What Was the Real Relationship Between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates?

As the world now knows, one of the more surprising names to have popped up around Jeffrey Epstein is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

It’s been widely reported that Gates had flown on Epstein’s plane at least once, and visited his home multiple times — but the depth of their relationship is not fully known, and more details are emerging. The media is rife with speculation that one cause of Gates’ recent divorce from his wife Melinda was his relationship with Epstein.

When asked about how they met, a spokesperson for the Gates Foundation told me that many people encouraged Gates to meet with Epstein, suggesting that Epstein would help bring funds into the software entrepreneur’s famed philanthropic organization.

In 2019, Gates was quoted as saying, at the New York Times DealBook conference, “I made a mistake in judgment in that I thought those discussions would lead literally to billions of dollars going to global health. Turned out that was a bad judgment, that was a mirage.” He also admitted, “I gave him some benefit by the association.” 

So, here’s what I know from my reporting that takes this story further. 

In Bill Gates’ case, one conduit to him was a protégé of Epstein’s: Her name is Melanie S. Walker. 

Walker is a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon who became a top adviser to Gates at his Foundation and after that, became a senior adviser at the World Bank. The Gates Foundation placed her at the international financial institution in a somewhat-common arrangement called a secondment. What that means is the Foundation paid her salary — even though she was working for the World Bank. 

She found herself in such echelons in an intriguing way: Walker came from a working class family in Texas; as she reached adulthood, she was beautiful and bright. Having finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas, she was on a sightseeing trip to New York in 1992. She was having tea in the main dining room of the Plaza Hotel when Jeffrey Epstein approached, because, says a source with knowledge, he thought she was attractive. With him was Donald Trump, who was busy shaking hands with people in the room. (Trump was then the Plaza’s owner.) Trump also introduced himself to Walker.

Epstein then became a mentor to Walker. Walker told the Times that Epstein offered her a modeling opportunity — but the person familiar says Epstein told her not to go into modeling, and he encouraged her to finish medical school, which she did. 

From 1992 to 2000, the time period when she went to medical school in Texas, records show that she listed an address in a New York apartment building that Epstein owned. This was a place she could use for occasional meetings in New York, according to the person familiar with her. But, this person says, she didn’t live there.

According to a source with knowledge, in 1998, while she was pursuing a post-doctoral study at Cal Tech, Epstein hired her as his “Science Advisor.” She would later tell people who then spoke to me, that she felt a deep gratitude toward Epstein, both for his advice and for the job.

A source who was friendly with Epstein then recalls her role as providing Epstein with introductions to interesting faculty members at Cal Tech and elsewhere — people whose work he might be interested in funding. This person recalls meeting her at a dinner at Epstein’s house in New York. Her relationship with Epstein seemed only professional to this observer.

Around the same time, she and Prince Andrew became close friends. But not through Epstein, at least according to a source with knowledge. The story goes, according to that source, that Walker received a spare ticket to a Broadway show from a different friend and sat next to Prince Andrew.

In the early 2000s, she found herself in Seattle, and for the first time, the orbit of Bill Gates — this was after she moved in with an executive at Microsoft. His name is Steven Sinofsky. According to an eyewitness, Sinofsky brought Walker to Microsoft events, and at a company barbecue, she met the Microsoft founder. 

In 2006, she was hired by the Gates Foundation, partly so she would stay in Seattle along with Sinofsky, says a person familiar. A separate source says during this time Walker talked highly about Epstein. 

Meanwhile, two other people close to Gates and to Walker — the physician Boris Nikolic and the scientist Nathan Myhrvold — had also met Epstein and also talked up Epsein to Gates, says this source. In 2010 Gates announced the Giving Pledge: a commitment by the world’s richest individuals and families to give away the majority of their wealth – and he wanted to connect with as many of these types of people as possible.

At this time some of the people at the Gates Foundation had gotten the impression from Epstein that he was a billionaire and therefore a potential contributor to the Giving Pledge and that his time in prison in 2009 was mostly undeserved. Epstein had told them that he simply caught a bad rap for an experience with women who had lied about their age.

Sources say Nikolic was impressed with Epstein’s ideas for fundraising, as was Gates, who met Epstein in early 2011 at a dinner, according to the New York Times. Sources say Gates wasn’t aware that Epstein did not have the sort of money he claimed to have, until much later. 

Gates and Epstein worked together on a global health fund. Everything went well — until, according to the New York Times’ description of a pitch document, Epstein asked a cut of any donations that he had helped facilitate from high-net-worth individuals. Gates and the people around him never finalized the plans because, according to someone with knowledge, once the lawyers looked at it, all sorts of warning bells went off. This may have been a factor in Gates ultimately dropping Epstein. 

But, Epstein apparently wasn’t so easy to shake off. Sources describe him like a mollusk at elite global philanthropic gatherings — to which he wasn’t invited.

Nikolic would subsequently run into Epstein a few times a year — either at Davos World Economic Forum, which Epstein wouldn’t attend but rented a chalet nearby; or at Ted conferences, where he was also wouldn’t enter, but where Epstein, regardless, set up camp; or at Harvard, where Nikolic worked. The encounters, according to the source, were brief and pleasant. 

Nothing materialized from his outreach to Gates; sources say Epstein made a final “fuck you” to Gates two days before he died. At this moment, he appointed Nikolic as a substitute executor of his will. Nikolic says he had had no meaningful contact with Epstein for years — so, the move could have been designed to shine a light on the Gates/Epstein relationship, with the full knowledge that it could be extraordinarily damaging to Gates’ reputation. I reached out to Nikolic who told me in an email exchange he had fainted at his mother’s wake when heard of his appointment and that “it was absolutely a retaliatory move”. 

He added: “Over the past few years, we have all learned that Epstein was a master deceiver. I now see that his philanthropic proposals were designed to ingratiate himself with my colleagues and me in an attempt to further his own social and financial ambitions. When he failed to achieve his goals, he started to retaliate.” Nikolic sought legal advice and declined his executor duties. 

Walker, meanwhile, has got on with her work as a neurosurgeon, and Gates, as we know, has gotten divorced. But the story serves as a warning perhaps that one should assume that the world of philanthropy is every bit as susceptible to high-flying power-plays as the for-profit world — and that a determined crook like Jeffrey Epstein can get a lot of undeserved credibility by associating with distinguished people on the inside.

Vicky Ward is the host of  Chasing Ghislaine, an Audible Original podcast, executive-produced by James Patterson, released on July 15th.

Jeffrey Epstein stalks his shadowy network of plutocrats from the grave

It’s almost two years since the alleged paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, months before he was due to face trial on charges of trafficking and abusing scores of minors.

His victims, understandably, have said that his untimely death robbed them of justice — which they now hope will be served in the forthcoming trial of Epstein’s alleged accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. (She has denied all charges). But Epstein remains the subject of intense media curiosity, not just because of Maxwell, but also because of his extraordinary, destructive reach into the international plutocracy.

In the manner of a standing pack of cards collapsing from a gentle push, the list of billionaires who have paid a reputational price for their association with Epstein grows, as it confounds.

Some of the names are now widely known: the former retail king Les Wexner who has stepped off the board of L Brands, the company he founded; the founder of Apollo Global Management, Leon Black, who has also stepped down as CEO, after an outside review described how he paid Epstein fees of nearly $160m for tax advice and lent him $30m; the hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, who faced an allegation in a civil deposition by an alleged Epstein victim, also stepped down from his firm. (All three men have denied any wrongdoing). More recently, it’s been reported that the world’s greatest philanthropist Bill Gates was divorced by his wife Melinda, in part because of his meetings with Epstein.

That Epstein was able to infiltrate such a group raises a fundamental question: what did Epstein, a college dropout who spent only five years at the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns, offer that was so apparently irresistible?

The answer lies in the complexity of power and how it can manifest itself. In the last decade of his life, in an effort to rehabilitate his image, given that he was a registered sex-offender, Epstein curated elite, predominantly male salons.

I have been investigating Epstein for nearly two decades. According to my recent reporting Epstein claimed to some of his select guests that he could get them to whoever they needed — quietly. For example he knew Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — and if you doubted this, the Crown Prince’s photograph was hanging on the wall. He said he could get you to Vladimir Putin and to any number of prominent Israelis. He had friends in high places in developing Africa, France, Britain, the Middle East, Japan, and China.

And yet all this convening was done either on offshore islands, or in private rooms, on private trips, or in private planes — in short he was like a private concierge at the world’s most elite male club. Whether or not he really could deliver on everything he promised remains debatable. But astonishingly, given the sophistication of his audience, his followers seem to have believed him.

One example: over a tea meeting held around 2014 in Epstein’s mansion, Epstein bragged to the journalist Edward Jay Epstein (no relation) that his financial clients included an assortment of African dictators. He also said that he was effectively in control of the deepwater port of Djibouti.

Ed was sceptical: but mid-conversation a butler announced the arrival of Black. “Let Leon wait,” Epstein said. It was 15 minutes, according to Ed, before Epstein wrapped up, leading the veteran journalist to wonder if his host might actually be credible.

We know that Epstein invited Bill Gates to dinner at his New York home in 2011. He also invited the economist Larry Summers and the then JPMorgan banker, Jes Staley. According to someone familiar with Epstein’s thinking, the grouping was a deliberate effort to legitimise Epstein to Gates, whose spokesperson has said he made an “error in judgment” and that Epstein’s “ideas related to philanthropy gave Epstein an undeserved platform”.

Wexner has also said that he was completely deceived by Epstein’s extraordinary “cunning”. According to the retailer, Epstein stole $46m from him. Significantly, Wexner waited until after Epstein’s death to mention the theft publicly.

This is important because one of the vulnerabilities of the 0.001 per cent that Epstein keenly understood — and manipulated — was the power of social humiliation. He told me in 2002 that he’d discovered in the 1980s, when he was working as a self-described bounty hunter, that “when rich people lose money, they don’t want to go to the authorities, they just want it back.”

What he didn’t tell me was how enormously beneficial this insight was to him personally. Over the years, a number of extremely wealthy people or leaders of institutions have told me they or their families had been cheated by Epstein but they remain far too embarrassed to go on the record about it.

All this murky activity speaks to a truth most powerful people won’t readily admit: that while we may think the western world is run via an obvious chain of command, through boardrooms and politicians, this is not the only way that influence works.

There is a whole other socio-economic system at play in the shadows; and billionaires who are now under attack by Epstein, even from the grave, appear to have wanted access to it badly enough to pay a very high price.

Vicky Ward is the host and co-producer with James Patterson of the podcast ‘Chasing Ghislaine.’

Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?

Back in 2002, when I was reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s finances for Vanity Fair magazine, he was not a household name. During that time, I paid a visit to the Federal Medical Center, Devens in Devens, Massachusetts to meet with an inmate, one Steven Hoffenberg.

We sat in a little room off a recreation area, Hoffenberg dressed in the requisite orange jumpsuit, while I, several months pregnant with twins, was dressed per prison requirements: as shapelessly as possible.

It was an absolutely intriguing meeting.

Hoffenberg was serving 18 years in prison for committing a $450 million Ponzi scheme. In the 1980s he’d been running Towers Financial, a debt collection and re-insurance business, and had worked alongside Epstein, who was a paid consultant. Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had plans to turn Towers into a global colossus – through illegal means.

But Hoffenberg was so transfixed by Epstein and his ideas that he had even paid the rent for Epstein’s office space. (Now he says he was “stupid” and greedy for doing so).

Hoffenberg told me with a sad grin that he represented a problem for Epstein because while they were working together, Epstein had confided in him as to how, exactly, he made a career out of conning people and institutions – not least because the idea was that they’d do it together.

Hoffenberg said that Epstein had a term for the perfect execution of the grift. He called it “playing the box,” which meant that he ensured that even if his crime was uncovered, the victim would be unable to do anything about it, either because of social embarrassment or because the money was tucked away in a place they couldn’t either find it or get it.

(What Hoffenberg had failed to realize, he told me, is that Epstein would con him. Epstein would take $100 million of Towers money, move it offshore and meanwhile cooperate with U.S. prosecutors against Hoffenberg, who was unable to do anything about this because he’d pled guilty, which meant there was no trial – and therefore no discovery.)

I can’t prove all of Hoffenberg’s claims – but some of them are accurate.

I have discovered, for example, that Epstein certainly did secretly co-operate against Hoffenberg and gave at least three interviews to prosecutors, and that had the case ever gone to trial, a source with knowledge says it would have likely turned out far worse for Epstein than for Hoffenberg.

Hoffenberg also knew something else Epstein wanted hidden, according to Hoffenberg: he claimed that Epstein moved in intelligence circles

The Hoffenberg/Epstein relationship was not something Epstein, then pitching himself to Vanity Fair as a money-manager extraordinaire for billionaires only, had volunteered to me.

So when I gingerly raised Hoffenberg to Epstein, and mentioned I had documentation showing that the two were linked, the financier turned really nasty.

He maintained he hardly knew Hoffenberg, he’d just consulted briefly on a couple of deals, that he’d not been involved in any prosecution of Hoffenberg and that if I wrote any different, things would turn out badly for me. Here is exactly what he said:

“If there’s any implication of wrong doing, I will take legal action against you personally. I’m telling you so you understand. I will be as harsh as I possibly can personally … not for the magazine, but you, because I had this discussion with you. This relationship is with you…. you shouldn’t risk your future for a job.”

Now, Epstein’s “sensitivity” regarding Hoffenberg was equal to his sensitivity on what he called “the girls”.

He went berserk if you mentioned either subject.

In hindsight one has to wonder if Hoffenberg presented an equally big problem as “the girls” would. Hoffenberg told me that in the 1980s, after Epstein left Bear Sterns in ignominious circumstances, Epstein was trained in moving money off-shore and that a mentor of Epstein’s was someone Hoffenberg knew: a British defense contractor, who died in 2011, named Douglas Leese.

Hoffenberg claimed that Leese was an arms dealer. (Leese’s son Julian says that is not true). But the UK parliamentary record does mention Leese in reference to the El Yammamah arms deal of the early 1980s.

I remember distinctly that in our first meeting Hoffenberg told me that Leese was pivotal in understanding Jeffrey’s MO, because Leese had introduced him not only to aristocratic Europeans (who Epstein subsequently fleeced) but to all sorts of people in the arms business – including the late Turkish-born businessman Adnan Kashoggi – and, allegedly, the late media mogul Robert Maxwell.

Back in 2002 I didn’t pay much attention to this.

This was because Epstein breezily threw me off.

First Epstein told me he’d never met Robert Maxwell. And I asked him twice if he knew Douglas Leese, whom I had never heard of, and Epstein said no. The second time, he elaborated:

“Douglas Leese … I think he was the father of somebody I knew … I think his son was friendly with Ferranti, that’s where that whole crowd comes in that you asked me about a long time ago. I think his name was Nicholas … it was sort of that 66th(?) Street building, I think they might have all lived there.”

So, I forgot about Douglas Leese. And I didn’t bother to pursue the notion Epstein had known Maxwell.

But all these years later, Leese’s name popped up again in my new reporting for a podcast and a documentary series about Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who is currently awaiting trials on charges of helping Epstein in his alleged sex-trafficking operations of minors. (She has denied all charges).

First I found a lawsuit filed by Leese in Florida which he asserted he “was involved with various highly confidential business enterprises including business in the United States, some of which involved governmentally- involved or other highly confidential business projects.”

Second, a source who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed told me that Jeffrey had invited the source to join him and Leese on a private-jet trip to the Pentagon in 1981.

Even Leese’s own son Julian told me that his father was a mentor of sorts to Epstein in the 1980s and was totally shocked that Epstein would have pretended not to know him.

So why Epstein’s silence on Leese?

And was his denial about knowing Robert Maxwell equally meaningless?

What about the spy stuff?

Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had said he had worked on several projects with Robert Maxwell, including solving Maxwell’s “debt” issues. (Maxwell died in 1991, under vey strange circumstances, apparently having fallen off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine in the middle of the night and it was discovered in the aftermath he’d stolen 100s of millions of dollars from the pensions of his employees).

Epstein had also told Hoffenberg that via Maxwell and Leese he was involved in something that Hoffenberg described as “national security issues,” which he says involved “blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a level that is very serious and dangerous.”

So here’s where it gets tricky.

Four separate sources told me – on the record — that Jeffrey’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis.

Some of these sources are more reliable than others. But the gist of the claims that you will be able to hear and, ultimately watch in a three hour documentary series, is that Robert Maxwell, who was himself a conduit between the Israelis and other governments during his life time, introduced Epstein to Israeli leaders, who then allegedly used Epstein as the equivalent of an old-fashioned Russian “sleeper,” someone who could be useful in an “influence campaign.”

The sources who range from former arms dealers, to former spies – and also Steve Hoffenberg suggest that Epstein, who lacked any sort of moral compass, decided to go one step further and compromise influential people by recording them doing things they wouldn’t want made public.

All of this is completely unprovable. And people close to Robert Maxwell say it sounds ridiculous.

But here’s what’s odd.

First, Epstein did visit Israel in 2008, with a view to moving there permanently and avoid his jail time in 2009 for the state charges he was convicted of. On his return, he told the Russian model Kira Diktyar that he’d changed his mind and decided to face the music. (He didn’t mention he’d avoided a far more serious federal investigation, thanks to a cushy non-prosecution agreement).

And once he got out of jail, in the last ten years of his life, Epstein bragged to various people, including journalists, that he was advising a whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various African dictators, Israel, the British — and of course the Americans.

He also told several of the same people that he was making a fortune out of arms, drugs, and diamonds.

He told one person, the journalist Edward J. Epstein that he knew the owner of the deep-water port of Djibouti on the horn of Africa, a smuggler’s paradise, so well that he was basically in charge of it.

Now according to my sources in the intelligence world, this is hyperbole – but also not completely ridiculous. His name was mentioned as a middleman in both Africa and the Middle East. He was known in the intelligence world as a “hyper-fixer” somebody who can go between different cultures and networks.

Usually these people are very silent about what they do.

And yet Epstein was not silent. He had a photo of the Saudi crown prince, MBS on the wall, and photos of Bill Gates and all the VIPS who flocked to his salons.

It’s not wholly surprising therefore that the same sources who say they know he was some sort of intelligence asset say that he became a liability – which is why, possibly, he lost any “protection’ and was arrested.

A handful of people I interviewed, including former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, maintain that this is exactly what happened to Robert Maxwell, which is why, they say, Maxwell was killed. His financial problems were about to make him vulnerable. (His death was officially said to be because of heart attack).

Who knows what to make of all this?

But, when I think back to 2002 when I first met Steve Hoffenberg, I do remember asking him why he thought that Epstein, normally reclusive, had raised his head above the parapet and attracted media attention by flying Bill Clinton to Africa.

Hoffenberg had smiled.

“He can’t help himself. He broke his own rule,” Hoffenberg said. “He always said he knew the only way he could get away with everything he did was to stay under the radar, but now he’s gone and blown it.”

Vicky Ward is the host of the Audible Original podcast Chasing Ghislaine, which premieres on July 15th.

How Jeffrey Epstein Used Philanthropy to Worm His Way Into Powerful Circles

As the world now knows, one of the more surprising names to have popped up around Jeffrey Epstein is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. It’s been reported that Gates flew on Epstein’s plane at least once and visited his home on several occasions. More recently, the media has been rife with speculation that one of the causes of Gates’s divorce from his wife Melinda was his relationship with Epstein. But the depth of their friendship is not fully known.

When I asked a spokesperson for the Gates Foundation how the two men met, I was told that many people encouraged Gates to meet with Epstein, suggesting that he could bring enormous resources to critical health initiatives.

Gates touched on the subject himself at a New York Times Dealbook conference in 2019. “I made a mistake in judgment in that I thought those discussions would lead literally to billions of dollars going to global health. Turned out that was a bad judgment, that was a mirage,” he said, adding, “I gave him some benefit by the association.”

One of the questions that I hear repeatedly is: How on earth could someone like Gates ever have been exposed to Jeffrey Epstein after he was convicted as a sex offender. (Epstein was prosecuted on state charges of soliciting a prostitute and a minor in 2008.)

Difficult as this is to swallow, what I learned talking to people who worked with or around the financier is that part of Epstein’s genius (I hate to use that word, but it’s appropriate) was manipulation. In particular, he had a unique ability to use philanthropy as a tool to worm his way into circles where he otherwise might not have been invited.

Over and over again Epstein found a human conduit—usually a scientist or researcher—whom he would manipulate into helping him gain entrance to a world, that under any other circumstances, would or should be closed to him. This of course is the dark side of philanthropy, the part that few people want to talk about, but, talk to enough of the scientists who got to know Epstein and they will tell you, it is its Achilles heel.

To hear about the people Epstein used to gain access, tune into Chasing Ghislaine starting on July 15.

The Venomous Epstein Tapes

Ghislaine Maxwell and I crossed paths soon after I moved to New York in 1997.

Though she was a few years older than me, we were both English, Oxbridge-educated and would sometimes be invited to the same parties. She was pin-thin, expensively dressed, funny, fun, clever, worldly and the effortless centre of attention.

She talked about sex a lot — and she liked to behave outrageously. During one Manhattan dinner I heard about, she told a British movie star to lie face-down on the floor; she jumped on his back and gave him a massage right there on the ground in front of everyone. Even as people laughed, one observer wondered if what she was doing was not inappropriate.

Usually, she was by herself. I had no idea whether or not she had a boyfriend.

But then, in the autumn of 2002, I was assigned to write an article for Vanity Fair magazine about an intriguing and very rich man called Jeffrey Epstein. I soon discovered that Ghislaine had had a complicated relationship with Epstein for over a decade.

They didn’t live together, I was told. Some sources claimed she worked for him — although Epstein later denied this. He insisted they were not romantically involved, instead telling me she was his best friend.

What struck me as strange was that at the start of my reporting I’d bumped into Ghislaine at a friend’s baby shower: and when I mentioned I was writing the article, she started to cry.

At the time I put it down to how unequal their relationship seemed. I’d heard she loved him and he did not love her back.

She wanted to marry him and have children, sources told me — though she had insisted otherwise. Meanwhile, he wanted to stay single and sleep with (many) other women, which he certainly did.

And Ghislaine, according to the sources, put up with this — they presumed because Epstein could provide her with the same lavish lifestyle she’d grown up with as the daughter of the late and crooked media mogul Robert Maxwell.

After his bizarre death in 1991, Robert’s children (two of whom were accused but cleared of aiding their father’s crime) were left — at least officially — more or less penniless. So, Epstein looked after Ghislaine financially, in return for her introducing him to the glitterati. That was the mythology.

But when I toured Epstein’s house in 2002, 11 years after Robert Maxwell’s death, there were photos everywhere of another ex-girlfriend, former Miss Sweden Ava Andersson Dubin — but none that I saw of his ‘best friend’ Ghislaine.

I asked him about this and he brushed it aside, saying there were ‘lots of photos of lots of people’ in the house.

My 2002 article was on Epstein’s money. No one knew how he’d become so rich: he lived in what was said to be Manhattan’s biggest private townhouse, a nine-storey mansion.

He had a huge ranch in New Mexico, an island in the Caribbean and his own Boeing 727 — on which he had recently flown Bill Clinton to Africa.

Adding to the mystery, he rarely went out. It was said, instead, that wealthy and powerful people came to him — he claimed to manage the fortunes of billionaires.

Our numerous phone calls as we arranged the interview — which was to be off-the-record, meaning I couldn’t quote him — had shown me I was dealing with a mercurial control freak.

And he was true to form. He made a point of eating the sandwiches laid out for his ‘tea’, one by one, without offering me anything, despite the fact I was pregnant.

He had also left out a copy of a lurid book by the notorious French libertine the Marquis de Sade for me to notice on his desk.

We spoke for some time, and I left. Afterwards, weirdly, his assistant phoned me to tell me he’d thought I was ‘pretty’. A messenger delivered a book to me at my home address: ‘Maths For Dummies’. (I’d told Epstein I hadn’t studied maths since I was 14.)

I was creeped out: I hadn’t given him my home address — Vanity Fair’s was easy enough to find — and the flattery was crass.

Then, even more uncomfortably, he began to bombard me with phone calls. These went on daily for months. From their tone — alternately smarmy and bullying — I knew he was hiding something. I just didn’t know what.

He wasn’t remotely charming or funny. He was deeply misogynistic: from a terrible joke about his desire to see his female staff only wearing Prada bikinis in his New York house, even in winter, to telling me he enjoyed being surrounded by women because he liked ‘elegant things’.

Mostly, though, he was a thug, who soon told me he had compiled a dossier on my then-husband and me. He claimed that he could get my husband fired from his job, and me from mine.

He continually threatened to sue me personally, which, he reminded me, he knew I couldn’t afford. Strangest of all, he threatened to put a ‘hex’ — a demonic spell — on my unborn children.

This crossed all normal boundaries — and it became an obsession for him. He wanted to know who my doctor was, where the babies would be delivered. And he warned me: ‘I know all the doctors in this town.’

Because of the threats, I recorded him, on the advice of my lawyer. The transcripts of these conversations run to some 450 pages.

Now you will be able to hear parts of these, re-enacted by actors (sadly, I lost the micro-cassettes years ago) in my podcast Chasing Ghislaine, released on Audible next week. This is executive-produced with bestselling writer James Patterson, and we have also filmed a documentary series to be released by Discovery Plus later this year.

Now, of course, Epstein is dead: he was found hanged in his New York federal jail cell in 2019 in circumstances that continue to trouble conspiracy theorists.

Ghislaine, his alleged accomplice, is awaiting trial for sex trafficking and other offences, and faces up to 80 years behind bars if found guilty. She denies all the charges.

And in light of the appalling alleged crimes, particularly those committed against children, that this pair have been accused of — and, in some cases, of which Epstein was found guilty — my conversations with the man are all the more chilling.

What you hear in them is a master manipulator at work: someone with many secrets to hide.

In 2002, for example, Epstein told me rich people don’t go to the authorities when their money is stolen: they just want it back. Now I know what he meant.

I have discovered while preparing the podcast that, for 30 years, Epstein was embroiled in a shady underworld involving international espionage, blackmail, money-laundering and smuggling guns, diamonds and drugs.

He boasted that he was a ‘hyper-fixer’: someone who could move between different countries and cultures, exchanging information, but mostly making money through shadowy deals.

But, perhaps inevitably, what most fixated him during his talks with me were ‘the girls’.

Again and again, he asked me: ‘What about the girls? What have you got on the girls?’ The answer, I know today, was ‘not enough’.

One woman who’d been to dinner at Epstein’s house described the event to me as being like Eyes Wide Shut, the 1999 film starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and featuring a debauched mass orgy.

There were parties, I heard, where Epstein and Maxwell cavorted with rich older men — among foreign women who looked much younger.

Now I know that, at the same time Epstein was demanding of me ‘what about the girls?’ he was raping 15-year-old Jennifer Araoz, a beautiful child from the poorer New York borough of Queens.

Jennifer’s harrowing testimony and its devastating impact on her life are revealed in our podcast: she now runs a foundation, Survivors Initiative, to help girls like her.

For my Vanity Fair article, I did find two sisters, Annie and Marie Farmer. Separately, each told me that Epstein had sexually abused both of them, Annie when she was just 15. I believed them and I wanted to publish their story, but to my dismay, the sisters’ allegations did not make into my Vanity Fair article.

The magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, says that he and the publication’s lawyers didn’t believe my reporting was sufficient, even though I maintain we had three sources supporting their allegations. (Carter has denied this.)

Troublingly, however, I have an email from December 2002 — just before the story was due to be published — from a colleague at Vanity Fair that reads: ‘Bless you — guess who just appeared in Graydon’s office? Jeffrey Epstein.’

It is, to say the least, highly unusual for the subject of an investigative magazine article to appear in the offices of the outlet profiling them — and perhaps especially in the editor’s office.

Did the impeccably well-connected Epstein put pressure on the magazine to drop any hint of the sexual abuse I had uncovered about him? I don’t know.

But there is no doubt Epstein was rattled by my forthcoming article. In one of our last and most unpleasant exchanges, he snarled that we had reached the point where this was no longer about a journalist and the subject of a magazine profile, it was about me and him: it was, he said, ‘personal’.

His threats to my unborn children had affected me, and when I subsequently gave birth to twin boys, they were two months premature. I believe the stress of dealing with Epstein led to the premature births, and as they remained in the neonatal intensive care unit for weeks, then months, it was hard to forget his ugly threat to have a witchdoctor cast a spell on them.

As for Ghislaine?

Writing my magazine article, I was told by reliable sources that she was hopelessly in Epstein’s thrall.

Stuart Pivar, a New York society art dealer and a former friend of Epstein’s, told me that Epstein appointed him to watch over Ghislaine in the days after Robert Maxwell mysteriously fell to his death from his yacht in 1991.

Pivar said Epstein told him to make sure Ghislaine ‘made it through this dark period’. But it was difficult to match the glittering social queen Ghislaine seemed at Manhattan parties with the woman described by the Farmer sisters, ‘pathetic’ in her emotional and financial dependency on Epstein, who treated her with disdain.

Annie told me Ghislaine had given her a topless massage when she was 16 — below the age of consent in America. Maria claimed Ghislaine had pretended to be asleep and held her hand while Jeffrey groped her one night in Ohio.

I had to put these allegations to Ghislaine in a deeply unpleasant phone call. She denied everything. She was furious.

And after the article ran — without, luckily for Maxwell and Epstein, the Farmers’ allegations — I hoped never I’d never see the pair of them again.

But Ghislaine and I were to cross paths again a few more times.

We ran into each other a few years later in New York. This time, she had a new boyfriend, Ted Waitt. He had founded a computer hardware company and made a fortune. They’d met through Bill Clinton and now she boasted about flying helicopters and piloting a submarine that was attached to Ted’s yacht, as well as the philanthropic work she was doing, saving the oceans.

She didn’t mention Jeffrey Epstein — and why would she? In 2009, he had been jailed for 18 months for solicitation of a prostitute and a minor in Palm Beach, Florida. Much of New York society had decided that he was a creep — though they didn’t know that a U.S. Attorney, no less, had shut down a far more serious federal investigation into his crimes.

That might have been the end of the story. But in 2011, a photograph, taken in Ghislaine’s London townhouse, emerged. It showed a young girl, Virginia Roberts, standing with Prince Andrew with his arm pulled around her waist as Ghislaine smiled beside them.

Roberts claimed that when she was 17 Epstein and Maxwell had ‘pimped her out’ to Prince Andrew. In subsequent years Ghislaine has denied this.

In 2011, the year that photograph emerged, Maxwell and Waitt separated. I last glimpsed Ghislaine in 2014 at a book party, but I don’t recall talking to her. That was one of the last events many of her friends remember seeing her at in New York.

In 2015, after leaving Vanity Fair, I finally wrote a piece about the Farmers with the sisters’ help, published in the Daily Beast. This laid out their claims of what had been done to them in the 1990s.

I’ve no idea what Ghislaine thought of that article. But the following year, 2016, I received a call — the number was withheld — and answered.

It was Ghislaine. She asked if I knew that I was on the witness list for Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who was then suing her for defamation.

A spokesperson for Ghislaine had called Virginia a liar.

I was surprised by the call. I hadn’t met Virginia, though I would later interview her.

But I couldn’t get off the phone quick enough. Journalists don’t want to be dragged into people’s private legal actions. Our job is to report and to protect our sources.

Ghislaine left New York in 2016, I discovered. But in 2019 she emailed me out of the blue, asking to meet for coffee.

This was in the wake of allegations that Epstein had received an unduly lenient sentence in Florida — allegedly perverting justice for dozens of his victims.

I sensed that she wanted to see me for litigation purposes, so I did not reply to her note.

Since her incarceration a year ago, she has become perhaps the most hated woman in the world. People find the idea of a woman allegedly abusing other women — children, even — worse than if a man does it.

And Ghislaine isn’t just any woman. She’s educated, born into immense privilege, with an extraordinary contacts book.

But there are still many questions about her. Even those who thought they knew her well are in the dark about the true nature of her relationship with Epstein — and what they may or may not have done together.

Still others — particularly certain very rich, very powerful men — fear that, even from the grave, Epstein could yet bring them down.

Chasing Ghislaine is an Audible Original podcast released on July 15. audible.com/ghislaine

How one school leader is winning the trust of parents

Like many parents, I suspect, I’ve been anxiously awaiting news from my twin sons’ schools about plans for the fall in these most uncertain of times.

Last week, one of them, The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, invited all parents to a webinar where they laid out their plans for a reopening and took questions in real time.

The session, which lasted an hour, was one of the most uplifting experiences I’ve had since the pandemic began.

The headmaster, Steven Murray, and his fellow faculty members inspired hope — not just because they are opening the private boarding school — and certainly not because they promised a Covid-free environment for the students. In fact Murray was clear that the school was unlikely to be Covid-free and that the community’s mind-set would have to change: “zero risk tolerance is not realistic; coming to school will not be 100% risk free any more than driving a car is risk free,” he said.

What was truly inspiring was the immense effort, thought, integrity — and above all humility– that went into his presentation. Of course, the school has resources that many public schools and other private schools may not have, but Murray has certainly put them to good use in this crisis.

He and the faculty task force have been on a steep learning curve and already made extraordinary infrastructure innovations and program alterations that include: pre-arrival protocols, testing, tracking technology, tracing, mask-wearing, social-distancing, isolation, an expanded health center, PPE, hepa filters, new air filters, touchless toilets, sinks and showers, plexiglass shields, individual cleaning bags for students, longer lunches to avoid crowding, quarantine facilities, smaller classrooms and staggered arrivals.

But Murray did not promise perfection. Rather, he showed vulnerability, promising to loop parents in on his deep-dive discovery about how best to keep the kids as safe as possible in “the new normal.”

“I never knew I’d be studying viral load in a breath or a cough versus viral load left on a doorknob … or using terms like de-densifying social spaces … but here we are,” he began.

And, for me, the most striking part, perhaps was when he likened the many impressive safeguards being put in place to … cheese.

“Most of the protocols are imperfect, but taken together, it’s a little bit like Swiss cheese, each slice has holes, but layered together the holes begin to be covered and so together a series of overlapping protocols can make us safer.”

Swiss cheese has never seemed so comforting.

And how ironic that Murray should use that imagery just three days before the President used another dairy product, in a horrific simile when describing how the National Guard cleared protesters in Minneapolis “like a knife cutting butter.”

Listening to Murray, I felt hopeful for the first time in days (as did my son when I gave him the highlights).

Yes, it’s possible that my son and other students will get sick he goes back to school — but I take great comfort, as does he, in the fact that he is in the best possible hands, a faculty who are learning and reaching out, unafraid to say what they don’t know to both students and parents, as they go. Also comforting was a study published Tuesday that people under 20 are about half as likely to get infected by the virus than their elders.

Murray’s presentation was a welcome reminder of what real leadership can and should look like in these uncertain times, when there is a vacuum at the top of our country.

Our President continually talks about himself and his management of the pandemic in hyperbolically optimistic — one might easily argue mendacious — language. He has claimed success in confronting the virus, giving credit to just one person: himself.

Whereas Murray was careful to lay great emphasis on how success for the school could only come from a shared responsibility in the community.

“My actions affect others,” Murray said and he talked of new behaviors to be learned, and internalized and how the example comes from the top.

As he said this, the contrasting image of the President’s unmasked face, came to mind, along with imaginings of what the unmasked rallies slated to begin this weekend will look like and what sickness they will spread.

In considering how to open safely, Murray said he has consulted with the CDC, state officials, local hospitals, pediatricians, New England high schools and universities, business leaders including the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and the PGA, the owner of an NBA franchise, Pennsylvania University Medical school, state and federal officials and hired an consulting firm that specializes in epidemiology and environmental hazards in hospitals.

At Lawrenceville, unlike the Trump White House, they are NOT taking the view that they know better than the scientists and other experts.

Murray is not running for re-election in November, but in some ways the stakes for him are just as high as they are for the President.

If his school doesn’t open, come September, the outcome could be disastrous, given that his business model is heavily dependent on tuition fees.

So, since he cannot promise a Covid-free environment, he is offering something that is, I’d argue, just as valuable, maybe more: trust.

His webinar showed that even in the midst of the crisis — or crises in which our country is immersed — trust is winnable.

From where I sit, Swiss cheese is a great deal more reassuring than sliced butter.

Trump brings back 2016 veterans as his campaign makes aggressive turn

As President Donald Trump struggles with sagging poll numbers and faces a chaotic news cycle, his reelection campaign is going back to the well of players who shaped his successful 2016 bid.

In the last week, Trump’s campaign has hired two veterans from his first White House run, Jason Miller and Boris Epshteyn, to senior advisory roles — moves that people familiar with the decisions say are part of an effort driven by the President himself for his team to push back more combatively at Democrats and their presumptive nominee, Joe Biden. According to two people with knowledge of their conversation, Trump encouraged Miller to “maximize the killers” who could reinvigorate the campaign.

“We are going to get much more aggressive,” said one senior campaign official.

Miller and Epshteyn are just two examples of how the President is increasingly relying on the group of people who helped him win the White House four years ago. Hope Hicks, one of the original Trump campaign aides, came back to the White House in March after leaving the West Wing in 2018. The President’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, still meets with and talks to Trump on a regular basis while serving as an unpaid senior adviser to the campaign. And David Bossie, who runs an unaffiliated PAC and is close with Lewandowski, is also regularly called upon for counsel. Last week, Trump also appointed Lewandowski and Bossie to the Commission on Presidential Scholars, which advises the Department of Education program.

The campaign insists the moves are not a shakeup. Campaign manager Brad Parscale, who ran the campaign’s digital operation in 2016 but now runs all of the day-to-day operations, remains in charge. A senior campaign official said these new hires are in part designed to support Parscale as he manages the home stretch of the campaign.

But the hires also reflect how Trump often seeks familiarity and affirmation when facing difficulties — and the last three months have produced a steady stream of challenges for the President. A June CNN poll of registered voters nationally finds Trump trailing Biden by 14 points, the worst in a series of recent polls that have the former vice president ahead, sometimes with a majority of support. There have been nearly 2 million cases and over 111,000 deaths in the US from coronavirus, while protesters continue to march in streets across the country in response to George Floyd’s death.

“When a campaign starts to struggle, it’s normal for a candidate to look for an outside set of eyes to come in and provide a fresh perspective or provide a new direction to the campaign,” said Kevin Madden, a former presidential campaign adviser to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. “That’s what the President is doing here. He wants his old crew of true loyalists who were there for his 2016 win.”

The slate of returning advisers suggests Trump intends to double down on the approach that won him both the Republican nomination and the presidency in 2016: bruising your opponent while defending yourself as aggressively as possible.

Both of his most recent hires join the campaign from positions as unofficial surrogates on alternative outlets to the mainstream media. Miller, a veteran Republican consultant who was senior communications adviser for Trump’s campaign in 2016, had for months co-hosted the War Room podcast with former White House and Trump campaign official Steve Bannon to defend the President during the impeachment inquiry. And following a short stint in the White House in 2017, Epshteyn delivered on-camera pro-Trump commentary on the Sinclair Broadcasting network of local television news stations.

The President has been looking not just to get the 2016 band back together but to start a comeback tour. In recent weeks, aides have told CNN, the President has been anxious about quickly resuming his in-person campaign rallies, which have been non-existent since the brunt of the pandemic began. The Trump team has been laying the groundwork to relaunch rallies in July but had sped up the timeline in part because of the overwhelming protests in support of Floyd and police reforms.

The rallies will not just give the President the chance to direct the news cycle back to himself but to fully train his rhetorical fire on Biden, who had not yet clinched the Democratic nomination when social distancing became the nationwide norm. While Trump and his team are anxious to unload on Biden, officials say they recognize that the overwhelming barrage of news has made the race much more about the President than his opponent. Still, they believe that there is plenty of time for the narrative to change.

“It’s all about Trump,” the senior official said. “The general populace has forgotten Joe Biden even exists.”

Trump’s campaign argues that once protests subside and as the country re-opens, Biden’s role in the race will become much more important and they will be able to draw a clearer contrast.

“It will be quite a contrast between the two,” said Tim Murtaugh, campaign communications director, “When we start our rallies and you see the crowds it will be clear that there is a stark enthusiasm gap between Biden and the President.”

CNN’s Dana Bash contributed to this report.

Trump’s allies grow frustrated with White House response amid national upheaval

As President Donald Trump remains out of public view and as his aides deliberate how and whether he should address some of the worst racial unrest in decades some of his allies are growing increasingly frustrated with what has felt like silence from the White House.

Many of the President’s traditional defenders — from campaign donors to Republicans on Capitol Hill to some in the conservative media — have privately grumbled that Trump has allowed several days to pass without addressing the nation or making any formal appeals for unity.

What Trump has done publicly — tweet extensively about his grievances with Democratic state and local leaders and mention the protests in the middle of a previously scheduled event — has at best gone unnoticed and at worst fanned the flames of outrage into a second week.

Some outside allies have reached out to the White House in recent days to push for an appearance from the President in which he would confront a crisis he has largely watched unfold from behind closed doors or in his underground bunker.

One major campaign donor worried that the damage inflicted by Trump’s absence during a historic weekend of violence and pain could alone imperil his reelection.

One person familiar with the matter said there is a sense among allies that an attempt to address the situation in a speech over the weekend fell completely flat. The person said the unrelated backdrop of the Kennedy Space Center — and the fact that the speech came on a Saturday afternoon — ensured few people even registered the passages that were added at the last minute.

“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said in his remarks after watching the first manned US space launch in nearly a decade. “The mobs are devastating the life’s work of good people and destroying their dreams.”

Trump’s measured tone stood in stark contrast to his barrage of tweets over the weekend, which included messages blaming Antifa for the unrest and vowing severe retaliation.

A growing number of congressional Republicans, even Trump’s allies, have privately said the “caps lock” tweets are not helping the situation. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said on “Fox News Sunday” that he had spoken to Trump over the weekend about his inflammatory tweets, which he described as “not constructive.”

Over the weekend, some aides sought to convince Trump not to use violent rhetoric after he wrote on Twitter that “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” warning language like that could inflame an already combustible situation and would not appear presidential.

Inside the White House, advisers remain divided over whether a speech delivered from the Oval Office or elsewhere at the White House would help lower the national temperature.

Trump has expressed interest in delivering a speech to the nation, a person close to the White House said, but some administration officials believe that would be a mistake. A senior White House aide said governors and mayors should be the ones responding to the destruction in their respective cities and states — a view at least partially shared by Trump, who has spent days going after local leaders for not calling the National Guard fast enough or cracking down on violence aggressively enough.

In a heated phone call with governors on Monday morning, Trump placed responsibility on the governors for resolving the national crisis and said some of them appeared “weak” in their responses so far.

Other White House officials argued over the weekend against something as formal as an Oval Office address, a person familiar said, out of concern that such a speech could “inflame the situation, not make it better.”

As aides debate how and whether to confront the situation, Trump’s back-and-forth between violent rhetoric and a more measured tone has weighed in the deliberations, one official said. Some advisers wonder whether a presidential address calling for calm would be quickly erased by Trump’s own penchant for escalation and instigation.

It did not seem such a speech was imminent on Monday morning.

“A national Oval Office address is not going to stop Antifa,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in an appearance Monday on Fox News, noting that Trump had addressed the killing of George Floyd — a black Minneapolis man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest — several times already.

“The President has addressed this repeatedly,” she said. Later, McEnany said Trump’s “focus right now is acting and keeping our streets safe.”

The naive–and reckless–rule breakers of Covid-19

Last week, a Washington, DC-based media executive who is used to attending 200 cocktail parties a year decided that he could take talking to his microwave no more.

In contravention of the city’s shelter-in-place executive order, he secretly attended two different dinner parties in Georgetown, an affluent DC-neighborhood.

When he first told me this, I assumed I had either misheard or misunderstood. “Virtual dinners right?” I asked. “No” was the reply. These were the old-fashioned, in-person sort.

Each time, he explained, the host’s instructions were the same. For both dinners, he entered through the back gate of the property, so disapproving neighbors would not see him. He was told in advance that neither he, nor any other guests, could take any photographs or talk about the party.

The first dinner was hosted by a movie producer. A group of four listened to music and sat under heated lamps six feet apart in the garden where they were served dinner. According to the executive, none had been in contact with anyone who had suffered Covid-19 — as far as they knew. All had been isolating.

The two dinners in Washington are not the only anecdotes I’ve heard of illicit gatherings that break the country’s shelter-in-place restrictions and feature varying degrees of social distance.

I’ve been told by a source about an underground hair salon in Palm Beach, Florida, that never ceased operations, despite the state’s restrictions, and which her elderly mother has insisted on patronizing.

I’ve also heard about the trio of real estate executives who get drunk together, rotating homes every night in a leafy suburb of Westchester.

And the AA group in Virginia Beach whose members sit in a circle in someone’s garden, because, they say, virtual meetings are not sufficient to prevent some from falling off the wagon.

There are the Brooklyn friends who’ve had Sunday dinner together since the pandemic began. And there is the news report this week about the cannabis users who, police said, quite brazenly gathered in Manhattan for a 4/20 Day celebration. And so on.

I even know elderly people in my native country, the United Kingdom, who’ve gone over to each other’s gardens to sit six feet apart for a glass of wine. “I’d rather die than live without seeing people,” one of them offered as justification.

Most of the people I talked to are middle class or affluent. It takes money to have a dining table in your backyard in Washington. And a lot of money to have a live-in chef.

It would appear that just as the rich are more easily able to outrun Covid-19 than the working classes, they may also be more able and willing to break the shelter in place rules.

But according to Robert Leahy, the Manhattan-based director of the American Institute of Cognitive Therapy and author of the book, “The Worry Cure,” they may be gathering under a false sense of security in the belief that Covid-19 won’t touch them. “It takes one sneeze or one case to create a cluster,” says Leahy, pointing at Fairfield County, Connecticut, which currently has 8,472 confirmed Covid cases, as an example of a wealthy enclave that’s turned into a hot spot.

An arresting new CDC graphic — highlighted by CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta — about transmission of the coronavirus among people seated at adjacent tables in a restaurant shows that the virus may be passed on in droplets much more easily than hitherto known.

Regardless, the breach of physical distancing rules is a behavioral trend that psychologists fear we are likely to see increasingly in the next few weeks, as state by state, the nation waits for an uneven legal reopening.

“I believe there will be increasing non-compliance that is simply due to human nature,” says Leahy.

“Even when there’s not a pandemic we, as a species, tend to make decisions that negatively affect our public health based on our immediate need, whether it’s smoking, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, overeating, overspending… we are wired to look for immediate gratification. Remember, we were once scavengers. That’s why this is very hard,” says Leahy. “The difficulty that people have is in the uncertainty about how long they have to wait to get back to doing what they used to do.”

But Leahy says the ultimate question for people to think about before they gather like the groups in Washington and elsewhere, is this: “What is more dangerous? Feeling anxious or risky behavior?”

Even for the AA group, the answer, Leahy says, is always risky behavior. “What I am saying to those people who gathered for whatever reason is: ‘Which, ultimately would you regret more? That you didn’t go to the AA meeting or the hair salon or the dinner? Or that you got Covid-19 or infected someone else with Covid-19 and that person died?'”

Meanwhile, he says to take solace in the government’s phasing plans to reopen, and to remember this situation is not forever.

“Focus on what you CAN do and not what you can’t. Many people can connect with friends, family, meetings.”

“Remember, socially distanced does not have to mean socially disconnected.”

In other words, you don’t have to talk only to the microwave.

How the very rich are different in the Covid-19 fight

I have spent two decades reporting on people at the nexus of money, power and culture. I’ve written books about corruption among the country’s wealthiest 1%, Wall Street greed and the ruthlessness of New York real estate titans. So these past few weeks I have been on the phone to many people who are not stuck, like me, in a New York City apartment, where we are on constant alert for the ominous sound of sirens puncturing the silence with increasing frequency.

Instead, many of those I spoke to are in places where they feel relatively safe. Many don’t realize they may be in a bubble of false security as the number of coronavirus infections spreads out into suburban and rural Long Island — including Suffolk County, home of the Hamptons — and other areas where the country’s extremely wealthy have second homes.

One hedge fund billionaire is at his ranch in Texas; another is isolating from other family members on a compound in Martha’s Vineyard; a couple is in a villa on Harbour Island, Bahamas; an individual rented a yacht on the Long Island Sound … and so on.

It would be unfair to say that these people are living without fear. If they needed any proof that Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate by pocketbook, they need look no further than some of the high-profile confirmed cases like Knicks owner James Dolan, actor Tom Hanks and Prince Charles.

“We are just trying to do our best for ourselves and our families. You can’t blame us for that,” one multimillionaire with three country homes told me.

All I spoke to did so on condition of anonymity; all felt they were better placed to outrun Covid-19 if they were not stuck in high-density areas like New York City. (I should add that those who spoke to me are not necessarily representative of the entire socio-economic group. Major Wall Street financiers have been spotted in Central Park and certainly billionaires like Bill Gates have donated significant funding to coronavirus research.)

But while the wealthy may not be immune, their affluence makes it easier for them to insulate themselves. Unlike essential workers, housekeepers or nannies who cannot survive without their weekly paychecks, publications like The New York Times have data showing how those of means were able adopt protective isolation measures earlier than lower-income workers.

The top 1% of US earners can do that even better than the rest of us. Some of those in the Hamptons seem even to be enjoying themselves. Some are playing golf while others are gardening and comparing notes about hygiene. One person I know has her family’s food driven out from New York City every day. It’s not the same experience as walking past the hospital tents in Central Park or the boarded-up stores. And it can be harshly antithetical to the experience of an essential worker who must take public transport to get to a hospital or grocery store for a day’s work.

For some of the rich I speak to, a more urgent headache than the symptom of the virus is the possible ramifications of the economic shutdown — but even that may be much less meaningful than you’d think given the tax break some are getting from the stimulus package. A clause in the bill allows commercial real estate developers to offset paper losses from the depreciation of their buildings against taxes on profits from other investments like the stock market. A New York Times report says the estimated cost of the change over 10 years is $170 billion.

One real estate mogul told me that he cracked open the champagne beside the pool the day the CARES Act was passed by Congress.

“Some people are going to get very rich out of this,” says someone else I know in the health care supplies business.

Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Ashwin Vasantold me that he’s heard disturbing stories of wealthy individuals procuring their own ventilators. This at a time governors of hard-hit states say they’re about to run out of their own essential supplies.

Two people I spoke to told me that they have obtained prophylactically, their own stash of the malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, currently undergoing clinical trials as a possible therapy but not yet proven safe and effective for this use. Vasan says that whichever doctor supplied the drug behaved not only dangerously, but irresponsibly.

“Every hospital in the city is doing clinical trials of that medicine under controlled conditions so to say: I’m going to give it to someone in their home without the ability to truly monitor them … I don’t consider them to be remotely responsible,” Vasan said.

Vasan says that this is a time for health care professionals to pull together. “This is not a time for concierge medicine,” he says. And yet several in the Hamptons told me they felt safe precisely because there are private doctors who have homes there and whose private staff will pay house calls, assuming you have paid their multi-thousand-dollar subscription fee.

The self-protectionist mindset of the wealthy is not new, according to the historian Dr. Amanda Foreman. “During the Second World War, despite the rationing across the United Kingdom, those who could afford it, could have dinner in the Ritz hotel,” she says.

But the irony of an elitist approach during these times is that it may well backfire, according to Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist and former Harvard medical professor who recently chaired the ninth US-China health summit in the pandemic epicenter of Wuhan.

According to Haseltine, the people who have left the city have put themselves at greater risk than if they had stayed put and practiced careful isolation and hygiene, because they have put themselves further away from the best hospitals. His opinion was echoed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his April 3 press conference, where he talked about the spike in Nassau and Suffolk counties. “Long Island does not have as elaborate a health care system as New York City … and that has us very concerned,” he said.

Haseltine says it’s “a fundamental mistake” to think you are safer in a wide-open space.

“It’s comfortable to be in a country house … People feel they have more control,” he says. “You have more space, you think that you’re not one of many, you’re more special. But it’s all psychological.”

The risk of Covid-19, he says, is equated to how many people you meet who might be infected. It’s not like the bubonic plague of London that was spread by fleas and rats. With Covid-19 there is no reason to think that people in the countryside are any less infected than the people in New York City.

Somewhere in all this, there is a very grim morality story.

Foreman says that the social division of Covid-19 could be summarized as “The Makers and the Takers.” If you’re a Maker, you’re someone who has found a way to contribute to the community in various ways, from the student who set up a volunteer network to shop for the elderly to first responders and workers like caregivers who take daily personal risks to save others. If you’re a Taker, you’re fixated only on yourself, your survival — and what the pandemic will mean for your bottom line.