Searching for Clues in Jeffrey Epstein’s Boyhood
When Jeffrey Epstein was about 6 years old, he moved with his family to Sea Gate, in Coney Island. He would spend his formative years there, in a gated neighborhood several blocks from the beach, making friends who stayed close to him for most of his life.
Like many families in Sea Gate, a mostly working- and middle-class Jewish refuge, the Epsteins had little. It was the dawning of the 1960s, and Epstein’s father, Seymour, worked for the New York City Parks Department as a laborer, earning less than $8,000 a year. His mother, Paula, worked as a school aide at P.S. 188. So while their house on Maple Avenue was ample, a three-story Dutch colonial with a broad front porch, the Epsteins occupied only a small rental apartment on the second floor. Epstein lived there with his parents and his younger brother, Mark, who was called Puggy.
In Sea Gate, Epstein became known as Bear. “He used to sleep a lot,” Mark Epstein explained in an interview with The New York Times. “His friends used to come to play with him after school, and my mother would say, ‘Let him sleep.’ So he was like a bear sleeping in the den.” On family visits, Epstein’s cousin Ronnie Goodman, who is now 81, would observe Jeff at about 14 years old on his bed, reading a math textbook and blasting Beethoven. “Who reads calculus books to relax?” she said in an interview.
On the other side of the tall fence encircling Sea Gate, the west end of Coney Island — including the site of the Epsteins’ previous apartment — was a demolition zone, whole blocks slated for the bulldozer or burned and vandalized during urban renewal. White families fled if they could afford to, and among those who stayed, racial tensions simmered and boiled.
To its residents, Sea Gate signified safety from people and places they viewed as threats. A private police force patrolled its cabanas and community basketball courts. Kids had the run of the place, crowding the paths and the beaches, at home in one another’s houses. They attended one another’s bar mitzvahs; an accordion teacher made the rounds several days a week. “It was like day camp all year round,” recalls Susan Danzig, who lived near Epstein on Maple Avenue. Adults seemed beside the point.
The children in Sea Gate were not spared the convulsions of the 1960s. Heavy drugs were used there. Pals went to Vietnam and never came back. But the kids were aware, at the time and from a distance of five decades or more, that compared with those living outside the gate, they had it good.
By junior high school, Epstein was part of a tight friend group: four smart, ambitious boys who preferred music to sports and cracked one another up. Pure happiness, as Epstein’s close friend Terry Kafka described it in a 2016 email, was “sneaking up to the $5 seats at the Fillmore Auditorium, Drinkin a Sunny Boy” orange soda, “eating a lobster roll — the ultimate luxury.” As teenagers, Epstein and Kafka traveled across Europe on $2 a day; they hung out at the TWA terminal at Kennedy International Airport, watching the jets take off and picking up girls. The trove of records released by the Justice Department and known as the Epstein filesoffers a documentary account of these friendships.
Warren Eisenstein, a gifted mimic and guitar player who made everyone laugh, and Michael Buchholtz, a nonstop talker known as Frog, rounded out the quartet. When Epstein turned 50 in 2003 and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell asked his most famous friends for tributes for what became known as the birthday book, she also reached out to these childhood mates. Their letters reflect a profound nostalgia for the unwatched way they grew up — the junker cars, the light shoplifting, the out-of-bounds pranks. The constant pursuit of sex and talking about sex.
“You didn’t learn life’s lessons in your house,” Kafka reminded Epstein in his letter. “You learned them from us.”
He added, “We didn’t look to our families really for anything.”
Epstein was a child once, and the picture that emerges from the files, as well as nearly two dozen interviews to amplify the record, contains the fuzzy outlines of his future self: From a young age, Epstein preferred the protective company of a tight group of brainy boys to the rowdy popularity contests of adolescence. In interviews, people who encountered him in childhood called him “aloof,” “standoffish,” “shy,” “arrogant,” “supercilious” and “intense.” Some schoolmates found him so withdrawn that he made no imprint at all.
“I don’t know if he was antisocial, but he wasn’t sociable,” his Lafayette High School classmate Ellen Fuhrer recalled in an interview. In a school full of bright, striving kids, she never saw him chatting with classmates in the hallways between classes. “He was always alone,” she said.
But in his inner circle, and particularly among the Sea Gate boys, he elicited enduring fondness and loyalty. His friends considered him smart, even brilliant, generous and funny, willing to bend a rule for a laugh or the next great adventure. “If he likes you, he will do anything for you,” Kafka wrote to Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff in 2019. “If he doesn’t, he won’t give you the time of day. He’s the most private person ever. Even when he was poor!” Even today, after everything she has learned about him, his high school friend Barbara Santangelo credits Epstein for tutoring her in geometry so she could get into college. “I talk about it now and I could get choked up,” she said in an interview. She remembers spending Christmas Eve in Sea Gate with Epstein and his friends, watching old bar mitzvah films.
Every villain prompts a hunt for an origin story — an understandable if often fruitless quest to try to comprehend the incomprehensible. With Epstein, it’s exponentially more difficult: a trek through emails and documents written decades after his youth, complicated by interviews with aging people incredulous that their lives collided with his. Still, deep exploration of these millions of pages yields astonishing insights. Epstein’s life touched innumerable others, not just tycoons and aristocrats and politicians, and not just a wide network of “girls” and procurers of “girls.” Epstein lived in a tight-knit community among relatives and classmates and teachers and neighbors. People who knew him as a child struggle to square the sexual predator with the boy they knew.
“There were boys who would bother us” in junior high, jostling girls in the halls to grab their breasts, said Lisa Durham, who attended elementary school and junior high with Epstein. “He wasn’t one of them. Never.”
Intimations circulate, on social media and in published articles, that Epstein himself was a victim of child sexual abuse. In the memoir “Nobody’s Girl,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s earliest victims, suggests that “in me, an abused child, Epstein saw a bit of himself.” Giuffre, who died by suicide in 2025, once asked Epstein whether he’d had a happy upbringing, she wrote, and “he cut me off almost before I finished my question, making clear that was a topic I should never raise again.” (When asked directly by lawyers in 2009 whether he remembered if his brother had ever been sexually abused, Mark Epstein replied, “No.”)
Other hypotheses for Epstein’s motivations emerge from the archaeological wreckage of the files: that he had class-anger issues, control issues, neuroticism, narcissism, autism, attachment issues, sex addiction, hebephilia (sexual desire for early adolescents). Epstein was always “socially inept,” Santangelo remembered in an interview, recalling a G-rated kiss he gave her on the beach. When Patricia Schmidt dated Epstein in the 1980s, she referred to him as the “Just So Guy,” because everything in his home needed to be just so: his bedroom at 55 degrees, the bathrooms surgically clean, no tea bag left on a kitchen counter. “Physically, he was very needy, in terms of just wanting to be held,” she remembered in an interview.
He was also “very guarded,” she said. “I knew he was not going to reveal any of his vulnerabilities.”
In Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2022 sentencing hearing after her conviction on federal sex-trafficking charges, her lawyers portrayed her as a victim of childhood trauma and pointed to Epstein as “the mastermind” and “principal abuser.” But many in Epstein’s childhood circle maintain that it was the other way around: Maxwell exploited and enabled Epstein’s rapacious nature. In an interview, Epstein’s cousin Goodman compared the symbiotic malevolence of Epstein and Maxwell to that of Leopold and Loeb, the University of Chicago students and lovers who in 1924 conspired to commit the “perfect crime” and killed a 14-year-old boy.
Epstein’s mother, Paula, contributed to the birthday book, too, and in her letter, written before Epstein was charged with sex crimes in Florida, she expresses both delight at her son’s ascent — “a limousine awaits you as a dignitary” — and bewilderment. Paula Epstein sometimes took a rose-colored view of things, and in her letter she construed their young family as convivial. “We had many, many parties,” she wrote, and “you enjoyed being there.” Then she got to her point. “Today you AVOID gatherings, parties — why?”
Epstein’s father, Seymour, was the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father owned a wrecking company in Brooklyn, and his mother suffered a “nervous breakdown” and underwent shock therapy. Seymour quit high school “because I never liked school,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay before his death in 1991 that Maxwell included in the birthday book.
Before landing his job at the Parks Department in 1956, Seymour seems to have drifted, selling cutlery at Macy’s and working as a conductor on the subway. He was a “very, very basic guy” who enjoyed television and especially Tarzan movies, Gary Grossberg, an Epstein family friend, said in an interview.
In their emails the Epstein brothers regularly mocked their father. In 2013, Mark wrote to his brother to inquire about the results of a DNA test: “Was Seymour really part ape?” he asked. Then, in 2016, the brothers were snickering about Seymour’s personal hygiene. “Wife beaters with gravy on it,” Epstein wrote to his brother in 2016.
“Stains on his boxer shorts!” Mark replied.
In another email, from 2012, Mark wondered what Seymour really wanted when he asked Paula for help washing his back. Was it a euphemism for something else?
“Aghhhhhjh,” Epstein replied.
Epstein’s Sea Gate friends joined in the belittling of his parents, making lewd jokes about them and calling them “Seymour” and “Paula” in their birthday book letters. “In this group of friends, you were allowed to say anything about anybody as long as it was funny,” Mark said in an interview.
Epstein’s parents didn’t socialize with the other parents at the beach cabanas or play canasta, his neighbor Danzig recalled. And they didn’t say “two words” to Santangelo when she stopped by the family’s apartment. “They weren’t rude,” she continued, just uninvolved. So though Paula pushed her sons to learn musical instruments and fretted to teachers about Jeff’s handwriting, neighborhood kids regarded her as “simple” and, sometimes, “silly.” One of her favorite sayings was “I’ll worry about that when the time comes,” Mark said in 2009 when deposed in a civil case against his brother.
Still, Epstein seems to have been concerned about his mother’s opinion. In February 2019, the day after the U.S. Department of Justice announced a new investigation into his 2008 guilty plea in Florida, in which he admitted to procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, Epstein emailed his brother. In a rare show of emotional transparency or, perhaps, regret, he thought of his deceased mother and asked, “Do you think Paula would understand?” He punctuated the question with a smiley emoji.
Epstein expressed open admiration for at least one adult. He credited Terry Kafka’s father, Timmy, with teaching him skills he needed in business: “negotiation, strategy, tactics, contracts etc,” he wrote. (“Let them think you’re the schmuck,” Timmy advised, according to a 2014 email between Epstein and Kafka.) Timmy was a firefighter and, apparently, a small-time scam artist, who, according to the files, might bring an extra suitcase to a business hotel to swipe the towels. Timmy liked to “flash the tin” — his badge — to gain free entry to movie theaters or amusement parks, Epstein and his friends recalled.
In interviews, people who knew Epstein in junior high made special note of his appearance. The nickname Bear suited him, they said, and not just because of his sleeping habits. As a preteen, Epstein was “chunky” or “chubby,” they said. He soon had conspicuous body hair. “We got that from my father,” Mark said.
Now an elite public middle school with a competitive entrance exam, Mark Twain Junior High School in 1964 was tense with racial conflict in an increasingly impoverished neighborhood. “We had police escorts from the public bus to the school at certain times,” recalled Scott Ehrlich, who attended with Epstein. Epstein once said he did not like wearing a tie because it gave kids on the street something to grab when they dragged you from one place to another.
The solution, at Mark Twain, was to sequester the high-achieving white kids, who tended to be Jewish, and collect them in classes labeled Special Progress, or S.P. Some of these S.P. students, including Epstein, skipped eighth grade. “We were a special class, kind of an island, isolated from the others,” Durham recalled. “And people resented us.” Because of their insularity, the Sea Gate kids were regarded as especially privileged.
For the rest of his life, Epstein displayed a keen determination to enforce the boundaries between those on the outside and those who were “in.” Even the network of “girls” functioned to exclude others. When an unnamed person in 2011 asked Epstein to explain how having “400 women” at his disposal could be as satisfying as “a deep relationship with one woman,” he responded that he liked the security. “The Harem,” he wrote, has traditionally “meant protection for those inside from those outside.”
At Mark Twain, Epstein set his sights high. Tall and blond, Kathleen Suter was a “sweet” Breck Girl beauty, said her friends. Epstein sat next to her in homeroom, Melody Stern remembered in an interview. “He loved her,” Stern said. When the teacher had her back turned, Epstein would speak to Suter in a low voice, trying to make her laugh, and Suter would gaze back at him, laughing. “It was like their own little world,” Stern said.
In the 1966 class picture, Epstein stands behind Suter wearing a twisted smile, as if captured mid-joke. The birthday book includes an infatuated poem he wrote about “a pretty girl with long golden hair.” He signed it, “Love, Jeff Epstein.” The recipient’s name is redacted, but the poem is placed near other material that appears to be from Suter.
Epstein and Suter met again in their 20s. Her letter in the birthday book introduces the “Girlfriends” chapter, and their names are on a 1976 application for an apartment on East 59th Street in Manhattan, according to records in the files from Bear Stearns, Epstein’s employer at the time. And both are listed on a marriage index from 1977, according to city records. Suter did not respond to requests for comment, and there is no evidence that they actually married. Whatever the extent of their relationship, they kept in touch for many years; the tone of her emails to him is fond and nostalgic. He sent her gifts and recorded at least one appointment with her in his calendar. Around 2008, Epstein’s lawyers asked Suter, among others, to write character references for Epstein in advance of his plea, and in her note she praised him and noted that he had offered to cover the cost of her son’s education. She called Epstein her “guardian angel.”
Suter contributed to the birthday book, too, and that letter was less adoring. “The lessons I’ve learned from you during the past 35 years haven’t always been easy,” she wrote.
Bernard Laffer grew up in Coney Island and dated Suter. He believes that she was Epstein’s “muse” and the prototype for many of his subsequent girlfriends and victims. Epstein even claimed to have dated Morgan Fairchild, the blond “Falcon Crest” star, and in his 30s, he kept a photo of her on his bedroom wall, according to Schmidt. (Through a representative, Fairchild said she knew Epstein but never dated him.)
In Laffer’s view, Suter is “the image of what he chased all along. Some semblance of purity.”
To Michael Arambula, a forensic psychiatrist in San Antonio who testifies as an expert witness in child sex abuse cases, Epstein has a familiar profile.
Most sex offenders have been abused as children, he explained in an interview, although most victims of abuse do not grow up to become sex offenders. An adult who is attracted to teenagers is different from a pedophile, who targets prepubescent children. Pedophiles tend to be cautious; they hide their desires by blending in as teachers or coaches or uncles. Hebephiles, like Epstein, are more antisocial, Arambula explained: “There’s a level of recklessness and disregard.” Though he never met Epstein, he offered the following hypothetical.
“Say someone grows up in a not-so-good neighborhood, and because the kids are just kind of unsupervised, they experiment with all sorts of things,” he said. Their early experiences with sex can be illicit, aberrant or callous, and these define their nascent idea of sexual pleasure. He concluded, “These guys, when they get older, they’re still like that.”
When faced with emotional turbulence — distress over a breakup, sudden success — they turn to their deviant sexual fantasies as a way to cope. The desire for control and sexual gratification fuses with that recklessness as an aphrodisiac. “They can act out to relieve their inner distress,” Arambula said. “That can feel really great, and they take advantage of people.”
Epstein once said he did not like to take notes in school and did not see why it was necessary. And the intelligence his friends admired was not reflected in his junior high grades. “I knew you were an excellent student because your report cards were ‘A plus,’” his mother bragged in her birthday letter. But this must have been wishful thinking. On his final report card at Mark Twain, which Paula Epstein signed, he received “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement” marks in “effort,” “responsibility” and “self control.”
In most academic subjects, Epstein was a middling student. He did well in math, but not A plus.
“There’s all this hullabaloo about him being a math genius and all but frankly he wasn’t. He wasn’t at the top of the math team,” said Ehrlich, who was on that team with Epstein in high school.
Kafka marveled at how Epstein managed not to get summer jobs. His three best friends did. Eisenstein worked at Nathan’s, the hot-dog stand, for minimum wage, according to Kafka’s birthday letter, and Buchholtz was a cabana boy. “But you, Jeff would never work,” Kafka wrote. “Yes, you were special.”
In the summer of 1967, Epstein attended Interlochen music camp, a prestigious oasis in the Michigan woods. Epstein’s music teacher recommended him, according to Paula’s birthday book letter, and he was admitted as a student in bassoon, with an interest in radio. At Interlochen, Epstein found himself in a new, extremely elite sphere: talented youth from all over the country who had been marked as special. Just as Epstein established rank with his Sea Gate friends by lending and sharing precious or rare items — such as recordings by the French pianist Jacques Loussier, who made jazz from Bach — he bonded with his camp mates by lending his copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” according to an interview with Gavin Ferriby, who lived in the cabin next door.
In a blog post, Ferriby remembered Epstein as a person with “an offbeat sense of humor, goofy at times and had a knack for quietly skirting or just barely complying with the rules.” Together they would take a sailboat out on the lake to escape the rigid culture of the camp. The group photo taken that summer of Cabin 1 shows Epstein with his head tilted and his hands in his pockets and wearing his familiar, inscrutable smile. He was sockless, even though socks were mandated in the camp regulations, Ferriby observed. Epstein was 14.
In her birthday book letter, Epstein’s mother noted that perhaps his musical training suffered while he “had fun.” Epstein met a girl that summer, and at New Year’s he and Kafka somehow managed to fly to Michigan to visit her. “It was also the first time I had ever laid eyes on a bright, attractive, bubbly, blue-eyed mid western female,” Kafka wrote in his letter. “She was like an alien to me. She wasn’t Jewish or Italian. Wasn’t she your first?” Kafka had another reason to be impressed: Where they came from, no one ever went anywhere, he wrote. “The first time I ever flew was with you,” he wrote, adding: “Jeff, you took me with you.”
A preview of the adult Epstein emerges around 1970, when he and Kafka, both teenagers, flew again, this time to Europe. Epstein lost all his chubbiness and, as Kafka put it, became “absolutely skinny.” He was “constantly working the train schedules — riding by night so we would have a free place to sleep,” Kafka wrote. The boys spent two weeks in Corfu, crashing on the beach with kids from all over the world and two girls from Cleveland. In his birthday letter, Kafka wrote that “I really saw a true transformation in you” that summer. “You began to realize that you could get away with shit! That chicks and people in general were schmucks!”
Later, Epstein told Suter that he had started attending peace marches, not because he cared about politics but “because they were the easiest places to get laid,” as she wrote in the birthday book.
A fifth Sea Gate friend contributed to the birthday book. Known as Neutral, Jeff Nier was “a fun party guy,” according to his obituary, an athlete and fisherman who hung out on the beach and was five years Epstein’s senior. Epstein’s childhood friends disagree about the extent of Nier’s influence, but the stream-of-consciousness anecdotes in his letter laughingly depict the two of them pursuing women and girls in a sexually threatening and degrading way.
