"It's Just Politics:" The Time I Met Jeffrey Epstein, Twice

The single most bizarre meeting of my life

Hi everyone! Since this post about Epstein has gone viral, I’ve received the advice to paywall the post. I don’t want to paywall this post, but I do need money — I am not currently financially stable and I am actively trying to figure that out. If you are in a financial position to subscribe to my Substack, then you are helping me go on writing.

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the post.

—

I initially met Jeffrey Epstein in a weirdly uncomplicated way: We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance.

This was back in 2017. I was in my mid-thirties, spending lots of time in New York City. I have one of the broadest networks of anyone I know because I spent years attending every event and taking every meeting; by 2017, I had a consulting business at the intersection of media and technology, and I was good at it partly because I knew a wide range of people. When I arrived in New York I put out the word that I’d be there a few months, and introductions rolled in.

The acquaintance who introduced me to Jeffrey Epstein told me that Epstein was a very interesting guy, had funded amazing projects, but had a “complicated” reputation. They said Epstein’s reputation was due to “politics.”

This was well before Epstein re-emerged into the national consciousness. At the time, I had never heard of him. I glanced quickly over Epstein’s Wikipedia page and accepted the “it’s just politics” explanation without researching the matter more thoroughly. At the time, I figured it was just another coffee meeting.

It did not turn out to be “just another coffee meeting.”

It turned out to be part of a shift in worldview, a re-examination of what people call “conspiracy theories,” a set of deep questions around trust.

In the years since, I’ve intermittently wondered whether I should publish the story you are about to read. I know very little about Jeffrey Epstein overall, and I had no contact with him following our two brief meetings in 2017, so I don’t know if this account will be very illuminating. Nevertheless, here it is. As God is my witness, every word of this is true.

—

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly had the largest private residence in Manhattan, but the place wasn’t too blatant from the outside. His initials, in gold, were embedded beside the wooden front doors. I glanced around as I walked through the doors and saw some cameramen down the street, watching me.

Photo of Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan doors. Credit: Bill Tompkins, Getty Images

In Epstein’s front room, a breathtakingly competent receptionist corralled me and instructed me to sit and wait. I sat where she told me to sit. From my chair, I looked around and saw, down a hallway, a painting that appeared to depict Bill Clinton in an embarrassing position.

Eventually, I was led into a fancy dining room where Epstein sat alone at a long table, in front of a huge display of photos that showed him alongside celebrities like Trump and the Clintons.

At first the conversation meandered. We discussed basic scientific research (Epstein reportedly was one of the biggest private science funders in the USA). We discussed spirituality, and public health, and immersive art. He seemed smart and quick. Then, with the public health conversation, we started talking about New York City’s sexual history… and suddenly we were discussing what sex parties were like before the AIDS crisis (a time he was old enough to remember and I was not).

I should note here that I spent much of my twenties doing activism, writing, and education related to sexuality and sexual minorities. People often ask me about this personal history, and I always try to answer their questions honestly because I think honesty is important. As a result of my unusual history, I was not automatically discomfited when Epstein brought up sexual topics, because people frequently bring up those topics with me. Yet, as the conversation intensified, something about his energy became intensely uncomfortable for me, even though I am accustomed to navigating such topics.

After an hour or two, he told me that we should talk again sometime. I went about my day. But it was hard to stop thinking about him. I returned to my West Village apartment with a sense of unease.

From my brief scan of Epstein’s Wikipedia entry, I recalled that Epstein had been convicted of something related to sex crimes against minors, but I also recalled that he hadn’t served much time. The person who introduced me to Epstein dismissed his crimes as “politics.” But was it true?

I thought to myself: I would expect a man convicted of such crimes to carefully contain his sexuality. Yet Jeffrey Epstein, in person, was anything but contained.

I began to research his background. I had work to do, but I couldn’t concentrate. The day after I met him, I spent ten hours on-and-off reading about Epstein. I felt increasingly horrified, fascinated, and baffled about what I’d stumbled into. As I read article upon article about Epstein’s trial ten years before, it became obvious that his conviction — far from being political — was blatantly lightened by his political connections. That Epstein spent only a year with a ludicrously comfortable jail sentence was a miscarriage of justice — not because he was innocent, but because he was guilty as sin. And the only way any person could say it was “just politics” would be if they’d never looked into the matter at any depth, or if they had knowingly lied.

Jeffrey Epstein soon emailed me again, inviting me back. Ever since, I’ve wondered whether I ought to have said no to that second meeting. But I wanted to know what he wanted from me, and I wanted to better understand what I’d wandered into. So I agreed to go back one more time.

—

On my first visit to that lavish mansion, I expected “basic coffee meeting.” On my second visit, I had no idea what to expect.

Epstein met me at the same long table. I think this was the moment where he started insisting that I should call him Jeffrey, but maybe it was earlier. Anyway, everything initially seemed the same as our first meeting, except that there was an old-fashioned phone sitting on the table at his elbow. Within the first fifteen minutes of our conversation, the phone rang and Jeffrey picked it up. He said something like: “Oh yeah, give the girl an internship.” Then he named several large amounts of money.

Then Jeffrey hung up and turned to me with a smile. He informed me that sometimes, he really wanted to give people money. It was the easiest thing in the world, Jeffrey smilingly said, to make it look like the money hadn’t come from him.

What was happening? I cleared my throat. I felt momentarily uncertain if I was imagining things. Was he offering me money? But why? I suspected that if I asked point-blank if he was offering me money, then he’d just laugh.

What was the most effective and polite way to turn it down? I tried to think. I mumbled something about how I wasn’t looking for money, although I understood that he had generously funded our mutual friend. Jeffrey’s eyes flickered, as if I’d communicated something of import, and he changed the subject.

Soon after that, he rang a bell and a group of young women entered the room.

Really pretty women. Who looked like teenagers.

Oh.

I had read about these barely-legal Russian women in Page Six. A source told the gossip magazine that Jeffrey’s Manhattan mansion was “full of young beauties,” and that “half of them are from the former Soviet Union and the other half are a mix of Americans and Europeans… When the Russian girls arrive in the city, they already have Jeffrey’s phone number.”

I looked at them. They did not look underage to me. The Page Six article had reported that they were at the legal age of consent. Still, they were much younger than me, effortlessly lovely, particularly the one Jeffrey reached out and pulled into his lap. Her perfect features were bored, as only a teenager can look bored.

The group asked if I wanted anything to drink. I definitely didn’t want an intoxicant, so I asked for hot cocoa, soon borne to me by a cloud of giggling girls on a silver tray with elaborate accessories. I took small sips and continued to feel clear-headed.

At this point, as you might imagine, I was confused about what might be expected of me. But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because Jeffrey immediately prompted me to start talking about the sexuality workshops I used to teach in my twenties. Then he encouraged the girls to ask me questions. The group particularly wanted to know about BDSM and polyamory (“Polyamory! Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” said Jeffrey).

By doing this, Jeffrey, intentionally or not, diverted me into my educator mode. This is a role I’m accustomed to, and the young women seemed genuinely interested, so I simply started talking to them about sex education. Taking this familiar “educator” role did not erase the strangeness of the moment, but it gave me something to talk about while I sought a sense of what lay under the surface.

My audience was clearly surprised by the impromptu sex education lesson — they were just as surprised as I was. But despite their surprise, they did not seem nervous or angry. Were these girls being trafficked? The situation felt weird, but simultaneously, the young women — at least, the women I was seeing in front of me, in that moment — seemed capable. They showed an unusual mix of curiosity, excitement, and intense judgments: One, sitting kitty-corner from me, responded to a mild description of BDSM by insisting, “Any man who’d do that to you doesn’t really love you.”

I gazed across the table at her. The gap in our ages and life experiences hit me abruptly, like a blow. Suddenly the BDSM distinctions of consent and non-consent felt hard to explain, even though I’ve explained them a million times.

I felt Jeffrey’s attention on me like heat.

I dropped my eyes. I moved the very pretty spoon around my hot cocoa. Some classic feminine instinct stirred and gently suggested that I could get out in one piece if I said something like: ‘I have a boyfriend.’

The bored and beautiful girl in Jeffrey’s lap obscured much of his body from my view, but I could see his face. I began to utter a sentence about “my primary partner,” which is the polyamorous way to say “I have a boyfriend.” I was unsure how to finish my sentence, but it didn’t matter because Jeffrey interrupted me, laughing: “Primary partner! I haven’t heard that phrase before. I like that.” And yet, when I met his eyes, he looked stricken and glanced away.

What… was… happening? Was Jeffrey Epstein disappointed that I had a boyfriend? I felt extremely confused. Had this rigmarole been an attempt by one of Manhattan’s richest men to seduce me?

It all seemed so absurd that I could hardly believe it. How could I imagine that this powerful, intelligent supervillain would be attracted to… me? Why would I catch his eye when he was literally surrounded by teenage Russian models? But on a deeper, interpersonal level, I knew the truth of the disappointment I saw so briefly on his face. In that moment, I also knew something else: I was attracted to this man, in a weird way, even though I didn’t want to be.

Later, I read the stories about his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s somewhat older than me. I learned about the sorts of things they (allegedly) did together. And eventually, finally, I began to understand the terrible role that, maybe, Jeffrey Epstein tried to recruit me for.

But that was much later. In the moment, I felt a rapidly increasing desire to gracefully escape one of the most confusing meetings I’d ever had, without triggering the enmity of a powerful man.

I drank the hot cocoa. It was some of the best I’d ever tasted. I politely said so.

The meeting wound down calmly, like most coffee meetings. I answered several more fascinated questions from the girls. Then I exited, blinking, into a sunny afternoon and took the subway home.

Later, I got CCed on an email between Jeffrey and the person who introduced us. The email notified our mutual acquaintance that Jeffrey would send them a new grant of money.

—

For a long time the Epstein meetings were something I rarely discussed — one of many weird things that have happened in my weird life, but not a subject for casual conversation.

Occasionally, in my perambulations around the media and tech industries, his name cropped up. One woman turned to me at a random party and said: “I heard you met Jeffrey. Isn’t he great?”

“Ah,” I said. I cast about for the right thing to say, and decided to be fairly direct. “I did meet him. What do you think of the charges against him?”

“Oh,” she said, with an airy wave of her hand, “it’s just politics.”

A year or two later, I heard from a female friend, through a community whisper network, that this woman was a known procuress for Epstein.

What was the right thing to do? I turned the question over and over in my mind. I thought about the young women I’d seen in his house. They seemed fine, but were they? Even if they were, the entire interaction had been so weird that I was sure something sketchy was happening, somewhere, in Epstein’s orbit. But at the same time, I did not feel that I had any power to affect things: He was operating right out in the open; he obviously felt that he had impunity.

When I discussed him with people in my Bay Area and New York communities, it was in whispers, at parties and cocktail bars, trying to figure out where he was active and where he was not. None of us, it seemed, felt we had any ability to do anything about him at all, except stay away from him.

Then Epstein’s history resurfaced in 2019 and erupted into a brand-new national scandal. Previously it had never occurred to me that he’d ever face true accountability for his crimes, as seemingly it also did not occur to anyone else in the whisper network that previously discussed him. So his re-arrest felt both surprising and correct. I felt concerned and curious about what we might learn as the situation went public, and also relieved that justice might finally be served.

But then a strange effect began to swirl through my community conversations about Epstein. In the wake of the new charges, I heard that many associated Epstein with “conspiracy theories.” Among the “liberal coastal elite” that comprises many of my friends, many equated his name with conspiracy theory mockery. Sometimes during these conversations I asked whether any of them had looked into the story. Invariably, they had not.

There emerged a widespread belief that the Jeffrey Epstein story began and ended with some bad stuff back in the oughts — oh, and something about the MIT Media Lab (but let’s not mention Harvard, or any other institutions) — and that it was purely a story about sexual abuse. But the story of Epstein is not just a story about the complexities of sex or sexual assault. It’s about power and money and networks.

Depending on your perspective about all this, two more details I picked up in those years may be interesting. The first was a thread on Twitter/X that I saw soon after Epstein’s crimes resurfaced into the public consciousness, in 2019. I don’t know the author of the thread and he deleted his posts soon after I saw them, but he appeared to be an academic, the protégé of someone who got in trouble for accepting Epstein money. The academic pointed out that, while the conversation about Epstein generally focuses on money and sex, it was clear that Epstein also loved to collect clever minds for conversation and networking. The academic suggested that a man so stigmatized and isolated might care, most of all, about being able to have an interesting conversation with interesting people. He suggested that people like me, who got referred to Epstein for “coffee meetings,” were more important and less interchangeable than we looked.

The other detail came from a short article, which I can’t find now, about a woman Epstein tried to date. She was reportedly an entrepreneur with a strong public interest in spirituality and “woo,” and unlike most of the women he went after, she was not young. This has some obvious similarities to me, and after I read about her, I began to wonder what sort of energetic projects Epstein might have been attempting, and whether, perhaps, I might have been potentially valuable to him due to my interest in those domains. Some of the science research Epstein funded was about stigmatized woo or woo-adjacent topics; when I met him, it was common knowledge in my community that I’m very interested in spirituality. I assume today that I will never know what he was trying to accomplish with the woo/spirituality stuff, but it remains a question I think about sometimes.

For years, many people I spoke to seemed weirdly convinced that — unlike the obvious Epstein-related sex conspiracies that have been repeatedly proven — any other conspiracies related to Epstein must be “conspiracy theories.” Yet money and power and networks are clear, well-documented aspects of how Epstein’s sexual playbook worked. Stories like mine show an outline of how recruitment attempts were made. These stories show how our social context, including our non-sexual networks, created a seemingly respectable veneer over recruitment among the “liberal coastal elite,” while also entangling our sexuality, and how this sometimes occurred in situations where the presence of sexual energy felt strangely hard to define.

Sex and power don’t exist in a vacuum sealed away from the rest of society. In any community, sex and power are deeply encoded causal elements in the network. So why were the political elements of the Epstein story labeled, for so long, a so-called “conspiracy theory” — especially when we already know that an active political conspiracy protected him from justice at least once?

This experience taught me a lot about people’s ability to dismiss uncomfortable facts, about the human capacity to unsee terrible things that ought to be visible, given that they’re directly in front of our faces. In 2020, years later, when I got involved with the so-called “dissident right,” this was one aspect that drew me: During those years, it felt like the right wing was the only place I could go where smart people were willing to talk about this stuff without labeling it a conspiracy theory. After many years of seeing threads of corruption wound through my “liberal coastal elite” world, I had an easier time trusting people who were willing to talk about it, than people who weren’t.

At this point I don’t identify with any political movement, but if I were going to start, I’d want it to be a movement that treats this stuff at an appropriate level of seriousness and has an actual plan for dealing with it: A movement that never, ever dismisses it as “just”… anything.

•

—

—

Again: If you are in a financial position to subscribe to my Substack, then you are helping me go on writing.

If you’ve never heard of me and are curious, you can learn more about me and this Substack here.

Thank you!

—

Update, 11/15/25: I have restricted the ability to comment on this post to paid accounts, but the entire post remains free to read. Please refer to my comments policy if you’d like to know more about how I handle comments.

—

Update, 2/1/26: Someone on Twitter/X read the Epstein files and looked me up. This person pointed out that I emailed Epstein a few months after these meetings happened, in early 2018. Until now, I completely forgot about this, but it’s true. The reason this happened is that my friends were curious about Epstein and wanted to learn more about what was going on, and I also became more curious over time, after I processed what happened during the two meetings in October 2017. So I did in fact email Epstein again in early 2018, because I wanted to see if I could learn more about what on Earth was going on. Epstein never got back to this inquiry, and I never saw him again.