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A Jeffrey Epstein look-alike who went viral for the “crazy” resemblance said the comparisons started when The Post ran a photo of the powerful pedophile on its front page in 2019.
“Palm Beach Pete”— a square-jawed, silver-haired Epstein dead-ringer from Florida — said he was first flagged for the uncanny likeness after The Big Apple’s favorite tabloid began covering the sex trafficking case.
“It was in The Post, it was on TV all the time – it was the ‘it’ story, and I looked like him and I would be walking down Fifth Avenue, and tourists would circle around me and I felt that vibe, because I’m a New Yorker, so you get that vibe when people are doing stuff like that around you, and the Post was definitely part of that ammunition,” the 71-year-old doppleganger told The Post Friday.
Pete, a former real estate executive and avid tennis player who was born on the Upper East Side, said attention ramped up after news of Epstein’s 2019 arrest landed on the cover of The Post.
“It happened all the time in New York City and the Hamptons – it was always happening,” he said about being compared to the perverted financier, who died of suicide that same year while locked up on sex-trafficking charges.
Pete, who did not want to give his last name, found himself unexpectedly going viral this week after someone filmed him driving his convertible down a highway in the Sunshine State — sparking fresh conspiracy theories that the powerful predator had returned to Florida and was living it up.
He said he was en route to a tennis match at the time.
“Epstein is alive! Epstein is alive!” the man who shot the video yelled, sending social media into meltdown. The Instagram clip of him driving had raked in million likes as of Friday.
“I think it went viral last Thursday or Friday,” he explained. “I was out for dinner with my girlfriend and some Generation Zers were talking, like, whispering, and she said, ‘Peter, they’re talking about you,’ so I went over to their table and said, ‘Hey guys, are you talking about me?’ Non-threatening. And they said, ‘Yes, are you the guy that went viral?’ I said, ‘That’s me,’” — at which point the group asked him to take a photo.
“Now [the comparisons are] constant because I’m viral … It’s never been to this magnitude or degree of views and likes and eyeballs. I’m feeling people staring at me,” Pete said, adding he has since launched his own Instagram page dubbed not.epstein.
He said he woke up Friday morning to more than 21,000 followers — up from just 3,000 the previous day.
And as much as he’s relishing the attention, Pete, who moved to the Sunshine State about two and a half years ago, doesn’t love being associated with the convicted pedophile.
“I don’t feel good about it – I don’t want to be associated with him. He was a monster, a terrible human being and I have nothing to do with that,” Pete said. “It’s kind of amusing that all this is going on because of how I look, but it’s not who I am, obviously, and he’s dead and he was just a bad, bad human being.”
The Palm Beach resident, however, was confident he’s crossed paths with Epstein before at parties in the 1990s.
“I actually knew his brother because his brother used to have these two big dogs – these two standard poodles – and he used to walk them around the Garment District and I said, ‘Wow, nice dogs,’ and we got friendly,” Pete recalled.
“Jeff was not really a bigshot – he was really under the radar before he got accused of being a sex trafficker, and then he got that slap-on-the-wrist, easy sentence in Palm Beach.”
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