Sick sci-fi sex fantasy written by Epstein's first benefactor people say inspired his twisted island... before author's SON ended up arresting him
Conspiracy theorists have drawn eerie parallels between its disturbing plot and Jeffrey Epstein 's real-world sex trafficking ring.
The book in question, Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale, published in 1973 by Donald Barr — a former headmaster of a New York City prep school and father of Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr — has found itself at the heart of a tangled web of online controversy.
Fueling the speculation is the fact that Donald Barr, a former CIA officer, once served as headmaster at the prestigious Dalton School on the Upper East Side, where Jeffrey Epstein taught in the mid-1970s, despite lacking a college degree.
Though Donald Barr had stepped down by the time Epstein was hired, conspiracy theorists have seized on the timing, the lurid novel, and his son Bill Barr's role in Epstein's 2019 death in custody — as proof of a sinister connection.
'The Internet is abuzz with many bizarre theories,' reviewer Justin Tate posted on Goodreads about the 250-page book, which is now being sold online for as much as $4,000 a copy.
'Some read Space Relations like it's the Da Vinci Code, with hidden clues that might even reveal who killed Epstein. Others marvel over loose connections between Barr's plot and Epstein's crimes.'
What has most stunned readers is how eerily similar the fictional universe is to the real-life sex trafficking empire run by Epstein, who abused scores of underage girls in New York, Palm Beach and his now-infamous private island.
The plot of Space Relations follows John Craig, an Earth diplomat captured and enslaved on a distant planet called Kossar, where the ruling aristocracy maintains a brutal regime of sexual domination and forced breeding.
Craig ultimately becomes a servant to Lady Morgan Sidney, a sadistic elite described as having 'high breasts and long thighs', and is compelled to rape a teenage slave girl as part of an intergalactic breeding clinic.
Critics have called the book 'cheesy', 'bad writing' and 'incredibly creepy' — but that hasn't stopped a cult following from forming among collectors, conspiracy theorists, and critics of America's ruling class, who say the novel reads more like a disturbing prophecy than fiction.
Just one year after Space Relations hit shelves, Donald Barr was headmaster at Dalton.
In 1974, Epstein, then a college dropout in his early 20s with no teaching qualifications, landed a job there teaching math and physics.
His brief stint at the school is widely seen as the springboard for his later social climbing — and grooming.
It's never been definitively confirmed that Donald Barr personally hired Epstein. But it's that foggy link — between the bizarre content of the novel, Epstein's inexplicable employment, and Bill Barr's involvement decades later — that has sent the internet into a frenzy.
Following Epstein's death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York in August 2019, then-Attorney General Bill Barr promised a full investigation, calling the circumstances a 'perfect storm of screw-ups' — including non-functioning security cameras and asleep guards.
He ultimately accepted the ruling of suicide, despite widespread doubts and calls for deeper scrutiny.
Recently, conservative YouTube host Tucker Carlson featured a segment exploring the connections, interviewing controversial history podcaster Darryl Cooper, who called the coincidences 'very strange and unacceptable'.
Cooper questioned Bill Barr's motives for dismissing Epstein's death as a 'suicide before they'd finished the investigation.'
Donald Barr's son, Bill, came under fire for his handling of the Epstein suicide investigation when he was President Donald Trump's Attorney General in 2019
'It could all be a coincidence, but the odds are against that,' said Cooper.
The claims have been debunked by fact-checkers, including Snopes, which labeled the theories 'mostly false.'
There is no proof Donald Barr, who died in 2004, played a role in Epstein's hiring, nor are there strong similarities between the fictional interplanetary sex ring in Space Relations and Epstein's real-life criminal enterprise.
Still, for a novel that once gathered dust on the back shelves of second-hand bookstores, Space Relations has found a strange second life — not as science fiction, but as the focus of one of the strangest conspiracies of the post-Epstein era.
1999 - Virginia Roberts Giuffre is allegedly recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to became Epstein's 'sex slave,' at 17. She also claimed that he forced her to have sex with his friend Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth.
2002 - Trump tells New York Magazine that his friend Epstein 'likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.'
2005 - A 14-year-old girl tells police that Epstein molested her at his Palm Beach mansion.
May 2006 - Epstein and two of his associates are charged with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. State attorney of the time Barry Krischer, referred the case to a grand jury who heard from just two of the 12 girls law enforcement had gathered as potential witnesses. They returned just one single count of soliciting prostitution.
July 2006 - The case is referred to the FBI by the Florida Palm Beach police who were unhappy with how the case was handled.
2007 - Epstein's lawyers meet with Miami's top federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, who would later become the Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration. They secretly negotiate the 'deal of a lifetime'.
June 2008 - After pleading guilty to two prostitution charges, the millionaire was sentenced to 18 months in a low-security prison in exchange for prosecutors ending their investigation into his sex acts with minors and give him immunity from future prosecution related to those charges. In reality, Epstein was able to work from his office six days a week while supposedly incarcerated at the jail.
July 2008 - Accusers learned of the deal for the first time.
July 2009 - Epstein is released from jail five months early.
July 2018 - The Miami Herald publishes investigative journalist Julie K. Brown's exposé on Epstein's long history of alleged sexual abuse and news of the 'deal of a lifetime' after Acosta was made Labor Secretary.
February 2019 - The justice department opens an internal review into Epstein's plea deal.
July 7, 2019 - Epstein is arrested after his private jet lands at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport from Paris. At the same time, federal agents break into his Manhattan townhouse where they uncovered hundreds of photographs of naked minors.
July 8, 2019 - Epstein is charged with sex trafficking charges which detail how he created a network of underage girls in Florida and New York, paying girls as young as 14 to provide 'massages and sex acts.' The charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years in prison.
July 11, 2019 - More than a dozen women, not previously known to law enforcement, came forward to accuse him of sex abuse.
July 24 - Epstein was found unconscious in his cell after an apparent suicide attempt. He was moved to suicide watch at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
August 9, 2019 - More than 2,000 documents are unsealed which reveal the lurid allegations against Epstein in detail.
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The Independent
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- The Independent
Exclusive: Registered sex offender banned from Spirit Airlines after arrest for groping teenage seatmate
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The Sun
21 minutes ago
- The Sun
How brutal Hells Angel leader led gang in deadly riots, rape & rock gig killing…as ex-wife opens up on savage beating
THE roar of Harley-Davidsons and stench of petrol was all it took to announce the Hells Angels were in town. And leading the pack of leather-clad outlaws for decades was hardman Sonny Barger, whose name struck fear into the hearts of even the toughest of bikers. 14 14 As California became gripped with drug-fuelled mania and political instability, Sonny was the man at the head of a group that left a trail of violence everywhere they went. From leading deadly riots, running drugs, and even threatening Keith Richards with a gun, it's little surprise that Sonny and his crew were dubbed 'vikings on acid'. Many now romanticise him as a legend - but the truth is that he presided over a group that carried out gang rapes of teenagers and that committed twisted acts of cruelty without blinking an eye. And ex-wife Noel Black, who says Barger was an "old school charmer" when they met, soon saw his violent side. 'After the first ass kicking, I should have left,' she says. 'He didn't kill me, but I should have just ran.' Now, the life and times of Sonny Barger is told by those who knew him in the documentary Secrets of the Hells Angels, airing tonight on Channel 4. Four months after he was born in 1938, his mother ran off with a bus driver and he was raised by his alcoholic father and sister in the rough port district of Oakland, California. School was attended just to pick fights with his fellow classmates, and at 16 he was expelled for hitting a teacher with a baseball bat. Then he tried the army - but after forging his birth certificate so he could join without parental permission, he was given an honourable discharge just 18 months later. Instead he joined a bike club, popular with other ex-military men, named the Oakland Panthers. Bloodsoaked world of UK's Hells Angels as Mafia-style bikers drag bodies of rivals down streets and stash rocket launchers & uzis for war 'I needed a second family,' Sonny wrote in his autobiography about this time. 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Fights broke out, the bikers beat the crowd with pool cues, and one frightened fan - Meredith Hunter - was knifed to death with the assailant, Alan Passaro, getting away with it on grounds of self-defence. '[They] were out of it on bad acid and cheap wine, and they were just looking for trouble,' remembered Keith Richards. 'Somebody knocked their bikes over and the next minute this black kid got scared, pulls a gun, and they did him'. To many, it was the day that the peace of love of the 1960s died. Sonny and his bikers for their part blamed the Stones for coming on late And not even being a member of one of the biggest bands in the world would keep you safe from Sonny's wrath. 'I stood next to him and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar, or he was dead', Sonny remembered. 'Altamont may have been some big catastrophe to the hippies, but it was just another Hells Angels event to me.' 14 Misogynistic violence Though the Angels were a lawless rabble, they maintained a strict code of honour within themselves. Disloyalty meant death - as Paul 'German' Ingalls found out in 1968. After being found guilty of stealing Sonny's valuable coin collection by an internal Hells Angels 'court', Ingalls was forced to consume barbiturates until he suffered an overdose. Equally brutal were the Hells Angels' sexual crimes, with wives and girlfriends seen as the 'property' of the men. Sonny's first wife, Elsie Mae, had died of an embolism in 1967 after a (then illegal) abortion, and he split with his second wife, Sharon, in 1996. 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In 1972, Oakland sergeant Ted Hilliard testified that he had accepted guns, dynamite and grenades from Sonny in return for the release of Hells Angels members from prison, as the police wished to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Black Panthers and Marxist groups. Sonny was keen to go further - offering 'to deliver the bagged body of a leftist for every Angel released from jail' - but this was refused. By now, Sonny had developed a serious cocaine addiction and funded this by selling heroin, and Hells Angels chapters around the country practically controlled the entire market for meth. When police raided his home in December 1972, they found eight guns throughout his house and even a human skull on his dresser that to this day remains unidentified. He was finally convicted in 1973 for possession of heroin and firearms. 14 14 Sentenced to ten years, he served only four and a half, running the Hells Angels from his cell and marrying his second wife, Sharon, there. Thanks to his habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, Sonny contracted throat cancer in 1983. This led him to become a public anti-smoking advocate, even saying: "Want to be a rebel? Don't smoke as the rest of the world." Having his vocal cords removed didn't stop him from being convicted in 1988 for conspiring to blow up the clubhouse of rival club the Outlaws, though he insisted he was merely the victim of entrapment by the FBI. In total, Sonny spent 13 years in prison throughout his life. By the 2000s, he had stepped away from his public leadership of the gang, though in 2002 he tried to organise a peace conference when warfare between the Hells Angels and Mongols gang exploded. However, this conference was cancelled after a mass riot in Laughlin, Nevada, between bitter rivals left three dead and dozens injured. Hells Angels members swarmed a casino, with CCTV capturing the moment bullets whizzed around slot machines. 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Daily Mail
21 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Wealthy Boston neighborhood faces uptick in drug-related incidents
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