It’s awards season, and every film buff (or people who like movies playing in the background while doing chores) is talking about whether Marty Supreme was snuffed or raving about Jessie Buckley’s win. However, I am being cynical and ruining the fun by turning our eyes to everyone’s favorite pedophile: Jeffrey Epstein. Evil knows no bounds, ladies and gents, and the New York financier had a particular interest in the arts. The most obvious example is his dealings with the Rothschild family from 2013 until 2019. While obviously the interests were primarily financial, he had interests in running in circles with artistic elites, using those connections as leverage to bribe young girls. In some cases in Hollywood, however, his motivations seemed to revolve around regaining social standing after being convicted of running a child prostitution sex trafficking ring. In this regard, the most prominent relationship he utilised is with one Patty Siegel.
Epstein and Siegel were close friends, with Epstein having heard about her as a famous Hollywood publicist. He reportedly sent her a “Cartier travel clock” at the beginning of their correspondence. She sent him an invoice for $50,000 for her services in 2011. In 2010, she sent him a $37,600 budget for her trip to Cannes. Epstein gave Siegel $30,000 as a birthday gift in July 2018. They were so familiar that Epstein asked her to find a woman to have his child, to which Siegel responded, “If I wasn’t 102, I would take that job in a nano second”, who was 64 at the time. Epstein responds, “If you were fifty years younger, whoops… forty”. Siegel was 64 at the time.
On July 22nd, 2009, Patty Siegel welcomed Jeffrey home from prison into her New York home. He had just served 13 months on child prostitution charges, and Patty was now tasked with helping him reenter high society. Siegel’s main job was to throw Oscar viewing parties because the 58,000 members of the Academy in 2012 were required to watch every film that was nominated. This requirement warped into a networking opportunity for the Academy, actresses and actors, and anyone else looking to get their finger on the pulse of Hollywood. The more notable the guest list, the more appealing these viewings were for potential directors, producers, Academy members, etc.
Siegel writes to Jeffrey a year after his release, saying: “I have no idea what the reaction will be to your re-entry into society…your friends are there for you…and at least the house is drop dead gorgeous”. This house line may seem a bit out of left field, but it actually was one of the main components of Siegel’s job. During the period of screenings for Oscar-nominated films, any theatre available to rent was booked for months on end, and the responsibility fell on promoters to try to secure the houses of wealthy people to hold screenings. Epstein had his gorgeous Palm Beach mansion, which was his collateral that he used to socialise with the Hollywood elite. And socialise he did.
You cinephiles may have heard of the term “cursed movie”, like The Wizard of Oz, where you can allegedly see someone die in the background, or The Exorcist, which had a haunted set. Well, I would be willing to add the film The King’s Speech to this list of cursed movies. This movie essentially unites Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, becoming a nexus attracting powerful Hollywood men. This 2010 film beat out more popular films like The Social Network and Inception. This “last-minute” dinner held in December 2010 had a guest list including Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Prince Andrew, George Stephanopoulos and Jeffrey Epstein. Weinstein appears in the files in the years following, accused of participating in massages with underage girls. Woody Allen and Jeffrey Epstein were much closer; however, Allen appeared in the FBI database of the files 7,122 times. In one email from 2013, Epstein’s assistant asked Allen’s assistant if the filmmaker would be available for a dinner at a paedophile’s house, to which Allen’s assistant replied, “That would be tremendous”. Another attendee of this infamous dinner was magician David Blaine. Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s 71st Street mansion, David Blaine starred in a CBS TV special called “Real or Magic?”. At one point, he is shown how to swallow and regurgitate a fish whole, which he dedicates to his “inspiration”, Woody Allen, and he films this in the mansion’s bathroom and kitchen.
One could never accuse Siegel of being bad at her job, per se, since she introduced two of the most prolific and powerful sex offenders in modern history.
Siegel, with all her PR prowess, would also advise Epstein how to navigate the media post conviction. In a March 2011 message, she asks Epstein how he could “neutralise” the editor of The Daily Beast and Newsweek, Tina Brown. In a statement to Variety, Siegel says that she went to Epstein’s mansion twice “socially” for the Prince Andrew event and again for a Yom Kippur dinner. She attests to knowing nothing about “underage girls” and that when she read the 2011 articles documenting allegations of child prostitution, she “could not comprehend” that they were true. In an email that Siegel sent to Epstein in 2012, she complains that she is tired of seeing Epstein in public with young women.
Unfortunately, this article is only a tip of the iceberg regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Hollywood, but let it serve as a reminder that your favourite film losing at the Oscars may not be because it was subpar, but could be because the paedophile elite have debts to pay to one another behind the scenes. (Unless the film you were rooting for was F1, because maybe it lost on its own merit.)
