Jeffrey Epstein Born in Brooklyn, New York

Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Seymour G. Epstein, worked for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation throughout his career. His mother, Pauline (née Stolofsky), was a homemaker and later a school aide.

The Epstein family lived in the Sea Gate neighborhood of Coney Island, a gated community on the western tip of Brooklyn that was home to a largely Jewish, working-class population. Epstein had one brother, Mark, who later became a real estate developer in New York City.

Classmates and teachers later recalled Epstein as intellectually gifted, particularly in mathematics. He attended public schools in Brooklyn and showed little in his early life to suggest the trajectory he would later take. His social origins were resolutely middle-class, which makes his eventual accumulation of extraordinary wealth and access all the more striking — and all the more dependent on the patronage he received from Les Wexner and others.

Epstein later minimized and obscured details of his early life in social and professional settings, sometimes implying more distinguished origins than were accurate.