On one day in September 2014 the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein held meetings with four billionaires – Bill Gates, Mort Zuckerman, Hyatt Hotels’ Thomas Pritzker and the financier Leon Black. All deny wrongdoing and say they regret knowing Epstein, but were drawn into his strategy for reputational repair and financial survival six years after he was registered in Florida as a sex offender, according to a WSJ series that is far from over. Others invited to give depositions under oath because of alleged links to Epstein and a US Virgin Islands lawsuit against his banker, JP Morgan, include Google’s Sergey Brin, the ex-Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz and the bank’s own Jamie Dimon. The Journal has thousands of pages of Epstein’s emails and appointment schedules. The Observer suggested at the weekend they’d been leaked by Republican operatives because Democrats feature prominently in the documents. Either way, this will run and run.
