Masha Bucher, a Silicon Valley VC and founding father of Day One Ventures, took to X this week to deal with information stories documenting her shut enterprise and private relationship with convicted intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein. Bucher’s title — primarily below her maiden title, Masha Drokova — appeared within the newest dump of Epstein recordsdata over 1,600 occasions, The San Francisco Standard reported.
“He made me really feel I may very well be protected from the regime, somebody with energy and connections who may protect me” from threats she related along with her residence nation Russia, which she mentioned she feared after she obtained her U.S. inexperienced card, she wrote within the submit.
“I used to be naive; I didn’t dig deep sufficient early on,” she wrote about why she agreed to work with Epstein. “I believed his story that his earlier conviction was about sleeping with a woman who lied about her age and trusted validations from a number of buyers and scientists.” She additionally apologized to her founders, crew, and buyers, saying that this case has “brought on ache I by no means supposed.”
The recordsdata paint an image of how Bucher — whose Silicon Valley profession started in social media and public relations — agreed to grow to be Epstein’s publicist in 2017, serving to rehabilitate his status after his 2008 sex-trafficking conviction and organising conferences between him and varied journalists, as Forbes reported.
The paperwork present that Epstein supported and inspired her within the early days of Day One Ventures. The agency has since grown considerably — as Bucher instructed TechCrunch, it closed its most up-to-date fund, a $150 million third car, in 2024, bringing its property below administration to $450 million.
A few of the most salacious particulars from the emails contain Epstein giving her cash and a Prada bag, and on one event, asking her for nude images — although there’s no indication whether or not she complied — in keeping with SFGate. Bucher is actually a widely known VC within the Valley, having backed breakout firms like Superhuman, Distant, Worldcoin, and Truebill (which exited to Rocket Firms in 2021), in addition to others like Valar Atomics.
The entire episode is a very awkward one for a VC whose entire spiel to founders is that she’s a PR professional who will help them with their public picture. But it surely’s not Bucher’s first run-in with controversy.
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When youthful, Bucher was identified in Russia as a member of Nashi, a pro-Putin youth group. In actual fact, she was featured in a 2012 documentary known as “Putin’s Kiss” — named for the broadly circulated second within the nation when she kissed Putin’s cheek — as CNN reported.
In her submit on X, she mentioned she has since given up her Russian passport, publicly denounced Putin, and met with a few of Epstein’s victims.
She’s actually not the one VC whose title has been discovered within the Epstein recordsdata, which isn’t shocking given how linked he was to some of the biggest names in tech. The paperwork don’t point out that Bucher broke legal guidelines. Nevertheless, she was engaged in pleasant correspondence with Epstein till simply 11 days earlier than his arrest in July 2019, Forbes reported. Epstein died in jail roughly one month later.
