Way back in 2012, the newscaster, TV personality and dedicated anti-religious bigot suddenly found her lonely self stuck between husbands.
Divorced from real estate financier Howard Gould in 2011 after seven years of marriage, she knew it was time to reach out for another mate.
But not just any mate would do for our Ashleigh. Oh no. Ashleigh tossed her wishful fishing line into the murky premarital waters, hoping to hook up with filthy rich pedophile Jeffrey Epstein!
Just four years prior, in 2008, Epstein had pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution. But his taste for sex with underage girls apparently didn’t bother Ashleigh.
After all, nobody’s perfect—and beggars can’t be choosers.
“I seriously want to dig him up and wring his dead, filthy, foul neck.”
At least now that he was no longer behind bars, having served 13 months and registering as a sex offender, Ashleigh wouldn’t have to settle for conjugal visits. He was out and he was single (and, she hoped, ready to mingle).
Even more fortuitously, Epstein was working on returning to high society with the help of his high-powered public relations maven Peggy Siegal, whom Ashleigh knew.
So, as these things are done, Ashleigh reached out to Siegal in an email since released by the Department of Justice as part of the Epstein files.
Banfield, on December 4, 2012, at 7:08 p.m. from CNN offices, emailed: “Stuck at office.. ..And late for Matt Damon premiere tonight.. Won’t make the movie..but may try for party..is that still ok? And is your friend Jeffrey still single?”
Siegal, of course, relayed the inquiry to Epstein, who promptly replied, “Why does she ask about me single.”
Some might say cruelly, Siegal replied, “Because she is a desperate single sexy smart newly dumped single mom looking for love in all the wrong places. She was married to Stanley Shuman’s wife Sydney’s cheating son. And you are totally hansome [sic]...and smart and have a few bucks. Not a tough call.”
Well, it was a very tough call for Epstein, who didn’t take a bite at Ashleigh’s self-baited hook at all.
Not even a nibble.
Epstein replied, “i didn’t think it was for her/ agghh.”
Looks like Ashleigh, at 44 then, didn’t realize she was way beyond her “sell-by date” when it came to Epstein’s taste in women or, rather, girls.
Given that “taste” is what the object of her affection was just in prison for, she should have known.
“The release of the Epstein files has opened a Pandora’s box for former friends and associates of Jeffrey, with many embarrassing emails and exchanges that have nothing to do with Epstein’s sex trafficking and criminality,” Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Barry Levine, author of The Spider: Inside the Tangled Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, told Freedom Magazine.
“Even those like Ashleigh Banfield, who asked Epstein’s publicist pal Peggy Siegal whether he was ‘still single’ at the time—mind you, three years after his conviction for solicitation of a minor for prostitution.”
Epstein, meanwhile, was in touch with Banfield’s would-be matchmaker to discuss another unusual personal request around the same time: seeking assistance in finding a woman to bear him a child.
“If I wasn’t 102,” Siegal, who was 64 at the time, joked, “I would take that job in a nano second.”
Epstein emailed Siegal, “I need great genes, smart pretty, funny. If you were fifty years younger, whoops … forty.”
“Whoops” indeed—if Siegal had been 50 years younger, she would have been 14, right up Epstein’s alley (but, fresh out of prison, not something he would want to advertise).
A 14-year-old certainly would be more to his taste than the middle-aged Banfield.
But how DARE he reject her!
Snubbed and ignored, Banfield quickly changed her tune about Epstein, from trying to date him to viciously attacking the sex offender. (Fair and impartial journalism never was Ashleigh’s strong suit, as her bigoted, defamatory “coverage” of Scientology serves as ample evidence of.)
In fact, there was no limit to Banfield’s assaults on the deceased sex offender.
Banfield took to the airwaves on NewsNation and her Drop Dead Serious podcast to condemn Epstein in the most vituperative terms, calling him a “creep,” a “sleazeball” and a “pedophile.”
“Wait until you see some of the pictures of the stuff that this sleazeball had. Filthy, dirty sex toys,” she said. “Turns out he liked to, you know, bind people—read kids. He liked to bind, more than likely, kids.”
(Was she surprised?)
She went on to rage, “There are legions of people on both sides of the aisle who believe that Epstein was strangled inside that jail cell—to shut him up. And to keep him from releasing big names, big important people who may have been a part of his sick tendency to surround himself with young girls and then pass them around to his friends for sex, after he, himself, had had them for sex.”
“I seriously want to dig him up and wring his dead, filthy, foul neck.”
Well, since she can’t marry him…
Eventually, Banfield gave up on her favorite pervert and married sales executive Chris Haynor on December 29, 2017, her 50th birthday. Two years later, on August 10, 2019, Epstein died, an apparent suicide, and was found hanging in his jail cell.
Ashleigh, no doubt, smiled at the news.
As they say, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Ashleigh Banfield was subsequently cancelled from NewsNation’s primetime lineup.
