"It was like the devil had heard it in my voice. He'd in some way figured out the worst thing he could ask me. Peggy Siegal, the once omnipresent New York publicist, is describing her first conversation with Jeffrey Epstein. It was a phone call - she believes in 2006 or 2007, sometime before his first criminal conviction. She says she's never before discussed it."
"At the height of her power, Siegal's defenses seemed inviolable. She was confident and casually rude, inviting herself anywhere she wanted to go. She critiqued her own flaws before others could, once writing and sending out a booklet called How to Look Like Me at 60, which detailed every bit of cosmetic work she'd had done and was passed from hand to hand up Park Avenue and into Beverly Hills."
"For four decades, beginning in the 1980s, she was the woman studio heads relied on to stir up Oscars buzz by hosting exclusive screenings and clubby dinners. She'd worked for everyone in Hollywood - Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein, Barry Levinson - and specialized in bringing together charming, influential people from disparate social worlds and especially the cultured classes of L.A. and New York."
Peggy Siegal was a powerful New York publicist who dominated Hollywood for four decades beginning in the 1980s, orchestrating exclusive screenings and dinners that generated Oscar buzz for major studios. She worked with industry titans like Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein, maintaining a legendary rolodex of over 30,000 VIPs organized by influence and importance. Known for her brash, confident demeanor and self-deprecating humor, Siegal seemed invulnerable at the height of her career. However, Jeffrey Epstein contacted her by phone around 2006-2007 before his first conviction, asking something she felt was deliberately designed to exploit her vulnerabilities, suggesting he had penetrated her carefully constructed defenses.
Read at Intelligencer
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]