Skip to content
Connect
Stories

French politician Jack Lang says Epstein donation was to fund a movie

People in this story

POLITICO, October 2020

Retired French politician Jack Lang has broken his silence over a sizeable donation from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, telling POLITICO it was meant to fund a movie. In 2018, a year before his arrest on sex trafficking charges and his suicide in prison, Epstein made a donation of more than $57,000 to a French nonprofit through his private charity. The president, the treasurer and the secretary of the nonprofit were all long-term staffers or friends of Lang, France’s culture minister in the early 1980s and then again from 1988 to 1993.

News of the donation — first reported last week by the Daily Beast — raised a host of questions for Lang, a prominent figure from the French Socialist Party closely associated with late President François Mitterrand’s high-powered promotion of the arts.

The former minister, now president of the French Arab World Institute, declined to answer all of those questions when reached by phone on Tuesday. But, in a brief conversation, he said the money was to finance a movie — without providing specifics.

Asked whether work had started on the film, he said: “It’s being finalized, I believe.” An investigation by POLITICO suggests that the nonprofit has so far barely existed beyond some basic paperwork.

Continue reading at POLITICO.

More Stories

Plastics and other trash littered a salt marsh in Chelsea in April.

Massachusetts lags on banning plastics

09.25.2023
Picture of Dasani water bottles.

Gov. Healey to sign order banning single-use plastic bottles for state agencies

09.21.2023

Predictive policing software terrible at predicting crimes

10.02.23
In the News