If you remain understandably puzzled over the enigma of Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death, I have a story for you about the recently deceased Steve Hoffenberg, a business associate of Epstein’s whom I knew well—but whom I understood not at all.
Listeners and watchers of “Chasing Ghislaine”—my podcast on Audible and the docu-series of the same nameI co-produced with James Patterson for discovery+—will know of my strange personal history with Hoffenberg. I first met him when he was in prison in Devens, Massachussetts, in the fall of 2002. I was at that point reporting on Epstein for Vanity Fair and, at a time when no one understood how Epstein appeared to be so wealthy, I realized that Hoffenberg, a name once well-known but forgotten in New York by then, had been a mentor of Epstein’s in the late 1980s and, further, that he had paid for Epstein’s office rent and loaned him millions of dollars for a couple of investment schemes that went belly-up. In 2002, Hoffenberg was serving the early years of a 20-year jail sentence, so I contacted him via the prison authorities, and he invited me to come and see him. I don’t think he had many visitors.
It was a meeting I’ll never forget.