Newly disclosed correspondence shows that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein contacted a former French government minister in an apparent attempt to assist with arrangements for the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony.
In a September 2018 email to Jack Lang, a former minister in France’s Socialist Party government, and his daughter, Caroline Lang, Epstein appeared to offer suggestions for a potential venue for the annual architecture awards.
This was among the three million pages made public last month, and they include records indicating that the US-based practice Gensler was contracted to carry out architectural work on properties owned by Jeffrey Epstein on Little Saint James Island between 2007 and 2011.
Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, invited Pritzker to dinner in New York with the financier and other guests, saying that there would be five models as serving girls at the event.
The firm confirmed that it had been engaged for professional services during that period. The files include dozens of invoices, bank statements and internal memoranda detailing the scope and administration of the work. The precise nature of the projects is not immediately clear from the documents alone, but the paper trail is substantial.
Also in the archive, a 2012 email from Epstein to Thomas Pritzker references architect Frank Gehry in familiar terms. “Frank Gehry and I see eye to eye,” Epstein wrote, adding that Gehry “loves you” and had shown him photographs of Pritzker’s plane. The tone is casual, almost offhand — yet it shows the degree to which Epstein positioned himself within elite cultural and business networks long after his 2008 conviction.
Epstein died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, a death ruled a suicide. His longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence in Texas following her conviction for sex trafficking.
The continued emergence of correspondence and financial records is likely to prompt further scrutiny of the professional and social relationships that surrounded Epstein in the years before his arrest.