In late September, Dershowitz’s secretary related a message that Kessler wanted to speak with him about Boies - with whom Dershowitz has a long-running feud. Dershowitz recorded the call, during which Kessler said he no longer trusted Boies and Pottinger.

"The problem is that they don’t want to move forward with any of these people legally," said Kessler, adding "They’re just interested in trying to settle and take a cut."

“Who are these people that you have on videotape?” Mr. Dershowitz asked.

“There’s a lot of people,” Kessler said, naming a few powerful men. He added, “There’s a long list of people that they want me to have that I don’t have.”

“Who?” Mr. Dershowitz asked. “Did they ask about me?”

“Of course they asked about you. You know that, sir.”

“And you don’t have anything on me, right?”

“I do not, no,” Kessler said.

“Because I never, I never had sex with anybody,” Mr. Dershowitz said. Later in the call, he added, “I am completely clean. I was at Jeffrey’s house. I stayed there. But I didn’t have any sex with anybody.”

As the Times asks, "what was the purpose of Kessler’s phone call? Why did he tell Mr. Dershowitz that he wasn’t on the supposed surveillance tapes, contradicting what he had said and showed to Mr. Boies, Mr. Pottinger and The Times? Did the call sound a little rehearsed?"

Dershowitz told the Times he has no idea why Kessler called him.

In a November 7 email, Boies told the Times "I still believe he is what he purported to be," adding "I have to evaluate people for my day job, and he seemed too genuine to be a fake, and I very much want him to be real."

That said, he also noted "I am not unconscious of the danger of wanting to believe something too much."

Ten days later, Mr. Boies arrived at The Times for an on-camera interview. It was a bright, chilly Sunday, and Mr. Boies had just flown in from Ecuador, where he said he was doing work for the finance ministry. Reporters wanted to ask him plainly if his and Mr. Pottinger’s conduct with Kessler crossed ethical lines.

Would they have brokered secret settlements that buried evidence of wrongdoing? Did the notion of extracting huge sums from men in exchange for keeping sex tapes hidden meet the definition of extortion?

Mr. Boies said the answer to both questions was no. He said he and Mr. Pottinger operated well within the law. They only intended to pursue legal action on behalf of their clients — in other words, that they were a long way from extortion. In any case, he said, he and Mr. Pottinger had never authenticated any of the imagery or identified any of the supposed victims, much less contacted any of the men on the “hot list.”

When the Times showed Boies text exchanges between Kessler and Pottinger, he "showed a flash of anger and said it was the first time seeing them." 

Eventually, Boies concluded that Kessler was probably a con man.

"I think that he was a fraudster who was just trying to set things up," adding that he had probably baited Pottinger into writing things that were more nefarious than they really were.

Pottinger, meanwhile, claims he was stringing Kessler along - "misleading him deliberately in order to get to the servers."

Despite Kessler’s story falling apart, the Times asks if his claims are plausible.

Did America’s best-connected sexual predator accumulate incriminating videos of powerful men?

Two women who spent time in Mr. Epstein’s homes said the answer was yes. In an unpublished memoir, Virginia Giuffre, who accused Mr. Epstein of making her a “sex slave,” wrote that she discovered a room in his New York mansion where monitors displayed real-time surveillance footage. And Maria Farmer, an artist who accused Mr. Epstein of sexually assaulting her when she worked for him in the 1990s, said that Mr. Epstein once walked her through the mansion, pointing out pin-sized cameras that he said were in every room.

“I said, ‘Are you recording all this?’” Ms. Farmer said in an interview. “He said, ‘Yes. We keep it. We keep everything.’”

During a 2005 search of Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate, the police found two cameras hidden in clocks — one in the garage and the other next to his desk, according to police reports. But no other cameras were found.

So - it appears that Kessler was either a fraud or an operative, and the entire saga may have been designed to cast doubt over whether tapes actually exist. Or, Kessler is for real - and for some reason hasn’t found a way to release the videos. That said, since he says he’s not interested in extortion, what’s the hold-up?