Epstein file: On a late afternoon in June 2019, Stephen K. Bannon sent Jeffrey Epstein a series of excited texts. “Dude!!!!!” he wrote. “Tell me if this is true.”
Mr. Epstein had sent him a headline from The Miami Herald. It reported that victims of Mr. Epstein’s sexual abuse had lost a court battle to overturn a decades-old agreement that had shielded him from prosecution for those crimes.
For months, Mr. Bannon, a leader of the MAGA movement and a former top aide to President Trump, had been advising Mr. Epstein on how to handle the renewed allegations that he was a serial pedophile. Mr. Bannon recommended which lawyers to hire — his own — when to lay low and when to start pushing his narrative. He ensured that the two men received what the two men called “media training.”
Also read about Epstein file: As detailed in our complete breakdown of the Epstein Files…
“First we need to dismantle the lies; then crush the paedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as a benefactor,” Mr. Bannon wrote to Mr. Epstein in April 2019, five months after a Miami Herald series revealed how evidence of Mr. Epstein’s crimes had been ignored.
Three million pages of Epstein-related documents released by the Justice Department on January 30 show for the first time the extent of Mr. Bannon’s many friends’ efforts to counsel Mr. Epstein as he was leaving. In the six months before Mr. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and charged with sex trafficking of minors, Mr. Bannon’s name appeared in the files almost daily, often because the two men exchanged texts.
In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Bannon said his relationship with Mr. Epstein was strictly professional.
“I am a filmmaker and TV host with decades of experience interviewing controversial figures,” he said. “This is the only perspective through which these private communications should be viewed — that of a documentary filmmaker who works to obtain 50 hours of interviews with a solitary subject over time.”
He said the film would fully expose Mr. Epstein and “smash the myths he created.” A spokesman said Mr. Bannon planned to release the film, which has now been in production for six years, later this year.
Mr. Bannon is one of the biggest political names embroiled in the latest chapter of the Epstein scandal. Mr. Bannon is a headline speaker at major Republican political events and hosts one of the country’s top political podcasts. Like many other prominent members of the MAGA movement, he has called for the release of files related to Mr. Epstein.
A stream of text and email exchanges show that after Mr. Bannon and Mr. Epstein met in late 2017, Mr. Bannon promised to help Mr. Epstein restore his reputation. As Mr. Epstein’s legal troubles escalated in 2019, documents show that Mr. Bannon helped craft a defense strategy.
He told Mr. Epstein several months before his arrest: “We must confront a ‘rapist who traffics girls to be raped by the most powerful, richest men in the world’ — one from whom there is no escape.”
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said his client had simply tried to ingratiate himself with Mr. Epstein for the documentary. But written communications during the year and a half before Mr. Epstein died in custody in August 2019 suggest that far from being cautious, Mr. Epstein was eager to fulfill Mr. Bannon’s wishes and needs.
He sent Mr. Bannon and his son Apple Watches. He offered Mr. Bannon his private jet to fly to Europe, joking: “How does it feel to be the highest-paid travel agent in history?”
He offered Mr. Bannon a full medical workup at a high-end concierge emergency clinic in Mr. Epstein’s “private quarters,” telling him that “your medical expenses from A to Z are covered by me.” Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said he had never seen Mr. Epstein’s doctor, nor had he flown on his private jet.
While Mr. Bannon was promoting himself as a strategist to populist and nationalist political parties abroad, Mr. Epstein tried to help him build connections.
Read more about Epstein file: According to the full Epstein Files documentation analysis…
“Whatever you want, I’m ready,” he wrote to Mr. Bannon in mid-2018.
The newly released files have tarnished and tarnished several prominent figures in the United States and abroad by documents about their contacts with Mr. Epstein. Most recently, former top Obama administration lawyer Kathryn Rumler resigned from Goldman Sachs after emails revealed a long friendship with Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Bannon, 72, has faced several legal troubles in recent years. His spokesman said the court cases partly explain why the documentary has not yet been released.
To testify before the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021
An effort to fund Mr. Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico led to charges that Mr. Bannon had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds from contributors. A state court sentenced him to three years’ probation on a fraud charge in February 2025, but Mr. Bannon escaped a trial on related federal charges when Mr. Trump pardoned him just before leaving office in January 2021.
Federal agents had arrested Mr. Bannon the previous year while he was on a yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, who was later convicted in a separate $1 billion fraud scheme. Mr. Bannon was named as a co-conspirator in that case but was not charged.
“Someone has to fund his nonsenses,” Mr. Epstein emailed an associate who asked why Mr. Bannon had allied himself with Mr. Guo.
Mr. Bannon has continued to be a featured speaker at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference and at Turning Point USA, the conservative organization founded by Charlie Kirk. At a Turning Point event last July, he shouted to a crowd, “It’s deeper than Epstein!”
Mr. Epstein first tried to meet with Mr. Bannon in November 2016, after Mr. Trump won the presidency, the documents suggest. But Mr. Bannon, a top campaign strategist for Mr. Trump and later a senior White House official, agreed only after the president had fired him in August 2017.
The two men quickly seemed to bond over finance, science, politics and the ongoing drama in the Trump White House. “We have become friends,” Mr. Epstein wrote to an associate about Mr. Bannon in February 2018.
By then, Mr. Bannon was seeking to advise right-wing foreign politicians, mostly in Europe. Mr. Epstein introduced him to political figures he knew.
The pair do not appear to have discussed the irony of a famous billionaire who kept a black book of his connections with the global elite helping Mr. Bannon whip up anti-elitist political sentiment.
Mr. Bannon met Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, through Mr. Epstein. When Mr. Barak formed a new political party in Israel in June 2019, Mr. Bannon wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Can we announce I’m his strategic adviser?”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Barak said he had never hired Mr. Bannon. On Saturday, Mr. Barak apologized for his friendship with Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Epstein’s itineraries show more than a dozen breakfasts, lunches and dinners with Mr. Bannon at Mr. Epstein’s seven-story Manhattan townhouse.
The texts reveal a level of seeming chumminess, with the two men exchanging political gossip and jokes about each other. Mr. Epstein repeatedly urged Mr. Bannon to care for himself, texting: “lucifer with a stroke. Bent horns and all Doesn’t look so good.”
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said that in addition to not taking up Mr. Epstein’s offers to hitch a ride on his plane, he never stayed overnight at any of Mr. Epstein’s residences.
Yet, some documents suggest that Mr. Bannon was willing to entertain such perks.
At the end of March 2019, Mr. Epstein was staying at his luxurious apartment near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He had told his pilot that Mr. Bannon would be flying back to New York with him on April 2.
Mr. Bannon texted him on March 29 from Rome: “Is it possible to get your plane here to collect me?” Mr. Epstein replied that the plane was unavailable, but offered to pay for a charter flight.
Two days later, Mr. Bannon wrote that he was flying to Paris that evening and asked, “I’m staying with you tonight??”
“Yes stay,” Mr. Epstein replied. “Enroute,” Mr. Bannon texted a few hours later. The next morning, Mr. Epstein wrote to an associate: “Steve Bannon is here with me.”
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said Mr. Bannon decided to stay in a hotel that he had already booked, but said Mr. Bannon declined to provide a receipt to The Times.
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said he conducted about 12 hours of interviews with Mr. Epstein for the documentary. But for reasons that remain unclear, the newly released files contain only two hours of interviews.
In those segments, shot in Mr. Epstein’s grand library in New York, Mr. Bannon asked Mr. Epstein whether he had reflected upon how he ended up behind bars in 2008. “No,” Mr. Epstein replied. “I would just say how strange that this happens.”
Mr. Bannon did not ask Mr. Epstein directly about his treatment of women, although Mr. Epstein acknowledged to him that he had been classified as a sexual predator. His spokesman said Mr. Bannon did not get deeper into that topic in 12 hours of interviews but planned to address it later on.
Read more about Epstein file: These materials form part of the broader Epstein Files court records…
To Mr. Epstein, Mr. Bannon said that while others called him irredeemable, “you are a lot of things — which we will show — but you are NOT that.”
Mr. Epstein was worried that he came across as too glib in the footage, like “prince of darkness meets the joker,” he wrote in one message. But Mr. Bannon reassured him, saying his film crew had been mesmerized because they had been expecting a “monster.”
