Hollywood power broker Peggy Siegal saw her career unravel after her ties to Jeffrey Epstein came under scrutiny following the financier’s 2019 arrest on sex trafficking charges.
Roughly 5,000 emails between Siegal and Epstein sent between 2009 and 2019 were released by the Department of Justice earlier this year. The correspondence between Siegal – who represented clients such as Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein and Barry Levinson – shed new light on the pair’s seemingly symbiotic relationship.
Siegal opened up about what she gained from her association with Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial, in a recent interview with New York Magazine.
The revelations offer a closer look at the Hollywood publicist’s role in Epstein’s social orbit and the fallout that followed.
HOLLYWOOD EXECS LOSE DEALS, CLIENTS FLEE AS EPSTEIN FILES TRIGGER FALLOUT IN THE INDUSTRY
Jeffrey Epstein gifted Peggy Siegal $100,000 for her 70th birthday in 2017, roughly two years before the financier was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors. “I had no problem taking his money,” she told New York Magazine. “He had lots of it.”
Siegal laid out her plans on how she was hoping to spend the money in an email to Epstein. $30,000 was set aside for a birthday party she wanted to host in Southampton with 70 guests. Another $15,000 was to be donated to Elton John’s AIDS Foundation so she could “attend a party at his house in June.”
Siegal also revealed she’d use some of the huge sum to supplement her apartment renovation as she was looking for a temporary fix while she waited for “an amazing brown and beige leopard rug that is wall to wall carpeting for my whole apartment and being made in France.”
“When the apartment gets done, you’re my first visitor,” she wrote at the time.
While Peggy Siegal claimed she never went to Jeffrey Epstein’s island or traveled on his plane, the Hollywood publicist helped the disgraced millionaire regain access to elite social circles following his time behind bars in the 2000s.
According to New York Magazine, Siegal got Epstein invited to the 2013 Met Gala and helped him gain access to dinners alongside A-list names such as Martha Stewart, Lorne Michaels and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
She also routinely added him to screening lists and occasionally brought him herself.
A close associate of Siegal’s claimed the publicist became “the linchpin” for Epstein’s social life.
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Peggy Siegal helped Jeffrey Epstein plan a party filled with A-list guests and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as the guest of honor. According to emails, Epstein was eager to befriend Woody Allen and suggested Siegal invite the director to his party.
“Woody is a great idea. Do you know Woody? I do,” she wrote back. The publicist seemed to consider the possibility it could create a fallout. “Could there be any resistance because he had a public issue with Soon-Yi? … just thinking ahead.”
She suggested inviting art dealer and Allen’s close friend Lorinda Ash, writing, “He may feel better if people he knows are around [him]. On the other hand a royal may intrigue him.”
Siegal insisted to New York Magazine that the dinner party was a “total exception” and that she never hosted parties for Epstein. She claimed she had only agreed to this party in order to get Harvey Weinstein’s film “The King’s Speech” to former Prince Andrew and in front of Queen Elizabeth II.
“Harvey had been trying to get a quote from the queen,” she told the outlet, noting she had been marketing the movie at the time. “It was ridiculous.”
Looking back, Siegal claimed she “jeopardized” her relationships with “all these important people” by inviting them around Epstein. “They did not know who he was.”
“All of Jeffrey’s illegal, immoral behavior was in Palm Beach, and he went to jail in Palm Beach, and the New York Times never wrote about him. World-famous newscasters didn’t know who Jeffrey Epstein was. And they counted on my relationship with them to invite them to an interesting evening, which I had many, many times before. They came on my say-so.”
The New York Times did write about Epstein’s 2008 jail stint.
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Jeffrey Epstein’s emails to Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal showed that he may have been interested in finding a “baby mama.”
“You shmooze and find me a baby mama,” Epstein wrote in an email.
“A baby Mama … if I wasn’t 102 I would take that job in a nano second,” the publicist wrote back.
“I need great genes,” Epstein added. “smart pretty, funny if you were fifty years younger, whoops, forty.”
She responded, “I am thinking this is a position for a European who understands the mistress (in this case baby mama) mentality. You need someone young without much of a career. Maybe a professional student someone who is kept and can just keep going to school. Also, who doesn’t have much of a family herself. A wanna be socialite is NOT the way to go. Looking and looking. xoxo Peg.”
Peggy Siegal admitted she “wasn’t oblivious” to the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was “morally compromised” and a “con man.”
“I was in denial, but if I tell you that he told me he changed his ways, then that’s telling you I knew that he was a pervert,” she told New York Magazine.
“I mean, obviously I had a sense that he had done something wrong if he had gone to jail,” Siegal added. “I wasn’t oblivious that he was morally compromised and a con man. But I don’t know how to say this to you: The idea of child pornography is so heinous that you can’t even think about it. You can’t even discuss it. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s nothing I wanted to deal with.”
