In between hobnobbing with royalty and world leaders and abusing children and young women, Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been googling himself regularly. Across several batches of documents related to the convicted sex offender made public, we see Epstein shoot off emails to associates, complaining that his digital footprint includes factual information about his crimes.
i want the google page cleaned (November 5th, 2010)
mike „ can you olcan up my wiki page (April 18th, 2011)
Any way to clean up my wiki page (September 17th, 2013)
Epstein regularly directed his gripes at Al Seckel, a fixer type who appears over and over in Epstein files and promises to bury news articles and other content that mentions his abuse. But Seckel didn’t do it alone. Over thousands of documents, it’s clear that many people — SEO consultants, contacts in the sciences, and even unrelated acquaintances — helped to obscure Epstein’s past whenever someone searched for him online. Even after Epstein had pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution, making him a registered sex offender, his network was happy to do him favors and reputation management firms took him on as a client. Reputation management services aren’t necessarily a tool to cover up crimes — it’s a standard public relations practice — but in Epstein’s case, the agencies would have known about his abuse, given that that’s what they were being hired to try to minimize.
In October 2010, Seckel laid out an overview of the group’s plan of attack to defend Epstein’s reputation online. The situation, as Seckel described it, was that a search surfaced “over 75+ pages of derogatory material,” and that someone would be “very hard pressed to find any ‘positive’ references.” To “balance the only one-sided negative opinion that has been spread over a wide birth on the Internet,” Seckel said, the team would need to flood the zone with content they can control, specifically pointing to spinning up websites with original content related to Epstein’s connections to science and charities. Seckel would be the unpaid “team leader” along with other unpaid consultants. A person named Michael Keesling would be paid $25,000 to purchase and host web domains, contract a “Phillipine Crew” that would spread flattering links around the web, and other tasks. An unidentified group of “hackers” would be paid $2,500. A “Stephanie Horenstein (Fred Horenstein)” would be paid $2,500 to leave positive comments on Epstein-related news articles. The Verge’s messages sent to a Michael Keesling working in SEO out of West Hollywood went unanswered.
During this time frame, Epstein and his team discussed editing his Wikipedia page to remove mentions of him being a sex offender and pedophile, replacing his mugshot with other pictures, and pushing down news articles they didn’t like. Among the recently released files are several wire transfers to Keesling, totaling $22,500. Elsewhere, Keesling also mentioned receiving “over [$20,000] in cash” from Seckel without a receipt.
By 2013, Epstein was in the market for another “good reverse [SEO] person,” as he wrote in an email, and was recommended someone named Tyler Shears. Within a few weeks, Shears was laying out a 30-day plan — quoting $125 per hour — and starting with tactics like beefing up content around a different Jeffrey Epstein “in order to help remove some of the negative results for our Epstein.” By February 2014, Epstein’s accountant noted that Shears had billed over $50,000 and that Epstein was “unsure of what has changed” since he hired Shears. A person with the same name and company did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Epstein also shopped around for reputation management firms and according to emails was turned down multiple times. In 2010, Seckel forwarded to Epstein an exchange he had with a company called Infuse Creative.
“We have no problem helping someone who is innocent of accusations or a true victim of circumstance, but if there is truth to these allegations and the conviction, I’m afraid we’d have to pass,” Gregory Markel, founder of the firm, wrote to Seckel. “Do you personally know how much of these allegations are true?”
Elsewhere, an associate whose name is redacted in files told Epstein that Reputation.com couldn’t represent him “because of [his] background” but that another firm, Integrity Defenders, would (files also include a paid invoice for $2,449 from Integrity Defenders).
“Please ask him or anyone else not to click on any of the negative links EVER again as that can keep them lingering on the first page,” an account manager at the firm wrote in an email. The website for Integrity Defenders is inactive and The Verge was unable to contact the company.
“What splendid ideas!”
When it came to attempting to conceal Epstein’s crimes online, many people — paid and unpaid, knowingly or unthinkingly — assisted in the whitewashing. In 2010, after Seckel and his team spun up websites focused on Epstein’s ties to science and his philanthropy in an effort to drown out media coverage, the fixer started emailing acquaintances, asking for a favor. The request was simple: Would they link to Epstein’s sites on their own websites? Seckel asked scientists associated with UCLA, multiple physicists, and others in the scientific community. The idea, at least from an SEO perspective, is that getting valuable links from trustworthy sources like academic institutions would signal to Google that Epstein’s new sites should be surfaced to anyone searching for him. Part of how Google decides which pages to rank highly in search results is by looking at whether other sites link to a page; Epstein’s camp appears to have been trying to push down negative search results by securing valuable links from outside entities.
One of the acquaintances who agreed to add links back to Epstein’s sites is Mark Tramo, an adjunct professor in the department of neurology at UCLA who told SFGate that he had “not heard anything [about] statutory rape or minors being involved, I never saw him with young girls, never visited the island, never flew in his planes.” But in 2010, Tramo was eager to acquiesce to Seckel’s request for links.
“What splendid ideas!” he responded, before going on to describe the “support” (including anonymously) Epstein had provided for his work. Reached via email, Tramo said he had “no independent recollection” of Seckel and denied that his nonprofit’s website had ever included links to Epstein’s sites. “I’m horrified, sickened, and angry that Epstein dared to associate himself with me one minute, then turn around and commit heinous crimes the next. How dare he?!” Tramo said in a longer statement shared with The Verge. “I wish I’d never been introduced to him by the Harvard Provost, and I regret I ever had anything to do with him.”
But Seckel seemed pleased with his link-spreading operation. “Links all over the world and at major institutions going up,” Seckel wrote in another thread to Epstein. Even after Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a girl under 18 for prostitution, the industry he snaked his way into was happy to keep up the ruse.
Update, February 10th: Added additional comment from Mark Tramo.
