With Jeffrey Epstein denied bail and prosecutors building their case in his sex trafficking indictment, one of the next shoes to drop—possibly many shoes—will invariably be: Who within Epstein’s social orbit might be implicated in the scandal one way or another? As someone involved in litigation against Epstein told my colleague Gabriel Sherman earlier this week, “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.”
Ever since Epstein’s arrest on July 6, there’s been growing scrutiny of his vast network of rich and/or famous and/or powerful friends and acquaintances—or former friends and acquaintances, as it were. There’s a road map to that network in Epstein’s now-infamous black book, filled with many bold-faced names, phone numbers, and addresses, from Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Ehud Barak to Alec Baldwin, Ralph Fiennes, Mick Jagger, and even Courtney Love. “It is a mosaic of Epstein’s social contacts,” the investigative journalist Nick Bryant told me.
Bryant first got his hands on a copy of the black book in 2012, after the feds caught Epstein’s former house manager trying to peddle it for $50,000. At the time, Bryant was shopping a feature on Epstein, without success. “My Epstein article would focus on the government malfeasance that enabled Epstein to skate on scores of child abuse charges,” Bryant wrote in a pitch he submitted to various editors, “and I would also look into covert ties that the government may have had with Epstein. Moreover, the little black book opens up multiple vistas of investigation, and I would attempt to amass sufficient corroboration on some of the power broker perps who molested these girls.”
Three years later, when Epstein was back in the news due to fresh allegations that his pal Prince Andrew had slept with one of the girls who’d alleged she’d been trafficked by Epstein (Buckingham Palace denies this), Bryant finally published the black book in full (phone numbers redacted) in a Gawker article. In particular, the article called attention to a bunch of names that Epstein’s former house manager (who passed in late 2014) had circled, supposedly to identify them as potential “material witnesses.” (Trump, Barak, Alan Dershowitz, Les Wexner, Bill Richardson, and others.) “Some of its contents had been reported, but when you just put it out there and showed these names, and these markings circling the names, that was the power of it,” recalled John Cook, Gawker’s investigations editor at the time. (In a separate Gawker post, Bryant published the similarly star-studded passenger logs to Epstein’s private plane, otherwise known as the “Lolita Express.”)
As a reporter, Bryant has spent the past two decades researching and writing about child trafficking, a beat that has put him outside of the journalistic mainstream (and one that inevitably intersects, at times, with the conspiracy realm). In 2009, before he turned his attention to Epstein, Bryant published a small-press book called The Franklin Scandal, about an alleged power broker pedophile ring in Nebraska that garnered national media attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bryant’s pal David Carr, the late Times media columnist, was a fan, and the book was optioned by Magnolia Pictures in 2016. Three years later, the project still hasn’t found a home, but Magnolia boss Eamonn Bowles thinks that may very well change given all of the renewed exposure on the Epstein case. “There are some stories that are just too wild to be reckoned with while they’re happening,” he said. “You kind of need a historical perspective.”
After a mutual acquaintance pointed me in Bryant’s direction, I gave him a call to talk about Epstein, the black book, and where he thinks all of this might be headed.
Vanity Fair: You started digging into Jeffrey Epstein after writing The Franklin Scandal. What are some of the similarities you found?
Nick Bryant: That book is a template for what’s happening now and how high up it goes. A major parallel between the two stories is that Lawrence King, who was one of the primary pimps of this pedophile network I wrote about, and Jeffrey Epstein, they were both flying children interstate, and they had both done it with impunity for a number of years. In both instances you have officials who were unwilling to back down. In Epstein, you had the Palm Beach Police Department that was unwilling to back down, and in Lawrence King, you had the Nebraska Senate that was unwilling to back down. Epstein had an island, and I’m sure he had these parties also at his place in Manhattan and elsewhere, and there were hidden cameras. In this particular venue in Washington, DC, where the Nebraska victims were trafficked, there were also hidden cameras. The individual who owned the house in Washington, DC, he had intelligence affiliations. We’re seeing with Epstein that he also had alleged intelligence connections. King and Epstein collected children in the same type of fashion. King would have kids conscript other kids, just like Epstein would have kids conscript other kids. In both cases the victims were threatened and hassled. Both Jeffrey Epstein and Lawrence King had lavish lifestyles, but there wasn’t an obvious explanation for their wealth, and both were prominently associated with power brokers of the highest order. [Editor’s note: A grand jury concluded there was no evidence to charge King with any sex crimes.]
