PARIS – On the morning of February 7, 2026, Jack Lang walked away from the Arab World Institute, the cultural institution in Paris that he had helped build into a pillar of French soft power over two decades. The resignation was voluntary, he said. The timing made it harder to believe.
Days earlier, the United States Department of Justice had released a new tranche of the Epstein files. Inside the correspondence covering 2012 through 2019, Lang’s name appeared 673 times.
Lang had spent nearly 20 years across multiple French governments as minister of culture and then education minister. He created France’s annual Festival of Music, which draws millions each June. He had led the Arab World Institute since 2013, an institution that receives €12.3 million annually from the French foreign ministry, roughly half its operating budget. His name in Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondence was not a passing reference. It was a sustained presence.
Lang told reporters he met Epstein roughly 15 years ago through film director Woody Allen. Their relationship, he said, had been one of arts patronage: Epstein presenting himself as a benefactor of cultural causes, as he had to many others in the orbit of European institutions. “The accusations being made against me are baseless,” Lang said at first. Days later, with investigators moving closer: “I fear nothing and I am clean as a whistle.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot summoned Lang to a meeting the following Sunday. The call was not incidental: the Arab World Institute draws €12.3 million annually from Barrot’s ministry, roughly half its total budget. The government was simultaneously the institution’s largest funder and the authority now required to account for what its president had been doing for seven years.
On February 6, French financial crimes prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into both Jack Lang and his daughter Caroline. The charge: “laundering of aggravated tax-fraud proceeds.” The phrasing points not to money received openly but to the movement and concealment of proceeds from an underlying offence.
That charge centred on Prytanee LLC, an offshore company established in 2016 in the United States Virgin Islands. Caroline Lang, a film producer and until her February 3 resignation the head of France’s Independent Production Union, held 50 percent of Prytanee’s shares. The company’s accounts held $1.4 million, presented as a fund to support young artists. Who held the other half of the shares, and where the $1.4 million originated, has not been disclosed by prosecutors.
What made the offshore structure harder to dismiss was a second document: Epstein’s will. Signed two days before his death in a Manhattan federal detention cell in August 2019, it named Caroline Lang as a beneficiary, with a $5 million bequest. She said she had been entirely unaware of the provision and had never received any payment. “I was an acquaintance,” she told investigators. “I was incredibly naive.” She insisted she had received “no remuneration, nor any benefit” from the Epstein connection.
On February 16, nine days after her father’s resignation, French police searched the Arab World Institute in Paris. Officers entered the building as part of the laundering investigation. The raid transformed what had begun as a single political resignation into a formal judicial proceeding touching one of France’s state-funded cultural institutions.
The wider investigation extended to other figures connected to Epstein’s network in France. Prosecutors opened separate inquiries into diplomat Fabrice Aidan and recruiter Daniel Siad. Conductor Frédéric Chaslin became the subject of a new case. The 2022 death of Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling executive found dead in his Paris prison cell while awaiting trial on charges of rape and sexual assault, was reopened with investigators examining whether it was suicide or something else.
Lang maintained throughout that he knew nothing of Epstein’s sexual crimes despite Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution being a matter of public record for the entirety of their acquaintance. He welcomed the French judicial investigation with what he described as “serenity and even relief.” The Epstein files have placed senior political figures across multiple governments under renewed scrutiny in 2026; Lang is, as of now, the most prominent European politician named in the correspondence yet to face a criminal indictment.
What neither the Epstein correspondence nor the French investigation has resolved is what Prytanee LLC was actually used for. The offshore jurisdiction, the $1.4 million balance, the artistic-patronage framing, and the will provision to the co-owner are documents in the file. What they add up to, whether they constitute the laundering prosecutors allege, is now a question before French magistrates.
