April 2, 2026
The Network: The financiers, institutions, and governments that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein
In 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was a registered sex offender, one year out of a Florida jail. According to emails in this collection, he was also brokering introductions to British cabinet officials for JPMorgan. The transaction at issue was the acquisition of an RBS commodities trading unit. The emails place him in contact with Peter Mandelson, then serving in Gordon Brown's cabinet. They reference Alistair Darling, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. His value to JPMorgan in that context, the documents indicate, was explicitly relational: he knew people, and those people returned his calls.
Hoffenberg and the origin
Before the hedge fund, before Les Wexner, before Little St. James, there was Steven Hoffenberg. Hoffenberg ran Towers Financial Corporation, which was eventually exposed as one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history, defrauding investors of approximately $460 million. He was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to 20 years.
In the court records from the Towers Financial proceedings, Hoffenberg's name appears everywhere. Epstein's appears in truncated form. Investigators concluded Epstein had been deeply involved in the scheme's design and execution. Hoffenberg, after his release from prison, described Epstein as the "mastermind" and said he had escaped prosecution by cooperating with investigators, at the cost of Hoffenberg's own exposure.
No cooperation agreement between Epstein and federal prosecutors in the Towers Financial matter appears in the documents. Its absence is itself noted in subsequent records reviewing his background. What is documented: Epstein was never charged. Hoffenberg served 18 years. The two men had been in close professional contact throughout the scheme's operation.
It was the template. Not the last time Epstein would be present at the scene and absent from the indictment.
Wexner
In 1991, Les Wexner signed a power of attorney giving Jeffrey Epstein authority to hire and fire his employees, borrow money in his name, and "take any and all actions consistent with the purpose of this appointment" on his behalf. Attorneys who later reviewed the document described it as among the broadest grants of financial authority they had seen outside a formal fiduciary structure. Wexner was, at the time, one of the wealthiest people in the United States, the founder and chief executive of L Brands, the conglomerate that owned Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works.
The Virgin Islands attorney general's complaint alleges that Epstein used this access to misappropriate more than $100 million through entity transfers, real property transactions in which he both negotiated and received the proceeds, and financial account movements that could not be accounted for by Wexner's team after the relationship ended.
The Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street, nine stories and one of the largest private residences in New York City, was acquired by a Wexner-affiliated entity and transferred to Epstein for a below-market sum. One court filing describes the transfer documents as signed by Epstein as both grantor and grantee.
Shortly before Epstein's 2008 conviction, court filings and JPMorgan financial production documents describe a block of Apple stock valued at approximately $46 million being transferred out of a Wexner-controlled account into an account in Epstein's name. Attorneys for victims and the USVI government argue the transfer was part of an asset concealment effort timed to protect liquid holdings from civil damages judgments. The documents identifying it were produced by JPMorgan in civil proceedings and carry Bates-referenced account records.
In a 2019 letter to the Wexner Foundation, Wexner acknowledged he had been "deceived" by Epstein and that Epstein had "misappropriated vast sums of money." The letter did not name a figure.
Victoria's Secret and the modeling pipeline
The Wexner relationship gave Epstein something beyond money: a brand. Multiple victim statements describe being told that Epstein owned Victoria's Secret and could arrange modeling contracts. Court documents establish he had no ownership interest in L Brands and was never employed by the company. In depositions taken in civil proceedings, senior L Brands executives acknowledged awareness that Epstein used the Victoria's Secret name in recruiting. None took documented action to stop it.
The modeling agency MC2 Model Management, based in Miami, received more than $1.5 million from Epstein's accounts according to Virgin Islands financial records. Court filings allege MC2 functioned as a procurement channel, bringing in models through what were presented as legitimate professional meetings. Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent with operations in New York and Europe, appears in the records as a separate procurement figure with a longer association with Epstein. He died in French custody in 2022 while under investigation for rape of minors.
The Sempra deal and British politics
RBS Sempra was the commodities trading joint venture between Royal Bank of Scotland and Sempra Energy. In 2010, JPMorgan acquired it for approximately $1.7 billion. The deal required regulatory approval and political goodwill at a moment when the British government was managing the partial nationalization of RBS following the financial crisis. The politics mattered, and Epstein was in the middle of them.
The emails describe his role in unambiguous terms: he was not advising on the transaction's structure or financing. He was providing access. Mandelson was in cabinet. Darling was at the Treasury. Epstein had relationships with both, and the correspondence indicates that his value to JPMorgan was precisely the ability to reach people who, at that specific moment, had direct influence over whether the deal could be completed cleanly.
He was, at the time, a registered sex offender.
Epstein's own financial interest in the transaction is referenced in the correspondence. Whether it was a fee arrangement or a position in one of the entities involved is not resolved in the documents available in this collection. What is resolved: Epstein was in the room, his role was explicit, and the bank knew it.
Staley
Jes Staley was head of JPMorgan's investment bank during the period when Epstein was among the bank's most profitable private banking clients. He later became chief executive of Barclays.
The JPMorgan civil complaint characterizes their personal correspondence as "profoundly close." One Staley email to Epstein says he has "few" relationships "so profound." The correspondence spans more than a decade and totals approximately 1,200 messages. It covers the years when Staley was climbing through JPMorgan's leadership, and the documents describe a relationship that was not purely transactional. Epstein attended events. He arranged introductions. He made calls on Staley's behalf to people who would take the calls. When Staley needed to be in a room with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that kind of access moved through Epstein. When he met Bill Gates and Prince Andrew, the same. A JPMorgan internal report reviewed in civil proceedings found that Staley had visited Little St. James.
JPMorgan's compliance department had been raising concerns about the Epstein account since at least 2006. The bank kept the account for seven more years. Staley and Epstein both left JPMorgan in 2013. Staley has denied knowledge of Epstein's criminal activity.
The FBI file
The collection includes a partially declassified FBI FD-1023 form referencing Epstein and foreign governments. An FD-1023 is a specific internal document used to record information provided by a confidential human source. Its presence here, tied to Epstein's name and foreign governments, has two possible readings: either someone was reporting to the FBI about Epstein's foreign contacts, or Epstein himself was the source providing that information. The documents do not establish which.
The cover sheet identifies the subject areas as involving Israel, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. The document entered this collection through a congressional oversight referral. The three substantive attachments the cover sheet references are not present. They were either withheld from the congressional production or held in a classified annex.
An FD-1023 with three missing attachments describing foreign intelligence contacts across three countries, surfacing through congressional oversight and going no further: that gap is itself a finding. The relationship between Epstein and foreign intelligence services was serious enough to document formally at the federal level. The substance of what was documented has not been released.
Universities
Epstein donated approximately $30 million to Harvard over several years, including funding for the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Harvard gave him office space on campus. The relationship continued after his 2008 conviction. University records reviewed in the collection show that Harvard administrators knew his conviction status and continued accepting donations.
At MIT, some donations were made after his conviction and deliberately structured as anonymous gifts. An internal review, prompted by a New Yorker investigation, found that administrators had been informed of his background and had made a deliberate decision to classify the donations as anonymous.
One email in the collection, written by someone in Epstein's circle discussing the rationale for continued Harvard engagement, uses the phrase "for the name." The academic connections were not philanthropic in any standard sense. They were cover: associations with institutions serious enough that the next allegation, whenever it came, would arrive into a context of established legitimacy rather than into a vacuum.
The Virgin Islands attorney general's complaint describes what all of this added up to: "Epstein deliberately cultivated relationships with powerful individuals in order to create a shield of legitimacy and political protection around his criminal enterprise." It names JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank as institutions that, the government alleges, prioritized those relationships over their legal obligations to detect and report trafficking proceeds.
The documents in this collection do not prove that every powerful person in Epstein's orbit knew what that orbit contained. What they show is that he built his protection the way he built everything else: systematically, with institutional backing, and across a long enough time horizon that each individual relationship could be explained away. The operation on the island and the operation in the boardroom were not separate stories. The documents show both, and they need to be read together.
Source documents include court filings from the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Virgin Islands attorney general's civil complaints, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan production materials from federal civil actions, House Oversight Committee materials, Maxwell trial exhibits, and FBI records from multiple jurisdictions. All are indexed in the Epstein Files collection, which contains 239,126 documents and is publicly searchable. Document dataset courtesy of jmail.world [1].