Billionaire sex-perv Jeffrey Epstein enjoys sex with underage girls, that much we know. But before we all knew this, he was a very popular financier with many important and famous friends. He went to a lot of parties! He flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa for some reason! We can only imagine what the on-flight entertainment was. Now he's apparently getting ready to plea guilty to all sorts of things involving prostitution, and some ladies are suing him for making them his sex slaves when they were underage, so he doesn't quite go out on the town that much. Except sometimes he does! And, to answer our own question, it's because uber-publicist Peggy Siegal is still happy to stand by her 14-year-old raping friend Jeffrey.

New York found Epstein at a Siegal event. She's quoted talking about him more-or-less glowingly in New York's December feature on the disgraced financier. And today Page Six reports on a public sighting that would've really been too terrible to conceive:

May 8, 2008 — JEFFREY Epstein, who made a trip to Israel last month, thought about staying there, as Roman Polanski did in France, rather than face trial and possibly jail on charges of soliciting sex from prostitutes. But the money manager came home. "Would you want to live in Israel?" he asked Vanity Fair's Vicky Ward yesterday. At the screening the night before of HBO's documentary about Polanski, the crowd - including Harvey Weinstein, Jeff Bewkes, Dustin Hoffman, Emmy Rossum , Alec Baldwin and filmmaker Michael Mailer - was buzzing that Epstein had absconded. In fact, he was in his Upper East Side mansion. Ward wrote yesterday on the VF Web site, "He'd even thought about going to the Polanski screening until various friends e-mailed him to say, in so many words, 'Are you in- sane?' "

We'd guess "various friends" means "Peggy Siegal." Or, hell, Howard Rubenstein, Epstein's flack, who also reps the Post, as you may remember. Still, it's a good sign that they're finally advising him not to go out, especially to see movies about famous people who run away to foreign countries to avoid jail time for sex crimes.

Ugh.