Kate Briquelet, and Pervaiz Shallwani who broke the bombshell news that Epstein had—finally—been arrested for a second time.
Justice had—at least partly—prevailed. Epstein’s rage against the Beast had not.
The post How Furious Epstein Fought to Stop the Daily Beast From Telling the Truth appeared first on The Daily Beast.
