The Evil Design of Epstein’s Mansion

On the morning federal agents walked into 9 East 71st Street, the first thing past the stone vestibule was not a foyer in any ordinary sense. It was a painting of Bill Clinton in a blue dress, hung where no visitor could miss it, and a bank of seven security monitors watching the house that Jeffrey Epstein had spent two decades turning into something between a salon and a trap.

That arrangement is the spine of a floor-by-floor reconstruction published in June by the YouTube channel Moss, built from FBI photographs and diagrams released with the Justice Department’s Epstein files. The images were taken during the July 2019 search, days after Epstein’s arrest at Teterboro and weeks before he was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell. What they show is less a home than a machine: cameras aimed at beds, a massage room dressed for use, a safe full of drives and a second identity, and, a few rooms away, the dining table where prime ministers and celebrities had been fed.

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The house Wexner signed over

The building is a 1930s neoclassical mansion between Fifth and Madison, long described in court papers as roughly 21,000 square feet across seven floors and about forty rooms. The video puts it nearer 50,000 and calls it the largest private residence in Manhattan; published accounts have not confirmed that figure. Leslie Wexner, the retail billionaire who was Epstein’s principal patron, bought it in 1989. Control later passed to a Virgin Islands company tied to Epstein. After Epstein’s death the executors sold it, in 2021, for about $51 million.

Epstein treated the address as proof of arrival. Framed photographs of him with public figures crowded credenzas. Copies of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury sat on shelves; Wolff has said he advised Epstein on how to deal with Donald Trump. A kitchen table held a picture of Epstein with Steve Bannon. In a closet, agents found jackets matching a winter photograph of Epstein with Ghislaine Maxwell.

An email cited in the video has Epstein telling an assistant to place the Clinton painting near the entrance so people would see it when they came in. The canvas, “Parsing Bill,” shows the former president in a blue dress and red heels, a Lewinsky-era joke turned into décor. Joe Rogan later called the placement a threat dressed as art. The files do not prove blackmail. They do show that Epstein wanted the joke waiting at the door.

Above the stairwell hung a sculpture of a woman in a bridal gown clutching a rope, a piece The New York Times also described from the same cache of photographs. In the preferred office, a stuffed tiger and a stuffed dog lay on the floor. Epstein once said he wanted guests to think about what it means to stuff a dog.

The room that mattered

The third floor is where the layout and the indictment meet. The first room agents photographed there is the massage room: dark, oversized paintings and photographs of women on the walls, oils on a shelf, a painted sky on the ceiling, a marble shower next door. The Times, reviewing the images, reported lubricant and a silver ball and chain. Survivors and the 2019 federal charging documents describe underage girls brought to this house, and to the Palm Beach property, to massage Epstein while he was naked. The video’s narrator calls the room the one that most clearly explains what the mansion was for. Epstein, the images suggest, made no effort to make it look like anything else.

Beside it, a large safe had been cut open. At Maxwell’s 2021 trial, an FBI agent testified that agents found hard drives inside, about $70,000 in cash, 48 loose diamonds and other jewelry, and a foreign passport with Epstein’s photograph under another name.

Two adjoining bedrooms, painted blue and white, settle an argument that had circulated for years without a picture. Cameras are mounted high in the corners, one of them aimed directly at a bed. Victims had long said the house was wired. The photographs are the first public images that show the lenses.

Other rooms on the floor were mid-renovation: plastic sheeting, scaffolding, a statue like a praying figure, photographs so heavily redacted they are barely legible. A closet held what the video describes as a photograph of a naked infant. Higher up, a bright pink room carried an oversized painting the narrator reads as naked children. Those readings are the video’s, not a formal identification by the FBI.

A barre, a basement, a set

On the fourth floor, a gym sits next to a yoga studio with an Eastern-style statue and a ballet barre. The attached bathroom has a statue of a ballerina’s legs sticking out of the wall. In 2019 the Times reported that while Epstein was recruiting teenagers in Florida, associates were also drawing aspiring performers out of New York dance studios. The barre does not prove that pipeline. It sits in the same building.

The upper floors are stranger for how ordinary they are: bland bedrooms, a kitchenette, storage, boxes labeled “JE” and with the names of his properties, some labels redacted past reading. A top-floor office opens onto a balcony painted with Little St. James. Another Bannon photograph is on the desk. A picture of a female child is on the wall.

Under the house, checkered floors run through an industrial kitchen, lockers, a laundry with commercial machines, and a room of older computers and terminals. Agents seized drives across Epstein’s properties after the arrest. What those particular machines held is not visible in the photographs.

Viewers of the video have fixated on how incoherent the rooms feel: patio furniture and an umbrella indoors, a room of doors, construction debris beside a crown and a captain’s hat. One theory in the comments is that the chaos was deliberate, so a victim describing the place would sound unreliable. That is speculation. What the record supports is plainer. The same address that hosted Ehud Barak, Woody Allen, and David Blaine — names the video attaches to the dining room — also held the massage room, the cameras, and the safe.

The townhouse has been sold and altered. The July 2019 photographs remain the fullest public map of how it was arranged when the government finally walked in: a painting at the door, lenses over the beds, and a room stocked for the conduct that put Epstein in a cell.