Daily Beast co-founder and former Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown revealed more about how the Beast’s reporting on Jeffrey Epstein left the sex predator’s elite circle “ignoring the elephant in the room.”
Brown, appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, recalled the effect of the series of articles written about Epstein in 2010 by anti-human trafficking advocate Conchita Sarnoff.
“There were all these people who were just in this favor bank of this elite world that we all know very much is the way the world goes round,” Brown told Daily Beast Executive Editor Hugh Dougherty.
“They were all there for different reasons, but at the end of the day, they were all ignoring the elephant in the room that they had no business ignoring because after we published those pieces, there was nothing you could say that was ambivalent about Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct.”
Sarnoff reported on the slap on the wrist Epstein received in 2008: an 18-month “house arrest” sentence for soliciting prostitution from a child, which allowed him to go back and forth from New York to his private Caribbean island. Epstein‘s illegal encounter wasn’t a one-off, she also revealed; he was a serial pedophile.
When first commissioning Sarnoff, Brown said there was no telling what horrors would be uncovered.
“There’s nothing like being sort of, you know, aggressive and ignorant at the same time,” she said. “At that point, Jeffrey Epstein was not this kind of mythic demon that he is now.”
Brown said Epstein came off like a “creepy social climber” when she first met him “briefly” at a Clinton Global Initiative reception in 2005.
“He was just one of those rich guys, you know, percolating around and who was sort of on the fringes of sort of the action, really. Not an outsider, but someone who certainly wasn’t a major figure,” she recalled. “He had these dead eyes that I always found very… I thought he was a creepy social climber was my instinct.”
But as the reporting process moved along, the web of Epstein’s influence came into greater focus; Sarnoff was able to acquire flight logs showing various VIPs taking trips to the financier’s private island.
“The more she reported, the more kind of alarming it became because of the people on those flight logs,” Brown said. “Then you start to think, ‘Oh my God, the guy is so hugely well-connected.’ And it was puzzling.”
“They were all kind of involved for different reasons,” Brown explained. “There were the ones who were looking always for the sex and the girls and the fact that he was… just satisfying people’s most kind of insidious fantasies, really. And then there were the ones who were just trying to grift in the same way that he was trying to grift on them… They want to ride on his private plane. They want him to get their kid into a fancy school.”
Epstein, for instance, helped get Woody Allen’s daughter into Bard College, emails from Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Previn, show.
The Daily Beast’s reporting quickly got Epstein’s attention.
Not only did they spur Epstein’s fixer, Peggy Siegal, to try to “neutralize” Brown, as the Department of Justice’s recently released Epstein files revealed, but Epstein himself managed to snake his way past security at the Daily Beast’s headquarters in New York to confront Brown in her office.
“I stood by the door, and I said to him, ‘Jeffrey… what are you doing here?’” Brown recalled on a prior episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
“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.’”
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