The $158-Million Question: What Was Leon Black Paying Jeffrey Epstein For?

All of which is to say that it was also a crowd with a particular interest in the life of Epstein, whose notorious town house sits about 20 blocks south of 92nd Street Y, and whose financial dealings have captivated Wall Street for the better part of a decade. “Yes, we’ll get to the Epstein of it all,” Sorkin said as he took the stage to some laughs. “We’ll go there very quickly.”

As for the “$158-million question,” as Cohan put it, Black has said that he was paying Epstein for tax advice and estate planning. Money to Burn doesn’t propose a more sinister relationship between the two men, though it acknowledges that the sum was exorbitant for such services. The Times reported in March that Epstein helped Black structure about $20 million in payments to a dozen women, at least some of whom had been in sexual relationships with Black. (Black’s attorneys told the paper that Black wasn’t aware that Epstein paid any women on his behalf. Semafor recently reported that two of the story’s authors, David Enrich and Matthew Goldstein, “laid into” Cohan, who is also a former Vanity Fair contributor, when they spoke with Black’s representatives about Cohan’s depiction of their reporting in Money to Burn, which closely dissects communications between Goldstein and one of Black’s accusers: At least three women have accused Black of sexual assault, which he has strenuously denied and which has not resulted in any charges. Cohan’s book doesn’t touch on Epstein’s involvement in the payments to women that the Times reported, and quotes a Black spokesperson describing Goldstein’s reporting as a “smear campaign.” According to Semafor, one of the Times reporters claimed that Cohan hadn’t given them a chance to respond to his depiction of their reporting; Cohan said he spoke to Goldstein during his reporting.)

“I still don’t know whether you believe as the author that these payments that were made to Jeffrey Epstein by Leon Black were made because, as he would say, he was provided excellent tax advice,” Sorkin said on Wednesday, “or whether you believe that he was really being paid because Jeffrey Epstein was a grand fixer for him of girls and all sorts of other shenanigans and things that we don’t know about.”

What ensued was an epistemological discussion worthy of Black’s Dartmouth philosophy thesis that Cohan cites in his book. (“That’s dark,” Cohan said when Sorkin read aloud from it: “All of life is but an accumulation of masks, and the world itself is but one large, incommunicable, mysterious, and ironical mask.”)

“We all think there’s more to it,” Cohan said of the relationship between Epstein and Black. Sorkin said he understood that, but he wanted to know what Cohan himself thought after writing over 600 pages on Black. “It’s unclear whether anybody believes [Black’s] story, but he believes it,” Cohan said. “And he told it to me on the record. What am I supposed to do? I’m just a journalist.”