Companies and individuals were either hired or submitted detailed action plans for the project, with fees as high as $12,500 per month, according to hundreds of pages of emails and documents released by the US Department of Justice last month. These companies, to varying degrees, offered to target news articles highlighting the financier’s status as a sex offender, edit his Wikipedia page, and pump out fluff pieces seeking to highlight his philanthropy that would skew search engine results, the documents show.

“Nothing for me more important,” Epstein wrote to an associate in 2010, instructing him to find a reputation management firm. At other points, he said he needs “someone to redo my Wikipedia” and asked friends for advice on his “Google issues.”

The documents expose the murky ecosystem of reputation laundering where obscure firms, often undaunted by clients’ unsavory histories, charge for the technical expertise needed to reshape public image online. Epstein sought to sanitize his digital footprint as he continued to cultivate relationships with billionaires, academics and public figures, betting that a cleaner online presence would smooth his return to the upper echelons of society. The proposed strategies also show how Epstein leveraged philanthropy to whitewash his reputation.

At the center of the strategy was Al Seckel, an optical illusions expert and brother-in-law of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Seckel, who died in 2015, acted as a fixer and laid out a strategy for what amounted to a search engine optimization arms race to drown out reports relating to Epstein’s 2008 conviction for child sex offenses.

In a 2010 email to a prospective contractor, Seckel said the goal was a “very positive humanitarian successful presence for Jeff that is pervasive on the web.”

“We can’t stop his determined critics from writing about him,” Seckel wrote, “but we can provide them with little to grab a hold of, and in a certain sense, would bore the hell out of any tabloid journalist.”

The tactics were expansive and highly technical. Seckel described employing “teams” in the Philippines to continuously rewrite and link to content to boost and dilute Google rankings. They would create websites outlining Epstein’s scientific interests and philanthropy and boosted pages for other people named Jeffrey Epstein, including a sports blogger and a hair transplant doctor.

Wikipedia, which ranks highly on Google and can be edited by the public, was a central battleground. Seckel and his crew worked to remove language and soften the characterization of Epstein’s offenses, for example by changing “girls” to “escorts.” But Wikipedia’s volunteer community of editors reverted changes within minutes, according to the emails. Eventually, Seckel and his team were able to “hack” the IP addresses of certain editors to block them from interfering, he wrote.

Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, did not respond to a request for comment. But the public logs of Epstein’s page show many edits in 2010, with some editors subsequently blocked for overly positive framing.

Pennsylvania-based Reputation Changer said it could “inundate” search engines with content and dominate the first four pages of results on Google in a 2012 “Reputation Clearing Action Plan.” It agreed fees of $12,500 for the first month and $8,500 per month thereafter. The company set up several websites, blogs and wrote press releases and articles to push all but one negative article from the first page of Google within a month, according to one email.

Reputation Changer pitched for Epstein’s business after passing his name through its “ethics committee,” according to emails from an Epstein team member that were part of the files released by the Justice Department.

Reputation Changer rebranded as Brand.com in 2013 and has since closed. Bloomberg contacted several executives named in the files, but none responded to a request for comment.

Epstein wasn’t always happy with the results, at times complaining about the spiraling costs of the clean-up operation. “I was never told, never that there was a 10k fee per month, you initially said the project would take 20... then another 10. Then another 10,” he said in an email to Seckel in 2010. Other times he disliked the tactics, asking for Seckel to delete a newly created, PR-friendly Facebook profile. “Get rid of it. ASAP,” Epstein wrote.

The financier also received referrals through powerful connections. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, one of Dubai’s most high-profile business executives, recommended Israeli firm LookupPage. He forwarded materials from banker Ketan Somaia describing how the firm had helped suppress coverage of fraud charges against him in 2011. Somaia was convicted in London in 2014 of obtaining money by deception and jailed for eight years.

Epstein asked bin Sulayem for a contact for LookupPage. It is not clear if he ever hired the company.

LookupPage no longer exists as a business. One former executive declined to comment, several others did not respond to requests for comment.

Representatives for bin Sulayem did not respond to a request for comment. Somaia did not respond to a request for comment.

Another contractor, Tyler Shears, was referred to Epstein by self-described hacker Pablos Holman at the financier’s request. Shears claimed credit for securing “positive articles in Forbes and Huffington Post,” according to documents included in the Justice Department release.

Shears links to a Forbes article in 2013 covering Epstein’s efforts to fund gaming software, and another about his scientific philanthropy in the Huffington Post.

Shears and Holman did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for Forbes and the now-rebranded HuffPost did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Not every firm was willing to take on Epstein.

California-based Reputation.com sent a non-disclosure agreement ahead of preliminary discussions in early 2012, but ultimately declined to represent him. “Reputation.com said they can’t represent you because of your background. BUT Integrity Defenders will,” an aide told Epstein. Reputation.com founder and former CEO Michael Fertik declined to comment.

According to the tranche of emails, Integrity Defenders was granted a small contract, $2,449 plus taxes in February 2012, but Epstein’s team concluded the firm was not making sufficient progress and moved on. Alan Assante, then-president of Integrity Defenders, did not respond to a request for comment.

Gregory Markel, founder of California-based Infuse Creative, wrote in 2010 that his company had no problem helping someone who had been wrongly accused, “but if there is truth to these allegations and the conviction, I’m afraid we’d have to pass.”

In May 2013, the founder of Five Blocks, Sam Michelson, reviewed Epstein’s case, and also declined to take it on. “Regardless of the facts – and we know that what is said online often fails to match the truth – I made the decision several years back, not to take on cases of this nature,” he wrote, according to the released emails.

Markel and Michelson did not respond to requests for comment.

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