The Vanity Fair photographer behind last month’s close-up portraits of President Donald Trump’s closest staff shared a terrifying anecdote about his experience photographing Jeffrey Epstein.
In a post to Instagram on Tuesday, Christopher Anderson, 55, shared a series of photos he took of the infamous sex criminal and explained how Epstein threatened him over their ownership.
“In 2015 I was assigned by @jodyquon @NYMag to make a portrait of Epstein to accompany an article by @michaelwolffnyc,” Anderson wrote. “I didn’t know much about him, other than the fact that he had heavy connections to powerful men.”
Anderson described how he met the would-be convicted sex trafficker, noting how he asked to meet before their photoshoot to discuss the purchase of the photos after publication.
“When Epstein arrived, his eyes sized me up like someone always looking for the angles,” Anderson said. “He quizzed me about my pictures and how the shoot would go and how much I thought my pictures were worth.”
The photographer noted that a “young woman with an Eastern European accent” let him inside Epstein’s residence, whom he later saw “setting up a massage table just off one of his offices.”
Anderson continued, saying that Epstein offered him $20,000 to own the photos after their publication, which he said was “all the money in the world to me at the time.”
“Several days later, he decided to pull out of the story and started calling me to demand the pictures. I reiterated that the pictures were not his until after publication. Then the threats started,” he wrote.
“He sent his bodyguard/driver, Merwin, a massive guy in a long black overcoat and black, leather gloves, to my studio to intimidate me (it worked),” Anderson added. “Epstein succeeded in threatening the magazine, too, and they killed the story.”
“I cashed the check and Merwin came by again to collect the hard drive and make sure I didn’t have any more copies of the photos. Today, I found the copy on a very old hard drive.”
Anderson went on to describe the photos he shared from the 2015 shoot, which include pictures of a taxidermied tiger and of a printed email correspondence with the Royal Government seeking payment from “the Duke and Duchess,” referring to ex-Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.
All of the former Prince’s titles were revoked last year after his continued connection to Epstein was revealed, as were the titles of his ex-wife, the former Duchess.
Anderson emerged into the spotlight last month following his brutal close-up portraits of Trump’s top aides for Vanity Fair, accompanying a bombshell two-part story about Trump’s inner circle. His especially candid photos prompted a lot of buzz, particularly surrounding a zoomed-in look at what appeared to be Karoline Leavitt’s lip-injection sites.
The photographer also told The Washington Post that, among the staff he photographed, Stephen Miller was the most concerned about his image—asking Anderson whether he should smile.
“And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye,” Anderson said about his encounter with Miller. “And he says to me, ‘You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.’ And I looked at him, and I said, ‘You know, you do, too.’”
