Child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein once suggested giving Pope Francis an erotic massage—complete with a lewd joke about Jesus.
The crude reference was contained in one of millions of files released by the Justice Department into Epstein’s life, which have so far referenced everyone from Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet, to billionaires, Democrats, and journalists reporting on the disgraced financier’s networks.
But in newly surfaced emails from 2015, written when Pope Francis was visiting the U.S., Epstein suggested inviting him over for a “massage” and joked in vulgar terms about the pope sexually climaxing during the encounter.
“=hought (sic) id invite him for a massage,” said the sex predator’s poorly written email, which also contained letters masked by symbols.
“so when he =ears oh jesus Im coming. he feels =appy”
Epstein’s email was written on September 23, 2015, seven years after he was convicted in a Florida court on child sex charges under a controversial plea deal that allowed him to escape more severe charges.
The vulgar message was a reply to his brother Mark, as they discussed Francis’ visit that year, a tour that included meeting then President Barack Obama, addressing Congress in Washington and the UN General Assembly in New York, and holding mass at Madison Square Gardens.
During the New York leg of the visit, the Pope stayed overnight in an apartment not far from Epstein’s own residence.
“You’=e probably smart enough to get out of town when the pope is here, but =f you’re in NYC, he will be staying around the corner from =ou,” Mark Epstein wrote.
“You should invite him over for an egg cream and =xchange stories.”
Church observers say the emails were emblematic of the way the disgraced financier often mocked the Christian faith and treated the Catholic Church as something to be undermined.
Christopher Hale, a former Obama staffer who now runs the Substack publication “Letters From Leo” said that Epstein “was not merely being tasteless.”
“He was expressing contempt—for Francis, for the papacy, and for the moral authority the pope represented,” Hale wrote.
The latest tranche of DOJ files presents an insight into this, showing how Epstein developed an intense interest in Vatican history and politics in the 2000s, despite not being Catholic.
He pored over Catholic texts and papal biographies, posed with his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell alongside Pope John Paul II, and surrounded himself with Vatican critics such as MAGA acolyte Steve Bannon.
In a 2019 text message, Bannon even wrote a message to Epstein suggesting they should “take down Francis,” who Bannon viewed as a significant obstacle to his brand of nationalist populism.
The correspondence between Epstein and Bannon took place at the height of concerted conservative efforts to oppose Francis, who had signaled his openness toward LGBTQ Catholics and expressed concern for migrants and the environment in his public statements and written documents.
Francis was 88 when he died Easter Monday in April 2025, one day after Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, visited him at his residence in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.
MAGA world has now set its sights on his successor, Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, who has asserted the church’s distance from Trumpism on everything from immigration policy to foreign policy and climate change.
In December, Pope Leo hit out at Trump’s Russia-Ukraine peace proposal and warned that the administration risked destroying the longstanding alliance between Europe and the United States.
In October, days after Trump described climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Leo declared that world leaders should “act with courage” on the issue.
This resulted in MAGA Republicans hitting out and calling him a “woke pope.”
And he has repeatedly raised concerns about the treatment of immigrants under Trump’s deportation strategy, raising the ire of the White House.
“This administration is trying to enforce our nation’s laws in the most humane way possible, and we are upholding the law,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in response to Leo’s rebuke last year.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for her role as his accomplice.
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