Within the swirl of earlier declassified material is Epstein’s address book, whose contents was first published by journalist Nick Bryant in 2019. In the back, Epstein kept a carefully curated list of hotels, restaurants, and stores. There were no hidden gems, holes in the walls, or up-and-coming locations. Instead, it was filled with places that exclusively—and famously—catered to a global set of millionaires and billionaires who sought to see and be seen. There’s an entry for Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant, the famous power lunch spot (now permanently closed) in the Seagram building that had a James Rosenquist mural and was frequented by Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger. For dinner, he had phone numbers for Mr. Chow, where models, socialites, and other moneyed New Yorkers would drink lychee martinis and eat Peking duck while racking up sky-high bills.
Hotels were exclusively five-star and famous for their over-the-top fanciness: The Mark in New York, The Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, and Plaza Athénée in Paris. There’s even an entry for the secretive Corviglia Ski Club in Switzerland, whose membership once included Coco Chanel.
A mention in Jefffrey Epstein’s black book doesn’t mean something untoward or illegal happened there, or that he even frequented these places. But they do suggest a gilded existence—where gold on the outside hid a cheap, dark metal beneath.
Investigators took thousands of photos of Epstein’s compound on Little St. James, where some of the most egregious crimes are said to have taken place. One of them shows a shower. There’s a bottle of Frederic Fekkai shampoo, an expensive haircare product from the luxury salon. Yet also on the shelf? A bottle of Head and Shoulders. Amid all rare antiques, the extensive art, fancy amenities was a creepy, cruel man with dandruff shampoo.