Peggy Siegal Defends Her Past With Jeffey Epstein

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“It was like the devil had heard it in my voice. He’d in some way figured out the worst thing he could ask me.”

Peggy Siegal, the once omnipresent New York publicist, is describing her first conversation with Jeffrey Epstein. It was a phone call — she believes in 2006 or 2007, sometime before his first criminal conviction. She says she’s never before discussed it.

Siegal, now 78, was once the film world’s most coveted publicity power broker. For nearly four decades, beginning in the 1980s, she was the woman studio heads relied on to stir up Oscars buzz by hosting exclusive screenings and clubby dinners. She’d worked for everyone in Hollywood — Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein, Barry Levinson — and specialized in bringing together charming, influential people from disparate social worlds and especially the cultured classes of L.A. and New York. She was as known for her brash, bulldozing style as she was for her “golden rolodex” — a catalogue of more than 30,000 VIPs, organized by industry and importance, how many houses they owned, and whether they were voting members of the Academy.

At the height of her power, Siegal’s defenses seemed inviolable. She was confident and casually rude, inviting herself anywhere she wanted to go. She critiqued her own flaws before others could, once writing and sending out a booklet called How to Look Like Me at 60, which detailed every bit of cosmetic work she’d had done and was passed from hand to hand up Park Avenue and into Beverly Hills.