Jeffrey Epstein has kept public relations professionals busy with crisis management work ever since Palm Beach police first arrested him on prostitution charges in 2006. The latest tranches of Justice Department documentation provide fresh insight into who they were, what they did and how much they were paid.
These spin doctors are employed to win in the court of public opinion even as their typically high-profile, resource-rich clients often pursue legal cases in court or in arbitration. Frequently, they’re tapped by law firms, who shield their efforts behind the cloak of attorney-client privilege. These government disclosures offer a rare window into the how their work unfolds.
Among the earliest communications advisors Epstein brought onboard appears to have been the New York PR guru Dan Klores, who handled damage control for Paris Hilton when her sex tape leaked and for fellow publicist Lizzie Grubman after she plowed into 16 people in her father’s Mercedes SUV in the Hamptons. Bank records indicate Epstein paid Klores’ firm $10,000 in January 2007, as the FBI pursued its probe into the financier. Klores’ services for Epstein were not detailed in the DOJ materials.
Soon after, as media coverage of the case intensified, Epstein switched to Klores’ former boss Howard Rubenstein, a dean of the field who’d wrangled messaging for World Trade Center leaseholder Silverstein Properties after Sept. 11 and for Kathie Lee Gifford during her sweatshop saga. When New York magazine interviewed Epstein, its reporter met the mogul in Rubenstein’s office. To the New York Post, at the time also a Rubenstein client, the flack asserted that Epstein had “no business relationship” with Jean-Luc Brunel or Brunel’s MC2 Model Management. Documents have since shown that Epstein was a key financial backer of the late Brunel and MC2, now considered key conduits in his sex trafficking operation.
Post-Rubenstein, Epstein reached out to the seasoned flack Ken Sunshine about representation. His CV has included troubleshooting for Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, Sean Combs, Harvey Weinstein and Epstein pal Bill Clinton. Nothing came of their talks.
Epstein also worked with Merrie Spaeth, a White House Director of Media Relations during Ronald Reagan’s administration. She’s best known for advising the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the right-wing veterans group that attacked 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. According to Bloomberg’s review of a trove of e-mails which the outlet obtained from Epstein’s personal Yahoo e-mail account, Spaeth helped Epstein pen drafts of a public apology in 2008 which was never released. This was months before he pled guilty to a Florida state charge of procuring an underage prostitute. She also provided media coaching on how to respond to anticipated inquiries about his predations. When Bloomberg asked her about this, she said she “ultimately terminated the engagement because of my discomfort with it.”
Immediately after Epstein completed his probation in August 2010, the publicist R. Couri Hay — whose experience was mostly with New York society figures, luxury brands and institutions like Lincoln Center — sent him a detailed strategy proposal to help resuscitate his image, outlining a cost of between $15,000 and $20,000 per month on a six- to 12-month retainer agreement. “You have a very colorful story but it’s not all black nor is it strictly black and white,” he wrote Epstein. “I can help you turn your reputation around.”
Hay suggested securing positive press centered on Epstein’s financial support for scientific research. “At the appropriate times we could discuss possible photo opportunities with Pulitzer prize-winning scientists and other VIP’s that would demonstrate their respect and trust for you at targeted events,” he wrote. In addition, he proposed the endowment of a “Pulitzer Prize in Mathematics,” noting that he’d “have to check into the feasibility.” If not, he assured, “we can find an equally prestigious institution that would.”
Questioned about this exchange in November 2025, Hay told The New York Times he’d never ended up working for Epstein and contends he didn’t understand how “heinous” the financier was. He described himself as “blinded a little bit by the glamorous facade that Jeffrey and Ghislaine [Maxwell, now imprisoned for child sex trafficking] put on in social circles in New York and in Palm Beach.”
Epstein went on to engage Mike Sitrick, a legendary L.A.-based cleanup specialist who Fortune once compared to Harvey Keitel’s fixer character Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction. Sitrick has mopped up for Michael Vick following his dogfighting scandal, Vince McMahon when former WWE personnel alleged sexual abuse and trafficking, and the Church of Scientology in response to investigative exposes.
A key focus of Sitrick’s work for Epstein was handling the growing media interest in Prince Andrew’s association with the financier, especially after the Duchess of York called Epstein a pedophile. The royal has since been stripped of his title and on Feb. 19 was arrested this week by British police on corruption charges amid a public firestorm over his ties to the billionaire.
Records uncovered in the files appear to indicate Epstein tried to stiff the PR czar, who was employed via the financier’s then-attorney Roy Black. In March 2011, he complained to Sitrick, “We accomplished very little this week,” despite acknowledging they’d “stopped four articles that I know about and tomorrows is very toned down.” Epstein’s takeaway was that his reputation “got pounded.”
Soon after, Epstein stopped paying Sitrick’s fees, so Sitrick took him to court. “Despite the salaciousness of the coverage in both the U.K. and the U.S., Mr. Sitrick and his team were able to stop stories that would have aired on TV and in the mainstream media in the U.S.,” Sitrick’s legal team wrote to Epstein’s counsel that July, adding that Sitrick had worked “days, nights and weekends” to address “a tsunami of negative publicity.” In 2015, Sitrick won a default judgment for $155,000. “I have no idea why he didn’t pay the bill,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “No one ever expressed dissatisfaction with our work before or during the litigation.” (Sitrick notes he never met Epstein in person.)
Meanwhile, from the time of Epstein’s release, Spaeth spent years checking in. “I just wanted to touch base and make sure you were feeling more secure,” she wrote him in 2011. “You know you can always call on us.” Four years later, she wrote Epstein’s assistant, “Just want him to know he has friends who are thinking of him.” Spaeth told the Dallas Morning News on Feb. 4, “I am embarrassed that I had any involvement whatsoever including our follow ups with him.”
Another of Epstein’s optics consultants in the years leading up to his July 2019 re-arrest and death a month later in federal custody was power publicist Matthew Hiltzik. His firm represented Elizabeth Holmes as the Theranos scandal erupted, as well as Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp amid their litigious disputes with exes Angelina Jolie and Amber Heard.
An invoice in the Justice Department tranche shows that Hiltzik Strategies charged Epstein $25,000 for the month of June 2017. Hiltzik, who appears to have been introduced via the writer Michael Wolff, produced a memo suggesting approaches to help recalibrate his client’s image. It included questioning the integrity of attorneys who’d brought claims against him and leveraging what Hiltzik termed “third party validators” to speak out on Epstein’s behalf. The listed potential proxies included a group of then-respected names — Larry Summers, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Bill Richardson, Kathy Ruemmler — who’ve since been tarnished by their association with Epstein.
That October, the day after The New York Times published its landmark exploration of Harvey Weinstein’s own sexual misconduct, which precipitated the #MeToo movement, Epstein wrote Hiltzik, “how do you rate harveys strategy? are you help=ng?” (The error-laden prose is due to a mix of the financier’s nonstandard typing and the DOJ’s formatting corruption.) The strategist, who had worked for Weinstein years earlier, quickly replied, “It is not wise,” adding, “And while I have spoke= to him, I did not formally engage And he didn’t list=n to wise advice from several reasonable people who tried to help.” Hours later, Epstein responded, “I truly wish him well.”
In December 2018, a month after Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown began publishing her explosive investigations into the Epstein saga, the financier had his high-profile attorneys Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz draft a newspaper op-ed to defend him. Epstein later looped Hiltzik into an email thread, requesting his thoughts — to which the scandal handler wrote back, “there should be a line in there somewhere which clearly confirms that JE understands and recognizes that he did something wrong.”
Hiltzik tells THR that he never worked on managing the publication of any story about Epstein, and says he broke off ties with the financier after Epstein spurned his advice to take public accountability.
Few figures aside from Epstein have cycled through so many crisis gurus in so short a time. But his death isn’t the end of his gainful contribution to the spin industry. With the DOJ’s latest document dumps, such consultants are freshly in-demand among the hundreds of powerful people named in them. (Exhibit A: Risa Heller, soon to be fictionalized by Lizzy Caplan in a Netflix drama about her crisis PR job, is now busy with the evolving fallout for media mogul and L.A. Olympics czar Casey Wasserman.) Occasionally they offer on-record statements, attributed to an unnamed spokesperson or representative. More often, they’re busy pushing off-record messaging behind the scenes, hoping to position their clients in the best possible light — given the circumstances.