Peter Simel was driving a convertible down a Florida highway in March when a stranger’s camera made him famous for the wrong reason. The footage, posted online, looked enough like the late financier Jeffrey Epstein that a corner of the internet decided the convicted sex offender had not died in his jail cell after all.
Simel is a 71-year-old retired commercial real estate executive who lives in the Palm Beach area. Online he is known as “Palm Beach Pete.” The resemblance has hung over him for months, revived every time the clip circulates, and the rumor has proven harder to kill than any of his explanations.
He tried the obvious defenses. He opened one social media account after another insisting he is not Epstein. He appeared on podcasts in the spring, where he discussed taking a DNA test. By June he said he had passed a polygraph and was waiting on the results. None of it quieted the theory.
So this month he flew to Tel Aviv, where he said he submitted a DNA sample to a laboratory he identified as BioGenesis, a facility he described on social media as decades ahead of anything in the United States. He returned with a report, posted online, that he said proved he is “completely not” Epstein.
The trip did not settle the matter. The laboratory’s existence could not be independently verified, and no outside source confirmed the results. Skeptics noted that the website he pointed to appeared to have been registered only recently. In the internet’s telling, the test itself became part of the bit.
Jeffrey Epstein died in August 2019 in a federal jail in Manhattan, where he was being held on sex-trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging, a conclusion that conspiracy theories have never fully accepted. The case has lingered in American politics and elite circles ever since, feeding the kind of rumor Simel now spends his time answering.
Epstein’s death carried the kind of loose ends that keep such rumors alive. He was arrested in July 2019 after federal prosecutors in New York brought sex-trafficking charges, more than a decade after a 2008 Florida plea deal, which critics called a sweetheart arrangement, spared him federal charges. His ties to politicians, princes and financiers fed a cottage industry of speculation that outlived the man himself.
Palm Beach is part of the reason the rumor stuck. Epstein owned a mansion there, and the town was where the original investigation behind the 2008 deal began. A lookalike filmed driving an open car through the same region was enough to close the loop for people already convinced the official story was wrong.
The “Epstein is alive” theory predates Simel. It drew on the timing of his death, weeks after he was denied bail, and on the fact that his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted years later, keeping the case in the news. Every grainy photograph of an older man who faintly resembled him became a data point, and Simel, living in the same Florida town where Epstein kept a home, was the most convincing one yet.
The mechanics of the rumor are familiar. A grainy image, a passing resemblance, and a public that has never quite believed the official account. Simel became the proof that Epstein was alive simply by existing, and no amount of denial seemed to matter to the people who wanted the story to be true.
What makes his situation harder is that the resemblance is not a stretch. The two men share a similar build and a similar cast of features. For an audience primed to distrust the official record, that is enough. Every video he posts, every interview he gives, is read by some as further evidence rather than as the refutation he intends.
Simel has said the episode has complicated his life. He has described strangers approaching him, and he has framed the DNA test as a final attempt to put the matter to rest. He has also said he is running for mayor of Palm Beach, a turn that has given the story a second life in local politics. A polygraph and a foreign laboratory, in his telling, are the most a private citizen can do to prove a negative about himself.
It is a strange position: a man trying to prove he is not a dead criminal, to an audience that would rather believe the criminal cheated death. The burden of proof, which usually rests on the accuser, has landed on him.
Epstein has been dead for seven years, and the legal machinery around his associates has mostly wound down. But the rumor has its own half-life, and Simel now occupies a small place in it, the ordinary man whose face keeps a conspiracy alive, and who keeps trying, one test at a time, to convince people he is exactly who he says he is.
