Jeffrey Epstein, as has become clear again with the latest Department of Justice file dump, will go down in history as perhaps this century’s most horrifically accomplished social climber. He knew pretty much everybody, name-dropping, favor-trading, sex-trafficking and possibly blackmailing his way all the way up, up, up.
Only Vladimir Putin, it seems, was beyond his Mephistophelian charms.
Many of the people revealed as knowing him well had previously claimed they hardly knew him, and all of them are now claiming they certainly didn’t know him well enough to witness the pedophilia. Now they are disgraced by their connection, and often, out of a job.
Many people stuck with him even after he had gone to jail in 2008 in Florida for sex crimes, and in some cases even after he landed in jail again in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. Back then, the plight of the victims often seemed to be an afterthought. That’s most likely because whatever they received from him in the past — access to career-enhancing people, access to young girls and an endless supply of freebies — might still be on offer. This is the nature of the Epstein files: It’s the record of what a global class of very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted.
Sometimes it was a Prada bag. Other times it was a flight on Mr. Epstein’s jet, or a weekend at his island. Sometimes it was a donation to a charity or school. Or a job for their kid working on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for Mr. Allen’s own kid to get into Bard. Sometimes it was a “tall, Swedish blonde.” Other times it was a young woman who might be a “a little freaked by the age difference.”
In writing about an earlier tranche of emails, in The Times, Anand Giridharadas asked: “How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner.”
Inside dope wasn’t the only thing Mr. Epstein had on hand. The picture provided by the latest files shows how Mr. Epstein won favor and friendships by acting as a kind of superconcierge. Sometimes that meant sending the helicopter to pick up guests, as Mr. Epstein offered to do for Elon Musk in a 2012 email, writing, “How many people will you be for the heli to island?” On another occasion, Mr. Musk asks his concierge Epstein, “Do you have any parties planned?” Mr. Epstein provided private plane trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts (those went to Steve Bannon), nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen) and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky). And then there’s the resistance Substack star Michael Wolff, who is all over the Epstein files, who emails Mr. Epstein, “Shoes are very nice. Thanks.”
There are numerous ways to look foolish and creepy in the Epstein files, the worst of which is obviously emails like the one Peter Attia wrote to Mr. Epstein in 2016, eight years after Mr. Epstein became a registered sex offender: “Pussy is, indeed, low-carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” Everyone has surely by now seen the photo of the erstwhile Prince Andrew with his arm around a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre. There’s also a photo of Bill Clinton in a hot tub.
There are other, seemingly more innocuous, emails that are somehow just as damning, because they show a world where it’s fine to bring your children to the island of a registered sex offender. In 2012, the wife of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Mr. Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff, “We will be coming from Caneel Bay in the morning,” bringing “two families each with four kids ranging in age from 7-16! Six boys and two girls. I hope that’s OK.” Later, Mr. Lutnick lied about his association with Mr. Epstein, saying he was so “disgusted” by Mr. Epstein in 2005 that he had no more contact. In 2017, Mr. Epstein donated $50,000 in honor of Mr. Lutnick to an unknown organization.
Many of the emails show a world that includes a form of status upselling. Mr. Epstein used his Hollywood friends (Mr. Allen and Brett Ratner, the future director of the “Melania” documentary) to entice his rich, smart but unglamorous friends. A free plane flight for a high-status person (perhaps even a royal) who otherwise doesn’t have access to a private plane will go a long way.
In 2016, Brad Karp, the chair of Paul Weiss, the fanciest law firm in New York and one of the first to settle with the Trump administration, wrote to Mr. Epstein, “Can I raise a personal issue with you concerning my son David?” He went on, “He would love to work, in any capacity, with Woody on his upcoming film project, if that’s a possibility. He certainly doesn’t need to be paid and he’s a really good, talented kid.” A parent asking a friend for a job for their kid is hardly illegal. But it’s interesting that Mr. Karp’s law firm was one of the first to make a deal with the administration of another person who appears thousands of times in the Epstein files, Donald Trump.
And what does Mr. Trump have to do with it? He’d promised to rid America of exactly the sort of self-dealing global elite that Mr. Epstein was in the middle of. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Mr. Trump said in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. It was a message that resonated, and when you watch the speech again as I did the other day, the enthusiasm of the crowd is striking. Finally, someone was letting the American people know the terrible secret that no matter how hard one worked, no matter how smart one was, there was no getting ahead in America circa 2016. It wasn’t their fault. It was the fault of the elites. Around this time, we saw the rise of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claimed that a sex-trafficking ring was being run by elites out of the nonexistent basement of a pizza shop.
QAnon sounded crazy to the rest of us at the time — and it’s still crazy — but the Epstein files show it had parallels in reality.
There are many terrible secrets buried in the Epstein files, which mix the mundane and the horrific, the thirsty and the criminal, and perhaps that’s the most upsetting part of all of this. Casually wrapped up together with a bow are canceled men and sex trafficking and media advice from Michael Wolff. Being a convicted sex offender did not make Mr. Epstein an outcast, not when he seemed to have something to offer. His transactional amorality actually seemed to add to his appeal to people who were convinced that the rules didn’t apply to them.
Source images by Ali Shahgholi and MicroStockHub, via Getty Images.
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
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