Reputation management The efforts to clean up sex offender's public image

Jeffrey Epstein and his associates worked to suppress negative press and rebuild his image in the years after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor, newly released documents reveal.

- Anna Betts

The documents, among 20,000 pages released on Wednesday by Republican members of the House oversight committee, include emails and memos that depict a coordinated effort to influence online search results and journalists, and restore Epstein's reputation.

In December 2010, Epstein, who was released from jail in July 2009, exchanged a series of emails with Al Seckel, an eccentric collector who appeared to be helping manage Epstein's online reputation. An obituary says Seckel died in France in 2015.

"The google page is not good," Epstein wrote. "After sept when you told me you thought it would take appox twenty thousand to clean up and hopefully in time for Nov 1, then another ten thousand, and another ten thousand and your emails about how you are all about results."

Seckel sent Epstein screenshots of the first page of Google search results for Epstein's name, assuring the financier that the "daily beast article is gone", and that "the other ones, including the powerful Huffington Post, are about to be pushed off".

The screenshots show a HuffPost story titled Jeffrey Epstein, Convicted Pedophile and Former Hedge Fund Titan Now a Free Man, published on 21 July 2010, as the seventh link on the list of search results.

A few days later, Seckel informed Epstein that "the bots did the sweep".