Author reveals 'oh-my-God moment' from first Epstein meeting
Michael Wolff, a journalist who has written four books about President Donald Trump, shared the surprising information late financier and convicted child sex offender revealed on his private jet the first time they met.
In a post on his Substack, Wolff detailed his first meeting with Epstein in 2000, when they were traveling from New York City to the TED conference in Monterey, California, on Epstein's Boeing 727 with a number of other conference attendees and “three model-tall young women.”
The flight happened years before Epstein was under investigation for sex trafficking and abuse of young women, The Daily Beast reported.
Wolff described the peculiar experience.
"The dodginess could not be missed," he wrote.
Epstein then apparently started describing an island he was planning to develop in the Caribbean to architect David Rockwell. He asked Rockwell to review his blueprints.
"He clearly became more confounded as he looked more closely, and as Epstein chattily describing the extent of his other-worldly seeming project. 'What are these little rooms here?' a puzzled Rockwell finally asked, pointing to an area that might seem to resemble a medieval cloister,” Wolff wrote.
“That’s where the girls stay," Epstein apparently told the architect nonchalantly.
Little St. James is a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands that was owned by Epstein and served as a location where he allegedly engaged in sex trafficking and abuse of minors. The island has become a focal point of investigations and public scrutiny following Epstein's arrest and conviction, with authorities examining records and evidence related to criminal activity that allegedly occurred there.
Wolff said that after the conference, he headed back with Epstein and the three young women to New York City. After he boarded the flight, Epstein asked him a question.
“‘Do you want to ride back here in the petting zoo?’ I thought I heard him say, without immediate comprehension, and, very slowly, second-guessing if I could have possibly heard him correctly—and, if I had (long before the interpretation of this might have been obvious), what could this possibly mean. ‘Or up in the cockpit with the pilots?'" Wolff wrote.
The author said he chose to ride in the cockpit instead.