How a Philippines-based ops tried to bury Jeffrey Epstein's bad press

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MANILA, Philippines — Long before his 2019 arrest, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was already working to erase his criminal past from the internet.

By 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was already a convicted sex offender and on probation after a year in jail. Still very wealthy and socially connected, he was desperate to have his public reputation swept clean.

Unfortunately for him, Google was beginning to show results while users typed on its search box. Auto-suggestions would yield "jail" and "pedophile" tied to the American financier's name. References to his crimes, guilty plea and jailtime dominated search results.

Among the 20,000 pages of "Epstein Files" recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice were email exchanges that follow how Epstein turned to Al Seckel, the husband of hte sister of his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, to lead the damage-control campaign.

Seckel, a self-styled "optical illusions" collector, proposed a blunt strategy: overwhelm negative search results with a flood of positive—and in some cases misleading—content until critical links slid out of view.

"I wish I could use all my creativity and powers to make it all go away instantaneously, but I can't," Seckel wrote in an email to Epstein in October 2010. "However, it is not a hopeless case, based on our analysis of it."

The approach relied on a simple premise of what is now considered old-school search engine optimization, or SEO: bury the bad links and boost the good.

"The greater the number of links, then the higher the ranking," Seckel explained.

He then appealed to Epstein's background as a math teacher in the 1970s, long before he was a multimilionaire. "Jeffrey, it's all mathematics, that's all it is, and all it ever will be." 

Outsourced to the Philippines

The emails indicated that Seckel hired a team based in the Philippines to fashion a moat of links around websites and pages they created on Epstein and others who share his name. His supposed involvement in sports, science and philanthropy would be a highlight on these new sites.

"Our group in the Philippines is building links and links to our sites, pseudo sites, and the other Jeffrey Epsteins of the world," Seckel wrote. 

He argued that once automated web crawlers revisited search results, Epstein’s critics would instead see favorable or unrelated content created by his team.

"Then the old sites will just get moved out of the way. Poof. We just need more links than [sic] them," Seckel said.

The operation was not a one-off magic trick of the "illusions" enthusiast. It followed a playbook common to PR firms at the time, offering "reputation management" services designed to game search algorithms. A 2012 Wall Street Journal report detailed how such firms buried negative coverage for companies and individuals while amplifying positive narratives.

While it sounded simple enough, Seckel kept fixing for Epstein what proved to be a neverending campaign. 

"We are quite exhausted because this job is so incredibly massive and intensive, and we are under a lot of pressure to give you the results you would want," he wrote in another October 2010 email to Epstein.

Wikipedia battles

A key focus of the effort was Wikipedia. Seckel forwarded an email from a "team leader" describing how extensive the efforts are for Epstein in the country.

"Philippines are [sic] continuing to do a lot of backend work, with additional work as soon as they receive the articles and photos from Jeff," they wrote. 

Repeated attempts to remove or soften referencs to Epstein's criminal records were reversed by other users monitoring the page.

"He has over twenty people with google alerts on him, who go and undo our edits every time we remove material," the team leader wrote, adding that "more extreme measures" might be needed.

The team also Seckel for more funding for the job.

"Once additional money comes in I can continue to start pimping the 'other' Jeffrey Epsteins that already exist on the web, trying to jump them up in rankings," they said. "You've already seen the kind of work effort I will bring to this project, so I'm counting on you to make this happen and provide me the material and funding that I need."

It took Seckel and the team two months to scrub Wikipedia and search results of what they called "toxic" terms.

"We have stopped the hacking on your wiki site, and that was a major effort. Your wiki entry now is pretty tame, and bad stuff has been muted, bowlerized, and pused to the bottom," Seckel wrote. "This was a big success."

High cost, limited effect

The service commanded a retainer of $10,000 to $20,000 a month, or roughly P450,000 to P900,000. Epstein objected to the escalating costs.

"I was never told... that there was a 10k fee per month„ you inittaly [sic] said the project would take 20.. then another 10. then another 10," Epstein wrote in one exchange, complaining about the incremental charges.

To this, Seckel shot a sharp response.

"We were trying to fix up your mess. I didn't create it. Just thought it would be something to help. This was NEVER about trying to pull money out of you, and fact, we have don't everything possible to keep the costs down considerably," he wrote on Dec. 16, 2010.

While his reputation still suffered in public, Epstein was not exiled from his private, elite networks. The cleaned up search results, at least for a time, kept invitations coming.

Documents showed the convicted sex offender still had a full social calendar in the years after 2010, speaking and meeting with director Woody Allen, famed professor Noam Chomsky, and British billionaires Richard Branson and Bill Gates, among others.

He went on to acquire a second private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2018 and entertained charity calls, including a fundraiser for typhoon-hit Tacloban in 2014.

Collapse of the façade. Explosive accusations by former victim Virginia Giuffre surfaced in 2015, helping Epstein's cases return to the spotlight.

It was also the year Seckel reportedly died, with accounts saying his body was found at the "bottom of a cliff" near his home in France.

Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal charges accusing him of trafficking and abusing underage girls, some as young as 14, across multiple locations in the United States and abroad.

He died in custody in August 2019 while awaiting trial.