9 East 71st Street

The townhouse at 9 East 71st Street stands on the north side of the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Built as the Herbert N. Straus mansion in the early 1930s, the limestone residence, measured at between about 19,000 and 28,000 square feet, ranked among the largest single-family houses in New York City. Leslie Wexner bought it through a trust in 1989, and it became the primary New York base of Jeffrey Epstein from 1996, when he moved in, until his 2019 arrest. From December 2011 it was held by Maple Inc., a Virgin Islands corporation whose filings to the territory omitted the house.¹²³

The Straus Mansion

Herbert Nathan Straus, an heir to the R. H. Macy & Co. department-store fortune and a son of Isidor Straus and Ida Straus, who died in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, bought the lot in 1928 and commissioned the Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer to design a French neoclassical mansion.⁴ Construction began at the end of the 1920s, and Straus imported eighteenth-century European rooms and fixtures for the interior.⁴ The stock-market crash of October 1929 disrupted the project, and Straus halted work in 1931 with the house roughly ninety percent complete after spending about 600,000 dollars.⁴

Straus remained at his Park Avenue apartment and died in 1933 without ever living in the unfinished mansion.⁴ His heirs left the structure vacant for more than a decade while property-tax obligations accumulated.⁴ The house later passed through institutional and residential uses before returning to private ownership; until 1989 it housed the Birch Wathen School, a private school.¹

The exterior was finished in limestone in the French neoclassical manner, set off by a fifteen-foot oak entrance door and tall arched windows, and the residence stood "almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-story neighbors."¹ A 2003 Vanity Fair profile described an entrance hall hung with "row upon row of individually framed eyeballs," which Epstein told visitors had been made in England for injured soldiers, a foyer with a "twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior," a "leather room" where tea was served by menservants in white gloves, and an upstairs office with a gilded desk Epstein said had belonged to the banker J. P. Morgan and a stuffed black poodle on a Steinway grand piano. Much of the decoration was the work of the French decorator Alberto Pinto. Epstein told people the house had 51,000 square feet and that he bought it because he knew he "could never live anywhere bigger."¹

Wexner Purchase and Transfer to Epstein

Leslie Wexner, the founder of The Limited and L Brands, bought the townhouse through a trust in 1989 for a reported 13.2 million dollars. Wexner married Abigail Koppel in 1993 and the couple moved to Ohio; in 1996 Epstein moved into the house. Vanity Fair reported in 2003 that "public documents suggest that the house is still owned by the trust that bought it, but Epstein has said that he now owns the house."¹ Epstein, who held a sweeping power of attorney over Wexner's finances granted in 1991, used the house as his Manhattan residence while title remained with Wexner-linked entities. A 1998 purchase and sale agreement for the house involved a 10 million dollar promissory note and a personal guaranty signed by Epstein.⁵ An FBI internal memo released in 2026 stated that Epstein "controlled all of Wexner's personal finances with virtually no oversight" and described his sale to himself of a New York home that had belonged to Wexner at a discounted price; the financial mechanics of that transfer are detailed on the Leslie Wexner page.⁶

By 2011 the house was held by Nine East 71st Street Corporation, which the Virgin Islands government described as "owned by Epstein." In November 2011, after registering as a sex offender in the Virgin Islands, Epstein formed three Virgin Islands corporations, Cypress, Inc., Maple, Inc. and Laurel, Inc., with himself as president and director, Darren Indyke as vice president, secretary and director, and Richard Kahn as treasurer and director. Maple acquired the townhouse from Nine East 71st Street Corporation "on or about December 23, 2011," a transfer between two companies Epstein controlled; Cypress took the Zorro Ranch and Laurel the Palm Beach house the same month. The territory alleged that Epstein "transferred ownership of them to the Virgin Islands, and then concealed this fact even from Virgin Islands authorities in an attempt to shield the properties from any judgment in the states where they are located."²

Maple's annual reports to the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of the Virgin Islands, signed by Epstein and Kahn under the attestation "ALL STATEMENTS CONTAINED IN THIS APPLICATION, AND ANY ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTS, ARE TRUE AND CORRECT," never listed the house or its expenses for 2011 through 2016. For 2017 Maple reported cash of 18,281 dollars as its only asset and expenses of 150 dollars while paying 327,497.48 dollars and 6,487.04 dollars in New York City property taxes; for 2018 it reported cash of 21,265 dollars and expenses of 300 dollars while paying 336,471.87 dollars. The territory alleged that Indyke and Kahn "knew or should have known that their attestations were false" and that the transfers "were made for the sole purpose of sheltering these assets from collection." When Epstein died in August 2019, the estate valued its shares in the corporation holding the townhouse at 56 million dollars.²

Epstein listed Manhattan as his residence in legal filings, and a 2018 federal complaint by investors in Towers Financial Corporation gave his residence as 9 East 71st Street; the townhouse functioned as the hub of his New York operations, with staff, a large household and the art and furnishings later catalogued during the federal search.⁷⁸ After his death a plaintiff identified as "VE" sued the estate's co-executors, Nine East 71st Street Corporation, Financial Trust Company and NES, LLC in the Southern District of New York (No. 1:19-cv-07625); all were represented by Troutman Sanders, the firm that had defended Epstein against Towers claims.⁹

Interior Accounts and Surveillance

Court testimony, photographs entered as evidence and journalistic accounts described an interior filled with framed photographs of women and girls, including images displayed in the stairwells and private rooms.¹⁰ Witnesses and reporters described a chessboard whose pieces were dressed to resemble Epstein's staff, a life-size hanging female doll, a mural depicting a prison yard and a painting that appeared to depict Bill Clinton.¹¹

Investigators who searched the house in 2019 reported finding hidden cameras positioned to monitor bedrooms and bathrooms, and photographs of partially nude and apparently underage females were recovered from multiple rooms.¹⁰ Compact discs and hard drives containing images were found in plastic bins and drawers distributed throughout the residence.⁸

Several women who later gave testimony in civil suits and in the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell described being brought to the townhouse as minors or young adults and directed to upstairs massage rooms, accounts that form part of the body of allegations against Epstein and his associates rather than adjudicated findings as to this address.¹⁰ Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 of sex-trafficking and conspiracy charges arising from conduct that prosecutors said occurred at Epstein's residences, including the New York townhouse.¹⁰

The July 2019 Federal Search

Federal agents executed a search warrant at 9 East 71st Street on the evening of July 6, 2019, the day Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport, and continued into July 7.⁸ An FBI team from a child-exploitation and human-trafficking task force forced entry when no one answered, and agents located a locked safe in a fifth-floor dressing area, which they opened with a saw; the supervising agent later testified that "we brought a saw."⁸

Prosecutors said the safe held about 70,000 dollars in cash, dozens of loose diamonds, compact discs, hard drives and an expired foreign passport.¹² The passport had been issued by Austria in 1982, was valid until 1987 and bore a photograph of Epstein under the name Marius Robert Fortelni, listing an occupation of "manager" and a residence in Dammam, Saudi Arabia; its pages carried entry stamps for France, England and Saudi Arabia from the early 1980s.¹³ Prosecutors cited the diamonds, the cash and the false passport at Epstein's bail hearing as evidence that he had the means and intent to flee, and Judge Richard Berman denied bail.¹²

Epstein's defense lawyers said the passport had been given to him by a friend decades earlier for personal protection during travel, asserting that some Jewish Americans had been advised to carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally during a period of hijacking risk, and that Epstein never used it to clear immigration.¹³ Epstein was found dead in his federal jail cell on August 10, 2019, and the ruling was suicide.¹⁴

Post-Death Sale

After Epstein's death the townhouse was placed on the market by his estate, listed in 2020 at 88 million dollars, a price that was cut by 23 million dollars to 65 million dollars in January 2021.³ In March 2021 the mansion sold for 51 million dollars to Michael Daffey, a former Goldman Sachs executive who had managed hedge-fund clients for the bank and was retiring from its global-markets division.³

A spokesman said Daffey financed the purchase with cash and a bridge loan, and the proceeds went to Epstein's estate, which had established a fund to compensate his alleged victims.³ Coverage placed the building at about 19,000 to 28,000 square feet across seven stories with roughly forty rooms, the wide variance reflecting differing measurements of the much-altered house over the decades.³

The sale closed the chain of ownership that ran from the Straus heirs through the mid-century institutional uses and the Birch Wathen School to Wexner's trust, to Nine East 71st Street Corporation, to the Epstein-controlled Maple Inc. entity, and finally to a private buyer who paid roughly 1,800 dollars per square foot.¹²³ The fund established from the estate's assets, including the proceeds of this and the Palm Beach sale, processed claims from women who said they had been abused at Epstein's properties.³