[BREAKING] Epstein’s history of exploiting women started decades ago — with a member of his own family: biographer

Long before Jeffrey Epstein became the world's most famous sex offender, he committed an act that foreshadowed a lifetime of manipulating women, and his first victim was his own mother.

According to a researcher examining Epstein's early years, the disgraced financier's pattern of exploiting women began decades before his sex trafficking empire collapsed.

“His mother Paula adored him,” CUNY sociology professor Thomas Volscho, who is researching a book about wealthy sex traffickers, told The Post.

"His parents were remembered as hard-working and well-loved people from a simple Brooklyn family." However, one of the first documented controversies involving Epstein centered on him leaving his family in the lurch while he was a student at New York University.

According to a May 1976 Fidelifacts report, New York University took Epstein to civil court in December 1975 after receiving an invalid tuition payment.

"He wrote a check on his mother's checking account to cover his tuition and the check bounced," Volscho told New York University's Washington Square News student newspaper.

“When NYU sent a debt collector to his address, his brother answered the door and said he had gone to Europe and then coughed up about three or four hundred dollars of the thousand-something dollars owed.” The NYU lawsuit was later settled, but the incident is an early glimpse into a pattern that would define Epstein's life.

Survivors revealed that Epstein, who dropped out of New York University without a degree and lied to potential employer Bear Stearns about his education, repeatedly used promises of admission and payment of tuition at New York University and other elite institutions to lure and control his victims, according to the House Judiciary Committee.

He offered the prospect of an education to draw young women into his orbit, and in some cases he or his associates would secure scholarships or pay tuition fees and then threaten to withdraw their funding if they did not meet his demands.

As despicable as Epstein's manipulation tactics were, he was the grand master of them.

Even after his mother died, he exploited her for his own benefit.

On August 9, 2019, after meeting with his attorneys at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, prison staff allowed Epstein to make, in violation of policy, an unrecorded, unmonitored phone call before he was returned to his cell, according to a report from the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General.

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Epstein said he was calling his mother, Paula Epstein, but she had been dead for 15 years.

He was actually calling his girlfriend.

Guards found him dead in his cell the next morning and his death was ruled a suicide.

His mother never lived to see his conviction in 2008 or the global scandal that would follow.

Friends remembered her as a devoted mother who worked while raising her children with her husband Seymour Epstein, who died in 1991.

She died in April 2004 at age 85, just before the initial police investigation into her son's activities in Palm Beach began, and was buried at the Star of David Cemetery in West Paul Beach, Florida, with her husband.

In yet another blow, the names on the family crypt were removed to deter protesters and vandals following Jeffrey's death, according to Find A Grave Memorial.

“The irony,” Volscho added, “is how two loving parents can produce such a monster.”

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