New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP/Instagram
A Florida man who went viral for his uncanny resemblance to deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein spoke out on Thursday and addressed the kerfuffle.
A video posted last Friday showed a man wearing a backwards baseball cap driving down a Florida highway in a convertible with the top down. The man who shot the video narrated it, stating, “Epstein is alive. Epstein is alive!”
“Dude has to get this constantly,” one user replied. “Time to grow a beard.”
On Thursday, the Epstein lookalike responded.
“Hey everybody, this is Palm Beach Pete,” he said while driving. “And my video went viral because some dude randomly filmed me while I was driving on I-95, unbeknownst to me. And the next thing I know, I’m a viral sensation. I had my phone down for about four hours and didn’t know my phone was blowing up with all these comments from that video. So, it got a lot of traction. It’s pretty crazy. Thanks.”
“So, you’re not Jeffrey Epstein?” a man off-camera asked.
“I’m not Jeffrey Epstein,” he replied. “I’m Palm Beach Pete.”
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 in what authorities say was a suicide. He has been back in the news as the Department of Justice has released many – but not all of its files – on Epstein. Last year, Congress passed a law mandating the DOJ release all of its Epstein files with only the names of the victims redacted. However, the DOJ has not released all of the documents and has redacted material that was not the victims’ names.
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