Landon Thomas Jr.

Named on the documents as	Landon Thomas, Jr. and Landon Thomas in his own signature blocks, which give his title as Financial Reporter, later Financial Correspondent, New York Times; Thomas Jr., Landon in the mail headers; Thomas, Landon in directory order; and LT when he signs off informally to Epstein1
Size of the file	1,353 documents on "Landon Thomas"; 1,753 over the union of forms. It is a floor12
The acts this page is built on	He wrote the 2002 magazine profile that defined Epstein publicly. Five years later Epstein’s own lawyers told the government they had “personally reviewed Mr. Thomas’s own notes.” In 2011 he answered Epstein’s request that his paper discredit an accuser with “I might be interested in that story. Would Andrew’s people cooperate?” In 2015 he asked Epstein to match a charitable donation, accepted $10,000, and sent the wire instructions3456
The pattern, in one line	A reporter who covered Epstein also raised money from him, sought stories from him, warned him who was investigating him, and asked him for leads on other men.
What no document read here shows	That his newspaper knew of the donation at the time; that any story he published was altered by it; how his notes reached Epstein’s lawyers; or any response by him to any of this. No document read for this page shows him in any contact with any victim
Covered elsewhere on this wiki	Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the accuser Epstein asked him to target · Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor · Alan Dershowitz · Richard Kahn, who received the wire request

Landon Thomas Jr. was a financial journalist at New York magazine and then, for roughly fifteen years, at the New York Times. He is the author of the single most-quoted article ever written about Jeffrey Epstein, and the documents in this release show him in direct correspondence with Epstein from at least 2009 until 2017.

Nothing on this page is a finding of criminality, and no document read for it places him in contact with any victim. What the documents show is a working relationship between a reporter and a subject that ran in several directions at once: he wrote about Epstein, asked Epstein for money for charities, asked Epstein to broker access for a story, asked Epstein for tips about other men, and told Epstein who else was asking questions about him. Each of those is documented separately below, and each is dated.

2002: the profile

New York magazine published “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery” under his byline, on 28 October 2002. ⚠ The copy of the article in this release does not print that date; the sheet carries only a print date of 23 June 2017. The publication date is taken from a reference list printed alongside it, and is the weakest-sourced fact on this page. The Justice Department itself later cited it by name, in a filing, as the leading example of Epstein’s background having been “extensively researched and reported in the media.”³ It is the article that produced the description of Epstein as a man who came “with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world.” The double hyphens are the sheet’s own: it is a browser print-out and every dash on it is set that way. The desk first quoted that sentence as far as “the ladies” and stopped, which made it read more salaciously than the source does; the full clause balances the two halves and is given here whole.³

It is also the source of Donald Trump’s best-known remark about Epstein. The profile sets it against Epstein’s own account of himself:

Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”³

That passage was read at the image at 400 dpi before it was published here, because the text layer of the sheet is badly degraded and renders Trump’s name as “Tromp” and “frump”. Every word above is as printed.

Fourteen years later Thomas was still discussing that quote with Epstein, because a book author had put it to him that the quote was invented. He wrote to Epstein that the suggestion he had not actually spoken to Trump was “bull shit of course.”⁷ That email is also the best evidence in this release that the profile is his, since it is the author saying so in the first person.

2007: the notes

This is the earliest and the gravest item, and it is an allegation by Epstein’s lawyers, not a finding.

In a Kirkland & Ellis filing served on the government during the non-prosecution negotiations, under a section heading of its own, “The USAO Leaks Confidential Information to the New York Times”, Epstein’s counsel wrote that the US Attorney’s Office “has repeatedly leaked information about this case to the media, including to Landon Thomas, the senior business correspondent for the New York Times.” They then made a claim about their own possession of his working papers:

We have personally reviewed Mr. Thomas’s own notes, and they are remarkably detailed about highly confidential aspects of the prosecution’s theory of the case and the plea negotiations.⁴

The filing goes on to reconstruct his telephone calls with a line prosecutor in detail, asserting that the prosecutor told him which statutes were under consideration, described the conduct alleged, and disclosed the terms then being negotiated, including a defence proposal of house arrest. It asserts that when Thomas put to the prosecutor that there was evidence the complainants had lied about their ages, the prosecutor answered that this was no defence and that Thomas “should not believe ‘the spin’ of Mr. Epstein’s ‘high-priced attorneys’”, and said that Epstein “doesn’t have a defense.”⁴

And then the sequence that is hardest to explain innocently. The filing says Epstein’s attorneys learned of that call, complained to the office, and met the First Assistant and the United States Attorney about it, and that on Thomas’s next call, two weeks later, the prosecutor “admonished” him, in Thomas’s own word as the filing has it, for disclosing the contents of their earlier conversation to the defence.⁴

The filing also says whose hands they passed through: it names Jay Lefkowitz as the lawyer who reviewed them, and says the notes were hand-written.

Read plainly, Epstein’s lawyers are claiming that the contents of a reporter’s conversations with a prosecutor, and the reporter’s hand-written notes, reached the defence. ⚠ This page states that as their claim. It is an advocacy document written to accuse the prosecutors, it is subject to a protective order, and no document read for this page records how the notes were obtained, or whether Thomas knew. The line prosecutors’ names and the First Assistant’s are barred in the copy read here and are not sought or supplied. The United States Attorney, R. Alexander Acosta, is named in the clear on these sheets, as is Jay Lefkowitz.

2011: “Would Andrew’s people cooperate?”

On 1 July 2011 at 04:01 in the morning, Epstein emailed him about the collapsing Strauss-Kahn prosecution and asked his paper to turn the same treatment on the woman accusing Prince Andrew:

now that strauss kan girl will be shown to be a total liar. maybe your paper should jump on and show that virigina s allegations re andrew are the same,, she also accused numnerous people of having sex with her,, dersh, ehud etc. not one newpaper had the balls to question her credibility⁵

The “virigina” is Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Epstein is asking a New York Times reporter to have his newspaper attack the credibility of a woman who had accused him. The characterisation is Epstein’s, written by the man she was accusing, and this page reproduces it as evidence of what he asked for, not as a description of her. The allegations he refers to were denied by those named and were litigated for years afterwards.

Two minutes later, at 04:03, Thomas replied in full:

I might be interested in that story. Would Andrew’s people cooperate?⁵

He did not decline it. He asked a sourcing question. ⚠ No document read for this page shows that any such story was ever written, or that he took the request further than that sentence, and the page asserts neither. Half an hour later Epstein wrote again, adding that the resignation of the head of a sex-crimes unit the previous day could not be coincidence and was “the rush to accuse by rabid prosecutors.”⁵

2014 and 2015: the money

He asked Epstein for money for charities on at least two occasions, and the second one is documented from request to wire instruction.

On 7 November 2014 he wrote under the subject line “Beware: shameless fund raising plug to follow…” about Robert College in Istanbul, an institution whose board he sat on and on which his father had sat before him, offering to bring its headmaster round. Epstein replied “tell me more when i see you.”⁸

On 6 March 2015 he asked for a matching donation. The exchange, over about thirty-five minutes, runs:

Thomas: Do you want to match my $500 donation to this early childhood outfit in Harlem? I would ask my company but they are broke and this school really needs the help because their founder and main fund raiser ( a great man by the way) died recently. I think in fact I might have persuaded you to give to the Ricardo O’Gorman Garden in the past. … Anyway: more shameless shaking of the money tree. … Hope you are enjoying your media respite.

Epstein: 10k?

Thomas: They might name the school after you!

Epstein: any name you might like it to be from?

Thomas: Why not yours?

Epstein: young person scho0l no thanks

Thomas: Yikes. How crazy has all this become. How about anonymous? Or your company name or some such. I will leave it up to you to do what you think is best. But however you do it I thank you.

Epstein: my privilege⁶

It matters that the exchange ends where it does, and an earlier draft of this page cut it three messages short. ⚠ Stopping at “Why not yours?” showed a reporter proposing a donor’s name for a children’s school and no reply. The sheet shows the donor refusing, in those words, and the reporter retreating to anonymity in the next message. He had asked for $500 to be matched and was offered twenty times that. He was right that Epstein had given before: a foundation ledger in the release records $10,000 to “The Ricardo O’Gorman Garden & Center” on 15 September 2003.⁹

On 30 March 2015 at 4:05 pm he sent Epstein the wire instructions for the school’s bank account. Three minutes later Epstein forwarded them to Richard Kahn under the subject line “Fwd: wire instructions”, the body of which opens “10k from foduntaion”. The misspelling is Epstein’s own.¹⁰ The banking details are barred in every copy read here and are not reproduced.

“Hope you are enjoying your media respite” is dated March 2015, two months after the allegations against Prince Andrew and Epstein returned to the front pages. Epstein’s foundation, Gratitude America, gave the same school $30,000 more on 2 August 2017.¹¹

2016: who was asking about him

On 4 January 2016 he emailed Epstein under the subject line “Connolly digging into Trump and you…” In the congressional copy of that email the message is flagged “Importance: High”; the copy released under the EFTA numbering does not carry that marking in its text layer. ⚠ The email has no body. It was rendered at 400 dpi: the sheet carries the header and signature block and then nothing, with no bar, no whitening and no blank rectangle where a body would be. Nothing was withheld; the subject line was the message.¹²

On 1 June 2016 he wrote again about the same author, John Connolly, who was working on a book:

Keep getting calls from that guy doing a book on you — John Connolly. He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media. I told him you were a hell of a guy:) … He actually seemed to be a sensible guy/solid reporter … I think he is close to finishing up. Did you ever speak to him?⁷

A reporter telling his subject what another reporter is asking about him, and reporting what he said on his subject’s behalf. The detail that Connolly “seems very interested in your relationship with the news media” is the part this page notes without interpreting.

2017: asking Epstein for leads

On 19 December 2017, during the first weeks of the metoo reporting wave, he asked Epstein for tips about other men.

Thomas: Have you heard anything about Jamie Dimon and women? There have also been reports about settlements from Bloomberg…

Epstein: Jamie , gates Michael Douglas , gagosian

Thomas: Where does one go to get more color on Jamie? That is a current topic of interest here.¹³

⚠ The last sentence is a repair, not a reading. The sheet’s text layer breaks at “That i=”, and the words after it are the desk’s reconstruction from the second copy. It is set here as a quotation because the two copies’ damage is complementary and the sentence is legible across them, but it has not been read at the image and should be treated as the weakest quotation on this page.

Epstein answered with a list of four names and the reporter asked how to develop one of them. ⚠ This page draws no conclusion about any person Epstein named. A name in that reply is evidence that Epstein offered it, and nothing else whatever. No document read for this page shows any story resulting.

Identification, and a counting trap worth recording

Union 1,753 documents, and it is a floor.

form	documents	outside the base set
"Landon Thomas"	1,353	base
"Landon Thomas Jr."	941	0
"Thomas, Landon"	56	39
lthomas	1	1
Landon (bare)	1,752	399

⚠ THE TRAP: "Landon Thomas, Jr." and landon.thomas each return exactly the same count as a form they are not. The index tokeniser splits on . and ,, so landon.thomas and "Landon Thomas" are literally the same query, and so are "Landon Thomas, Jr." and "Landon Thomas Jr.". A sweep that lists them as separate forms is reporting one measurement four times and calling it corroboration. They are excluded from the union as independent forms for that reason.²

Bounds: the bare forename Landon returns 1,752 and carries other people; it was not classified and no figure here rests on it. No Damerau-Levenshtein enumeration was run. His surname is among the most common in this release at 41,225 documents and was not used as an identifier at any point.

What was checked and found to be nothing

His name co-occurs in the same documents as the abuse vocabulary, and every one of those co-occurrences examined is bibliographic. In the documents sampled, his name appears 50,000 to 1,800,000 characters away from the vocabulary, because the documents are Justice Department filings and court exhibits that cite his 2002 article in a footnote while discussing the case elsewhere. In one, his article is attached as Exhibit “NN.”¹⁴

⚠ SCOPE, STATED PLAINLY: the co-occurrence sets were NOT read exhaustively. They run to 66 documents for one term alone, six were read in full, and nothing on this page rests on any of them. They are recorded here so that a later pass knows the class exists and that it has not been cleared.

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Footnotes

1. Counts on the authoritative pages_fts route, scoped text_content, each form run as an exact phrase, identifier sets compared by set difference against the "Landon Thomas" base. Title forms taken from his own signature blocks, which read Financial Reporter in the earlier mail and Financial Correspondent in the later. ↩ ↩²

2. Same route. Base 1,353; union 1,753; bare forename 1,752, sampled not classified; surname 41,225, not used. The tokeniser is unicode61, which splits on . and ,; the identical returns are an artefact of that and are documented on the page rather than buried. ↩ ↩²

3. The article is “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,” New York, 28 October 2002. Cited under his byline with that date in a Justice Department filing, https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00003177 p. 34, as an example of Epstein’s background having been extensively reported. A copy of the article itself is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01297125 p. 8, the sentence quoted above is also printed at https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00032040 p. 49, and the article is attached as an exhibit at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00081180 p. 27. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, with region crops at 800 and 1600. The text layer of this sheet is severely degraded (it renders Trump’s name as “Tromp” and “frump”), so every word of both quotations on this page was transcribed from the rendered image rather than the text layer. Byline confirmed as By Landon Thomas Jr. ⚠ The publication date of 28 October 2002 is NOT printed on the article sheet, which carries only a print date of 23 June 2017; the date comes from a reference list printed with it in the same PDF, which also gives the title as “Money Man of Mystery”. ⚠ DOJ-OGR-00003177 p. 34 could not be retrieved by the verification pass and its byline citation is UNCONFIRMED, not confirmed. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00157655 pp. 39-40, a filing by Kirkland & Ellis on Epstein’s behalf, marked subject to a protective order, containing the section headed “The USAO Leaks Confidential Information to the New York Times” and the numbered paragraphs reconstructing the reporter’s calls. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi: the section heading, the notes passage, both quoted phrases on p. 40, and the “admonished” passage are verbatim, and all eleven redaction bars on these sheets are solid with nothing legible beneath and no text-layer leakage. Everything drawn from this document is the assertion of Epstein’s own lawyers in an advocacy filing and is presented as their claim. The line prosecutors’ names are barred in this copy; they were not sought and are not supplied. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01863930 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01864064 pp. 1-2, two copies of the same 1 July 2011 exchange, the second carrying Epstein’s later message of 08:30. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. ⚠ The two copies print the time differently: EFTA01863930 heads the message 8:03:24 AM, in UTC, and only EFTA01864064 prints the 4:03 AM Eastern time used on this page. The 04:01 and 04:03 pair and the two-minute gap are confirmed. She is named on this page because she is the publicly self-identified survivor of this matter and is named throughout this wiki. Epstein’s characterisation of his accuser is reproduced as evidence of what he asked a newspaper to do; it is his language, not this page’s, and not a characterisation this page adopts. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00862690 p. 1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00862693 p. 1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00862696 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00862700 p. 1, four copies of the 6 March 2015 thread, quoted here from the copies that carry the full exchange. A further copy of the opening message is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01746904 p. 1. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. The full thread runs about thirty-five minutes and the page now carries it to its end, after an earlier draft stopped three messages short. The sum is “$500”: the sheet sets it in oldstyle figures, in which a zero is an x-height oval, and at native resolution it reads as “$5oo”. ⚠ Some copies of this thread print the sender’s direct telephone lines and others bar them. No telephone value is reproduced on this page. ↩ ↩²

7. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01738431 p. 1, the email of 1 June 2016. Read from the text layer; not verified at the image. ↩ ↩²

8. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00868811 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00868815 p. 1, the 7 November 2014 exchange. Read from the text layer; not verified at the image. ↩

9. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00224262 p. 98, a foundation disbursement ledger, entry of 15 September 2003, “The Ricardo O’Gorman Garden & Center”, $10,000, Unrestricted. Read from the text layer; not verified at the image. A single ledger line is a weak record of a payment and is cited only as corroboration of his own statement that Epstein had given before. ↩

10. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02345031 p. 1, the 30 March 2015 message carrying the wire instructions, and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02506088 p. 1, Epstein’s forwarding of it three minutes later. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. The ABA and account number are barred in both copies and nothing about them is reproduced; the three-minute gap is confirmed. ⚠ The subject line is “Fwd: wire instructions”; “10k from foduntaion” is the first line of the body, and an earlier draft of this page merged the two into one quoted string. No address or number from these sheets is reproduced here. ↩

11. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01348685 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01360022 p. 1, images of a Gratitude America, Ltd. cheque dated 2 August 2017 for $30,000 payable to The O’Gorman Garden, with the bank’s own exception record. Read from the text layer; not verified at the image. A press summary in the release at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00026723 p. 3 describes the same payment. No document read here connects this 2017 payment to Thomas, and the page does not. ↩

12. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01738559 p. 1 and its sibling, page-stamped HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033283. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi: the sheet has no body. Header and signature block, then blank, with no bar, no whitening and no blank rectangle. The email was its subject line. The subject line is all that is claimed from the EFTA copy. The “Importance: High” flag appears only in the congressionally-released sibling, and the page attributes it there and not to the other copy. ↩

13. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02545789 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02546385 p. 1, two copies of the 19 December 2017 exchange. Read from the text layer; NOT verified at the image. ⚠ The closing sentence is a reconstruction across the two copies, whose quoted-printable damage is complementary; EFTA02545789 breaks at “That i=”. The words women and gagosian are genuine readings from EFTA02546385. The names in Epstein’s reply are reproduced because the act being documented is that he supplied them to a reporter. This page makes and implies no allegation against any of them. ↩

14. Intersections computed on the pages_fts route between the "Landon Thomas" set and single-term sets. Sizes at the time of writing: massage 66, underage 66, minor 64, victim 64, recruit 50, trafficking 32, girls 131. Six documents of the underage intersection were read in full, including https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00003177 p. 34, https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00032040 p. 49, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00081180 p. 27 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00157655 p. 39. In every one the mechanism was the same: a footnote citation of his 2002 article inside a long case document. The sets were not read exhaustively and are not cleared. ↩