How Jeffrey Epstein Wooed a Princess
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Late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein maintained close ties with members of at least two royal families in the years following his 2008 felony conviction for soliciting an underage girl, personal emails obtained by The Daily Beast show.
Epstein served 13 months in a Florida prison on state charges, then spent another year on house arrest and probation, which ended in July 2010. The terms of his release required him to register as a Level III sex offender for the rest of his life. But that didn’t stop him from palling around with the global elite.
In a Sept. 21, 2013 message to Epstein from his longtime executive assistant Lesley Groff, she laid out his schedule for the day. There was a reminder to call an Eastern European violinist, a breakfast with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and a string of appointments with professors, diplomats, and a real estate broker who was showing Epstein’s opulent Upper East Side townhouse to potential buyers.
And then there was the note about the princess.
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“Reminder: Princess Mette to arrive today and stay until Thurs, Sept 26,” Groff’s email notes, referring to Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit. “7:00pm Mette???” it adds, just after a note regarding a 6 p.m. meeting with former Norwegian Prime Minister, Nobel Committee chair, and Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjørn Jagland.
The emails, which The Daily Beast obtained from authorities in the U.S. Virgin Islands via a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal Epstein’s ongoing relationships with European royalty—even as a felon.
“Crown Princess Mette-Marit was visiting New York City on a work trip between September 21st until September 26th in 2013,” Guri Varpe, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian Royal Court, told The Daily Beast.
She provided details of Mette-Marit’s activities during the period she was in the city, which were two-pronged: as a Special Representative for UNAIDS, the Crown Princess met with youth leaders and others to discuss “continued commitment to combating HIV/AIDS.” She also attended the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, which honored a Norwegian fertilizer company for its “commitment to alleviating the global food shortage in an environmentally sound and sustainable manner.”
According to Varpe, Mette-Marit “has never been” to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned two islands and allegedly carried out some of his most heinous sex trafficking crimes. The princess stayed at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, not with Epstein, Varpe said, reiterating in a follow-up email that emphasized the fact that Mette-Marit never visited Epstein Caribbean lair.
Mette-Marit, who reportedly met Epstein through mutual friends, has apologized for her interactions with him, telling Norwegian business daily Dagens Næringsliv in 2019, “I never would have associated with Mr. Epstein if I had been aware of the seriousness of the crimes he committed. I should have investigated his past more thoroughly, and I am sorry that I didn’t.”
She broke off all contact with Epstein in 2013, according to Varpe.
“Partly, this was because she felt that Mr. Epstein attempted to trade on the relationship he had to the Crown Princess, and use it for his own gain in other relations,” Varpe previously told Dagens Næringsliv.
There are other familiar names among the emails between Epstein and Groff, such as Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.
“The Duchess for Tues or Wed (I have emailed her assistant, Amanda, RE a meeting),” Groff wrote to Epstein in March 2010.
“Duchess anytime,” Epstein replied.
Also included in the document dump is an email chain between Epstein and two JPMorgan executives, in which he mentioned Prince Andrew as a potential investment partner.
“He is now allowed to make money,” Epstein wrote.
In another, Epstein appeared to realize some of the dealings he was suggesting might not be suitable for public consumption. He made reference to “funky type assets [which] cannot go to private foundations,” and called on the bankers to “review the list of clients to make sure politically correct.”
Ferguson later admitted accepting nearly $25,000 from Epstein—via Prince Andrew—to pay back a debt she owed to a onetime personal assistant. She eventually apologized for her relationship with Epstein, telling the Evening Standard, “I deeply regret Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me. I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf.”
She vowed she would “have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again,” adding, “What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed.”
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Epstein subsequently threatened to sue Ferguson for calling him a pedophile. Then-British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted he maintained full confidence in Prince Andrew as the nation’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, though the prince himself apologized for his friendship with Epstein, and stepped down from the envoy job in July 2011.
Prince Andrew was front-and-center in a now-infamous 2001 photo with convicted Epstein procurer Ghislaine Maxwell and 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who alleged she had been trafficked by Epstein to have sex with Andrew.
Representatives for Ferguson and Prince Andrew did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Groff, who worked for Epstein for some 20 years and was identified by prosecutors as a “potential co-conspirator,” never faced criminal charges over helping facilitate her boss’ activities.
In an email, Groff’s attorney, Michael Bachner, told The Daily Beast, “Over the course of Ms Groff‘s employment with Mr. Epstein, she made hundreds of appointments every day for him for a wide range of individuals, including professors, politicians, actors and their spouses. It was simply not her function to ask the reason for any appointment and never suspected that Mr. Epstein was engaged in illegal conduct. Not surprisingly, Ms. Groff was notified by law enforcement well over a year ago that she would not be charged with any wrongdoing in connection with her employment with Mr. Epstein.”
Epstein hanged himself in 2019 as he awaited trial in a Manhattan lockup on federal sex trafficking charges. This month, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a $75 million settlement to victims of Epstein who accused the firm of turning a blind eye to what they said were red flags for sex trafficking by its well-heeled client.
“The scope and scale of Epstein’s abuse, and the many years it continued in plain sight, could not have happened without the collaboration and support of many powerful individuals and institutions,” plaintiffs’ attorney David Boies said in a statement.
The money is going to some 125 women, which is in addition to the $121 million disbursed to some 150 victims by a survivors’ fund set up after Epstein’s death. Last year, Epstein’s estate was forced to pay $105 million to the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle a 2020 civil law enforcement action under jurisdiction’s anti-criminal enterprise, sex trafficking, child exploitation, and fraud laws.
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