I met Jeffrey Epstein exactly once, over breakfast at the Carlyle Hotel in New York in 1998. What I remember most is how boring he was. He seemed distracted, almost uninterested in the conversation. I chalked it up to a bad meeting and moved on. It was only years later, after the full scope of who Epstein was became public, that I began to reconsider what had actually happened that morning.

The meeting came about through my friend Lynn Forester, who later became Lady de Rothschild. Lynn was friends with Epstein and was starting a new company. She hoped he might invest and asked if I would take a meeting with him on her behalf. At the time, I was Corporate Vice President of Business Development at Intel and the co-founder of its venture and M&A arm, Intel Capital. Intel was one of the most valuable companies in the world, and plenty of people in the financial world would have gladly taken a meeting with me back then. Now, not so much.  So giving an hour to support a friend seemed like reasonable. I knew nothing about Epstein beyond what Lynn had told me which was he was a financier.  

The breakfast was forgettable. Epstein showed little curiosity about Intel, about Lynn’s  investment opportunity, or about me. I left thinking he was simply dull. That impression sat undisturbed in my memory for years.

Then recently, I watched an episode of the Ezra Klein Show titled “The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power,” and something clicked. The episode laid out how Epstein operated not as a traditional financier, but as a predator who cultivated relationships by identifying what people wanted and what made them vulnerable. He had a remarkable ability to detect exploitable weaknesses, whether it was a hunger for money, status, or sex. He would find the crack and work his way in.

Thinking back to that breakfast, I believe that’s exactly what was happening. Epstein wasn’t bored because I was uninteresting. He was bored because he couldn’t find a way in. He must have sized me up quickly and concluded I wasn’t someone he could manipulate and once he reached that conclusion, I was of no use to him. The problem with meetings that double as meals is that you can’t easily cut them short. So the three of us were stuck with each other for the duration of breakfast, two people with nothing left to say.

I also crossed paths with others in Epstein’s orbit, though I didn’t understand the connections at the time. In 2000, I met Ghislaine Maxwell at a cocktail party a friend organized to introduce me to people in New York. She struck me as entirely self-involved, bragging about her lifestyle. That same year, I had dinner with Prince Andrew, who I actually enjoyed as he was friendly and funny, who has since been stripped of his title along with Sarah Ferguson (they were divorce but still very close). These encounters meant nothing to me then. They had no impact on my life In retrospect, they were small brushes with a world I wound never have been  drawn into. What stays with me now is how deliberate Epstein’s system was. He wasn’t just a criminal who happened to know powerful people. He was someone who methodically assessed everyone he met for leverage. That breakfast at the Carlyle wasn’t a failed meeting. It was a screening one I failed by simply having nothing he could exploit.