Jeffrey Epstein was an American billionaire financier who was accused of running a large-scale child sexual abuse and trafficking network. While awaiting trial in a United States federal detention center, he died by suicide.

Jeffrey Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, United States, as the son of Pauline Stolofsky and Seymour George Epstein, a Jewish family. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked as a gardener for the New York City Parks Department. He had one younger brother, Mark Epstein, born in 1954. Epstein and his brother grew up in Sea Gate, a private gated community in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and he attended the nearby Mark Twain Junior High School.

Jeffrey Epstein began playing the piano at the age of five. In 1969, at just 16 years old, he graduated from Lafayette High School after skipping two grades.

Between 1971 and 1974, Jeffrey Epstein studied at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a research institute affiliated with New York University. He left the institute in June 1974 without obtaining a degree.

In 1974, Jeffrey Epstein began working as a physics and mathematics teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan, where many of his students came from some of the wealthiest families in the country. He taught until 1976, when he was dismissed due to “poor performance.” During his time at the school, he met Alan Greenberg, the CEO of Bear Stearns, whose children attended the school. Impressed by Epstein’s intelligence and ambition, Greenberg offered him a position at Bear Stearns.

After leaving teaching, Jeffrey Epstein entered the banking and finance sector. At Bear Stearns, he worked as a low-level assistant to a trader who bought and sold securities on his own account. Through financial analysis and trading activities, Epstein accumulated significant wealth and became a multimillionaire.

In August 1981, Jeffrey Epstein founded his own consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group Inc. (IAG), which claimed to assist clients in recovering money stolen by fraudulent brokers and lawyers.

Over the years, Jeffrey Epstein developed long-standing business and social relationships with prominent figures from global financial, political, and cultural elites, including Donald Trump, Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, the son of Queen Elizabeth II. Due to his close association with Epstein, Prince Andrew later resigned from royal duties.

In April 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, launched an investigation after receiving a report that an adult man had paid a 14-year-old girl, recruited through a school friend, to provide erotic massages at his villa. The investigation led to Jeffrey Epstein. Following the inquiry, Epstein was convicted by a Florida state court on June 30, 2008, of soliciting prostitution from two girls, one of whom was under 18 years old. He served 13 months under supervised conditions. Subsequent federal investigations identified an additional 36 underage girls, including one as young as 14, who had been sexually abused.

On July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested again and jailed in connection with federal charges of sex trafficking and sexual abuse of minors in Florida and New York.

Jeffrey Epstein died on August 10, 2019, at the age of 66, after hanging himself in his single-occupancy cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York while awaiting trial.

After his death, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, publicly stated that he doubted the official ruling of suicide, describing the death as “more like a murder.” He claimed that his brother possessed damaging information about powerful individuals, which could have made him a target. Mark Epstein consistently argued that the circumstances surrounding the death were inconsistent with suicide and rejected the findings of the Department of Justice.

Despite widespread public suspicion and legal challenges raised by Epstein’s attorneys regarding the cause of death, the medical examiner ruled it a suicide. As Epstein’s death nullified the criminal proceedings, a judge dismissed all federal charges against him on August 29, 2019.

Source: Biyografiler.com