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Feb 26, 2026
Jeffrey EpsteinJeffrey Epstein
The Langs’ troubling friendship with Jeffrey Epstein
Former French culture minister Jack Lang and his daughter Caroline Lang appear thousands of times in the most recently released documents. All evidence suggests that she had a much closer relationship with the sex offender than she now admits.
By Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ivanne Trippenbach
Published yesterday at 6:00 pm (Paris), updated yesterday at 9:03 pm
17 min read.
On June 20, 1990, before dawn, Jack Lang arranged to meet his guests at Le Bourget airport, just north of Paris. President François Mitterrand’s minister of culture had big plans to export the annual national music celebration he had created to the Soviet Union. His round trip to Moscow involved celebrities (Eddy Mitchell, Charlélie Couture, Alain Delon), a filmmaker tasked with capturing the event, and around 15 journalists. Out on the tarmac, the delegation discovered their aircraft: a private Boeing 727, fully fitted out with a lounge, bedroom and bathroom. The plane had been lent by a “friend,” answered Monique Lang, the minister’s wife, when asked about the mysterious owner’s identity. That “friend,” French diplomats whispered to the stunned guests, was Robert Maxwell.
The British media mogul and Lang had already known each other for several years. In 1987, the Socialist culture minister and the businessman, a former Labour MP in the House of Commons in London, even formed an alliance. At the height of the battle over the privatization of TF1 television station, undeterred by any mixing of business and politics, it was with Lang’s support that Maxwell and Francis Bouygues, head of the world’s largest construction group, managed to convince Mitterrand to choose them to buy France’s first television channel.
Maxwell also became a valuable patron for Lang. On July 18, 1989, they were side by side at the inauguration of the Grande Arche de la Défense, the giant monument aligned with the Arc de Triomphe. It was one of those celebrations that characterized the Lang years, complete with champagne and saxophonists dressed as astronauts. The British businessman had saved his friend’s colossal project by contributing 150 million francs (€42 million today).
The businessman also demonstrated his generosity by contributing 500,000 francs to fund events and commemorations related to the bicentennial of the French Revolution, notably for the digitization of period documents, affording himself the pleasure of attending all the Parisian ceremonies. Maxwell was, in fact, so close to Lang, who was also the mayor of Blois, in central France, that he owned a printworks in that city. In October 1989, he attended the Estates General of European Culture there at Lang’s invitation. Without even visiting his own printworks.
At the time, one of the minister’s two daughters, Caroline Lang, was 28 years old. After appearing in the films L’Argent (Money, 1983) by Robert Bresson and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1986) by Francesco Rosi, she studied to obtain a doctorate in public law. And, for her first foray into professional life, she was hired by none other than Maxwell Communications in London. As always with the Lang family, blurring the lines was the rule, with private interests and public service, family and ministry all intertwined. At Jack Lang’s own office, Monique, in everyone’s eyes, acted as the head of communications, welcoming all the important artists on behalf of her husband.
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In Epstein’s “little black book” – his address book, which the FBI seized as early as 2009 while investigating his embezzlement and sexual abuse of minors in Florida – Caroline Lang’s name is already there: three phone numbers and a New York address, apartment 9C at 400 East 52nd Street, in the heart of Manhattan. Had the daughter of the former Socialist minister already been noticed, as early as the 2000s or even before, by this businessman determined to spin his web around the world? Very few French nationals appeared in this directory that contained some 1,700 names. When contacted by Le Monde, Caroline Lang declined to comment.
Wildly close-knit clan
Since January 30 and the publication of the Epstein files, the documents have cast a raw light on the connection binding the Lang family, particularly Caroline, to Epstein. Their extensive correspondence, which lasted seven years, from 2012 until the sex offender’s arrest in 2019, reveals an intimate and troubling relationship.
Records show that on March 24, 2012, the American hosted a dinner in Paris attended by Caroline Lang, along with filmmaker Woody Allen and his spouse, Soon-Yi Previn, and US Ambassador Charles Rivkin and his wife. Epstein, who had been convicted four years earlier of soliciting prostitution of a minor, took care to keep paparazzi at bay, even as he returned to Parisian high society and rebuilt his extraordinary network. The following day, Jack Lang’s daughter thanked him by email for inviting her to his table. On March 26, she visited his luxurious Paris apartment at 22 Avenue Foch in the 16th arrondissement. Welcomed by the butler, she spent some time with the American, discussing Japanese literature and Vladimir Nabokov, the writer whose most famous novel, Lolita (1955), is also the confession of a sexual predator about the relationship he had with a 12-year-old girl.
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This apparent nonchalance of the Lang family, pampered by their American friend, never seemed to be shaken. But it did not reflect Epstein’s true situation. For several months, the FBI had been on his trail. On November 28, 2018, the Miami Herald published an in-depth investigation titled “How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.” The “serial sex abuser” in question was Epstein. The Trump administration official mentioned by the Florida daily was Alexander Acosta, the very man who, 10 years earlier, had accepted a secret deal with the millionaire to reduce his sentence to 18 months in prison in exchange for his guilty plea to soliciting prostitution from a minor, at a time when the FBI had identified 33 victims. This time, the journalist behind the investigation found around 80 women claiming to have been sexually assaulted and raped by the businessman between 2001 and 2006, when they were between 13 and 16 years old.
Did Caroline Lang hear about this article published on the other side of the Atlantic? In any case, she knew that her friend was accused of “international sex trafficking” and of “sex orgies” with a very large number of young women, some of whom were minors at the time. On March 4, 2019, Epstein himself sent her the letter to the editor his own lawyers had just published in The New York Times, in response to the Miami Herald investigation and the inquiries now being conducted by the largest American daily newspaper. Caroline Lang replied to thank him.
Fifteen days later, however, she invited him, as usual, to a family lunch on Place des Vosges. “Perfect, as usual, I will be on time,” Epstein replied with delight. She also invited him to a contemporary interpretation of Swan Lake at the Théâtre National de Chaillot with her parents on March 30, 2019.
The next day, Epstein told her in an email that Jack Lang had a “proposal” for him. Through Caroline, a meeting was arranged between the two men at the café Ma Bourgogne, Place des Vosges, to discuss it. It is not known what idea Jack Lang had for his American friend. However, his daughter Caroline would be among the last French people to see Epstein, who was arrested by the FBI on July 6, 2019, as he returned from Paris aboard his private jet. On August 8, 48 hours before he was found dead in his prison cell, the convicted sex offender included her in his will, leaving her $5 million (€4.2 million).
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