Epstein Saga: How a school teacher with fake degrees became so powerful

Before the private jets, the island, and the proximity to presidents and princes, Epstein was a teacher. In the mid-1970s, he taught mathematics and physics at the Dalton School in New York, one of the city’s most prestigious private institutions. He came from a working-class family in Brooklyn and had never completed a college degree. He fabricated academic credentials to secure the teaching position, and his classroom performance left little impression. Dalton administrators asked him to leave after the academic year. By any conventional measure, this should have marked the limit of his upward mobility. Instead, it marked the moment when social access began to substitute for merit.