Jeffrey Epstein And His Network Of Rich Freaks Were Obsessed With The Chiropractor

As the number of powerful, wealthy people revealed to have associated with Jeffrey Epstein increases, so too does the coherence of their collective excuse: They only knew Epstein as a genius of math and science, a polymath who could dispense tax advice worth hundreds of millions of dollars, opine on quantum entanglement, and offer wise counsel on how to navigate choppy political and social waters. They were not sending obsequious emails to Epstein in his capacity as a conduit for shady money, world-historic sex criminal or, uh, shadow representative of Israel. They were simply seeking his considerable breadth and depth of knowledge.

Both the content and style of Epstein's emails undermine the claim of his genius. Check out this excerpt from an incredibly weird, rambling email he sent to powerful crisis PR guy Matthew Hiltzik in 2017:

looling into , can the music produced by the brain give us an insight into how it works. . different cultures have different music. german music is stiff. rigid on the beat. afrom americans flecible ie JAZZ.

Also refuting Epstein's supposed brilliance is his fondness for a certain controversial branch of physical therapy: chiropractic care (the noun form is "chiropractic," as clunky as that sounds). Epstein's social use of the occasionally effective, mostly harmful, fundamentally unscientific medical practice actually winds up being a useful entry point into understanding the broader Epstein phenomenon.

What is chiropractic? The colloquial understanding is that it's a pseudomedical suite of practices for dealing with back pain, which can involve a variety of wrestling moves and pugilistic techniques. That's mostly true, though it undersells how weird this stuff's origins are.

Chiropractic was invented in the late 1890s by magnetic—as in "using magnets," not as in "he was very charismatic"—healer D.D. Palmer, who claimed to have "discovered" it after having "received chiropractic from the other world." Writing as if he were Dr. Bronner, Palmer articulated a philosophy of his nascent psuedoscience that infused the slightly more on-the-level field of osteopathy with an ecclesiastical fervor. His son B.J. succeeded Palmer as chiropractic's chief evangelist in the early 20th century and mildly de-Christianized the practice without totally secularizing it. The younger Palmer—who later gave a 21-year-old Ronald Reagan his first-ever media job, hiring him in 1932 to broadcast college football games on the radio—also maybe ran his father over with a car as a result of that schism.

Elon Musk comes from a line of chiropractors. His great-grandmother is believed to have been the first practicing chiropractor in Canada and his antisemitic grandfather Joshua Haldeman was a lifelong chiropractor in Canada, the U.S., and South Africa. Chiropractic has gained increasing mainstream acceptance in the United States through the decades, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that chiropractic will grow by at least 10 percent over the next decade out of an apparent combination of an increasing number of Americans leading more static lives and an already threadbare healthcare system fraying further.

Back pain is horribly debilitating, forcing the sufferer to remain in mostly stationary agony until it goes away, so I see the temptation of symptom relief. I know some friends who swear by chiropractic. I have also heard horror stories about chiropractic making stuff worse. Having bowling balls dropped on your spinal column, getting karate-chopped in the neck, and receiving the People's Elbow can also lead to all sorts of worse problems, like strokes and also dying.

Epstein had a tremendous enthusiasm not just for quack doctors rolling his vertebrae like dice but for wellness practice in its many forms. He expressed his wish for a "spiritual adventure travel agency"; he opined on ketamine therapy; people were always emailing him about stuff like holotropic breath work and "New Rosicrucianism"; and, as detailed in a recent TrueAnon episode, he was fascinated by kundalini and reiki.

Epstein was always saying stuff like this:

From what has been revealed in the email troves, we know Epstein had been managing a low-testosterone condition and several sexually transmitted diseases. Though had no publicly known spinal diagnoses, there are several references to back pain in the emails: Epstein's urologist Harry Fisch (a character in his own right, though sadly not one we have much time for) asked about Epstein's back pain in March 2016; someone with a redacted email address and a French email signature recommended cupping "for your lower back pain" in 2018; after Epstein's 2019 arrest, his lawyers complained that he wasn't getting his back pain medication; and UCLA professor Mark Tramo was emailing Epstein about his back pain in 2018. Clearly, his back was all fucked up.

So, more than just about anything, Epstein loved going to the chiropractor. The terms "chiropractor" and "chiro" (and various misspellings) appear hundreds of times in his emails in a variety of contexts. Here he is forwarding an email exchange with Peter Thiel to his aide Lesley Groff so she could help him assemble a remarkable agenda.

Epstein was not a one-chiropractor man, instead making frequent trips to various chiropractors around the world. This was not incidental to his often strange and distasteful associations with the rich and powerful. He was constantly giving and soliciting recommendations for new chiropractors.

The first prominent person to discuss the chiropractic arts with Epstein was Reinaldo Avila da Silva, husband of British politician Peter Mandelson. Within days of Epstein's release from prison in July 2009 after his first sex crimes conviction, Da Silva and Epstein were talking spine stuff. Epstein wrote "please call me to discuss" before copy-pasting the full text of this rambling Blogspot post from 2004 about the histories of osteopathy and chiropractic. A few months later, Da Silva hit him up for money to pay for an osteopathy course. Epstein sent him the money immediate'y [sic].

Mandelson, Da Silva's husband, had been a major player in the U.K.s Labour Party for 40 years until he resigned from his ambassadorship to the U.S. on Feb. 1 after the extent of his ties to Epstein was revealed: In addition to referring to Epstein as his "best pal" in 2003, Mandelson was also leaking a bunch of sensitive government documents to Epstein in exchange for both money and access.

Another person who emailed Epstein days after his release from prison in July 2009 was Peggy Siegal, the influential publicist who helped reintegrate Epstein into high society in New York and Hollywood. The emails in which Siegal advises Epstein on how to respond to media coverage, whom to be seen with, and how to get "top political and military minds to speak" to speak at his Manhattan townhouse are embarrassing and damning; less embarrassing, but still cringeworthy, is her suggestion that her 70th birthday party feature the "handsome Israelie [sic] Dr. Ilan Baum, the chiropractor," among others, who she wanted to "say a few words … or just be available to go from table to table for consultations."

Eva Dubin, a former physician and beauty-pageant winner who testified at Ghislaine Maxwell's sex-trafficking trial and is married to hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, seems to have set Epstein up to undergo the "Egoscue method," a form of posture-alignment therapy, in 2015 from the method's creator, Peter Egoscue. According to an automated chatbot on egoscue.com, the method involves "teaching you how to restore your body's natural alignment and function through a series of personalized exercises." Dubin got in touch with Egoscue with the help of Sonia Jones, an influential ashtanga yoga instructor and wife of hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones.

Another prominent person who pops up is Tommy Mottola, former CEO of Sony Music, ex-husband of Mariah Carey, and one of the most powerful people in the American music industry. Mottola's relationship with Epstein was extensive, with Epstein advising Mottola on how to steer clear of being accused of some unspecified transgression on Christmas Day in 2017. These guys loved to email on holidays: On New Year's Eve 2015, Epstein was trying to arrange a phone conversation (in his characteristically sparse email diction) with Mottola, but the latter had to go get his spine unkinked first.

Someone with a redacted email address was arranging for Epstein to see a theater performance of Wuthering Heights in 2012, when Epstein non-sequitured in to ask for a chiropractor recommendation.

Next October, Epstein helped set up an unknown contact with a Dr. Dean, identified as a "big fat greek, but very good and kind."

Apparently Dr. Dean wasn't really doing it for Epstein, as he asked his brother Mark for a recommendation two days later in an email with no subject line. "I thought it was a scam but he really helped me," Mark writes.

In 2016, Epstein saw Dr. Wayne Winnick for some chiropractic treatment. On its own, that would not be all that notable, but emails show Epstein did so on the recommendation of Brad Wechsler, the longtime CEO of IMAX and money manager at Leon Black Apollo Global Management.

The majority of the hundreds of interactions between Epstein and chiropractors do not involve famous or powerful people. They include:

• Epstein writing in May 2009, while on work release, that "a chiropractor with an interst [sic] in music is not surprising."
• Epstein's aide Lesley Groff telling someone with a redacted email address in 2015 that "JE did have a chiropractor he loved in the city for adjustments, but he died."
• Another amazing schedule:

• A 2015 email in which another aide expresses confusion at the difference between physical therapy and chiropractic.
• A 2017 email to Groff in which someone notes that their physician told them their chiropractor was actually making their neck pain worse.

What Epstein's emails (and of course the essential reporting of the Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown) show is decidedly not a genius, but rather a guy whose influence rested on his ability and eagerness to facilitate exploitation and crime. I read the mysterious quality that people ascribed to Epstein's intelligence as an expression of their own uncertainty about how this strange, evil man came to be a fixture at the center of a vast network of extremely influential people: Maybe other people saw something they couldn't, nude emperor style?

That's where we find our connection back to chiropractic. Much like Epstein was a sucker's idea of a genius, so too is chiropractic a dupe's idea of pathbreaking medical care. It presents as an esoteric corrective to an otherwise painful, exploitative system, and benefits from the same childish logic that supported Epstein's reputation: If he is friends with a bunch of rich master-of-the-universe types, he must be smart; if chiropratic is scoffed at by a medical establishment everybody hates, it must be good. Maybe that guy wrapping boxing tape between his fingers before treatment has what it takes to solve my lingering problems?

The final notable person we find in the emails is the journalist Michael Wolff. In Feb. 2019, four months before Epstein's second arrest, he forwarded Wolff a rambling email he'd written to himself, apparently about the FBI's investigation of his sex crimes. In that email, Epstein expressed his shock and amazement that the FBI would interview his chiropractor.

Wolff, recently found to have advised Epstein in 2015 on how to handle Donald Trump, has the same name as chiropractors in both New York and Texas. I sent a message to Wolff—the journalist, not either of the chiropractors—asking if he had ever gone to see a chiropractor; I sent one also to the Instagram account for the upstate New York farmhouse Wolff restored with his wife, asking if they could recommend a good chiropractor nearby. We will update this post if he responds.