You haven’t seen this reported anywhere yet, but a member of Colorado’s congressional delegation is mentioned in the tranche of emails released by the House Oversight Committee from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate last week — and, frankly, it’s not the one I would have expected.
“I am supposedly arranging a fundraiser for congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado on Sept 27 in NYC,” one of the predator’s correspondents wrote to him in August 2012. “She is the only one with a scientific agenda and she is just super – if anything, I am hoping on your involvement?.”
Congresswoman Diana DeGette, who represents the Denver area in Washington, D.C., never emailed Epstein herself. Though DeGette did not comment for the record, a source close to the congresswoman tells me that Epstein did not participate in the September 2012 fundraiser mentioned in the email, and Federal Elections Commission records show that Epstein has never contributed to her campaigns. What caught my interest was not any implication that DeGette might know more than she is saying – there is nothing to indicate that – but who sent the original email in the first place: a woman with ties to U.S. politicians and Scandinavian royalty, who has been accused not just of knowing about Epstein’s crimes, but of abetting them.
While Barbro Ehnbom, the Swedish-American businesswoman who emailed Epstein about DeGette, is not a familiar name to American audiences, she is well-known in Sweden, where she has become a local face of the Epstein scandal. Since 2020, the Swedish press has covered a slow-rolling series of revelations about Ehnbom’s role in Epstein’s misconduct, including allegations that she procured young women for the sexual predator.
In the nexus between DeGette, Ehnbom, and Epstein, what we find is not impropriety on DeGette’s part, but the haunting implications of a political system which runs less on the will of the voters than on the cash of the donors.
To be clear, there is no indication that DeGette had any knowledge of Ehnbom’s involvement with Epstein, much less of Ehnbom’s alleged role in facilitating Epstein’s crimes. DeGette, the longest-serving member of Colorado’s congressional delegation, even signed the discharge petition to force a vote on releasing more of Epstein’s files.
Yet her presence in the files — the mention of perhaps Colorado’s least controversial congressperson in so odious a context — drives home the unsavory truths lurking behind the entire Epstein affair: that when politics runs on money, the sources of that money are less and less scrutinized, and the recipients of it become more and more willing to avert their eyes. It is an example of how money has spread through our politics like dry rot through structural beams, compromising everything in the long run.
If a system so desperate for cash can bring even Diana DeGette to within a stone’s throw of Jeffrey Epstein, who can possibly stay clean?
Like so many others who have been found in connection to the prolific sex trafficker, Ehnbom’s relationship with Epstein seems to have revolved primarily around one thing: money. Though she had a good amount of it, he had more, and she had many causes and organizations which could benefit from the abuser’s largesse.
Raised in Stockholm, Ehnbom is a Swedish success story. After abandoning her doctoral studies in 1969 to move to the United States, Ehnbom found herself working on Wall Street and in the pharmaceutical industry, according to her website. As an investment banker, founder of the Swedish Secret skincare company, and a board member of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, Ehnbom says that she has “actively worked to foster collaborations between Swedish and American businesses.” She also runs the annual Swedish American Life Science Summit, or SALSS.
In her later life and career, Ehnbom’s efforts have been dedicated to charitable, philanthropic, and networking organizations. She founded a scholarship for women in economics at the Stockholm School for Economics, and runs the BBB network – short of Barbro’s Best & Brightest – which she says is for “young ambitious women.” In Sweden, Ehnbom is prominent enough that she has been touted as a mentor to princess Sofia, who is married to the fourth-in-line to the Swedish throne.
Thanks to local reporting, Ehnbom’s relationship with Epstein was known in her native Sweden before the latest release of emails. Unfortunately, it appears to have been Ehnbom’s access to networks of young women which made her valuable to Epstein.
In February 2022, the Stockholm School of Economics, where Ehnbom founded the Female Economist of the Year scholarship program, released a statement saying that it had been made aware of “connections between Jeffrey Epstein and the Female Economist of the Year Scholarship.” The school wrote that they had learned that Ehnbom had invited some of the scholarship program’s young fellows to meet with Epstein, referring to Ehnbom’s behavior as “astonishing and regrettable.” The school also noted that “an administrative separation was implemented between the Barbro Ehnbom Foundation and the School of Economics” as a result of the revelations.
In March 2022, Swedish outlet ETC reported further on the revelations that Ehnbom had “brought young women to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion.” The ETC report details Epstein’s donations to a scholarship fund Ehnbom created, and how Ehnbom then “repeatedly invited young Swedish women to Epstein’s luxury home in New York,” encouraging them to show “bare legs.”
The recently released emails heavily imply that Ehnbom was aware of Epstein’s less savory activities. In the emails, Ehnbom tells Epstein that she will send him pictures of that year’s crop of BBB fellows, and makes other references to young women. In Epstein’s response to Ehnbom’s email about DeGette, he asked her who her “wife choice” for him was that year. Ehnbom replied, “How about this year’s SALSS Project Manager – brainy and sensual! Picture attached!”
As she catered to his appetites, Ehnbom kept her eye on the ball, frequently soliciting Epstein for contributions to her various organizations. Another step down the fundraising chain, Ehnbom crossed paths with Diana DeGette.
SALSS – the Swedish-American Life Science Summit – appears to be at the center of DeGette’s relationship with Ehnbom. The two originally met because of DeGette’s advocacy for the biomedical industry in Congress, and had formed a relationship by 2009, when DeGette served as the keynote speaker at that year’s SALSS conference. Ehnbom also describes herself as an abortion rights activist, a cause DeGette champions as co-chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus. In 2012, Ehnbom reached out to Epstein about a fundraiser she was planning to host for DeGette in September of that year. According to FEC records, DeGette did receive a number of contributions from donors in New York City around the date of the fundraiser, but a source close to the congresswoman says that Epstein did not participate. In fact, he never even acknowledged it in his reply to Ehnbom’s email.
In 2014, Ehnbom personally contributed $1,500 to DeGette’s campaign – the only record of her doing so – and, in 2018, the two women posed for a photo together at another SALSS event in D.C. The two women do not appear to have been linked together more recently than 2018.
While the amount Ehnbom actually contributed to DeGette’s campaign was a pittance in terms of federal political spending (and does not account for any funds Ehnbom could have spent on DeGette’s behalf via superPACs or other dark money vehicles), the amounts are secondary to the roles each played in the relationship. To Ehnbom, DeGette was a chit, a symbol of the power she had access to. To DeGette, Ehnbom was a donor – and, regardless of the amounts they actually directly give, everyone in Congress knows donors are best kept happy, because they don’t just write checks themselves, they also open doors to other people and other checkbooks. If you want to stay in Congress, either because you have unfinished business or just because you like the way it makes you feel, you need those checkbooks.
Though their relationship may have petered out, Ehnbom is still cashing in that chit, frequently touting her connection to DeGette as a standard part of her biography. On her website, Ehnbom mentions that she is “involved in fundraising for abortion rights and gun control with current U.S. Congresswoman Diana DeGette.” In another undated interview with Nordic Life Science magazine, Ehnbom is noted as “a Democrat [who] supports for example the US Congresswoman Diana DeGette.” No other members of Congress are ever mentioned.
The troubling thing about DeGette’s relationship with Ehnbom is that the system in which DeGette works – a system which, on paper, is supposed to facilitate her representation of nearly 800,000 people – insists on it. In order to continue representing those 800,000 people, DeGette and 534 other members of Congress like her are required to spend an extraordinary amount of time cozying up to and eking checks out of the wealthy. Rather than needing to spend their time engaging with, learning from, and raising the necessary funds from the people they represent, they are compelled to hobnob with an elite jet-set who could not care less about the needs of their constituents.
When you become dependent on people who do not care about your constituents, how long can you maintain the balance? Moreover, when you become dependent on those people’s checks, how much can you afford to scrutinize them? How often can you afford to question their motives, or their other associations?
“Jeffrey Epstein is the most grotesque example of something people inside politics don’t like to admit: when you’re constantly scrambling for big checks, the worst people can buy their way into the room.” That’s what Melat Kiros told me when I reached out about this story. Kiros, who is challenging DeGette in next year’s Democratic primary, has made a point of building her campaign on the support of small donors. To date, she has received contributions from more than 2,300 individuals.
“Even if Representative DeGette never met Epstein, that desperation for money lowers the bar on who gets access and lets predators and grifters launder their reputations through our institutions,” Kiros said.
DeGette’s other primary challenger, Wanda James, echoed that sentiment, and highlighted the length of DeGette’s tenure in Washington. “Unfortunately there’s still a lot more that’s being hidden by the Trump administration around these Epstein Files, but one thing is clear: this kind of power and longevity in Washington becomes corrupting and erodes trust,” James said.
“If anything, this just shows how badly lines become blurred when people make Washington a career path that requires the constant influx of campaign cash from increasingly seedy and corrupt sources,” James said. “This is why voters in Colorado are sick and tired of career politicians and why I am fighting to stand up to the powerful and corrupt.”
While the monstrous nature of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes puts a fine, unmissable point on the problems of money in politics, he is far from the only monster buying access to the halls of power, or using our representatives as chits to cash in over dinner parties and interviews for glossy magazines.
Most of the people who sought money from Epstein after his 2008 conviction for having sexual relations with a 14-year-old child made some sort of tortured calculus to do so. “He’s paid his debt to society,” they surely told themselves, while determinedly shutting their ears to the rest of the rumors. “Plus, it’s for a good cause.”
Every member of Congress is compelled into that same calculus a hundred times a week, regarding villains great and small, criminal and corporate. Should they cash that check from the payday lenders? The private prison companies? Should they take the money from the billionaire whose business interests clearly care nothing for ideology? If they do, what will it cost them? And if they don’t, who will replace them? By the time they’re done dialing for dollars, it’s a wonder any member of Congress can remember their constituents at all: they have been all but removed from the equation.
How can a system like that be expected to work, as intended, for the good of the people? Truth be told, I don’t know that it can.
“This isn’t about one name in one email,” Kiros told me, effectively summing up my own thoughts. “It’s about a system that rewards wealth over basic judgment, and it’s exactly why we need to get big money out of politics and fund campaigns through the people, not whoever can write the biggest check.”
