A former employee of the late Jeffrey Epstein was reportedly found dead in his apartment during a welfare to check.
Police called Steven Hoffenberg’s home in Derby, Connecticut, and found his body decomposing on the floor of his bedroom. Daily mail and New York Post reported on Thursday. He was 77.
Hoffenberg was discovered around 8 p.m. on Tuesday after a friend called police.
“Everything points to it being Mr Hoffenberg,” a Derby police spokesman told the Post. “There’s no indication that it isn’t. We believe it is him. We’re just waiting for dental records.’
The cause of death has not been confirmed, but the body showed no obvious signs of trauma, a police source told the Daily Mail.
Police said the body was “in a state where no visual identification could be made.”
Police believe the body has been rotting in the house for at least a week. A coroner uses dental records to identify the body.
Hoffenberg was once Epstein’s boss, claiming the disgraced financier was complicit in a half-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme he was executing through his Towers Financial Corp. Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
While Hoffenberg was incarcerated, Epstein allegedly sexually assaulted teenage girls, obtained with the help of his Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes.
After completing his sentence, Hoffenberg reached out to Epstein’s victims and joined their fight for justice.
Convicted sex offender Epstein was found unresponsive in his prison cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Hoffenberg was appointed by a court in 1993 to run the Post for a short period and helped the newspaper out of bankruptcy.
The first person to call the police to check on Hoffenberg was reportedly his girlfriend Maria Farmer, an artist who survived Epstein’s abuse.
“Hoff was one of my dearest friends on earth, more like a father than my own father ever was to me. He lived in kindness, always giving what little he had, never asking for anything,” Farmer told the Daily Mail. “This man was incredible and a dear friend to Epstein survivors…as he was.”
Farmer told rolling stone: ‘I want people to know how kind this gentleman was to survivors, when they asked for nothing.’
Contact our news team by sending an email to: [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.