Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion: A Pope, a President, and a PM share space with Trump

In a typed letter sent on Epstein’s 63rd birthday, and accessed by the New York Times, Woody Allen recounted how the posse of young women who worked as assistants reminded the filmmaker of Count Dracula’s castle, which was “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place”. Bela Lugosi was the actor famous for playing Count Dracula in the 1931 movie of the same name.

An expert who spoke to The Indian Express said the continuous trickle of information on the matter will keep it fresh in the minds of the public and may put some pressure on US President Trump, especially ahead of the midterm elections next year.

Who visited Epstein?

The “seven-story, 21,000-square-foot townhouse” is now under a shadow as the place where Epstein held gatherings of the who’s who years after he became a registered sex offender. A framed photo at the estate shows Epstein with a young Trump and his then-girlfriend Melania Knauss, with longtime confidante Ghislaine Maxwell cropped out. Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, had split from Epstein in mid-2010s.

Another photo shows Pope John Paul II,  the head of the Catholic Church from 1978 till his death in 2005. SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who had a recent public falling out with Trump and alleged that the current US President was mentioned in the ‘Epstein Files’, peeks out from another.

Former President Bill Clinton can be seen smiling with his arms crossed as he leans on a table while gazing at Epstein. There’s British billionaire Richard Branson as well as former US Secretary of State Larry Summers. Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro adorn two separate frames with Epstein the common link.

Jeffrey Epstein’s New York mansion. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Sharing space with these were other items: A framed dollar bill signed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, with “I was wrong!” written over George Washington’s face and a chalkboard with a map of Israel that had former PM Ehud Barak’s signature preserved by Epstein. NYT said Gates’ message could be in a reference to a lost bet.

Trump’s former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon also looks out from framed photos in at least two rooms in the mansion, NYT reported. One of these is a “mirror selfie” snapped by Epstein.

Why did people visit Epstein?

The allure of the townhouse, a stone’s throw from Central Park, was twofold.

First was the chance to meet Epstein. The visitors found him to be “fun, smart and curious”. The galaxy of individuals as diverse as “politicians, scientists, teachers, magicians, comedians, intellectuals, an etymologist, a concert pianist” in a single room seemed like a chance too good to be passed over.

And second was the prospect of mingling with the young women wandering about the property, NYT reported. The mansion itself was redesigned by Epstein with framed prosthetic eyeballs and a sculpture of a woman wearing a bridal gown held in the air by a rope. It also had his office with a taxidermied tiger on a rug and his suite that displayed a photo with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Going up the stairs took one to the now infamous massage room with paintings of naked women hanging from the walls. In this room, Epstein is said to have ordered teenage women, some still in school, to massage him while he lay naked. Court records and interviews with victims held by the NYT showed he sometimes “raped or assaulted them”.

What happened at these dinner gatherings?

The food could be “meagre” and something as plain as Chinese takeout, filmmaker Woody Allen described in a letter.

NYT, Epstein’ın Manhattan’daki malikânesine girdi:

🔺Tavandan sarkan gelinlik giymiş kadın heykeli

🔺Vladimir Nabokov’un romanı Lolita’nın 1955 tarihli ilk baskısı

🔺Clinton, Trump, Papa, Prens Salman’la fotoğraflar

🔺Ehud Barak’tan mektuplarhttps://t.co/GhuF8O8UfI pic.twitter.com/4mE3IapLf2

— serbestiyet (@serbestiyetweb) August 6, 2025

The photos accessed by the NYT show guests sitting across from each other in leopard-print chairs with a large rectangular table in the centre. Sometimes, a magician performed, while a chalkboard would be brought on other occasions for a guest to sketch a diagram or write a mathematical formula.

What was in the letters sent to Epstein?

Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak wrote to Epstein that “There is no limit to your curiosity”, adding that the New York financier who was found dead in his jail cell was “like a closed book to many of them but you know everything about everyone.”

There were suggestions for the dinner menu, including from media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman, who tried to convince Epstein to have a simple salad and whatever else “would enhance Jeffrey’s sexual performance.”

Allen’s letter mentioned how the spartan dinners of the earlier years took on a more refined form in the later years. The filmmaker, who has faced allegations of sexually assaulting his adoptive daughter, said that on his first visit, the food was very “meagre”.

“So meagre, my wife [and] the ones sitting next to her kept mumbling, is this it? Is this all we’re getting? After I leave, I may have to go to a restaurant”.

But, the next time the couple came over, Allen writes that his wife took matters in her own hands. She said in a “tactful way she has: there is going to be more food, isn’t there? Under her badgering, the situation gradually improved and subsequent dinners offered buckets of Chinese food ordered from a local restaurant”.

Why are the latest revelations significant?

The Epstein saga has revealed the connection between powerful people in the United States with a tainted financier, said Vivek Mishra, deputy director, strategic studies programme, at ORF.

This keeps alive the conspiracy theories that a “cabal of child sex traffickers” is part of the deep state running the US government.

“The timing of this report is certainly important because we have seen that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is getting fractured because of the Epstein case, and you have people like Megan Kelly and people like Tucker Carlson, who have called for more details of this case to be released,” says Mishra.

What did Trump say about Epstein?

Trump was once seen as close to Epstein. They both were pictured socialising together in the 1990s and early 2000s and Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy”. But then the two had a falling out. Recently, Trump revealed that he cut ties with Epstein after the disgraced financier “stole” employees from him. When asked at another event if these were women in the real estate tycoon’s employment, Trump replied in the affirmative.

“He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata,” Trump said.

Aboard his official Air Force One plane, Trump elaborated: “I think (Giuffre) worked at the spa,” Trump said, adding: “He (Epstein) stole her.”

He was referring to Virginia Giuffre who died by suicide in April this year. She was one of the many young women to accuse Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sex crimes. Maxwell recruited her while she was a minor working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Giuffre said.

As far as going to Epstein’s island is concerned, Trump has maintained that he never went there.

“I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down,” Trump told reporters when asked about it in Scotland. “In one of my very good moments, I turned it down,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters.

What’s the latest in the Epstein case?

While Epstein was found dead in his jail cell and his demise was ruled a suicide, his partner-in-crime Maxwell is still in federal prison. Maxwell has been recently moved to a low-security prison amid speculation that she may receive a pardon from the US President. When Trump was asked about this, he said he hadn’t thought about it.

“I’m allowed to do it, but nobody’s asked me to do it,” Trump told Newsmax in an interview. “I know nothing about the case, but I know I have the right to do it.”

Amid widening public scrutiny of the case and a demand to release the Epstein Files, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed the Justice Department Tuesday to submit files in the sex trafficking investigation into Epstein. This is part of a wider congressional probe that lawmakers believe may show links to President Donald Trump and other former top officials.

The committee has also issued subpoenas to former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and eight former top law enforcement officials asking them to submit depositions. Trump had also sought to divert attention towards former president Clinton, saying: “The question you have to ask is, did Bill Clinton go to the island? Because Epstein had an island”.

After talking up the Epstein Files during his Presidential run, had Trump changed tack and called the attention around the case “a hoax.”

“It’s a hoax that’s been built up way beyond proportion,” he said and claimed that if there had been anything serious in the Epstein Files, Democrats would have used it against him in the last election. But his MAGA base seemingly turned against him and pressured him to release the files.  The action against the Clintons is seen as part of that effort.

How is Trump likely to navigate the Epstein scandal?

Recent news reports have focussed on a “bawdy” letter purportedly written by Trump to Epstein wishing him on his birthday. Trump has denied this, along with a report that said Attorney General Pam Bondi warned the US President in May that his name appeared in the Epstein Files.

“It is going to be extremely difficult for the Donald Trump administration to suddenly say that there is no Epstein file,” says Mishra from ORF. “My sense is that if you’re looking for an implication of the President himself, I don’t think that is happening because of various reasons, but I think that until the midterm, there will be extreme pressure on the Trump administration to bring out certain high profile names, even if it were from the opposition (Democratic) party to really pin them down in terms of how they were connected with Jeffrey Epstein”.