When Jeffrey Epstein died, he left behind an estate with an
estimated value of $600 million. There were vast financial holdings, a private
jet and palatial properties including an island hideaway, a grand Manhattan
mansion and a 7,600-acre New Mexico ranch.
اضافة اعلان
But taxes, property upkeep and temperature-controlled storage
for his art collection — as well as $121 million in settlements to more than
135 women who accused him of sexually abusing them when they were young — have
since cut into the size of Epstein’s estate. It is now worth about one-third of
its value when the financier, 66, hanged himself in a Manhattan jail cell while
awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges 2 1/2 years ago.
The biggest continuing expense is legal costs: $30 million so
far to law firms brought in to clean up Epstein’s affairs. Lawyers have helped
hand out settlements, liquidate assets and sift through the complicated
holdings of a man who once set up his own offshore bank.
The work won’t be finished anytime soon. The estate must still
resolve a civil fraud lawsuit, brought by the attorney general of the Virgin
Islands, who claims Epstein used the territory to facilitate a criminal
enterprise by bilking it out of more than $70 million in tax revenue. And
Ghislaine Maxwell, the former associate of Epstein who was convicted of
sex-trafficking charges last month, has sued the estate to recoup her legal
fees.
Not until all that is over will the estate dispense whatever is
left, according to the terms of a secret trust that Epstein set up and named in
a will drawn just two days before he died.
The details of the trust are not public. But Karyna Shuliak,
Epstein’s girlfriend and the last person he spoke to on the phone before
killing himself, will be one of the main beneficiaries, The New York Times
previously reported. Shuliak, a native of Belarus, is a dentist who shared an
office on the island of St. Thomas with Epstein’s Southern Trust Co. A lawyer
for Shuliak declined to comment.
The estate has paid $9 million to the lawyers and their team who
established and oversaw the victims restitution fund, and $21 million to at
least 16 law firms for services and expenses, according to a review of
quarterly financial statements filed by the estate in Superior Court in the
Virgin Islands.
Five firms — Troutman Pepper, Hughes Hubbard & Reed, White
& Case, McLaughlin & Stern and Kellerhals Ferguson Kroblin — have each
taken in fees that exceed the nearly $900,000 average award to victims from the
compensation fund. A lawyer for nine accusers who submitted claims took issue
with the size of those legal bills.
“It is appalling that lawyers divvying up the estate of Jeffrey
Epstein are profiting more than his victims,” said Florida lawyer Spencer
Kuvin, who has been seeking compensation for some of Epstein’s accusers for
more than a decade.
Daniel Weiner, a lawyer with Hughes Hubbard, which has billed
the estate more than $6 million, said it was wrong to compare the legal fees
and the settlement amounts. He said the estate’s executors, Darren Indyke and
Richard Kahn, had put no limitations on the amount of money handed out by the
restitution fund, which an independent administrator oversaw.
The victims who participated, he added, were able to avoid
litigation costs that could have reduced the amount they received. (Victims’
lawyers are being paid out of the awards; a one-third share is typical.)
Weiner said he would not discuss whether Indyke and Kahn, who
were longtime advisers to Epstein, would ultimately receive any proceeds from
the estate through the trust.
“The trust Mr. Epstein created before his death has not and will
not be funded, if ever, until every single claim against the estate has been
resolved,” Weiner said in a statement. “Public curiosity as to contingent
beneficiaries who may never receive anything from that trust cannot justify
violating their legitimate privacy interests.”
The fees are just one component of the long list of costs that
have whittled away at the fortune that Epstein built primarily by providing
financial and tax advice to a small group of wealthy men. Among them were two
billionaires: Leon Black, a founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global
Capital, and Leslie Wexner, founder of a retail empire that once included
Victoria’s Secret.
The estate’s tax bill alone was roughly $180 million. Upkeep of
the properties — two tropical islands, the ranch and a Paris apartment are
still unsold — has cost millions more. The estate is also paying about $15,000
a month to store Epstein’s art collection in a temperature-controlled warehouse
in Long Island City, according to court filings. More routine expenses include
roughly $390 a month to Verizon for phone services and about $154 a month to
Dish for satellite TV services, the filings show.
Cash has come in as assets have been sold off: $66 million from
the sale of Epstein’s former homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida,
although that was well below their asking prices. A Gulfstream jet, one of
three planes Epstein owned, was sold in late 2020 for $10 million, some $7
million less than the estate had valued it.
The value of the estate is now roughly $185 million, and the
litigation with the Virgin Islands has the potential to wipe out much of that.
Denise George, the territory’s attorney general, filed a civil
fraud complaint against the estate two years ago, contending that Epstein
improperly received a tax benefit that allowed him to finance sex trafficking.
That wrongly deprived the territory — where the poverty rate is roughly twice
the national average — of badly needed revenue, George said. She is seeking to
recoup tens of millions in lost revenue, plus punitive damages.
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