Tina Brown once had a “chilling” encounter with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, in her very own office, and amid the MAGA firestorm over his unreleased purported client list, she’s spilling the tea.
The Daily Beast, which Brown founded in 2008, published some of the earliest stories about Epstein’s deeds and the network that enabled them.
One day Epstein showed up to Brown’s office — unexpected, unannounced, and quite menacing, she recounted in Thursday’s edition of The Daily Beast podcast and revealed last week in her substack, Fresh Hell.
Before that, Epstein had told Brown by phone that she should kill the stories they were working on because the reporter was a “well-known nutcase” spreading “totally ridiculous” nonsense about him, Brown said. She thanked him and referred him to legal.
A few weeks later Brown returned from lunch to find Epstein had made his way through building security and into her office. Stunned, she stood in the doorway and asked what he was doing there.
“He looked at me with this kind of snake eyes, cold,” Brown said. “And it was menacing — it was really menacing — and he pointed his finger and he said, ‘Just. Stop.’ ”
She stood her ground.
“I said, ‘Jeffrey, you know, we are continuing to do these pieces. If you have an issue, just talk to our—’ ”
He interrupted.
“ ‘Just. Stop,’ ” he said, still pointing. “ ‘There will be consequences if you don’t stop.’ ”
She asked him to leave and again suggested he speak to the Beast’s lawyer, but that just made him narrow his eyes, “morose and menacing,” and repeat himself.
“ ‘You heard me,’ ” he said. “ ‘Stop.’ ”
Then he strode out.
“It was a very chilling experience,” Brown told Dougherty. “It was scary actually, but we barreled ahead.”
It also underscored how easy it would be for Epstein to overpower his young victims, she noted. “He was so intimidating.”
It would take nine years and numerous additional reports before Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. Five weeks later, on August 10, guards found him dead in his cell at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Brooklyn.
His hanging death was ruled a suicide, but recent revelations about gaps in the video surveillance outside his cell have renewed doubts.
Trump’s most ardent supporters were counting on him to pull back the veil on the Epstein files. In February, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said his client list and other documents were “sitting on my desk right now,” about to be released.
Last week, she asserted there was no list. This sparked a firestorm among many Trump’s supporters that has yet to abate, especially since the president himself fanned the flames by denouncing them.
With News Wire Services