In the mid-2010s, well after he was already a convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein began closely following the sexual assault case against another prominent figure: Philadelphia-born actor and comedian Bill Cosby.
Among the millions of documents released Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice — in the latest tranche of what’s become known as the Epstein files — are emails detailing a neighborly relationship between the disgraced financier and the entertainer, who both owned townhouses on East 71st Street in Manhattan.
Epstein and his representatives corresponded with Cosby, invited him to dinner parties, and at one point sought to retain Cosby’s personal chef as his own.
When Cosby’s prosecution gained steam in 2015, Epstein and his inner circle became devout followers of the legal proceedings in Montgomery County, where Cosby was ultimately sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for sexual assault. (The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the sentence in 2021 after Cosby served nearly three years.) Emails indicate Epstein often saw parallels to his own ongoing legal issues — and also viewed the Cosby case as a valuable distraction from his own misconduct in the news.
“im getting bad press again,” Epstein wrote to a friend in January 2015, days after a new legal development emerged against him in Florida. “as i predicted. now that cosby was off the sex headline they need to resuurect a new one.”
Before their separate criminal troubles escalated, the two men were neighbors, living among other Wall Street elites and big Hollywood names. On Jan. 4, 2013, Epstein ordered his assistant to deliver a typo-strewn dinner invitation to Cosby’s home, with a who’s-who guest list.
“Take this note to bull cosby s house. dear neighbor. woody allen, lewis black, bobbly slayton are having, dinner at my house, thought you might like to join. a neighborhood event,” Epstein said.
Days later, another person, whose name has been redacted from the records, wrote Epstein to say that he heard Cosby was traveling and could not attend the Jan. 23 dinner. “Otherwise, he would have loved to come,” the person wrote, relaying a secondhand message through Cosby’s “house man.”
Attempts to reach Cosby on Sunday were not successful.
Epstein’s interest in Cosby’s case was intertwined with his apparent desire to do business with the comedian. Between 2017 and 2018, he had his real estate broker aggressively pursue Cosby’s team about buying his house across the street from Epstein’s own seven-story home.
Around October 2017, Richard Kahn, a lawyer who worked closely with Epstein, sent the financier an email with the subject line “Bill Cosby is reportedly going broke paying for multiple legal bills.” Epstein asked his New York-based real estate broker David Mitchell to begin looking into purchasing “the Cosby house.”
For more than a year between Cosby’s trial and retrial in Montgomery County, Epstein hounded Mitchell for updates on Cosby’s interest in selling the residence. He even emailed a former New York Times reporter in 2018, saying that he was “trying to buy Cosby.”
Cosby’s attorney eventually told Mitchell the property wasn’t for sale, emails show, but that a good offer might “get a conversation started.” Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
Cosby, now 88, went into foreclosure on both of his Manhattan homes. He listed the East 71st Street address for sale in 2025 for $29 million.
In Cosby, Epstein sees parallel
The records show that by 2015, Epstein and his inner circle were trading emails of news stories about Cosby and analyzing court filings from litigation against the entertainer.
As the case mounted, Epstein and his longtime friend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, looked for rulings that they could use in their own favor.
“Does the new Cosby information cause any issues for you?” someone, whose name is redacted in the files, wrote to Epstein in July 2015. The email was sent shortly after Montgomery County prosecutors reopened a criminal investigation against Cosby for the 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand.
In October that year, Epstein emailed Maxwell with a judicial memorandum responding to a motion to get one of the sexual assault lawsuits against Cosby thrown out. (Maxwell’s attorneys would later use Cosby’s overturned conviction in 2021 to argue for the dismissal of her own sex trafficking case.)
Others in Epstein’s network were interested in Cosby as well. Epstein’s accountant emailed him a link to a news story about Cosby’s arrest in December 2015 and continued to send his client updates on the trial over the next several years.
At one point, the case even kindled a creative idea. Epstein emailed film producer Barry Josephson in 2015 with an idea for a movie that was “a fictionalized account of what happens to people falsely accused,” taking inspiration from the Cosby case as well as debunked sexual assault allegations on college campuses that occurred years prior.
“Few willing to stand up and say that these girls are liars,” Epstein wrote. (Josephson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.)
‘Burned at the stake’
Epstein emailed others about the Cosby trial, too, most often Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of filmmaker Woody Allen, who lived near Epstein and visited his home often for intimate house parties.
Allen has faced public criticism for his relationship with Previn — a daughter adopted by his former partner, actress Mia Farrow. Farrow also publicly accused him of sexual abuse of their adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, which Allen has repeatedly denied.
In May 2016, while inviting Previn to dinner with Noam Chomsky via email, Epstein offered a seemingly unsolicited take on the Cosby case.
“Whether guilty or not, [he’s] being burned at the stake,” Epstein wrote.
“They all want blood,” Previn responded.
The topic dominated their email correspondence for the next two years.
Allen, now 90, also took the side of Cosby in conversations with Epstein.
“[He] is being persecuted. Ok, even if he’s guilty no one died,” the filmmaker wrote in a 2016 exchange with Epstein. “He’s been publicly humiliated, stripped of honors at schools, forced to cancel comedy tour, dropped from tv series that was in the works, old show taken off the air. Do they want his head on a pike?”
The Inquirer messaged Allen’s last known publicist for comment on Sunday and did not receive an immediate response.
Epstein committed suicide in a Manhattan jail following his 2019 arrest on child sex trafficking charges.
