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New Analysis: Trump Connected to Epstein through Rothschild Financial Network
The same dynasty that endorsed Jeffrey Epstein in 1987 saved Donald Trump from bankruptcy in 1990. The Epstein files now reveal Epstein was not just a math teacher who became a billionaire.
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For fifteen years, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were best friends. They partied together in Palm Beach and Manhattan. They were photographed together, quoted praising each other, and linked in the tabloids. That friendship — and what it may have involved — has dominated the Epstein story since the files began dropping in January.
But the millions of pages released by the Department of Justice this year, combined with Leslie Wexner’s explosive testimony under oath on February 18, reveal something more significant than a friendship. They reveal that Trump and Epstein were not two men who happened to know each other. They were two men built by the same financial dynasty — a dynasty with a two-hundred-year history of building exactly this kind of network.
The Dynasty
To understand what the Epstein files have exposed, you have to understand the Rothschilds — not as an antisemitic trope, but as a specific, documented, two-century-old banking operation with a specific business model.
The Rothschild family built its fortune through a pattern that has repeated across every major financial crisis since the Napoleonic Wars. In 1825, when the Bank of England faced a liquidity crisis, it was the Rothschilds who supplied the gold to avert collapse — making the family indispensable to British finance. In the crash of 1873, while every other major bank in Vienna was destroyed, the Rothschild-founded Creditanstalt was the only institution left standing. It absorbed the market. By 1913, Creditanstalt’s assets equaled the entire Austrian state budget. In 1890, when Barings — then the most powerful bank in London — faced ruin, the Rothschilds organized the rescue on terms that permanently subordinated their rival.
The pattern is always the same. Finance the boom. Survive the crash. Consolidate during the wreckage. The family doesn’t just weather crises. It emerges from them stronger, having absorbed the clients, the assets, and the influence of everyone who didn’t survive.
N.M. Rothschild & Sons set the daily gold price in London for nearly a century. Rothschild & Co is consistently ranked among the top ten global investment banks for mergers and acquisitions. Sir Evelyn de Rothschild served as the personal financial advisor to Queen Elizabeth II. The family’s advisory business, restructuring practice, and wealth management operation span over forty countries.
This is not conspiracy. This is the documented history of a financial institution that has operated continuously since 1798. And in the 1980s, two branches of this dynasty made two decisions that would converge, decades later, in the same White House.
Their Man: Epstein
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On February 18, 2026, Leslie Wexner — the richest man in Ohio, the founder of Victoria’s Secret — testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee. The FBI had named him an unindicted co-conspirator. At eighty-eight, he decided to talk.
In his prepared statement, Wexner named every person who endorsed Jeffrey Epstein before Wexner hired him. There were three. Two were from Bear Stearns — chairman Ace Greenberg and future CEO Jimmy Cayne, who “endorsed Epstein without hesitation.” The third was from the Rothschild dynasty.
“Epstein also offered a reference, Élie de Rothschild,” Wexner said. “When I spoke with Élie, he highly recommended Epstein based upon work Epstein had done for his family.”
Élie de Rothschild — Baron de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking dynasty — personally vouched for a man who had been pushed out of Bear Stearns, had no financial license, and had spent the previous six years doing undocumented work in Europe alongside arms dealers and intelligence-connected figures. Epstein carried an Austrian passport listing a Saudi residence. He had no visible clients, no public track record, and no credentials.
And yet one of the most powerful bankers in the world picked up the phone and told the richest man in Ohio to trust him.
That endorsement opened everything. Within four years, Epstein held Wexner’s power of attorney — total control over a billion-dollar fortune. He embedded himself in the Ohio business network that would eventually feed into JPMorgan Chase. He became a director of the Wexner Foundation. He ran the real estate development of New Albany. He even relocated a CIA-linked cargo airline — Southern Air Transport, the Iran-Contra airline — to Columbus to ship clothes for Wexner’s retail empire. Customs agents found cocaine on one of its planes in 1996.
The Rothschild relationship didn’t end in 1987. It deepened across decades and branches of the family. By 2015, Epstein had signed a $25 million contract with Ariane de Rothschild’s Edmond de Rothschild Holding. He exchanged over five thousand emails with Ariane. He brokered introductions between the Rothschilds and Wall Street’s largest private equity firms. He told Peter Thiel in 2016: “As you probably know, I represent the Rothschilds.” He told Ariane herself that “the Epsteins were the Vienna bankers” — a reference to Gustav Ritter von Epstein, who built the Palais Epstein on Vienna’s Ringstraße in the 1870s, right next to Parliament. The same crash of 1873 that destroyed Gustav’s bank made the Rothschild-founded Creditanstalt the last institution standing.
His relationship with the Rothschild dynasty was real, deep, and sustained from 1987 until the year before his death. And newly released files show he didn’t just work with banking aristocracy — he operated as part of it.
But newly released documents from the Epstein files — never before reported — reveal something remarkable: Jeffrey Epstein operated within and was accepted by the highest circles of European banking aristocracy. The people around him — diplomats, professors, royalty, and the Rothschilds themselves — treated his connection to the Viennese Epstein banking dynasty as fact.
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On March 19, 2011, Epstein sent Eva Dubin a link to the German Wikipedia page for Gustav Ritter von Epstein — the banker who built the Palais Epstein on Vienna’s Ringstraße and founded one of the city’s most prominent banks in the 1860s. “Can you believe it,” Epstein wrote, “there was a justa epstein.” (EFTA00906935)
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The next day, Terje Rød-Larsen — the former United Nations Special Envoy to the Middle East — emailed Epstein after visiting Vienna: “Palais Epstein (next door to parliament) is currently hosting a ministry and owned by the government. I like the sound of von Epstein!” (EFTA01803256)
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Three weeks later, Martin Nowak — an Austrian-born Harvard professor who had received $6.5 million from Epstein for his research program — emailed Epstein with a suggestion: “what about: Jeffrey Ritter von Epstein.” (EFTA00708179)
In June 2012, Nowak visited Vienna and found the family tomb in a Viennese cemetery. He photographed the gravestones of Gustav Ritter von Epstein and his son Dr. Leopold Ritter von Epstein and emailed the image to Epstein with the message: “in my most surrealistic (mahlerian) adventure i found the tomb of your ancestors.” (EFTA01177485)
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In April 2013, Epstein was brokering a business deal with Francesca von Habsburg — a member of the actual Habsburg imperial family. “She’d very likely come into this deal with you,” an associate wrote to Epstein. “She holds the highest ranking equity in the company and has a board seat. She knows Ghislaine FYI.” (EFTA02037333)
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In August 2014, someone named Andrea emailed Epstein after visiting the Palais: “Had a meeting today at Palais Epstein .... So wonderful.. You should try to get it back!” (EFTA02588005)
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And by December 2018, Epstein was telling Ariane de Rothschild herself: “the Epsteins were the Vienna bankers. Bought their bank on the ring, hence still Palais Epstein.” Ariane — the chair of a Rothschild bank, a woman who would know the history of every banking family in Europe — accepted it without question.
What these documents reveal is that Jeffrey Epstein operated as part of the European banking aristocracy — and was accepted as such by UN diplomats, Harvard professors, Habsburg royalty, and the Rothschild family itself. The Rothschild endorsement of 1987 was not a favor extended to a stranger. It was a recognition — of a man who moved through their world as though he belonged in it, and whom they treated accordingly.
Their Man: Trump
In 1990 — three years after Élie de Rothschild endorsed Epstein — Donald Trump was finished.
His three Atlantic City casinos were hemorrhaging cash. He owed $3.4 billion. Every major American bank had written him off. He was facing the kind of bankruptcy that strips away everything, including the name.
The man who saved him was Wilbur Ross.
Ross was a senior managing director at Rothschild Inc. — the New York arm of N.M. Rothschild & Sons. He had joined in 1976 and would spend twenty-four years there, building and running the firm’s bankruptcy restructuring practice. When Trump’s bondholders needed someone to sort out the disaster, Rothschild sent Ross.
Ross did something that no conventional bankruptcy advisor would do. Instead of forcing Trump into liquidation, he told the bondholders that Trump’s name “added value.” He restructured the deal so Trump kept control of his casinos. He convinced creditors to accept losses so that a man who owed $3.4 billion could walk away with his brand intact and his ability to borrow again preserved.
This was the Rothschild model — the same model the family had been running for two centuries. Identify the asset with future value. Restructure around it. Maintain the relationship. The family had done it with governments, with banks, with entire economies. Now their man in New York did it for a bankrupt casino developer from Queens.
Trump never forgot. In 2017, he made Wilbur Ross his Commerce Secretary. Ross was seventy-nine. He had no political career. What he had was twenty-four years at Rothschild, a phone call in 1990 that kept Trump alive, and a vice chairmanship at the Bank of Cyprus — the largest bank on the island, well known as a haven for Russian oligarch money, where Ross’s co-investors included a former KGB agent and Viktor Vekselberg, a Putin associate.
One Network
The first documented interaction between Trump and Epstein is 1992 — two years after Rothschild’s man saved Trump from bankruptcy, and five years after Rothschild’s endorsement launched Epstein into Wexner’s orbit. They became inseparable. Fifteen years of friendship, parties, and shared social circles followed.
But what the Epstein files now show is that the friendship was the surface. Underneath it was a shared financial architecture.
Trump and Epstein used the same banks. For decades, both men moved their money through JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank — simultaneously, during the same years, through the same institutions. JPMorgan processed over $1 billion in Epstein-related transactions while Trump maintained hundreds of millions in accounts at the same bank. Deutsche Bank lent Trump over $2 billion while also banking Epstein — and paid $150 million to settle charges over its Epstein relationship.
The Bear Stearns leadership that launched Epstein’s career collapsed into JPMorgan in 2008 — and JPMorgan acquired the wreckage while already holding both men’s accounts. The Ohio network that Epstein built through Wexner fed into the same JPMorgan through the Bank One merger. Every financial road these two men traveled led to the same places.
And now consider the Commerce Department — the Cabinet seat that controls American trade policy and sanctions enforcement. Under Trump, it has been held by Rothschild’s man and then Epstein’s man. Wilbur Ross, who spent twenty-four years at Rothschild and saved Trump, held the seat from 2017 to 2021. Howard Lutnick, Epstein’s next-door neighbor and business partner — whose family visited Epstein’s island and who co-invested with Epstein — holds it today. The FBI’s own internal slideshow lists both Trump and Lutnick among “prominent names associated with Epstein.”
Same desk. Rothschild’s man, then Epstein’s man.
The Map
This is what the Epstein files have made visible.
The Rothschild dynasty — operating through its documented, two-century-old model of endorsement, restructuring, and crisis consolidation — endorsed Jeffrey Epstein in 1987 and saved Donald Trump in 1990. Both men rose through the same banking institutions. Both men’s financial lives were processed through the same banks at the same time. And when the fifteen-year friendship between them is placed against this financial architecture, it stops looking like coincidence. It looks like two assets of the same network, operating in the same orbit, built by the same machine.
The friendship wasn't their only connection, they shared a financial network.
This is Part 2 of an ongoing investigation. Part 1: “Jeffrey Epstein, the Rothschilds and the Crown“ examined Leslie Wexner’s deposition and the multi-branch Rothschild connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
Zev Shalev is the founder of Narativ and creator of The Greatest Heist investigation. The Epstein Archive contains 120,000+ documents.
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