Posted by According to the millions of documents published by the US Department of Justice, the paedophile, who owned a flat in Paris, visited it many times in the years 2000 and 2010, until his death in prison in 2019.
An 800 square metre flat at 22 avenue Foch, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, valued at 8.6 million dollars. It was in this sumptuous property that Jeffrey Epstein made his home in the capital from 2001 onwards. It was his home base in Europe, where the multi-millionaire travelled several times a year, even monthly, until he was arrested in 2019 for sex trafficking of minors on his return to the United States from yet another trip to Paris.
The millions of documents published by the US Department of Justice on Friday 30 January provide an overview of the people the paedophile met in Paris between 2000 and 2010. It should be noted that he was unable to visit Paris in 2009, when he was imprisoned in the United States for trafficking in underage prostitutes. The emails consulted by franceinfo do not reveal the precise content of these Parisian meetings, and none of these documents implicate the people named in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes. To date, the judicial investigation opened in France in 2019 for “rape of minors over the age of 15” and “sexual harassment” has been closed since the suicide in prison of model agent Jean-Luc Brunel, in 2022. A close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, this Frenchman was accused of rape by several former supermodels. But on Monday 9 February, the NGO Innocence in Danger called for the reopening of an investigation in France into the actions of the American financier.
Lists of people to see in Paris
What was Jeffrey Epstein doing in the City of Light? Exchanges of emails with his assistant Lesley Groff give a very broad picture. For the multi-millionaire, Paris seemed to be the capital of European networking. Before each trip, he and his assistant would draw up a list of “people to see in Paris”. She would then try to arrange meetings with the people on the list. Once the agenda had been drawn up, she would send a summary e-mail to her boss with the date, time and place of the meetings, without specifying the purpose. Many of these meetings took place in the American financier’s flat.
For example, director Michel Hazanavicius was invited to visit his flat in March and May 2012. “I met him twice in person, and once at a dinner with around twenty people, including Woody Allen,” the Oscar-winning director told L’Humanité. “I obviously didn’t know about his predatory behaviour. These meetings took place in Paris at the time of the craziness of The Artist, which had just won Oscars. We were Hollywood darlings at the time, and met a lot of celebrities.”
David Stern, the man who appears to have been the intermediary between Prince Andrew and the paedocriminal, according to the BBC, is also noted in the diary for a “meeting at the Paris flat” on 11 September 2015. Two months later, Desmond Shum, a Hong Kong businessman, was in turn invited to lunch at the financier’s home. A few days before the arrest of the paedocriminal, an appointment at home with Anas Alrasheed, former Minister of Information of Kuwait, was also noted in the diary, on 19 June 2019.
Relationships in all walks of life
This network is representative of the way Jeffrey Epstein tried to extend his network. The continuous growth of his sphere of influence seems to have been facilitated by some of his Parisian contacts. These include Caroline Lang, the daughter of Jack Lang, who this week was forced to resign from the Arab World Institute following revelations about his links with Jeffrey Epstein. The 86-year-old former Socialist minister is, along with his daughter, the subject of an investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) for “laundering of aggravated tax fraud”.
Caroline Lang told France Télévisions that she met the businessman around 2012, via a couple of mutual friends: Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn. She was received on Avenue Foch on 12 May 2012, according to a summary email, and assured France Télévisions that she had “absolutely no suspicion” of the sexual crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2014, the producer tried to arrange a meeting with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had already appeared on Jeffrey Epstein’s list in May 2012. The Sofitel affair had come to a head and the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was awaiting trial on charges of “aggravated procuring” in the Lille Carlton affair. The meeting, scheduled for 30 June 2014 at the Royal Monceau in Paris, was eventually cancelled. It is not known whether the two men ever met.
Meals with businessmen from the Gulf
In Paris, Jeffrey Epstein also maintained his business network. Gianni Serazzi, an Italian entrepreneur specialising in luxury goods, Ugo Brachetti Peretti, an Italian oil executive, and Ian Osborne, a British billionaire implicated in the Panama Papers, were among the people he wanted to see during his visits.
Other businessmen from the Gulf States were also present, including Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati. On 28 September, Jeffrey Epstein wrote to him: “I am going to have lunch with Jabor Al Thani. Do you know him?” It was probably Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani, with whom he had exchanged several emails. This businessman is a member of the Qatari royal family, with whom Jeffrey Epstein seemed to be close. In 2018, he invited far-right ideologue and former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon by text message to a lunch at the “house in Paris of HBJ”, the nickname of Hamad ben Jassim Al Thani, former Prime Minister of Qatar.
The influence of Ariane de Rothschild
Another business relationship, with banker Ariane de Rothschild, has turned into a personal one. The Franco-German boss of the Swiss banking group Edmond de Rothschild was introduced to him by Nicolas Sarkozy’s former adviser, Olivier Colom, in June 2013. Colom himself had been recommended to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 by Norwegian diplomat Terje Roed-Larsen. When questioned by Mediapart, Olivier Colom maintained that he had “never been aware of anything that was revealed by the arrest of this criminal in 2019, apart from his previous conviction. I was taken advantage of and I deeply regret it.” For its part, the Edmond de Rothschild group told Le Monde that “Ariane de Rothschild had no knowledge of Mr Epstein’s personal behaviour and condemns the crimes of which he was guilty”.
Mentioned alongside Caroline Lang in a list of “important telephone numbers” in Paris, intended for Jeffrey Esptein’s assistants, Ariane de Rothschild in turn arranged meetings for the businessman. In an email dated 12 February 2014, she suggested dinner the following day at L’Ami Louis restaurant in Paris, with Terje Roed-Larsen and his then political adviser, French diplomat Fabrice Aidan. According to Radio France’s revelations, “this foreign affairs secretary for the East, who has worked for the Quai d’Orsay for twenty-five years, exchanged dozens of direct and sometimes familiar emails with Jeffrey Epstein” between 2010 and 2017. Jean-Noël Barrot, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced on Tuesday 10 February that he was taking the matter to court. According to Mediapart, the diplomat was investigated by the FBI and the UN in 2013 on suspicion of consulting child pornography websites, before leaving the United States.
In the same email, Ariane de Rothschild suggested “organising something” with Thierry Bruet, a French painter and sculptor. A few hours later, he received another email, in which she told him that the Franco-Tunisian fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa had invited them to dine “in his kitchen”. Jeffrey Epstein is also very active in the artistic world, where he is keen to buy works.
Links to the scientific community
Jeffrey Epstein has financed a number of scientific projects in the United States and has also sought to forge links with the French scientific community. This time, his gateway was Misha Gromov, a Russian mathematician who had naturalised in France. The two men exchanged numerous emails and met on several occasions, including 21 June 2019 in Paris, as mentioned in the paedocriminal’s diary. Jeffrey Epstein or his assistant asked him by email for recommendations of “interesting” people in Paris.
In fact, it was Misha Gromov that the American financier consulted in 2017 to approach Cédric Villani. The businessman then contacted the LREM MP on behalf of the mathematician, a figure so prestigious that Cédric Villani claimed in Libération that he had not asked himself any questions. “When someone announces himself on Gromov’s recommendation, you go!”
Misha Gromov also repeatedly recommended that Jeffrey Epstein meet the geneticist François Taddei. The scientist was immediately added to the list of people to see. In an earlier email, Misha Gromov had already mentioned the geneticist, explaining that he was “hoping for help from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research created and directed by François Taddei” to fund “an extra-curricular mathematics programme for children”. To which Jeffrey Epstein replied: “For your information, if it can help, Jack Lang is a very close friend of mine, he’ll help you if you want.” Franceinfo has found no record of a meeting between François Taddei and Jeffrey Epstein.
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