Nellie Bowles, the wife of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has described her time with Jeffrey Epstein in a response to reports of her inclusion in the latest round of the Epstein files.
In an essay published in the Free Press on Tuesday, Bowles described how she was a reporter at the New York Times in 2018 when she visited Epstein’s Upper East Side home a decade after he was first convicted of six crimes.
Following the release of the files on Friday, Bowles rejected suggestions that she had kept her meeting with the convicted sex trafficker a secret, writing on X, “So secret that I wrote about the meeting and used the reporting from it .... twice ... for the NYT.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Bowles for comment.
While detailing her hour with Epstein, Bowles at times strikes a slightly more reflective tone in the essay, writing that she asked her colleagues at the Times, “Should I really do this? Would I be killed inside the largest home on the Upper East Side?”
Bowles noted that there were a number of stories she thought Epstein could be a source for and that business reporters at the Times occasionally used him as one, so she agreed to the meeting.
“We sat for coffee at a long table,” she wrote. “He was using an American flag as a tablecloth.”
Bowles labeled Esptein as “charismatic and dark, sarcastic and quick.” She said she tried he meet “his wit, or tried to.”
She said he bragged about his connections to the rich and famous, “and showed me framed photos of himself with famous people. He actually did that for a while, showing me photo after photo of himself with American elites. The Clintons, of course, but also directors and authors, famous professors whose papers I’d read in college, all beaming with him. It made me feel more comfortable, which I imagine was the point.”
“He made bawdy jokes,” Bowles continued. “He was, you’ll be shocked to hear, a misogynist. He said he has islands where he goes with his friends, and that they have girls stay on one island since girls just yap yap yap, and he needs some peace and quiet, you know what I mean?”
Bowles also noted that there was “nothing hidden” about what Epstein was doing. “People looking now for code words in his emails miss that there’s endless discussion of women and girls in there, and it’s totally open, almost mundane,” she wrote.
After agreeing to a tour of his seven-story townhouse, Bowles wrote that she became uncomfortable after Epstein closed a door, sealing them inside a room decorated to look like her native California.
“I knew I was in a warren of rooms in a mansion with a sex criminal, and I’m sorry to admit it, but I was scared and said I was out of time and had to leave,” she wrote. “He walked me downstairs. In all, I was at his house for about an hour.”
Bowles continued, lamenting the fact that she did not profile Epstein after meeting him, arguing that her role as a writer was to “capture scenes and mark them down and share them with readers” and not to act as a police detective or district attorney.
“Sure, I ended up using the reporting from that meeting in New York Times stories when he was arrested almost a year later,” Bowles wrote, referencing one story about Epstein’s townhouse and another on the ethics of taking tainted funds, “But I never got a great Epstein story. And that was my job.”
“My regret is that I had the chance to profile one of the darkest, most interesting characters of that moment, and I didn’t. I had the chance to start a long conversation that could have been the biggest story of my life, and I chickened out after a single coffee gave me the heebie-jeebies. The fact that there’s only one exchange with me in the Epstein files shows my weakness as a reporter: There should have been more.”
Emails also revealed that Bowles corresponded with Epstein again after their meeting, with Epstein asking her approximately one month later how her introduction of her partner, Weiss, to her parents went.
“how did it go introducing your partner to mom? even better than the good career move? :)” Epstein wrote.
Responding 10 days later, Bowles wrote, “Ahahahaha I missed this and just figured out who you are. It actually went great!”
“When ste [sic] you and your babe back in nyc,” Epstein replied. There is no evidence Bowles responded to this second email, and Epstein would be arrested again ten months later, dying by suicide in his jail cell a month after his arrest.
