Photographer 'Releases His Own Epstein Files' and Shares Chilling Encounter

Photographer Christopher Anderson, whose Vanity Fair photos of the Trump administration caused a sensation last month, has taken to Instagram to reveal he was once threatened by Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2015, Anderson was commissioned by Jody Quon from New York magazine to photograph the disgraced financier for an article that was being written by Michael Wolff.

“I didn’t know much about him, other than the fact that he had heavy connections to powerful men,” Anderson writes. “He wanted to meet me before the shoot to negotiate buying out the pictures after publication. A young woman with an Eastern European accent answered the door (I would later see the same girl setting up a massage table in a room just off one of his offices).”

Anderson says that when Epstein arrived, “his eyes sized me up like someone always looking for the angles.” He began to grill the photographer about his pictures, what the shoot would be like, and how much the photos were worth.

“He said he didn’t want anyone else to have the pictures after the magazine published them, and offered me $20,000 to own them after publication,” says Anderson,

“It was all the money in the world to me at the time. I had a young family and lived basically month to month. He wrote a personal check and handed it to me. The magazine had already given me permission to make such an arrangement, and we made it clear that he wouldn’t see any of the pictures until after publication.”

A post shared by Christopher Anderson (@christopherandersonphoto)

Anderson shared the photos from the shoot, done in his signature style, which mixes wide environment shots with extremely tight monochrome head shots and details of his subject’s environment. The shoot was done across two of Epstein’s houses, one of which contained a stuffed tiger.

Among the detail shots is an eyebrow-raising email addressed to Amanda Thirsk, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s former private secretary. The printed email, sent in 2011 when Mountbatten-Windsor was still Prince Andrew and the Duke of York, outlines demands for $59,933, for which Epstein said he needed to pay for his “MBA at Columbia.”

After Anderson took the photos, things began to go awry. “He decided to pull out of the story and started calling me to demand the pictures,” the photographer explains. “I reiterated that the pictures were not his until after publication. Then the threats started.”

Anderson claims that Epstein sent a “massive” bodyguard called Merwin, who wore a long black overcoat and black leather gloves, to his studio. “It worked,” says Anderson.

After New York magazine killed the story, Anderson cashed the check and Merwin came by to collect the hard drive, “and to make sure I didn’t have any more copies of the photos.”

Anderson says that yesterday he found copies of the photos on a “very old hard drive” and decided to share them. As of writing, the fascinating post has over 100,000 likes.

Image credits: Via Christopher Anderson / Instagram