A chemist, inventor, and art collector named Stuart Pivar, who says he was among Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friends, has given a shocking interview to a reporter for Mother Jones—a melange of apology and victim-blaming sprinkled with nuggets of gossip.
Pivar’s name was in the pedophile financier’s little black book, and when reporter Leland Nally phoned him, the 89-year-old rambled on about his old pal, calling his underage victims “trollops” and excusing his crimes as the symptoms of a personality disorder.
Here are some of the most batshit moments:
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Pivar says Epstein wasn’t a criminal, he was “sick”
Pivar repeatedly portrays Epstein as the victim of a mental disorder, satyriasis, that made him crave sex. “He was in a position financially to yield to it, big time. But nevertheless, he could not help himself. I’ve seen him do things which he couldn’t—couldn’t help himself, he was afflicted with it. If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much?”
Pivar blames Epstein’s accusers
He concedes that Epstein recruited underage girls for sex but says they were “complicit”—even though legally, minors cannot consent to sex with adults.
“What Jeffrey did is nothing in comparison to the rapes and the forceful things, which people did,” Mother Jones quotes him as saying. “Jeffrey had to do with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again.”
“Anyone who did one thing, let us say, to some 16-year-old trollop who would come to his house time after time after time and then afterwards bitch about it—why, no one would pay attention,” he added. “Except Jeffrey made an industry out of it.”
Pivar knew what happened to accuser Maria Farmer
Although he does not provide a time frame, Pivar says he had a falling out with Epstein over Farmer. She publicly accused Epstein in April of sexually abusing her and her underage sister in the '90s. While Pivar does not provide a time frame, and his account is somewhat confusing, he suggests he heard about it from Farmer much earlier:
“One day at the flea market there’s Maria Farmer, who I knew ’cause she was a student at the New York Academy of Art, and I [asked], “What are you doing here?” And she started to tell me about some terrible thing, too terrible to utter, having to do with Jeffrey Epstein. And then a minute later, he shows up. And I began to put two and two together. And I realized that something was going on, which I didn’t know about. And at that point, I knew that he had a different life that I was not aware of.”
Pivar goes on the say that what Epstein did to Farmer was “inexcusable.” “He locked her up, and she couldn’t get away, and her father had to come and rescue her. That’s a story she told. And, of course, that’s the least of what she told me,” Pivar said, according to Mother Jones. “Forget that, her little sister, for Christ’s sake, the guy actually brought her to his place and did those kind of things, which, of course, is inexcusable and that’s the kind of thing which satyriasists do because they can’t help themselves.”
There is no indication in the interview that Pivar alerted the authorities to what happened to Farmer and her sister.
Epstein attacked Pivar’s assistant
He says that he took Epstein to visit a prominent art dealer and brought along his assistant, “who was a very attractive young girl.” At one point Epstein “grabbed her up from behind and lifted her up and squeezed the hell out of her and she screamed. I said, ‘Jeffrey put her down! What are you doing?’ And the three or four of us who were watching were horrified, and he put her down. He was out of control. Have you ever seen anyone do a thing like that?” Again, there is no indication anyone reported Epstein.
Epstein liked to ask about “pussy” at his science dinners
Pivar recounts dinners Epstein would host for big-name scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, and Jaron Lanier at his mansion. Epstein knew “nothing” about science and would throw out pointless questions like “What is gravity?” Pivar said. Then after a couple of minutes—Jeffrey had no attention span whatsoever—he would interrupt the conversation and change it and say things like, “What does that got to do with pussy?!”
Epstein filled his house with fake art—as a joke
Worth more than half-a-billion dollars, Epstein could have afforded masterpieces to hang on his walls, but Pivar told Mother Jones that the money manager filled his house with fake art to put one over on his guests. “When you walked into this house, for example, there was a Max Weber or something like that, and it was a fake. And it amused him that people didn’t realize that. He was able to furnish his house with the fake paintings,” he told the magazine. “Jeffrey had a collection of underage Rodins, for example, because what difference does it make if it’s real or not real? And if the real one costs nothing and the expensive one—it doesn’t make a difference. He was amused to put one over on the world by having fake art. He thought that he was seeing through the fallacy.”
