A former classmate recounts personal memories of Jeffrey Epstein and mentions a vague 'problem in Florida'

ERSON Seymour and Paula took Gary their third son. “Paula was a iker,” Grossberg remembers, |-time job.” y, with curly hair and a high, Donatelli recalls.* Beverly was t thanks to his precocious tal- vo grades, they graduated from together, in 1969. smembers. “He tutored my girl- He taught me geometry in just a now, she recalls gentler times— d boardwalk, roller-coaster rides, 1001, 1 think he kind of loved me,” he kissed me. In fact, our history g invitation for Jeffrey and myself sretty inappropriate now. But back y. Jews and the Italians, that was te High School. They didn’t social- mother was crazy about him, she Italians.” ral decades, Beverly remembers and something of a prodigy—a a math whiz. friends the other day,” she says- ontifying details, and dialogue have been F Fittuy Ricu “There is nothing but nice we can say about him. He is actually the reason I went to college.” Beverly lost contact with Epstein over the years. But not long after Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, she got a call out of the blue. “He had a photo of us on the beach,” she says. “A friend noticed it at his birthday party. And Jeffrey said to the friend: ‘I bet she has a big ass now. So Jeffrey called me and invited me to his home on 71st Street. We hung out. We reminisced. He was the same Jeffrey. A gentleman.” The two never did speak again, but to this day Beverly sym- pathizes with her high school sweetheart. “I feel so bad for him,” Beverly says. “That's how much I liked him.” Gary Grossberg was a year younger than Epstein and in the same class as Epstein’s kid brother, Mark, with whom Grossberg remains very friendly, though he hasn’t seen or spoken with Jef- frey in some time. Both brothers are good people, he says. “Jeffrey’s a brilliant and good person. He is also incredibly generous.” Grossberg says he’s talked to Epstein about “the problem in Florida.” As he sees it, Epstein “got carried away...perhaps he was hanging around with the wrong people.” Grossberg wonders, too, if the things that made Epstein spe- cial contributed to his eventual fall from grace. “He was a diamond in the rough, you see,” Grossberg explains. q “People recognized Jeffrey’s brilliance very early on. But he had a _ gift for recognizing opportunities very quickly. He started buying HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022060