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 news organisation Philstar.com, 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.
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.
Public relations and crisis management experts said 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 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.”
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.
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
