In some cases, the truism “there’s always an Iowa connection” becomes a threat. The Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book,” revealed this summer, is one such case.
Amid 238 pages of fawning, friendly and conspiratorial birthday messages to the billionaire rapist and child trafficker written by his rich, powerful cohorts and gathered by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 — most famously the “enigmas never age,” “another wonderful secret” note from Donald Trump — is a grim little anecdote from Fairfield, Iowa.
In a jovial letter included in the “Friends” section of the birthday book, Democratic Party donor and founder of Clearstone Venture Capital William Elkus recounts a 1988 trip to Iowa he and Epstein took to “manag[e] the money of the Zimmerman family.”
Elkus mulls over the apparently common saying that in southeastern Iowa, “its [sic] hard to tell the difference between the girls and the hogs.” Yet somehow, in this land of unfortunates and yokels, Epstein chanced upon a “spectacular tall blonde woman” who was going city to city selling athletically branded clothing to colleges. Using the unique charisma that comes with having a suppurating void where a soul should be, Epstein “did his magic” and convinced the bombshell to come back to New York with him for the weekend.
“I’ll admit to wondering at the time whether Jeffrey somehow arranged the whole episode through some long distance escort service,” Elkus writes. But, “she was the real McCoy.”
Elkus, like many of Epstein’s acquaintances, credits the man with an almost superhuman charm and intelligence. As of the time of this writing, a veritable library of emails from Epstein has been released for public viewing, and the half-spelled, nigh-incoherent ramblings do not support these assertions.
That Fairfield was involved in an attempt at mythmaking to bolster a cult of personality is somewhat appropriate. Claire Hoffman, author of Greetings from Utopia Park, a memoir on her childhood growing up in a Transcendental Meditation community in Fairfield, describes her experience discovering the truth behind the “Yogic Flying” technique, a form of meditation supposed to enable the practitioner to fly Superman-style. When she was 9 or 10, she stumbled on the process in action, which was more “awkward, ugly jumping” than bird, plane, etc., and the aesthetic dissonance was the first steps of many towards disillusionment.
Read the full letter to Epstein from Elkus:
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
