Being a convicted sex offender didn’t make Epstein an outcast, not when he still seemed to have something to offer. His transactional amorality actually seemed to add to his appeal to people who were convinced the rules didn’t apply to them.
By Molly Jong-Fast
Jeffrey Epstein, as the recent release of the Justice Department’s files made clear, will go down in history as perhaps the most successful social “trap” of this century. He knew almost everyone; by mentioning important names, trading favors, trafficking for sex, and perhaps blackmailing, he rose to the highest peaks. It seems that only Vladimir Putin was beyond the reach of his Mephistophelian charm. Many of the people who turned out to know him well had previously claimed to know him very little, and all are now claiming that they certainly did not know him well enough to witness pedophilia. Now they are ashamed of their connection, and often, unemployed.
Many people stuck by him even after he went to prison in Florida in 2008 for sex crimes, and in some cases even after he ended up in prison again in 2019 on sex trafficking charges. Back then, the fate of the victims often seemed secondary. That’s likely because whatever they had gotten from him in the past—access to career helpers, access to young women, and an endless supply of free gifts—could still be on offer. That’s the nature of the Epstein files: It’s a record of what a global class of highly privileged, accomplished, and self-respecting people want to be given.
Sometimes it was a Prada bag. Other times it was a flight on Mr. Epstein’s jet, or a weekend on his island. Sometimes it was a donation to a charity or school. Or a job for their child on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for Mr. Allen’s own child to get into Bard. Sometimes it was a “tall Swedish blonde.” Other times it was a young woman who might have been “a little shy about the age difference.”
Writing about an earlier batch of emails in The Times, Anand Giridharadas asked: “How did Mr. Epstein manage to bring so many strangers together? The emails reveal an economy of nonpublic information sharing that was a major draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner.” Inside information was not the only thing Epstein had at his disposal. The picture provided by the recent files shows how Epstein gained favors and friendships by acting as a kind of “super-butler.” Sometimes that meant sending a helicopter to pick up guests, as he offered to do for Elon Musk in a 2012 email, writing: “How many of you will be on the helicopter to the island?” On another occasion, Musk asks his butler Epstein: “Do you have any parties planned?”
Epstein offered private jet trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, oversized zip-up hoodies (these went to Steve Bannon), almost $10,000 worth of underwear and T-shirts (Woody Allen), and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky). And then there’s Substack star Michael Wolff, who is all over the Epstein files: “The shoes are really nice. Thank you.”
There are many ways to look stupid and disgusting in the Epstein files, the worst of which are undoubtedly emails like the one Peter Attia wrote to Epstein in 2016, eight years after Epstein was registered as a sex offender: “The f*ck is, indeed, low-carb. Still waiting on the gluten results, though.” Everyone has probably seen the old photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre by now. There’s also a photo of Bill Clinton in a hot tub.
There are other, seemingly more trivial emails that are just as damning, because they depict a world where it’s okay to bring your kids to a sex offender’s island. In 2012, the wife of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Epstein’s aide, Lesley Groff: “We’ll be coming up from Caneel Bay in the morning,” bringing “two families, each with four kids, ages 7-16! Six boys and two girls. Hope that’s okay.” Later, Lutnick lied about his relationship with Epstein, saying he was so “disgusted” by Epstein in 2005 that he had no further contact. In 2017, Epstein donated $50,000 in Lutnick’s honor to an undisclosed organization. Many of the emails depict a world that involves some form of status-boosting through middlemen. Epstein used his Hollywood friends (Allen and Brett Ratner, the future director of the documentary “Melania”) to lure his wealthy, smart, but not glamorous friends. A free jet flight for a high-status person (perhaps even a member of the royal family) who otherwise doesn’t have access to a private jet goes a long way.
In 2016, Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, the most prestigious law firm in New York and one of the first to reach a settlement with the Trump administration, wrote to Epstein: “May I discuss a personal matter with you regarding my son David?” He continued: “He would very much like to work, in any capacity, with Woody on his next film project, if that is possible. Of course, he does not need to be paid and is a truly good and talented guy.” A parent asking a friend for a job for his child is hardly illegal. But it is interesting that Karp’s law firm was one of the first to make a settlement with the administration of another person who appears thousands of times in Epstein’s files, Donald Trump.
And what does Mr. Trump have to do with this? He had promised to cleanse America of precisely the kind of self-serving global elite that Epstein was at the center of. “Nobody knows the system better than I do, so I alone can fix it,” Trump said in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican nomination. It was a message that resonated, and when you watch the speech again, as I did a few days ago, the enthusiasm of the crowd is impressive. He was finally telling the American people the terrible secret that no matter how hard someone worked, no matter how smart they were, there was no way to get ahead in 2016 America. It wasn’t their fault. It was the elites’ fault. Around this time, we saw the rise of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claimed a sex trafficking ring was being run by the elites, from the basement of a nonexistent pizza shop.
QAnon seemed like a crazy theory to the rest of us at the time, and it still is, but the Epstein files show that that file had parallels in reality.
There are many terrible secrets buried in the Epstein files, which mix the mundane and the horrific, the attention-seeking and the criminal, and perhaps that is the most disturbing part of it all. Wrapped casually together with a ribbon are the “cancelled” men, sex trafficking, and media advice from Michael Wolff. Being a convicted sex offender did not make Epstein an outcast, not when he still seemed to have something to offer. His transactional amorality actually seemed to add to his appeal to people who were convinced that the rules did not apply to them. (The New York Times)