There’s a running joke among alumni of Manhattan’s elite Dalton School — a dark, uncomfortable joke that landed differently after the summer of 2019. They call it “the Epstein-Barr problem.” Not the herpes virus you learned about in biology class. Something far more unsettling.
It’s the story of how a college dropout named Jeffrey Epstein walked into one of the most prestigious prep schools in America, got handed a teaching job he had no business holding, and decades later died under the watch of the very government led by his benefactor’s son. If you wrote this as fiction, your editor would tell you it was too on the nose.
So let’s walk through it.
The Hire That Makes No Sense
In the early 1970s, the Dalton School was one of the crown jewels of New York City’s private education scene. Tuition was astronomical. The alumni list read like a who’s who of American power — Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, Chevy Chase. And running the show was Donald Barr, a former OSS intelligence officer turned headmaster known for his disciplinarian approach and no-nonsense reputation.
Sometime around 1973-1974, this no-nonsense headmaster made a very nonsensical decision. He brought on a twenty-year-old kid from Coney Island named Jeffrey Epstein to teach calculus and physics to the children of Manhattan’s wealthiest families.
The problem? Epstein had no college degree. He’d bounced around Cooper Union and NYU’s Courant Institute without finishing either program. He had no teaching credentials. No professional background of any kind. He was, by every measurable standard, completely unqualified for the position.
“What we’ve all been wondering,” one of Epstein’s former students later told Yahoo Finance, “is how did this guy get his job in the first place, without a degree.”
That’s the question that never quite gets a satisfying answer.
Harry Segal, a 1974 Dalton graduate who went on to become a senior lecturer at Cornell, told the Huffington Post that alumni had been cracking wise about the connection for years. “The joke has been this is the Epstein-Barr problem at Dalton,” he said.
Nobody was laughing by 2019.
The Young Teacher Who Couldn’t Keep His Eyes Off the Girls
Students from that era remember Epstein vividly — and not for his math instruction. He showed up to school in fur coats, gold chains, and open shirts that exposed his chest. He had a thick Brooklyn accent and an energy that felt more nightclub than classroom.
But it was his behavior with female students that stuck with people for decades.
“He was much more present amongst the students, specifically the girl students, during nonteaching hours,” recalled Scott Spizer, class of 1976. “It seemed just… kind of inappropriate.”
Kerry Lawrence, also class of ’76, put it more directly: “There was a mild sense of creepiness.”
Multiple students reported seeing Epstein show up uninvited to a party where Dalton students were drinking — the only teacher present, socializing with teenagers. “I can remember thinking at the time, ‘This is wrong,'” Spizer told the New York Times.
At least one female student reported Epstein’s advances toward another girl to the headmaster’s office. He was eventually let go — not for the creepy behavior, according to Peter Branch, the interim headmaster who followed Donald Barr, but simply because his teaching “didn’t come up to snuff.”
Of course, by then, Epstein had already made the connections that would launch his career. He’d gotten close to Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the CEO of Bear Stearns, whose children attended Dalton. That relationship catapulted a degree-less twenty-something from teaching teenagers straight onto a Wall Street trading floor.
The Dalton School wasn’t just where Epstein taught math. It was where he learned how the game was played.
The Novel Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s where the story takes a turn from “strange coincidence” to “you cannot be serious.”
In 1973 — the same year he reportedly hired Epstein — Donald Barr published a science fiction novel called Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale.
The plot? A planet ruled by wealthy, bored oligarchs who have grown so depraved that they kidnap humans and sell them into sexual slavery — including teenagers — for the entertainment of the ultra-rich. Enslaved people are forced to perform sexual acts “for the dual purposes of entertainment and controlled procreation.” One character runs a clinic used to breed enslaved people. The rich and powerful operate with total impunity.
Literary critic Becky Ferreira later described the novel as “highly unsettling” due to its fixation on the sexualization of adolescents and its casual treatment of rape as entertainment for the ruling class.
Multiple observers have noted the eerie parallels between the novel’s plot and the crimes Jeffrey Epstein would eventually be convicted of — a network of wealthy elites, the exploitation of young girls, and an operation that functioned in plain sight for decades because the perpetrators were simply too powerful to touch.
Donald Barr wrote a book about sex trafficking by oligarchs, then hired the man who would become America’s most notorious sex trafficker, all within the same year or two. His son would later become the nation’s top law enforcement official during the very period that trafficker met his end in federal custody.
The book, long out of print, now sells for between $150 and $300 on eBay.
Fast Forward: The Attorney General and the Dead Prisoner
Let’s jump ahead forty-five years to July 2019.
Jeffrey Epstein, now a convicted sex offender and billionaire financier with ties to presidents, royalty, and some of the most powerful people on earth, is arrested by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York on sex trafficking charges that could put him away for life.
The man overseeing the Department of Justice at the time? William Barr — Donald Barr’s son.
Immediately, the conflict-of-interest questions started flying. It wasn’t just the father-Epstein connection. Bill Barr had also worked at Kirkland & Ellis, the very law firm that had represented Epstein during his sweetheart plea deal in Florida back in 2008 — the deal that let him plead guilty to minor state charges and serve just thirteen months in county jail, with work release six days a week.
Barr announced he would recuse himself from any review of that old Florida deal. But from the active prosecution in New York? The one that could actually put Epstein away? He declined to step aside.
Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi called it “a distinction without a difference.” Legal ethics experts noted that Barr’s decision raised serious questions about the appearance of impartiality. Between his father hiring Epstein, his former law firm representing Epstein, and his boss’s documented social history with Epstein, the optics were, to put it charitably, terrible.
August 10, 2019: The Death That Changed Everything
One month after his arrest, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. The official ruling: suicide by hanging.
The circumstances surrounding his death read like a checklist of institutional failure — or something worse.
The two guards assigned to check on Epstein every thirty minutes had allegedly fallen asleep and didn’t conduct rounds for approximately three hours. They later falsified log entries to cover the gap.
Epstein’s cellmate had been transferred out the day before, leaving him alone in his cell — a violation of standard protocol for someone on suicide watch or recently removed from it.
Of the eleven surveillance cameras in the Special Housing Unit where Epstein was held, ten were reportedly not recording due to malfunctioning hard drives. The one camera that was functioning captured only a hallway — not the entrance to Epstein’s tier or his cell door.
Attorney General William Barr said he was “appalled” by the death and pledged to personally lead the investigation. Senior members of his staff arrived at the MCC shortly after the death — a move that multiple sources with decades of experience in the federal prison system described as highly unusual. One source told CBS News they couldn’t recall ever seeing members of the Attorney General’s senior staff investigate an inmate death in more than twenty years of service.
Barr personally reviewed approximately eleven hours of surveillance footage and declared that it clearly showed no one had entered the area where Epstein was housed. He concurred with the medical examiner’s suicide ruling and described the entire episode as “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”
Case closed. Or so it seemed.
The Footage That Doesn’t Match the Story
In 2025, the FBI publicly released that surveillance footage — and things started to unravel.
CBS News conducted an in-depth forensic analysis and found significant inconsistencies between Barr’s description of the video and what it actually showed. The footage, according to multiple independent forensic analysts, did not provide a clear enough view to definitively prove that no one entered Epstein’s cell area.
Forensic experts Jim Stafford and Conor McCourt examined the released footage using specialized software and found that it wasn’t a raw export from the prison’s DVR system at all. Metadata analysis showed the file was created on May 23, 2025 — nearly six years after Epstein’s death — and appeared to be a screen capture of two separate video clips stitched together, not a continuous recording.
A cursor and a menu bar were visible on screen at various points in the footage.
Then came the bombshell from newly released Department of Justice documents: investigators reviewing the surveillance footage had observed what appeared to be an orange-colored shape — consistent with someone wearing a prison uniform — moving up a staircase toward Epstein’s isolated, locked tier at approximately 10:39 p.m. on the night of his death.
Official reviews of Epstein’s death made no mention of this figure. Barr’s public statements indicated no one entered the area. Former deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino had declared on national television: “There’s video clear as day — he’s the only person in there and the only person coming out.”
The released footage told a different story. Or at the very least, it told an incomplete one.
Additionally, the New York City Medical Examiner’s office reviewed the jail surveillance footage six days after Epstein’s death and concluded the video was too blurry to identify any individuals. Hours later, that same office publicly ruled the death a suicide.
Dr. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist retained by Epstein’s brother Mark, stated that Epstein had likely been dead for several hours before he was found and that because the body had been moved, determining the exact time of death was impossible.
Congressional Questions Without Answers
In August 2025, William Barr was called before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to answer questions behind closed doors about his involvement in the Epstein death investigation. The committee had issued deposition subpoenas to several figures, including Barr, former President Bill Clinton, former AG Eric Holder, and former FBI Director James Comey.
The questions for Barr were pointed: What exactly did the video he reviewed show? Was there a missing minute in the footage? Why did his public statements appear to contradict what the released footage actually depicted? Why was the involvement of his senior staff at MCC so unusual compared to standard protocol?
As of this writing, satisfying answers remain elusive.
The Thread That Won’t Break
Let’s lay out the timeline one more time, because seeing it all together is what makes it so extraordinary:
1973: Donald Barr, headmaster of the Dalton School and former OSS intelligence officer, publishes a science fiction novel about wealthy oligarchs running a sex slavery operation involving teenagers.
1973-1974: Around the same time, he hires a twenty-year-old college dropout named Jeffrey Epstein to teach math and physics to teenagers at his elite Manhattan school. Multiple students later recall Epstein’s inappropriate fixation on female students.
2008: Jeffrey Epstein, now a billionaire with connections to the most powerful people in the world, receives a sweetheart plea deal in Florida, represented in part by the law firm Kirkland & Ellis.
2009: William Barr, Donald’s son, joins Kirkland & Ellis.
2019: William Barr becomes Attorney General of the United States. Jeffrey Epstein is arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in New York. Barr declines to recuse himself from the prosecution.
August 10, 2019: Epstein is found dead in his cell under circumstances that a majority of Americans — across party lines — do not believe constitute a simple suicide. Barr personally oversees the investigation and declares it a suicide.
2025: Released footage and documents contradict key elements of Barr’s public statements about what the surveillance video showed.
Any single one of these connections could be dismissed as coincidence. All of them together? That starts to feel like something else entirely.
To be clear: none of this proves wrongdoing by William Barr or his late father. The medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, and no official investigation has concluded otherwise. The documented failures at MCC — the sleeping guards, the broken cameras, the transferred cellmate — could genuinely be the “perfect storm of screw-ups” that Barr described.
But the reason the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” meme became one of the most enduring cultural phenomena of the last decade isn’t because people are conspiracy theorists by nature. It’s because the official story has more holes than the MCC surveillance system.
And at the center of it all sits a family connection so improbable, so layered with coincidence upon coincidence, that even the most measured observer has to pause and ask: how is all of this possible?
The Dalton alumni had the right name for it all along.
It really is an Epstein-Barr problem.