On October 11, 2013, Thorbjorn Jagland strode through the mahogany doors of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and stepped up to the podium.
In front of an array of television cameras, the chairman of the committee announced the winner of that year’s peace medal.
There was something “beautiful” in the work of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), he said, hoping it could nudge the war in Syria closer to an end. There was a banquet, then a torchlit procession.
Then, after a few days’ rest, on October 14, the former Norwegian prime minister emailed Jeffrey Epstein to ask whether he could visit Little St James, the palm-fringed island in the Caribbean where the financier sexually abused underage girls for more than 20 years.
“I can arrange tickets,” Epstein happily replied. “Xmans [sic] present.”
In total, the Epstein files now number more than six million documents, images and videos. Managed by Donald Trump’s department of justice, the release has largely spared the US president.
But – perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not – it has torn through the globe-trotting Davos elite with the force of a pent-up earthquake.
Much has been redacted. Thin, black boxes obscure the names of potential co-conspirators in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.
I guess there’s nowhere quite like it
But from the files we can see with unprecedented clarity how the Coney Island-born maths teacher built two separate, if allegedly overlapping, networks: one of young girls, the other of the world’s richest, brightest and most powerful men.
Some time in 2014, Epstein held a cocktail party at his 21,000 sq ft Manhattan townhouse, reputedly the largest in the city.
By then, the host was a convicted sex offender, released from a light 13-month sentence for soliciting a minor on July 22, 2009, when he emailed British politician Peter Mandelson that freedom felt “fresh, firm and creamy”.
Before long, the New York limestone mansion became, once again, the scene of bewildering lunches and intellectual tete-a-tetes.
Guests willing to brave the paparazzi often included Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and early investors in cryptocurrency. Conversation could whip from Mars to missiles, blockchain technology to the big bang.
“I guess there’s nowhere quite like it,” said Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire newspaper owner, according to an unpublished profile of Epstein by the journalist Michael Wolff, who was invited as a fly-on-the-wall.
Surrounding the guests were hints of Epstein’s predilection. Copies of Nabokov’s Lolita left on the table; in his Paris mansion, a literal (stuffed) elephant in the room. And ever present, according to Wolff, a coterie of “comely young women” who would attend Epstein on his rare walks in the park “like something out of an 18th-century French court”.
Also present that night was Mr Jagland, the handsome, white-haired diplomat who still led the Nobel Peace Prize panel and had, in 2009, been appointed secretary-general of the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights body and overseer of the European Court of Human Rights.
He ran up vast expense accounts while working for Douglas Leese
The father of two gave a “scathing critique” of American foreign policy, Wolff wrote, defended his 2009 decision to award the Nobel prize to Barack Obama, then was offered a flight back to Europe on Epstein’s private jet, the so-called “Lolita Express”.
How Epstein afforded such an outrageous lifestyle remains unclear. In his own telling, he was a financial mastermind. When banking evolved in the 1980s to depend on complex equations, the super-wealthy turned to him to manage their affairs, he often said. But according to a lengthy investigation by the New York Times, Epstein was also an inveterate conman and thief who latched on to wealthy clients with his natural charisma and dated their daughters while bleeding them dry.
In 1981, at the age of 28, he quit Bear Stearns instead of serving a suspension for insider trading. He ran up vast expense accounts while working for Douglas Leese, the British defence magnate, who sent him away in disgrace from his countryside manor. Several small investors found that their money had disappeared. But he kept the bigger fish on the hook as long as he could.
Between them, Lesley Wexner and Leon Black, the billionaire tycoons behind Victoria’s Secret and the private equity fund Apollo Global Management, are estimated to have paid (or, in the case of the former, allegedly lost by theft) hundreds of millions of dollars.
He asked Epstein for advice on a US agent who could help him secure gigs
Over several days trawling through Epstein’s correspondence, The Telegraph found comparatively little discussion of the financial markets.
Instead, there are endless efforts to arrange his two diaries – one for the glitterati, the other for women between the ages of 15 and 17. For the latter, he would use teenage models to recruit their friends. It was a similar trick with the former: constantly leveraging one acquaintance to gain another, bigger prize.
“I collect people, I own people, I can damage people,” Epstein told one ex-girlfriend, according to a report in Vanity Fair. Another described him as a “sociopath” who could “feel energy very clearly” and “manipulate that for his own ends”.
The collection of Mr Jagland began in the spring of 2012, when he was hunting for work to top up the roughly €200,000 he earned at the Council of Europe and his nominal remuneration from the Nobel panel.
In May, he asked Epstein for advice on a US agent who could help him secure gigs on the lavishly paid speaking circuit. In a flash, Epstein ran through his notorious black book.
By May 25 of that year, according to emails in the Epstein files, a call had been arranged with Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico (where Epstein was the largest landowner) and founder of the Washington Speakers Bureau.
Mr Jagland’s job demanded constant travel, from meetings with Emmanuel Macron in Paris to sit-downs with Vladimir Putin in Sochi.
Over time, he came to rely on access to Epstein’s spectacular properties in the French capital, New York and – allegedly – the Caribbean.
The two men also bonded about women. “I have been in Tirana [Albania] extraordinary girls,” the Norwegian wrote in May 2012.
Eight months later, on January 9, 2013, he said he was celebrating the 60th birthday of his wife, Hanne, adding: “I can’t keep it going only with young women as you know.”
Within weeks, Epstein was boasting widely of his “great friendship” with the “head of the human rights court in Strasbourg” and “Nobel prize chairman”.
Between 2012 and 2018, he dropped Mr Jagland’s name into invitations to at least a dozen luminaries, including Bill Gates, Todd Pritzker, the billionaire, the president of the Maldives, and Kathy Ruemmler, the former White House chief counsel.
In June 2015, Epstein asked Noam Chomsky, the philosopher, to dinner with Mr Jagland. Like a salesman in a market, he rattled off a menu of conversation topics: “Drones. Solitary confinement, death penalty (Europe does not have one…) tribalism, mafia, Syria, Ukraine, Saudi, Egypt, Libya.”
The self-styled intellectual polymath told Mr Chomsky that a mutual exchange of ideas underpinned the relationship: “I give him his financial ABCs class, he gives me my lessons in pragmatic politics.”
The diplomat did provide scraps from the political high table
But the financial ledger leaned only one way. A few months before the dinner, Mr Jagland asked Epstein for help in raising stg£800,000 towards the purchase of a flat in Oslo.
“I don’t want to have much debt when I retire. So a joint investment which you talked about would be interesting,” he wrote. (Mr Jagland told Norwegian media he never took any money from Epstein for the flat.)
The diplomat did provide scraps from the political high table. Terse updates litter his correspondence (“I’m fine but the situation in Ukraine is catastrophic”; “Everything is uncertain now because of the refugee/migration crisis in Europe”; “Very difficult situation with the Russians and the Turks”.)
He does not appear to have delivered his benefactor’s grandest ambition: a connection to Vladimir Putin, to whom Epstein wished to pitch insights on Mr Trump and Western financial markets.
Earlier this week, the statesman said he had only met Epstein as part of “normal diplomatic activity”. His lawyers said he never had any “dealings with young girls”.
In the eyes of Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Mr Obama, the Epstein files have rung the death knell for the style of “21st-century” do-gooding practised at climate summits, UN general assemblies and Davos. One day, the elite talked of ending violence against women and girls, he wrote on Substack. The next they “caught a ride on Epstein’s private jet or visited his private island”.
What remains in question is how many more dominoes will fall, and how close they will land to the centre of Epstein’s malevolent, barely hidden world.
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