The Cafe' [Think Tank]- Bill Clinton as you have never seen him before... :-)

Painting of Clinton in blue dress hung in Jeffrey Epstein’s home

 

Macabre decor of financier’s Manhattan residence included prosthetic eyeballs, a human chessboard, stuffed poodle, and doll swinging from a chandelier

By TOI STAFF 

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly had an oil painting of former US president Bill Clinton dressed in women’s clothing conspicuously displayed in his Manhattan townhouse.

“It was hanging up there prominently — as soon as you walked in — in a room to the right,” a law enforcement source told The New York Post on Wednesday. “Everybody who saw it laughed and smirked.”

The artwork by artist Petrina Ryan-Kleid shows the former US president draped over a chair in the Oval Office, dressed in a blue dress and red heels recalling his tryst with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

It wasn’t the only oddity in the sprawling 51,000-square-ft. home of the US financier and convicted pedophile.

According to The New York Times, Epstein had commissioned a mural of “a photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.” A female doll swung from a chandelier, and the residence touted a human chessboard featuring scantily clad models of his staff, according to the report. The doll, The New York Post added Wednesday, was wearing a wedding dress.

Jeffrey Epstein, on March 28, 2017. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. (New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP, File)

“The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers,” Vanity Fair reported in 2003.

Epstein, according to that profile, also had a stuffed black poodle perched on a grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that,” he was quoted as saying. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”

“This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries,” Vanity Fair said, describing the property as supposedly “Manhattan’s largest private residence.”

Epstein, who apparently committed suicide in his prison cell on Saturday, had hobnobbed with the rich and famous for years, counting Clinton and US President Donald Trump among his friends. Clinton and Trump both said they hadn’t seen Epstein in years and knew nothing of his alleged misconduct when new sex trafficking charges were brought against him last month.

Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña recently said the former president “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.” He said that, in 2002 and 2003, Clinton took four trips on Epstein’s plane with multiple stops and that staff and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg.

Epstein is believed to have killed himself early Saturday while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The cause of the death has not been announced, but a person familiar with operations at the lockup said Epstein was discovered in his cell with a bedsheet around his neck. His death has spawned numerous conspiracy theories, many of them involving the Clintons.

Epstein had been denied bail and faced up to 45 years behind bars on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges unsealed last month. He had pleaded not guilty and was awaiting trial next year.

Epstein owned a private island in the Caribbean, homes in Paris and New York City, a New Mexico ranch, and a fleet of high-priced cars.