Jeffrey Epstein liked to sleep in a 54-degree chill. That’s the detail that a woman who was involved with Epstein in the early 2000s remembers most vividly because she couldn’t nod off in the cold: “I was like, I'm fucking freezing. I'm going to die of hypothermia.” But Epstein had his rules. He never wanted to go to restaurants, preferring his chef's meals of mostly plants and grilled protein. He meditated each morning, in complete silence. He worked out but was wary of bulking up too much, theorizing that too much muscle mass was detrimental to one’s intelligence. “He had theories about…everything,” the woman adds.

In addition to his sexual predation with “tweens and teens,” Epstein pursued ambitious, beautiful New York City women in their 20s in the early 2000s, some of them ex-models seeking a professional afterlife. To this woman, and others, Epstein introduced himself as the owner of a hedge fund with clients investing $1 billion or more. He kept his child molestation secret, and came off as a gentle, erudite recluse. He was often at movie premieres, sometimes with a blonde on each arm—a blonde of legal age, but still, as noted this week by David Boies, usually under 25 years old. His predation had not been reported to the police yet, but there were indications that he was somewhat different than most mature men his age. Eleanora Kennedy, the elegant wife of powerhouse lawyer Michael Kennedy, recalls asking Epstein to underwrite a premiere party at the Metropolitan Club for The White Countess, a Merchant Ivory film released in 2005. “I got him on the phone and explained that the event was also a benefit for a women’s medical center conducting a study about menopause,” says Kennedy. “As soon as I said ‘menopause,' he said, ‘Ms. Kennedy, if you don’t say that word again, I’ll send you a check for $10,000.’”

Like most of the older men who date young women, Epstein seemed to take great pride in his behavior. He seemed to desperately want other important men to perceive him as a great lothario, Genghis Khan in a monogrammed sweatshirt. A former model who was on Epstein’s 727 shortly after she graduated college recalls him taking her and some older men on a tour to show off his custom-designed, padded floors. “When I saw that I thought, Wow, rich people are weird,” she says. “I was so stupid and naïve—Why are padded floors cool? I was too young to get it.” The men simply laughed and winked, joking with each other that Epstein padded his floors so that he could have sex on the floor at 10,000 feet.

Epstein was open about his interest in sex, presenting it as his only vice. He did not drink, smoke cigarettes, or take drugs. He was a germaphobe who hated shaking hands and preferred to spend most of his time off his massage table talking with important men like President Bill Clinton about politics on speakerphone (he liked it when a woman he was involved with listened in). He seemed to be a cut above most of the older rich guys who were prowling the city’s “models and bottles” scene, as the post-9/11 era of downtown nightlife was known. A new nightclub formula had just been devised: ice buckets of Cristal and Ciroc “bottles” were set up at leather banquettes, alongside every kind of model—Victoria’s Secret model, runway model, supermodel, ex-model—and if you were a rich older guy who wanted to take a seat, it could cost you up to $10,000, though Puffy and Leo didn’t have to pay a thing.