'Palm Beach Pete' reassures everyone, 'I'm not Epstein I promise'
A Florida man known only as “Palm Beach Pete” is letting the world know he is definitely not deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A video posted online late last week by Instagram user Andrew Posey showed a man in a white baseball cap and sunglasses driving a convertible with the top down in South Florida. The man’s white hair and square jaw provide a marked resemblance with Epstein.
The person taking the video claims: “Epstein is alive.” Text written across it states: “Epstein out here in South Florida.”
Epstein had a Florida home, but he was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 as he awaited trial for federal sex trafficking charges. Authorities later ruled the death to be a suicide.
The video was subsequently shared on the OnlyinFlorida Instagram account and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times across multiple accounts.
In response to the video, the unidentified man, who goes by Palm Beach Pete online, has taken to social media to reassure everyone that he is not the convicted sex offender.
In a post to X on Thursday, he wrote: “I’m not Epstein I promise…”
He shared a video, recorded in a car, where he says: “Hey everybody, this is Palm Beach Pete and my video went viral ’cause some dude randomly filmed me as I was driving on I-95, unbeknownst to me. And the next thing I know, I’m a viral sensation.”
He goes on to say he hadn’t accessed his phone for several hours when the video went viral. “So, I got a lot of traction, it’s pretty crazy.”
Someone in the car, off camera, asks if he is Epstein, to which he replies: “I’m not Jeffery Epstein. I’m Palm Beach Pete.”
I’m not Epstein I promise… https://t.co/aam64gfYYi
— Palm Beach Pete (@not_jeffepstein) March 19, 2026
He has also set up an Instagram account called “ not-epstein .” He posted a video to it on Friday morning, standing on a balcony with the ocean in the background.
“Good morning everybody. This is Palm Beach Pete. I want to thank everybody for the positive comments I got for saying I’m not Jeffrey Epstein,” he says. “I’m just me being me. It’s a crazy phenomenon that has gone really viral.”
He expressed appreciation for all the support he has received and reiterated that he is, “Peter from Palm Beach. Have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. He’s a very bad person, what he did, obviously. And he is dead. And I’m alive.”
In an interview with entertainment news program TMZ on Friday, he said, he has “gone viral before, but never to this magnitude.”
He recounted incidents in New York City, such as a man filming him at a hockey game, and a clip from a Real Housewives episode when a fan spotted him in the background and posted it with the claim he was Epstein.
“It’s not new to me, but this amount of eyeballs is out of control,” he said.
He added that he works in commercial real estate, plays tennis and is very social. After TMZ asked if he would consider cutting his hair or changing his appearance to look less like Epstein, he said: “I’m not going to change. This guy is dead. He was a really bad person and I can hold my head high.”
Epstein has stayed in the headlines as the U.S. Department of Justice releases large batches of files tied to his case, but not all documents have been made public and some material has been redacted.
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