How Jeffrey Epstein Tried To Bury His Past Online

After his 2008 conviction for trafficking minors, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t try to face his past; he tried to hide it. Instead of openly repairing his image, he worked behind the scenes to push the ugly parts of his story out of sight. Negative reports were quietly drowned out by a flood of flattering content that talked up his supposed tech investments and charitable interests, making it harder for anyone searching online to see what he had actually been convicted of.

Documents that later became public reveal just how far Epstein went to manage his reputation. He frequently fired off emails complaining that the internet was full of reminders of his crimes. To handle this, he leaned heavily on a man reportedly named Al Seckel, who appears repeatedly in his files promising to bury news stories and other mentions of his abuse. But Seckel wasn’t working alone. Epstein drew on a network of people, from contacts in science and marketing to casual acquaintances, all helping to keep his past out of sight whenever someone tried to look him up online.

Epstein still had people lined up to protect his reputation, even after he had admitted to serious crimes. Some public relations firms agreed to take him on, helping him manage how he appeared to the world. While reputation management is usually a normal part of PR work, in his case it was different; these agencies were tasked with softening or hiding the very abuse he had committed, fully aware of what they were being hired to cover up. According to The Verge, Epstein and his team discussed editing his Wikipedia page to remove mentions of his crimes and replacing his mugshot with other photos.

Epstein tried to hire reputation management firms, but several turned him away. In 2010, one founder told his associate Seckel that they could help someone wrongly accused, but if the allegations were true, they couldn’t take the job. Epstein enlisted a mix of people, knowingly or not, to help polish his image online.

In 2010, Seckel set up sites highlighting Epstein’s scientific connections and charitable work, then asked scientists and academics to link to them. The goal was to make these positive pages more visible in search results. After 2019, with fresh investigations and relentless media coverage, Epstein’s wrongdoing became impossible to ignore. Ultimately, no effort to clean up his image could cover up the reality of his crimes.