Hollywood Publicist Peggy Siegal Tells All on Epstein: 5 Biggest Revelations From Her Bombshell Interview

In the wake of the torpedo that crash-landed on her career last year, legendary Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal has opted to share some revealing details of her 12-year relationship with Jeffrey Epstein this week in a New York magazine feature, detailing the quid pro quo she and the late financier developed as he sought inroads to the entertainment industry’s A-class and she enjoyed the spoils of his vast wealth.

Siegal, 78, saw her four-decade career working with Hollywood’s top studios and directors to push their films and create Oscar buzz obliterated when she was named as one of the “social guarantors” who helped Epstein gain footing in elite circles when he left jail in Florida in the mid-aughts. In recent months, hundreds of emails between Epstein and Siegal have been unleashed sporadically by the Department of Justice after a bipartisan House vote forced their release. The emails have laid bare their cozy and affectionate language and paint a clear picture of the relationship that developed between them.

Speaking with New York after the bombshell exploded, Siegal revealed even more about the late financier and her dealings with him, and explained more about what she received from the relationship that is now costing her everything.

Epstein manipulated her from the start

While Epstein had become aware of Siegal’s role in Hollywood, her particular prowess and the legendary “golden Rolodex” with more than 30,000 A-listers’ contact details, she was unaware of him — or the wealth at his disposal and what he would spend for access to her clients and social world. So he sent her a Cartier clock as a gift and then called her up; right off the bat, he spoke to her as if they were old friends. Epstein even brought up that she had never married, a touchy subject.

“He proceeded to name-drop all these people we both knew, friends in common. He made it clear that he had numerous houses and a jet and that he was a player and should be on my screening list. ‘Have you ever been married?’” he asked her, as she told New York.

“I instantly knew,” she said to the magazine, “that he collected information to use against you. I instantly knew that’s what he did. It was something I was very sensitive to. He wanted to find out some weakness in my makeup or my life. There was a sense of danger. It was like a warning bell.”

Siegal maintains she knew nothing of his crimes — but did

When Siegal learned of the extent of Epstein’s sexual misconduct crimes in the New York Times in 2017, she made statements indicating that she did not have any awareness of his crimes, nor did she accept money from the very wealthy financier. Since his 2008 sentence had seemed so lenient — he’d served only 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail — her pal via email must have been targeted, she told herself.

But that tune changed with a new statement days later “acknowledging that she’d accepted funds from Epstein for travel but said that this arrangement had ended in 2010.”

The emails tell a different story, one that has the two remaining in regular contact from April 2009 until April 2019. And they exchanged money and access until three months before Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges.

Their relationship was distant but “platonically affectionate”

At one point, as their decade-plus quid pro quo was netting Epstein the access to Hollywood he desired and Siegal the funding she needed to keep up with the celebrities she chased, a semi-flirtatious email had Epstein writing to Siegal: “I need great genes. Smart, pretty, funny — if you were fifty years younger, whoops, forty.”

New York theorizes that the relationship became both a business and personal relationship that was mutually beneficial between two single power players: She had a “strong and steady man, a provider, who guarded against her antagonists” in her life. For him, she provided “the affection of a woman of appropriate age (his senior in fact), a truer respectability than he could buy, a decorous life.”

“Jeffrey Epstein was … I don’t want to use the word ‘infatuated,’” Siegal told the magazine. “Jeffrey Epstein actually knew exactly who I was.”

Epstein sought to befriend Woody Allen via a star-studded dinner

While Epstein was utilizing Siegal for access to premieres, parties and events attended by some of the top filmmakers in Hollywood, he asked her to help shore up the guest list for a dinner he wanted to plan for Prince Andrew. Woody Allen was deemed to be the ideal guest — along with his partner, Soon-Yi Previn — perhaps because of the accusations he’s faced from his ex-partner Mia Farrow, who insists he sexually assaulted their adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, when she was a child.

Siegal spent a significant amount of time working on the dinner for Epstein, fretting over the guest list and who sat near whom; how they plotted and planned is evident in the emails. Now, she claims to New York that the sole reason for her working on something as damning as a party for Jeffrey Epstein was to get a copy of The King’s Speech to Queen Elizabeth, via Prince Andrew. She says that was being done on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, who New York reports hates Epstein, on the off chance that the royal could get the queen to provide a blurb to help promote the eventual best picture Oscar winner.

Siegal, in retrospect, sees how this was all a terrible idea.

“I totally jeopardized my relationship with all these important people — they did not know who he was. All of Jeffrey’s illegal, immoral behavior was in Palm Beach, and he went to jail in Palm Beach, and the New York Times never wrote about him.” (Note: It did.)

Years later, Siegal still doesn’t get it

Becoming a pariah can’t be very fun. But for a person whose career and livelihood depended on someone in a crisis or Hollywood divorce or lawsuit losing out and having that very pariah-like feeling, Siegal trafficked in gossip and judgment but can’t seem to grasp why she would possibly be shunned over her Epstein friendship and professional relationship.

“Seven years ago, I was trashed on the front page of the New York Times, alongside Clinton and Dershowitz,” she told New York. “I was trashed in Vanity Fair. No studio would ever work with me again. No one would let me in at their screening [at the Telluride Film Festival]. I had to buy a pass for $5,000 to go see a movie. No one would talk to me — they would walk across the street to avoid me. Why does Peggy Siegal, who is 78 years old, who did nothing her entire life but work as a single woman and make a success as a result, have to suffer so badly for this story, when heads of state and royalty and presidents have done far worse than I have?”