US Department of Justice files reveal that Ariane de Rothschild, head of the Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild, was in frequent contact with Jeffrey Epstein. The banker and the sexual attacker, who died in 2019, exchanged dozens of messages and planned several meetings over approximately five years before the criminal’s arrest.
The official information published on Friday (6) by the American agency does not present evidence of criminal conduct between the two, but the records call into question the explanation given by the bank in the past. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal cited a company statement stating that the meetings occurred strictly due to Ariane’s routine professional activities at the institution.
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According to an investigation carried out by Reuters, there was no independent confirmation about the real motivations for these contacts. The messages show that the pair scheduled meetings at Epstein’s properties in Paris and New York at different times. The documents also indicate that the head of the bank was invited by him to stay in his private apartment.
Exchanged messages
On March 19, 2019, shortly before being arrested, Epstein informed de Rothschild that he was in Paris. “Are you really?!! I’m here too. When would you be free?”, she asked in response.
“It’s been a long, long time,” Epstein replied, before they both arranged a meeting for the next day. The news agency emphasizes that it was not possible to validate whether this meeting, or others suggested in the messages, actually took place as planned.
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The exposure of this previously unknown intimacy places de Rothschild in the group of figures who made up Epstein’s social circle. The data came to light after the opening of documents motivated by pressure from victims and members of Congress.
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To Reuters, a bank spokesperson stated that Epstein was only a business acquaintance of the bank from 2013 to 2019, and that she had no knowledge of Epstein’s conduct, in addition to “unequivocally condemning his behavior and the crimes he committed”, he said, in a note sent by email.
After pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, Epstein spent 13 months incarcerated in Florida. Most of the messages exchanged between him and de Rothschild are concentrated between the mid and late 2010s. In July 2019, the financier faced new accusations in New York and Florida for sex trafficking, abuse and exploitation of dozens of young people between 2002 and 2005, cases in which he claimed innocence.
The executive’s name appears in more than 4,400 results in the Department of Justice’s digital searches. Much of these records consist of repeated copies of the same email conversations.
In a dialogue that took place in 2016, de Rothschild mentioned having the flu and stated that she would not stay with “B”, an individual whose identity was not revealed. As a result, Epstein offered her his own property for her to stay in, highlighting: “…it would be private. No one would know.” The banker, currently 60 years old, refused the invitation on the grounds that she would stay with someone else who would “pretend to be my mother”. At the time, she described “B” as a “disaster” and said she was “tired of dealing with him”. Benjamin de Rothschild, her husband, passed away in 2021. The financial institution declined to comment on individual messages.
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Being part of one of the most renowned banking lineages on the European continent since his marriage in 1999, de Rothschild assumed the role of CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild bank in 2023. The institution, located in Geneva, is responsible for managing 184 billion Swiss francs, an amount equivalent to US$236.8 billion.
