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A multipart investigation by The Wall Street Journal has revealed prominent people who met multiple times with Jeffrey Epstein. The Journal’s reporting, based on thousands of pages of emails and schedules largely from 2013 to 2017, also provides new details about how often or where people met with Epstein, and the kinds of favors Epstein did for them. It shows Epstein had contacts with an array of powerful people long after he was a registered sex offender. He had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. He was arrested again in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges,...

Billionaire financier Leon Black was accused of raping a 16-year-old autistic girl at convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's New York townhouse in a lawsuit filed in New York federal court Tuesday. The lawsuit was the second to accuse Black, the co-founder and former chief executive of Apollo Global Management, of inappropriate sexual conduct stemming from his relationship with Epstein. The woman, who filed the suit anonymously through law firm Wigdor LLP, claims Black violently raped her in Epstein's New York townhouse in 2002. “These allegations — about an incident that supposedly took place 20 years ago — are totally made...

A vast trove of Jeffrey Epstein's private calendars and emails are being revealed today by DailyMail.com. The hundreds of pages in the files give an unprecedented insight into the late pedophile's extraordinary network of power and influence. Among the revelations is that Epstein appeared to know personal details about the marriage of Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda – while magician David Blaine had numerous dinners with the financier.

The secrets of what happened at Jeffrey Epstein’s homes between her “nubiles” and many powerful men will sit with the jailed socialite in a Tallahassee prison. Will she ever squeal?As Ghislaine Maxwell’s years-long plummet from grace concludes with her settling into a prison cell at the minimum security Federal Correctional Institution in subtropical Tallahassee, the enduring mystery around her dealings with Jeffrey Epstein—the who, what, and why—will remain, for the time being. Still, so much remains unanswered in the Epstein-Maxwell saga: What was the point of the industrial-scale grooming operation the socialite and the late supposed billionaire financier operated together?...

Another bombshell from The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow centering on a famous man accused of sexual misconduct has resulted in the resignation of an important figure at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Current Time 0:35 Duration 0:45 Report: Trump’s Personal Assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, Resigns A day after publishing a piece detailing allegations that the MIT Media Lab "had a deeper fund-raising relationship with [Jeffrey] Epstein than it has previously acknowledged" and "attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him," the director of the media lab resigned. Farrow reported the resignation in an update to his...

Ronan Farrow reported the Media Lab at MIT concealed its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as it secretly pocketed at least $1.7 million in his donations — far more than the school has admitted publicly. The Media Lab knew the disgraced financier was a convicted sex offender, but still took his gifts and used him as an intermediary with other wealthy donors, including Bill Gates and investor Leon Black, Farrow reported for The New Yorker.Epstein helped secure at least $7.5 million from well-heeled donors for the school, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, Farrow wrote, citing...

Remember the old saying, "Once burned, twice shy"? It's supposed to mean that when one has a bad experience, one should be more cautious in similarly dangerous circumstances. California got burned in the early 1990s when Leon Black, fresh off a career with the scandal- tainted Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond shop, set up his own investment firm and persuaded the state's new insurance commissioner, John Garamendi, to seize a supposedly insolvent Executive Life. Executive Life had a fat portfolio of junk bonds that Black had helped assemble, and Garamendi allowed him to broker a deal with some French buyers...

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System poured $1.71 billion into Apollo Management last year, more than twice as much as it gave any other private- equity manager, Bloomberg News reported. The move was a bet on Apollo chief Leon Black’s historical success in distressed investment, but, Bloomberg says, it hasn’t paid off so far. Apollo, which has posted average annual returns of more than 25 percent in the last two decades, is now struggling to right some of the tottering companies in its portfolio. One of its private equity holdings, Linens ‘n Things, filed for bankruptcy protection. Another, the real...

These guys should be running for governor: Democratic Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi and Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock. They'd make the race a lot more interesting — less predictable, much closer, more focused, offering a clearer choice of views and visions. (snip) These candidates are interesting in themselves — both knowledgeable, thoughtful, experienced policy wonks. As insurance commissioner, Garamendi helped write workers' compensation reform, has forced down homeowners' premiums and decreed that auto rates should be based on driving records, not where a motorist resides. McClintock, a longtime conservative legislator from Thousand Oaks, was the crusader who deserves the most...

Mendacious: Given to or marked by deliberate concealment or misrepresentation of the truth. John Garamendi is running for Lt. Governor and to supplement an apparent mendaciousness, he is praying for induced selective memory loss. Some fifteen years ago, as California insurance commissioner, Garamendi seized the assets of the Executive Life Insurance Company. In doing so, he allowed a questionable junk-bond player and a French government-owned bank to realize a humongous windfall despite a bunch of annuities and policyholders getting the short (and dirty) end of the stick. It is beyond troubling that the man who is ‘supposed’ to be the...

The state Republican Party has launched a television ad attacking state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi for mishandling the collapse of the Executive Life Insurance Co. The ad targeting Garamendi, a Democrat running against Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, for lieutenant governor, began running Aug. 28 in the Sacramento and Los Angeles media markets. (snip) ANALYSIS: The GOP advertisement attempts to weaken Garamendi, a former gubernatorial candidate and statewide officeholder, by exploiting what is perhaps his greatest political vulnerability. Garamendi has long been dogged by criticism for allegedly mishandling the collapse of the Executive Life Insurance Co. In 1991,...

The state's giveaway sale of Executive Life and the insurer's fat portfolio of junk bonds is the gift that keeps on giving - political headaches, that is. State Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, who seized the troubled insurer in 1991 and then approved its sale, desperately wants to deflect the onus for the multibillion-dollar debacle that left tens of thousands of disabled and retired annuitants twisting in the wind. But try as he might to shift the burden onto the French buyers, it appears they will at most cede only a tiny fraction of their huge profits from the transaction. A...

Executive Life Insurance policyholders have feuded with state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi over his 1991 seizure and resale of the company. They may find themselves in the same leaky boat, however, as the long-running financial, legal, diplomatic and political wrangle over billions of dollars in insurer assets nears a climax. Thousands of policyholders, many of them retirees and disabled who are dependent on income from annuities, are increasingly unlikely to receive a substantial recovery from the French businessmen who acquired Executive Life and its fat portfolio of junk bonds. And that means Garamendi is increasingly unlikely to get political relief...

<p>A swanky office in Beverly Hills, brash investment bankers scoring hundred-million-dollar paydays, a spectacular collapse ending in federal investigations. The belly flop of Global Crossing Ltd. seems remarkably similar to the saga of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., the investment bank that imploded a dozen years ago. In fact, it may be more than coincidence. At least five key players in the startup of Global Crossing were prominent executives at Drexel.</p>

LOS ANGELES – A federal judge urged both sides to resolve their differences after a jury found that a French company owned by billionaire Francois Pinault conspired to defraud California regulators as part of a scheme to take over failed insurer Executive Life. However, while ruling on the state's lawsuit, the jury cleared Pinault himself of any involvement in the scheme. Jurors also considered three allegations that the firm, Artemis SA, had caused harm to Executive Life policyholders. They found in favor of the defense on two of those counts. The rulings carried no immediate financial judgments. U.S. District Judge...