Jeffrey Epstein as Figaro
Epstein was a stereotype out of comic opera: the rich but foolish adulterer's clever facilitator.
In opera buffa, such as Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, a common plot device is that a rich man wants to pursue a beautiful young woman, so he employs a wily underling fertile of imagination in the arts of trickery to help with the arrangements.
Complications invariably ensue.
From the New York Times news section:
How Epstein Helped Solve a Billionaire’s Problems With Women
The Wall Street titan Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $170 million for what he said was tax and estate work. But his services went beyond that.
By Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Steve Eder, and David Enrich
March 23, 2026
… In the later years of Mr. Epstein’s life, after he was incarcerated and registered as a sex offender, no one did more to bankroll his opulent lifestyle than Mr. Black, 74, a towering figure on Wall Street and a fixture of the global art scene.
Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein $170 million over six years for what Mr. Black has said were tax and estate-planning services. The sum dwarfed what elite law or accounting firms would have charged for similar work, baffling both his Wall Street peers and investigators on Capitol Hill.
The millions of pages of Epstein-related emails and other documents that the Justice Department released this year offer a potential explanation for the size of the payments: Mr. Epstein essentially served as a fixer whose services went beyond modernizing Mr. Black’s finances or reducing his taxes, according to a New York Times review of those records.
Mr. Epstein suggested ways to obscure millions of dollars that Mr. Black paid to women, as well as to Mr. Epstein himself. He brainstormed about how to avoid taxes on some of the payments. He took credit for defusing a government audit of a woman to whom Mr. Black had paid millions of dollars. He planned ways to surveil, intimidate and silence another woman who was threatening to publicly accuse Mr. Black of abuse. He even counseled Mr. Black to separate from his wife after she learned of his infidelity.
Mr. Black paid about $20 million to a dozen women, at least some of whom he’d had sexual relationships with, according to the recently released files and notes taken by congressional investigators and shared with The Times. Mr. Epstein was involved in figuring out ways to dispense a significant portion of that money.
Mr. Epstein summed it up to Mr. Black in a 2017 email: Mr. Epstein’s job, as he saw it, was partly about “saving you from yourself.” …
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been investigating Mr. Black’s financial ties to Mr. Epstein for years, accused him in a letter last week of seemingly using Mr. Epstein to hide payments to women. He also questioned whether Mr. Black had complied with tax laws. …
On several occasions, Mr. Epstein introduced Mr. Black to women, according to emails and investigative records released by the Justice Department, as well as interviews with lawyers involved in Epstein cases.
All the references in this article to Mr. Black’s affairs refer to “women,” not “girls,” so they were presumably over the age of consent.
At least three of the women later accused Mr. Black of rape or sexual assault, allegations that he has denied.
After all, women who were friends and associates of Jeffrey Epstein are universally known for their chastity and would never consent to give up their prized virginities to some billionaire in return for money.
For years, Mr. Black had been paying women — some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, according to the Justice Department’s Epstein documents, court filings, Mr. Wyden’s letter and two of the lawyers involved in Epstein cases.
For tax purposes, Mr. Black classified many of the payments as gifts. The recipient of a gift generally does not need to pay taxes on it. The giver does not need to pay taxes, either, until his lifetime giving exceeds a certain amount. The threshold varies by year, but in 2012, the limit was about $5 million — and Mr. Black had surpassed it, emails show. That meant that he would have to start paying a 40 percent tax on any large gifts.
Mr. Epstein suggested that because at least some of the gifts had come from a bank account that Mr. Black held jointly with his wife, perhaps half could be attributed to her for tax purposes.
Uh … You know, if I had been Black’s Figaro, my first suggestion would be: …
Paywall here.
