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As recently as 2019 — as mounting press coverage and renewed investigations were closing in before his arrest at Teterboro Airport on sex trafficking charges, as most everyone else in Jeffrey Epstein‘s orbit had already shunned the 66-year-old — Bannon was still standing by his man. The rumpled former Trump aide reportedly advised Epstein from the shadows, joined strategy calls, and ultimately helped stage a behind-the-scenes media makeover, arranging a series of videotaped sessions at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in which Bannon served as his interlocutor.

The setup looked like a documentary shoot — a small crew, professional lighting, with Bannon lobbing tough, prosecutorial questions from off-camera. They were a kind of debate-prep, seemingly designed to get Epstein ready for an image-changing sit-down interview with a news outlet like 60 Minutes, with Bannon playing the part of Mike Wallace. But Epstein, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, may have footed the bill for it all, throwing ownership of the footage into question.

The interview never took place — some PR rehabs are just too daunting — but for months now, Bannon has been publicly promoting that footage of his erstwhile friend — 12 to 15 hours, by his own count — as the foundation of a planned docuseries, working title The Monster. He’s been pitching it as journalism, a raw look inside Epstein’s pathology. In fact, though, those tapings seem to have been far from journalistic.​

According to author Michael Wolff, who was there for the first taping and reviewed transcripts of others — and who first revealed the existence of these tapes in his 2021 book Too Famous — the point wasn’t exposure. It was spin. “There’s no question the tapes were media training,” he tells THR. “And there’s no possible way Epstein would have signed off on them being used in a documentary.”