Before Jeffrey Epstein managed money for the world’s rich and powerful, he was educating their teenage children.
Epstein, the accused sex trafficker awaiting a bail ruling in a Manhattan jail, taught math and physics at the Dalton School, a private K-12 institution whose students are the sons and daughters of New York City’s elite. It was there on the aristocratic Upper East Side in the mid-1970s that a charming, bright young man with a head for numbers catapulted from his Coney Island roots to a double life of astounding wealth and disturbing depravity.
By the time he was 45, Epstein was living 18 blocks from Dalton in a nine-story mansion now worth $77 million, one of several posh homes where investigators say he molested dozens upon dozens of young girls, who were recruited to give him massages and coerced into sex acts. He followed a similar pattern at his waterfront estate in Palm Beach, where he pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution — despite being charged with far more serious crimes against underage girls — and received a remarkably lenient sentence, courtesy of a U.S. attorney who would later become President Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
Read more at our news partner the Miami Herald.