Epstein Data Wiki

Matthew Hiltzik

Properties2
tagsperson, public-relations, hiltzik-strategies, 2017-2018, privilege, retainer
aliasesMatthew Hiltzik, Matt Hiltzik, Hiltzik, Hiltzig, Hiltzik Strategies

12 min read

Named on the documents asMatthew Hiltzik and Matt Hiltzik; Hiltzig with a g, a printed misspelling that reaches 57 documents the correct surname never does; and Hiltzik Strategies for his firm1
Size of the file571 documents on the exact phrase; 714 over the union with the misspelling, a 25% increase12
The act this page is built onHe was retained to do public relations for Jeffrey Epstein in April 2017, and the engagement was routed through Epstein’s lawyer. His own chief operating officer set out the reason in writing: “I’d like to structure the engagement through Jeffrey’s lawyers (standard practice in order to help protect attorney-client privilege)“3
What he was paid$25,000 a month, for at least five months. Invoices 2436-1, 2436-2 and 2436-5 survive; 2436-3 and 2436-4 were never produced, so the numbering itself shows August and September were billed. A floor of $125,0004
And what he askedSix weeks after the retainer, under the subject line “privileged and confidential”: “Need to figure out how much of this can be shared publicly How much does your plea allow for a review of the facts etc”5
Eighteen months later”Writing from my gmail for privacy purposes”, and “Let’s coordinate further conversations thru your attorney so that anything continues to be privileged as it was before”6
⚠ What this page does not sayNothing here is an allegation of illegality. Structuring a communications retainer through counsel is a recognised practice and his own firm describes it as standard. What the documents show is the arrangement, the money and the questions, and this page reports those
Covered elsewhere on this wikiDarren Indyke, through whose firm the retainer ran · Michael Wolff · Julie K. Brown · Noam Chomsky

Matthew Hiltzik is a New York public-relations executive and the head of Hiltzik Strategies. In 2017, nine years after Jeffrey Epstein’s conviction and two years before his arrest, Epstein hired him.

This page is about a professional engagement, and it says so plainly. No document read for it alleges that he did anything unlawful, and the arrangement he entered into is one his own firm calls standard practice. What makes it worth a page is that the documents record the whole of it: how the retainer was structured and why, what it cost, who approved the payment, and what he was asking Epstein six weeks in.

The retainer, and the route it took

An engagement letter dated “As of April 27, 2017” would have retained Hiltzik Strategies. It is not addressed to Epstein. It goes through Darren K. Indyke, PLLC, and describes the work as being “for your client, Jeffrey Epstein.”3

⚠⚠ THE COPY IN THE RELEASE IS AN UNEXECUTED DRAFT AND THIS PAGE SAYS SO RATHER THAN CALLING IT A RETAINER. All three signature lines are blank, the designated signatories being the firm’s chief operating officer, the lawyer’s professional corporation, and Jeffrey Epstein himself. The term and the fee are unfilled placeholders, highlighted, so the document states no price at all. Matthew Hiltzik’s own name appears nowhere on it.

⚠ The work and the money are nonetheless documented, by the invoices and the bank records below. What is not documented is a signed engagement.

The draft carries its own privilege clause, expressly referring to contemplated litigation involving Jeffrey Epstein: a stronger statement of the arrangement’s purpose than the e-mail quoted next, and in the instrument itself.3

The reason is in the file, in the words of Hiltzik’s own chief operating officer:

I’d like to structure the engagement through Jeffrey’s lawyers (standard practice in order to help protect attorney-client privilege)3

⚠ This page takes that sentence at face value and at its own valuation. Routing a communications retainer through counsel to bring it inside privilege is a known and lawful arrangement, and the firm describes it as standard. What the document establishes is that the structure was chosen deliberately, that privilege was the stated purpose, and that the firm said so in writing before the work began.

The money

The engagement was billed at $25,000 a month. Invoice #2436-1, dated 2 June 2017, is for $25,000.00, and the release carries later invoices in the same series.4

The payment ran through Epstein personally. On 7 July 2017 the request reached him and he authorised it with a single word: “yes.”4 The transfer then appears on Epstein’s Deutsche Bank statement. And on a balance sheet of his own the line reads:

Legal / PR - Hiltzik 25k & Goldberger 25k4

⚠ An earlier version of this page quoted that line as ending at “Hiltzik 25k”, added a full stop the document does not have, and called it “simply” that. It is a paired entry against a figure of (50,000), and the $25,000 alone would not have met the schedule’s own reporting threshold: it appears there only alongside a second lawyer’s fee.

That last detail is the arrangement described from the other end. ⚠ Epstein’s own bookkeeping files the public-relations retainer under legal.

What he was asking, six weeks in

On the night of 5 June 2017 Hiltzik wrote to Epstein under the subject line “privileged and confidential”. He was replying to an account Epstein had given him of the case against him. His message is two lines and it is a working brief:

Need to figure out how much of this can be shared publicly How much does your plea allow for a review of the facts etc The material is adding up5

⚠ Epstein’s message beneath it characterises the principal complainant against him in terms this page will not repeat and does not adopt. That characterisation is the accused man’s, written to the person he was paying to manage his public standing, and it is recorded here only as the thing being answered. She is not named or described on this page.5

A numbered question set headed “JE Questions” survives in the file, with answers interleaved.5 ⚠⚠ It is NOT his compilation and this page previously implied it was: the document refers in the third person to a question “posed by Hiltzik” and is addressed to Epstein, so somebody else assembled it. ⚠ Nor can it be dated: the document carries no date at all, so “afterwards” is not established. ⚠ No document read for this page shows what was done with it, whether any of it was published, or whether Epstein answered.

Eighteen months later

On 4 December 2018, six days after the Miami Herald series began, he wrote to Epstein twice. ⚠ These are two separate messages and this page previously presented them as one, in the wrong order. In the morning message, a line part-way down reads:

Writing from my gmail for privacy purposes6

And in a message that evening he returns to the 2017 structure:

Let’s coordinate further conversations thru your attorney so that anything continues to be privileged as it was before6

⚠ “As it was before” is the reason both quotations sit together. The arrangement set up in April 2017 was not a formality that lapsed; it was invoked again, by name, a year and a half later, at the moment the coverage turned.

The book, and the question he asked about it

Between the retainer and the Herald series, one exchange shows what he was actually asked to handle. On the evening of 16 June 2017 a Google Alert reached Epstein carrying a Hollywood Reporter item that a director had been signed to write and direct a screen adaptation of *Filthy Rich*, the 2016 book about Epstein by James Patterson and John Connolly. Darren Indyke forwarded it to Epstein at 7:52 the next morning, Epstein forwarded it on at 8:51, and at 13:02 UTC Hiltzik replied in full:

Ok Well this is both irritating but also offers an opportunity to refute things How bad is the book?

Two things are documented in three lines. The first is the posture: a screen adaptation of a book about his client is “an opportunity to refute things”, which is the only statement in this file of what he thought the coverage was for.

The second is the question. How bad is the book? It had been published eight months earlier, and Epstein had told a correspondent the previous October that he had several copies and had read it. The adviser had not, and asked. ⚠ This page draws nothing further from that. A publicist who has not read a book about his client eight months on is consistent with a narrow engagement and with several other explanations, and the release settles none of them.7

Identification, and a misspelling that is a quarter of the file

Union 714 documents, and it is a floor.

formdocumentsoutside the base set
"Hiltzik" (bare surname)65786
"Matthew Hiltzik"571base
"Hiltzik Strategies"6832
"Hiltzig" (misspelled)5957
"Matt Hiltzik"40
"Mr. Hiltzik"00

⚠ THE MISSPELLING IS NOT NOISE. Hiltzig with a g reaches 57 documents that the correct surname never touches. That is the author’s-own-misspelling mechanism this desk records elsewhere, and here it is worth 8% of the whole file. The union of the two spellings is 714, a quarter more than the exact phrase.1

⚠ AND "Mr. Hiltzik" RETURNS ZERO. Nobody in this release is discussing him. He is a participant in correspondence, not a subject other people write about. ⚠ Note what that does NOT mean: it does not make him marginal. He is the sender on 173 documents and on the to-or-copy line of 267 more.2

Surname contamination is negligible and was measured rather than assumed: 3 of 657, all of them a journalist of the same surname appearing in press clippings.2

Footnotes

  1. Counts on the authoritative pages_fts route, scoped text_content, each form run as an exact phrase, count(distinct efta_number), identifier sets compared by set difference against the "Matthew Hiltzik" base. ⚠ The tokeniser splits on . and ,, so "Hiltzik, Matthew" and "Hiltzik Matthew" are one query, as are "Mr. Hiltzik" and "Mr Hiltzik"; neither pair is treated here as two corroborating forms. "Matthew A. Hiltzik" returns 0, recorded because a form that fails is evidence about the corpus. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Same route. Base 571; union with the misspelling 714; bare surname 657 with 86 outside the base; contamination 3 of 657, read individually. By the role his name plays across the union: 173 sender, 267 to-or-copy line, 84 schedule entries, 100 body mentions, 48 subject lines, 31 firm footers, 6 financial instruments, 3 the other man, 2 book indexes. ⚠ 617 of the 714 were not opened and are UNTESTED, not cleared. ⚠ All thirteen documents in which his name co-occurs with abuse-exhibit vocabulary were opened and read individually rather than counted; none is an exhibit, and every one is correspondence or a press forward. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00583908 p. 1, the engagement letter dated “As of April 27, 2017”, and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00450388 p. 1, the message setting out the reason for the structure. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. The quoted sentence is his firm’s chief operating officer’s own. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00617467 p. 1, invoice 2436-1 of 2 June 2017 for $25,000.00; https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01042771 p. 1, Epstein’s one-word authorisation; https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01297010 p. 3, a Deutsche Bank Wealth Management statement in Epstein’s name covering 3 January to 29 June 2017, recording a transfer to JPMorgan Chase for Hiltzik Strategies dated 5 June 2017; and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00811530 p. 2, the balance-sheet entry. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi.

    ⚠⚠ An earlier version of this page quoted the bank statement as a single transaction “line” including the amount. It is not a line: the amount sits in a separate right-hand column, and a redaction bar stands where that amount would be. The figure is taken from the invoice, not from the statement, and no amount from that sheet is reproduced.

    ⚠ The authorisation of 7 July 2017 answers the JULY invoice, 2436-2, not the June one named above. Its stamp is explicitly UTC; the quoted inbound message beneath it bears a clock time five minutes LATER than the reply, so no local time is given for either.

    ⚠ Invoices 2436-3 and 2436-4 are not in the release. Five months of billing is therefore a floor. ⚠ A separate wire printing this surname is NOT cited here, and the reasons are now stronger than when the desk first excluded it. It is dated February 2015, not 2017 as the desk first recorded, since the sheet’s own date fields force that reading. It appears as two records rather than one, its beneficiary is a professional corporation that is not this firm, and its reference field carries only a bare surname with remittance data unavailable. Whether it concerns him at all is not determinable from the sheet, and it stays out. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02386184 p. 1, his message of 5 June 2017 under the subject line “privileged and confidential”, and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00799469 p. 1, the question set headed “JE Questions”. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. ⚠ The message beneath his, from Epstein, characterises the principal complainant in terms this page does not reproduce and does not adopt. She is not named, described or identified here, and no detail from that part of the sheet appears on this page. His own words are quoted as printed, including the missing punctuation. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01014386 p. 1, his message of 4 December 2018. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. ⚠ Two name-shaped redactions appear on this sheet, one of them inside his own morning message, and nothing from either is reproduced here. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Google Alert of 16 June 2017, 9:56 p.m. EDT, and the chain of 17 June 2017. EFTA00685379 pp.1-2, p.1 read at the image at 300 dpi, p.2 at the text layer. p.1 carries his reply timed “Sat, 17 Jun 2017 13:02:35 +0000” under the subject “Re: Google Alert - Jeffrey Epstein”, and beneath it Epstein’s forward of 8:51 a.m. and Darren Indyke’s of 7:52 a.m.; p.2 carries the alert with the Hollywood Reporter headline. His message is quoted in full, including its lack of terminal punctuation and its lower-case line breaks. ⚠ A solid bar covers his own address on this copy, and no address, telephone or other contact value from either sheet is reproduced here. ⚠ This document was cited by no page on this wiki before 2026-09-19, and this page mentioned neither the book nor Patterson. ↩

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