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Despite Epstein’s Toxicity, Steve Bannon Stood by Him, Texts Indicate
Mr. Bannon, a MAGA podcaster, developed a seemingly chummy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking. He said it was in the name of getting Mr. Epstein to open up.
Sharon LaFraniere and Teresa Mondría Terol
Sharon LaFraniere is an investigative reporter covering the Trump administration. Teresa Mondría Terol is an engineer who used A.I. to help analyze millions of Epstein files.
Midafternoon in late June 2019, Stephen K. Bannon sent Jeffrey Epstein an excited series of texts. “Dude!!!!!” he wrote. “Is this real Tell me this is real.”
Mr. Epstein had just texted him a headline from The Miami Herald. It reported that victims of Mr. Epstein’s sexual abuse had lost a court battle to nullify a decade-old agreement that protected him from prosecution for those crimes.
Off and on for months, Mr. Bannon, a leader in the MAGA movement and a former top aide to President Trump, had been advising Mr. Epstein on how to handle resurrected allegations that he was a serial pedophile. Mr. Bannon recommended which lawyers to hire — his own — when to lie low and when he should jump on an opening to push his narrative. He scheduled what the two men called “media training.”
“First we need to push back on the lies; then crush the pedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as philanthropist,” Mr. Bannon wrote to Mr. Epstein in April 2019. That was five months after a Miami Herald series exposed how prosecutors had ignored evidence of Mr. Epstein’s crimes.
The three million pages of Epstein-related documents released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30 reveal for the first time the extent of Mr. Bannon’s efforts to advise Mr. Epstein when many of his friends were abandoning him. In the six months before Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged with the sex trafficking of minors in July 2019, Mr. Bannon’s name appears nearly every day in the files, often because the two men exchanged texts.
In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Bannon said his relationship with Mr. Epstein was strictly professional.
“I am a filmmaker and TV host with decades of experience interviewing controversial figures,” he said. “That’s the only lens through which these private communications should be viewed — a documentary filmmaker working, over a period of time, to secure 50 hours of interviews from a reclusive subject.”
He said the film would fully expose Mr. Epstein and “destroy the very myths he created.” A spokesman said Mr. Bannon planned to release the film, now six years in the making, later this year.
Mr. Bannon is one of the biggest political names to be caught up in the latest chapter of the Epstein scandal. Mr. Bannon is a headline speaker at major Republican political events and hosts one of the nation’s top political podcasts. Like many other prominent members of the MAGA movement, he had called for the release of the files pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
A torrent of text and email exchanges show that after Mr. Bannon and Mr. Epstein met in late 2017, Mr. Bannon promised to help Mr. Epstein rehabilitate his reputation. As Mr. Epstein’s legal troubles mounted in 2019, Mr. Bannon helped strategize a defense, the documents indicate.
He told Mr. Epstein several months before his arrest: “we must counter ‘rapist who traffics in female children to be raped by worlds most powerful, richest men’ — that can’t be redeemed.”
A spokesman for Mr. Bannon said his client sought only to ingratiate himself with Mr. Epstein for the documentary. But written communications during the year and a half before Mr. Epstein’s death in custody in August 2019 suggest that far from wary, Mr. Epstein was eager to cater to Mr. Bannon’s wishes and needs.
He shipped Mr. Bannon and his son Apple watches. He offered Mr. Bannon his private jet to fly around Europe, joking: “How does it feel to have the most highly paid travel agent in history?”
He proposed that Mr. Bannon get a full medical work-up in Mr. Epstein’s “private area” at a high-end concierge emergency clinic, telling him that “your medical expenses from a to z have been covered by me.” Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said he never saw Mr. Epstein’s doctor, nor did he fly on his private jet.
As Mr. Bannon promoted himself as a strategist to populist and nationalist political parties abroad, Mr. Epstein tried to help him build connections.
“Whatever you need, I’m in,” he wrote to Mr. Bannon in mid-2018.
A host of prominent figures in the United States and abroad have been tarnished and toppled by the documentation of their contacts with Mr. Epstein in the newly released files. Most recently, Kathryn Ruemmler, a former top Obama administration lawyer, resigned from Goldman Sachs after emails revealed a lengthy friendship with Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Bannon, 72, has faced a string of legal troubles in recent years. The court cases partly explain why the documentary has yet to be released, his spokesman said.
He served four months in prison in 2024 for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify before the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department is now seeking to wipe out that conviction.
An effort to fund Mr. Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico led to charges that Mr. Bannon had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds from contributors. A state court sentenced him to three years’ probation on a fraud charge in February 2025, but Mr. Bannon escaped a trial on related federal charges when Mr. Trump pardoned him just before leaving office in January 2021.
Federal agents had arrested Mr. Bannon the previous year while he was on a yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, who was later convicted in a separate $1 billion fraud scheme. Mr. Bannon was named as a co-conspirator in that case but was not charged.
“Someone has to fund his nonsenses,” Mr. Epstein emailed an associate who asked why Mr. Bannon had allied himself with Mr. Guo.
Mr. Bannon has continued to be a featured speaker at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference and at Turning Point USA, the conservative organization founded by Charlie Kirk. At a Turning Point event last July, he shouted to a crowd, “It’s deeper than Epstein!”
Mr. Epstein first tried to meet with Mr. Bannon in November 2016, after Mr. Trump won the presidency, the documents suggest. But Mr. Bannon, a top campaign strategist for Mr. Trump and later a senior White House official, agreed only after the president had fired him in August 2017.
The two men quickly seemed to bond over finance, science, politics and the ongoing drama in the Trump White House. “We have become friends,” Mr. Epstein wrote to an associate about Mr. Bannon in February 2018.
By then, Mr. Bannon was seeking to advise right-wing foreign politicians, mostly in Europe. Mr. Epstein introduced him to political figures he knew.
The pair do not appear to have discussed the irony of a famous billionaire who kept a black book of his connections with the global elite helping Mr. Bannon whip up anti-elitist political sentiment.
Mr. Bannon met Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, through Mr. Epstein. When Mr. Barak formed a new political party in Israel in June 2019, Mr. Bannon wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Can we announce I’m his strategic adviser?"
A spokeswoman for Mr. Barak said he had never hired Mr. Bannon. On Saturday, Mr. Barak apologized for his friendship with Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Epstein’s itineraries show more than a dozen breakfasts, lunches and dinners with Mr. Bannon at Mr. Epstein’s seven-story Manhattan townhouse.
The texts reveal a level of seeming chumminess, with the two men exchanging political gossip and jokes about each other. Mr. Epstein repeatedly urged Mr. Bannon to care for himself, texting: “lucifer with a stroke. Bent horns and all Doesn’t look so good.”
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said that in addition to not taking up Mr. Epstein’s offers to hitch a ride on his plane, he never stayed overnight at any of Mr. Epstein’s residences.
Yet, some documents suggest that Mr. Bannon was willing to entertain such perks.
At the end of March 2019, Mr. Epstein was staying at his luxurious apartment near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He had told his pilot that Mr. Bannon would be flying back to New York with him on April 2.
Mr. Bannon texted him on March 29 from Rome: “Is it possible to get your plane here to collect me?” Mr. Epstein replied that the plane was unavailable, but offered to pay for a charter flight.
Two days later, Mr. Bannon wrote that he was flying to Paris that evening and asked, “I’m staying with you tonight??”
“Yes stay,” Mr. Epstein replied. “Enroute,” Mr. Bannon texted a few hours later. The next morning, Mr. Epstein wrote to an associate: “Steve Bannon is here with me.”
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said Mr. Bannon decided to stay in a hotel that he had already booked, but said Mr. Bannon declined to provide a receipt to The Times.
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said he conducted about 12 hours of interviews with Mr. Epstein for the documentary. But for reasons that remain unclear, the newly released files contain only two hours of interviews.
In those segments, shot in Mr. Epstein’s grand library in New York, Mr. Bannon asked Mr. Epstein whether he had reflected upon how he ended up behind bars in 2008. “No,” Mr. Epstein replied. “I would just say how strange that this happens.”
Mr. Bannon did not ask Mr. Epstein directly about his treatment of women, although Mr. Epstein acknowledged to him that he had been classified as a sexual predator. His spokesman said Mr. Bannon did not get deeper into that topic in 12 hours of interviews but planned to address it later on.
To Mr. Epstein, Mr. Bannon said that while others called him irredeemable, “you are a lot of things — which we will show — but you are NOT that.”
Mr. Epstein was worried that he came across as too glib in the footage, like “prince of darkness meets the joker,” he wrote in one message. But Mr. Bannon reassured him, saying his film crew had been mesmerized because they had been expecting a “monster.”
After news broke in early February 2019 that federal prosecutors were reviewing the handling of Mr. Epstein’s 2008 criminal case, the messages between the two men took on a new urgency.
Mr. Epstein asked whether he should respond to the reports.
“Have you lost your mind,” Mr. Bannon texted, using an expletive. “the moment you say ANYTHING this is global story#1!!!!!”
In the following weeks, Mr. Epstein peppered Mr. Bannon with questions: Should his lawyers grant the press an anonymous interview? Should he invite a reporter for The New Yorker to his house?
At one point, Mr. Epstein forwarded a transcript with an unnamed victim, “Jane Doe 1,” suggesting it supported his defense.
Mr. Bannon offered his own suggestions.
“Did u hire the crisis comms guy so we can drive the narrative off that great times piece,” he asked in March 2019. That was an apparent reference to a letter from Mr. Epstein’s lawyers, published in The Times the previous day, that contended that allegations against Mr. Epstein were greatly exaggerated.
He recommended that Mr. Epstein hire William A. Burck and Alex Spiro, who had represented Mr. Bannon during the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He referred to them as “my boys.”
Mr. Bannon notified Mr. Epstein of a meeting with Mr. Spiro in April 2019, but at the last minute Mr. Bannon texted: “Spiro out. Firm killed it just now.”
In a statement, Mr. Spiro said: “Several people asked me to represent or at least speak with Mr. Epstein. I categorically refused to do either.” Mr. Burck said he had no contact with Mr. Epstein.
That same week, Mr. Bannon texted Mr. Epstein: “Friday afternoon media training @ your place — 2 camera shoot; my crew so totally confidential.” Mr. Epstein replied that the three-hour session would be “trial by fire.” Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said it was solely for the documentary.
Later, Mr. Epstein wanted a legal agreement, known as a Kovel, apparently designed to extend attorney-client privilege to his communications with Mr. Bannon, who is not a lawyer. Mr. Bannon wrote back: “we need a deal for the entire ‘training.’”
Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said Mr. Bannon never signed the agreement and voluntarily shared his footage with federal prosecutors after Mr. Epstein’s death in a jail cell, ruled to be a suicide.
Mr. Bannon wrote in their correspondence that he believed that Mr. Epstein was under constant surveillance, and both men tried to ensure that Mr. Bannon would not be left lingering on the doorstep when he visited Mr. Epstein in Manhattan. Mr. Bannon alerted Mr. Epstein when a servant should be ready to open the door for him.
At one point, Mr. Epstein wrote that he would understand if Mr. Bannon declined a dinner invitation. “I fully understand my toxicity for the moment,” he said. But the two men continued to schedule meetings up until Mr. Epstein’s arrest.
They had planned to meet on the first weekend of July 2019, after Mr. Epstein flew home from Paris. But he was apprehended that Saturday when his plane landed at a New Jersey airport.
“All canceled,” he texted. It was his last message to Mr. Bannon.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Sharon LaFraniere is an investigative reporter focusing on the Trump administration.
Teresa Mondría Terol, an engineer who uses artificial intelligence and other machine-learning algorithms to assist reporting, is a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class.
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