Journalists and researchers will spend the next months ferreting through the Epstein files in search of further criminal conduct or a new conspiratorial wrinkle. But one truth has already emerged.
In unsparing detail, the documents lay bare the once-furtive activities of an unaccountable elite, largely made up of rich and powerful men from business, politics, academia and show business. The pages tell a story of a heinous criminal given a free ride by the ruling class in which he dwelled, all because he had things to offer them: money, connections, sumptuous dinner parties, a private plane, a secluded island and, in some cases, sex.
That story of impunity is all the more outrageous now in the midst of rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality. The Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends occurred over two decades that saw the decline of America’s manufacturing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which millions of Americans lost their homes.
If Mr. Epstein’s goal was to build a wall of protection around his abuse by surrounding himself with the well connected, he failed in the end. But both before and after he was first prosecuted for abusing girls, his correspondence described a network of people whose high-flying lives belied the struggles of ordinary Americans. And at the center of that network was a sexual predator seemingly on top of the world.
“We’ve heard so much about the Epstein scandal over the past several years,” said Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who writes frequently about political culture. “And yet people do seem shocked by the scope of elite complicity in his world. It’s a level of corruption that the public is now getting a full view of.”
In 2002, Mr. Epstein hosted former President Bill Clinton and the actor Kevin Spacey on a tour of African countries aboard his private jet.
His talent for entertaining attracted interest from one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, who emailed Mr. Epstein in 2012 to ask, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” (Mr. Musk has said on social media that he “had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island.”)
He dispensed favors to, and rubbed elbows with, Woody Allen; Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual; Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel in the Clinton investigation; Kathryn Ruemmler, a former Obama White House counsel and currently the general counsel of Goldman Sachs; Stephen K. Bannon, one of President Trump’s top political allies; Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru; the film producer Barry Josephson; Lawrence H. Summers, a former president of Harvard and former Treasury secretary; Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew; Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York; Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway; and a cavalcade of financial titans.
James E. Staley, who recently stepped down as the chief executive of Barclay’s in the wake of allegations involving his ties to Mr. Epstein, emailed Mr. Epstein in 2014 to suggest that upper-caste Americans like themselves were unlikely to ever face a populist uprising like the protests taking place in Brazil at the time.
Pointing to Super Bowl ads that year, Mr. Staley wrote: “Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay-Z.”
The shocking nature of some of the revelations, combined with the prominence and status of those in Mr. Epstein’s orbit, has done nothing to quiet the conspiracy theories that his behavior spawned and that both the right and the left have sought to weaponize for political advantage. If anything, the raft of new details has spiraled into feverish new speculation with little or no factual basis.
In 2014, Mr. Epstein received an email from an associate whose name has been redacted that said in full, “Thank you for a fun night … your littlest girl was a little naughty.” In another email, Mr. Epstein instructed a recipient whose name is also redacted to buy several sex toys, adding: “I want you to talk as nasty, vulgar, imaginative as you can … It will free your mind. Its like a mental sneeze.”
Mr. Epstein wrote to another undisclosed recipient in 2009, who was identified on Wednesday in a House hearing as Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a powerful Emirati businessman: “where are you? are you ok, I loved the torture video.”
Lacking context, such messages are subject to speculation about their meaning and provide fresh opportunities for those intent on drawing attention to themselves and their views.
An assistant to Mr. Epstein wrote to him in 2011: “I ordered sweet young coconuts from Thailand for you and they just arrived … just so you don’t have to drink juices from old hairy things.”
Underscoring how even the apparently mundane can be stretched into the potentially conspiratorial, frequent references to pizza have given fresh life to the discredited 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, in which prominent Democrats were said to be torturing and raping children in the basement of a Washington restaurant. That the places and characters in Pizzagate are almost entirely different from the ones appearing in the Epstein files has not stopped some from insisting that there is a connection.
In an email exchange in 2018, Mr. Epstein’s urologist, Dr. Harry Fisch, informed him that “You have refills available” and that “after you use them, wash your hands and lets go get pizza and grape soda” — a peculiar combination used in several emails between the two men that, Mr. Fisch wrote, “No one else can understand.” (Dr. Fisch did not respond to an email request for comment.)
“It was this exchange,” the right wing podcaster Tucker Carlson said on his show on Friday, “that made us think, ‘Whoa, wait a second. Maybe the long-debunked conspiracy about Pizzagate wasn’t actually debunked, and maybe someone should take a closer look at this.’”
Ms. Hemmer, the Vanderbilt professor, said that the shadowy nature of Mr. Epstein’s life, coupled with the Trump administration’s haphazard production of the documents, was “bound to beef up a ton of conspiracy theories.”
Newly released video logs of the prison wing where Mr. Epstein was found dead, for example, suggest that a human figure not previously accounted for in the records was moving in the general direction of Mr. Epstein’s cell late that evening.
This has led some internet sleuths to conclude that Mr. Epstein, whose death in federal custody in 2019 was ruled a suicide, might have been killed. Others have speculated that he might not be dead at all, given that Mr. Epstein testified in a deposition in 2017 that he had a barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps, but no such tattoo is visible in the recently released photo of his body.
Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who worked with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican congresswoman, and Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, to pass legislation compelling the release of the documents, dismissed the conspiracy theories.
But, he said in an interview, “we must ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless and arrogant.”
Ms. Greene, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump for repeatedly demanding the release of the Epstein files, said she felt some vindication about the behavior of a male governing class they exposed. “The files are giving us an inside look into a world that we all thought existed,” she said. “And we were all called conspiracy theorists for saying so.”
While Mr. Epstein’s remarkable web of connections suggests to some that he was a puppet master calling the shots for a cabal of elites, that same web offers at least some proof to the contrary. Mr. Epstein counted presidents and cabinet members as his friends, but his influence on American policymaking was negligible.
His chums in the media were not newspaper publishers and TV network chief executives but those farther down the food chain, including the author Michael Wolff and a New York Times financial reporter, Landon Thomas Jr., who left the paper after admitting that he had solicited money from Mr. Epstein for a personal charity.
Notably absent from his coterie were any federal prosecutors, judges or law enforcement figures who could have allowed him to escape justice.
In the end, Mr. Epstein was arrested, charged with serious sex crimes and died in prison while awaiting trial. His associate Ghislaine Maxwell also remains incarcerated.
Still, that is far from a complete reckoning, Ms. Greene said. She noted that none of Mr. Epstein’s male friends or associates had been imprisoned for their behavior. “And now the administration is saying it’s time to move on?” she said. “I don’t hear any of the victims saying that.”
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
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