Next Models co-founder, Faith Kates, is the latest female powerhouse to take a hit amid the Jeffrey Epstein files.
We’re told Kates, who co-founded the modeling agency in 1989, quietly exited the company via a grammatically challenged email on Nov. 24, after her friendly emails with the pedo resurfaced.
In the email obtained by Page Six, Kates wrote, “36 years after starting next by accident I have decided it’s the right moment to step back and retire from a job I loved.”
She attributed her decision to being a “30 year cancer survivor,” who now wants “to step back in, in order to give back.”
“The foundation I have been working with for the past years now at a critical point and now with the assistance of AI and the brilliant doctors we have been working with we will be able to diagnose gynecological diseases sooner and save so many lives,” she wrote.
She concluded by telling Next, “I’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines.”
An indudstry source told Page Six that she was forced out and is now “spinning it as if she’s retired, but it’s no coincidence that it’s happening while her name is being riddled through all of the currently relased Epstein files,” they said.
Another baffled insider explained Kates’ decision to characterize her departure as retirement was, “hers and hers alone.”
A spokesperson for the modeling agency did not comment.
Kates’ resurfaced Epstein emails are from 2017, two years before the billionaire was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges that landed him awaiting trial in jail.
(He was found dead of an apparent suicide two months after the arrest.)
In one email, Epstein name-drops Honeycomb Hedge Fund founder, David Fiszel, and “Trump,” while discussing Thanksgiving plans.
Scroll further down the email chain, and Kates gushes about how she “always wants to see” Epstein, and asks when he’s back in NYC.
We’re told Epstein was seen around the Next offices in the aughts, but, “he just seemed like some dude. No one knew him,” the source said.
Kates did not get back to us.
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