Jack Lang, a former French culture and education minister, on Monday said he had no idea about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein after his name appeared in files related to the investigation into the late convicted sex offender.
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Lang, 86, knew Epstein for several years, requesting favours such as the use of his car or plane for himself or his family, French daily Le Monde reported.
French investigative website Mediapart also reported that Epstein in 2016 founded a company based in the US Virgin Islands, half of whose shares were owned by Lang’s eldest daughter Caroline.
But it said no files it reviewed suggested either father or daughter had been implicated in Epstein’s sexual crimes.
Lang said he first met Epstein through the US film director Woody Allen “about 15 years ago”.
“I was completely shocked when I discovered the crimes he had committed,” Lang, who has been president of the Paris-based Arab World Institute since 2013, said in a statement.
“I fully accept the ties I may have formed at a time when nothing suggested that Jeffrey Epstein could be at the heart of a criminal network,” he added.
“Had I known, I would have immediately cut off all contact with him.”
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while in prison facing charges of sex trafficking underage girls.
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FRANCE 24 © 2026
10:52
‘Naive’
Caroline Lang, a one-time actor and now a film producer, told Mediapart she met Epstein through Allen and his wife in 2012, and that one day the US financier told her he wanted to “invest in young French and international artists”.
She said his lawyers set up the company called Prytanee LLC, but that she did not invest any money in it. An email in the Epstein files suggests she instead contributed her knowledge of the art world, Mediapart reported.
She told the investigative website she had been “incredibly naive”.
Later Monday, Caroline Lang resigned as head of the Independent Production Union (SPI).
“I do not want this situation to in any way harm the union,” Lang said, who was only named as the SPI head three weeks ago.
A leading French conductor, Frédéric Chaslin, also named in the new batch of Epstein documents, meanwhile slammed reports of a 2013 email he sent to Epstein in which he said he had “found a formidable girl”.
“It is ... totally unacceptable and false to insinuate that I ‘found a girl’ for Jeffrey Epstein. The reality is simple and verifiable: he had asked me to recommend an interpreter to accompany him on visits to Parisian museums,” Chaslin wrote in a Facebook post in response to a report by the Diapason magazine on the email exchange.
In the 2013 email, Chaslin wrote: “I have found a formidable girl for your next stay in Paris. Philosophy student. 21. She looks a bit like the current wife of (Roman) Polanski.”
Epstein had at this time already been convicted of soliciting an underage person for prostitution.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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