Former prime minister Ehud Barak was a “frequent guest, almost a fixture” at convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in New York before Epstein’s death in 2019, according to a new book by journalist Michael Wolff.

Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious – Twenty Years of Columns, Essays and Reporting, to be released on Tuesday, features Barak’s relationship with Epstein in great detail.

According to Wolff, Barak worked hard to rehabilitate Epstein’s image following a Miami Herald story in 2017 that broke the allegation of rape, molestation and sex trafficking of underage girls that turned into an arrest in July 2019.

 

Epstein and Barak, along with the former’s lawyer, Reid Weingarten, reportedly asked Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist and senior counselor to the president who they described as a “new friend,” for a PR strategy to publicly exonerate Epstein.

Barak, who reportedly excused Epstein’s crimes as merely prostitution and claimed it is “no longer called prostitution... it is something else, much worse,” once joked to Epstein that they have “nothing to worry about” as the secrets “are safe,” according to Wolff.

Barak and Epstein also reportedly claimed that former US attorney-general William Barr was the most powerful man in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidency.