Starting in the Summer of 2016 and then through the first year of the Trump administration, as I wrote my book Fire and Fury about the first months of the Trump White House, I spoke periodically to Trump’s longtime and now estranged friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, of course, would go on to be branded as among the world’s most famous sexual predators and, in 2019, died, most likely a suicide, under federal indictment and as a prisoner in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison.
But in 2016 and in the nascent days of the Trump administration, Epstein, although the subject of many allegations and lawsuits, was still a free man, living alone in extraordinary splendor in one of the largest private residences in Manhattan.
Among the reasons he agreed to talk to me was his own incredulity that Donald Trump, a man who, in their friendship, had displayed so many disqualifying attributes to high office, was on his way to becoming president—indeed, who became president. In short, even Jeffrey Epstein was appalled.
Our conversations took place in the dining room in the back of his house on East 71st Street, where he customarily conducted something like an ongoing colloquium with a long and now notorious list of the rich, powerful, and celebrated. Or we would sit, up a grand staircase, in the baronial study which ran the length of the mansion.
Epstein was, clearly, obsessed with Trump, and I believe personally afraid of him. He was not the only one who knew the real Donald Trump, he told me, but he did, surely, know him, really know him, he would emphasize.
Now, he was groping for a way to explain how the man he knew—a man who had hardly ever tried to hide his blatant moral flaws—had risen to the very top of American politics.
Last week, on the podcast I host with James Truman for iHeart, Fire and Fury—The Podcast, we first broached the Epstein-Trump subject after the model, Stacey Williams, came forward to discuss how Trump had abused her when she was Epstein’s girlfriend in the 1990s. The response to the podcast was immediate and overwhelming, suggesting a hunger to know about a story, the Trump-Epstein relationship, that has seemed for so long to hide in plain sight.
The Fire and Fury podcast has partnered with the Daily Beast, which has helped with the myriad technical difficulties of bad recordings (my fault here), to publish, in Epstein’s own words, some of the highlights of his experiences with and observations about what I think can be fairly described as his fellow predator.
During the podcast I noted the glaring and confounding circumstance that one of these predators ended up in the country’s darkest prison and the other in the White House.
We still need to understand how that came to pass.
Editor’s note: The Daily Beast’s Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles holds an investment in Kaleidoscope, the maker of the Fire and Fury podcast.
