Tarnished by Epstein Scandal, Can Power Publicist Peggy Siegal Make a Hollywood Comeback?
For as long as most people can remember, old-school power publicist Peggy Siegal has been a fixture of the annual Oscars arms race known as awards season. Studio bosses employed her to hold screenings for taste-makers among the upper crust of Manhattan and Hamptons society. Her coveted guest-list of Academy Awards voters can ensure their nominated clients are top of mind when ballots are cast.
“She’s the best at what she does,” says Roger Friedman, a longtime entertainment writer and the founder of Showbiz 411. “It goes back more than 40 years—she worked on Jaws with Steven Spielberg.”
But in July, Siegal’s business fell off a cliff. That month, the New York Times reported on the social and media introductions she provided Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy accused sexual predator, who killed himself while in police custody last August.
The association proved toxic. Literally overnight, Siegal was dropped by the West Coast studios who paid her bills, including Netflix and FX, and some of the high-profile guests who previously flocked to her parties. Her once-thriving events company has barely functioned since the scandal broke.
Defenders say she is being unfairly scapegoated, when others with ties to Epstein have barely faced censure, let alone ruin. Critics say Siegal’s notoriously brusque personality has left her without a reservoir of goodwill to draw on during her current crisis. Most consequentially, however, her former Hollywood clients are staying away.
“She has been ostracized by the studios,” said an insider with direct knowledge of negotiations with her business. “These are publicly-traded companies, and the corporate lawyers are the ones saying ‘No.’ They can’t risk the press writing, ‘Peggy Siegal, who had links with Jeffrey Epstein…’ about their movie.”
Now, Siegal is devoting as much energy to her own rehabilitation as she ever put into an Oscars campaign. With no studio clients, she has been darting around the film festival circuit, networking at premieres and parties as if her professional life depends on it.
Which it does.
“Impeach Peggy!”
Summer started auspiciously enough for the Peggy Siegal Company, a boutique operation with offices in a glass skyscraper on Lexington Avenue, just across from Bloomingdale’s.
In June, Sony Picture Classics hired her to wrangle guests including Whoopi Goldberg, Carol Alt, and Agnes Gund to a red-carpet screening and nearby after-party for its documentary, Maiden. And Netflix tapped her in early July to throw a bash at the exclusive Polo Bar for Ryan Murphy’s new series, The Politician. The event drew media figures like Anna Wintour, as well as a smattering of social names and buzzy young actors like Mamie Gummer and Beanie Feldstein.
Then in July, everything changed. After Epstein's arrest on sex trafficking charges, the Times report on the profile-raising work she once did for Epstein, after his first jail sentence for soliciting under-age prostitutes, sparked a mass desertion by her clients.
Calling her “the city’s most prominent professional hostess,” the article described how she used “her gate-keeping powers to usher Mr. Epstein, a friend, into screenings and events.” Most notoriously, in 2011, she “threw the dinner party at Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion for Prince Andrew, giving [Katie] Couric, [George] Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler and others a chance to speak to a member of the royal family a few months before the much-anticipated wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.”
Siegal defended her work to the paper of record, saying: “He said he’d served his time and assured me that he changed his ways.” But her embarrassed guests had to explain themselves to reporters; Stephanopoulos apologized for accepting the invitation. In a subsequent article in the Hollywood Reporter, Siegal admitted Epstein had furnished her with "funds for travel," but emphasized their financial relationship had ended by 2010.
The Damage Was Done
Two days later, a headline in Variety announced: “Hollywood Studios, Networks Cut Ties With Peggy Siegal Over Jeffrey Epstein Scandal.” The article named Netflix, FX, and Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures among the companies that had abruptly ditched the former awards kingmaker.
Siegel herself told Variety in a statement:
“Over the years I invited [Epstein] to attend a handful of my events. I did not know at the time — and did not learn until recently — that he had been abusing underage girls. That just wasn’t common knowledge. Had I known that he had been accused of abusing underage girls, I would not have maintained a friendship with him. I am horrified as each of these women come forward and the accusations mount. I am deeply embarrassed by my relationship with him and that I allowed him to use me.”
Siegal was celebrating her 72nd birthday in Europe when the bomb went off. To contain the fallout, she hired Matt McKenna, a seasoned crisis PR expert who had cut his teeth working for the Clintons. “Epstein was never a client” of Siegal’s, McKenna told T&C at the time. But neither further explanation, nor a comment from the woman herself, was forthcoming.
Upon returning home, Siegal found herself in the unprecedented position of not being welcome in Hamptons' party pictures. One close source described her as “absolutely devastated. It took 40 years to build the business, and it went away in a day.”
“It was tough for her in the summer,” one acquaintance, a society figure, said. “When I saw her she said, ‘Nobody wants to be seen with me, and I don’t have any jobs.’”
Privately, there is still some social support for Siegal, as long as it isn’t mentioned in the press. Forty people attended a dinner she organized for The Two Popes at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October, a black ops event with no media coverage. And she is discreetly sending invitations to two other small events in early November, both held by longtime friends.
Others remain aghast that Siegal may have put them in party pictures beside the man who is now synonymous with child sex trafficking. “Anyone who was tied with Epstein is persona non grata,” said one former guest at her events.
Another added: “A lot of people are saying, ‘Impeach Peggy.’”
Persona Non Grata
Fall is awards campaign season, traditionally a busy period for Siegal. She has an enviable record of success, including doing her part to help Leonardo DiCaprio finally win an acting Oscar in 2016, after five nominations.
“It’s not just a matter of inviting people to a party,” says Friedman. “She has taste, and she has always been the only person in New York that can really produce for the studios during Oscars season.”
But this year, for the first time in decades, Hollywood hasn’t been calling. Multiple sources tell T&C she has either not been invited—or else is actively barred—from studio screenings on the festival circuit. In response, Siegal bought her own tickets, often VIP packages costing thousands of dollars that include access to parties where she once had carte blanche, according to a close source. Now, she is on a charm offensive to rekindle her contacts—as a paying guest.
The lobbying effort kicked off Labor Day weekend at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. Industry heavyweights at its annual Patron Brunch that Friday morning included Renée Zellweger, Martin Scorsese, and Adam Driver, as well as top executives from Netflix and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Among the 400 guests taking in the view of the San Juan Mountains? Peggy Siegal, with her receipts.
Ten days later, she was hobnobbing at the Toronto International Film Festival Tribute Gala, where Meryl Streep and Joaquin Phoenix accepted awards in the ballroom of the Fairmont Royal York hotel.
And in late September, she was kissing Robert De Niro’s cheek following the opening night screening of The Irishman at the New York Film Festival. A few days later she was back to work a room containing director Noah Baumbach and actress Scarlett Johansson following their film, Marriage Story.
At least in New York, Siegal still seemed as welcome in those spaces. In fact, many in the film community believe she has been unfairly scapegoated for Epstein’s sins. Howard Bragman, a longtime Hollywood publicist, calls the backlash against Siegal “misogynistic, mean-spirited, and certainly misplaced.”
“Princes and presidents and billionaires and celebrities all seemed to be in Jeffrey Epstein’s web. Yet the only one who seems to be paying a price is Peggy,” he tells T&C.
Friedman says: “She didn’t realize the true level of Epstein’s evil, and is incredibly remorseful. But she did not commit any crimes; she just invited him to parties.”
Hollywood Ending
Not everyone feels so charitably toward the publicist who has long flaunted her abrasive personality and transactional attitude to relationships. “Peggy made a lot of enemies and snubbed a lot of people, and now there’s payback,” says one New York-based producer.
“There’s also been a generational shift in Hollywood, and Peggy is a victim of that because of her age. She doesn’t have people like Richard Plepler to rely on anymore,” he said, referring to the former HBO chief who departed in February after AT&T gobbled up the premium cable channel's parent company.
Younger faces can also mean fresh competition, and renewed schadenfreude. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times dryly noted that her “fall from grace might create more space on the playing field.”
And what of her former clients? At a recent red carpet screening, Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, said his company has no plans to work with the Peggy Siegal Company.
“We really haven’t come up with anything that would have worked with her, so we don’t have to make that decision,” he said. But he insisted it was not because she was blacklisted. “We use whoever’s around,” he said. The event was organized by one of Siegal's competitors.
Does he consider Siegal to still be employable?
“I would think so,” Bernard said. But he added: “The fact is, she’s just not doing much business.”
So little business, in fact, that one close insider said the doors to the Peggy Siegal Company may not be open much longer. “Once she closes, it’s over,” says the source.
Siegal, normally quick to pick up a reporter's phone call, has declined to be quoted for this article. But in early October, T&C ran into her at a New York Film Festival party at Tavern on the Green, in a VIP room with Julianne Moore and Greta Gerwig.
When pressed if she would be running campaigns this awards season, Siegal replied that she didn’t know.
“When I have an answer, I’ll tell you,” she said.
Then she turned and made a beeline for another A-lister getting 2020 Oscars buzz. There were more cheeks to be kissed, and work to be done.
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