White House Vanity Fair portraits photographer shares terrifying Epstein anecdote

Christopher Anderson, the photographer who shot members of Donald Trump’s cupboard for a Vanity Fair function final month, has taken to Instagram to publish a portrait he as soon as took of Jeffrey Epstein, accompanied by a disturbing anecdote.

Beside a stark, black-and-white picture of the late pedophile and 5 extra of him and his lavishly-furnished workplace – full with stuffed tiger and framed images of the occupant’s well-known associates – Anderson wrote: “Yes, that’s Jeffrey Epstein.”

He defined that he was assigned by New York Magazine to {photograph} Epstein in 2015 for example an article by Michael Wolff, the journalist and Trump biographer whose e mail correspondence with the disgraced billionaire was launched final yr by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

“I didn’t know much about him, other than the fact that he had heavy connections to powerful men,” Anderson wrote of Epstein. “He wanted to meet me before the shoot to negotiate buying out the pictures after publication.

“A young woman with an Eastern European accent answered the door (I would later see the same girl setting up a massage table in a room just off one of his offices) followed quickly by his private secretary, Lesley Groff.”

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Anderson continued: “When Epstein arrived, his eyes sized me up like someone always looking for the angles. He quizzed me about my pictures and how the shoot would go and how much I thought my pictures were worth.

“He said he didn’t want anyone else to have the pictures after the magazine published them, and offered me $20k to own them after publication.”

The photographer defined that the provide amounted to “all the money in the world to me at the time” as a result of he had a younger household to help and that he had already been granted permission by the journal to make such an settlement along with his topic, who was made to grasp he wouldn’t obtain the photographs till they’d been printed.

“Several days later, he decided to pull out of the story and started calling me to demand the pictures,” Anderson resumed. “I reiterated that the pictures were not his until after publication. Then the threats started. 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).

“The magazine killed the story, too. So 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.”

The Department of Justice is at present within the means of releasing all of its paperwork and investigative supplies on Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in 2019 whereas awaiting trial, in compliance with the Epstein Transparency Act.

The deadline for the complete publication of the information was December 19, however the DOJ has to this point posted solely round 1 p.c of its complete holdings (by its personal estimate) on its web site in two tranches. It has suggested a federal choose that it nonetheless has greater than 2 million paperwork to evaluate earlier than they are often posted.

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More than 400 DOJ attorneys and 100 FBI analysts are set to spend “the next few weeks” dedicating “all or a substantial portion of their workday” to analyzing the information, Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to U.S. District Judge Paul A. Englemayer in an replace this week.

The authorized consultants are making redactions within the curiosity of safeguarding the intercourse offender’s victims, defending nationwide safety, and stopping ongoing investigations from being compromised, the DOJ has mentioned.

Anderson just lately attracted consideration for his sequence of portraits of members of Trump’s inside circle, like White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller.

“Very close-up portraiture has been a fixture in a lot of my work over the years,” he informed The Independent. “Particularly, political portraits that I’ve done over the years. I like the idea of penetrating the theater of politics.

“I know there’s a lot to be made with, ‘Oh, he intentionally is trying to make people look bad’ and that kind of thing – that’s not the case. If you look at my photograph work, I’ve done a lot of close-ups in the same style with people of all political stripes.”