You may have heard back in the beginning of the month that the mansion belonging to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had sold, despite its tawdry recent past. Another New York Times report this week revealed the buyers as soon-to-be retired Goldman Sachs executive Michael D. Daffey and his wife, Blake Daffey, who plan to move their home base from London to the Upper East Side, steps from Central Park.
Where some see a cavernous mansion haunted by the alleged misdeeds of its mysterious later owner, others see a deal. It was on the market for $88 million before it was lowered to $64 million; these two purchased it for $51 million, according to city records reviewed by the Times (the money will go to a restitution fund for his victims).
A spokesperson for the couple, Stu Loeser, offered their take on the whole thing to the publication: namely, it’s “a place with a lot of potential.” Interesting! It will be up to interior designers Timothy Haynes and Kevin Roberts to rethink the unthinkable.
“The first order of business is a complete makeover—physically and spiritually,” Loeser told the Times. He did not go into the how of it all—truckloads of sage, a full bulldozing, exorcism, etc.—but did say they’re expecting it to take 18 months.
Among the cursed items that once graced the place were rows of framed artificial eyeballs “imported from England.” A portrait of Bill Clinton in a blue dress. A chess board whose pieces were modeled after his staff, and they were “dressed suggestively,” per one report from 2019. There was a taxidermy poodle. He put it on a piano.
He had in his home photographs of Mohammed bin Salman, Clinton, and Woody Allen for unclear reasons, according to James B. Stewart, who visited his home once to interview him. There are almost no public photos of the place as he was living there, but some of these objects were observed by Vicky Ward for a Vanity Fair profile in 2003, and a few anonymous sources who claimed to visit the domicile over the years, as reported by the Times and the Daily Mail.
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