The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
The Tenggerese people carry vegetables as offerings to Mount Bromo during the Yadnya Kasada ritual in East Java Photograph: Rendy Agung Prakoso/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Rothwell, UK Local people try to disarm the halberdiers of their halberds – a medieval weapon – after the reading of the charter, granted by King John in 1204 to the people of the town to allow them to hold a market and a fair, as part of the Rowell Fair Proclamation Day. Rowell Fair is a royal charter fair running from 30 May to 6 June Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Voters hold umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun as they queue outside Beshale Katla polling station. Ethiopians have begun voting in parliamentary elections Photograph: Marco Simoncelli/AFP/Getty Images
Medina, Saudi Arabia The interior of al-Masjid an-Nabawi (the Prophet’s mosque) as Muslim pilgrims who have completed their hajj duties in Mecca continue to arrive Photograph: Ali Atmaca/Anadolu/Getty Images
Beirut, Lebanon People flee the southern suburbs of Beirut after the Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the military to attack targets in the southern suburbs Photograph: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters
Mykolaivka, Ukraine The White Angels police unit looks up at the sky for drones during the evacuation of civilians from the city Photograph: Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu/Getty Images
Tyre, Lebanon A plume of smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of the southern Lebanese town. Iran’s foreign ministry said on Monday that a ceasefire in Lebanon remained a key condition for any deal with the US to end the Middle East war Photograph: Kawnat Haju/AFP/Getty Images
Bandar Abbas, Iran People ride paddleboards, with vessels in the strait of Hormuz visible behind, as seen from the southern coast of Iran Photograph: Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA/Reuters
Nanyuki, Kenya Protesters gesture as soldiers stand by during a protest against a proposed Ebola quarantine centre to be established by the US at Laikipia airbase Photograph: Andrew Kasuku/AP
Xinghua, China A drone photo shows agricultural machines harvesting wheat in Huguan village, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
Pyongyang, North Korea Children take part in the 76th anniversary of International Children’s Day at Taesongsan Funfair Photograph: Jon Chol Jin/AP
Beijing, China A man shields himself with an umbrella from the sun as he walks by a resident sunbathing on a bench along the Liangma River on a hot day Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
Kolkata, India Pedestrians watch as workers remove a statue of the Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi, which will be reinstalled in a safer place. The giant statue, erected to mark Messi’s visit to India last year, is swaying in the wind and will be removed, a lawmaker said Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
Perth, Australia The Indiana Teahouse at Cottesloe beach is pictured after a storm Photograph: Paul Kane/Getty Images
Probolinggo, Indonesia The Tenggerese people carry vegetables as offerings to Mount Bromo during the Yadnya Kasada ritual in East Java. The Yadnya Kasada festival is held to seek blessings from the Hindu gods for safety and prosperity by presenting offerings such as rice, fruits, livestock and other goods Photograph: Rendy Agung Prakoso/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
T he yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.
Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance.
Now, 80 years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria – a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and middlemen from the global south – the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. The authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter.
Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades”, and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past 15 years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita airports counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesandō, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.
Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address holidaymakers thronging formerly sedate neighbourhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten, or coffee shop, airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savour the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai , or “tourism pollution”, a term ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.
Tokyo’s race towards peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of about 5,000 square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities such as Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.
Still, mass tourism is as demoralising and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank – I know it is not maliciousness on their part – but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offences invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathises with the family of sightseers blundering their way on to a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases, or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the pavement at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.
Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omote-nashi – basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese – has been popularised by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlour.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.
M ine is not a neighbourhood for sophisticated tourists. Taitō is temples and cheap hotels. The more civilised sightseers are busy elsewhere, I know. Chinese tourists still make up the bulk of travellers to Japan, but there are markedly fewer than five or eight years ago. Perhaps they have had their fill of Sensō-ji temple or find the shoddy stalls in Ameyoko market suspicious. In this part of east Tokyo, the tourists come mostly from Australia or the US, white English speakers decked out in athletic gear as if they expect the flat course from Ueno to Asakusa to tax their endurance. In inclement weather, they cover themselves and their rucksacks in disposable rain jackets, so they look like ghosts coming through the mist.
They approach with a rustle and the rumble of plastic wheels on pavement. They sleep in converted love hotels in Uguisudani. They gather at the mammoth Uniqlo in Okachimachi. They take photographs outside temples in Asakusa. They wear body cameras so that they can show the world their visit to Kappabashi Street. I surveil them without guilt: they have come to turn their tourist gaze on the city, and turnabout is fair play.
Battalions of immigrants have been redirected to this half of the city to serve the tourists, who most likely overlook how the waitresses at Asakusa restaurants are now often Vietnamese students and Chinese sojourners. It is beyond most foreigners to listen for a note in a server’s accent when they speak English or Japanese (now that ordering is most frequently done on a tablet, conversation is kept to a minimum anyway), let alone be alert to telltale, un-Japanese body language.
The guest worker in Japan, though necessary to keep operations running, is stretched thin between demand and bureaucracy, especially considering the quasi-legal subterfuge required to ship them in. While the recently assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe expanded the quota for moderately skilled immigrants in a series of reforms translated as “comprehensive measures for acceptance and coexistence of foreign nationals”, many still arrive on student visas. Brokers and language schools arrange minimal coursework and permission to work a 28-hour week on the side, though much longer shifts are typical. Legal measures to end death from overwork could be more difficult to enforce among student workers, who are preyed on by language schools and staffing agencies. The truly unlucky souls wind up as part of the technical intern training programme, a scheme to bring in unskilled labour under the guise of vocational training that domestic and foreign investigations have found is rife with human trafficking, fraud and vicious abuse that culminates in death, disfigurement and psychological trauma. When guest workers abscond from the legal programmes – in 2023 alone, more than 9,000 interns disappeared from the books – they become even more vulnerable, surviving on under-the-table jobs.
As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated. The ruling centre-right Liberal Democratic party acknowledges them as their sole defence against shoshi koreika – “fewer children and ageing”. Until automation takes a stronger hold – we’re only now phasing out floppy discs, fax machines and employment for life – or the economies of Vietnam and Nepal surpass Japan’s, the only way to keep salad wraps in 7-Eleven is to import staff.
Federations of bureaucrats and upstart politicians dream of an economy based on real estate investment and financial speculation. They would prefer to run their new city with a new population, one willing to render their cash or labour without expecting the power to make demands. Demographic collapse can be sidestepped, tourists and guest workers selected by grade like eggs, quotas adjusted to the whims of finance. The state-affiliated Japan National Tourism Organization is shooting for 60 million tourists a year by 2030. Efforts are under way to entice foreigners to work as farmhands, cooks and truck drivers. Meanwhile, the Japanese population shrinks to a nub.
T he guest workers don’t live in this neighbourhood either. My neighbours are the subset known as expatriates: the software engineer from Sweden who sends his daughter to the same school as my son; the English teacher from Tennessee; the Chinese couple who run a signage shop down the block; the Gujarati jewellery dealer I know to wave at, who illegally parks a Maserati with a swastika on its hood outside the mid-rise next door; and the French photographer whose Japanese wife tells me theories about dog training, vegetarian diets and 5G in the vaccine.
I myself followed a woman to Tokyo. We met when she was a tourist in my country. We were to return to her home and then drift through rugged places as tourists together, before I signed up for a master’s in contemporary Chinese literature at Sun Yat-sen University, and she sweated through an undergraduate degree in a more marketable field. But too many months went by. We ran out of money, we were happy and I was trapped. We married at the municipal office in Shibuya, posed for the silly portraits that are de rigueur for newlyweds (her in gown and costume jewellery, me in matt grey tailcoat), and made the formal application to convert my tourist visa to “Spouse or child of Japanese national”, authorised to work in any sector.
I took a job mopping vomit and picking up empty cups at a nightclub in Roppongi. I cleared tables in an Italian restaurant in Harajuku and worked in the kitchen of a pizza shop in Oji, apprenticing under an embittered long-term expatriate restaurateur forced into business with his ex-wife. It felt familiar. I had worked most of my life at the lowest end of the service industry or in warehouses and slaughterhouses. I consoled myself that when I finally finished my novel, it would be more authentic for having been composed while I was forking soggy hamburger buns into the trash. With few marketable skills, I didn’t have much choice.
It didn’t help that I was too stubborn and stupid to learn Japanese. I skipped the free language lessons provided by the Arakawa ward government and worked on my Russian instead, hoping to understand what the bouncers in Roppongi were saying. I practised my Spanish with the Peruvians who worked front-of-house at the Italian place. I never learned a polite word in Tagalog, only obscene slang.
Now I earn a living writing, with wire transfers from abroad. It is better to be in the category of tourist that can call themselves expatriate, even if it pains me to admit I have more in common with the Swedish software engineer across the street than the Chinese student-labourers who spill out of a language school above the closest 7-Eleven in the afternoon.
Being an expatriate author is not as glamorous as I imagined as a boy dreaming of a loft in Tangier with a novel-in-progress spread out on the floor. It is not even as romantic as when I attempted it the first time, spending my savings in Guangzhou, writing unpublishable short stories in between appeals to my mother for another Western Union money transfer. But it does mean I am sought out by sophisticated tourists when more famous Anglophone writers don’t get back to them. This began when the country reopened after the pandemic, and the exchange rate made it affordable for half-famous authors, graduate students with bylines in leftist magazines, and minor internet celebrities to travel to Tokyo.
F lattered by their attention, I was happy to act as de facto tour guide to what passes for “authentic” Tokyo. I met my guests at Uguisudani station, pointing in the direction of a cluster of love hotels where a recent street scuffle broke out between ageing criminals over sex industry protection money, before leading them to the Fujizuka cult mound (a miniature Mount Fuji, relic of a religious movement dating back to the 16th century) fenced inside a backyard shrine. I chaperoned them through the more intimidating public housing developments; usually deserted. I brought them to inspect nagaya , those corrugated-iron-sided terrace houses awaiting demolition. I aspired to reveal history otherwise buried, such as the bones that came to the surface when foundations were dug around Minami-Senju station, where the crematoriums and execution grounds once presided.
“Araki shot pictures for Midori here,” I have told more than one of my guests in Yoshiwara Park, “and now the soapland girls come here to pose for their daily photo diaries.” Around the corner, I pointed out the gory pictures beside the statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon. “Kawabata came here in 1923,” I said, “right after the earthquake, and wrote about the hundreds of corpses of the courtesans and their children, boiled alive in the pond as the fire swept through the pleasure quarter.”
I took my guests for tepid coffee gelatin and slices of buttered milk bread at kissaten between blaring televisions and demented proprietors. I pushed crocks of monkfish stew under their chins, pointing out how the gelatin rendered from fish skin made for an exquisitely rich broth, which could only be cleaned from the palate by buckwheat shōchū. I used to end the tours I gave of east Tokyo at the site of the old labour market, or yoseba , in Irohakai. Some people knew the place by reputation. They had streamed Yama: Attack to Attack, the 1985 documentary about neighbourhood activism, famous for bringing down the rage of organised crime and resulting in the murder of its original director during the production of the film, as well as his replacement after its completion. Even if the neighbourhood was no longer called Sanya (city authorities scrubbed it from maps in the 1960s), some of my guests knew that name from reading about labour struggles.
Sanya provided the foundation for a city now divided between tourists and guest workers. After the second world war, the men who arrived from the impoverished rural regions of the north became permanent residents for its cheap proximity to Ueno station, where the trains dropped them off. The crowded welfare barracks set up by the American occupation were taken over by landlords who carved them up to accommodate even more. The yoseba at Sanya functioned as an auction for human beings. Construction firms listed how many of each particular sort of worker they needed every workday – 10 men with experience pouring concrete, say, and 20 more unskilled labourers – and labour brokers descended on the slums before dawn to negotiate their wages.
The economic miracle fizzled. Sanya became a refuge for the homeless, a place for ward governments to redirect vagrants. The yoseba declined but never went away altogether. Foreign workers joined the natives in hoping for work, but by the time I began coming to Irohakai, there were only a handful of elderly men standing around. The mobbed-up labour brokers had been replaced by subcontractors or man-and-a-van renovation guys. I noticed only a few foreigners, probably Bengali or Nepali. There are better places to find employment.
The men who ran the flophouses and hostels had to adapt. Now they collected a daily housing allowance granted by the government from the demobilised migrant workers. They filled the rest of their beds with sightseers. Sanya, despite being one of the poorest sections of the city, became a tourist destination. As I told my visitors, when I first arrived in Tokyo, the arcade had a roof, which the local government and the developers since conspired to demolish, in part to stop the homeless from sitting under it.
They wanted to see the neon streets of the bubble economy years, still preserved in American media. They wanted to catch the girls in outrageous dresses posing in Harajuku for FRUiTS magazine’s freelancers taking “street snaps” like it was twentysomething years ago. They wanted, even if it would be gauche to admit, to play out their Lost in Translation Charlotte-and-Bob fantasies in a rundown karaoke box in a hip neighbourhood. They wanted to see the bathhouses converted into art galleries. My tour reminded them that Tokyo was just as cruel as anywhere else. “All of this will be gone soon!” I said. I meant it as a lament. They may have been relieved.
I f history is any guide, temporary residents will be swept away via deportations or pogroms, or when the next generation moves to the nicer parts of the city. Enclaves may never fill in for neighbourhoods, but neighbourhoods themselves do not last. Tokyo is a young city relative to many other foreign capitals, having become a centre of power only after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. There is little left of the old world, as most of the city was burnt or knocked down in the 20th century. Curtis LeMay torched and demolished 16 square miles with his B-29s. People were displaced. The city expanded again.
In my neighbourhood, most of the native Japanese came from somewhere else over the course of a generation – down from the north to work on the reconstruction of the city, or from the vast, sprawling suburbs. The shrine festivals of east Tokyo are attended by the new young couples, but there are too few dedicated locals left to observe the rites, so the shrine maidens tasked with handing out amulets in their white gowns are girls recruited through temporary labour websites, while stout country boys are hired to carry the shrines in the procession. The Japanese residents of my building are mostly old widows who arrived in the city after the war and whose children have relocated in favour of work and easier commutes. They have no real need to stay here and could be just as happy in Akabane, Minowa or Machiya as they are in Shitaya. The Edokko – someone whose roots in the city go back four generations or so – have always been rare. It is hard to find a number, but a single percent of the population is probably optimistic.
The prospect of being expelled from the city is terrifying. The residents who grouse to newspapermen about the sound of plastic wheels on the sidewalk hate the city, but they are more afraid of their shallow roots being dug up, of towers and chain coffee shops burying all traces of their existence. In a nation that gathers around Tokyo like the last torch in the encroaching dark, being asked to quit the city for a wretched exurban stretch of pachinko (pinball) parlours and family restaurants amounts to exile, even if we’re talking about the native soil of one’s own parents or grandparents. A government policy that offered cash in exchange for relocating out of the city was deemed a failure, and with good reason: to leave Tokyo would be to give up on the dream of Japan’s reconstruction, when the dignity and wealth of the nation was worth any sacrifice, when everyone was told they were witnessing a miracle.
Japan was a miracle! The transformation from a bloody empire to a placid failed democracy is remarkable – even more so because the Allied occupation left war criminals in charge. Its carefully managed postwar economy was a behemoth. Moderate prosperity and lifetime employment was guaranteed if you could tolerate the strictures of corporate life. But the men in charge put it all on black, went bust and made up their losses selling off what remained to foreign capital; Japanese socialism – the command economy responsible for public housing, employment for life and fast trains – was dismantled. Japan became hopeless, and the promised renewal has never come to pass.
And so, everyone is looking backward. The guest worker wants to relive the dream of the 1980s, when they could wash ashore in Japan from Fuzhou or Tehran and entertain hopes of striking it rich and returning home loaded down with foreign currency. The budget tourists photographing the maid cafe touts in Akihabara; the sex tourists in Kabukicho; the solemn, well-dressed tourists in the Andaz lobby; the busloads of elderly European tourists disembarking behind Sensō-ji; and the long-term sightseers who call themselves expatriates – they are no less nostalgic. They want the futuristic, clean, fashionable Japan they dreamed of when they were children.
I started meeting those important strangers who reached out to me in the perfumed lobbies of luxury hotels or in restaurants on the upper stories of Nihonbashi and Ginza department stores, choosing the sorts of places that a kyabakura hostess might take a client on a pre-shift date, gorging herself on steak and champagne before marching the man triumphantly into her establishment to be drained of more cash. They were disappointed with my doomsaying about the urbanist paradise. My guests didn’t want to hear that the future here, as everywhere, was human trafficking and budget tourism. Eating pigeon in the satellite branch of a Hong Kong barbecue shop on the upper floor of a crystalline tower, nobody wanted to be lectured about the replacement of housing projects and migrant worker slums with retail-residential complexes.
Political and business elites are enthusiastic for foreigners to solve the demographic collapse, prop up flaccid service sector consumption and reheat the real estate market. As those claiming citizenship pass from the city, its neighbourhoods can be optimised by city planners working for property developers, reconstituted with temporary residents who make fewer demands and who, if necessary, can be exsanguinated from the body politic.
Tokyo is preparing for such a future. But foreign labour has become harder to attract, as Japan grows poorer while its neighbours become wealthier. For tourism numbers to recover to their pre-pandemic peak, let alone grow, the yen would have to be kept at a price that drags down the rest of the economy – to say nothing of the difficulty of guaranteeing geopolitical and ecological stability.
The future will only come when people abandon their faith in sustainable development goals and omotenashi , or in the wisdom of converting red-light districts to duty-free shopping zones and knocking the roofs off the arcades to accommodate more hotels. At that point, there will no longer be enough physical or spiritual remnants to credibly resurrect even the least romantic visions of the past. Those left behind – the grandchildren of the enclaves and the less ambitious products of the expatriate neighbourhoods, the returnees from exile in suburbia, those who have held on – will face the problem of what is to be done with a city transformed to maximise investor confidence. An old society in a poorer country served by young people who have come from far away is one that must look elsewhere for new sources of hope. That is why I stay. If it is true – this time, after so many false starts – that Tokyo is the future, I would like to know what that means.
This piece was adapted from an essay titled Eastern Promises , in the Baffler issue 77, Expatriates
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Trefwoorden – The long read, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Larry Summers, Rape and sexual assault, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Woody Allen, features
Title – ‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant
Jonathan Whitcomb, attorney for Lesley Groff , 5 June 2020
“She did not know.”
Lesley Groff, longtime executive assistant to Jeffrey Epstein , has always claimed she knew nothing of his crimes. Complicity requires knowledge. To be legally complicit in a crime, you have to know you are helping to commit it. To be morally complicit, the bar is lower. You don’t even have to play an active part. To have knowledge of the crime and do nothing is enough.
But how do we know what someone knows?
I think of all the times I’ve closed my eyes or shut down a thought or turned away from something wrong, large or small, a planet-level ecological harm or a sub-fiver theft in the supermarket right in front of me. Surely, I say to myself, someone else will do something. It’s not my fault or my responsibility; I am too inconsequential to make a difference here. Somewhere in the course of those thoughts, I decide not to let the knowledge of what I’ve seen or heard or inferred take up residence in my mind. In this way, over time, I’ve found that it is much easier to live with what I know if I do not admit what I know even to myself.
FBI interview with Lesley Groff, 24 September 2021
G roff met with a headhunter, and he told her that “there was a job to organize one man’s life. This man was EPSTEIN, a Manhattan socialite. GROFF had never heard of EPSTEIN before this. ”
Lesley Groff never planned to be an assistant. After college at the University of Texas in Dallas, she moved to New Jersey with her first husband, worked for an office supplies company for nine years, divorced, worked as a salesperson at the department store Nordstrom, met her second husband at a triathlon and then decided she wanted to try to find work as an events planner on Wall Street. In 2001, a headhunter found her resumé on Monster, a jobs listing site, and set up Groff, then in her mid-30s, with an interview to be an assistant to a wealthy financier.
For the interview, Groff went to Epstein’s offices on the 4th floor of 457 Madison Ave, part of the Villard Houses, a set of elegant 19th-century brownstone residences built around a courtyard, also home to a luxury hotel. She met with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein, whose phone kept ringing during the interview. He would talk briefly, then hang up, and Groff came away with the impression of a vibrant, hectic workplace.
Once she got the job, Groff was given her own office and worked alongside Epstein’s team of assistants, lawyers and a trader who together managed his money and life. Some years later, she moved to work from his home, a seven-storey townhouse on East 71st Street near 5th Avenue where a lifesize sculpture of a woman in a white wedding dress clutching a rope hung in the central hallway.
Groff was in charge of Epstein’s calendar, making his appointments and setting up his calls. When she started the job, Maxwell had told her that Epstein had a massage every day. Epstein would call Groff in the morning, order her to “Call X and see if she can do a massage at 4” and then continue to call her every 15 minutes until it was fixed. If Groff was unable to get X, he’d tell her to call Y. (In response to questions about these appointments, her lawyer, Michael Bachner wrote: “During her employment, Lesley never witnessed or was told of anything illegal related to these massages.”)
Groff worked for Epstein for 18 years, from 2001 until his arrest in July 2019. No criminal charges have ever been brought against her (or anyone else connected to Epstein, apart from Maxwell). Since Epstein’s death, in August 2019, Groff has remained almost invisible and spoken only through her lawyers. Recent photographs have shown her going to pilates or walking her dog near her home in Connecticut, off-duty and low-key. Compared to the royals, politicians, billionaires and professors who have featured in the Epstein files, Groff is low status – a non-celebrity with no public reputation to lose. But when you search for her name in the files, you receive more than 160,000 results, more than anyone else. (I have read perhaps 10,000 of these, a fraction.) No one was more regularly in contact with Epstein, day-to-day.
After the release of the Epstein files, the US Congress’s committee on oversight and government reform decided to review the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation into Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes. On 3 March 2026, they sent a letter to Groff asking her to attend an interview in Washington on 9 June: “The Committee believes you have information that will assist in its investigation.” They believe, in other words, that Groff knows more than she has ever said she knows.
Interview with Lesley Groff in the New York Times , 5 February 2005
“It comes down to the bond. I know what he is thinking and I know when I need to be fast. It’s a nice roll we are on.”
To be a good executive assistant is an act of immersion. The job requires the management of minutiae: dates, times, appointments, travel, meals, gifts, emails, calls. But it also requires the anticipation of these things, to know what is desired before it is desired, and to do this, the assistant must be familiar with the inside of their boss’s mind. In a healthy arrangement, the relationship is close but boundaried. She – almost always she – can tell her boss what she thinks, or say no. Victoria Rabin, the founder of the Executive Assistants Organization , describes it as a kind of work marriage. No other professional relationship, she told me, requires the same degree of trust or intimacy. (Her old boss used to tell her that she knew more about him than his wife and could ruin him in five minutes.)
While an assistant might have the power that comes from knowledge, it is not a marriage of equals. “If you are committed, you sell your soul to that person,” said Rabin. In a less professional dynamic, the assistant is so crucial to her boss’s daily existence, and so completely in his power, that she becomes a voiceless functionary. Rowena Chiu, briefly an assistant to Harvey Weinstein , compared her role to that of a butler in Downton Abbey, where the chief requirements were to do as you were told and remain invisible. Chiu, who says she was sexually assaulted by Weinstein, was often told she could be replaced in an hour. She would hear Weinstein on the phone bawling out an A-list director and think, if he can do that to them, what can he do to me? She was, she said, a “gnat on an elephant”.
Over the years, Epstein had several assistants but Groff was the most senior and longest-serving. As I read her emails, I was initially struck by the extent to which she marshalled his time and movements, or acted as his gatekeeper. But in reality, she was more like a well-trained avatar. In a 2005 New York Times article about executive assistants on Wall Street, in which both Groff and Epstein were interviewed, Epstein described his assistants as “an extension of my brain” and a “social prosthesis” – not as separate individuals, but as part of his mind and body.
Groff’s task was to ensure that Epstein’s life ran according to his precise preference. “Jeffrey has requested that he please NOT be disturbed while in gym working out … even if a guest is here waiting”, she emailed her colleagues in 2012. “When Jeffrey is waiting for something and you know the urgency with a package, you should give it to him right away if at all possible,” she wrote about a two-hour delay in the delivery of some pastries in 2015. “He called me asking where his cannolis are !?” On any given day, Groff would move from having a towel rail fixed (“can we PLEASE get someone on top of this”), to working out how to respond to Epstein’s allergic reaction (“it is apparent that his face is not right”) to ensuring Steve Bannon had received Epstein’s gift of an Apple Watch (“can you confirm Steve has his watch?… I need to get back to Jeffrey … sorry for being such a pain!”).
She was good at her job – quick, polite and relentlessly positive, even when her tasks tended towards the absurd, as when she had to deal with two “monster” vacuum-packed steaks left behind on Epstein’s plane or when she was trying to figure out how to transport three tubs of Oreo ice-cream (“ JE’s favorite ”) from New York to another of his properties without it melting. She wrote emails bursting with exclamation marks, emoticons (particularly the smiling wink) and expressions of elation: “Tremendous!”, “Super!”, “Terrific!” When Jonathan Farkas , a New York businessman, told her that her efficiency was the envy of the German army, Groff sent the email to her husband, Ike: “think I should forward to JE???!!!” Ike replied that she should save it in her files, in case she ever needed another job.
Epstein knew Groff was competent, but his emails rarely recognised her efforts beyond an occasional curt “thx”. Instead, he showed his appreciation with money. In the New York Times interview, he revealed that when Groff announced she was pregnant in 2004, he offered to pay for a nanny and bought her a car to ease her commute from Connecticut. “There is no way I could lose Lesley to motherhood,” he said. According to a payroll document , he also doubled her salary from $60,000 in 2004 to $120,000 in 2005. There were perks: in 2014, Epstein emailed Groff offering a “florida holiday my style please, five star hotel the whole works”. (Groff’s husband, Ike, forwarded the email to someone else: “Seriously the best boss ever”.) On Valentine’s Day in 2018, Epstein bought her and some other assistants Glam Squad appointments, where stylists would come to their home to do their hair and makeup (“too sweet!” wrote Groff). Once, in 2015 , she got to tour his private plane, ride on his helicopter and take a boat to his private Caribbean island, Little St James, before staying at a luxury hotel. “The heli was one of the best parts!” she wrote in a group email to her family, who were duly impressed. “I didn’t know he had a helicopter too! WOW!” said one. “NOT a boring job!” wrote Groff’s mother.
By 2015, Groff was earning $140,000 a year and had been given several bonuses , the Florida trip and approval to buy a car worth up to $45,000. She was able to buy, rebuild and decorate a white clapboard house in the town of New Canaan, Connecticut, now estimated to be worth around $5m. (Though her emails also reveal she and Ike had to take out a large construction loan from the bank to do the work.) In 2016, she emailed Ike to tell him her salary had gone up to $150,000 plus a $7500 bonus check (“not bad! :)” and mentioned a loan she was going to take out with Epstein: “Makes me happy!”
Groff seemed to sense limits to Epstein’s generosity: he was not a cash cow, or at least, the money he gave was on his terms. Ahead of a family mini-break in New York, Ike suggested she ask Epstein to get them tickets for a show. The cost would mean nothing to Epstein, but Groff felt she couldn’t justify asking for $500 Hamilton seats and wondered if she could swing Dear Evan Hansen instead.
When Groff got her raise to $140,000 in 2014, Ike, who worked for Tourmaline Partners, a trading firm, joked that he could retire. (“Ha. Please don’t do that,” Groff replied.) She was well paid but always aware that she lived in a different economic reality to her boss. In her FBI interview, Groff recalled seeing an invoice of a carpet for his aeroplane that amounted to more than she earned in a year.
FBI Interview, 24 September 2021
GROFF felt it was pretty incredible to see all the people EPSTEIN dealt with in politics, television, etcetera. GROFF felt “wow”; prior to working for EPSTEIN, she never knew people who owned a plane, etcetera.
Groff’s emails were full of celebrities and their staff. There was Amanda who assisted the then Duchess of York; Bill Gates’ Lauren; Larry Summers’ Julie; Woody Allen’s Kathryn and Gini. She had to check the timings of a meeting with Naomi Campbell (who signed off her emails “ Love & Light ”) and it was Groff’s job to figure out which car the duke should be picked up in and what Woody and Soon Yi would like for dinner . (“Woody would like: Chicken dumpling with cilantro, and Piri piri chicken wings. I would love grilled asparagus goma ae, eggplant shishito miso honey, and shrimp tempura and seasonal vegetables,” confirmed Soon Yi, whose emails from her phone were accompanied by the red balloon emoji, giving each an air of minor celebration.)
Privy to so much detail, the terms of Groff’s job were strict. She told the FBI that when she was hired by Epstein she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. If she ever spoke about anything she learned from people he worked with, she would have to pay him $100,000. Early on, Maxwell had told her she was here to work, not to chat or fraternise with anyone she met through the job, including Epstein. If, for example, she had bought tickets for Epstein to see a movie, she knew not to ask him if he enjoyed the movie the next day.
Groff was expected to maintain the facade that she knew nothing and no one. In her first month in the job, she told the FBI, she was invited to a party through work and went along with her husband, disobeying the no-fraternising rule. “EPSTEIN found out and ‘torched’ her the following Monday.” He told her he was going to fire her, but put her on probation. Groff never did anything like it again. Mistakes, she learned, were not tolerated.
Not once, Groff told the FBI, did she have “normal conversations” with Epstein. Instead, he would issue one-line decisions: yes, no, “pay it”, “burgers”. And Groff would reply with a quick, chirpy confirmation: “will do!!” Epstein knew he could rely on her to do anything fast and well. When an employee offered a litany of excuses as to why they’d failed to ship a painting from Paris to New Mexico, Epstein replied with a single line: “give the job to lesley, thanks”. When Groff went on holiday, she reassured Epstein that she would have her BlackBerry with her. He replied by instructing her where she needed to be on the date of her return: “71st on 20th” (meaning his house). Groff: “Of course!!!! Can’t wait!”
Over time, I began to recognise the tone of Groff’s emails to Epstein. They reminded me of the kinds of messages I sent in my first jobs, at the lowest level of institutions where I still naively thought that good behaviour would be noticed and rewarded. It is the tone of service, of knowing your place and being eager to please, often used by junior women to senior men. It is also the tone of a perfectionist, of someone trying to create an impression of flawlessness, where everything is possible and nothing too much. You will do all that is asked of you and more, running as consistently and indefatigably as a machine, and – crucially – you will never say no.
The colleague who failed to ship the painting confided in Groff about Epstein: “it has been tough with him”. “I’ll bet,” replied Groff sympathetically. In 2014, Groff exchanged emails with a colleague who had just been on the receiving end of an Epstein email which was “worse than ever … Swearing and telling me I am a disgrace … He literally has never been this bad. Which is saying a lot.” Groff tried to offer some support, then suggested that the person “take the bull by the horns and go!” They were grateful for her encouragement – “it really helps”. Groff, for some reason, never followed her own advice.
25 January 2012, DOJ Epstein Library
From: Lesley Groff Just confirming you and your friend will be coming to see Jeffrey tomorrow at his home at 7pm! Thanks, Lesley (what is your friend’s name too, just so I have it)
25 May 2012, DOJ Epstein Library
From: Lesley Groff Hello .! Hope all is well! Jeffrey will be in NY next week and Peter M andelson will be around as well. Jeffrey was asking if you and “your friend” could come by and meet Peter… Thanks, lesley
5 May, 2015, DOJ Epstein Library
From: Lesley Groff Hello …might you and/or your new friend be available to come see Jeffrey tomorrow at 2pm? Please let me know as soon as you can! thanks, Lesley
Groff’s emails inviting girls – her word – to “see” Epstein all followed a particular pattern. Often the arrangement involved a negotiation around the timing of their job or classes in college: “ Tuesday I’m at school till 10pm – we have orchestra rehearsal for the concert on Friday”. Groff would also receive emails from intermediaries on behalf of other girls: “She can skip some classes and leave school at 1pm. If Jeffrey wants her at 3.30pm she can make it”. Groff replied: “ok, all good to know…we will let JE decide. thanks!”
Sometimes, Groff struggled to find someone Epstein had requested: “ Jeffrey thinks I should have her info, but I can’t find any? Who’s friend is she? do you know?” Sometimes, she would try to predict her boss’s requirements: “What [REDACTED] does JE want to see in Paris.. ? Is that [REDACTED] do one of you know?” (Her colleague replied: “I think possibly [REDACTED]. We always see her in Paris”.) Once, she spent a day emailing back and forth with someone in Russia trying to fix a time for her to see Epstein, before realising that he had meant a different person with the same name. “So no worries! Talk to you next week!”
If the girls were coming from overseas, Groff organised their air travel, visas and accommodation. “She was arranging all of that,” Juliette Bryant told me, a survivor who had met Epstein in South Africa and then spent two years in New York after Epstein had promised her a modelling career. Epstein would never contact Bryant directly, but Groff would ring often, say “Hi Juliette, it’s Lesley,” then put Epstein on the line. “She seemed friendly,” said Bryant, but they never spoke much more than the top and tail of a call. She only met Groff once. Surely, Bryant thought, Groff must have been aware that something wasn’t right: “If I’d been working in that office I’d have found it odd,” she said, “with all the young girls coming and going.”
The rotating cast of girls generated another layer of administration. Groff returned their lost property: “ please check for a green bikini (kind of a jungle print) in one of the drawers… the girl who was there last thinks she left it in the drawer”. She arranged their payments in cash, usually between $500 and $1,000, once specifically for “ time spent on the island”. She would arrange appointments for them at his preferred New York dentist ( Thomas Magnani ) and hair salon, Frédéric Fekkai . (And sometimes for herself: in 2018, Groff had a haircut, highlights, manicure and eyebrow wax worth $825 ). Once, when one of Epstein’s accountants questioned a payment to a cosmetic vein specialist, and suggested a name of who the treatment could have been for, Groff responded , “Gosh .. I really don’t know! She seems too young for that! ?”
Groff was not the only assistant to arrange these appointments. Rina Oh, an Epstein survivor, told me that “different secretaries communicated with certain girls”, but they always followed the same script: “‘Mr Epstein would like to make an appointment to see you, he’s going to be in New York on such and such dates, are you available to see him at 2pm?’ Then I would have to confirm, and then she would write it in the calendar.”
Groff’s emails to girls on Epstein’s behalf were typically formal and decorous, careful in their language and bright in tone, but the replies she received could be unpredictable. On 5 May 2014, an email arrived from a girl who told her that her friend would not be available to see Jeffrey on 8 May, “but I can bring another girl… if Jeffrey want to ! Let me know”. Groff sent the email to Epstein: “Below from [REDACTED]… please advise.”
Sometimes the emails came with photographs attached. On 18 April 2012, someone emailed apologising for a delay and sent pictures of two friends, “both Russians.;)))”. “No worries… thanks,” replied Groff. On 1 May 2012, a person emailed to check if Groff had received the “new photo”. Groff hadn’t, so they sent it again, with the subject line, “[REDACTED] from Ukraine”: “Darling, here is the pictures of new girl. She is 21. Very sweet and lovely. Let me know you received them please. I took them from her portfolio. So, maybe the quality is not so good. But I think you can still see everything.;))).” Groff sent the email to Epstein without comment.
Groff also fielded the girls’ questions and concerns. After arranging an appointment with a girl and her friend to see Epstein on the evening of 21 October 2011, she received the following email from the girl at 3.45pm that day:
“Hey Lesley, My friend just got back, and I spoke to her now about tonight. She has never done anything of this sort before, and is a little nervous about the whole thing. I don’t know what Jeffrey has planned for tonight, but is it ok if they just meet this time? She would really feel more comfortable that way. If Jeffrey would rather not, its ok.. Let me know”
Groff responded: “He says of course you can just stop by!!! :)”
Non-prosecution agreement , 2007
“If Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova.”
The first time Groff’s name appeared in a legal document connected to Epstein’s crimes was in the secret plea deal he made with the state attorney’s office in South Florida. In return for federal immunity – and immunity for various assistants, including Groff – Epstein agreed to plead guilty in 2008 to two low-level state charges, which included the charge of “solicitation of minors to engage in prostitution”.
When I asked Groff’s lawyer, Michael Bachner, about her knowledge of the 2008 conviction, he replied: “After Epstein’s arrest in 2008, he continuously lied to Lesley and other members of the staff, insisting that he had been blackmailed and set up. He angrily said that the allegations against him were simply false, and he had no idea that the ‘prostitute’ he had contact with was a minor. In Lesley’s mind, that was the reason that he was treated so leniently by law-enforcement before and after he was sentenced.”
Over the subsequent years, as Groff continued to work for Epstein, she was made aware of the controversy around the plea deal’s terms. On 25 March 2011, her husband, Ike, emailed her a link to a story in the Daily Beast : “Jeffrey Epstein: How the hedge fund mogul pedophile got off easy.” Groff replied, “yes, he told me yesterday this would be in the Daily Beast”.
Then, in 2017, a case was brought by the author Sarah Ransome, who alleged that she had been abused by Epstein, and this abuse had been facilitated by Maxwell, Groff and two other staff members. Later that year, Ransome withdrew the case against Groff and the other staff, and reached a settlement with Epstein and Maxwell the following year.
Groff continued to work for Epstein until his arrest in July 2019. In his will, written two days before his death on 10 August 2019, he put his estate into a trust to be distributed among various friends and relations, with most ($50m) going to his last partner, Karyna Shuliak. Smaller sums were assigned to Maxwell ($10m), his brother, his pilot and various other staff members. Groff was listed in a clause under the subheading, “After My Death”:
I forgive any loans which I made to the following individuals or entities:
e) Lesley Katherine Groff
After Epstein’s death, Groff was named in several lawsuits, including those brought by anonymous victims in 2019 and 2021 that were later dismissed . As a condition for receiving money from the Epstein victims compensation program , survivors were barred from pursuing any legal action against Epstein’s estate or former employees. By the time it closed in 2021, the programme had awarded $121m to 135 survivors.
Groff’s name also appeared in FBI interviews conducted in 2019 and 2021. In the 2021 interview , the victim, who was under 18 at the time, described how Groff arranged her appointments with Epstein, which were massages that “turned sexual right away”. She thought it was “pretty obvious Lesley knew what was going on”, though she never said anything to Groff about the massages. She would tell Groff if a friend couldn’t make it and suggest other girls. Groff, she said, also arranged a payment from Epstein to cover an abortion and payments to cover accommodation when she was staying in hotels. She said she told Groff that she couldn’t get an apartment as she was not yet 18.
The most prominent of the cases naming Groff was a civil suit brought by Jennifer Araoz against Epstein’s estate after his death. Araoz said she had been abused and raped by Epstein at his home when she was 14 and 15 years old. In her complaint , Araoz’s attorney, Daniel Kaiser, claimed that “Ms. Groff directly facilitated, as well as conspired with Epstein and the other co-conspirators, to make possible and otherwise facilitate the sexual offences committed against minor Plaintiff, Ms Araoz.” In response, Groff’s lawyers , Jon Whitcomb and Michael Bachner, argued that Araoz had confused Groff with someone else: the alleged crimes had been committed at Epstein’s house at a time when Groff wasn’t based there. Groff’s job, they said, “did not include arranging sexual liaisons with underage girls”. In fact, they argued, Groff was an innocent party who had “been wrongfully maligned for years based upon sheer speculation, conjecture and innuendo, ie, if she worked for Jeffrey Epstein, she, ipso facto, must have known he was abusing teenage girls and must have participated therein.” They emphasised one key point: “She did not know.”
On 1 December 2020, the case was dismissed. Araoz had withdrawn because of the conditions set by the compensation programme, declared her lawyer . “We are not surprised that the civil case has been dropped since Lesley found out about these inexplicable crimes when the rest of the world did,” said Bachner at the time. “As a wife and a mother, Lesley remains heartbroken for Jennifer and all of the victims,” added Whitcomb.
When I asked Bachner about the allegations in all the civil suits naming Groff, he said they were “simply wrong, confused, and devoid of any facts establishing that she had any idea of Epstein’s horrible and nefarious conduct. In fact, in some instances, the conclusory conduct alleged against her occurred years before Lesley was even employed by Mr. Epstein. We note that every civil case against Lesley was dismissed and she never paid a cent towards a settlement.”
Although all the civil cases were dropped, Groff was still under criminal investigation. But in December 2021, Whitcomb and Bachner stated that after a two-year investigation, federal prosecutors had decided not to bring any charges against her. In her lawyers’ depiction, Groff did nothing, saw nothing and knew nothing. Her ignorance was so total that it seemed to take on solid form, enclosing her like a reinforced-steel chamber, built to withstand attack.
4 June 2014, DOJ Epstein Library
From: Ike Groff To: Lesley Groff https://pagesix.com/2014/06/04/ accusers-bid-to-reopen-epstein-sex-abuse-case/
From: Lesley Groff To: Ike Groff Oh man. I knew down thing [sic] was going on but I did not know what. This could be bad
Complicity is elusive and slippery, not easily witnessed or proved. The accomplice is not the leading actor, but a figure in the shadows. In his book Complicit, the Berkeley professor of law Christopher Kutz describes how an individual can only be charged with a crime of complicity – co-conspiracy or aiding and abetting, say – if their actions independently meet criteria of criminality. Prosecutors have decided that Groff’s actions were not crimes in themselves.
If Groff’s complicity is no longer a criminal matter, it remains an ethical one. Groff and the team of pilots, drivers, lawyers and accountants allowed the Epstein machine to run with frictionless continuity. Every individual involved in his life, however small their tasks, contributed to its operation and its effects. The concept of individual moral accountability is too limited, writes Kutz, when so many serious harms are brought about by multiple people working together. But that doesn’t absolve the individual: “Something being a collective responsibility does not entail that it is not an individual responsibility.”
Groff, then, was one of the many enablers of Epstein. Enabling abuse is not a crime, but Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah, is now lobbying multiple countries to make it one. (Guiora is the son of Holocaust survivors; his first book was about the concept of the bystander, the person who watches a crime take place in front of them and does nothing, such as those who taunted his father with water while he was on a death march in the former Yugoslavia.) In his second book, Armies of Enablers, Guiora wrote about those who enabled the sexual abuse perpetrated by, among others, the United States national team gymnastics coach Larry Nassar at Michigan State University and Catholic priests in Boston. In every case, there were people who allowed the abuse to continue either by protecting the abuser, the institution or ignoring victims’ reports. They knew what was happening, even if they never witnessed it taking place, and did nothing.
For Guiora, Groff is a classic case. If she was making appointments and booking flights, she was enabling: “All this shit can’t happen without her.” In that sense, she was just like the leaders in the Catholic church or the university administrators who put their loyalty to their institutions over their duty to a victim. The only difference was that in Groff’s case, said Guiora, “her institution was Jeffrey Epstein”. (When asked what Groff knew of Epstein’s crimes, Bachner said, “It is our strong position that Epstein purposefully kept Leslie isolated from his criminal conduct since he had no reason to confide in her and every reason to lie. Epstein lived in two worlds – one legitimate and the other not – and made sure they did not collide… Lesley now realises that Epstein made her a face of his legitimate world. It is no wonder she was included on so many emails.”)
For some of Epstein’s victims, Groff’s behaviour speaks for itself. She was the person who arranged their appointments, booked their flights and paid their money. “They were all deeply involved,” Rina Oh told me. “They can’t deny they were enabling.” Juliette Bryant wondered if Groff and her colleagues convinced themselves that the girls were models visiting from overseas, rather than entertain the idea that Epstein had constructed a system of international sex trafficking. More likely, she thought, Groff knew something was going on but chose not to think about it. “A lot of people don’t ask questions.”
FBI interview, 24 September 2021
GROFF is in retirement along with her husband. GROFF has a son. GROFF enjoys exercising and listening to books on tape.
Among Groff’s emails are hundreds between her and Ike which reveal a wholesome domestic life far removed from the incessant demands of her work. They plan dinners and discuss house renovations, the bank loan and decisions about paint colours and window styles. They figure out play dates, football practice timings and summer camps for their son and worry about how much time he’s spending on social media.
Groff comes across as a mother devoted to her child in the ordinary, consuming way. She worked from home when she could, to have more time with him and made sure she was home the day he started in the third grade. In an email to a pregnant former colleague, Groff tells her to enjoy every minute as it was the “best best best” part of life. Time passed so quickly and she found herself crying when she looked at photos of her son when he was little. Having a child was, she wrote, “THE MOST AMAZING thing you will ever experience.”
After a while, clicking on email after email, I felt I was reading things I shouldn’t. I found myself in the private enclosure of Groff’s mind, her family and home, the details of a life that she kept separate from her job: the train she was going to take home, the burgers she’d make, the voluntary work she wanted her son to take part in. And yet, reading these intimacies also revealed the extent to which someone can divide their life in two. It is possible to have everyday concerns, to care deeply for the people you love, and to willingly work for a terrible man who does terrible things. There was nothing exceptional or particular about Groff that made her able to do this: anyone could have had their CV plucked from a pile and done exactly as she did. We like to think, from the safety of not being in her position, that we would have done things differently, but the capacity to close our eyes to horror is surely near-universal.
And yet, there is still the question of why she did it for so long. When I put this question to Bachner, he replied: “Although Lesley considered resigning, Epstein was manipulative in persuading her to remain… [She] was awestruck by the quality of the company that continued to surround Epstein after his conviction, including heads of state; philanthropists; scientists; philosophers; past and present elected officials; and men and women of universal approbation. Regrettably, Lesley, like so many others, was misled by Epstein and those complicit with him.” Later in the statement, Bachner added: “Lesley wishes she had never met Epstein and that she had resigned. Instead, her life has been turned upside down – including being viciously threatened – simply for doing her job as a secretary for a con-man who intentionally misled her and kept her isolated from his criminal conduct.”
Whatever Groff knew, it seems she never seriously questioned what Epstein was doing or her part in it. Perhaps, as Groff performed her role as his social prosthesis, she felt her actions no longer belonged to her but were simply an execution of his will. It did not matter what she thought about what he did, because it was not her job to think, only to enact his desires. This is not to excuse what she did or didn’t do, but an attempt to understand how someone can split themselves between two moral planes; to understand how someone who worries about the amount of time their child spends on their phone might spend years arranging girls to see a man convicted of abusing children; and to understand why, in all that time, she didn’t walk away.
W hen Groff goes to Washington on 9 June, she will not be the first of Epstein’s former employees to appear in front of the house committee. His accountant, Richard Kahn, and lawyer, Darren Indyke, were both interviewed in early March. Kahn said he made the wrong decision in continuing to work for Epstein after 2008, but there was a financial crisis and he had a family to support. Indyke said he “had no knowledge whatsoever of Jeffrey Epstein’s wrongdoings” while he was working for him. Kahn also spoke of the toll it had taken on his family and said his reputation had been dragged through the mud – a situation that did not seem to elicit great sympathy. (A Democratic representative, James Walkinshaw, accused Kahn of being “wilfully ignorant”.)
The interviews offered no great revelation or catharsis. But they did paint a picture of the odd, suspended existence of all those closely connected to Epstein who have evaded formal accountability. They might never be found guilty of a crime, but they cannot escape the shadow of association with the man. They live, instead, in the purgatory of undefined suspicion, where the best that can be hoped for is the impossible: a life out of sight, their names forgotten, the past rewritten.
During her last weeks of working for Epstein, Groff handled the usual range of tasks. Flights were booked for [REDACTED] from San Francisco to Hong Kong. A propane delivery to Epstein’s island needed chasing. There was a back and forth on who was keeping a copy of some boat logs . Groff wasn’t sure of the necessity of this, “but the fact Jeffrey asked about it means something”.
On 5 July 2019, Groff emailed Epstein and various colleagues about a man called Pokey, who was supposed to have arrived on the island. “He said he would be there 7am last we heard,” she wrote. “Can you confirm?” Epstein, meanwhile, emailed Groff and others complaining about some malfunctioning windows which were “meant to swivel past each other so the ENTIRE window is open”.
The next day, Epstein would fly on his private jet from Paris to Teterboro airport, New Jersey, where he would be arrested on charges of the sex trafficking of minors. There was no sign in the emails, as Groff worried about Pokey’s no-show, that her boss’s entire criminal edifice was on the verge of collapse. It was just another day, with its mixture of administrative demands and the endless efforts to make one man’s life unfold, minute to minute, exactly as he wished. Another employee replied to say that Pokey wasn’t answering his phone. Groff, not one to back down from a pressing task in front of her boss, issued an instruction: “Keep trying.”
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I n almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. “You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.” Then you get to work.
Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence – you suspect, speaking to her, that it’s a little more than that – is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura received a phone call. A pregnant friend named Aya was in trouble. Nishimura grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street and found Aya surrounded by five men. When one of them kicked Aya in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend to run, then went for the attackers with her bat.
By the time the police arrived, the attackers were covered in blood and Nishimura had fled. She went into hiding 170 miles away in Tokyo. A fortnight later, when she returned to Gifu, a local man approached her in a nightclub. He was a member of the Inagawa-kai, one of Japan’s largest organised crime syndicates, and he wanted her to join. Nishimura was already in a biker gang called the Worst, who raced and robbed while dressed in the white jumpsuits of wartime kamikaze pilots. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime, too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling – and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. The Inagawa-kai man didn’t have the right energy, Nishimura thought. She turned him down.
Yakuza life nonetheless appealed. It offered respect, protection and, above all, the opportunity to make big money. A few days later, another yakuza sent for Nishimura. His name was Ryochi Sugino, and he ran a Gifu affiliate of one of Japan’s largest yakuza groups. Sugino was a convicted murderer but he was also charismatic and, somehow, paternal. Nishimura trusted him. “He had this aura,” she said.
Aged 20, she and an underboss shared sake at the gang’s downtown Gifu headquarters, a ritual known as sakazuki that formalised Nishimura’s entry into the yakuza, and established her loyalty to Sugino until death. Now, as the saying went, if Sugino told Nishimura a crow was white, she would have to agree. She was proud of her new identity, she told me. “Everything that was yakuza-like, I would do.”
Some of the men taunted her for being a woman. But they also appreciated the business she brought in, running girls and meth around Gifu. Unlike members of Italian mafias, who kick cuts of criminal profits up through a rigid hierarchy, yakuza operate more like franchises, with members paying a monthly tribute to trade off the syndicate’s threat of violence.
At the time Nishimura joined, the yakuza were thriving. Unlike many organised crime groups around the world, the yakuza did not consider themselves outsiders. They had long been institutionalised, having grown powerful with, rather than against, the state. They claimed a connection to feudal-era samurai and helped plunder Asia on behalf of imperial Japanese forces. By the middle of the 20th century, their image as patriotic felons had been further massaged by yakuza-owned movie and manga houses.
By the 1980s, when Nishimura became a member, the yakuza did not merely traffic guns, drugs and women; the gangs ran casinos, golf courses and high-rises, and extorted money from publicly listed corporations by threatening to disrupt their operations. The largest yakuza syndicates were worth hundreds of millions of dollars and were active on the stock market, with operations from Hawaii to Ho Chi Minh City.
But as Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 90s, and a succession of scandals laid bare organised crime’s cosy relationship with politics, the Japanese public increasingly demanded that police crack down on the gangs. These days, after years of increasingly tough lawmaking, plus competition from international and tech-savvy crime syndicates, the yakuza are widely seen as a spent force.
Nishimura is no longer a member. She lives in a small, ground floor apartment near Gifu’s railway station, surrounded by plants and photos of the two sons whose adult lives she has – because of her criminal past and her drug addiction – mostly watched unfold from afar. When we met, across three days last autumn, Nishimura, 59, wore her hair in a dyed-blond ponytail, pulled through a rhinestone-studded baseball cap and paired with a white denim jacket and drainpipe jeans. The most visible signs she was once a yakuza are the lurid tattoos that spill on to her neck and hands, and the little finger missing from her left hand.
Nishimura has no desire to become a feminist icon. “I was a man,” she told me. “I had to behave like a man.” Nonetheless, she speaks of feeling ashamed of her decades of crime – much of it targeted at women – and she is attempting to add redemption to her repertoire. She has written a memoir about the highs and lows of life in the mob, and works for a charity to help ex-yakuza ditch the gangs for good. As the fortune of Japan’s historic underworld fades, Nishimura hopes her life’s latest chapter may just pull her own family back together, too.
A s a child, Nishimura devoured the stories yakuza told about themselves – particularly the swashbuckling rebels portrayed onscreen by stars such as Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara, who lived by a code: protect the weak and fight the strong. For Nishimura, that meant rebellion against her father, a disciplinarian civil servant whose parenting style, as she recalled it , involved flogging and flinging his children, half-naked, out in the cold. Anything from bad grades to slouching could be met with a beating. “Hard work,” he told Nishimura and her two younger brothers, “never betrays you.”
By the age of 14, Nishimura had joined a group of so-called “delinquents”, smoking cigarettes and cutting class. It was a “fresh experience”, she writes in her memoir, a “time of liberation and freedom”. But when Nishimura bleached her hair blond, it enraged her father. He shaved her head, and she arrived at school the next day with her head wrapped in a towel.
From then on, Nishimura became a habitual runaway, sleeping in cars or under the eaves of temples. She renamed herself Mako, meaning “the devil’s child”, and got the first of hundreds of tattoos that now cover almost her entire body. Some Nishimura did herself with a stick and poke – including the ones on her thighs, which hurt the most. “I can endure pain,” she assured me.
Aged 17, after a few months in juvenile detention for drug possession, Nishimura joined the Worst, one of hundreds of bōsōzoku (literally: “speed tribe”) biker gangs across Japan. Yakuza were often recruited from biker gangs, and it wasn’t long before Nishimura came on to the radar of a 40-year-old yakuza, who in turn introduced her to Sugino.
When Nishimura’s mother, Hiroko, discovered that her daughter had graduated from juvenile detention to become Japan’s sole female yakuza, she turned up at the gang’s HQ in Gifu. It wasn’t difficult to find: yakuza have registered offices, logos and even employees of the month. “Please take care of my daughter,” Hiroko begged Sugino. But Nishimura now had a second family – one that, she felt, accepted her for who she truly was.
For the first two years as a Sugino-gumi yakuza, Nishimura lived out a kind of probationary period, knocking off a list of daily chores that could include cooking (colleagues particularly enjoyed her potato salad), cleaning, laundry, working the reception desk or walking the boss’s two akita dogs, one of which had, according to legend, notched up four kills of his own and was thus named, unimpeachably, Dog Killer Maru.
The Sugino clan also taught Nishimura how to extort businesses, and to identify corruptible cops and politicians. (During the 1980s, a newspaper reported that one Gifu yakuza organisation retained a sitting member of the Diet, Japan’s legislature, as an “adviser”.) Nishimura used drug money to set up a sex worker service, then invested its profits in slot machines. She gave some of the cash she made to the elder of her two brothers, a struggling truck driver who himself had flirted with the mob. She lifted weights, learned karate and spent vast sums on tattoos, including designs worn by fabled kingpin Kenichi Shinoda.
One of the yakuza’s most profitable areas was the sex industry. Nishimura would deliver women to Watakano, a half-square-mile island 75 miles south of Gifu given the nickname Prostitute Island. Pimps might pay advances for good-looking girls, so Nishimura searched among Gifu’s indebted or drug-addled women for potential money spinners.
On one occasion, according to her memoir, just as Nishimura was about to close a deal for one of them, a young meth addict named Reiko, the girl ran away. Nishimura tracked her to Osaka, Japan’s second city, and paid a yakuza member to kidnap her again. Nishimura drove the terrified girl back to Gifu in her Mercedes, adding travel expenses, food and drug costs to her debt. You’ll have to clean up after yourself, Nishimura told her.
Nishimura then drove Reiko to a ferry terminal, where they boarded a dilapidated fishing boat before Nishimura passed the girl to a Watakano yakuza. Years later Nishimura ran into the girl. She had repaid her debt but she was vacant, and didn’t recognise Nishimura at all. Nishimura recognised her role in Reiko’s misery. But, she said: “If you are a yakuza, if you don’t do these sorts of bad things, you can’t really rise or become better.”
R ivals often called Nishimura the “little man”. She remains either the only or one of two women to have performed the sakazuki. (There is a woman in Osaka who may have done so before Nishimura, but she refuses to speak about her past.) Nishimura is the “exception that confirms the rule” of the yakuza’s strict patriarchal culture, according to Martina Baradel, an Oxford University academic and author of the books Yakuza Blues and 21st Century Yakuza. (In the early 1980s, the widow of the leader of Japan’s largest yakuza syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, took over while her husband’s chosen successor languished in prison. But she never performed sakazuki.)
Occasionally Nishimura would make concessions to the underworld’s patriarchy – such as answering the phone at Sugino-gumi reception in a deeper voice. But she is insistent that nobody made a sexual advance on her, or treated her as anything other than a fellow member. Nishimura’s biggest threats arrived in other forms.
As her profits and status soared, Nishimura’s private life spiralled out of control. Drink had never agreed with her; neither had she enjoyed huffing paint thinner with her biker friends. But meth was another story. It kept her alert, and high, like her hair was standing on end, she said. The Sugino-gumi outlawed drug use, but Nishimura’s small apartment welcomed a rotating cast of gangsters and users, who sat around injecting meth.
It wasn’t long before Sugino discovered the gang’s addiction problem, and ordered Nishimura to apologise on their behalf in the yakuza way: by slicing off the tip of her little finger. Nishimura pinned the digit between a short sword and the ground, and stepped on the blade. But the sword slipped, and cut her finger diagonally. So she did it again, severing it a joint deeper, before heading to a nearby hospital whose staff filed the protruding bone, evened the bloody stump with nail clippers, and stitched it together. Then she returned to HQ, and handed the grisly remains to her boss. Seeing the nonchalance with which she’d performed the act, squeamish members would later come to Nishimura to perform it on them, too – which she did, gladly, and often for a fee.
Nishimura, now 21, had long since dropped out of contact with her father. Her mother, Hiroko, remained in touch, meeting her wayward daughter in secret, giving her money, and hoping that, one day, the family would reunite. But when police raided Nishimura’s apartment, they found methamphetamine, and a judge sentenced her to two-and-a-half years in prison for possession. While inside, she studied business law, and learned financial con-artistry from a fellow inmate.
When Nishimura was released in 1990, aged 24, she was met at the front gate by a yakuza guard of honour, driven to gang HQ, dressed in a suit and handed a million yen – about £4,700 today. The ceremony, known as demukai , “was an important rite of passage for the yakuza member,” according to an anthropological study from this period. “It was a symbol that the state’s rehabilitation efforts had failed.”
In prison, Nishimura had managed to get clean, but upon her release started taking meth again. She was renowned for her toughness, but inwardly the drug had made her a wreck. She grew paranoid, and suffered hallucinations. “I was worn out,” she writes. “Shadows looked like people; running water sounded like a human voice.”
B y the end of the 80s, the yakuza had lost their status. For decades, Japan’s gangs had maintained a reputation as outlaws stealing from the rich, composed of burakumin, a low-ranking social caste historically confined to “dirty” roles such as butchery and undertaking. But a series of high-profile scandals revealed that the bosses were living extravagant lifestyles and corrupting politicians. Fed up with their influence and with gangland violence, the public turned against them.
Even the yakuza film genre, so beloved of Japanese audiences through the 1950s and 60s, had changed. The hagiographies had given way to newer films, such as Boiling Point in 1990, which parodied their thuggery. In 1992, a film called Mob Woman depicted a female lawyer who successfully faced down the yakuza. After it screened, a trio of gangsters set upon the director, Juzo Itami, and slashed his face with knives.
Itami recovered; the Diet nonetheless enacted an anti-yakuza law prohibiting them from involvement in the stock market, collecting protection money and working as loan sharks. The law – which was similar to the 1970 US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act – allowed authorities to designate yakuza as “violent groups”, enabling the seizure of assets and property.
It wasn’t just a matter of lost honour or prestige. The yakuza had ridden high on an economic miracle that carried Japan from postwar ruin to the world’s third-largest economy. But the bubble burst in 1990, wiping 60% off the value of Japan’s Nikkei stock index and devaluing the yen. Yakuza lost huge investments in global megaprojects, while foreign gangs outmuscled them in drug and sex markets they had previously dominated.
At its height in the 1960s, the yakuza had claimed to have more than 184,000 members in 5,000 syndicates – far more than the Italian and Italian-American mafias combined. According to police records, by the mid-1990s, yakuza numbers had dwindled to about 90,000. Gangsters from China, Vietnam and even Russia began moving in on the yakuza’s home turf. “The day when Japan is run by the world’s gangsters,” wrote the Sunday Mainichi magazine in 1992, “may not be far off.”
I n 1995, aged 29, Nishimura met a member of a rival clan at a yakuza dinner party in Gifu. He was 15 years her senior, and in a relationship. They began an affair and, six months later, Nishimura got pregnant. Motherhood changed her almost overnight. “I never thought I would die for anyone,” she said. “But when I had children, I started to think I could die for them.”
Nishimura’s lover had been on bail when they met, and he was rearrested while she was expecting. She couldn’t control the courts but she vowed to quit meth for good. Nishimura broke off contact with her Sugino-gumi colleagues, and stopped hanging out at their regular haunts. Her father had died several years before her child was born but Hiroko came to Nishimura’s house every day, delighting in her first grandchild. Hiroko and Nishimura even shopped together, like a normal mother and daughter. In some small way, Nishimura felt, the baby would repay the pain she had put her own parents through.
When the boy’s father emerged from prison, a year into his son’s life, and refused to leave the yakuza, Nishimura left him and moved from Gifu to Kasugai, a city closer to Nagoya and the village in which she had grown up. But motherhood didn’t offer the thrills of organised crime, and for years, she writes, “life seemed to stand still”.
When, in her son’s final year of nursery school, his father asked to give the relationship another try, Nishimura agreed. They moved into an apartment in Gifu together, and for a while things were good. But Nishimura couldn’t hold down administrative jobs, or work at a local nursing home. When employers saw her tattoos or missing finger, they would find a way to reject her.
She returned to crime – first running a massage parlour, then sourcing meth in Tokyo and selling it by the kilo. “I was impressed by how easily meth could be made into money,” she writes. “One drug deal could bring in several times the profit of one month’s worth of legitimate work.” Aged 39, Nishimura gave birth to her second son. Unlike her father, she didn’t beat her children, but she was surprised how strict she could be. “You understand the reason behind that severity,” she told me. “My father was right.”
All this time Nishimura had avoided her old yakuza colleagues in the Sugino-gumi. Instead, she assumed the role of gangster’s wife, cooking and cleaning for her partner’s men at their Gifu headquarters, even though she was the family’s main breadwinner. She and her partner fought, she says, sometimes violently: according to Nishimura, one time she hit him and he responded by throwing a kitchen knife at her.
Nishimura stayed off meth, but instead consumed prescription tranquillisers, eventually taking an entire sheet of 10 pills each day. She started dealing meth from her home, and police arrested her. They released her after 10 days, having searched the flat and found nothing but shipping labels. But one day in 2014, aged 48, Nishimura was hospitalised after taking enough pills to paralyse her. It was “like I was tied to the bed”, she writes.
When she was discharged, she reached out to her old yakuza friends. But time hadn’t been kind to them, either: Nishimura’s closest ex-colleague was an alcoholic, and the gang was broke. Yakuza once vowed never to harm or extort regular citizens, but they were now engaged in the kinds of digital romance scams Nishimura believed were below them, including those that targeted elderly people. The “responsibility to fight the bullies to help the weak”, she told me, seeming to forget her own cruelties, “is the core of yakuza thought. If it’s not like that, I don’t like it.” Soon afterwards, she left the gang for good.
T he fate of Nishimura’s former gang in Gifu reflected the decline of the yakuza across Japan. The 1992 anti-yakuza laws had curbed some of the gangs’ business, but companies or individuals still paid them to extort or intimidate. So, in 2011, Tokyo outlawed all financial transactions with them. Not only were yakuza now blocked from their main source of income, but members could not buy vehicles, open bank accounts or even register a sim card. Gone was the promise of a glitzy gangster lifestyle, and numbers plummeted.
One anecdote from recent years captures the diminished status of the yakuza. In February 2020, when a Covid-19 outbreak stranded the Diamond Princess cruise ship at Yokohama for a month, members of a local yakuza group offered to clean the stricken vessel. “Humans like us should do the dirty job,” said one high-ranking member. His offer invoked the mythical history of the yakuza’s origins in the low-caste burakumin . But it was also an attempt to score good PR: by this time, there were fewer than 30,000 yakuza, and one of their bosses was now offering to sweep shit off a ship’s decks. (Japan’s government refused the offer.)
Today, Japan’s criminal world is dominated by small, informal groups known as tokuryū , a term used by police to describe gangs without the rigid hierarchies or infrastructure of yakuza syndicates. Many orchestrate their crimes online, offering so-called yami baito , or shady part-time jobs, via social media, recruiting scammers for romance and crypto fraud.
Foreign gangs that were once hired muscle for the yakuza are now key players in Japan’s sex and drug trades. These gangs are “very flexible”, says Tadashi Kageyama, a senior managing director at risk advisory firm Kroll. “They partner up with the Chinese gangs, they partner up with the Vietnamese gangs, they partner up with the Russian mafia,” he told me. Modern organised crime is highly digital, says Kobe-based academic Wolf Herbert. “And the old yakuza? They don’t even have a smartphone.”
Japanese cops today arrest under half the number of foreign nationals they did 20 years ago. Nonetheless, foreign gangs have become a useful foil for Japan’s resurgent far-right. The prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, said in November that “members of the public feel anxiety and a sense of unfairness due to illegal acts … committed by a small number of foreign nationals”. Criminal monopolies – particularly those that, like the yakuza in its heyday, have captured a large portion of the police and judiciary – are less prone to violence than an underworld contested by several smaller gangs. Even Nishimura suggested to me that, “maybe it’s safer with the yakuza around than others”.
B y 2016, Nishimura had split from her partner. But partly because of her drug addiction, he won custody of their sons. Even her mother stopped visiting. Nishimura drifted through a succession of dead-end jobs, wondering if she would ever see her children, or her mother and brothers, again. She was alone, without even the down-and-outs in her former gang for company. And then she met Satoru Takegaki.
Takegaki had been a yakuza enforcer for 32 years, a tough guy who was close to the Yamaguchi-gumi boss. But over time he had grown disillusioned: money was scarce, and newcomers ignored the sense of honour and tradition that he believed should underpin yakuza life. When a boss’s son was gunned down in a dispute, Takegaki left the Yamaguchi-gumi altogether. There are, in theory, ways to retire from yakuza life. But Takegaki’s former colleagues didn’t accept his departure. They shot up his house, after which he installed CCTV cameras and slept with a sword by his side.
Soon after, in the city of Himeji, he founded Gojinkai, an NGO helping other yakuza leave the criminal life. By 2020, when Nishimura first met Takegaki, he was often quoted in the media predicting the yakuza’s demise. She began visiting the Gojinkai office once a month, joining Takegaki and other former yakuza in a street-cleaning exercise. It was “wonderful to see such a bigshot in the past taking the initiative to pick up trash”, she writes. Nishimura’s inability to leave her criminal past behind had left her poor, alone and jobless. But she was inspired by Takegaki. “If he can do it,” she thought, “so can I.” (I was unable to reach Takegaki for comment, though he told a Telegraph reporter in 2021 that the yakuza would be extinct “in 50 years, perhaps less … They will be the stuff of movies and legends, just like the ninja. Gone.”)
Gojinkai aimed to address a major issue for anyone trying to ditch the yakuza and join the legal economy. Authorities consider them members for five years after leaving – meaning they are left unbanked, unable to find employment, and more susceptible to rejoining the underworld. Ex-yakuza “are afloat in the grey zone,” says Herbert. “So there is no way for them to get out of the criminal scene.”
Working with Gojinkai gave Nishimura a sense of purpose. After the pandemic, Takegaki allowed her to open a branch just minutes from her old gang HQ in Gifu. She helps former members with housing and drug rehab, and finds work for some of them at a local demolition firm. “I want to let people know that whatever you’ve done in your past, you can still face the future,” she said. “And you can sort yourself out.”
Helping others’ rehabilitation felt like a small way to atone for her past. But Gojinkai was an unpaid gig: Nishimura was still just scraping by financially, and missing her two boys, who were now young men. She knew her eldest had become a champion kickboxer in Tokyo, and surrounded herself with pictures of his exploits. But she was poor and lonely. Above all, she wanted her family back.
T he Kogane shrine in Gifu is a complex dedicated to Shinto, Japan’s indigenous, animist faith. Some version of the shrine has stood on the same spot for almost 2,000 years, though it has been destroyed and rebuilt through a series of national calamities, from an 1891 earthquake to allied firebombing campaigns. Shinto has also become a key part of Nishimura’s post-yakuza reinvention. And on a chilly Sunday morning last October, she invited me to join her at Kogane, as she paid her respects alongside a white-robed priest.
Nishimura’s younger brother and mother joined us on the visit. Hiroko is even tinier than her daughter, with rosy cheeks and cropped, greying hair. She had kept secret her sporadic visits with Nishimura over the years. But in December 2024, alongside Martina Baradel, the author, mother and daughter sat together in the family home for the first time in decades – making sure to do so while Nishimura’s younger brother was at work. In the spring of 2025, mother, daughter and brother met at a Gifu cafe. They spoke for three hours. “We had to cry,” said Nishimura.
She apologised for the years of hurt she’d caused her brother. He, too, is missing a little finger: he claims he was only a yakuza for a short time, and went back to driving trucks after a year. He spoke about their childhood, about how Hiroko would fight their father, telling him not to be so harsh on the kids. When Nishimura stopped coming home around the age of 14, “it was hell”, he said. By the time of the reunion, he and his sister hadn’t seen each other for more than two decades.
Years of secrets and intermittent contact with her children had taken their toll on Hiroko. “I was missing them,” she said, bursting into tears. She was “anxious, worried about what they would do”. Nishimura, sitting opposite, wiped away a tear of her own.
Nishimura meets occasionally with her older son, who is now in his late 20s. His younger brother isn’t yet ready. For now, Nishimura knows that reuniting with Hiroko and her brother will have to do. “I’ve realised how important family is,” she told me.
She shrugged, perhaps uneasy with the sudden outpouring of emotion, then offered a rare hint that her sex had in fact protected her in her life of crime. “If I was a man,” she said, “I’d have been killed already.”
Hiroko beamed. “I didn’t even see it in my dreams” that she would ever share a moment with her kids like this. “I’m so happy,” Hiroko added. Tears kept streaming down her cheeks. “Every day I was thinking about her,” she said, pointing at Nishimura, the prodigal daughter, her painted hands wrapped around a coffee cup, “because she’s so cute!”
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This article was amended on 21 May 2026. Mako Nishimura is missing part of her little finger on her left hand, not her right hand as an earlier version said.
Y ou can judge a woman by the people she surrounds herself with. For the last few months I’ve been talking to the people Marilyn Monroe surrounded herself with, during her eventful 36 years on earth. Ostensibly and primarily, I was doing this to make a radio documentary, which begins on what would have been her 100th birthday. But I also had a secret secondary motive: I wanted to find out if – maybe in another life – Marilyn and I might have been friends.
The first thing to say about Monroe’s friends is that she had a lot of them. The fact that more than six decades have passed since her death, and it’s still possible to find enough living people to interview, tells you something. This is all the more surprising because MM (as she’s sometimes referred to in fan circles) seems far too much the archetypal, immortal screen goddess to do anything as ordinary as have mates. And while it’s possible to imagine her trailed by a harem of pathetically adoring men – like Tom Ewell’s character in The Seven Year Itch – her sex-symbol image means people find it harder to envisage her having real friendships with women.
But Monroe could indeed be what some might call a “girl’s girl”. Amy Greene is an ex-model and the widow of Milton Greene, the photographer with whom Monroe formed her independent film company, Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP), in 1955. Greene shared her home with the star for several years in the mid-1950s, and remembers the consternation this arrangement caused: “Girlfriends would say, ‘Are you out of your mind to have that woman in your house?’ I’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you? There’s nothing there. They’re business partners!’ And when we got to know each other and we became real friends, I knew that she would never hurt me by banging Milton.”
Female friendships figure prominently in her movies, too. She pals around with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire (very much the Charlotte to their respective Miranda and Samantha), and has a close bond with Eileen Heckart’s Vera in Bus Stop – significant, since this was MMP’s first co-production. Perhaps most memorable, though, is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , in which Monroe co-starred with Jane Russell, a brunette who could vie with her for mid-century sex symbol status.
Monroe was being paid only a fraction of Russell’s £200,000 fee, but despite this contentious setup, the two developed a mutual affection that endured long after filming wrapped. In Russell’s 1985 memoir, My Path and My Detours, she recalls a day at the beach with close female friends: “[We] had wine, music and more talk by the fire … I thought of Marilyn. I wished I had her phone number, because I knew she belonged there, where we were all laughing about our problems.” That was August 1962. The next day Russell received word that Monroe had died .
Marilyn also had relationships with Hollywood contemporaries that were less sisterly. In 1953, Mamie Van Doren, now 95, was contracted as Universal’s “answer to Marilyn Monroe” and she remembers regularly bumping into her sometime rival around town. Van Doren described Monroe to me as “a lovely person [who] didn’t have a bad bone in her body”, but she also has a line in scurrilous gossip – see her latest memoir, You Thought I Was Dead (out on 2 July) – which ranges from the slightly shady (“Everybody thought I was copying her, but it was more or less the other way around”) to the outright unrepeatable-for-legal-reasons. Still, her overriding sentiment was solidarity with another young woman at the mercy of the male-dominated studio system: “We had the same problems; what we were expected to do if we wanted to get a role. And she was more having problems with that than I was.”
As for male friends, everyone’s heard about Monroe and John F Kennedy. Some even allege their dalliance contributed in some way to Monroe’s early death. While JFK may have been the most powerful man in the world, my impression from speaking to her confidants is that his standing in Monroe’s heart was far less significant.
The men who ultimately meant the most to her were her platonic friends and collaborators. Men such as the photographer Lawrence Schiller, with whom Monroe worked on the second most scandalous nude photoshoot of her career. The first was the “red velvet” series, shot when Monroe was young and broke, and later used by Hugh Hefner to launch Playboy (Monroe was never paid a cent more than the initial $50 fee).
The second was all Monroe’s idea, a publicity stunt devised on the 1962 set of her final, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give, to remind the world – and the studios – of her star power. As Schiller tells it: “Very few people really understand light. Marilyn understood it. This is a woman unsurpassed by any other I’ve come across in the entertainment business … She knew a lot about photography, and she knew what was right for her.”
Another long-term friend was Sam Shaw, the man who took probably the most famous photograph of the star – the one where she is standing above a subway grate in a billowing white dress. In Shaw’s posthumously published book, Dear Marilyn, he credits her “elegance and clean sense of fun” with the shot’s success. Their letters reveal a warm, supportive friendship, rooted in shared artistic passions and hardscrabble childhoods, which eventually grew into a chosen family for Monroe. Shaw’s daughter Edie, who, like Monroe, was born on 1 June, told me about a circus trip with the movie star to celebrate Edie’s 10th birthday and Marilyn’s 29th: “She was a complex person. She would talk in the same sort of language that you’d speak to her. So if it was a child, she was sweet and soft. If it was a studio head, she was tough. She could be many Marilyns.”
Monroe got on well with children and her thwarted desire to become a mother is often cast as central to her tragedy. But Greene believes, based on their kitchen-table chats, that her true feelings were more nuanced: “She loved [to say], ‘Oh, I want children.’ She loved the word ‘children’. But it was a fantasy, and she knew it. She should never have had children. She couldn’t have dealt with them. She was not a housewife-y type.”
Moreover, as the Shaw family’s memories attest, Monroe did have children in her life, and plentiful opportunities to express maternal love. On the day she died she spent time on the phone consoling her former stepson Joe DiMaggio Jr over a recent heartbreak.
Put all these pieces together, and the picture that emerges is very different from the tragic tabloid fable of a lovelorn sexpot who died because the Kennedy brothers spurned her and she couldn’t have a family of her own. The Monroe her friends remember was a joyous, funny, intellectually curious woman, brimming with creative ambition. Anyone would have been lucky to have her as a friend.
Bombshell: Five Faces of Marilyn Monroe airs on BBC Radio 4 in the UK from 1 June at BST 13.45
Basílica sunset and Eid al-Adha prayers: photos of the day – Thursday
The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
The sun melts into the horizon behind Basílica de la Sagrada Familia. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP
Eithne Staunton Last modified on Thu 28 May 2026 15.17 BST
Dakar, Senegal Followers of the Layène Brotherhood, a Sufi Muslim sect, attend Eid al-Adha prayers in Cambérène Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
New Delhi, India Worshippers gather at Jama masjid for Eid al-Adha prayers, marking the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. During the festival, sacrificial meat is shared in three parts – for family, friends and those most in need Photograph: Rajat Gupta/EPA
Gilgil, Kenya A student injured in a stampede is helped from a school bus after a fire tore through a dormitory at Utumishi girls’ academy in Nakuru county Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
Gaza City A funeral for 10 Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike the night before. Gaza remains gripped by daily violence, with the Israeli military and Hamas accusing one another of violating the truce, in effect since 10 October. More than 900 people have been killed by Israel since the ceasefire, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the UN Photograph: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images
Port-au-Prince, Haiti Children play football in the hilly suburb of Pétion-Ville Photograph: Odelyn Joseph/AP
Delhi, India A boy plays in a park in the old quarters of the city Photograph: Kabir Jhangiani/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
Kolkata, India A Bangladeshi woman, who allegedly illegally crossed the border, arrives for verification at an Indian border security force camp. Hundreds of people have fled to the frontier, according to police, after the government ordered the construction of detention centres for undocumented Bangladeshi migrants and Rohingya refugees Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
Hyderabad, India A child yawns during Eid al-Adha prayers Photograph: Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images
Bangkok, Thailand Community members carry food into Buddarul Mumineen mosque after Eid al-Adha prayers Photograph: Matt Hunt/Anadolu/Getty Images
Paris, France Naomi Osaka walks on to the court at the Roland Garros French Open tennis tournament Photograph: Virginie Lefour/Belga/Shutterstock
Paris, France The installation of La Caverne du Pont Neuf by the French photographer and street artist JR. The artwork pays tribute to the the late French artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1985 wrapping of the city’s oldest bridge Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
Windsor, United Kingdom The newly renamed and redesigned Venus Garden at Windsor Castle in Berkshire. First used as a garden in the 1820s during the reign of George IV, this new design is inspired by the petal-shaped orbit of Earth’s closest planetary neighbour Photograph: Royal Collection Trust/PA
Cambridge, UK People on a punt tour past Clare College and King’s College Chapel on the River Cam after days of record-breaking heat Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
Mindelo, Cape Verde The Leopard tugboat shipwreck Photograph: Patrick Meinhardt/AFP/Getty Images
Yerevan, Armenia Cars transport military robots during a military parade marking Republic Day Photograph: Hayk Baghdasaryan/Photolure/Reuters
Tokyo, Japan The bipedal robot Mini Pi, made by the Chinese startup High Torque Technology, is surrounded by visitors during the Humanoids Summit. The annual technology conference is centred on advancing humanoid robotics Photograph: Franck Robichon/EPA
Barcelona, Spain The sun melts into the horizon behind Basílica de la Sagrada Familia. Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to visit the city next month Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP
Middle age is a brutal time of life. As those of us mired in it know, it’s perfectly suited to being mined for laughs (the unhinged type of laughs that are bound up with tears, crisis, and, inevitably, death.) But still too few comedy series take this pressured segment of time and squeeze it for all its acidic worth. Enter middle-aged joke machine Tina Fey , who with The Four Seasons – her zippy 2020s update of the 1980s film of the same name, co-created and written with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher – has triumphed once again. The second season of her midlife comedy drama is even more perspicacious, poignant and hilarious than the first.
Again there are four fancy holidays split across the seasons, each one given two gag-packed episodes – a rigid but neat structural device that allows the big moments to happen off-screen. Meanwhile we get the aftermath soundtracked by an avalanche of Vivaldi and bracing jokes about sad lonely donkeys, secret vapes mistaken for thumb drives, and the tragicomedy of being an angry, unravelling fiftysomething man in a T-shirt printed with “Keep Calm and Fuhgeddaboutit”.
The three couples have been reconfigured after the death of Nick (Steve Carell) at the end of season one. So there’s Kate (played by Fey) and Jack (the uptight/softie duo relentlessly workshopping their marriage into the ground), Danny and Claude (gay, unbearably chic, forever bickering) and Nick’s ex-wife Anne and the much younger woman for whom he left her, Ginny – now heavily pregnant with his baby. “Ladies aren’t supposed to be friends with the woman their dead husband left them for,” wails Anne. “You’re right,” says Kate. “There is no Beyoncé song about that.” Anyway, come summer the two women and a baby have moved in together, and Anne’s so besotted with her new role she is testing Ginny’s breast pump on her own nipple.
Springtime. The grief-stricken sextet go on an upstate hike to scatter Nick’s ashes from his favourite mountain. The first time they’re interrupted by a Brownies group. The second time everyone hates each other, plus Danny forgot the ashes. The third time they’re reeling from an active manhunt in the area that traps them in a retro motel overnight, in a town so depressing “Tracy Chapman sped away from it” – a joke so specific I felt it was written for middle-aged me, which is Fey’s special power. There are moments in The Four Seasons so hilarious I laughed like I do (re)watching 30 Rock. Which, considering I have a Romanian rescue dog called Lizzie Lemon, is a compliment of the highest order.
Summer: to the beach. Ginny has given birth, Danny and Claude (sort of, maybe) want a baby, and Jack has found a man friend to have play dates with on the beach. Aw, says Kate (at first): “I didn’t think middle-aged straight men could make new friends!” The conversations between Danny and Claude are particularly funny, moving, and sensitively wrought. Meanwhile Kate and Jack are “freeballing”: the name given to their decision to “grow apart on purpose”. If anyone else was writing these characters they would be insufferable. Instead, what unfolds is a beautiful meditation on the endurance test of long-term relationships.
Big Thanksgiving culminates in Jack kicking the turkey down the stairs and twisting his ankle. Little Thanksgiving travels back in time to the Covid pandemic when Steve was alive, and Anne almost left him. In many ways this second season belongs to Anne. She makes a joyous transition from lonely, fearful ex-wife to contented (enough) single woman willing to dress up as an folkloric old witch at an Italian Christmas pageant. She gets many of the best lines, and the most fabulous wardrobe.
It’s worth watching The Four Seasons for the knitwear alone. The laughably exquisite settings are straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie, and this being Fey, there’s a joke about that, too. “Life is not a Nancy Meyers movie!” claims Anne after an attempt at a summer fling goes awry. Of course, the joke is that The Four Seasons looks like a Nancy Meyers movie, but is nothing like one. Pull back the woven rug and the neutral linen curtains and – how would Meyers put it? – it’s complicated . This is a dark and difficult world in which good men smash up vintage snack shacks, regrets must be lived with, sacrifices made, childhood traumas kept buried, and people who love each other want completely different things.
I found the levels of lush lakeside lawns and lobster rolls ludicrous at first but by the time these flawed, flailing friends were wintering in the Italian alps and Kate was delivering an Emmy award-deserving speech to Jack (while running a marathon!) about her secret levels of despair, I was all in. The sublime locations are a lure to reel you into the murky depths of midlife experience. “I worry that you and I are going to get weirder and weirder and keep pulling apart until we’re living like strangers,” she wheezes, “and all the neighbourhoods kids are gonna skip our house at Halloween because we’re too creepy. And sometimes honestly I’m afraid to die and other times I’m like sure, it seems nice, the big sleep … let’s fucking do it!” At which point Kate and Jack cross the finish line together, and embrace.
Actor, producer and member of the Cannes jury Demi Moore arrives on stage during the closing ceremony in Cannes. Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images
As La Croisette closes for another year, here are the most memorable looks from its final week
The French actor Isabelle Huppert’s black and white Chanel gown consists of giant paillettes that sparkle under the lights at the festival’s closing ceremony Photograph: Domine Jerome/ABACA/Shutterstock
Stellan Skarsgård puts another contemporary twist on red-carpet tailoring by swapping the traditional white shirt/black tie formula for a red on red look by Loewe at the Histoires de la Nuit premiere Photograph: Alfonso Catalano/SGP/Shutterstock
The Senegalese director and producer Angèle Diabang Brener wears a tangerine-coloured gown with a contrasting gold neckline detail to the closing ceremony Photograph: Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
Working with her stylist, Mohit Rai, Indian actor Aishwarya Rai wears a sculptural gown for the Histoires de la Nuit premiere. Created by the Delhi based designer Amit Aggarwal the dress features crystalline embellishments on lattice-like structures that according to Aggarwal ‘create an interplay of luminosity, depth, and fluidity’ Photograph: Max Montingelli/SGP/Shutterstock
The pleated detailing on Tilda Swinton’s Chanel dress gives it a lovely bouncy movement as she makes her way down La Croisette for the closing ceremony Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
Like Swinton, Chloé Zhao also opts for a red dress on a red carpet styling trick for the festival’s closing ceremony. Zhao’s knitted dress is by Gabriela Hearst and the looped tiered fringe on the skirt again gives it a springy bounce effect Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images
Renate Reinsve and her stylist Karla Welch have been taking a minimalist approach to red carpet dressing but there is always at least one element of surprise. Here they makes the case for disco trousers at the closing ceremony. Reinsve’s Louis Vuitton look consists of sequined silver trousers paired with a full-length sleeveless top fastened at the neckline Photograph: Zabulon Laurent/Shutterstock
The French actor and master of ceremonies Eye Haidara wears a ruched black dress by Elie Saab featuring cut-out back detailing at the premiere of L’Objet du Délit Photograph: Jean-Marc Haedrich/SIPA/Shutterstock
After nearly a dozen looks over the past two weeks, Demi Moore leaned into duvet dressing for the closing ceremony. Her emerald green Balenciaga dress was teamed with a puffy pale blue shawl that cocooned the actor and jury member Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA
Winner of the best actress award, Tao Okamoto wears a delicate floral dress by Chanel Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
Zoe Saldaña’s floral Chanel dress for the closing ceremony appears to be tied with a giant bow at the waist Photograph: Alfonso Catalano/SGP/Shutterstock
Adèle Exarchopoulos’s top by Phoebe Philo looks so plump and padded it could double up as a pillow. The designer is all about the little details and Exarchopoulos’s trousers with exposed zippers are another perfect example of this Photograph: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images
Festival jury member Ruth Negga gives a nod to old Hollywood in a black high-necked dress that trails behind her and contrasting white gloves at the premiere of the film Coward Photograph: Andreea Alexandru/AP
Penélope Cruz wears a one-shoulder dress by Chanel that features a thigh-high split and fun fuzzy pom-poms at the premiere of La Bola Negra Photograph: Domine Jerome/ABACA/Shutterstock
Monica Bellucci leaves after the screening of the film Histoires de la Nuit on Friday dressed all in black Photograph: Manon Cruz/Reuters
Swinton wears a suit fresh off the Chanel couture catwalk at the premiere of La Bola Negra. If you zoom in, you’ll notice its ombre effect comes from sumptuous velvet and tiny fluttery feathers Photograph: Andreea Alexandru/AP
Evie Templeton is carving out a name for herself in the horror and thriller genres. Her gothic inspired Rodarte dress gives a nod to the mood at the Victorian Psycho photocall Photograph: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images
Ruth Wilson wears a trompe l’oeil blazer-dress by JW Anderson at the Victorian Psycho presentation Photograph: Domine Jerome/ABACA/Shutterstock
Pale rose and lavender make for a delicious colour combination for Kārlis Arnolds Avots at the Ulya photocall Photograph: Alberto Terenghi/Shutterstock
An Astroturf-green pleated skirt and knitted vest by Chanel makes for an elegant yet fun look for Anamaria Vartolomei at a photocall for La Bataille de Gaulle: L’âge de Fer Photograph: Anthony Harvey/Shutterstock
The American actor Maika Monroe in a cross-back dress from Saint Laurent at the premiere of La Bataille de Gaulle: L’âge de Fer Photograph: Max Montingelli/SGP/Shutterstock
Another premiere, another moment for big pants. Here Marion Cotillard attends the Roma Elastica screening in a sheer spider web-like knitted dress by Chanel Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
Bows are showing no signs of fatigue in fashion. Here Alexa Chung wears a pretty satin dress by Dior couture that is loosely tied with a black ribbon at The Man I Love premiere Photograph: Max Montingelli/SGP/Shutterstock
The designer Thom Browne is known for his love of sharp tailoring so this softer take as seen on Moore at The Man I Love premiere is unexpected. Even the bow is undone, something we never thought we’d be writing given Browne’s go-to is a neat three-move oriental knot. It just goes to show anything can happen at Cannes! Photograph: Soul Brother/Shutterstock
Bella Hadid’s Schiaparelli dress with its plunging neckline and brooch detailing is a tribute to Jane Birkin. The actor-singer wore a similar crocheted version in 1969. At the time, Birkin famously styled hers backwards to create a deep neckline that she fastened with a brooch Photograph: Daniele Cifalà/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Seaweed-like organza fringing, cyclamen floral embroidery and a looped cocoon shape sounds a bit bonkers on paper but Wilson’s Dior dress at the La Bataille de Gaulle: L’âge de Fer premiere is a new off-beat choice for the actor Photograph: Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock
She’s appeared on the catwalks of Jean Paul Gaultier and Alexander McQueen and is known for her maximalist style. However, for the premiere of Rossy de Palma’s latest film Bitter Christmas written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, the actor went back to fashion basics in a simple little black dress and woven espadrilles Photograph: Sébastien Nogier/EPA
Jury member Juliette Binoche at Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas premiere wearing a tailored look from Celine. The oversized and undone bow detailing plus chunky shoes add a little edge Photograph: Daniele Cifalà/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
The model Anja Rubik has worked with Saint Laurent for more than a decade so unsurprisingly, for the opening of Bitter Christmas, she wore one of its classic Le Smoking suits Photograph: Stéphane Cardinale/Corbis/Getty Images
Zhao chose a navy Prada dress with contrasting black velvet pockets for the premiere of a Bitter Christmas. Cue ‘a dress – with pockets!’ hysteria Photograph: Aurore Marechal/Getty Images
Marvel star Sebastian Stan opts for a tonal oatmeal look for a photocall for his new film Fjord Photograph: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images
Dita Von Teese has made a 50s hourglass gown her red carpet signature. Here, a contrasting black velvet corset on her Tamara Ralph couture gown draws even more attention to her waist as she attends the premiere of a Bitter Christmas Photograph: Gisela Schober/Getty Images
The Night Manager star Diego Calva goes for sharp tailoring for the premiere of Her Private Hell. Calva clearly likes fashion and his suit’s oversized peaked lapels, plus the tiny brooch and square sunglasses, are very on trend Photograph: Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
The Worst Person in the World actor Reinsve wears not the worst red carpet look at the Fjord premiere. Her simple white racer back gown is by Louis Vuitton Photograph: Domine Jerome/ABACA/Shutterstock
Daisy Edgar-Jones climbs the steps of La Croisette at the Fjord screening wearing a Balenciaga gown featuring a matching sheer, embellished cape Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/AP
Charlotte Gainsbourg has bit of a nonchalant approach to the red carpet which is captured in both her textural clashing look from Saint Laurent (brocade! lace! fringing!) and her refusal to stop for photographers at the premiere of Fjord Photograph: Zabulon Laurent/Shutterstock
Léa Seydoux loves a wafty gown for the red carpet so this sleek suit from Louis Vuitton for the premiere of L’Inconnue is a bit of a vibe-shift for her Photograph: SGP/Shutterstock
Skarsgård’s grey double-breasted suit from Ami is smart but a purposefully messy tie stops it from feeling too formal as he attends the Fjord premiere Photograph: SGP/Johnny Dalla Libera/Shutterstock
Sharon Stone gives a nod to wisteria season in a hand-beaded ombre gown featuring the embroidered detailing of the flower. Sheer gloves, a cape and clutch complete her red carpet look at the Fjord premiere Photograph: SGP/Johnny Dalla Libera/Shutterstock
At a photocall for her new sci-fi film Hope, actor Taylor Russell gives a nod towards the genre with a futuristic inspired Schiaparelli dress made from laminated spiral satin that creates a tree bark effect Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/AP
Here’s Cate Blanchett tasselmaxxing in a fringed dress from Givenchy and matching fringed gloves at the premiere of Garance Photograph: Jean-Marc Haedrich/SIPA/Shutterstock
A red dress on a red carpet is a Hollywood classic. At the Garance screening Julianne Moore goes for an off-the-shoulder look from Bottega Veneta. Its scoop neckline is even more of an opportunity for her Messika necklace featuring 67 carats of diamonds to stand out Photograph: Daniele Cifalà/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
The German actor Lars Eidinger wears a white tailored suit by Dior for the Moulin premiere but, instead of a shirt and tie, he wears a miniature ruff Photograph: David Fisher/Shutterstock
What to wear when your jewellery consists of a Chopard necklace featuring a 129 carat emerald cabochon? In Adriana Lima’s case the model keeps the rest of her outfit simple in a strapless long black dress Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage
Colman Domingo makes a case for the party at the front and party at the back shirt. His sheer and sequined purple shirt by Valentino also includes a shimmering cape detail that he was enjoying twirling around La Croisette in Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage
The Hope actor Jung Ho-yeon wears an intricate beaded custom Louis Vuitton by Nicolas Ghesquière dress for the film’s premiere. Its cowl neck is mirrored by a fluid train and the scoop back gives plenty of opportunity for the classic over-the-shoulder red carpet pose Photograph: Alfonso Catalano/SGP/Shutterstock
The French actor Emmanuelle Béart wears a structured leather jacket from Balmain at a screening of Garance Photograph: Max Montingelli/SGP/Shutterstock
Feathers, lace, florals – it’s a combination that sounds overwhelming but in the hands of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel it just works. Here, the model Liu Wen, who is a regular on the French house’s catwalk, wears a dress from its autumn/winter 2026 collection for the Garance red carpet Photograph: Alfonso Catalano/SGP/Shutterstock
Earlier this week Hadid described Cannes, a festival she has been attending for almost a decade as ‘her favourite week’. For her 2026 debut, she wears a simple column gown from Prada with a smattering of embellishment. The endorsement of the old-school Hollywood red-carpet shawl is unexpected but fun Photograph: Alfonso Catalano/SGP/Shutterstock
Zebra print is gearing up to be a summer hit on the high street. Here, Carla Bruni makes the case for it on the red carpet, too, in a fluted gown from Roberto Cavalli at the Garance premiere Photograph: Alfonso Catalano/SGP/Shutterstock
For those looking for whimsy here’s the Spanish actor Paz Vega in a wafty white dress, giant bow and huge aviators at the Paper Tiger premiere Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA
Blanchett goes back to red carpet basics in a classic long black dress by Louis Vuitton for the screening of the film Paper Tiger Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images
At first glance Moore looks as if she is embracing princess dressing at the premiere of crime drama Paper Tiger. But on closer inspection you’ll notice the dress’s ripped hem, skewed giant bow and raw edging. A nice subverting of glamour by the Paris brand Matières Fécales. Yes the name does translate as fecal matter. Fashion! Photograph: Zabulon Laurent/Shutterstock
French musician and producer Quentin Dupieux, also known as Mr. Oizo, gives dad trainers the thumbs up at the Full Phil premiere Photograph: SGP/Johnny Dalla Libera/Shutterstock
At the Full Phil premiere Kristen Stewart wears a crocheted dress by Chanel. Walking up the steps the actor hoisted up her dress to reveal a pair of high-top Chanel trainers – breaking the festival’s ‘no sneakers’ rule. Stewart has always been somewhat of a footwear rebel at Cannes. In 2018 she took off her heels to walk La Croisette barefoot in protest of its no-flats rule Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images
Sex Education star Emma Mackey wears a full-length white dress from Louis Vuitton featuring an inverted triangular cut-out at the premiere of Full Phil Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images
Rather than working with a stylist the director Zhao is choosing her own red carpet looks. This spiked Schiaparelli look shows she is not shying away from bolder looks Photograph: Zabulon Laurent/Shutterstock
The skirt suit has become synonymous with Chanel. Here, Stewart wears one from its latest couture collection that features a transparent tweed effect Photograph: Marco Barada/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
Oversized silhouettes, a flash of flesh and a smattering of bold accessories is quickly becoming Odessa A’zion’s fashion formula. Here the Marty Supreme actor wears Dior at the premiere of Karma Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage
John Travolta reveals his new penchant for a floppy beret and pair of gold rimmed glasses is inspired by old Hollywood director dressing. Cosplay but make it fashion? Photograph: Kristy Sparow/Getty Images
Andie MacDowell keeps it simple with a slightly sheer long black gown and a sleek blow-dry at the screening of the film Karma Photograph: Chassery+Courdji/Shutterstock
As the face of Chanel No 5 since 2020, the French actor Cotillard naturally chose to wear the brand for the premiere of her new thriller Karma. Cotillard likes to mix it up on the red carpet and this dress in leather with raffia edging and double CC buckles ticks all the edgy boxes Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images
The internet is very much enjoying Calva’s mechanic-core overalls by Isabel Marant that he chose for the Club Kid photocall Photograph: Stéphane Cardinale/Corbis/Getty Images
A fter decades of relentlessly marketing their vibrant Mediterranean city, the Barcelona authorities have appointed a man on a mission to say “no more” – and, he says, to return its most iconic market back to local residents.
Last year, the Barcelona area attracted 26 million visitors, up 2.4% on 2024. The appointment of José Antonio Donaire as the city’s first commissioner for sustainable tourism represents a significant change of heart and a shift away from viewing tourism as an unalloyed good to believing it is alienating citizens and eroding the Catalan capital’s identity.
“We’ve reached the end of the road, Barcelona has reached the maximum number of tourists it can accommodate,” he says. “We don’t want more tourists, not even one more, but we need to manage those we have.”
It could take some time to feel the impact of the changes Donaire proposes, not least because, whatever the city’s intentions, other actors, many of them beyond its control – such as the port, the airport, airlines, hoteliers and the big-is-better travel industry – may not be on the same page.
But there is no doubting his sincerity and ambition, which even extends to rescuing Barcelona’s famous La Boquería market, emblematic of the worst of what mass tourism has wrought on the city’s identity.
La Boquería, once a haven for chefs and foodies but for years a no-go area for most of Barcelona’s residents, will, he says, return to being a market that sells fresh food rather than takeaway snacks, which will be banned with the consent of the majority of stall holders.
“Within a year you’ll see the new Boquería,” Donaire says.
The city’s attempt to curb visitor numbers began in 2017 with a moratorium on building new hotels in central Barcelona, but that was largely undermined by the rapid surge in short-let tourist apartments listed on sites such as Airbnb.
In 2028, Barcelona’s 10,000 legal tourist apartments will have their licences revoked and it is hoped by the city council that the majority of these properties find their way back on to the rental market and alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
Donaire accepts this has not been the case in New York City – which in effect banned tourist apartments in 2022 without any subsequent increase in rentals – but says Barcelona has plans to incentivise landlords to put property back on the market.
“At the moment the housing stock is growing by 2,000 homes a year,” he says. “If we can get those 10,000 tourist apartments on the residential market, it’s the equivalent of five years’ growth.”
Donaire, an eloquent man with a penchant for tartan waistcoats who came to the job with a professorship at the University of Girona and as director of its tourism research institute , says the new policies are not aimed so much at reducing numbers as changing the profile and behaviour of visitors.
About 65% of visitors are classified as “leisure tourists” while the rest are either in Barcelona for conferences, or are what Donaire describes as “cultural visitors” who come for the museums, architecture and music festivals.
He says the aim is to reduce the number of leisure tourists to arrive at an equal three-way split between them, culture visitors and people coming on business. Other measures include reducing the number of cruise ship berths from seven to five: the city though will still receive upwards of three million cruise passengers each year.
These visitors spend little when they’re ashore and, as Donaire puts it, “create more problems than benefits”.
Another group that will not be affected by restrictions on city centre hotels and tourist lets are the seven million annual day trippers, most of whom arrive by coach. Barcelona has increased parking fees and forced coaches to park on the periphery of the city in an effort to reduce numbers.
About half of tourists in Barcelona are repeat visitors who will have already seen the main sites and Donaire plans to encourage this group to make day trips out of the city or to visit areas such as Montjuïc, a large park that is home to several museums but scarcely any residents.
“What we don’t want is to encourage tourism in areas that aren’t prepared for it and where it will create problems,” he says.
Barcelona is also – and not for the first time – clamping down on various forms of antisocial behaviour, including a ban on organised pub crawls. “We’re not interested in this type of tourism and we want it to disappear,” says Donaire. It furthermore plans to invest a portion of the recently increased tourist tax into the city centre to increase local commerce in an area where retail is dominated by convenience stores, souvenir and cannabis shops.
Such proposals will no doubt be received with some scepticism, especially as quality over quantity – although those were not Donaire’s words – is not a new refrain, but he and his backers hope that after 30 years of tourist boom the balance may be tipped back in favour of Barcelona’s residents. “Many citizens feel the city centre no longer belongs to them,” Donaire says. Can he be the man to give it back to them?
As he seeks an exit from the Iran war, Donald Trump is increasingly outsourcing his policymaking to US allies in the Middle East, while the White House appears unable to find a simple way to end the fighting and reopen global shipping lanes held by Tehran.
In Trump’s telling, the “dealmaker-in-chief” has maintained a consistent policy toward Iran aimed at preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, leveling threats and incentives to reach a new deal that would also open the strait of Hormuz.
But amid calls with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and contacts with Gulf leaders, the US president has oscillated between preparing to launch a major strike on Iran and then postponing plans for the supposed attack because a deal was “within reach” – despite little indication that Tehran and Washington are any closer to making peace.
The sequence of events began on Sunday, when Netanyahu said he would speak with Trump about the Iran file, adding that Israel’s “eyes are also wide open regarding Iran”. Shortly after their call, Trump wrote on TruthSocial that the “clock is ticking” regarding Iran. “They better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them,” he wrote. “TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!”
Pakistani diplomats had said that talks were continuing but had given no indication that Iran and the US were close to a peace deal. The US and Iran at the time had been trading drafts of a peace deal but Trump had said publicly that he was unhappy with Iran’s proposals. “Well, I looked at it, and if I don’t like the first sentence I just throw it away,” he said during his return flight from China to the US.
Trump is known for changing his views based on the “last man in the room”, with advisers sometimes prompting major policy changes based on short conversations. A presentation by Netanyahu in the White House Situation Room in February was instrumental in convincing Trump to launch joint strikes against Iran – even despite the skepticism of some of his senior advisers, the New York Times reported.
As he wrote that the ceasefire with Iran was on “life support”, open-source analysts also noted a significant increase in US military activity in the Middle East, including the presence of dozens of KC-46 and KC-135 refuelling aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.
But with rumours on Monday swirling of an imminent strike, Trump in an extraordinary disclosure said that he had cancelled an attack on Iran in order to allow for negotiations to move forward.
To explain the sudden about-face in US policy, Trump said US allies in the Gulf – the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the UAE president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, and the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani – requested a pause because “serious negotiations are now taking place, and that, in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America”.
Iran was also ready to sacrifice its nuclear program for peace, Trump claimed, although there was little evidence from Tehran that this was true. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, a relative moderate to the hardline leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), appeared to confirm renewed talks but added that “dialogue does not mean surrender” and promised to protect the rights of the Iranian people.
The reaction to Trump’s disclosure of a planned military strike on Iran has been mixed, and there has been considerable skepticism. A headline in the Daily Beast summed that up succinctly, writing: “TACO Trump Calls Off ‘Planned Military Attack’ Nobody Knew About.” (“Taco” stands for “Trump always chickens out” – a jab at the US leader’s tendency to back down on his threats during negotiations.)
Most importantly, none of the Gulf leaders appeared to know about Trump’s plans for an imminent attack. The Wall Street Journal had reported that Gulf leaders were “unaware” of US plans to attack Iran, instead urging more time for talks in order to prevent an escalation of violence that could blow back on energy infrastructure in Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Asked later, Trump kept his options open once again, saying that he had only called for a delay in the attack of several days.
“I never tell anybody when, but they knew that we were very close,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I would say we were, I was an hour away from making the decision to go today.”
Trump, meanwhile, said Iran had just a few days to return to negotiations.
“Maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, something, maybe early next week, a limited period of time,” he said.
“We may have to give them another big hit. I’m not sure yet,” he said.
