The woman who wrote the first searing accounts of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes has told how she lived in fear of retaliation from the disgraced financier and his powerful associates for almost a decade.
Conchita Sarnoff’s groundbreaking investigation, published by the Daily Beast in 2010, revealed the sweetheart deal the pervert struck to keep him from serious jail time, the names of some of his rich and powerful associates, and the flight logs showing them in his company.
Now, almost seven years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, the publication of 3 million new Epstein files has brought a fresh barrage of threats against Sarnoff—threats so potent that an investigation is underway, Sarnoff told the Daily Beast.
“Epstein is dead. He’s been dead since August of 2019,” Sarnoff, a human rights advocate, told the Daily Beast. Still, she adds, the menacing messages she receives have left her family “in distress” about her safety.
“You have no idea how hard it is for me to sleep at night—it’s so frightening," she said.
Sarnoff laid much of the groundwork for what the world now knows about Epstein when she was commissioned by Daily Beast co-founder and editor-in-chief Tina Brown. The first of her stories was published in July 2010, revealing the appalling details of Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart plea deal in Florida, which allowed him to avoid serious federal charges despite extensive evidence that he had abused and trafficked underage girls.
Sarnoff’s reporting, however, came at the cost of her safety, she said. “It was very difficult,” she remembers.
The writer says she “stumbled” into the Epstein case after knowing the multi-millionaire and his partner and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell—who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking—socially throughout the 90s.
Sarnoff said Epstein was seemingly awed by her then-husband , Daniel Sarnoff, whose grandfather founded NBC and oversaw the construction of Radio Free Europe during World War II.
“He admired David Sarnoff, which is the reason why Epstein and I met to begin with,” Sarnoff said. “And so when Epstein and I met….he thought that I would basically open doors for him.”
But when a mutual friend told her about Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution—a case that had largely escaped public scrutiny—she was stunned. Someone in her own social circle had committed the very crimes she had devoted her life to fighting.
“I couldn’t believe these two characters were, were perpetrating these crimes,” she said. “It was just, for me, not even fathomable.”
That was when Sarnoff decided to track down the court documents detailing Epstein’s crimes and make them public herself.
In the summer of 2010, she lured Epstein onto the phone under the guise of investigating a separate human trafficking scandal. He agreed to a series of phone conversations while under house arrest at his sprawling Palm Beach mansion—conversations that, unintentionally on his part, became the only interviews he granted during his incarceration.
It wasn’t until their final conversation that Sarnoff told Epstein she would be writing about his crimes.
“I remember being very, very scared… I knew what was going to come after that, and that was it,” she said. When Sarnoff finally told Epstein about her forthcoming article, he slammed down the phone. They never spoke again.
Even before that, Sarnoff said she felt threatened. As she dug deeper into Epstein’s life, she began to suspect she was being watched.
Her suspicion was confirmed one summer day in July 2010, as she stood in line at a CVS pharmacy in Florida. An unfamiliar young man stepped in behind her and stared.
“Are you Conchita Sarnoff?” he asked, according to Sarnoff.
Another time, she said, a mutual friend of hers and Epstein’s offered her thousands of dollars in a “foreign bank account” if she stopped digging into the financier’s personal life. She refused.
Documents among the 3 million new files released last week by the Department of Justice shed light on Epstein’s efforts to silence Sarnoff’s reporting for the Daily Beast.
Some of the files reveal that Epstein had his attorney, Jay Lefkowitz of Kirkland & Ellis, send a threatening letter to the Daily Beast in September 2010. A white-shoe law firm, Kirkland & Ellis also agreed in 2025 to provide Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to avoid revenge for representing his enemies in the past.
Lefkowitz tried to smear Sarnoff and claimed that Epstein had not been investigated for sex trafficking before issuing a pointed warning: “As I’m sure you are aware, the publication of false allegations of criminal conduct is defamatory per se. The Daily Beast should proceed carefully before publishing or republishing such allegations.”
Neither the firm nor Lefkowitz responded to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
“Fear was running through my mind when you’re up against a man who has so much money… someone who bullies his way into situations and never tells the truth,” Sarnoff said. “You could just tell he was a manipulator.”
Additionally, Epstein confronted Brown in person. She told The Daily Beast Podcast how, in the summer of 2010, he showed up at the company’s Manhattan office to pressure her over the reporting.
“I stood by the door, and I said to him, ‘Jeffrey... what are you doing here?’” Brown recalled. “He said, ‘Just stop.’ And he looked at me with this kind of snake eyes, cold, and it was menacing. It was really menacing. And he pointed his finger, and he said, ‘Just stop.’”
Epstein also bombarded the Beast and its parent company, IAC, with legal letters, to no avail.
Nearly a year and a half after Sarnoff first broke news of Epstein’s plea deal, the financier boasted in a September 2011 email that his intimidation tactics had scared off The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News.
“Tina Brown /newsweek/daily beast, is the one left standing, not the post, or the news or times will bother me,” he wrote in an email to Jes Staley, then a JP Morgan executive and later CEO of the British bank Barclays. At the time, Brown oversaw both Newsweek and The Daily Beast from the same New York office.
Meanwhile, Sarnoff said she took her reporting on Epstein to 27 book publishers—all of whom turned her down. One told her, “You are sitting on a pot of gold, but no one will publish this book.”
“And he was right,” she added.
Sarnoff declined to detail the threats she currently faces, citing an active investigation. But fear, she said, has followed her since the moment she vowed to expose Epstein’s crimes.
In truth, she is torn by those threats over whether she would do it all again.
“What I regret most is putting my children and my family through tremendous stress. I deeply regret that,” she said.
“But in the end, sometimes you have to take the risk to get something done.”
