ATTERSON — who was also a step-uncle of Ward to drop the story. But Ward came back with was dynamite. re salacious than anything Carter ting in the hours it would take to uncovered, picking the ones they all out in a narrative that would acts it contained. 144 CHAPTER 37 Vicky Ward: October 2002 Epstein went out of his way to spin the Vanity Fair story to his own ends, and soon after she got the assignment, Vicky Ward’s phone began to ring off the hook: calls from Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, the current head of Bear Stearns; from Les Wexner; from academics, scientists, and movers and shakers who counted Epstein among their friends. Then there were the calls from Epstein himself. He wouldn’t go on the record, but despite the rumors he’d spread behind Ward’s back, he was happy to talk informally, even give her a tour of his Manhattan mansion and trot out stories that he had dined out on for years. By most accounts, Epstein could be extremely charming-even if it had taken Ghislaine to teach him which forks to use when and he did his best to charm Vicky Ward. But she was not easily seduced, and she turned out to have a keen eye for Epstein’s missteps. 145 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009294¶
JAMES PATTERSON Over tea in his town house, she noticed, Epstein ate all the finger food that had been put out for both of them. She found it odd that the only book this supposedly brilliant man had left for her to see was a paperback by the Marquis de Sade. And then there was the call afterward from one of Epstein’s assistants—a woman Ward did not know-who told her, “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty.” Ward is pretty, with fine English features and flowing blond hair. She was also very pregnant then, with a bad case of morning sickness. She threw up often, sometimes in public, and these clumsy advances on Epstein’s part only added to her ever-present nausea. For a man who was supposedly brilliant, he’d struck her, oddly, as not very smart. “Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes,” she wrote. “They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. ‘Let’s play chess,’ he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. ‘You be white. You get the first move.’ It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets but few know the whole.” The testimonials Epstein’s friends gave were glowing: “I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” Les Wexaer told her. “Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are 146 not in investment strateg knows, his are not in fast world trends as each of us “I’m on my 20th boc Epstein in 1997. “The onl ly that I send drafts to is But Ward also talked questions and qualms ab in lawsuits against him. C with him. One who had y board of Rockefeller Univ One powerful investn conspicuous absence fro ing desks don’t seem to animals that big to not let Ward uncovered lega view with the SEC, given Stearns. She visited a fed at length with Steven Ho made a major mistake in told him to stay below the accusations, about Epste denied-and Ward kne mastermind, was not to b throughout the reporting concerned with what sh with what she’d uncovere Time and again, he have on the girls?” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009295¶