The Ladies of London and the ladies of Epstein

“I’ve heard rumours that she’s a madame,” says the American actress Margo Stilley, whose snide gossip about her friend Dara Huang kicks off Bravo’s newly rebooted reality show Ladies of London. The show follows the successful Bravo formula perfected by the Real Housewives franchise: a group of women forced together into a “friendship group”, plied with rosé, and sent to fancy events to fight with each other and then make up. In the first episode the ladies are at a fancy Mayfair party when all hell breaks loose. “I thought you meant a diva!” cries Lottie Kane, another socialite, “Not the brothel kind!” By the second episode, Huang had yelled “cut” to the cameras and quit the show.

What the reboot treats as a piece of bitchy melodrama turns out, in retrospect, to have a disturbing precedent in the original show. A decade ago, one of its central figures, Annabelle Neilson, who moved through the show as a languid aristocrat, thin and bohemian, a muse to Alexander McQueen and former wife of Nathaniel Rothschild, was revealed to be a close friend and confidante of Jeffrey Epstein. Emails released by the Department of Justice suggest she sorted women for Epstein’s choosing in the years preceding the show, referring to “putting a little group of girls together”, calling him “babe” and “honey”, offering “badly behaved English girls” and inviting him to “a little thing for my very young friend who is l[a]unching her bikini range.” “The problem with English girls,” she wrote to Epstein, “is they do seem to go a bit mad but not in the right way, if you know what I mean.” Her friendship with Epstein, like many in the files, was transactional – she stayed in his houses, went on the ‘Lolita Express’ and connected him with designer friends for financial support. He “looked after” her, even calling her mother once when she didn’t return from a night out in NYC.

The original series now feels disturbingly haunted because the dead recur with such uncomfortable regularity. Neilson died in 2018 from a heart attack at 49, which Epstein dismissed in his emails as “probably drugs”. Alongside her was the grumpy businessman Scot Young, who dated the perky blonde Noelle Reno in the show. Young, she told us, was going through “the biggest divorce Britain has ever seen”. His wife claimed he was hiding millions of his money because he got it through criminal means. A few months after the show aired, Young fell from the window of Reno's flat and impaled himself on an iron fence. The details of his death remain unclear, but his ex-wife suggested he was wrapped up in criminal dealings with a crime family, and investigations claimed he was pushed from the apartment by a Russian operative. Like Epstein, Young belonged to that class of high-value fixers, men who once worked discreetly behind the scenes, smoothing the machinery of wealth and power.

The Epstein files, in their own way, read like a grotesque inversion of reality television. There are the same recurring themes of money and access, without the restructuring of plastic surgery or the mercy of editing. Epstein as the “fixer”, the figure who oils the wheels of elite life, emerges into view, smoothing introductions and facilitating desires that are too disturbing to face. Men who sell their souls for sex, academics who sell their ethics for a trip on a private plane, women who sell their own friends for some kind of warped and tragic validation.

In the American Real Housewives universe, the transactional is standard. Old rich men marry young beautiful women and sell their privacy for fame. These women show off their celebrity adjacency; who knows whom, who has been invited where. In LA, this is how close they are to Hollywood. In Salt Lake City, how close they are to the Mormon Church. In Britain, the currency is their proximity to royalty. Two members of the original Ladies of London cast dated Prince Andrew. He took Caprice Boulter to Buckingham Palace and let her sit on the Queen’s throne and steal a bowl, reportedly one of his “classic moves’. And he swung Caroline Stanbury, now a star of Real Housewives of Dubai, around St Tropez in a superyacht after his divorce. She is named in the Epstein files as “a woman to talk to”. One Ladies of London cast member remarks that in other countries you can buy your way into society, but “England isn’t like that”. Money in Ladies of London – just as in the Epstein files – may not buy you a title, but it buys you proximity to those who have them, and to the spaces they inhabit.

We are living through a moment in which the glossy surfaces of elite life, once consumed as fantasy, are being repeatedly punctured by revelations of what lies beneath. Ladies of London tries to resist this shift, counting on a vision of wealth that is still alluring and entertaining, if a little repulsive. The danger is that the Epstein files are slipping into this too: a relic of salaciousness which is, disturbing but still somehow thrilling for the horrors it contains. Unlike the criminal boyfriends of Bravo, no one has been imprisoned since the files were released. The Bravo ringmaster, Andy Cohen, tells his stars, “you bring the trauma, and I’ll bring the drama!” For Epstein, the drama threatens to overwhelm the trauma, the criminal behaviour and the world-altering abuses of power, as we become too distracted by the entertainment.

Photograph by Rebecca Miller/Bravo/NBCUniversal via Getty Images, Ruth Rose/Bravo via Getty Images, David M. Benett/Getty Images