The Vanity Fair photographer behind final month’s close-up portraits of President Donald Trump’s closest employees shared a terrifying anecdote about his expertise photographing Jeffrey Epstein.
In a submit to Instagram on Tuesday, Christopher Anderson, 55, shared a sequence of photographs he took of the notorious intercourse felony and defined how Epstein threatened him over their possession.
“In 2015 I was assigned by @jodyquon @NYMag to make a portrait of Epstein to accompany an article by @michaelwolffnyc,” Anderson wrote. “I didn’t know much about him, other than the fact that he had heavy connections to powerful men.”
Anderson described how he met the would-be convicted intercourse trafficker, noting how he requested to satisfy earlier than their photoshoot to debate the acquisition of the photographs after publication.
“When Epstein arrived, his eyes sized me up like someone always looking for the angles,” Anderson stated. “He quizzed me about my pictures and how the shoot would go and how much I thought my pictures were worth.”
The photographer famous {that a} “young woman with an Eastern European accent” let him inside Epstein’s residence, whom he later noticed “setting up a massage table just off one of his offices.”
Anderson continued, saying that Epstein supplied him $20,000 to personal the photographs after their publication, which he stated was “all the money in the world to me at the time.”
“Several days later, he decided to pull out of the story and started calling me to demand the pictures. I reiterated that the pictures were not his until after publication. Then the threats started,” he wrote.
“He sent his bodyguard/driver, Merwin, a massive guy in a long black overcoat and black, leather gloves, to my studio to intimidate me (it worked),” Anderson added. “Epstein succeeded in threatening the magazine, too, and they killed the story.”
“I cashed the check and Merwin came by again to collect the hard drive and make sure I didn’t have any more copies of the photos. Today, I found the copy on a very old hard drive.”
Anderson went on to explain the photographs he shared from the 2015 shoot, which embrace footage of a taxidermied tiger and of a printed e-mail correspondence with the Royal Government searching for cost from “the Duke and Duchess,” referring to ex-Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.
All of the previous Prince’s titles had been revoked final yr after his continued connection to Epstein was revealed, as had been the titles of his ex-wife, the previous Duchess.
Anderson emerged into the highlight final month following his brutal close-up portraits of Trump’s prime aides for Vanity Fair, accompanying a bombshell two-part story about Trump’s internal circle. His particularly candid photographs prompted a whole lot of buzz, notably surrounding a zoomed-in take a look at what gave the impression to be Karoline Leavitt’s lip-injection websites.
The photographer additionally told The Washington Post that, among the many employees he photographed, Stephen Miller was probably the most involved about his picture—asking Anderson whether or not he ought to smile.
“And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye,” Anderson stated about his encounter with Miller. “And he says to me, ‘You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.’ And I looked at him, and I said, ‘You know, you do, too.’”