Then there is the outside world pressed to the glass, appalled and

Then there is the outside world pressed to the glass, appalled and titillated by the monster inside the big house—a kind of Boo Radley of the Upper East Side. I have taken friends by the Epstein mansion, and the reaction to its other-worldly size in Manhattan is almost always the same: audible disbelief (everybody makes their own particular odd noise). Press accounts, seldom supplying new information, ever recycle and repeat the mysterious (and monstrous) billionaire mythology, with brief glimpses of him stepping out of the house (the same photos endlessly republished), and the assumption of depravity inside. In fact, the life in the house, without wife or children or conventional domestic demeanor, in some way conforms to the most scripted fantasies: a life somewhere between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. The domesticity of the house, and the background of Epstein’s problems, centers around a group of young women who act as his support staff and companions. Some have worked for him for many years, marrying, having children, and continuing as part of his business and household infrastructure. One woman, on an afternoon when I was there, recently married, had just returned from an around the world honeymoon that Epstein had arranged for her. Some are his romantic interests. His present girl friend is in dental school. One former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a Swedish model and Miss Universe finalist, became a doctor and married hedge funder Glen Dubin and together they finance the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. Most at one time will travel with him to his floating residences—the ranch in New Mexico, the vast apartment in Paris, the Island in the Caribbean, the house in Palm Beach. This is so outside of conventional living or staffing or romantic relationships that it is hard to describe in a straightforward or straight-faced way. It sometimes seems part of Epstein’s implicit challenge: not just look at me, but do you even believe what you see? Or it seems he is just oblivious to what others are thinking. A willful and perhaps fatal tone deafness. But Hefnerian prurience can also be quite businesslike: poised young women in a mansion on the Upper East Side with various office responsibilities—in some sense not that different from any of the art galleries in the surrounding neighborhood. Epstein’s young women mingle freely with his powerful guests, not so much as hostess or, in tabloid language, harem-like (or as “sex slaves”’), but often as attentive students (that, of course, might be regarded as having its own fetish-like attraction). HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022711