Howard Lutnick believes Jeffrey Epstein may have used blackmail to get a lighter sentence
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, breaking with the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes high-profile associates of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein participated in his behavior -- and that Epstein may have blackmailed them with incriminating videos.
Asked by the New York Post's Miranda Divine on Wednesday's Pod Force One podcast whether high-profile associates of Epstein knew of his behavior and just ignored it, Lutnick said he believes, "No, they participated. They participated That's what his M.O. was -- 'Get a massage, get a massage.'"
"And what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video," Lutnick said. "This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever."
Lutnick, Epstein's former neighbor, said he believes Epstein may have traded alleged blackmail videos for a lesser prison sentence in the so-called "sweetheart deal" he received during his first criminal case on state charges in 2008.
"I assume, way back when, they traded those videos in exchange for him getting that 18-month sentence, which allowed him to have visits and be out of jail. I mean, he's a serial sex offender. How could he get 18 months and be able to go to his office during the day and have visitors and stuff? There must have been a trade."
The allegations stand in contrast with what FBI Director Kash Patel told Congress during testimony last month.
Ask by Sen. John Kennedy who, if anyone, did Epstein traffic young women to besides himself, Patel replied, "Himself. There is no credible information. None. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals."
Brad Edwards, a victims' rights lawyer who has been pursuing the Epstein case for nearly two decades, told ABC News that Epstein was largely his own client.
"Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client," Edwards said in an interview earlier this year. "Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein's sexual desires."
Edwards said Epstein lived, essentially, two separate lives: one in which he was sexually abusing women and girls "on a daily basis," and another in which he associated with politicians, royalty, and titans of business, academia, and science.
"For the most part, those two worlds did not overlap. And where they overlapped, in the instances they overlapped, it seems to be a very small percentage," Edwards said. "There were occasions where a select few of these men engaged in sexual acts with a select few of the girls that Jeffrey Epstein was exploiting or abusing -- primarily girls who were over the age of 18."
"He was abusing hundreds of women, if not a thousand. And it's a very small fraction of those women that he was sending to men," said Edwards.
Edwards said he is bound by attorney-client privilege and cannot ethically reveal the names of any of Epstein's alleged associates without permission from his clients. But he said he has seen no indication that Epstein kept a list of those men, or that he made it a practice to use those instances to blackmail or extort the men, even though those men may have been legitimately concerned that Epstein had compromising information that he could use against them.
Epstein's former companion Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 on charges of child sex trafficking and other offenses connected to Epstein, is the only associate of Epstein's to be charged in connection with his crimes.
The Trump administration has been dealing with the fallout from its decision not to release materials related to the investigation into Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in jail in 2019, following the blowback it received from MAGA supporters after it announced in July that no additional files would be released.
President Donald Trump, who was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, but later had a falling out, has called the push to release the files a hoax created by his political rivals.
"It's all been a big hoax," Trump told reporters in July. "It's perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans, and foolish Republicans fall into the net. And so they try and do the Democrats' work."
Lutnick, in his interview with Divine, described Epstein as "gross."
"I say to him, 'Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?'" Lutnick said. "And he says, 'Every day.'"
"And then he gets, like, weirdly close to me, and he says, 'And the right kind of massage,'" Lutnick said.
