Jeffrey Epstein in 2004.Credit...Rick Friedman/Corbis, via Getty Images

Washington went nuts — and the White House went on the defensive — after lawmakers dumped more than 20,000 emails belonging to Jeffrey Epstein into the public domain on Wednesday. The central intrigue was the late financier’s relationship with the president, but there were other stories buried in the mass of documents.

The emails are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene. Mr. Epstein’s inbox was larded with boldface names — many of them now faded or forgotten — that once meant everything to status-obsessed New Yorkers. It was the world that Donald Trump came out of, and the one that Mr. Epstein had so effectively beguiled after having grown up in a middle-class household in Coney Island.

As the emails stretch through the years, they show how that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement. Mr. Epstein and some of his male correspondents seem to squirm as they notice society changing around them.

The bulk of the documents come from an email address (jeevacation@gmail.com) that was set up around 2009, when Mr. Epstein was released from the Palm Beach County jail after having served 13 months of an 18-month sentence on a reduced charge of soliciting prostitution. It wasn’t exactly hard time: Florida officials allowed him to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week, outside the facility.

The newly available emails continue into the summer of 2019, when Mr. Epstein was arrested and imprisoned after federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking. (He was found dead in his cell at Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Aug. 10, 2019.)

The earliest documents in the collection depict the twilight of an old guard made up of Wall Street billionaires, media-industry heavyweights, politicians and old-money socialites, many of whom gathered at Mr. Epstein’s seven-story townhouse on the Upper East Side — a mansion that one guest, Woody Allen, compared to Dracula’s castle.

In those days, print newspapers and magazines still held sway, and Mr. Epstein had close ties to many key players in the news media and adjacent industries. He exchanged emails with a number of insiders, including the real estate magnate Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who was then the owner of The New York Daily News. Along with the journalist Michael Wolff, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Epstein had been part of a group that made an unsuccessful bid for New York Magazine in 2003. Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Epstein were at it again the next year, when they tried to buy Radar magazine.

Mr. Epstein was invited to the 25th anniversary party for The New York Observer in 2013. From left to right, The Observer’s then-chief executive Joseph Meyer, its then-publisher Jared Kushner and its then-editor Ken Kurson.Credit...Evan Agostini/Invision, via AP

The cache of emails includes exchanges about going to dinner at Rao’s, the uptown Italian restaurant where it was famously hard to get a table, and an invitation for Mr. Epstein to the 25th anniversary party for The New York Observer (it was a weekly paper, printed on salmon-colored newsprint and read by the city’s elite) at the Four Seasons restaurant (where the elite once power-lunched; it’s now closed) co-hosted by Michael Bloomberg (he was the mayor) and Jared Kushner (who owned The Observer). The guest list included Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein. You’ve probably heard about what happened with them.

“The celebration is going to be one of those quintessential New York nights,” read the party invitation, which was sent by the publicist Peggy Siegal, who was one of the city’s social gatekeepers until her reputation was tarnished by her association with Mr. Epstein.

Ms. Siegal is all over his inbox, and her emails carry with them the atmosphere of a New York that no longer exists. She would send Mr. Epstein articles she had written for Avenue Magazine (a society publication one would encounter in the lobbies of doorman buildings on the Upper East Side) and dispatches from her nights out at The Monkey Bar, back when that restaurant was co-owned by Graydon Carter, then the editor of Vanity Fair.

The publicist Peggy Siegal in 2016, and the scene at The Monkey Bar in 2011.

The emails show how the clubby nature of the old media suited Mr. Epstein. R. Couri Hay, a well-connected press agent, was another of Mr. Epstein’s correspondents. In 2011, Mr. Hay sent an email to warn that Tina Brown (the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who was in charge of Newsweek and The Daily Beast at the time) had assigned a story on Mr. Epstein to the writer Alexandra Wolfe (whose father was Tom Wolfe).

“This is for Newsweek, the magazine that is on the stands, not the website,” Mr. Hay explained.

He offered to help. He told Mr. Epstein that the planned article was to be about his “reemergence in New York” after “your previous problems.” He suggested providing “names and numbers of pro Jeffery power brokers for Alexandra to call.” Mr. Hay went on to note that the reporter had already checked in with a few people in Mr. Epstein’s orbit: the private equity titan Leon Black, the Victoria’s Secret billionaire Leslie Wexner and Mr. Trump.

Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Hay insisted that he had never ended up doing any publicity work for Mr. Epstein. He added that he had only contacted the financier at the behest of a mutual friend, Jonathan Farkas, a department-store heir who is included in the email dump.

The press agent R. Couri Hay, left, with the writer Jay McInerney, in 2016.Credit...Victor Hugo/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images

By the time Mr. Hay reached out, Mr. Epstein was a registered sex offender. He also faced a number of lawsuits and was under investigation by the F.B.I.

Mr. Hay said that, like others who moved among Manhattan’s elite in those days, he was not fully aware of how “heinous” Mr. Epstein was, adding that he felt bamboozled by his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“I admit that I, too, along the way, had been blinded a little bit by the glamorous facade that Jeffrey and Ghislaine put on in social circles in New York and in Palm Beach,” he said.

In his attempts to improve his public image in 2011, Mr. Epstein also emailed with Ms. Siegal, trying to get her to lean on Arianna Huffington to publish some pro-Jeffrey content in The Huffington Post. “If you rewrite your last email in better grammar,” Ms. Siegal wrote, “I can cut and paste and send it to Arianna Huffington from me.”

Ms. Siegal said Friday that she never did forward that email to Ms. Huffington. So then why did she tell Mr. Epstein she would? “People say things just to get people off the phone,” Ms. Siegal said.

“I was never contacted,” said Ms. Huffington, who co-founded The Huffington Post (now HuffPost) in 2005 and stayed on through 2016.

Mr. Epstein was also in contact with Landon Thomas Jr., a reporter at The New York Times from 2002 to 2019. Mr. Thomas, who wrote a feature story on Mr. Epstein for New York Magazine in 2002, left The Times after “his failure to abide by our ethical standards,” according to a Times spokeswoman. The lapse came when Mr. Thomas was found to have solicited a donation from Mr. Epstein for a cultural center in Harlem.

As print began to fade, Mr. Epstein hired a digital consultant to try to squelch negative articles about himself from search results, but it didn’t seem to work. Mr. Epstein sent a series of screenshots to the consultant in 2014 showing that, when he searched his name from a new computer in the Virgin Islands, the results remained the same.

Mr. Wolff popped into Mr. Epstein’s inbox often to brainstorm about how to shape his media coverage, suggesting publications that might accept an opinion piece, or a reporter who could prove sympathetic.

Mr. Wolff also offered up his own column inches to help his friend. He had joined USA Today as a freelance columnist; and he mentioned in 2015 that he could use New York Magazine. In 2016, Mr. Wolff advised Mr. Epstein to try to do some reputational repair work with an appearance on Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show.

Arianna Huffington and Charlie Rose at a New York book party in 2012.Credit...Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Mr. Rose would lose that show, not to mention his anchor job at CBS, in 2017, when multiple allegations of sexual harassment were made against him at the height of the #MeToo movement. From the vantage point of Mr. Epstein’s inbox, the revelations concerning the abusive behavior of men in power played out like a psychological thriller.

Mr. Epstein wrote to one confidant: “so many guys caught in the me too reaching out to me asking when does the madness stop.” To another, he wrote: “brett ratner now. Oy.”

Mr. Epstein was referring to the film director and producer, who had stepped away from a $450 million deal with Warner Bros. after The Los Angeles Times reported on allegations made against him by six women. Mr. Ratner has since resurfaced as the director of “Melania,” a soon-to-be-released Amazon Prime documentary about Melania Trump, which the first lady is producing.

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Wolff also emailed about another director whose reputation had sagged, their mutual friend Mr. Allen. Mr. Epstein fretted to Mr. Wolff that Mr. Allen’s “brain trust” wasn’t savvy enough to help him fight back in the digital era. “They are all old thinkers,” Mr. Epstein wrote, adding: “no social media strategy.”

The writer Michael Wolff at a Manhattan party in 2018.Credit...Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

In 2018, someone forwarded to Mr. Epstein that year’s program for Ms. Brown’s Women in the World Summit, which boasted a “power packed agenda of remarkable female newsmakers sharing their stories of male misbehavior.”

“Let’s do a men of the world conference,” wrote Lawrence Krauss, a prominent theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, who would soon depart the university after being accused by several women of sexual misconduct. His proposed summit, he wrote, would include Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Mr. Allen.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Epstein expressed amazement about the sudden cultural shift in an email to Joi Ito, who ran the media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until he resigned in 2019 over his connection to the befouled financier. In addition to losing his M.I.T. post, Mr. Ito stepped down from board positions at the MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The New York Times Company.

“With all these guys getting busted for harassment, i have moved slightly up the reputation ladder and have been asked everyday for advice etc,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Mr. Ito.

So many of the people whose names appear in the recently released emails have now left the public stage. But not the man occupying the Oval Office.

“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post on Friday.

He then set his sights on the former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and Democratic political donor Reid Hoffman: “Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a country to run!”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5798791&forum_id=2.#49435312)