Did Jeffrey Epstein only move into billionaire Les Wexner's Upper East Side brownstone in 1996, thus proving that Stacey Williams' story about Donald Trump groping her after they had left Epstein's "brownstone on the Upper East Side" in 1993 was false? No, that's not true: Epstein rented an Upper East Side home from 1992 to 1996, according to news reports. It was two blocks from Wexner's mansion and one block from Fifth Avenue, where Williams said they walked after leaving the brownstone. News reports said that Epstein purchased Wexner's Upper East Side mansion in 1996, but also that Wexner did not live there the majority of the time he owned it.
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 23, 2024. The post, opening with a quote from Williams, said:
'Late winter of 1993 I was on a walk with Jeffrey [Epstein] from his brownstone on the Upper East Side down Fifth Avenue, when Jeffrey looked at me and said "You know let's go stop by and see Trump".'
Strange: Epstein only moved into the Wexler mansion on 9 East 71st in 1996.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Oct 24 2024 at 19:43:16 UTC)
Beginning at the 1:37 mark of the video that was part of the post on X, Williams recalled her experience, saying:
'Late winter, early spring of 1993 I was on a walk with Jeffrey [Epstein] from his brownstone on the Upper East Side down Fifth Avenue, when Jeffrey looked at me and said "You know let's go stop by and see Trump." And so we went to Trump Tower.'
Williams calls Epstein's home a "brownstone on the Upper East Side" in the video.
The post, misspelling billionaire Leslie Wexner's name as Wexler, said:
Strange: Epstein only moved into the Wexler mansion on 9 East 71st in 1996.
Epstein rented another mansion on the Upper East Side during the time Williams discusses in the video, a townhouse at 34 East 69th St. on the Upper East Side from 1992 to 1996, as Buzzfeed News reported (archived here) in 2019:
But Epstein, the financier who has been charged with sex trafficking and accused of sexually abusing young girls, used to live in a different Upper East Side mansion only a few blocks away. It's a mansion that embroiled him in a dispute involving a lawyer for French Connection heroin ring suspects, the State Department, and transitively the government of Iran. ...
Beginning in February 1992, Epstein rented a former Iranian government building that had been taken over by the State Department during the Iranian revolution, at 34 East 69th Street in one of Manhattan's most expensive neighborhoods, and at a rate of $15,000 a month.
Buzzfeed News included an image of the building from a December 23, 1997, article (updated April 8, 2018) published in the New York Daily News (archived here):
(Source: Buzzfeed News screenshot taken on Thu Oct 24 2024 at 22:01:21 UTC)
Google Maps (archived here) shows that the building Epstein rented was one block from Fifth Avenue, home of Trump Tower, and two blocks from the Upper East Side mansion Wexner sold to Epstein in 1996, 9 East 71st St., as this screenshot shows:
(Source: Google Maps screenshot taken on Thu Oct 24 2024 at 21:01:43 UTC)
The account that created the post on X cites two sources in a subsequent tweet (archived here) as their reference for the claim that "Epstein only moved into the Wexler mansion on 9 East 71st in 1996." A January 11, 1996, New York Times article (archived here) quoted Epstein saying Wexner "never spent more than two months" in the house Wexner bought in 1989. Epstein told The Times "the house was now his."
The second link in the post was for a real estate blog (archived here) that wrote that Epstein had bought the home in 1996.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims regarding Jeffrey Epstein can be found here and of claims about Donald Trump can be found here.
