When Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, he left behind an estate worth about $600 million in property and assets (slashed to about $130 million by mid-2025), along with years worth of physical and digital evidence. For most of this year, the House Oversight Committee has been releasing dribs and drabs from this vast cache, from a bizarre birthday gift including the distinctive signature of future president Donald Trump (Trump has denied writing the letter) to a set of emails documenting his tense interactions with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and emotional conversations with former Harvard president Larry Summers.
But on Thursday, as the deadline for the release of the government’s full Epstein files drew near, the committee released some of the most disturbing photos yet—a cache that includes a set of abstract portraits of a young girl with the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita written on her body in pen. (To underline the lack of creativity, one image includes an out-of-focus copy of The Annotated Lolita, a scholarly edition of the midcentury ode to kidnapping a young girl and forcing her into sexual slavery.)
House Oversight Committee.
Though less viscerally offensive, the rest of the images—there are 68 in total—are still loaded with information, giving us a clearer view of Epstein’s life in the decade after his 2008 conviction for sex crimes. Before his 2019 arrest and subsequent suicide, the financier’s reputation was suffering. Yet his wealth and supposed charm still gave him convening power. From a gathering that included New York Times columnist David Brooks to royal audiences in Saudi Arabia, Epstein was still hobnobbing with public figures, even if the meetings took place in private. (In a statement, the Times said that Brooks met Epstein at a 2011 event “with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns,” adding, “Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely attended dinner.”)
But the images also reveal the decrepitude of Epstein’s surroundings during this period. The Lolita photos show the commercial-grade bedding you might expect to find at a short-stay hotel, while a conference room in one photo sports chalkboards scribbled with calculus, and a dingy kitchenette. His private airplane, the so-called Lolita Express, was drab and cramped. In one image, Epstein is flanked by young women, faces redacted, as they sit in a room with gold-painted walls and dirty red banquette seating. His photos with Steve Bannon show that his office is decorated with an ornate credenza, a Romantic-era painting, and a few quartz paperweights—ugly, tawdry trinkets.