Well, at last, someone gets it.
New York Magazine has published a powerful interview with Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal.
The interview allows that Siegal was a different kind of Epstein victim: preyed on financially, roped into his social world while keeping her totally apart from his crimes.
She’s not alone. The real key to understanding Epstein is to see him as the Devil enticing unwitting victims with his incredible amounts of money.
Siegal, a single woman in her 70s, was otherwise on her own, battling the men in corporate Hollywood and trying to stay alive. Epstein had radar for finding people in dilemmas, graciously over-helping them out, and then coming back for the pay off.
Post his Palm Beach jail time, Epstein needed someone who would introduce him into polite society. Siegal was not his publicist, New York points out. Those included the late Howard Rubenstein, who shielded him from coverage in the New York Post, another client.
The hitch was that Siegal wrote Epstein — as she did dozens of others — funny intimate emails that made it seem like they were close pals. Everyone she knew received them, not just Epstein. She was a very deft writer.
“At my mother’s funeral,” Siegal says, “I wrote a eulogy that brought the house down. And Nora Ephron turned to Barbara Walters and said, ‘She really has a voice.’”
But she and Epstein were not actual pals. She’d never been to the infamous island, or any of Epstein’s many houses, and rarely saw him. She was in his New York townhouse twice over a decade..
But the emails back and forth became voluminous. The result is that there’s massive correspondence, all of which show that Epstein was using her, and that she knew nothing about his actual devious activities.
Epstein, perhaps, was taken in by the faux intimacy of a pen pal. New York says, “For Epstein, the affection of a woman of appropriate age (his senior in fact), a truer respectability than he could buy, a decorous life.”
Yours truly turns up in the story. I’ve known Peggy for 40 years. It’s always been a roller coaster relationship. New York says I’m the only person who would go on the record to explain what happened during the Epstein era. Well, why not? I’m disappointed that all the people who were constant happy guests of Siegal over the decades — and significant deals and relationships — didn’t have the guts or grace to speak up.
(One mistake in the article: Siegal, like all of us at Cannes, went to Paul Allen’s annual party on his gigantic yacht, as did hundreds of guests. She never stayed on the boat.)
Now, maybe, the Epstein diggers can go onto bigger things, and people in the files who made Epstein’s secret criminal life possible. I can think of several who enabled him and knew what was going on. It’s time stop grabbing at low hanging fruit.
PS New York was so invested in this profile, they sent a terrific photographer, Gillian Laub, to take Siegal’s picture.
