In July 2014, Ginevra Tamberi was working as an aide to Woody Allen when she received an email from her boss’s friend, the financier Jeffrey Epstein: Would it be possible for him to visit the set of the movie Allen was filming? The project, then untitled, would be the 2015 black comedy Irrational Man, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone.
Epstein’s ask wasn’t simple. According to the most recent tranche of emails released by the Department of Justice, he wanted to arrive by helicopter and have lunch with Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. He wanted to rent a car to shepherd him around Newport, Rhode Island, where the film was shooting. And, as he wrote to Tamberi in an email thread dated July 24 with the subject line “extras,” he wanted background roles for three “assistants,” a term he used frequently for the young women in his social circle as well as his victims.
