MANILA: Newly released e-mails show that financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein hired a team in the Philippines as early as 2010 to clean up online search results tied to his criminal past.
The reference to a Philippine-based team has cast light on a lesser-known corner of the global outsourcing industry: online reputation management work routed to low-cost, English-speaking markets.
Epstein, who killed himself in a New York City prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, remains at the centre of ongoing investigations and public scrutiny over his network of associates.
The e-mails in question, released by the US Department of Justice, involve the late illusionist and science museum entrepreneur Al Seckel, a friend of Epstein’s, who helped coordinate the reputation management effort before his own death in 2015.
Seckel, whose body was found at the bottom of a cliff near his home in southern France, was the brother-in-law of Epstein’s long-time associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted in 2021 of helping Epstein recruit and abuse underage girls.
The documents, first reported by local newspaper The Philippine Star, show how the reputation management operation relied in part on workers in the Philippines to push down negative search results linked to Epstein’s criminal record between October and December 2010.
In one e-mail, Seckel told Epstein that “our group in the Philippines is building links and links to our sites, pseudo sites, and the other Jeffrey Epsteins of the world”. The pseudo sites cast Epstein in a favourable light and pop up first in search results.
Al Seckel explaining in an Oct 25, 2010, e-mail how a team he hired in the Philippines is working to clean up Google search results for Jeffrey Epstein.
The strategy, he wrote, was simple: “The old sites will just get moved out of the way. Poof. We just need more links than them.”
Details about the Philippine team hired have not been publicly disclosed.
The world’s outsourcing hub
Public relations and crisis management experts told The Straits Times that the Philippines’ involvement is grounded in the same factors – such as language skills, technical expertise and cost – that turned the country into a global business process outsourcing hub.
The Philippines already had hundreds of thousands of workers doing English-language digital tasks for foreign clients in 2010, said Mori Rodriguez, chief innovation officer and head of integrated brand public relations at EON The Stakeholder Relations Group.
They include labour-intensive and repetitive work like content writing, creating links between websites, and search engine optimisation, which ensures that web pages would appear higher in search results.
“So if you were Al Seckel sitting in the US looking for someone to do the heavy lifting of building backlinks, writing articles, monitoring Wikipedia, the Philippines was the obvious call,” said Mr Rodriguez. “Not because we were shady (but) because we were good at it and we were affordable.”
In many cases, foreign clients set the strategies and outsource the execution overseas.
Ron Jabal, chairman and chief executive officer of Pageone Group and a former president of the Public Relations Society of the Philippines, said this division of labour was common across industries.
“In 2010, the Philippines was widely recognised as a global execution hub,” he said. “Strategy and decision making typically remained with client-side advisers overseas, while Filipino teams handled production tasks such as writing, publishing support and monitoring.”
Massive work at ‘insanely low’ prices
The Epstein e-mails describe a laborious effort built around producing large volumes of content and links designed to overwhelm negative search results.
The Philippine team was tasked with building back-links to favourable articles, creating new content highlighting Epstein’s supposed business and philanthropic activities, and promoting other individuals with the same name so that search engines would surface those results instead.
“The greater number of links, then the higher the ranking... Jeffrey, it’s all mathematics, that’s all it is, and all it ever will be,” Seckel said.
In December 2010, MAl Seckel tells Jeffrey Epstein that the Philippine-based team managed to clean up search results for keywords like “jeffrey epstein jail” and “jeffrey epstein pedophile”.
The work stretched over weeks. In one update, Seckel said the team was already exhausted because “this job is so incredibly massive and intensive”. Then came a breakthrough.
“We have stopped the hacking on your wiki site, and that was a major effort,” he wrote on Dec 15, 2010.
“Your wiki entry now is pretty tame, and bad stuff has been muted, bowdlerised, and pushed to the bottom. This was a big success.”
The e-mails indicate that it took roughly two months of sustained work to push down the most damaging search results and stabilise Epstein’s online profiles.
The service came at a price that Epstein himself complained about. “I was never told... that there was a 10k fee per month,” he wrote in one exchange. At the time, the retainer reportedly ran from about US$10,000 to US$20,000 a month.
Rodriguez noted that the price was “insanely low” even by Philippine industry standards.
“That kind of maths only works if you’re outsourcing to a low-cost, high-capability market,” he said. “That’s us, that’s always been us.”
The disclosures have already drawn political attention in the Philippines, where lawmakers on Feb 11 started calling for a congressional investigation into the country’s possible role in such operations involving Epstein.
Al Seckel on Dec 16, 2010, sends Jeffrey Epstein a screenshot of top Google search results of his name as proof of success of the online reputation management services the latter paid for.
Ethical grey zone
Experts told ST that long before political trolling, coordinated disinformation campaigns and content farms became tools to shape public opinion and elections, similar techniques were already used to bury negative coverage and flood the internet with more favourable material.
They added that while online reputation management is not inherently deceptive and often involves legitimate communication work, the boundaries can blur.
“When a client comes to you with a reputation problem... the first thing you do is audit their digital footprint,” Rodriguez said. “You’re basically seeing what the rest of the world sees when it looks this person up.”
From there, agencies produce content such as professional profiles, media features or thought leadership pieces, then optimise them so they would rank higher in search results.
Jabal echoed this, saying legitimate campaigns focus on accuracy and accountability.
“Ethical reputation management does not attempt to falsify reality. It works by strengthening credibility, not by manufacturing it,” he said.
But the Epstein case highlights how easily the same tools can be used for questionable ends.
The experts all agree that the public relations industry in the Philippines remains largely unregulated as there is no licensing body or universal code of ethics that firms are legally bound to follow.
Rodriguez noted that many workers handling execution tasks may not even know who the end client is.
“The Philippine team doing the work (for Epstein) was probably processing it the same way they’d process a link-building project for a hotel chain or a real estate developer,” he said. “Work orders looked the same. Deliverables looked the same. The difference was the client.”
Alan German, a political strategist who heads the Manila-based Agents International Public Relations, said the lack of oversight makes it easier for ethically questionable work to pass through the system, especially when it is outsourced and far removed from the people doing the tasks.
Not all practitioners have the luxury of turning down clients either, especially when the pay is substantial.
“The lure of the financial reward is just really hard to overlook for some people,” said Mr German. “Technicalities are the refuge of the wicked.”
A wake-up call
The revelations have prompted calls for the local public relations industry to reflect on its own practices.
German said the episode should serve as a warning for Filipino practitioners who may treat distant clients as abstract cases rather than moral choices.
“Evil is evil. Good is good. It doesn’t matter what race, creed, culture you’re dealing with. If you’re helping to mask (wrongdoing), there’s something wrong with what you’re doing,” he said.
Jabal noted that the industry’s long-term credibility depends on practitioners maintaining clear ethical standards.
“Reputation management must always operate within the boundaries of truth, transparency, and the law,” he said.
For experts, the Epstein e-mails involving the Philippines are less an isolated scandal than a reminder of the hidden labour behind the internet’s information ecosystem, and the moral choices embedded in it. - The Straits Times/ANN
