16 years ago, Jeffrey Epstein looked at one of the biggest record labels on earth and saw the same thing he saw in model agencies and fashion shows: a “P factor” score. (One can reasonably infer the “P” refers to “pussy.”) The now‑public emails around his abortive bid for EMI are a paper trail showing how a convicted sex offender and his friends talked about the industry that signs our favorite artists, negotiates their masters, and decides who gets a slot on which stage—and how little any of it had to do with music.
On February 10, 2010, London‑based deal scout David Stern forwarded Epstein a short news item about EMI’s debt crisis and Terra Firma’s botched ownership, summarizing the situation in one gross little sentence: “Troubled industry but related to P: EMI (music) needs approx US$190m to survive or may be taken over by Citigroup.” “P,” in Epstein‑speak, seems to have been the way he and some members of his circle (namely, Stern) referred to women—a reported abbreviation for a word he used constantly enough that Stern started treating it like a lifestyle metric, wishing him “lots of P” on his birthday and on New Years, offering fashion-show tix “to review Chinese P,” and rating trips and social events with a “P factor” out of ten. (Ibiza: 9/10. Taizhou: 1/10. London, specifically on days with good weather: 8/10. Otherwise, lower. The German-Czech border: “economic atmosphere disaster but: P factor 9 / 10 !!!” Kiev: 7/10. A “massive Turkish luxury resort…FULL of Russians”: “P factor disaster – but 1 in 100 is bombshell.” An Odessa beachfront: 9/10, “with extra 0.5 dirt bonus !” Sarah Ferguson’s 50th birthday party: 0.2/10. And so on.)
If you work in music, you likely already know the EMI part of the story: the once‑towering conglomerate behind labels like EMI Records, Capitol, Virgin, and Parlophone was drowning in debt, staring down covenant breaches, with Citigroup ready to grab the keys. Terra Firma’s Guy Hands had overpaid spectacularly, the numbers didn’t work, and everyone in the finance‑press‑meet‑music‑press Venn diagram spent a few years treating the saga as a cautionary tale about private equity hubris and the slow implosion of legacy record companies. What was not in those contemporaneous post‑mortems was the way at least one would‑be savior was being pitched on EMI not as a distressed cultural asset, but as a way to buy into a “troubled industry” that happened to sit on top of a supply chain of women.
In the same thread where Stern lays out the looming Citigroup takeover and mentions his “friend” who is the right‑hand man to Terra Firma’s boss, Epstein replies, “who is your friend.. i am interested. Do we need help – mandelson?”—a reference to then-UK First Secretary of State and business secretary Peter Mandelson (who, it is worth noting, was summoned to testify before the US Congress regarding his own ties to Epstein last week). The documents show Epstein apparently emailing Mandelson a week or two later, asking for “bens contact info.. or havehim cal me re emi,” to which Mandelson appears to respond that he has passed along details and suggests they “talk re EMI??”. There is no indication that Mandelson did more than answer an email, and he has not commented on the specifics, but the dynamic is depressingly familiar: this is how these men use their networks, casually pulling in a cabinet‑level politician to help navigate a deal that, in private, is being sold as “most certainly [a] great asset to have for P!”
Thankfully, EMI never became an Epstein plaything; Citigroup did take control, split the asset in two, and ultimately sold the recorded‑music side to Universal Music Group and the publishing side to a consortium involving Sony and David Geffen in 2012. The private‑equity syndicate Stern alludes to in a 2011 email—“P business: Buy EMI and Warner Music and combine. Both available.”—never materialized, nor did a potential later bid involving KKR, even as a Connecticut businessman in Epstein’s orbit emails about putting “your buddy Andrew from the UK” into that syndicate. Kevin Law has since said he never bid on EMI with any group and never did a deal with Epstein; it’s unclear whether “Andrew” is Andrew Mountbatten‑Windsor or some other Andrew entirely.
But ignoring these emails because no transaction closed misses the point. The EMI emails are about how Epstein and his class of men thought about a whole sector of the culture: as a “troubled” but potentially lucrative pipeline where owning the infrastructure also meant owning proximity to the people on stage, backstage, in the VIP lounges and modeling agencies. When Epstein tells Stern “my friend is tommy mottola former head of sony I’d like him to be brought in to fix it,” he is not suddenly becoming a turnaround artist who cares about catalogue strategy; he is trying to plug Tommy Mottola—a man whose name appears hundreds of times in the DOJ release and who exchanged emails and visits with Epstein well into the late 2010s (a revelation that prompted Jimmy Fallon to pull out of a spaghetti sauce venture with Mottola which, like, whatever)—into a distressed label that Epstein has explicitly been promised is “related to P.”
Simply appearing in the files does not, by itself, prove that Mottola or Stern or anyone else committed crimes, and nothing in the EMI threads shows a deal actually happening. What those threads do show, though, is the casual way business, politics, and sexual access get braided together. A record label is not just masters and market share; in this world, it’s also the afterparties, the castings, the fashion tie‑ins, the ability to route young women through spaces that are structurally designed to protect powerful men from scrutiny. That logic is the same logic underpinning the (ultimately unrealized) discussions in the files about acquiring model agencies and fashion‑related companies, which French prosecutors have said they suspected were used by Epstein associate Jean‑Luc Brunel to house and transport girls. It’s all the same posture: business opportunities as Trojan horses for access, industries full of young women as perks bundled into the deal.
The concern, then, is not that Epstein got his hands on EMI; obviously, he didn’t. The concern is that the mindset on display in those emails is still considered normal in rooms we never get to see, and that the only reason we know about this one is because the DOJ hit upload on 1.4 million messages tied to a man who finally became too notorious to protect. The artists playing the venues, signing the deals, and smiling through the label dinners are not the ones trading “P factor” ratings over email. But they are, of course, the ones who suffer for it.
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