It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and beverages. The real world seems terribly far away, but with paparazzi often posted near by, it’s dangerously close too. Once I arrived for a visit and found several police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they’d come for him again. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state who had come for tea. We met several years before he became arguably the world’s most notorious sex offender. In 2002, his plane, a meticulously appointed 737, ferried a group of people to the TED conference in Monterey. He was the mysterious and peculiarly gracious host arriving after everyone had boarded: tanned, relaxed, attentive, soliciting every guest’s story and views, and accompanied by three young women not his daughters, witty, poised, helpful, and beautiful—out of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life. One more thing about this trip suggesting something of his unique view of the public world and what you got to see when you are near him. Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company rising into the stratosphere, came out to see his plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the plane to the other. Then, sitting in the plane’s plush living room, they described, in what I could not be sure was a put-on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google bras with the Os as convenient cups. In fact, the name Google, they said, was invented out of the belief that men would focus on a word with two Os in it. Since that trip, and through his travails, I have often been invited to his house to participate in the conversations that take place there. In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein—that Epstein, most recently embroiled in charges involved under age girls and Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew—spends most of his day at his dining room table in the in front of a laptop and beside a row of reading glasses (there are a lot of them in case, apparently, he misplaces a pair, but being quite meticulous he never does) conducting what must surely be the world’s most extraordinary colloquial. These meetings, and this lifestyle, have somehow stayed private or secret—or apart—not out of any formal or stated restrictions, but because, in some sense, it would be very hard to explain just what you’re doing there with a brazen sex offender in a guffaw-inducing home flaunting all moderation. And yet, defying disgrace, and tolerating his tone deafness—or mocking attitude toward the zeitgeist—so many come. Gladly. Willingly. Feeling that his invitation is quite an extraordinary privilege.