The Secret Life & Suspicious Death of Jeffrey Epstein
An astrological autopsy of one of the most debauched lives and mysterious deaths of our time. The world has questions. The sky has answers.
Over the past few weeks, thousands of pages of FBI interview notes, emails, flight logs, court filings, and internal Justice Department material connected to Jeffrey Epstein have finally been unsealed after years of suppression.
On paper, this should have brought clarity, but in reality, it has done the opposite.
Some of the material confirms what we already knew. Some fills in long-missing gaps. Some reveals how many powerful people continued moving in Epstein’s orbit long after the world understood who he was. And some of it lays bare, in confronting detail, the scale of the unfathomable depravity that surrounded him, and the full horror of what these monsters did to children.
The victims of Epstein’s crimes deserve justice, and the rest of us deserve answers.
How did this happen in plain sight?
How did a man like Epstein build influence at the highest levels of power?
How did he evade consequence for so long?
And why does his death, years later, still refuse to sit comfortably inside the official story?
The list of powerful people and entities connected to Epstein continues to grow: Maxwell. Wexner. Trump. Prince Andrew. Mentions of the CIA. Speculation around Mossad. References to Russia, Israel, and even the House of Windsor. Not as proven conclusions or concrete assertions of criminality or wrong doing, but as threads running repeatedly through the material, weaving questions without clear answers.
There is now more documented information available about Jeffrey Epstein than at any point since his death, and yet, the closer we look, the more the picture seems to blur. The documents tell part of the story, but some of what cannot be seen in those files is written somewhere else entirely.
What follows is not a catalogue of Epstein’s heinous crimes, but a reconstruction of how he operated - how he rose, how he was protected, how he fell, and why the night he died remains the most revealing moment of all. Because it is in the circumstances of his death - not his life - that a clear story emerges, one not just written about in documents and testimony, but in the sky and in the charts of those who circled in his orbit.
The world has questions.
The sky offers answers.
We’ll begin by unpacking the story on the ground - what the files show and what has been reported about the depraved life Epstein lived and the circumstances of his death. Then, once the documented trail reaches its limit, we’ll turn our attention upward - to the sky above that prison cell on the night Epstein’s life ended - to examine what the symbolism of that moment reveals when viewed through a different lens.
Because sometimes the clearest record of what happened isn’t found in a stack of files, but in what the sky never forgets.
And when the truth is hard to see in front of us, it helps to look up.
From Nowhere to Millionaire
The Epstein saga began back in 1974 when, at the age of twenty-one, Epstein scored a job as a mathematics and physics teacher at the elite Dalton School in Manhattan. Despite having no university degree or teaching qualifications, headmaster Donald Barr hired him anyway, and he taught there for about a year before being hired by Bear Stearns in 1975 after being introduced through Dalton parent connections.
Epstein worked in the firm’s special products division, where he learned how money actually moves at the top end of town - trusts, offshore structures, tax minimisation, and quiet discretion. He rose unusually fast for someone without a degree and left Bear Stearns in 1981 under murky circumstances that have never been clearly explained.
In 1982, Epstein set up his own financial advisory service for billionaires only, and began moving in the social circles of the ultra-wealthy in New York and Palm Beach. By the mid-1980s, Epstein had positioned himself as a fixer for the very rich - someone who could quietly handle sensitive financial matters with extreme discretion.
Enter Leslie Wexner - founder of The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret - who hired Epstein as his financial adviser in 1987, and who, by 1989, had granted Epstein extraordinarily broad power of attorney over his finances, allowing Epstein to effectively manage his money, properties, and financial structures.
That’s as much as we publicly know about Epstein’s finances and how he came to be so wealthy. What is better documented is how he used his money and influence in a vast criminal sex trafficking operation.
The First Arrest, and the Sweetheart Deal
By 2008, a police investigation uncovered dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14, had been lured to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, paid for “massages,” and then sexually abused and trafficked. Law enforcement had mountains of evidence, including witness testimony, flight records, seized phonebooks, and surveillance.
According to Forbes, newly unsealed FBI interview notes contained in the Epstein files indicate that, according to former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, Donald Trump was “one of the very first people” to call police in 2006 when the investigation became known locally.
Reiter recalled Trump saying, “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” describing Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, as his “operative” and “evil,” and urging authorities to focus on her. The account suggests Trump was aware of the allegations two years before Epstein’s arrest, despite his repeated claims that he did not know what Epstein was doing at the time.
Epstein was eventually arrested in Florida in 2008, but instead of facing federal sex trafficking charges (which could have put him behind bars for life) Epstein was handed a secretive, non-prosecution agreement, and ended up pleading guilty to two minor state charges: solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of a minor. He served just 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail, was allowed to leave the facility for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week on “work release,” and had his driver pick him up daily while he continued business as usual.
It was little more than a slap on the wrist, a sweet-heart deal that shut down the federal investigation, granted immunity to his unnamed co-conspirators, and was kept hidden from the victims, violating their rights under federal law. It was, by every legal standard, a get-out-of-jail-free card stamped by then–U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, who later claimed he was told to back off because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”
Notably, Acosta went on to serve as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor when he became the President of the United States in 2016.
The Intelligence Rumors
In the years following Epstein’s arrest, journalists, former intelligence figures, and investigators repeatedly raised the possibility that Epstein was more than a predator - that he may have functioned as a facilitator, fixer, or conduit within elite circles where sex, access, and influence overlapped.
Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe publicly claimed Epstein worked with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, in “honeytrap” operations designed to compromise powerful figures. Investigative journalist Dylan Howard reported on these claims, and victims told reporters that Epstein himself boasted about intelligence ties. Julie K. Brown, whose reporting for the Miami Herald helped reopen the Epstein case, said the Mossad theory is “not far-fetched,” while stressing there is no direct proof.
Questions have also been raised about possible ties to intelligence in the United States, with the Wall Street Journal revealing that CIA Director William Burns met privately with Epstein three times in 2014, years after Epstein’s conviction. His calendar shows meetings with multiple senior government and intelligence figures during that period. The CIA has said Burns met Epstein for advice on foreign policy, but the contacts have never been fully explained in public.
Keyword searches of recently released DOJ files relating to Epstein also show thousands of references to Russia. Among the material are records showing Epstein sought introductions to Russian political figures, including efforts to secure an introduction to Putin himself through intermediaries like former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. One document shows Epstein writing to a Russian official, Sergey Belyakov, claiming that a woman from Moscow was attempting to “blackmail a group of powerful businessmen in New York. It is bad for business for everyone involved.”
Jagland is now being investigated by Norwegian authorities on suspicion of aggravated corruption over his communications and contacts with Epstein. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has also announced that his country will be launching an investigation into Epstein’s possible ties with Russian intelligence. Similar investigations have also been announced in Latvia, France, and the United Kingdom, all focused on financial arrangements, access, and potential conflicts of interest.
While solid proof that Epstein was an intelligence asset has not yet emerged, it’s becoming clearer, at the very least, that Epstein trafficked children for sex whilst moving comfortably in circles where political power, money, and secrecy converged. That combination - sex and secrets - is the raw material intelligence services have used for centuries.
None of this proves Epstein worked for any intelligence service, but it does underline how unusual it was for a convicted child sex offender to retain access to political, financial, and diplomatic circles at the highest levels.
The Second Arrest
Epstein found himself in prison once again after being arrested for a second time on July 6, 2019, this time by federal prosecutors in New York, on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to traffic minors across state lines.
The indictment outlined dozens of underage girls had been lured under the pretence of modeling gigs or financial help, only to be abused, groomed, and traded across his network. During a raid on his Manhattan townhouse, the FBI recovered hundreds - possibly thousands - of nude photographs of underage girls.
This wasn’t just a rehash of 2008 - it was a federal reckoning, and the stakes were enormous. For the first time, Epstein was facing up to 45 years in prison, and the very real prospect of a public trial that could expose the names of dozens of powerful people who travelled in his circle.
According to documents obtained by the Associated Press, in the two weeks leading up to his death, Epstein’s mental condition seemed to deteriorate as he complained that he was constantly agitated and unable to sleep as he struggled to adapt to prison life, jail officials reported.
On July 23, 2019 he was placed on psychological observation after he allegedly attempted to commit suicide, leaving his neck bruised and scraped, but after 31 hours on suicide watch, Epstein reportedly insisted that he was not suicidal, telling a jail psychologist he had a “wonderful life” and “would be crazy” to end it. Six days before he died he was taken off suicide watch. One day before his death, his cellmate was transferred out, leaving him alone in his cell.
A Mysterious Death
The day before Epstein died, a U.S. federal court unsealed documents from a defamation case involving Virginia Giuffre alleging that she had been trafficked to then Prince Andrew when she was 17. Alongside the allegations was the now-famous photograph of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre, with Epstein’s then partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, standing in the background - a photograph it would eventually be alleged was taken by Epstein himself. That image moved the story from legal documents into front-page global news overnight.
According to a memo turned over to the Associated Press, the night before Epstein died - while news of Prince Andrew dominated the headlines - Epstein was meeting with his lawyers when he excused himself and told them he needed to make a call to his family, telling an employee of the jail that he wanted to talk to his mother. Not particularly mysterious, except for the fact that his mother had been dead for fifteen years.
On the night of August 9, 2019, Epstein was locked in his cell around 7.30pm, with two guards on duty that were supposed to do checks every thirty minutes that night, only they didn’t - phone records and computer logs show they were browsing the internet and shopping online for furniture and motorcycles. They were later charged for falsifying the logbook to make it look like they had done the checks, but in reality, no guard saw Epstein for roughly 8 hours between 10:30pm and 6:30am.
The cameras in Epstein’s tier had been on the blink for weeks, and as a result, the cameras facing his cell malfunctioned and the hallway footage was missing. But newly released Department of Justice documents show that investigators who reviewed surveillance footage from the night of Epstein’s death noted what was described as an orange-colored shape moving up a staircase toward the isolated, locked tier where his cell was located at approximately 10:39pm.
Epstein was found hanging dead in his cell at 6.30am on the morning of August 10, 2019, with a sheet looped around his neck.
The official cause of death was ruled a suicide by hanging, but the NYC medical examiner’s ruling of suicide was publicly contested by Dr. Michael Baden, the forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother, who argued the broken neck bones were more consistent with strangulation than suicide.
Prince Andrew’s Downfall
Epstein’s death did not end the whispers about his sordid dealings, depraved lifestyle and accusations of criminality. If anything, the whispers only intensified, as the allegations made against then Prince Andrew continued to make headlines, dragging Epstein’s name along with them.
On November 16, 2019, Andrew sat for an interview on BBC Newsnight with Emily Maitlis that he intended to be a reputational reset, but it was anything but. His explanations about the allegations and the now famous photograph were widely ridiculed. When questioned about the fact that he had been photographed visiting Epstein in New York in December 2010 - two years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor - Andrew acknowledged the visit and described it as a mistake, saying he had gone to Epstein’s home to end the friendship in person. Subsequent reporting, however, showed that he remained in contact with Epstein after that visit. The interview became known as one of the most catastrophic PR moments in modern royal history, and reignited public interest in the larger Epstein story.
On May 27, 2020, a documentary titled Filthy Rich landed on Netflix, bringing the Epstein story to a mass global audience in a way news reporting never quite had. Built around survivor testimony, court records, and interviews with investigators and journalists, the series laid out how Epstein operated, how young girls were drawn into his world, and how the system around him allowed it to continue for years. Rather than chasing spectacle, it focused on the mechanics of grooming, access, money, and silence, making the structure of the abuse understandable to viewers who may only have known the headlines.
Though the documentary focussed on Epstein, it also introduced Ghislaine Maxwell as a significant figure in the story - the woman survivors say befriended them, normalized the environment, and helped draw them in.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s Conviction
Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the British media baron long accused by former intelligence figures and biographers of having secret ties to Israeli intelligence, though never officially confirmed. He died in 1991 in circumstances widely described as mysterious after falling from his yacht, just days before it emerged that he had looted hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds to prop up his failing empire.
Soon after her father’s death, Ghislaine met Jeffrey Epstein, moving from the orbit of one powerful figure alleged to have intelligence connections into the inner world of another man whose extraordinary access to wealth and influence has prompted similar speculation.
Less than two months after the Netflix documentary dropped, Ghislaine was arrested on July 2, 2020, and charged with helping Epstein recruit, groom, and traffic underage girls in the 1990s and early 2000s. From that moment on, she would not see the outside of a cell without armed escort.
Her trial began in November 2021 in the Southern District of New York, and over several weeks, four women testified that as teenagers they had been drawn into Epstein’s world through Maxwell, who befriended them, normalized sexual contact, and helped manage the logistics of their abuse.
On December 29, 2021, after five days of deliberation, the jury found her guilty on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor and transporting minors for illegal sexual activity. The judge described her as a sophisticated predator who had played a critical role in enabling Epstein’s abuse, and in June 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
Hers remains the only criminal trial in which the inner workings of Epstein’s operation were laid out in a courtroom under oath, and Maxwell remains the only person convicted in connection with Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors.
Donald Trump’s Denials
Public demand for further investigations, indictments, and trials continued right through until the 2024 presidential election, when Donald Trump campaigned on releasing what supporters began calling “the Epstein files” - the investigative material the Department of Justice had gathered relating to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. Trump returned to the White House promising greater transparency around the case, but once in office, that promise became less clear in practice.
Early in his term, his Attorney General Pam Bondi held a highly publicized event displaying binders labelled “Epstein” and distributing them to a group of conservative media personalities. The gesture was framed as openness, but journalists quickly noted that the documents in the binders largely consisted of material that had already been publicly released through court cases and prior disclosures.
As questions persisted, the Department of Justice and the FBI stated in mid-2025 that there would be no further indictments in the Epstein matter. The announcement triggered renewed public frustration across the political spectrum, with many asking why so much investigative material continued to be suppressed.
When Elon Musk posted on social media that “Donald Trump is in the files,” the comment fueled speculation online about why broader disclosures were not forthcoming. News reports documented that Trump and Epstein moved in overlapping social circles in the 1990s and early 2000s, a history Trump repeatedly sought to distance himself from, despite mounting evidence.
Eventually, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on 19 November 2025, legally requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files within 30 days. The DOJ missed the deadline, eeking out only a small number of documents at the end of December 2025, before eventually dumping over 3 million files - still heavily redacted - in February 2026, holding back millions more that they said could not be released to the public due to legal, privacy, and evidentiary constraints.
What the Files Revealed
What people found inside the Epstein files was truly shocking - the psychological impact of the allegations contained in the files is hard to overstate.
The files include references to emails showing someone sending Epstein photos of children, asking if girls were “too old” for him, with the senders’ names completely redacted. A survivor telling Epstein she’d contracted an infection - he was the only person she’d been intimate with - being forced to see a male doctor he’d chosen. Someone reminding Epstein he’d once offered to buy her baby.
Some of the unverified allegations listed in anonymous FBI tip-offs, as described in the files, defy human comprehension. Alleged acts so vile, and so disturbing, they cannot be responsibly repeated here. The kind of details that makes you wish you hadn’t read them - unspeakable things that they did to children.
Though the publicly released Epstein files were heavily redacted, making it hard to identify any names that may have been involved in wrong-doing, at the very least they provided an extensive list of the names of powerful people who continued interacting with Epstein long after his criminal conviction for organising child prostitution in 2008.
Reporting by outlets including the BBC indicate that the files reveal post-conviction contact between Epstein and a range of public figures, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Deepak Chopra, Ehud Barak, Noam Chomsky, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, Lord Peter Mandelson, Brad Karp, Børge Brende, Miroslav Lajčák, Steve Tisch, Peter Attia, Sarah Ferguson and Richard Branson, among others.
None of this implies criminal wrongdoing, but at the very least it calls into question the judgment of some of the most powerful and prominent people in the world.
The files also include an email dated July 24, 2025, bearing an FBI header, showing someone instructing colleagues to compile a spreadsheet on powerful figures connected to Epstein - the list included Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Prince Andrew, Glenn Dubin, Jess Staley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Howard Lutnick, Alexander Guest, Jean-Luc Brunel, and William Barr. Again, this list of names does not imply there is any evidence of criminal wrong doing.
The Names They Tried to Keep Hidden
After demanding to review the unredacted Epstein files and see the names hidden behind the black bars, Representative Jamie Raskin said he was “able to determine, at least I believe, that there were tons of completely unnecessary redactions in addition to the failure to redact the names of victims, and so that’s troubling to us.”
In the publicly available redacted files, documents show that the FBI published a document in 2019 naming eight people as Epstein’s co-conspirators, though the only person on that list who was ever indicted was Ghislaine Maxwell, and the rest of the names were blacked out. “There’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.” Raskin said. “No way. It doesn’t work like that. So we need to figure out what other conspiracies were involved, what other co-conspirators were involved.”
After viewing the unredacted files, Representative Jared Moskowitz noted there are “lots of co-conspirators and they’re trafficking girls all across the world.” Representative Jamie Raskin said he viewed “lots of examples” of over-redactions, indicating that Donald Trump’s name was redacted in multiple places where it shouldn’t be, and that when he searched Trump’s name in the files it came up “more than a million times.”
Representatives Thomas Massie clarified that he did not see Trump listed as a potential co-conspirator. Trump has long denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein and has not been accused by authorities of any wrongdoing or charged with any crimes in connection with Epstein.
After pressure from Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, Epstein’s old billionaire pal Leslie Wexner and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel were revealed to be listed as co-conspirators, but the documents state there was "limited evidence" against them. Brunel died in jail in 2022 (after being held on charges of rape of minors and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation), while Wexner is alive and well (albeit 88 years old) and due to testify to Congress on February 18.
Wexner’s legal representative has indicated in a statement that the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Epstein investigation said at the time that Wexner was not a co-conspirator nor a target in any respect and that Wexner cooperated fully by providing background information on Epstein and was never contacted again.
This week, on the floor of Congress, Representatives Ro Khanna named five other men whose names had also been redacted in the files - CEO of DP World and an Emirati billionaire businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, as well as four others identified as Nicola Caputo, Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze and Leonic Leonov.
Khanna did not provide evidence of wrongdoing against any of these men nor have they been charged with a crime in connection with Epstein. “If we found six men that they were hiding in two hours,” Khanna said during his floor speech, “imagine how many men they are covering up for in those three million files.”
Khanna also warned that the fallout from the Epstein scandal could threaten the survival of the British monarchy. “This is the most vulnerable the British monarchy has ever been….maybe this will be the end of the monarchy,” Khanna said, calling on King Charles to answer for what he knew about his brother, Andrew, and that stripping his title of Prince is “not enough.”
He also singled out Peter Mandelson, arguing he could “bring down” the entire UK government after it was revealed the former ambassador to Washington may have leaked secret market-moving information to Epstein during the 2008 financial crisis. Mandelson now faces criminal investigation and has resigned from the House of Lords.
Suspicions and Conspiracy Theories
Far from clarifying anything, the Epstein files have unleashed a raft of new suspicions, accusations and conspiracy theories, based on information buried within the files. Now that we can see the extent of the horrors carried out as part of Epstein’s sick criminal enterprise, attention is turning to the way in which those in power hid the truth from the public for so long.
As the list of powerful people, entities and nations tangled up in Epstein’s web grows longer by the day, so does the list of people who stood to benefit from Epstein’s silence, triggering renewed speculation that he may not have committed suicide, but that his death may have been co-ordinated or staged. A new theory now circulating on the internet is that Epstein didn’t die at all, but may have been switched out and spirited away to Israel, though the evidence to support that theory is thin on the ground.
Epstein’s apparent suicide in jail is now being seen in a new light, as evidence emerged in the files that the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York drafted a press release on August 9, 2019 announcing Epstein’s death the day before he was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The reason this document was drafted has not been explained.
That a press release was drafted announcing Epstein’s death the day before he died is not the only revelation raising eyebrows and renewed questions since the release of the files.
Bill Barr was the U.S. Attorney General at the time of Epstein’s second arrest, and though Barr did not have a personal, documented relationship with Epstein, his father did. Remember back in 1974, Epstein got a job as a maths teacher at the prestigious Dalton School, even though he had no university degree or teaching qualifications? The headmaster who gave him that job was Donald Barr - Bill Barr’s father. There has never been any reporting to suggest this overlap was anything more than an unusual historical coincidence - the man who finally caught Epstein was the son of the man who gave him his first job - but that hasn’t stopped internet sleuths asking questions.
Raising even more questions is the fact that at the time of Epstein’s second arrest, Donald Trump was president (the first time around). Since it’s now been revealed that Donald Trump’s name appears in the Epstein files “more than a million times,” and it was reportedly Trump who reported Epstein to police in 2006 prior to his first arrest, the fact the Trump was president when Epstein was arrested in 2019 has prompted renewed public speculation online.
According to an email revealed in the Epstein files, Epstein’s brother, Mark, accused Donald Trump of being involved in the late convicted sex offender’s death in a tip sent to the FBI, and The Independent confirmed with Mark Epstein that he submitted the tip. “Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his jail cell,” the tip read. “I have reason to believe he was killed because he was about to name names. I believe Presient (sic) Trump authorized is (sic) murder.”
Internet theories abound, some more outrageous than others. Was he taken out by Trump? By Russian intelligence? The CIA? Mossad? Queen Elizabeth? Is he still alive and well, living it up in the Middle East? Or was it suicide after all? At a certain point, the paper trail stops and the unanswered questions begin.
While internet detectives hunt for clues in the Epstein files, there are hints hidden in the stars about what actually went on the night of Epstein’s death - what was happening in Epstein’s chart and the charts of all the major players we now know were connected to him, thanks to the Epstein files.
The stars paint an illuminating picture, and even go some way towards not just answering the questions surrounding Epstein’s death, but also his life. Who was he working for, who could be implicated by him, and who stood to benefit the most from his permanent silence?
There’s enough speculation and misinformation floating around already about Epstein and his many associates, so the only responsible place to unpack all the charts and shine some light on the clues written in the sky is in the Inner Circle, where it can be read by those who are ready for the deeper story.
Who protected him?
Who benefited from him?
And what really happened the night he died?
From Epstein to Maxwell, to Wexner, Trump and the Andrew formerly known as Prince, to the CIA, Mossad to Russia, Israel and the House of Windsor….
The world has questions.
The sky has the answers….