THE LANGS: The Family That Called Epstein ‘Dad’

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

The public story of Jack and Caroline Lang was supposed to be a triumph of culture and enlightened politics in the Fifth Republic. The private record now emerging from the Epstein files reads more like the biography of a dynasty that treated power as a family asset and a convicted sexual predator as a useful friend.

For years, the Langs projected an image that suited Parisian elites. Jack was the flamboyant minister who turned the Fête de la Musique into a global export and made culture a stage for presidential grandeur. Monique Lang (Jack’s wife) was the unofficial gatekeeper at the ministry and later at Place des Vosges, the one who knew every artist and every journalist. Their daughters, Caroline and Valerie,  grew up inside that glow. From the outside, the clan looked like a modern court that existed to celebrate art, ideas, and progressive politics. Sadly, Valérie, their youngest daughter, was taken by cancer at the age of 47.

Caroline herself embodied this official narrative. For almost three decades, she ran Warner Bros Television France, managing multimillion euro catalogues and deals with TF1, Canal+, and other broadcasters, while presenting herself as a bridge between French culture and the global industry. In parallel, she accumulated positions that signalled virtue and influence, from co-chair of Pour les femmes dans les médias, a group pushing for women in media, to seats on the board of a strategic commission of the National Centre for Cinema and Animated Images (CNC) and on the board of the Séries Mania festival. By January 2026, she had just been appointed executive director of the Syndicat des producteurs indépendants, the main body representing independent producers.

IMAGE: Caroline Lang in 1995 in Paris. (Source: Eric Robert / Sygma via Getty Images)

On paper, she was also a guardian of the vulnerable. Since 2021, she had quietly sat on the board of Le Refuge, a foundation that shelters LGBT youth thrown out of their homes often after violence and abuse. She joined at a delicate moment, as Le Refuge tried to recover from its own scandals around sexual harassment and mismanagement by its founder and to rebuild an image of probity with a more presentable board. In January 2022, Nicolas Noguier, the co-founder and former president of the Refuge foundation, and his partner, Frédéric Gal, former director general of the foundation, were charged with “rape” and “sexual assault” by the public prosecutor of Montpellier.

The night the Epstein files revealed her correspondence and offshore companies, the foundation’s administrators called an emergency ethics meeting, then accepted her resignation with a statement stressing that they had to protect “the most vulnerable LGBT youth” from the fallout.

The Epstein documents released by the US Department of Justice in January 2026 tell a colder story. They show a family that blurred public duty and private gain until the line disappeared. They also highlight a daughter who became one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest French contacts, with a father whose name ended up written into the dissolution clause of an offshore company in the US Virgin Islands, funded entirely by that same felon. The Epstein files reveal multiple threads of emails dripping with affection, big kisses and little hearts, even after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor and after major American investigations exposed the scale of his abuse.

Today, the Langs say they were naïve. They insist they were misled by a charming financier who fooled half the world. Yet their own correspondence, their offshore structures, the money that moved through foundations and trusts, and the last will of Epstein himself point to something much closer to an alliance built on access, prestige, and the quiet promise that certain transactions would never see daylight.

French authorities are finally treating it as more than an embarrassing friendship. On 6 February 2026, the Parquet national financier (PNF) opened a preliminary investigation into Jack and Caroline Lang for aggravated tax fraud laundering, with a mandate that explicitly targets undeclared structures in the US Virgin Islands. Within days, police raided the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in Paris and searched other sites linked to the family, including associations used as financial relays. Under heavy political pressure, Jack resigned from the presidency of the Institute on 7 and 8 February. On 16 February, investigators returned to the IMA with search warrants and seized more documents, a rare show of force against a flagship cultural institution.

At the political summit, the case was treated as a threat to the Republic’s image. President Emmanuel Macron and his prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, summoned Lang to the Foreign Ministry before his resignation, an audience normally reserved for ambassadors or crises of state. The Socialist Party, Jack’s old home, refused to defend him. Its first secretary, Olivier Faure, noted that no evidence tied Lang to sexual crimes, but called his public comments “worrying” and said he should contemplate resigning from his remaining positions.

Caroline abandoned a freshly obtained leadership role in the Independent Producers’ Union (SPI) and stepped down from the board of Le Refuge as the scandal deepened, as confirmed by Le Refuge’s own notices. Séries Mania and other organisations where she had influence also moved to distance themselves. What remains is the wreckage of a myth and a set of questions that go beyond one disgraced clan.

From Maxwell’s patronage to Epstein’s web

To understand how the Lang family slid into Epstein’s orbit, you have to start with another fallen mogul, Robert Maxwell. In the late nineteen eighties, Jack Lang was not only French President François Mitterrand’s most media-friendly minister, but he was also an ally of the British media baron who would later die off the deck of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine and be exposed as a colossal thief of his workers’ pensions.

IMAGE: Jack Lang was François Mitterrand’s favourite, who appointed him Minister of Culture in 1981. (Source: Jean-Claude Francolon/Gamma Rapho)

By 1987, that alliance had hardened into a shared project. As France debated the privatisation of  TF1, the country’s main television channel, Maxwell and construction tycoon Francis Bouygues fought for control. With Jack Lang’s discreet support, they convinced President Mitterrand to let them bid for the crown jewel of the French airwaves. If Lang pushed to ensure Maxwell was in the game alongside Bouygues, he did not do so on his own initiative; he was acting in line with the Élysée’s preferences, in a configuration where Mitterrand’s powerful adviser Samuel Pisar (Anthony Bliken’ step father) also loomed in the background, a man whose name would later appear in Epstein’s black book.

Maxwell’s money was woven into the fabric of Lang’s political glory. When the Grande Arche de la Défense risked collapse as a project, Maxwell injected one hundred and fifty million francs to keep it alive. He put half a million francs into events and commemorations for the bicentenary of the Revolution. In July 1989, he stood at Lang’s side at a lavish inauguration of the Grande Arche. The businessman even owned a printing press in Blois, Jack’s political stronghold.

IMAGE: Robert Maxwell and Jack Lang at the Ministry of Culture for the press conference of the Mission for the Bicentennial of the French Revolution (Source: Pierre Vauthey/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

Inside this ecosystem, there was no clear dividing line between public service, private influence, and family advancement. At the ministry, everyone knew that Monique Lang acted as de facto communications chief, channelling artists, producers, and media figures around her husband’s schedule. Their daughters never escaped this gravitational field.

IMAGE: Monique Lang (Source: Rachid Bellak / Bestimage)

Caroline’s early career was born straight out of that world. After small roles in films by Robert Bresson and Francesco Rosi (L’Argent and Chronique d’une mort), she earned a doctorate in public law, then moved in 1989 directly into the arms of her father’s patron. Maxwell Communications hired her in London, then sent her to New York as a senior international editor at Maxwell Macmillan.

She was not alone in the Maxwell universe. Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert’s favourite daughter, was working in the same empire, moving through the same social circles in London and New York. Ian Maxwell would later say it was highly likely that Ghislaine and Caroline crossed paths and describe a friendship between their two families, as reported by Le Monde.

IMAGE: Caroline, Monique and Jack Lang at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, September 29, 2019 (Source: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images/US Department Of Justice/“Le Monde”)

It is now clear that Ghislaine’s closeness to Jeffrey Epstein did not begin in Manhattan but stretches back to the nineteen eighties, when she was already part of his orbit well before the glossy New York years that later drew public attention, as reconstructed in EpsteinExposed and related court documents. When Robert Maxwell’s body was found in the Atlantic in November 1991, floating off the coast of the Spanish Canary Islands, and his looting of pension funds came to light, his empire collapsed, and Caroline lost her job. She stayed in New York all the same, signing with Time Warner as an international project manager until the end of 1994.

Around the same time, Ghislaine also fled London for Manhattan. Her charm and social fluency rapidly made her a star of the New York elite. It was in that city that she openly appeared as Epstein’s partner and accomplice in an international trafficking system, as detailed in her US indictment and trial coverage.

This is the background to a name that appears years later in a very different black book. When the FBI seized Jeffrey Epstein’s address book in the Florida investigation, they found an entry for Caroline Lang long before the Paris dinners she and her father now cite as the beginning of everything. The book listed three phone numbers and a New York address for her, apartment 9C at 400 East 52nd Street.

IMAGE: Caroline Lang is listed in Epstein’s black book on page 31 (Source: epsteinblackbook.com)

To this day, Caroline refuses to explain how she ended up there, as noted by Mediapart. She maintains that she first met Epstein only in the early 2010s in Paris and that the relationship deepened around 2012 when she was living in the sixth arrondissement, recently divorced and raising two daughters, a version she repeated to RFI. It is possible that Epstein and his network harvested her details earlier as a promising contact. It is also possible that an undisclosed meeting took place in the nineties when Caroline and Ghislaine moved through the same Manhattan salons. A February 2013 and January 2014 internal memo from Epstein’s assistant listing “Jack Lang and his daughter Caroline” among Paris “To See” contacts, alongside Jean Luc Brunel, Daniel Siad, Michel Hazanavicius, Linda Pinto, Axel Dumas, Daniel Athena, Ariane de Rothschild, Terje Rød-Larsen (recently arrested), and many others name cited in the Epstein files, is evidence that by then the Langs were already fully integrated into Epstein’s French strategy.

The gap between the public story and the documentary trail is not a detail or an anomaly. It is the first warning sign that the Lang narrative has been carefully curated.

Intimacy in plain sight

By March 2012, there is no doubt that the relationship is real and intense. Epstein is already a registered sex offender, convicted in 2008 in Florida for soliciting prostitution from a minor. His case has attracted media attention in Europe, and his Wikipedia entry clearly mentions his abuse of underage girls. A simple search on the internet would have quickly provided clarity. This is the man who hosts a quiet dinner in Paris with Woody Allen, Soon Yi Previn, US ambassador Charles Rivkin, his wife, and also Caroline Lang.

Two days later, Caroline goes to Avenue Foch. She enters Epstein’s luxurious apartment at number twenty-two and spends time with him discussing Japanese literature and Vladimir Nabokov, whose most famous novel, Lolita, is nothing less than the confession of a middle-aged predator obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl. This scene appears verbatim in the DOJ email exhibits.

IMAGE: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Read by Jeremy Irons, Unabridged (Source: Epstein file EFTA01612111 | DOJ)

That was not the only time the Lolita motif floated through Epstein’s cultural friendships. Other correspondence in the files shows him exchanging references to Nabokov and underage heroines with Leon Botstein, the long-standing president of Bard College. When Epstein dictated the Bard application letter for Caroline’s granddaughter, Jack dutifully signed.

Within forty eight hours of that first Paris dinner, Caroline moves from cultural conversation to family intimacy. She invites Epstein to the most sacred ritual of the clan, Sunday lunch with her parents and daughters at Place des Vosges. The apartment, a one hundred and thirty square metre jewel in a seventeenth century building in the heart of Paris, has been revamped on the advice of architect Fernand Pouillon, with ceilings stripped back for height, a Philippe Starck table, a banquette by Andrée Putman, and drawings by Pierre Alechinsky and Jean Tinguely on the walls, as described in the Le Monde investigation.

Around that table, Jack moves in and out of the kitchen, playing the convivial host, while Monique, their daughters, and granddaughters (Anna and Rebecca) preside. No friend or lover enters this inner circle without their approval, but Epstein passes the test despite his record. Whenever he came to Paris, every two or three months, he met Caroline and often her parents; he referred to them jokingly as “mom and dad,” all documented in the email cache published by the US Department of Justice.

Caroline becomes his fixer in France, and she does it with a zeal that contradicts any later claim of a distant acquaintance. She opens Versailles to him on a Monday when it is closed to the public and escorts him through its gilded rooms, leaving him to write that the day was “unique.” She arranges a visit to the Palais de Tokyo on a Tuesday, again a day when doors are normally shut, so he can enjoy Philippe Parreno’s exhibition in private, after her parents have persuaded the institution’s president to welcome him. She organises privileged access to the Picasso show at the Musée d’Orsay and slots him into the glittering opening of a César retrospective at the Pompidou. At the Arab World Institute, which Jack led at the time, she arranges a special tour of the “Osiris” exhibition with a lunch on the rooftop terrace that looks out over Paris. All of this is backed up by the DOJ email logs.

This is not just about art. Through Caroline, Epstein brushes up against political power. She dangles the possibility of meetings with finance minister Michel Sapin, economy minister Pierre Moscovici, and even President François Hollande. Later, at the thirtieth anniversary of the Louvre Pyramid in March 2019, he brags to Steve Bannon that he is there with the whole Macron government and elite ministers.

VIDEO: Epstein meeting Jack Lang, the former French Minister of Education, at the Louvre in Paris (Source: DOJ)

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Through the same channels, Epstein also reaches for other figures at the edge of scandal. In 2014, Caroline organised a planned meeting between him and Dominique Strauss Kahn at the Royal Monceau, at a time when DSK is already charged with aggravated pimping in the Carlton affair after the Sofitel disaster; Epstein cancels at the last minute. Jean Luc Brunel, the modelling agent later accused of supplying girls to Epstein and found dead in a Paris cell in 2022, appears with the Langs on Epstein’s internal lists of “To See” contacts and joins them on at least one Versailles visit.

The favours flow in the other direction as well. Epstein offers to pay for Caroline’s membership at the Union Interalliée, takes her shopping in Paris for her birthday, lends her and her daughters his Palm Beach villa on El Brillo Way for a week in 2014, proposes to pay all expenses for a trip to New York or the Caribbean, and receives from her an email asking whether he could take her to his island for a few days.

He pays for flights, cars, and hotel stays. In 2016, Caroline’s eldest daughter and three friends stayed in one of his New York apartments, asking his staff for NBA tickets, Broadway seats and a Juul, a detail drawn from the DOJ exhibit. In 2019, she returned for a month, again relying on Epstein’s apartments and driver, as Mediapart notes.

In November 2018, the Miami Herald published its landmark investigation into Epstein’s 2008 plea deal. Epstein’s lawyers respond with an op‑ed in The New York Times that he forwards to Caroline on 4 March 2019; she thanks him, then invites him again to family lunch and a performance of “Swan Lake” at Chaillot, as seen in the DOJ emails.

The idea that the Langs only realised the full horror of Epstein’s crimes after his final arrest in July 2019 does not survive this timeline.

Offshore shadows and the collapse of a myth

In July 2016, Epstein created Prytanee LLC in Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Officially, the company was designed as an art investment vehicle. In reality, every cent that entered the structure came from his Southern Trust Company. Caroline did not inject any capital; her fifty per cent stake in Prytanee was held through another Virgin Islands entity called The Pierre Trust. 

The true scale of this structure appears in a fifty-two-page internal Deutsche Bank presentation to US prosecutors, referenced as an exhibit in the DOJ dump EFTA01681865. For unknown reasons, the document was removed from the Epstein Library, but a few smart people managed to save it before it was deleted. It is fair to assume that someone intervened, and likely because the document traced capital flows of roughly 1.397 million dollars from Southern Trust to a Prytanee account at Deutsche Bank, named Caroline as a fifty per cent owner and authorised signatory, and embedded the company within a larger network of Epstein vehicles.

DOCUMENT: Deutsche Bank Presentation to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Source: Epstein File EFTA01681865 | DOJ)
efta01681865

Caroline has since claimed that she thought of Prytanee as a modest art fund and that she trusted Epstein’s lawyers to handle the technical details, and has admitted to the French investigative outlet Mediapart that she never declared either Prytanee LLC or The Pierre Trust to French tax authorities, calling herself “staggeringly naive” in an interview with France Info.

VIDEO: Implicated in the Epstein affair, Caroline Lang explains herself – Translated from French to English (Source: France Info | Youtube)

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Emails deepen that picture. On 21 October 2016, Etienne Binant, a company director and close advisor to Jack Lang, writes to Epstein’s lawyer Darren Indyke that he has finally secured “the Lang family support” and the signed documents (EFTA00438252). Company statutes drafted in September 2016 state that Prytanee will be dissolved only upon the death of three people: Epstein, Caroline, and a wrongly spelt “Jaques Lang,” as described in the summary of the DOJ documents. Another internal email from 2017 has Binant telling Epstein that a one-million-dollar transfer is ready for new acquisitions and that they should bypass galleries to have more impact on the “ecosystem,” a line taken from the 2017 emails released by the US House Oversight Committee.

Caroline now says she discovered the mention of her father’s name only on 31 January 2026, when Mediapart confronted her with the papers. Jack Lang swears he had no prior knowledge of the structure, as both have repeated in interviews with RFI and BFM TV. Yet throughout these years, Binant appears in the emails as someone who acts both for Epstein and for the Langs. He signs certain messages “for Jack,” arranges meetings between Epstein and French contacts, and becomes the manager of Prytanee. He serves as a patron of the Arab World Institute while simultaneously setting up what Epstein calls the “Jack Project” or “Lang Art Fund.”

In September 2017, at the request of Jack and Caroline, he invited Epstein to a very private birthday party for Jack, presenting it as a gathering of his inner circle. In early 2018, he negotiates a permanent chauffeur service in Paris, paid by Epstein for Jack, and checks with Caroline for her opinion. In January that year, he tells Epstein that he has signed documents regarding a benefit for Jack and Monique, without specifying what form that benefit takes. In August 2018, a documented transfer of 197,214 dollars leaves Prytanee’s account, another piece of unexplained cash flow that prosecutors are currently scrutinising.

The same pattern surfaces in real estate. In March 2015, Jack and Monique approached Epstein (EFTA01748059) about Ksar Masa, a luxury riad in Marrakech owned by their friends. Epstein asks for the price (EFTA01743969); Jack replies the next day that it is five million four hundred thousand euros “off shore.” French financial prosecutors have now integrated this email thread into their tax‑fraud laundering inquiry.

In 2015 and 2017, the Langs and Epstein cross paths in Morocco more than once, including a trip where he lends his private jet to the family, episodes again drawn from the DOJ emails

In 2018, money moves again. Epstein wires almost fifty-eight thousand dollars, specifically 57,897, to Gratitude America LTD, an association close to Jack, to fund a documentary titled Jack Lang la traversée du siècle, a film celebrating Jack’s life and career. Gratitude America also appears in the Deutsche Bank Presentation (EFTA01681865) featured in this report.

The last piece of the puzzle is Epstein’s will. Signed forty eight hours before he was found dead in his New York cell in August 2019, it bequeaths five million dollars to Caroline, one of a small inner circle of beneficiaries.  The Deutsche Bank presentation that mapped Prytanee and other entities, which was removed from public view, is almost certainly now in the hands of French prosecutors. It joins a long list of internal warnings that Deutsche Bank ignored as it kept Epstein as a client from 2013 to 2019, earning fees while he recycled money through the US Virgin Islands, as outlined in the New York State Department of Financial Services fine and subsequent reporting. In that network of flows, Jack and Caroline’s offshore art fund appears as one more node in a system that normalised collaboration with a convicted sex criminal.

When the US Department of Justice released further Epstein materials in January 2026, the shock wave reached Paris within days. Unlike previous scandals that Jack Lang survived, this one came with bank records, company statutes, and email chains that prosecutors could follow. Political allies who once defended him fell silent, and this time, it didn’t take years for the government to summon him. The Socialist Party leadership stated publicly that while no evidence tied him to sexual crimes, his statements were already troubling and that he should contemplate stepping back. Within a week, his resignation from the Arab World Institute was complete.

Caroline’s parallel fall was just as rapid, and the symbolism is brutal to the point of indecency. A woman who accepted an undeclared offshore structure funded by a sexual predator sat on the board of a foundation designed to shield teenagers from abuse and family violence. Even if there is no indication she used that role to harm anyone, her presence there speaks volumes about how easily powerful families can launder their image through worthy causes.

Macron’s Republic, Lang’s Institute, and a family gallery

The Institut du monde arabe was never just another cultural venue. Under Jack Lang, it became a hinge between Parisian political life, Gulf donors, and the global elite that orbited Epstein. Emmanuel Macron inherited that structure, then chose to keep Lang at its head and renew his mandate, even though Epstein’s conviction and reputation were already public when he entered the Élysée in 2017.

The IMA presidency gave Lang a semi-diplomatic platform and an institutional veneer for his private networks. When the Epstein files came out earlier this year, the Élysée did not discover his intimacy with the financier; it discovered that this intimacy now threatened a flagship of French “soft power.” Anne‑Claire Legendre, a loyal diplomat and close adviser to Macron on North Africa and the Middle East, charged with “giving new impetus” and restoring ethics at an institution whose real problem was the president, who had been allowed to run it as his private salon.

Under Lang, the institute functioned as far more than a neutral cultural bridge. A long Substack investigation by “Quoi qu’il en coûte” argues that for Epstein and parts of his network, it operated like a discreet “family office” in Paris. When Epstein needed a notary and a lawyer in Morocco in 2019, the IMA’s chief of staff, Philippe Castro, allegedly supplied contacts for two Moroccan lawyers; when billionaire Thomas Pritzker wanted Emmanuel Macron to speak at a prize ceremony in Paris, he supposedly used the institute as an interface to reach the Élysée. The same investigation describes IMA functionaries sending lists of French artworks with prices to Epstein and providing details such as Davos participants, turning a cultural foundation into a concierge desk for a convicted sex criminal and his peers. One could say, this is not mainstream judicial reporting, but it certainly matches the broader pattern established by Mediapart and others. The IMA under Lang was a networking hub where Epstein’s interests were serviced under the cover of intercultural dialogue, a pattern we have observed with other individuals like Leah Pisar (Project Aladdin), the daughter of Robert Maxwell’s lawyer, Samuel Pisar, and a personal friend of Ghislaine Maxwell, who appears consistently in the Epstein Files. Leah appears in the DOJ materials and exhibits as a repeated requester of Epstein‑Maxwell money for the NGO Seeds of Peace, a group that framed its mission as coexistence training for Israeli and Palestinian youth, while critics accused it of depoliticising occupation and historical trauma.

READ MORE: Leah Pisar’s Fundraising Trail Through Ghislaine Maxwell to Epstein

The arrangement also worked in the other direction. While Lang was opening doors for Epstein, the IMA offered subtle but real services to Macron’s own family. 

In 2024, the painter “Laurence Graffensttaden” enjoyed exposure and institutional backing at the Institut du monde arabe. An investigation relayed by Planet.fr, and based on reporting from Le Canard enchaîné, revealed that this pseudonym belonged to Laurence Auzière, Brigitte Macron’s eldest daughter, a cardiologist turned painter whose work has no obvious connection to Arab culture. The IMA itself boasts, in a 2024 news item, of unveiling a permanent work of “portraits cellulaires” by the duo.

IMAGE: PARIS, FRANCE – NOVEMBER 14: Jack Lang and Laurence Graffensttaden (also known as Laurence Auziere Jourdan, daughter of Brigitte Macron) and Jack Lang attend the “Nos Arts Nos Origines” Graffensttaden and Dan Ho Collaboration Work Preview at A2Z Art Gallery on November 14, 2024, in Paris, France. (Source: Foc Kan/WireImage)

Laurence Graffensttaden, created with Parisian school pupils as part of the programme “La Classe, l’Œuvre !” and associated with its collections. Graffenstaden’s own site and gallery biographies proudly note that a permanent work has entered the IMA’s collection and that it was inaugurated in the presence of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron. The institute, supposedly dedicated to promoting the arts and histories of the Arab world, had found room on its walls and in its programme for the president’s stepdaughter, under a crafted brand name, in a way that offered her visibility few unknown artists could dream of.

No public document has yet shown that Epstein’s money financed that particular exhibition. The exposed financial flows—Prytanee, Southern Trust, the offshore art fund, the Palm Beach villa money, the 57,897 dollars for a Jack Lang documentary, but are yet to be tied directly to Auzière’s art, as the overlap is hard to ignore. The same building where Lang entertained Epstein on the rooftop, arranged private tours of exhibitions, and used staff to service the financier’s wishes, also quietly amplified the artistic career of the First Lady’s daughter.

We do not yet know whether Macron’s Élysée ever raised an eyebrow at this bending of the institute’s mission. There is no email in the public record where Epstein writes directly to Emmanuel Macron, no letter where the president thanks him for advice. Claims that 2018 emails show Macron “consulting” Epstein via Davos interlocutors currently rest on interpretations by polemical commentators and YouTube channels rather than on primary sources published by the major investigative outlets.

What we do see is a pattern where a head of state leaves a political ally in charge of a strategic cultural institution despite his proximity to a convicted predator. That ally uses the institution to offer services to that predator and to cultivate other members of his network. The same institution then helps decorate the public image of the presidential family itself. When the scandal becomes unmanageable, the Élysée suddenly discovers the need for ethics, pushes the old friend out, and installs one of its own diplomats to manage the clean-up.

It is hard to seriously pretend that Emmanuel Macron, a hyper‑controlling president who personally arbitrates key appointments, knew nothing about the Moroccan notary and lawyer contacts, the offshore art fund orbiting the IMA, or the internal emails where Epstein boasts of being with “the entire Macron government,” or describing  Macron as man who  wants to “lead Europe, maybe the World” A head of state who sees and signs off on the smallest symbolic gestures around the Institut du monde arabe is unlikely to have never noticed that a cardiologist named Auzière was suddenly showing art there under a borrowed name as “Laurence Graffensttaden.”

The more plausible hypothesis is not ignorance but calculated distance: Macron could afford to let Jack Lang run the house, profit from the services and prestige it generated for his own diplomacy and his family, and keep just enough deniability to cut him loose if the scandal ever broke the surface. In that sense, the apparent “incuriosity” of the system looks less like an accident than a method. No one in power needed to be told exactly how Lang’s IMA operated; they only needed it to keep functioning, to host receptions, to sign partnership agreements, to provide a stage for presidential speeches and a discreet back room for the endless trade in influence that glues together Paris, the Gulf, New York, and Geneva.

Seen from that angle, the Lang–Epstein affair is not an aberration but an X-ray of how Macron’s Republic really works. A convicted sex predator buys himself a place in the Paris cultural aristocracy. A former minister offers him access, an offshore art fund, and a family circle that includes his grandchildren. A national institute funded by public and private money becomes a concierge desk, a gallery, and a favour machine. The presidential couple’s own family quietly benefits from this machinery. Only when the American justice system and a few stubborn reporters make the emails and statutes impossible to ignore does the executive decide that the line has been crossed. By then, the damage is done. The only thing left to salvage is the façade.

What the Lang affair says about power

For now, there is no solid evidence that Jack or Caroline Lang took part in Epstein’s sexual crimes. Their names do not appear in the flight logs to Little Saint James. However, we cannot ignore the financial ties (evidence) between the Langs and Epstein, or Epstein’s flight logs, which demonstrate a repeated travel pattern to Moroccan hubs like Marrakesh, Tangier, and Rabat starting in the early 2000s. Let’s not forget that Epstein lent his private plane to the Lang family for their own trips to Marrakech in April 2015 and April 2017. How do we explain an email dated March 15, 2014, from Epstein to Boris Nikolic, which confirms that Jack Lang worked for Jeffrey Epstein’s foundation in Paris?

IMAGE: Jeffrey Epstein email to Boris Nikolic confirming Jack Lang worked for his Foundation in Paris (Source: EFTA01901711 | DOJ)

We must also consider the possibility that the remaining 3 million+ documents that the DOJ/FBI have kept away from public eyes may contain far more incriminating information about the Langs and possibly about the French President Emmanuel Macron. 

This pattern does not come out of nowhere. In the early eighties, Jack Lang’s name surfaced on the fringes of the Coral affair, a real abuse scandal at an experimental home in the Gard, around the same period, he signed the infamous 1977 petition calling for decriminalisation of consensual relations with minors under fifteen, a text he would later dismiss as an “inexcusable stupidity.” His name also appears in other scandal like Rosella Hightower’s dance school incident in 1988 in Cannes. The name Lang also appeared in other reports and investigations in which he was suspected and also heard as a witness about abuses on very young boy in Morocco.

The only instance where children are mentioned in Jack Lang’s correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein is when the former French Minister sends Jeffrey Epstein an educational project entitled “Little Prince,” which, in a subsequent email, Caroline Lang presents as a mere “outline” and not a complete work. The document (“The Education of a ‘Little Prince’ for All Our Children”) models itself on the education of future kings (16th-17th centuries), criticises overly early specialisation, and asks whether every child should not receive a comprehensive “Renaissance-style” education. Epstein responds by email, proposing to add controversial questions (introduction to religion, “new sexualities,” tests, and the frequency of tests), and Caroline Lang indicates that her father accepts these additions. Epstein then has the text reviewed by Howard Gardner (Harvard), who judges it to be very similar to Rousseau’s Emile and written at too general a level to be truly usable.

The Epstein affair arrives as a kind of reckoning. This time, there are bank transfers, black book entries, and offshore statutes instead of rumours and petitions. When Jack goes on television to say he does not regret having known Epstein and that he is not in the habit of turning on people who are later accused of crimes, when he presents himself as “white as snow” and denounces a “tsunami of lies,” those words are quoted in interviews aggregated by Gala and BFM TV.

It would be comforting to think of this as an isolated case born of unique arrogance. The files suggest otherwise. The same US Virgin Islands structures that carried money for Prytanee show up in Epstein’s dealings with banking royalty such as Ariane de Rothschild and the Edmond de Rothschild Group. A 2015 agreement and related exhibits show Southern Trust entering a 25‑million‑dollar contract with Edmond de Rothschild Holding for work related to outstanding matters with the US Department of Justice, with 25 million routed to Southern Trust. Prytanee used the same Southern Trust pipeline, which raises serious concerns about both Ariane de Rothschild, who has yet to be interviewed by the French authorities, and the Langs relationship with Epstein.

A January 2014 dinner at Ariane de Rothschild’s Paris home with French billionaire and CEO of Hermès Axel Dumas, and Michel Hazanavicius, a French film director, screenwriter, editor, and producer, was planned but cancelled; Epstein instead leveraged Woody Allen, the same figure linked to the Lang introduction, to access Hermès‑linked events, according to EpsteinExposed’s dossier.

This is the real scandal. The problem is not just that a Parisian dynasty embraced a predator. It is that they did so for years, across continents, through trusts and shells and tax havens, while still presenting themselves as guardians of culture, defenders of human rights, and protectors of vulnerable youth.

In the end, the Lang affair forces a blunt question on French society. How many more revered figures have built part of their comfort, their travel, their foundations, their films, on money they preferred not to interrogate too closely? How many foundations, institutes, and festivals that trade on the language of emancipation have quietly relied on cheques from men like Epstein? Perhaps the most daring question, directly connected to Epstein’s associations with Israeli intelligence, is whether any of Jeffrey’s actions in France or with the so-called French elite fulfil a greater agenda, something far more sinister and treacherous, such as advancing the goals of a foreign entity.

When elites say they did not know, they are confessing something else. They are telling us that they did not want to look.

READ MORE EPSTEIN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Epstein Files

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2026/02/27/the-langs-the-family-that-called-epstein-dad/