How did I end up in Epstein’s little black book?

Every time Jeffrey Epstein is in the news, I start getting calls from strangers wanting to scream abuse at me. This happened a lot when the billionaire financier was found dead in his jail cell last year after being arrested on sex trafficking charges, and it has started again following the arrest of his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell a couple of weeks ago. The reason is that my contact details were in Epstein’s ‘little black book’, and whenever his name pops up some kindly soul takes it upon themselves to post a picture of the relevant page, which shows my mobile phone number, on Twitter. I may have to change my number, so frequent have the calls become.

On one level, it’s quite flattering. In a piece about the book last year, the New York Times described it as ‘a symbol of the exclusive world of the very famous and very rich’. And it does read like the modern-day equivalent of ‘the four hundred’, the crème-de-la-crème of international society compiled by the social arbiter Ward McAllister and printed in the New York Times in 1892. Among the names in the ‘little black book’ are Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Mick Jagger, Ted Kennedy, Alan Dershowitz, Courtney Love, Peter Mandelson and Ralph Fiennes. My details appear opposite those of ‘Yugoslavia, Prince Michael of’.

If Ghislaine had offered me a lift on Epstein’s private jet in the mid-1990s, I would have accepted

I can honestly say, hand on heart, I’ve no idea how I ended up in Epstein’s address book. I never met him and never set foot in any of his houses, let alone on his private island. Not that anyone believes me when I say this. Ever since the contents of the book were published on a gossip website in 2015, the people in it have been frantically protesting their innocence.