For Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Goldsmith family was a gateway to elite society and he wanted to be in their circle. The disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 facing sex-trafficking charges, longed for a billionaire’s lifestyle and cultivated the family’s friends, bankers, business associates and advisers. But Sir James Goldsmith, who was knighted by the Queen in 1976 and became a prominent British politician, remained wary of the American financier and even “despised” him, his daughter Jemima recently told the Guardian.
Two decades before Epstein came under federal investigation, Goldsmith – who died in 1997 – told a confidant that Epstein was a “sexual deviant” who was recruiting children for illicit activities. Goldsmith “told me not to have anything to do with him, that he was a pervert, and he didn’t want him near any of us. He had four daughters to protect,” recalled the famous French architect Robert Couturier, who designed opulent homes for Goldsmith in New York and Mexico.
Goldsmith’s alleged warning came around 1987, years before complaints about Epstein’s solicitation of young girls for sex began filtering into federal law enforcement. Epstein’s network of pretty “girls” evolved into what authorities describe as a global sex-trafficking ring that catered to the ultra-rich and powerful. It would become a scandal that touched royals, politicians, businessmen, academics, foreign diplomats and celebrities around the world, and left more than 1,000 victims in its wake.
It was all preventable,” Couturier told the Guardian. Epstein, born on Coney Island, had been on the radar of New York’s elite since he first surfaced at society events, often on the arm of heiresses, Couturier said. Lots of rich people are deeply gullible, as protected as they are from reality.
No one did anything about it.” In the mid-1980s, Sir James Goldsmith – known as “Jimmy” – announced he was making a shift in his US business operations. Goldsmith had hired a new chief executive who would open an office for him in Hilton Head, South Carolina, an emerging luxury resort. Goldsmith’s Hilton Head office is rarely mentioned in writings about his reign as the “lucky gambler”, as Time Magazine called him, an adviser to US presidents who became one of the world’s richest men by betting on undervalued companies.
His conglomerate, with command centers in Paris and London, had its US headquarters in New York, close to his elegant Manhattan townhouse where Goldsmith entertained and where the young Epstein trolled for wealthy clients. Hilton Head at the time was undergoing a chaotic development boom that brought in a rush of speculators, shady operators and vacationers lured by star-studded golf tournaments and tennis matches. Its population, 11,000 in 1980, doubled in a decade.
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