With an avalanche of new documents released by the House Oversight Committee, and looming legislation mandating further disclosures, the press has renewed its relentless coverage of the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, with some notable exceptions, a major part of his life's work has remained outside the media's gaze, his relationship with the state of Israel and his prominent role in helping advance the Israeli cyberweapons industry. And so our series continues.

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On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy.

Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein's New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. The bank's spokesperson denied any relationship to the notorious American sex trafficker. Epstein was found dead on August 10, 2019.

Four years later, after Epstein's meeting calendars were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, the bank finally admitted that de Rothschild had met with Epstein as part of her "normal duties at the bank between 2013 and 2019." Epstein provided introductions to U.S. finance leaders and law firms and provided tax and risk consulting, the bank disclosed, while also helping de Rothschild personally on "a couple of occasions" with advice on estate management.

The bank remained vague about the actual nature of its relationship with the convicted sex trafficker. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild's personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal that September.

A second set of documents—the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, hacked by Handala and uploaded by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets—sheds light on Epstein's efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. After Barak's retirement from government in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces' secretive Unit 81 technology unit, to source cyberweapons startups from the Israeli intelligence community. Gurvich did not respond to a request for comment.