Edward Jay Epstein

Edward Jay Epstein (December 6, 1935 – January 9, 2024) was an American investigative journalist and a political science professor at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Early life and education Edward Epstein was born in New York City on December 6, 1935. One of his professors at Cornell was Vladimir Nabokov. In 1973, he received his PhD in government from Harvard University. After leaving teaching, Epstein decided to pursue his writing career back in New York City.

In "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" (1982), Edward Jay Epstein detailed the heavy marketing strategy used by the diamond company De Beers to turn tiny rocks of transparent crystallized carbon into highly demanded, high-priced mass market items. In his 1996 book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, the author revealed, among other things, how the prolific businessman laundered money to finance espionage for the Soviets in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 2017, Epstein was the subject of a documentary, Hall of Mirrors, directed by the sisters Ena and Ines Talakic, and which premiered at the 55th New York Film Festival. This covered his most notable articles and books, including close looks at the findings of the Warren Commission, the structure of the diamond industry, the strange career of Armand Hammer, and the inner workings of big-time journalism itself. These were interwoven with an in-progress investigation into the circumstances around Edward Snowden's 2013 leak of classified documents, resulting in Epstein's book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. neither did so. On the contrary, Epstein concludes in his book that there is no evidence Snowden was employed by the Russian intelligence service while in the United States. What he said in his book was that Snowden, a former civilian contractor at the National Security Agency, as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously confirmed in its December 2016 report, removed digital copies of 1.5 million classified files from the NSA. Epstein also said that Snowden went to Hong Kong, where he secretly contacted Russian government officials, and that the House Intelligence Committee found, based on its access to U.S. intelligence, that "ince Snowden's arrival in Moscow [on June 23, 2013], he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services", The fact that a defector to Moscow had contact between 2013 and 2016 with an adversary's intelligence service does not make him a spy, and therefore Epstein never claimed that Snowden was a spy in the film Hall of Mirrors or in his book. Nonetheless, he said, "Other whistleblowers have gone to their respective service's inspector general with their concerns; by contrast, Snowden 'got in touch with' agents of the Russian government."

Connection with Jeffrey Epstein Epstein wrote that he first met Jeffrey Epstein in 1987 at a party. Jeffrey Epstein upgraded his flight tickets, let him stay at his properties, and introduced him to others. By early 1989, Epstein became aware of multiple instances of what he believed were fraud and other instances of legal market manipulation, and he wrote an article titled "The Win-Win Game" about this in a column for Manhattan, inc. He did not name Jeffrey Epstein in the article but identified him as a grifter and fabulist, and Jeffrey Epstein stopped speaking with him after its publication.

According to Edward Epstein, Jules Kroll sent an investigator to ask him about Jeffrey Epstein in 1996 as part of an investigation they were conducting for Les Wexner's L Brands. Kroll's investigators had already determined that Jeffrey Epstein was a former Brooklyn roofer with a faked resume.

Twenty-four years later, Jeffrey Epstein contacted Epstein again, inviting him to tea to discuss an article Epstein wrote about Vladimir Nabokov, and an artificial intelligence project named Sophia that Jeffrey Epstein's purported "robot team" was working on. In some of the released e-mails, Edward Epstein was shown to have messaged Ghislaine Maxwell, inviting her to a "Shadow Commission on 9/11" and linking his personal website where he investigated the September 11 terrorist attacks, which Maxwell declined.

Similarly, in another released e-mail conversation between Ghislaine Maxwell and Philip Levine (a businessman known to have been close to Jeffrey Epstein) that took place in September 18, 2001, a week after the terrorist attacks, and which went viral and was misinterpreted in social media, Maxwell discusses having landed in Santa Monica, California, on a helicopter; to which Levine jokingly replies: "Where's the real pilot?"

Published work