Deep in the trove of 20,000 documents released by the House Oversight Committee last week is an email from Jeffrey Epstein to Jeffrey Epstein, dated Oct. 8, 2016.
The entire message consists of a lengthy rough draft of what appears to be a profile of the disgraced financier that was never published.
Tucked in the middle of it — between dinner party vignettes, musings on the billionaire class and quotes from Epstein himself — is a reverent anecdote that serves to illustrate the stratospheric level of access that a onetime high school math teacher was able to achieve in just a couple decades.
“In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles is on television acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein is sitting with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery in London,” it reads, noting that Diana “is wearing her ‘revenge’ dress that evening.”
Another version of the draft included in the document dump is slightly less descriptive, saying Epstein was simply sitting “next to” Diana.
Regardless of his exact positioning, the presence of the world’s most notorious sex offender at what has become quite a famous moment in Diana lore is somewhat of a shock to read.
So how truthful is it?
There are clues about the author’s identity in the draft. The writer obviously had close access to Epstein and some others in his orbit, and notes he was once part of an effort to purchase New York Magazine.
Over the weekend, Semafor’s Ben Smith made a phone call to confirm that the author was, indeed, the controversial journalist Michael Wolff.
Smith reported that Wolff drafted the piece in 2014 as a sort of teaser for Epstein, in an attempt to gain greater access to the most powerful and wealthy of Epstein’s friends, to flesh out the reporting.
Wolff recounted telling Epstein, “It could be like this — but I need to have access to everybody.”
“I’m trying to lead him along to give me something, and the something would be: Give me access to everybody,” Wolff said, per Smith. (Much of his conversation with Wolff centered on the ethics of his chummy relationship with Epstein.)
The 8,600-plus-word piece would have run in New York Magazine; a 2015 email to Epstein consisted of a long list of fact-checking questions, including one about mingling with Princess Diana at the Serpentine Gallery. Epstein does not appear to have replied, at least via email.
The London meeting, if it occurred, would have come more than a decade before Epstein was publicly accused of sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl at his Palm Beach mansion — among a number of other underage girls — and long before the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown unearthed explosive details about the “sweetheart” plea deal Epstein was able to reach with prosecutors even as he continued to find new girls to abuse.
As an anecdote in Wolff’s story, it succeeds in illustrating the reach Epstein had as far back as the 1990s, when he palled around with then-real estate baron Donald Trump.
The 1994 “revenge” dress marked a contentious period for Diana. She had gone to the gallery for a fundraising event hosted by Vanity Fair that was held, as Wolff noted, the same evening that ITV aired an interview with then-Prince Charles in which he admitted to being unfaithful in his marriage.
The late royal paired the shoulder-baring evening gown with a sapphire-and-pearl necklace. Hitting above the knee, the dress was widely interpreted to be a message to her estranged husband and the world that she refused to be ignored. She appears in photographs striding into the venue in a swirl of black silk, one arm outstretched to shake someone’s hand.
HuffPost reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.