Jeffrey Epstein was late.

A startup founder sat in an ornate room in the financier's Upper East Side mansion, dominated by a nine-foot-tall painting of former President Bill Clinton wearing the infamous blue Monica Lewinsky dress, hoping Epstein might be interested in funding his company. One of his early investors, Masha Bucher, had arranged the meeting, describing Epstein as a rich businessman with a passion for science. He'd only realized Epstein had a different, darker reputation after doing a quick search for his name in the Uber to the meeting.

When Epstein finally arrived, he shrugged off questions about his career as a money manager, then bragged about his connections to Bill Gates and the Google founders. But when the founder finally began pitching his company, he was interrupted. Two young women had walked into the room. One sat on Epstein's knee while he leered, “Can you guess which one is older?”

The founder, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, said he ducked Epstein’s question about the women’s ages, and left the meeting feeling revolted. It was the last he ever saw of Epstein. "It's one of those things that's radioactive level 10," the founder told Forbes.

This was one of at least nine connections that Masha Bucher, the founder of VC firm Day One Ventures, would make between Epstein and Silicon Valley startup founders, according to hundreds of emails and messages between Bucher and the convicted pedophile released as part of the Department of Justice's Epstein document dump. According to the files, Epstein had originally met Bucher in 2017, bringing her on as a publicist to help massage his reputation in the wake of his 2008 sex trafficking conviction, then supported and encouraged her as she began investing out of her own fund.

She later credited him with helping her establish Day One Ventures in 2018. “I would never create my fund without the ideas and knowledge you shared with me,” she wrote to Epstein in a 2019 text.

Now, the 36-year-old investor boasts of having written early checks to 22 unicorns, including Elon Musk’s xAI, Sam Altman’s iris-scanning startup World and small nuclear reactor builder Valar Atomics, and has managed over $450 million. That is a rare feat for any female VC, but doubly so for a Russia-born former publicist who had no prior track record of investing, let alone a marquee Sand Hill Road fund on her resume. (xAI, World and Valar Atomics did not respond to a comment request.)

The time frame of the emails and texts between Epstein and Bucher (then using her maiden name Drokova) ranged from their initial meeting in 2017 to just days before his arrest in 2019. The young publicist, then in her 20s, initially helped broker meetings with journalists, the documents show. But their relationship grew from there. Epstein tasked his assistants with sending her Prada handbags and booking her haircuts at New York’s exclusive Fekkai Salon. She stayed at his expense at the Four Seasons hotel, according to the emails. Bucher would take hour-long phone calls with Epstein and the pair also swapped photos and videos over Skype. In........

© Forbes