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“It was like the devil had heard it in my voice. He’d in some way figured out the worst thing he could ask me.”
Peggy Siegal, the once omnipresent New York publicist, is describing her first conversation withJeffrey Epstein. It was a phone call — she believes in 2006 or 2007, sometime before his first criminal conviction. She says she’s never before discussed it.
Siegal, now 78, was once the film world’s most coveted publicity power broker. For nearly four decades, beginning in the 1980s, she was the woman studio heads relied on to stir up Oscars buzz by hosting exclusive screenings and clubby dinners. She’d worked for everyone in Hollywood — Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein, Barry Levinson — and specialized in bringing together charming, influential people from disparate social worlds and especially the cultured classes of L.A. and New York. She was as known for her brash, bulldozing style as she was for her “golden rolodex” — a catalogue of more than 30,000 VIPs, organized by industry and importance, how many houses they owned, and whether they were voting members of the Academy.
At the height of her power, Siegal’s defenses seemed inviolable. She was confident and casually rude, inviting herself anywhere she wanted to go. She critiqued her own flaws before others could, once writing and sending out a booklet calledHow to Look Like Me at 60,which detailed every bit of cosmetic work she’d had done and was passed from hand to hand up Park Avenue and into Beverly Hills. Siegal often said that because she’d had the fat sucked out of her butt and injected into her face, anyone who was kissing her cheek was also kissing her ass. She was eternally single but swatted down pity by joking that she’d give a Mercedes station wagon to anyone who found her a husband. She made it known that in reality she was wedded to her work.
But Epstein, the devil on the phone whom she’d never once met, seemed to see through her. He had sent a “very expensive” Cartier travel clock to her Upper East Side apartment — “It just appeared,” she says — earlier the same day. “I remember opening it up and saying, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ And then he called, like he was my best friend …How am I?He proceeded to name-drop all these people we both knew, friends in common. He made it clear thathe had numerous housesand a jet and that he was a player and should be on my screening list.” Then he asked her, “Have you ever been married?”
“I instantly knew,” she says, “that he collected information to use against you. I instantly knew that’s what he did.” She had not been married. “It was something I was very sensitive to. He wanted to find out some weakness in my makeup or my life. There was a sense of danger. It was like a warning bell.”
That alarm was unsteady — it seems to have swelled and faded as they spoke. In nearly the same moments, Siegal says, Epstein “was charming and funny.” Yet she “knew from the beginning he was a creep.” In the months and years that followed, he flattered her “constantly.”
“He thought I was terrific. He adored me,” she says. “He couldn’t get enough of me. He thought I was funny. He thought I knew everybody. That is sort of hypnotic.”
She stops to make sure she’s been understood: She means that Epstein was the one who was hypnotized — by her.
Siegal’s career and position in high society were destroyed in 2019, when it was reported that she’d been among, in the words of the New YorkTimes, the “social guarantors” who greased Epstein’s return to elite circles after his first stint in jail. Now, in thefiles recently released by the Department of Justice, more than 5,000 emails between Siegal and Epstein have been made public. Over a series of phone calls in late February and early March, Siegal told her version of events and described her relationship with Epstein. She was eager to defend herself, proud, and frequently panicked by the prospect of returning to this particular spotlight — of renewing her humiliation and her exile.
When theTimesstory broke, Siegal did not dispute that she’d ushered Epstein into screenings and events and hosted a now-infamous dinner at his Upper East Side mansion withAndrew Mountbatten-Windsor— then Prince Andrew — as the guest of honor. She told the press she’d never formally represented Epstein as a publicist and initially said their relationship had not involved money. (Epstein was repped, for a time, by the late Howard Rubenstein, who also worked for Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump; he later worked with Michael Sitrick, who represented R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein.)
Within days of her first statements, Siegal revised her story, acknowledging that she’d accepted funds from Epstein for travel but saying that this arrangement had ended in 2010. She maintained she knew nothing of his crimes and that, because his 2008 sentence had seemed so lenient, she had not believed the charges against him “were very serious.” (It was true that his penalty had been remarkably lax. For soliciting prostitution and “procurement of minors to engage in prostitution,” Epstein had served only 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail and a year of house arrest, during which he’d been allowed freedom to travel, including to his property in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Siegal, however, had known of accusations against him as early as 2007, whenshe spoke to this magazinefor an article that detailed allegations of molesting a 14-year-old girl.) Siegal insisted her relationship with Epstein had been distant: “I mean, I knew him,” she toldVanity Fairin 2020, “but I didn’t know much about him. I was never privy to his private life.”
