His web of influence has ensnared VIPs worldwide, from Andrew, the erstwhile prince, and Peter Mandelson through to successive US presidents.
Yet after the ever-widening furore over who had dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, one man who knew him well has remained largely out of the spotlight: his own brother.
Mark Epstein, 71, is the older sibling of the late sex offender but has long been a peripheral figure amid the controversy – quoted mainly just for his claims that his brother’s suicide in jail might actually have been murder.
Now, however, he has been thrust centre-stage over an email suggesting he knew more about his sibling’s complex sordid affairs than previously thought.
New documents released by Congress reveal an intriguing – if distasteful – exchange between the pair in which Mark Epstein appears to suggest that Vladimir Putin has compromising photos of Donald Trump performing sex acts.
In an email from 2018, Mark Epstein suggested to his brother that he ask Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, whether Putin has “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba”.
That brief, cryptic phrase has sent social media into conspiracy overdrive. “Blowing”, it was explained to the uninitiated, was another term for fellatio.
“Bubba”, meanwhile, is a well-known name for former President Bill Clinton.
As the internet pondered the idea that Trump had performed oral sex on Clinton – and that Putin had photos of it all – Epstein was drawn out of the woodwork to issue a hasty clarification. No, “Bubba” was not President Clinton, and no, the email exchanges were not referring to an actual event, and were instead just a joke.
“They were simply part of a humorous private exchange between two brothers and were never meant for public release or to be interpreted as serious remarks,” Mark Epstein wrote in a statement sent to The Daily Beast on Sunday.
“For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former President Bill Clinton.”
Mark Epstein has declined to comment further, prompting the even ghastlier online theory that “Bubba” was in fact a pet horse of Jeffrey’s jailed pimping associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.
But whoever – or whatever – “Bubbagate” really refers to, it has also raised the question of what information Mark Epstein might have about people in his brother’s orbit.
The “Bubbagate” email lay buried amid some 23,000 pages of freshly-released archives from the late Epstein’s estate, which both Republicans and Democrats have been trawling through for dirt to throw at each other.
Among the revelations so far have been emails from Jeffrey Epstein claiming that Trump spent hours at his house with the late Virginia Giuffre, who claimed to have been forced into sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (both men have always denied any wrongdoing).
Such has been the volume of news coverage over the Epstein affair – and the extent of Trump’s alleged involvement with the disgraced financier – that his brother Mark’s occasional interventions in the matter have gone largely unremarked until now.
Discussing Bubbagate on the latest episode of the satirical current affairs programme The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart spoke for many when he said: “And I know what you’re probably thinking: Jeffrey Epstein had a brother? He did, apparently.”
So who exactly is Mark Epstein, and what might he know?
Throughout the scandals involving his well-connected sibling, he has largely maintained a low profile, despite having a close professional relationship with him for many years.
Born to Jewish parents in 1950s New York, the pair grew up together in a plush gated community in the affluent suburb of Coney Island, both ending up working as investors. Mark spent time as the president of his brother’s firm, J. Epstein & Co, and has also run a T-shirt printing business, a leasing company and a modelling agency.
He is reported to have formally retired at the age of 39, and donated nearly US$1m ($1.7m) to a New York art college that he studied at in the 1970s. The exact scale of his personal wealth is unknown – when the Wall Street Journal tried to dig into his finances after his brother’s death in 2019, he declined to answer questions.
However, he was reported to own a 16-storey condominium in Manhattan worth around US$7m, and to part-own a US$1m luxury yacht. He also offered to put up US$100,000 bail when his brother was seeking bail before his trial on sex-trafficking charges.
He was originally thought to be the sole beneficiary of his brother’s will, valued at US$577m, but while on remand in jail in 2019, his brother signed it over to a private trust, preventing the beneficiaries’ identities being disclosed. The estate has already been the subject of legal claims by Epstein’s victims running to at least US$120m.
Mark Epstein claims that while he and his brother had been good friends in adulthood, they only met in person very occasionally. When he had to identify his sibling’s body after he hanged himself in his New York jail cell, it was the first time he had seen him in seven years.
He has never commented in detail on his brother’s alleged sex-trafficking crimes, although in a carelessly-worded interview last year, he said his brother liked to have a “good time”.
Challenged about his choice of words, he backtracked, saying: “I really don’t want to speculate because I wasn’t there.”
He has, however, raised doubts over whether his brother died by his own hand. In an interview with Newsnight in July, he said another prisoner might have been hired to kill him to stop him revealing more secrets about politicians in his contacts book.
“In the 2016 election ... Jeffrey told me that if he said what he knew about the candidates, they’d have to cancel the election,” he said.
He insists that he only became aware of his brother’s sexual proclivities in 2006, when Jeffrey called him to inform him that he was in trouble with the police for having sex with underage girls.
However, he claims that in the late 1990s, his sibling had a close relationship with Donald Trump – close enough, indeed, to swap secrets about each other’s sex lives.
In a CNN interview in July, he spoke of being on a flight with Trump on Jeffrey’s private jet, when his brother made reference to Trump sleeping with married women.
“Jeffrey asked him, how come you sleep with so many married women? And Donald said: ‘because it’s so wrong’.
“That’s not the kind of question you ask a casual acquaintance.”
The degree of intimacy he suggests between the two men is potentially embarrassing for Trump, who has been seeking to distance himself from Jeffrey as much as possible.
Trump is on record as describing him as “a lot of fun to be with”, and “as someone who likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”.
But he vehemently denies any wrongdoing with Epstein, saying the pair had a falling-out two years before Epstein was first arrested in 2006. “I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump said yesterday. “I threw him out of my club many years ago because I thought he was a sick pervert.”
Mark Epstein tells a different story of how the two men parted company. His brother, he said earlier this year, drifted away from Trump after coming to the conclusion that he was a “crook”.
In another interview on Monday, he added: “He didn’t tell me what he knew, but Jeffrey definitely had dirt on Trump.”
Beyond the wilder-eyed political punditry of social media, few are likely to take seriously the suggestion that Trump performed fellatio on Clinton, or anyone else.
Equally fanciful is the idea that the Kremlin had photos of the act for blackmail purposes, which only the Epstein brothers knew about.
On the other hand, plenty of Democrats believed the so-called Steele dossier, with its now-discredited claims that Trump enjoyed “golden showers” sex games in a Moscow hotel. Many Trump supporters also bought into the cult of Q-Anon, which held that Hillary Clinton led a secret cabal of Satanic, child-murdering Democrats.
So “humorous private exchange” or otherwise, Bubbagate is likely to invite further scrutiny over just what else Mark Epstein knew about his brother’s wealthy friends. For in the fevered, conspiratorial world of current US politics, there is no longer such a phrase: “It was just a joke”.
The brother of America’s most infamous networker may have thought his clarifications would have ended any further questions. But they may yet simply invite even more.
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