Long before Jeffrey Epstein became the world’s most notorious sex offender, he committed an act that foreshadowed a lifetime of manipulating women — and his first victim was his own mother.

According to a researcher examining Epstein’s early years, the disgraced financier’s pattern of exploiting women began decades before his sex-trafficking empire came crashing down.

“His mother Paula adored him,” CUNY sociology professor Thomas Volscho, who is researching a book on wealthy sex traffickers, told The Post. “Both his parents were remembered as hardworking, well liked people from a simple Brooklyn family.”

Yet, one of the earliest documented controversies involving Epstein centered on his leaving his family in the lurch while a student at NYU.

According to a May 1976 report by Fidelifacts, New York University took Epstein to civil court in December 1975 after receiving an invalid tuition payment.

“He wrote a check on his mother’s checking account for his tuition and the check bounced,” Volscho told NYU student newspaper Washington Square News.

“When NYU sent a debt collector to his address, his brother answered the door and said he’d gone off to Europe and then coughed up like three or four hundred dollars of the thousand-odd dollars owed.”

The NYU lawsuit was later settled, but the incident is an early glimpse into a pattern that would define Epstein’s life.

Survivors revealed that Epstein — who left NYU without a degree and lied to prospective employer Bear Stearns about his education — repeatedly used promises of admission and tuition payments at New York University and other elite institutions to lure and control his victims, according to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

He would dangle the prospect of an education to entice young women into his orbit, and in some cases he or his associates arranged scholarships or paid tuition, then threaten to pull funding if they failed to comply with his demands.

As despicable as Epstein’s manipulation tactics were, he was the grand master at them. Even after his mother’s death, he exploited her for his own benefit.

On Aug. 9, 2019, after meeting his lawyers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center New York, prison staffers allowed Epstein to make, in violation of policy, an unrecorded, unmonitored telephone call before he was returned to his cell, according to a report from the DOJ, Office of the Inspector General.

Epstein said he was calling his mother, Paula Epstein, but she had been dead for 15 years. He was actually calling his girlfriend.

Guards found him dead in his cell the next morning, and his death was ruled a suicide.

His mom never lived to see his 2008 conviction or the global scandal that would follow. Friends remembered her as a devoted mother who worked while raising her sons with husband Seymour Epstein, who died in 1991.

She’d passed away in April 2004 at age 85 — just before the initial police investigation into her son’s activities in Palm Beach began — and was buried in the Star of David Cemetery in West Paul Beach, Fla. with her husband.

In yet another blow, the names on the family crypt were removed to discourage protesters and vandals following Jeffrey’s death, according to Find A Grave Memorial.

“The irony,” Volscho added, “is how two loving parents can produce such a monster.”