Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book is a horrifying document | Moira Donegan

Conspiracy theorists wonder about what Epstein and his powerful friends may have done to cover up his crimes. But they barely were covered up

Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of friends. When his girlfriend-cum-assistant and convicted fellow sex trafficker, Ghislane Maxwell, set out to compile letters, drawings and well wishes from friends in celebration of the pedophile financier's 50th birthday in 2003, the resulting scrapbook was 238 pages long. The book, titled The First 50 Years, included letters from prominent well-wishers such as former president Bill Clinton and the Bear Stearns executives James Cayne and Alan Greenberg, as well as from the late Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout and Epstein's fellow pedophilic rapist.

The lawyer and longtime Epstein friend Alan Dershowitz contributed a mock cover of the magazine Vanity Fair, which was working on a profile of Epstein at the time; Peter Mandelson, until this week the UK ambassador to the United States, wrote that Epstein was my best pal!" The fashion designer Vera Wang compared Epstein to the contestant on the reality series The Bachelor, and the Microsoft executive and Bill Gates deputy Nathan Myhrvold included photos from a recent trip to Africa, writing that they were more appropriate than anything I could put in words". The photos included images of lions and zebras copulating, as well as of a zebra with a visible penis.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist