Photo: Bill Tompkins/Getty Images
Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse had always been something people talked about: how he apparently got it for free from Les Wexner, the various heads of state and celebrities who came in and out of the Gilded Age mansion at 9 E. 71st Street, or the cash and passports that turned up there after his arrest in 2019. The décor has also been the subject of some intrigue. A 2003 Vanity Fair profile reported on a “row” of glass eyeballs in the entrance hall, the New York Post shared a painting of Bill Clinton in a blue dress and a description of “a mannequin hanging from the ceiling — dressed up in a wedding gown,” and the New York Times spoke with a PR rep in 2019 who described a mural depicting “a photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.”
But on Tuesday, the Times ran an exposé with a few more of the odd things the sex offender kept in the townhouse overlooking the Frick. Here’s a rundown.
A listing photo shows a room that Epstein apparently used as his office, according to the Times piece.
Photo: Modlin Group
The Times piece describes the statue as art. The figure appears to be bronze and impossibly heavy, and it looks down at whoever is climbing a staircase to upper floors that held Epstein’s large office and primary bedroom.
We’ve seen the dark, eggplant-wallpapered massage room off Epstein’s bedroom. But we hadn’t seen Epstein’s sterile and oddly floral bedroom “suite,” as the Times calls it, which it reports has a “cluster of bathrooms” plus a barely hidden camera pointed toward the bed.
The décor is Laura Ashley by way of a beach-house rental, with a palette of white and blue that seems to take a cue from the Chihuly-esque chandeliers. They’re almost as 1990s as the huge flowers on the walls, which might be wallpaper but seem hand-painted.
The Times review of leaked photos showed “paintings of naked women, a large silver ball and chain, and shelves stocked with lubricant.” It doesn’t share those photos, though; this is the Times.
A Wall Street trader who visited the house “to pitch his investment strategy” sometime before the 2019 arrest told the Post that they saw a taxidermied poodle and a tiger. The Times has a photo of the tiger, and it’s as off-putting as the elephant head hanging on the wall of the Harvard Club.
Epstein had a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece in his office. The Times, perhaps needlessly, spells out the connection, describing the “1955 novel in which an intellectual develops a sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl and repeatedly rapes her.”
The Times reports that the dining-room décor included a map of Israel, signed by Ehud Barak — who also shows up as one of the signatories on a letter that the Times unearthed, which was sent to Epstein on his birthday in 2016 — and co-signed by Barak’s wife. It described him as a “closed book” and a “collector of people” who knows “everything about everyone.”
The Times devotes most of its word count naming the people who pop into photos that Epstein kept framed on sideboards around the mansion. There’s Mohammed bin Salman (“Atop a wooden sideboard” in the office, per the Times); President Trump and Melania (canoodling with Ghislaine and Epstein himself); a framed one-dollar bill signed by Bill Gates with the phrase “I was wrong!”; and shots of Mick Jagger, Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk.