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Steve Bannon took 15 hours of video of Jeffrey Epstein in the months before Epstein died in jail.
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He said it was for a “documentary” — a claim that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
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Sources say Bannon was friends with Epstein and was trying to rehabilitate his reputation.
Before his 2019 death in jail, Jeffrey Epstein spent hours being interviewed on camera by Steve Bannon.
A clip published by the New York Post in 2021 shows Bannon verbally sparring with Epstein.
Epstein declared he was a “firm believer and supporter” of Time’s Up, the organization founded to fight sexual harassment.
“I made my living from old thinking,” Epstein said from his palatial Manhattan home. “But the future is for the way women think.”
Bannon pushed back.
“Is that kind of sop because of all the depravity you’ve done against young women?” he asked.
It was vintage Bannon. The right-wing operator threw a Molotov cocktail into the political left’s arena, hoping for chaos. And he promoted himself by lashing out at Epstein.
The clip supposedly promoted a documentary, “The Monsters: Epstein’s Life Among the Global Elite,” from Bannon’s production company Victory Films. Before Epstein went to jail on sex-trafficking charges in July 2019, Bannon spent months in the financier’s homes in Manhattan and Paris. He boasted that he shot 15 hours’ worth of video.
Three years later, no documentary has been released. And Bannon’s close relationship with Epstein has been curiously memory-holed.
Bannon grew closer to Epstein in the summer of 2018, advising him on how to handle his myriad legal and media investigations. They continued to spend time with each other through the following summer, when Epstein was arrested in Manhattan on sex-trafficking charges.
The footage remains under wraps.
It has not surfaced anywhere — not in the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of assisting Epstein’s sex trafficking, nor in numerous civil lawsuits from his victims.
Bannon’s explanation that he was producing a documentary about Epstein was nonsense, according to people who spent time with both men around the time they were in each other’s lives.
In reality, the two acted like friends around each other. And Bannon, these people said, was trying to help Epstein — a notorious sex offender — with his public-relations problems.
Bannon met Epstein in December 2017, shortly after he stopped working in Donald Trump‘s White House. Epstein had his own history with Trump; participants in the Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, social scenes, they befriended each other in the 1980s but had a falling-out in the 2000s.
After Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial, a compensation program funded by his $630 million estate identified about 150 of his victims. Later litigation put the number closer to 200.
Bannon is serving a four-month sentence after a jury found him guilty of contempt of Congress for flouting a subpoena from the House panel investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. He’s also awaiting trial on criminal charges over his role in We Build the Wall, an organization whose cofounders enriched themselves with money donated for the purpose of building a US-Mexico border wall.
Recent media coverage of Bannon has seldom mentioned Epstein. A 10,000-word Esquire magazine article published last fall about Bannon’s machinations in right-wing media, including his role in the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, made no mention of Epstein.
Bannon, who frequently speaks to journalists, did not respond to numerous voicemails, emails, and text messages from Business Insider over the course of several years requesting comment about his relationship with Epstein.
He did not respond to an additional request for comment in a letter mailed to him on July 9 in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he is incarcerated.
Alexandra Preate, a spokesperson for Bannon, told BI in December 2021 that the documentary about Epstein would be screened “probably around Labor Day.” The date came and went. Preate has not responded to follow-up queries in the two years since, including a request for comment sent Tuesday.
On tape, Epstein talked about his relationship with Trump
Bannon first publicly claimed the footage was for a “documentary” in September 2021, more than two years after Epstein’s death. He told the Daily Mail in a statement at the time that the footage was part of “a planned 50 hours of open ended no holds barred interviews with Epstein for a 8 to 10 hour expose on his deep relationships with the global elites in finance, science, education, medicine, politics and culture.”
But people who spoke with Bannon around the time he was shooting the footage told BI that he was trying to improve Epstein’s public image. He also may have just wanted some of Epstein’s money.
Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, said Bannon was trying to help his brother “rehabilitate his reputation” after the Miami Herald in 2018 published a series of articles — which ultimately led to an indictment by federal prosecutors in Manhattan — about his sexual abuse of girls in Palm Beach.
Mark Epstein told BI that his brother had sent him footage of some of Bannon’s interview with him.
In that interview, Mark Epstein told BI last year, “Jeffrey said he stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”
In the 2000s, Trump and Jeffrey Epstein fought over Trump’s purchase of a Palm Beach mansion that Epstein coveted. The Miami Herald also reported that Epstein lost his Mar-a-Lago membership after he harassed another member’s daughter.
Mark Epstein said he inquired about the footage in a meeting with Bannon in New York after his brother’s death but that Bannon refused to share more information.
“He told me he had like 16 hours of videotaping with Jeffrey in his vault,” Mark Epstein said. “And he told me it was protected because it was witness preparation and it was protected under attorney-client privilege. But the thing is, Bannon’s not an attorney.”
Do you have any information about Steve Bannon’s footage of Jeffrey Epstein? Contact Business Insider Legal Correspondent Jacob Shamsian at jshamsian@businessinsider.com or on the secure messaging app Signal at JacobShamsian.07.
Mark Epstein said Bannon asked him for money, saying he needed $6 million to complete the documentary. Mark Epstein told BI he declined.
Jeffrey Epstein died in jail before he could go to trial. A years-in-the-making 121-page Justice Department watchdog report published last year found that he killed himself in his cell, but Mark Epstein found it unpersuasive, telling BI last year that it was “blatant bullshit.”
Mark Epstein said his brother told him that Bannon recorded the video to help prepare him for testimony. At the time, Jeffrey Epstein was facing civil lawsuits from accusers that could have led to depositions.
“I have also tried to reach Bannon about it a couple of times since our meeting and get no response,” Mark Epstein told BI in an email this week.
Mark Epstein said Jeffrey Epstein told him he wasn’t subpoenaed for any depositions at that time.
But Mark Epstein said his brother told him that if he had to testify in the future, he “would’ve had fun with it” and “channeled” Brett Kavanaugh during the now Supreme Court justice’s Senate confirmation hearings.
“You know when Kavanaugh was going through his confirmation hearings and he said to the senator: ‘Senator, I like beer. My friends like beer. Do you like beer, Senator?'” Mark Epstein said.
“So Jeffrey said he’s going to channel Kavanaugh and say: ‘Senator, I like pussy. My friends like pussy. Do you like pussy, Senator?'” he said.
The footage hasn’t come up in any of the Epstein lawsuits
If Bannon actually needed money, he didn’t seem to mention it to his usual financial backers.
Mike Lindell, a long-standing sponsor of Bannon’s media empire through his ads for MyPillow, told BI in a recent interview that Bannon never asked him for money to complete the purported documentary.
“I’ve never heard about it in my life,” he said, before launching into a digression about Dominion Voting Systems.
It’s also not clear whether Bannon sought money from Guo Wengui, a Chinese business tycoon who is said to be a billionaire and who was a member of Mar-a-Lago. Guo — who also uses the names Ho Wan Kwok and Miles Guo — served as a financial backer of Bannon, allowing the right-wing firebrand to live on his yacht and promoting Bannon’s various media projects to his social-media audience of Chinese dissidents. Evidence in Guo’s criminal fraud case in Manhattan shows Guo told his followers to watch some of Bannon’s other documentaries, but no discussion of Epstein appears in the records.
A representative for Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management who maintained a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, told BI that Bannon never asked for money from Black, adding that Bannon did not have a camera during the one occasion when Black and others met with Bannon in Epstein’s home. The representative said that the meeting took place shortly after the strategist left the White House and that the group discussed politics.
David Bossie, the president of the right-wing advocacy group Citizens United, who produced other Bannon media projects around this period, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Though the footage would offer a window into the final months of Epstein’s life, it doesn’t appear to have been subpoenaed for any legal cases involving him or his estate.
Bobbi Sternheim, an attorney for Ghislaine Maxwell, said federal prosecutors didn’t subpoena the footage for Maxwell’s trial, which was part of the same criminal investigation into Epstein.
Gloria Allred and Arick Fudali, two other attorneys who each represent numerous Epstein victims, also each said they were not aware of the footage being subpoenaed in any case. An attorney representing Epstein’s estate executors didn’t respond to a request for comment. David Schoen, an attorney who represented both Bannon and Epstein, told BI in an email that he didn’t know anything about the footage.
Brad Edwards, an attorney who represents dozens of Epstein’s accusers in numerous lawsuits, said the footage hadn’t been a part of any of his cases — yet.
“To my knowledge nobody has served a subpoena on Bannon for them, but I see no reason why not,” he told BI in an email.
However, he wrote, “there are a couple pending cases now where those tapes will likely be subpoenaed.”
Bannon planned to rehabilitate Epstein’s reputation
The New York Post story featuring the purported trailer was cowritten by Emma-Jo Morris, who also worked with Bannon to disseminate the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Morris told BI she hadn’t seen any of Bannon’s other Epstein footage and didn’t know what happened to the project.
Bannon’s time in Epstein’s orbit was recounted in the book “Too Famous,” published in October 2021 by Michael Wolff, who heavily relied on Bannon as a source for his books about Trump’s White House.
In a section titled “Monster,” Wolff wrote that Bannon sought to change the public perception of Epstein.
Bannon believed Epstein needed a public-facing communications strategy in response to Julie K. Brown’s “Perversion of Justice” series in the Miami Herald. Brown reported Alexander Acosta, who, as a US attorney in Florida in the 2000s, oversaw a criminal investigation into the financier, arranged a light plea deal even though law-enforcement agents were aware that Epstein had abused dozens of girls. Acosta resigned from his position as labor secretary in the Trump administration following the publication of the series.
Wolff’s book says that in a March 2019 conference call, Bannon, Epstein, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Epstein’s defense attorney Reid Weingarten discussed whether Epstein should give a primetime TV interview. They floated the idea of going on CBS’s “60 Minutes” or interviewing with Rachel Maddow or Gayle King, Wolff reported.
At one point, Wolff wrote, Epstein “made the gesture of the noose above his head” to express his distaste at the idea of being interviewed by King.
According to the book, Bannon said that recording videos would help Epstein prepare for an interview that would convince the world “he’s not a monster.”
“He’s got to sit there and watch the tape all the time, that’s how you learn,” Bannon said, according to Wolff. “This is like preparing for a deposition, except this is preparing for the court of public opinion.”
Wolff’s book includes long excerpts of conversations between Epstein and Bannon, as well as descriptions of Epstein’s activities during the time he was close with Bannon. The book does not disclose whether Wolff viewed Bannon’s footage.
Quotes in the book suggest that during sit-down interviews with Bannon, Epstein created an air of mystery: He was evasive about his interactions with girls, declined to name the wealthy people he advised on financial issues, and said he’d “escorted” Princess Diana “on occasion.”
Bannon also said he believed Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” though it doesn’t describe any evidence he offered to support the claim.
Bannon, who was the chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, believed Epstein knew “dangerous secrets about Trump,” Wolff wrote.
“You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign,” Bannon told Epstein, according to Wolff’s book.
Wolff wrote that Epstein said Trump “regaled him with the torrid details” of his sexual encounter with E. Jean Carroll in Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. A civil jury last year found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the Manhattan department store and defaming her by lying about it.
Wolff wrote that Bannon also appeared skeptical of Epstein’s many stories.
“Come on, dude. This is a stinking fish.” Bannon told his camera operator, according to Wolff.
“God, it’s all such bullshit. Nothing makes any sense in this story,” he reportedly said. “Which is what makes it so fucking compelling.”
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