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Meet Peggy Siegal, the NYC publicist who got Jeffrey Epstein into A-list events and has been called the 'best way' to make sure your movie wins an Oscar
Meet Peggy Siegal, the NYC publicist who got Jeffrey Epstein into A-list events and has been called the 'best way' to make sure your movie wins an Oscar
Taylor Nicole RogersJul 17, 2019, 18:13 IST
JIMI CELESTE/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
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Peggy Siegal is a prominent New York publicist who has organized promotional screenings for films including "The Big Short," "Argo," and "The Revenant."
Siegal invited registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to her screenings after Epstein was released from jail in 2010, The New York Times reported.
Siegal told The New York Times that she ended her relationship with Epstein at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017.
Peggy Siegal, one of New York's most powerful publicists, has spent over 30 years connecting New York's tastemakers to generate press and awards for the films she represents. Until two years ago, one of those influential people was registered sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
"I was a kind of plugged-in girl around town who knew a lot of people," Siegal told The New York Times. "And I think that's what he wanted from me, a kind of social goings-on about New York."
In 2010, a year after Epstein was released from a 13-month prison sentence for solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution in Florida, Siegal invited him to her events and even planned a dinner party at his house for Prince Andrew, according to The New York Times.
His relationship with Siegal was not the only way Epstein, who was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors on July 6, 2019, attempted to raise his profile during that time. Business Insider previously reported that former President Bill Clinton and Britain's Prince Andrew were also in Epstein's network.
Keep reading for a look inside Peggy Siegal's life - and her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Siegal's father owned a light bulb company, according to The New York Times, and Siegal's mother wanted her to focus more on social-climbing than building a career. She gave Siegal the name "Peggy" because she "thought that name would sound great in the halls of Vogue magazine," Siegal told the newspaper, and refused to send Siegal to the same elite private high school as her son.
"Every day in high school I had to watch my brother come home in a school uniform, going to school with rich kids in New York," Siegal said, according to the Times. "I was going to school at Fort Lee High with the children of hairdressers and gas station attendants. This was beyond humiliating."
"As a Jewish princess from New Jersey, I always wanted to be a queen," Siegal told the Times in 2016.
She's hosted events for journalists and members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to promote films including "The Big Short," "Argo," and "The Revenant."
Siegal specializes in hosting lunches, teas, and dinners for filmmakers to help them promote their work. She described the events to The New York Times as "a press conference wrapped around a piece of chicken."
Vanity Fair reported that Siegel is "the engine that drives" the New York Oscar circuit. "The best way to win an Oscar is to make a great film," the magazine observed, "but the best way to guarantee it is to get Peggy to shine a light on it."
Siegal has a directory of 30,000 contacts that includes Barbara Walters, Martha Stewart, Michael Douglas, Darren Aronofsky, and Sofia Coppola, according to The New York Times.
Siegal's vast social network is important to her work: She said she gets big names to attend her events to help draw in journalists and film critics. For example, she got Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel to attend an event for the Hungarian Holocaust film "Son of Saul," she told The New York Times, because "all Jews want to meet Elie Wiesel."
To make things easier, she told The New York Times she keeps her contacts list sorted by both nationality and profession.
For the past decade, Siegal has mailed a creative Valentine's Day card to her contacts.
Her 2019 card featured a picture of Siegal in a spacesuit imitating the movie poster for "First Man," a copy of the card obtained by The Hollywood Reporter shows.
"Happy Valentine's Day. I love you to the moon and back," the card reads.
Siegal always signs her cards and emails "XOXO Peggy," according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Among those contacts is registered sex offender and multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein.
"He said he'd served his time and assured me that he changed his ways," Siegal said about her reunion with Epstein after he was released from prison in 2010, according to The New York Times. The pair had been friends before his prison term, so she began to add him back to the guest list of some of her events.
Siegal planned a dinner party for Epstein at his Upper East Side home. The event was attended by Britain's Prince Andrew, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, and Chelsea Handler in 2010. "The invitation was positioned as, 'Do you want to have dinner with Prince Andrew?'" Ms. Siegal said. Many of the guests didn't know who the host was or about his criminal history, The New York Times reported.
A spokesperson for Siegal told Business Insider that Siegal's relationship with Epstein was social, not professional.
Siegal told The New York Times that she ended her relationship with Epstein at the height of the #MeToo era in 2017.
Siegal has said that she frequently goes under the knife.
"The best way to combat gender and age discrimination is to knock them out when you walk into a room," Siegal told The New York Times.
At her sixtieth and seventieth birthday parties, Siegal even passed out pamphlets with her beauty secrets, according to New York Magazine. The most recent edition, entitled "How to Look Like Me at 70," lists her favorite surgeons and beauty products.
She's known for being a tough boss.
Siegal isn't the easiest person to work with, The New York Times has reported. She has been known to yell at her subordinates and struggles to remember their names.
Many of her former employees are successful, however, going on to work for the Governor's Office of Motion Picture and Television Development, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros., according to The New York Times.
She lives in an Upper East Side apartment that used to belong to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' father.
Siegal lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment on East 74th Street, according to The New York Times. She said that she works seven days a week and is too focused on her career for a family.
