Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released 20,000 documents from the estate of registered sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. These included thousands of emails, as well as text messages, sent between Epstein and high-profile people such as Epstein confidant Ghislain Maxwell, political strategist Steve Bannon, journalist Michael Wolff and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Many of them point to or directly mention President Donald Trump.
Now, you can browse all those emails just like you do on your Gmail account.
Gmail is a website that looks a lot like Gmail, except it has a little hat hanging over its logo and a smiling Epstein on the profile picture in the upper right corner. (Click on it and it says “Hi Jeffrey!”) Inbox lets you click on thousands of emails, formatted to look exactly like a regular message in your inbox. In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. In Gmail, a bottom sidebar section reads labels and separates emails by category. In Gmail, this is a list of people who corresponded with Epstein.
The site was created by serial prankster Riley Walz and Luke Igel, co-founder of AI video editing tool Kano AI. Igel told WIRED that he brought the idea to Walz – which Walz confirmed – and then the two of them cobbled together the website with Cursor in one night. “We’ve cloned Gmail, except you’re logged in as Epstein and can see his emails,” Walz wrote in an X post revealing Gmail.
There’s a more readable way to understand the vast cache of emails released from the James Epstein estate than parsing thousands of PDFs on Google Drive. Among its useful features is that it recreates a core feature of Gmail, allowing users to mark emails they consider important and then ranking them based on how many people do so. By default, the Inbox lists emails in order of recency; The Community Starring feature is a way to surface what people see as more important emails.
“The email was very difficult to read,” says Igel. “It felt like it would have been much more of a shock if you had seen actual screenshots of a real inbox, but what you were actually seeing was a low-quality, poorly scanned PDF. You had to take a few steps of imagination to remind yourself that it was actually a real email.”
Being able to view these emails in a more familiar, readable format makes it much easier to follow the threads and back-and-forth, but also reveals strange things about Epstein’s communications. Igel says that when Epstein switched from BlackBerrys with physical keyboards to touchscreen devices in the early 2010s, there was a noticeable increase in typos and sporadic formatting.