Comb through Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and you find frequent correspondence with his private chef Francis Derby about “beef jerky.” Online sleuths have speculated that it is a code word for something more sinister. We know Epstein was a sexual predator, but what if he literally preyed on human flesh? After all, Derby cooked at a restaurant called the Cannibal. Make of that what you will.
I can’t quite bring myself to believe Epstein was devouring the teenagers he trafficked, but he did seem to have the eating habits of one. He was picky, entitled and equally fond of fad diets and junk food. He substituted Sweet’N Low for sugar in his morning coffee, while eating takeout pasta from Caravaggio and burgers from J.G. Melon for dinner. He yo-yoed between organic butter and spray-bottle “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” He placed Amazon orders for boxes of Twinkies, Tootsie Pops, Ring Dings and Baby Ruths.
Epstein and his staff were plowing through the jerky equivalent of 70 pounds of steak in two weeks
An estate manual for Epstein’s private island notes some of the food he liked: hamburgers, pasta, seafood, steak, Chinese food, Italian food. “His palate [was] medium for spice,” apparently. Freshly baked Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookies were “daily to be left in the refrigerator or in a plastic container on the counter” for him. He had his favorite Oreo ice cream flown to Paris with him. “He does not eat berries,” according to one girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak.
Epstein also had a penchant for pizza, which gets mentioned around 900 times in the files. “Jeffrey says he wants to go out to a pizza place with you! (He did not mention a particular pizza place, but he knows you are in the know on this ;)” reads one email to the actor Bobby Slayton.
Pizza, emails, underage sex trafficking… doesn’t this sound familiar? The Epstein files have revived Pizzagate, the 2016 conspiracy theory that emerged after the WikiLeaks release of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails. Pizzagate began as a rumor that politicians and business elites were running a pedophile ring in the (nonexistent) basement of the DC pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. Further down the rabbit hole, some even came to believe the rich and powerful were harvesting a compound called “adrenochrome” from children’s blood to keep them eternally young.
Conspiracists claimed that mentions of “cheese pizza” in Podesta’s emails were code for “child pornography.” Tucker Carlson said on his podcast that one of several references to “pizza and grape soda” in the Epstein files stopped him in his tracks. “Whoa, wait a second,” he said. “Maybe the long-debunked conspiracy about Pizzagate wasn’t actually debunked, and maybe someone should take a closer look at this.” (The Pizzagate conspiracy has been widely discredited following an investigation.)
The message Carlson refers to, from a man named Harry Fisch, reads: “After you use [Stendra, an erectile dysfunction pill], wash your hands and let’s go get pizza and grape soda.” Fisch was Epstein’s urologist, who wrote him prescriptions for testosterone and ED meds. At the same time, he taunted the high-cholesterol, low-T Epstein with photos of bakery counters, toaster pastries, cinnamon rolls, Ding Dongs, cookies and, if you can believe it, grape Fanta next to a slice of cheese pizza. Fisch sounds like a middle-aged man mocking his friend for being out of shape and impotent. “Wishing you and your triglycerides a happy 2016,” he wrote to Epstein. Happy new year, fatty.
Epstein periodically tried high-protein diets, which appear to have consisted mainly of beef jerky. I wondered if the diets weren’t just a convenient excuse for him to indulge in disgusting quantities of dried meat. At one point, Epstein and his staff were plowing through the jerky equivalent of 70 pounds of steak in two weeks. Epstein could be a petulant diva about his jerky. He sent it for nutritional analysis, obsessed over slight changes in the recipe (“too much soy, not enough lemongrass”), became distraught over its presentation in a plastic tub and blamed his chef for how quickly it disappeared. “I am concerned… that somehow I have no jerky again. I am very, very annoyed,” he wrote in one email. When his chef explained that he had been in the hospital but could mail him some more jerky that day, Epstein replied: “Too late but I hope you are better.”
Epstein’s pickiness was clearly not down to a mature, discerning palate, nor is there much of an indication that he obsessively optimized his nutrition, as you could imagine a calculating financier might. His morning bran muffin, however, is one thing he shared in common with Patrick Bateman. His staff shuttled “J.E. Muffins,” and sometimes muffin batter, everywhere from Palm Beach, New York, Little St. James, New Mexico and Paris. The recipe was so important that it is included in an operating manual for staff at his Manhattan mansion.
Epstein’s morning bran muffin is one thing he shared in common with Patrick Bateman
Virginia Giuffre, the most vocal of Epstein’s victims, wrote about his eating habits in her posthumously published memoir, Nobody’s Girl. She doesn’t mention the jerky or bran muffins but described him as “strictly disciplined” about his diet, “subsisting on tofu, salmon, chickpeas, ginger, and other foods he deemed healthy (and insisting that the girls around him do so too).”
Perhaps Epstein made an effort to come across as controlled, but indulged in his vices more privately (in jail, he bought Spam, Moon Pies, Pop-Tarts, potato chips, squeezable cheese and much more). In any case, he was strict when it came to hosting. When an assistant screwed up a dinner, he berated her over email: “You can tell the difference between Gucci, Prada or Chanel but not between a cheese knife and a steak knife.” Everything about that night was “childish, vulgar, cheap and crappy,” he wrote, and the food was “disgusting, inelegant, badly presented, laughable and totally your doing.” You can tell he spent much of his time around teenage girls.
Maybe a daily dose of adrenochrome gave Epstein a youthful metabolism, though it’s more likely that he developed depraved eating habits because, in general, he felt sheltered from the fallout of his bad choices. There is much to be discovered in the Epstein files. The takeaway here is that he was a total pervert, and ate like one, too.
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