According to John Connolly, former Vanity Fair columnist and co-author of “Filthy Rich: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein,” Jeffrey Epstein had a habit of taking advantage of, or intimidating, those around him.
Johnson & Johnson heiress Libet Johnson “told people that he took her for more money than all of her husbands combined,” Connolly told The Post. Johnson had been divorced five times.
Epstein was allegedly managing money for Johnson, and all in all, it is unknown how much the heiress lost. A $22 million ski chalet was transferred into Epstein’s name, and he was listed as a resident on Johnson’s Madison Avenue home. It is noted that Johnson had Alzheimer’s disease.
He used the relationship with Johnson as leverage over another unnamed socialite. He wanted an Upper East Side townhouse that she was selling, and she wanted to buy an apartment that Johnson owned. Epstein promised the woman that, in exchange for buying her townhouse for $2 million under asking, that he would introduce her to Jonson. The sale was made, and the introduction never happened.
Connolly also told The Post that his former Vanity Fair boss, editor Graydon Carter, was intimidated by Epstein over a story that Connolly was working on for the magazine in 2007 regarding Epstein.
Connolly claims that when Carter arrived at his country home in Connecticut, they found the head of a cat on their porch and that Epstein is the one that left it. Vanity Fair did not run the story, but Carter denied that it was Epstein and instead attributes it to “aggrieved George W. Bush supporters.”
“To suggest that if affected my editorial judgment is… wrong,” Carter said.
Epstein also went to bat for his friends, including his attorney Alan Dershowitz, who represented him against charges of unlawful sex acts with minors and secured Epstein’s 2008 “deal of a lifetime” plea.
“Dershowitz invested in a fund that Epstein put him into,” said Connolly. “When the financial market blew up in 2007, the guy [overseeing it] folded the fund and Dershowitz lost a lot of money. Jeffrey went to the guy and said, ‘If you don’t make Dershowitz whole, I will kill you and your entire family.’ The guy gave all of the money back,” Connolly claimed. Dershowitz claims that the guy returned a portion of the investment, not the whole thing.
Jeffrey Epstein also avoided jail, where his business partner Steven Hoffenberg did not, as part of a Ponzi scheme that alleges Epstein pocketed $17 million and was able to walk away scot-free. Hoffenberg was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his part in the scheme, stealing $450 million from investors.
Connolly has participated in several of the docu-series about Epstein, including the Netflix doc “Filthy Rich” and Investigation Discovery’s “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” which airs on Sundays.
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