Friends in High Places

The Epstein connection closest to the former governor is Dan Klores, former public relations guru to the New York elite. Klores was a longtime, close political ally of Cuomo’s: the candidate was the first and, for a time, only client of Klores’s newly formed PR firm, which ran his initial, unsuccessful run for governor in 2002, and for which Klores served as Cuomo’s chief advisor. Klores, at Cuomo’s urging, set up and represented the Committee to Save New York (CSNY) eight years later, the corporate-funded shadow lobby that worked to steamroll union opposition to Cuomo’s first, austerity budget. Later, Klores’s firm was among the top lobbyists for the gambling industry as Cuomo pushed hard to legalize casino gambling in the state.

Klores was also a longtime close friend. He, Cuomo, and New York Daily News columnist Mike McAlary “were inseparable for a while,” Klores said in 2011, holding a joint three-way birthday party every December. He was there at Cuomo’s bachelor party as well as at the family meeting following his separation twelve years later. Klores has given the maximum $2,100 to Cuomo’s current mayoral run and donated a total of $144,500 to his various statewide campaigns over the years.

Another client of Klores’s: Jeffrey Epstein. Klores was part of Epstein’s high-powered defense team following his first arrest in Florida in 2006, one half of a crack PR duo looking to protect Epstein’s image in the face of accusations of abusing underage girls. Epstein’s team was ready “to get their story out,” Klores told the Palm Beach Post that August.

In other words, one of Cuomo’s closest friends, who helped push his first-term agenda and with whom he threw shared birthday parties for years, spent a decent chunk of his time doing damage control for Epstein after his sprawling sex abuse operation came to light.

The other half of Epstein’s PR duo that year was also a Cuomo associate: Howard Rubenstein, another New York PR titan, whom Klores had gotten his start in the industry working for. Rubenstein served as Epstein’s spokesperson throughout his initial arrest and prosecution, earning a reported $200,000 to defend him in sometimes strikingly personal terms.

“I’ve known him for a few years, and know that for thirty years, he’s been one of the most charitable individuals I’ve ever met. He’s given tens of millions of dollars without seeking publicity for it, and he’s also known as a brilliant financial adviser,” Rubenstein told the New York Post about Epstein in 2007. “So this was clearly out of character for a man who’s led a very decent life.”

At times, the job meant attacking Epstein’s accusers. Rubenstein dismissed one lawsuit brought by an alleged teenage victim of Epstein’s by claiming that his guilty plea in Florida had made him a target “for money-seeking lawyers and their women.” When three women sued in 2008 to revoke Epstein’s backroom “sweetheart deal” — with its stipulation that Epstein wouldn’t face federal prosecution and that neither would any alleged coconspirators — Rubenstein protested that their lawsuit “has absolutely no merit.”

“They’re just looking for money,” Rubenstein said. “These women have lied repeatedly, and in no way shape or form were they victims. They were at his place freely and voluntarily. And one of them showed Epstein a fake ID.”

Twelve years later, when Rubenstein died, Cuomo warmly paid tribute to the “NY icon,” tweeting that “both my father and I were lucky to have his friendship.” That friendship translated into $107,000 worth of donations for the younger Cuomo between 2007 and 2018 as well as parties and fundraisers Rubenstein hosted at his home for Cuomo, including a January 2010 affair where he told guests, “This is totally off the record. I don’t want to read about this on Page Six,” as duly reported by the New York Post’s Page Six.

Rubenstein also sat on the executive committee of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), which the New York Observer once called the more-than-century-old “group that secretly runs the city.” At the time, REBNY was a “center pole” of the same CSNY that was integral to pushing Cuomo’s first-term agenda over the line. (REBNY members have spent big against Mamdani and for Cuomo in the mayoral primary, including its chair, who gave $250,000 to a pro-Cuomo Super PAC.)

There’s also newspaper magnate Mort Zuckerman, former owner of the New York Daily News and the Atlantic, and the current owner and publisher of the US News and World Report. Besides being listed in Epstein’s “little black book,” Zuckerman is one of the five dozen people who contributed a letter to the sex trafficker’s now-infamous fiftieth birthday book in 2003, grouped with around twenty others under the label, “Friends.” That was the same year Zuckerman teamed up with Epstein and several other business partners to make a failed bid to buy New York Magazine, and a year before he and Epstein went in together to fund gossip magazine Radar, which shut down after three issues.

Like Klores and Rubenstein, Zuckerman, a bitter foe of unions, also played a role in Cuomo’s first-term austerity push. Multiple outlets reported at the time on how Cuomo had “rounded up the two most powerful publishing magnates in New York,” Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch, and subsequently “went after pensions and the state workforce” with their support.

“Andrew is a ‘new Democrat.’ He’s saying, ‘I’m going to take on the unions, I want smaller government.’ And he’s got Zuckerman, Murdoch and [Michael] Bloomberg on his side,” former CEO of Northeast Public Radio Alan Chartock said at the time. (Incidentally, Murdoch was also a Rubenstein client and had two numbers listed in Epstein’s address book.)

Zuckerman was close enough with Cuomo that when the then governor went on an official trip to Israel in 2014 with top state legislators — his first international trip as governor and one of his few trips outside the state at all at that point — Zuckerman was the only nonfamily member that he took with him as a guest, the others being three of his brothers-in-law.

In the years since, the two appeared at numerous events together, often announcing state government-backed programs that Zuckerman was involved in to different degrees, as when Cuomo appointed him honorary chair of the New York-Israel Commission he launched in 2017. At a separate event in 2015 about free English training for immigrants, Cuomo heaped praise on the magnate: “A publisher who lives this message and has always been a champion of citizens, not just in this city and this state but around the globe who need a champion.”

Then there’s current Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Cuomo’s former brother-in-law, who was among the motley, elite group (alongside former Donald Trump acolyte Roger Stone) assembled by Klores in 1997 to celebrate Cuomo’s appointment to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). But he and Kennedy continued to associate long after Cuomo divorced his sister, Kerry: the newly elected governor appointed Kennedy to his transition team; a series of conversations between the two reportedly led him to delay approving fracking in New York in 2013; and eight years later, the two were on the same side on the push to close down Indian Point nuclear power plant.

Convicted Epstein coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell recently told the Department of Justice that “Bobby knew Mr Epstein,” and that the trio went on a dinosaur bone–hunting trip in the Dakotas in the early 1990s. Besides being listed in Epstein’s address book, Kennedy has admitted to twice flying on Epstein’s private jet, and photos of the two socializing in the mid-1990s recently surfaced. In the same Department of Justice interview, Maxwell disclosed that she knew Cuomo through Kerry and attended their 1990 wedding, though she denied Epstein and Cuomo had a relationship. (Incidentally, when Kerry was later charged with drunk driving, her lawyer was the same Gerald Lefcourt who was part of Epstein’s legal team in Florida.)

Donors With Epstein Ties

The Epstein connections also abound among Cuomo’s current donors.

Maybe the most prominent Epstein associate backing Cuomo is billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, who gave a total of just over $27,000 to his mayoral campaign, most of it to the record-breaking Super PAC supporting his run.

Dubin had an unusually close relationship with Epstein. His wife, Eva Andersson-Dubin, dated Epstein for eleven years before the billionaire pedophile introduced the two, and the Dubins remained friends with him even after his 2008 conviction. Their daughter, who Epstein reportedly considered marrying for financial reasons, called him “Uncle Jeff.” The couple received at least one nonerotic massage from one of Epstein’s victims, while another survivor charged she had been trafficked to Dubin, which he denies.

This relationship extended into business. Epstein brokered the deal that saw Dubin’s hedge fund, Highbridge Capital, get sold to JP Morgan in 2004, which David Boies, an attorney representing some of Epstein’s victims, has alleged became folded into his criminal activities. Highbridge “trafficked young women and girls on its own private jet from Florida to Epstein in New York as late as 2012,” Boies alleged in a January 2023 complaint, a charge he later repeated in open court.

Dubin’s relationship with Cuomo also goes beyond these most recent donations. Dubin gave a total of more than $126,000 to Cuomo’s campaigns for attorney general and governor between 2002 and 2017, including more than $50,000 in 2006 alone. This generosity might be why Dubin ended up on Cuomo’s Council of Economic and Fiscal Advisors after he won the gubernatorial election in 2010.

There’s also Michael Bloomberg, the third media magnate (and former New York City mayor) Cuomo had tried to ally with early on in his gubernatorial career, who poured a massive $8.3 million into the pro-Cuomo Super PAC earlier this year — one-third of its total haul.

Like Cuomo, Bloomberg was listed in Epstein’s address book. Unlike Cuomo, he had five separate phone numbers listed under his name for Epstein to use to contact him. The two shared numerous social connections in common, including Zuckerman, Rubenstein, and, most significantly, Victoria’s Secret owner Les Wexner, who had mysteriously given Epstein virtual control over his enormous wealth. When Bloomberg in 2013 decided to personally fund the creation of four New York City charter schools, Epstein put out a press release praising him, and calling himself “a long-time supporter of Bloomberg.”

The Trump Connection

But probably the most heavily Epstein-connected New York billionaire backing Cuomo’s run is also a secret one: current US president Donald Trump.

Trump’s scandalous, more-than-decade-long friendship with Epstein is at this point extensively documented: the two shared a girlfriend and ogled women together, they exchanged cryptic messages about a mutual “secret,” Epstein brought teenage girls he was seeing around Trump and recruited at least one of his victims from his resort, while Maxwell, his coconspirator and fellow abuser, was known to introduce women to Trump.

Trump has not donated to Cuomo’s campaign, but he is backing him in other ways. Following a reported phone call between the two about the race, Cuomo disclosed at a Hamptons fundraiser that Trump planned to intervene in the election on his behalf and direct Republican voters toward him. “[T]here will be opportunities to actually cooperate with [Trump]” if Cuomo wins, Cuomo told attendees. When asked if he was communicating with the White House, he replied: “Let’s put it this way: I knew the president very well.”

Cuomo said the same thing back in 2016, shortly after Trump had told an interviewer he and Cuomo “get along very well.” By that point, Trump and his family members had given Cuomo a total of $64,000, donations he defiantly refused to return. Cuomo mused after Trump’s election win that year that his New York roots would be a “bonus” and refused to criticize him for a  spate of hate incidents that followed his victory.

But that doesn’t do justice to the yearslong association between the two, whose families knew each other dating back to the mid-twentieth century. During the 1980s, when Trump became the top corporate donor to Cuomo’s father, he was also one of the high-profile clients of a newly formed law firm where Cuomo and his dad’s top fundraiser were partners, and Cuomo was reportedly eager to retain him as a client. (Another client of the firm: Bear Stearns, where Epstein had gotten his start in finance and whose top executives he continued to be intimately close with through the following decades.)

Trump donated generously to the younger Cuomo’s homelessness nonprofit in 1989 and was seen that year at a Klores-hosted birthday party for Cuomo, where he reportedly spent half an hour “huddling” with him. Trump was a onetime client of the same Rubenstein whom Cuomo counted as a political ally, who also at one point allegedly advised Trump’s future son-in-law after his father was sentenced to federal prison.

Over the coming years, Trump contributed a video message to Cuomo’s bachelor party (“Whatever you do, Andrew, don’t ever, ever fool around”), gave him private advice for his divorce (“That call never happened,” Cuomo’s spokesperson later said), and made Cuomo leave a party they were at to show him “something incredible” in his car — namely, his second wife-to-be, Marla Maples (“How amazing is this?” Trump reportedly said).

Allies in Common

There are other cases: Alan Dershowitz, for instance, the friend and lawyer who secured the “sweetheart deal” that allowed Epstein to keep abusing while in prison, and who, among other things, hired private investigators to discredit one of Epstein’s teen accusers. Cuomo is serving alongside Dershowitz as part of what the attorney called his “legal dream team” to defend Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against war crimes charges, after having repeatedly and vehemently defended Cuomo against his sexual harassment accusations.

There is former president Bill Clinton, who endorsed Cuomo shortly before the primary vote and gave him his first political post in 1997, appointing him his HUD secretary. Clinton’s yearslong friendship with Epstein, which began in the White House, is as well-trodden and documented as Trump’s, with Clinton having flown seventeen times on Epstein’s jet and also contributing a message to his birthday book.

There is former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, with whom Cuomo met with multiple times over his various trips to Israel, and with whom he worked on joint economic development agreements between the country and New York. Barak’s ties to Epstein are now infamous: he flew on Epstein’s plane, began a business partnership with him, and met with him dozens of times, including once when he was photographed entering Epstein’s Manhattan home while covering his face — all of it years after Epstein’s original conviction.

There is also Larry Summers, who has called Cuomo his friend, alongside whom he served in the Clinton administration. Though Summers has not officially endorsed Cuomo’s mayoral run, he has waded into the race by repeatedly attacking and fearmongering about his chief rival, Mamdani. Summers, too, had a longstanding friendship with Epstein, with the Harvard Crimson reporting on their “special connection” as early as 2003, and Summers appearing in the flight logs during the Clinton years and continuing to meet with and solicit money from Epstein well into the early 2010s.

It’s a Big Club

Looking over these associations, what becomes clear — beyond the surprising number of people close to Cuomo or politically backing him who have deep ties to Epstein — is the degree to which US politics has been dominated by a clique of New York elite. Through his wealth and physical proximity, it is a clique that Epstein worked hard to ingratiate himself into.

The ongoing Epstein scandal likely won’t cause the same kinds of problems for Cuomo that it has for Trump. But it is, to put it mildly, highly unusual for a political candidate of any kind to have had this many allies, friends, and political backers linked to the most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker of the century, often both during and long after he was accused of his terrible crimes. Beyond the deeply unsavory nature of that connection, there are real questions about what that says about Cuomo’s closeness with the city’s rich and powerful, and his ability or willingness to defy them if he becomes a mayor.