They are titans of industry and best-selling authors, world-renowned scientists and banking moguls, top-tier journalists and political power players.
In message after message, they often turned to the same man for advice, for connections, and to banter and trade gossip about President Donald Trump.
That man, Jeffrey Epstein, was already a registered sex offender after a 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution with a minor – but that did not seem to deter his pen pals, some of whom even looked to him for guidance on avoiding their own sexual scandals.
Those messages were laid bare in extraordinary fashion last week when the House Oversight Committee released more than 23,000 pages of records obtained from the estate of Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
The messages have been heavily scrutinized for new revelations about Epstein’s relationship with Trump – and indeed, show that Epstein relished talking about their one-time friendship as Trump rose to political power, offering his opinions on everything from the president’s sanity – “f***ing crazy” – to who should be in his Cabinet.
But the thousands of Epstein emails also show another key aspect of his uniquely corrupting role in American society: How he cast himself at the center of a web of power and influence.
CNN’s analysis of about 2,200 email threads found that at least 740 were exchanges between Epstein and prominent figures in academia, government, media and business. Epstein’s correspondence with them, which also included numerous text messages, spanned a decade from 2009 to the day before his July 2019 arrest.
Those text messages also show him communicating with other figures who apparently aren’t named in unredacted emails, including messages exchanged with Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett during a 2019 Congressional hearing. Plaskett told CNN that Epstein was a constituent, and that he was “a reprehensible person, absolutely disgusting.”
In starkly revealing terms, the emails show personal conversations between American luminaries and a man they knew to be a sexual predator – and yet still trusted for access, advice and friendship.
METHODOLOGY: CNN reporters parsed more than 23,000 pages of documents released by the House Oversight Committee and identified about 2,300 email threads. Emails reproduced in court documents or other files were not included. In totaling the email threads Epstein exchanged with prominent figures, CNN counted only separate documents released by the committee. About 100 email threads were removed from the analysis because they were duplicates of others, leaving about 2,200 distinct files. Some of those documents showed the same email thread at different points in time. CNN reporters also reviewed text message and iMessage chains between Epstein and some of the prominent figures, but did not include those messages in the count of emails they exchanged.
