← Diabolical Lies
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- [00:01]
A
Today's episode of Diabolical Eyes is brought to you by QAnon and all the freaks who believed in it way back in 2017. On behalf of Katie and myself, I'd like to formally apologize to all of you for thinking so little of your creepy little conspiracy theories about pedophiles running the world. Because you were, as it turned out, dead on the money. So sorry for getting in your way when you stormed the Capitol. You all are clearly prophetic geniuses, and this podcast will now be dedicated to spreading the truth of Pizzagate far and wide. Time to arrest Hillary Clinton for using the blood of babies to stay forever young. Lock her up.
- [00:35]
B
Lock her up.
- [00:39]
A
That is the ending of my joking. So, Katie, in the same way that you made me joke through our Gaza episode, I'm going to make you joke through our Epstein episode and you can figure out how to do that.
- [00:49]
B
Oh, good. I can't decide which one is worse. I'll get my pedophile puns ready.
- [00:55]
A
Gaza is worse. Gaza is for sure worse. All right, some quick housekeeping before we get into it today. If you are a Substack subscriber for this podcast, whether you are a paid subscriber or you just subscribe to get the public posts Knopf, my US imprint for yesteryear, my debut novel wants to send you a little treat if you pre ordered yesteryear. So as a thank you to any Diabolical Lies Substack subscribers who are supporting me and my novelist dreams by pre ordering the book, they are going to send you a cool little bandana that we custom designed as like a fun little crossover for friends of the pod who also want to be friends of yesteryear. So all you have to do, if you just click on the little substack email in today's post for Jeffrey Epstein, you will see that there's a little link where you just have to basically type in proof of your purchase and then they will get your mailing address and send it out to you. So no need to pay anything extra. It's just a fun little gift as a thank you. So feel free to check that out in today's email blast. So today we are talking about Jeffrey Epstein. How are you feeling, Katie?
- [02:03]
B
Apprehensive. I told Thomas that we were doing this and he's like, oh good. Super niche. No one's covering that.
- [02:09]
A
Yeah, exactly. What can go wrong?
- [02:10]
B
He's like, this will really set you guys apart.
- [02:13]
A
I know. It's funny because I feel like you and I are very careful about when we dip into Zeitgeist stuff. Like, we sometimes lean into it and sometimes avoid it. I've been reading Jeffrey Epstein stuff for, like, a month and a half now, which has really impacted my personal psyche. There is so much to talk about, and there are so many angles. And I want to highlight some of the angles that we're not talking about today. So obviously, there are the victim testimonies, the stories of what young women went through, a number that is now estimated in the thousands. Oh, my God. There is the rare portal of access we've been given into the billionaire class interiority with the dumping of Epstein files over the last year. We'll talk about that briefly, but we're not really going to focus on it. There's the politics of the Trump administration wielding the Epstein files like a weapon that they will eventually cut their own heads off with. I think that you could write several books on the fracturing of the Republican Party over this story. You could literally fill several books with all of the redacted Donald Trump mentions, let alone the millions of files that the Department of Justice has refused to release. There is the Ghislaine Maxwell of it all, the Donald Trump of it all, the conspiracy theorizing of it all, the QAnon come to life of it all. And all of this shit is, like, worthy of critique. And people have talked about it.
- [03:22]
B
Okay, so we're not talking about any of that.
- [03:24]
A
We're not talking about any of that. Okay, great, we'll hint at it. But I really wanted to think about, like, how we could contribute to this conversation. And so what I became really interested in when I was reading about the Epstein of it all was the cultural mythologizing that we were all kind of contributing to, and the narrative that seemed to be playing out regarding how we view men and how we view women in these abusive cycles. Actually, kind of ironically, I feel like our conversations and fixations on what evil is over the last few episodes and what it means to identify someone as almost superhuman in their ability to hurt one another is something I was thinking about. I feel like the way we see Epstein discussed in the cultural narrative is, like, not so much a man or a pedophile or a con man or whatever word, but, like, basically this evil and impenetrable force of someone who had, like, so much money and so much power, like, he couldn't be stopped. And this is the prevailing theory that I have seen again and again from conservatives and progressives alike, that the reason why Epstein got away with what he got away with for so long was because he had so much money and so many connections, and he was basically this brilliant evil mastermind. Have you experienced that as well?
- [04:43]
B
Well, I. I've intentionally not really engaged with much Epstein discourse, in part because it does feel overwhelming to me. Not because of the subject matter necessarily, but because of the sheer volume of information. Like, when I saw how many. How many documents, wasn't it like millions of documents that were. It just. It kind of like short circuited my brain, and I was like, there's almost too much here for me to feel like I can engage with this productively. But what I did notice in the brief reading and listening that I did about it was that Epstein is often discussed as a figure that's almost like preternaturally charming, like they would. They were talking about his correspondence with these other very powerful people and the way in which these powerful people were opening up to him about these very intimate matters, existential matters, spiritual matters, sexual matters, that he almost elicited a degree of unusual trust from people. And so I. I definitely picked up on that superhuman, oh, there's something very different about this person vibe. And I think that more broadly, my takeaway from the discourse that I've seen so far is that it almost feels like, because the QAnon theories were more correct than they were wrong, that we've kind of collectively begun to treat Epstein almost like a skeleton key for understanding or unlocking the Trump phenomenon more broadly, because Epstein has turned out to be so central to a lot of the dark mythologizing that Donald Trump himself did about the United States and about the quote, unquote elite or the swamp during his ascendance of his first term and kind of like how he became the center of gravity in American life, that Epstein feels so connected to Trump's ascendance that it kind of feels like there's this sense that if we can just understand Epstein, if we can just make sense of and uncover and reveal what this man has been doing, that, like, we'll understand all of it.
- [06:50]
A
Right. The irony, too, though, is the whole Trump base is like, we don't want pedophiles. We are. That's why we're voting for Trump. He's going to drain the swamp. And then you have, like, pedophile nation
- [07:02]
B
or the anti pedophile party. Yeah, yeah.
- [07:05]
A
It's just crazy. And, like, no one really seems to be willing to reconcile that. But I think his charm is a great example. I think that what I've seen, again, from the New York Times, from farther Right post from farther left is like some combination of Epstein singular charm, his singular amount of wealth, his singular amount of influence, his leverage, his network. Some combination of all of these supernatural factors was why he got away with what he got away with. And I don't believe that. And that's what this episode is about today. I think that it's very rare on this podcast for, I think, either of us to argue that having billions of dollars doesn't deeply impact your lifestyle. So I understand that this is a bit of an uphill climb for me to make, and I think in order to do so, we need to spend time with the legal timeline of Epstein's numerous cases. So today we're going to talk about all of the moments where Epstein should have been caught, the moments where he was fully caught. And basically, we're going to talk about why those moments never actually led to any repercussions, why they never converted themselves into actual punishment or jail time. And I think that that will allow us to talk about some uncomfortable cultural truths about the world that we live in today, which is a diabolicalized promise.
- [08:21]
B
So, yeah.
- [08:22]
A
Y. Yay.
- [08:23]
B
Yay.
- [08:24]
A
All right, so Epstein is born in the 50s and grows up in Brooklyn. He graduates from high school early. Katie, like you, he was very good at school. He shows an just. There are so many similarities between him
- [08:35]
B
and you plot twist. This entire episode is just all the parallels.
- [08:40]
A
He, like, goes to Bama old Ro.
- [08:43]
B
I am Jeffrey Epstein. He didn't kill himself. I am Jeffrey Epstein. He's still alive. It's me.
- [08:50]
A
That's the inevitable Candace Owens take down a diabolical lies will be that you are secretly Jeffrey Epstein. Okay, so he does show an early aptitude for math. I will give him that little credit. He takes a lot of courses at various colleges, but he never gets a college degree. So, like, he graduates from high school early, but he does not continue to accumulate degrees. He gets hired at Dalton School. Do you know anything about Dalton School in New York City?
- [09:14]
B
Isn't it like, that really fancy prep school?
- [09:17]
A
Yes, it's a very fancy prep school in Manhattan. He gets hired as a math teacher there, and the story here goes. It's like a very fabulous origin story. It's like he's working as this plucky math teacher, and then he is just so brilliant that he ascends to Beren Stern. Is it Beren Stern or Beren Stearns Bear? Stearns Bear Asterns. That's like the one thing I didn't fact check. Cause I care so Little about finance. Bear Asterns. So this story is partially true. He did basically get found by the parent of one of his students and then he gets a job at Bear Asterns. But the detail that is very infrequently mentioned is that Dalton was going to end his employment at the end of the year.
- [09:56]
B
Oh, why?
- [09:58]
A
So he was a teacher, Katie. Jeffrey Epstein was a teacher. And I wish more people were like,
- [10:03]
B
hmm, was he a diddler?
- [10:05]
A
What might it have meant for Jeffrey Epstein to spend all day, every day surrounded by 14 year old girls? So please read this from his time at Dalton.
- [10:18]
B
Okay. Several former students told NPR they remember seeing Epstein surrounded by female students at Dalton, though none recalled any incidents of misconduct. Okay. Quote, it was just kind of a general circle of girls, says Scott Spizer, who graduated from Dalton in 1976. He was much more present amongst the students, specifically the girl students, during non teaching hours. It seemed just, it was kind of inappropriate. There was a mild sense of creepiness, says Carrie Lawrence, also in the class of 1976. Quote, when you had a faculty member that girls were paying attention to, it was somewhat disconcerting. End quote. While there were a lot of. There was one particular male faculty member at my all girl high school that we all were paying very close attention to and he did not like it. He was very aware and was like, stay away from me, okay?
- [11:15]
A
Stay away. Whores.
- [11:17]
B
Yeah. Dr. Jackson. Shout out. Dr. Jackson, freshman English. He was a babe.
- [11:23]
A
Unproblematic king.
- [11:25]
B
Unproblematic king. Okay, but Skewer Lubin, who was Epstein's student for three years, remembers it differently. Quote, he didn't touch girls or anything. They all hung out around him because he was handsome in his sleazy polyester pants. She says. So okay, well having a bit of,
- [11:43]
A
I mean, so first and foremost we already see like these conflicting narratives coming out where it's like he wasn't doing anything wrong. They were just hanging all over him. Again, I would remind you, even at that point he was in his 20s
- [11:58]
B
and these girls, these children were just attracted to his polyester pants.
- [12:02]
A
Exactly. These were 14 year old girls. We don't know what happened there. He has denied ever doing anything inappropriate at Dalton, but we know that he was not going to continue his employment there. So his famed job with Bear Stearns, he gets hired after he impresses the father of a student. By now we're in the mid-70s, he's a young guy, mid-20s, a low level junior assistant to a floor trader. But he quickly rises through the ranks by 1980. He's 27 years old and a limited partner. Jesus. So that is very unusual. He is featured as Cosmopolitan's Bachelor of the month in 1980. There is a very famous story that is always referenced, like in podcasts, about Epstein, where at one point, his boss who hired him catches him and basically finds out that he lied about going to college. He says, you didn't actually go to college. And he says, why did you lie? And Epstein says, because I knew that you wouldn't hire me if I told you the truth. And this is like, wow, what a guy. Like, he lied. And I'm reading this being like, isn't it so funny that one of the themes of the Epstein story is how none of the women are credible? Right. All the women are liars. And that's something that we'll see again and again today. And Epstein is a liar from the jump. But when men lie, it's aspirational, baby.
- [13:18]
B
It's, like, strategic.
- [13:19]
A
He's ambitious.
- [13:20]
B
He just did what he had to do. Right, to get the finance job.
- [13:24]
A
Exactly. And it's also notable that this boss, the reason why he also liked this kind of, like, plucky con man was that he was known for hiring men who were PSDs, which is poor, smart, and desperate to be rich.
- [13:36]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [13:38]
A
I was thinking about that acronym, and I was like, how do we view women who are poor, smart, and desperate to be rich? How do we view all the women who were poor and offered thousands of dollars cash from Epstein over the years and thought like, oh, this could change my life. We view them as, like, whores. Frankly, that's how the culture views them is like, oh, well, that's what you did. God, you must be desperate. But when Epstein's desperate to be rich, it's viewed as, like, this wildly redeeming quality. So I'm gonna have you read some little info from the New York Times about Epstein's early years at Bear Stearns. It's Bear Stearns. I can't for the life of me remember or care. So I'm gonna move back and forth, and I won't really apologize for that
- [14:23]
B
before I read this. What's interesting is, like, a lot of the defenses that have been leveled, particularly I think there's a pretty famous clip from the Megyn Kelly show where she's like, they weren't children. They were teenagers. They weren't even minors.
- [14:37]
A
The Palm Beach Police department records were gon through in a little bit, we'll say otherwise.
- [14:42]
B
But a lot of the women that I mean Even like the house and habit storyline that I've been paying kind of like, somewhat of attention to. When she was named in the files, she'll say, like, oh, this wasn't a child sex trafficking ring. These were just like prostitutes from Eastern Europe who just, like, wanted the money. They were fully consenting adults.
- [15:02]
A
Sure.
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B
And it is interesting that their either desire or need for stability financially is viewed as somehow exculpatory evidence for his bad behavior.
- [15:15]
A
Completely.
- [15:16]
B
Okay, I'll read. One secret to Epstein's early success was his close relationship with Jimmy Cayne, a senior executive who would one day run Bear Stearns. Rumors, perhaps fueled by envy, began to spread that Epstein was helping Cain, who died in 2021, to pursue women and score drugs, according to several of their colleagues. Kane raved to colleagues about Epstein and began introducing him to some of his most lucrative clients. Quote, that's what really catapulted him. Tenenbaum recalled describing Epstein and Cain as, quote, two sleaze balls. Once or twice a week, Epstein would let it be known that he was having lunch with the chief executive of a major company. Meetings apparently arranged by Keynes at Elliot Woke, who became Epstein's boss after Tenenbaum. Wolk surmised that Epstein's appeal to these clients was partly his charisma and partly his newfound understanding of complex trading strategies that could save ultra wealthy clients huge amounts in taxes.
- [16:14]
A
Okay, so again, there's a lot here. There is the opening with like, well, crazy rumors were that these guys were doing weird shit with chicks. That was probably fueled by envy, right? No, what probably catapulted him forward, it was tax breaks, was his undeniable understanding of the tax system. I mean, this guy was a wunderkind, right?
- [16:37]
B
Yeah, it's like, give me a break.
- [16:39]
A
So a few years later, Epstein has to leave Bear Stearns after an internal probe in which, shocker, he is violating a number of ethical rules and lying. Again, again, who is the unreliable narrator here? He's spending tens of thousands of dollars of company money on clothing and jewelry for his girlfriend. He's engaging in insider trading with his girlfriend, Slay. He's just like, straight up breaking the rules. He, of course, is very offended by all this. And he essentially using an expense account
- [17:06]
B
for clothes and jewelry. That's icon behavior, which I will not apologize.
- [17:11]
A
Absolute queen. This is like how in another life, Donald Trump would be a beloved drag queen.
- [17:14]
B
Wendy Williams CO HOST exactly, exactly.
- [17:18]
A
So Epstein leaves. He starts running his own company. He's going to run a few companies. This first one is called intercontinental Assets group. And he essentially describes himself as a fucking bounty hunter, where he's like, I'm recovering stolen money for people. This is the beginning where, like, no one seems to know what he does or what his value is. So this is what I find really amazing. I am no finance queen, but it is very clear to me that this guy was not like a phenomenal day trader. There is this perception of him as being a total whiz at understanding the markets. And it does seem like he was a very smart mathematician, but there are many, many very math savvy people in finance. And what Epstein goes on to do, as far as we know, and again, there's a lot we don't know is a lot of shady shit that has nothing to do with understanding the market. Like, he's hunting down money using lawyers. Early on in his career, he convinces this guy to give him $450,000 for a crude oil deal that doesn't exist, never gives the money back. The guy files a civil suit with him, and Epstein wins on technical grounds. Who cares? Who cares? Financial genius. He was just like. He's just like, give me half a million, dude.
- [18:33]
B
This is like how all of venture capital works, where, like, you can. In 2021, you could literally make a PowerPoint presentation that was like, this app is going to do crypto and be like, 50 million. Here you go. Best of luck.
- [18:45]
A
Like Jared Kushner's slideshow. Yeah, dude, it's crazy.
- [18:50]
B
It honestly just to me is such a funny reminder of A, how fake money is and B, how fake capitalism is. Yes, yes, there does seem to exist, like, an Anna Delvey style person. Like the type of person who can essentially delude themselves and everyone else around them into creating a lifestyle and accessing a level of wealth that is, like, basically unthinkable to anybody who is just, you know, going about life trying to play by the rules of the system. It's like, it's kind of mind boggling.
- [19:22]
A
It is mind boggling. And you're kind of hitting on what I'm clearly trying to communicate here, which is it's clear that he has skills. I don't think anyone would deny that. But the idea that we have framed these skills as a financial genius are very interesting to me. And either A, say a lot about how we actually perceive the financial system in America, or B, say a lot about the leeway that we give men who end up making a lot of money and, like, basically try to find expensive excuses for how there is legitimacy here. Like, when I read about Epstein's money foibles. I'm like, this guy should be in the lular row category. Do you know what I mean?
- [19:57]
B
Yeah.
- [19:58]
A
And instead he is being framed as well. He's with Bill Gates and he's emailing all this geniuses.
- [20:03]
B
Yeah, financier. Well, and also famously, Bear Stearns is one of the firms that went under because of the great financial crisis.
- [20:10]
A
I'm clearly so averse to learning anything about Bear Stearns.
- [20:14]
B
Bear Stearns is one of the firms where it's collapsed because of the mortgage backed securities fraud was one of the first major events that then like, like created the great financial crisis and like the unwinding of all of that fraud. And so it's just, it's, it's like Lehman Brothers. Like when you hear one of these names, you can basically equate those firms to like large scale fraud.
- [20:38]
A
It makes sense that he would like basically thrive there because probably everyone was insider trading. Totally.
- [20:43]
B
And frankly, like the parallels of the CEOs of these companies that were willfully and knowingly engaging in mortgage fraud to make more money. Not only did they not get jail time, they were given millions of dollars as they on their way out.
- [20:57]
A
Right. So, so fucked Epstein. Epstein, very quickly and efficiently built, pulls together this career. And again, I think the, the driving factor here is his ability to convince people to do things for him. That is very clearly a skill that he has. So he eventually becomes kind of like a consultant and becomes a treasured client at Bear Stearns. So I want you to also read this from the New York Times. And it's a story about Epstein's former manager, Clark Schubach, and the kind of engagement that he had with Epstein.
- [21:27]
B
In 1986, Schubach hired a petite. Why is that necessary? Like petite with perky breasts, 23 year old. A petite 23 year old named Patricia Schmidt to be his assistant. She told us that her main job was to be eye candy, but her other duties included answering the phones that put her in regular contact with Epstein. One evening, Schubach, who is a senior managing director, asked her to deliver a sheaf of papers to Epstein at his apartment in the Solo Tower, a gleaming black glass building on the up. Dude, he like lives in like a Batman villain lair, a gleaming black glass building on the Upper east side. Epstein welcomed her in, made her tea, and invited her to come back anytime to use the building's rooftop pool. Schmidt suspected that she was dispatched to Epstein because she was an attractive young woman. Quote, Clark knew exactly what he was doing. Sending me to Jeff's apartment. She told us I was his leverage to Jeff. A week or so later, Schmidt took Epstein up on the offer. A doorman let her in, and she went straight to the pool. After she swam for a bit, Epstein arrived at the pool to say hi. He suggested that she check out the sauna. When he followed her in, Schmidt was surprised, but not dismayed. He asked if he could give her a massage. Schmidt said yes. It was the beginning of a sexual relationship, which Schmidt chronicled in her diary and until now had remained secret. Epstein saw that Schmidt had potential to further his own ends. He routinely asked her to go to the Bear Stearns library and research his prospective clients. Classic. You're outsourcing all your intellectual labor to a woman and then taking credit for it, Right?
- [22:56]
A
Right.
- [22:57]
B
He had her give his clients and acquaintances tours of Bear Stearns or escort them to dinner. Schmidt understood what was going on. Quote, it was always about getting him in a position of leverage. She said, I was his plaything. It was like, you are someone that's going to help me get where I want to go. Schmidt wasn't the only young assistant Schubach delivered to Epstein. In a body book compiled to celebrate his 50th birthday in 2003, another woman who worked at Bear Stearns wrote about how Schubach took her to Epstein's apartment and then left, at which point Epstein blurted out, you are a virgin. Right? The letter goes on to describe Epstein on a different occasion, tickling and kissing her. And the entry includes a photo of her in a thong.
- [23:40]
A
Thoughts?
- [23:41]
B
Yeah, he just sounds like a fucking dirtbag. These are women in their twenties who are assistants in New York City. So they're probably, like, not exactly raking it in. And this is some, like, powerful rich guy. This is not evidence of pedophilia, obviously, but it is evidence of being, like, a sleazy dirtbag.
- [23:59]
A
I want to make sure that we are, throughout this conversation, widening and narrowing the lens here. Obviously, what Epstein has done in terms of the scale and the depravity of it is beyond even our conception of the average level of misogyny. But it's also true that throughout his life, he was constantly given environmental reinforcements from all kinds of people, professionally and personally, that women can and should be used as objects.
- [24:26]
B
For sure.
- [24:27]
A
They're literally sexual play toys. That's a Bear Stearns thing. Like, you have these people happily hiring a man who didn't go to college thinking he's a genius. And the women are explicitly hired to be eye candy. Like that is not something that Epstein did. That was the entire company.
- [24:42]
B
That's like an 80s and 90s finance culture. I think it would be disingenuous to claim that things have not improved since the way that 80s finance in New York would have treated women. I do think that they have improved. However, I think that a lot of these same themes are implicitly still at play here. They just might show up in different ways. I think it's noteworthy that we're using the word leverage to discuss a human being, like the commodification or like turning a person into an asset that you can wield for personal gain. But it's not just sexual. They're also using her intellectually. She's doing research for him.
- [25:17]
A
And this is agreed upon by numerous men.
- [25:19]
B
Yeah.
- [25:20]
A
This is not something that is happening in a silo. This is something that is clearly a company. I don't want to say policy, but there is an atmosphere here that, once again, it really contextualizes this idea of Epstein at the very early phases of his career. And once again, you see from the jump, it is not unknown. His massage interest, his obsession with women, all of these things are very visible to the people who work with him very early. They know if they want to make him happy, they're going to send a woman to his apartment. So. So he does some work as a consultant, and then he develops J. Epstein and Company, which is, like, the business he'll be known for. There is very little known about how this business worked. It was estimated that he had 15 clients or less, and he was famous for, quote, only working with billionaires. We don't know if that's true. We still know close to nothing about who these clients were and how he made money with them. His biggest and only publicly known client is Les Wexner, who is the chairman and CEO of L Brands and Victoria's Secret. So. So Epstein was not just Wexner's financial manager. He was his power of attorney, which essentially meant he could do anything. He could buy and sell real estate on his behalf. He could transfer funds without telling him. This is extremely weird.
- [26:32]
B
They were fucking.
- [26:33]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want to throw your theory
- [26:34]
B
in here, this is my conspiracy theory. They were fucking.
- [26:38]
A
Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's more of an Occam's Razor conclusion than the fact that they were simply colleagues.
- [26:42]
B
Although I would give you power of attorney. And we're not fucking yet.
- [26:47]
A
Emphasis on yet leverage, baby. But, like, regardless of what their relationship was, I think we can all agree that this is not financier. Shit like this is like sociopathy shit to take over a person's entire life. At one point, Epstein is found representing himself as a talent scout for Victoria's Secret so that he can, like, manipulate women. Another example of their bizarre relationship. Les Wexner essentially gives Epstein his massive townhouse on the Upper east side. This is the house that will later be raided. But Epstein essentially was given this for free and then goes on to renovate it. And it is his own. You know, the property ownership transfers over to him. I'm going to have you read something that comes out from one of the first profiles on Epstein. It's from vanity fair in 2002. And even back then, we were trying to figure out how this guy makes his money.
- [27:37]
B
Unlike such fund managers as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, whose client lists and stock maneuverings act as their calling cards, Epstein keeps all his deals and clients secret, bar one client, billionaire Leslie Wexner, the respected chairman of Limited Brands. Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981, he has managed money only for billionaires who depend on him for discretion. Quote, I was the only person crazy enough or arrogant enough or misplaced enough to make my limit a billion dollars or more, he tells people freely. That's also very like con man behavior, right?
- [28:15]
A
He's the one who's telling you this.
- [28:16]
B
According to him, the flat fees he receives from his clients, combined with his skills at playing the currency markets, quote, with very large sums of money and, quote, have afforded him the lifestyle he enjoys today. Why do billionaires choose him as their trustee? Because the problems of the mega rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine. Oh, that's fascinating. And his unique philosophy is central to understanding those problems. Quote, very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars go off. King the is not to have it do harm more than anything else. You don't want to lose your money. Okay, There is like a nugget of truth here, which is that there is a class of people in this country, the 0.1%, who are not themselves billionaires through equity ownership of companies or like their founders. Like. I think often when we think about billionaires, we think about people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk who either found it or now own how have controlling stakes in companies that are worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. But there's another class of people, the money managers who do make a percentage cut of anything that they are managing for these people. And because of loopholes in the tax code like the carried interest exemption. They're only taxed on basically the money that they're skimming off the top of these returns at the top capital gains tax rate of 20%. So if, you know, you're a listener of this show and you are a super high ear, maybe you are like a white shoe law firm attorney.
- [29:49]
A
I'm sure that the bulk of our audience is white shoe law firm attorneys.
- [29:53]
B
There are three. The over, under is three. But. But what I'm trying to get at here is like, you might make a lot of money as, like a lawyer or a doctor, and we think about those people as being like, you know, rich, and they are to some degree, but you are paying a higher tax rate than somebody like Epstein would have been receiving a 1% fee on multiple clients, billion dollar portfolios where he could be making hundreds of millions of dollars a year and paying a lower tax rate on it than somebody that makes $70,000 a year. And so it's kind of funny to me that, like, in this Vanity Fair piece where this is a nothing burger explanation, right? This is like, yeah, well, people with a lot of money, they don't want to lose it. And so, you know, I understand their problems.
- [30:37]
A
And.
- [30:38]
B
And I'm really good at currency trading. And like, you know, because these amounts are so big, I'm. It's like, this is real. Like, this is real, and this is how people in this industry make a lot of money. It's just really notable to me not that that's the mechanism by which he is becoming rich, but that he has put himself in that position, in that vaunted position to be the type of money manager where you literally are making millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year, literally just taking a percentage fee of money that you're like, clicking a few buttons on every. Capitalism is fake, A financialized economy is fake, and the people that have the most money have the fakest jobs.
- [31:17]
A
Right. This is something that I just really want to hammer home. He didn't say anything insightful in that piece. The key is to not lose money is not an insightful thing to say. That's not interesting. That does not indicate to me that you have even a remotely interesting perspective, let alone that you're some financial genius. I think that your point is, again, the underscoring of this, which is we tend to lend rich men unbelievable credibility in the idea of their genius, rather than just being like, okay, cool. Was he charismatic? Sure. Was he also a white guy who was born in the 50s. Yes. And it is so fundamental to the construction of who Jeffrey Epstein was and what he got away with that we all must accept at face value that he was a genius. If you don't accept that, then a number of conclusions start to reorient themselves. And that's kind of the point of this conversation. I also want to pause for a moment and think about Les Wexner and Victoria's Secret. Again, we're going to widen the aperture for a moment. Has any brand done more to sexualize young women than Victoria's Secret? I remember buying my first push up bra when I was, like, 12 at Victoria's Secret.
- [32:31]
B
Oh, my God. I was just gonna whip that story out.
- [32:34]
A
And the real gag here, I was thinking about this as I was writing about this as a young woman. When you go to Victoria's Secret, you think you're buying into something that represents womanhood. You're like, I'm gonna come here when I'm 30. But then when you're an actual 30 year old, you're like, oh, my God. All this stuff is marketed to teenagers. Like, this is literally a store that is designed to sexualize preteens.
- [32:52]
B
Yes. It's like the sugar cereal equivalent of undergarments.
- [32:58]
A
Right.
- [32:59]
B
Froot Loops are not made for adults. Those are made for kids.
- [33:02]
A
Right.
- [33:03]
B
Do y' all remember the. The little, like, perfumes that they would sell? It was like, very candy scented, sexy names. It was so overt.
- [33:12]
A
It's Bath and Body Works adjacent. It's literally next to the Bath and Body Works.
- [33:16]
B
Yeah. And the pink line. How much of the revenue came from that pink line, which was, like, supposed to be for preteens and teens.
- [33:24]
A
Right.
- [33:24]
B
Ugh, it's sickening.
- [33:25]
A
They literally have bras designed for young women who don't yet have breasts but want to wear a bra. I want us to think about what that signifies. I was like a 28 negative A, and I was like, here's my mother's credit card. Thank you very much.
- [33:38]
B
And they also had vanity sizing. Because I remember going in there and like, everybody's like.
- [33:44]
A
They're like, you're a double D. Yeah, let's go.
- [33:47]
B
My tits are huge. I'm 13 years old and I'm ready to wear my D cup push up bra to math class.
- [33:56]
A
This is where anecdotes turn teary, Katie. Because I was thinking about how someone in our subscriber chat said something like maybe a month ago or something when people were talking about Epstein, and she said the most that she was ever sexualized was when she was underage and how once she actually became an adult, the sexualization kind of ended. And I was sitting with that and I was like, wow, that was actually true for me too. The most that adult men ever overtly sexualized me was when I was underage. It was when I was 15 or 16.
- [34:27]
B
That's crazy.
- [34:28]
A
And that is really notable to think about that Epstein was partnering with the guy who basically commodified sexualization of little girls in a way that is kind of hard to compare to any other company. So, yeah, it's not at all clear to me that Jeffrey Epstein was manipulating the market or trading like crazy. There are a lot of smart guys in finance. There are over 33,000 hedge funds in the US. Every single person who runs a hedge fund has had to convince at least a small number of people that they're a genius. That's how it goes. You have to be convinced that these people can like outperform the market in order for you to give them money. It's not clear to me that Epstein was better than any of these men and understanding the market, it's clear that he was willing to lie, cheat and scramble to take money from other people. And it's clear that once someone becomes rich in America, that signifies to us a level of value and intellectual worth that is very hard to claw away, even if they don't actually earn it.
- [35:26]
B
That does feel like an extremely important part of this. That A, again, I'm going to double down on the tax code loopholes of it all and the nature of compounding. Once you become rich, it is very easy to stay rich. You actually have to work pretty hard to fuck that up because your money starts making so much money for you. That's just the nature of capital markets and financialized economies. But B, to your point, the very nature of wealth, consciously or subconsciously does lead people to assume that you must have done something impressive to get it. It's so intertwined with like the puritan work ethic. And again, the way that that meritocracy and work ethic is weaponized against regular working and middle class people to believe that if they work hard enough or are smart enough or can, you know, what's the survivor slogan? Outlive, outwit, outplay or whatever. If you can do that, then you too will become rich. I mean, I think I saw something the other day that said something like 53% of Americans say they look up to billionaires. And again, I cannot emphasize enough one of the Smoothest paths, paths to becoming ultra rich in the United States is going into finance and banking where you are not adding any value to the economy. You are not inventing anything. You are not starting a company, you are not innovating. You are literally skimming off the top of somebody else's fortune. Or you are skimming in a, you know, more egregious way. You're skimming off the top of pension funds and you're getting a percentage of like thousands of people's retirement savings. The people who are actually doing the work in the economy.
- [37:01]
A
You're fucking over the firefighter.
- [37:04]
B
I'm so happy that this is a thread that you're pulling on and highlighting that, like the assumption that somebody has money, has money because they are smart or savvy or are in some way intellectual, and that you can then apply that expertise or intellectualism, like, across the board, broadly. We lend so much credibility to rich people in subjects that they know nothing about.
- [37:26]
A
And I would layer on top of that as we enter the next phase of this conversation, the credibility we are willing to lend to men in their virtue and the willingness we have in the inverse to scorn women and how easily both of those instincts come. So now we're in the early 2000s. Okay. Jeffrey Epstein is well established as this mystery man. And the first two profiles come out about him. One is by New York magazine and one is by Vanity Fair. So we're going to talk about both of those very briefly. So I'm going to ask you to read the intro to this New York magazine article in 2002 and just read basically the first section until we get to the line break.
- [38:08]
B
Okay? October 28, 2002. Title is Jeffrey Epstein, international money man of mystery. Subtitle. Terrific guy. Donald Trump booms from a speakerphone. He's a lot of fun to be with. Oh my God. Wow. Did they like re release this because of everything or did you actually just find this in the archives? Because this is insane.
- [38:32]
A
What I did when I was researching Epstein is I did the Google time constraints and I went from 1990 all the way through to 2020 to basically track what people were learning as time went on. So this was like 2000 to 2004 and these were the first two profiles that came out.
- [38:47]
B
Wow. Bravo. Yeah.
- [38:49]
A
Getting your money's worth over here.
- [38:51]
B
Okay. Quote, this is the beginning of the article. Okay. He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies, to say nothing of relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize winning scientists across the Country. What the fuck?
- [39:07]
A
Quick cutaway to Peter Attia being like pussy is in a car. They're geniuses.
- [39:15]
B
And for financial markets around the world, ever since The Post's page 6 ran an item about the President's late September visit to Africa with Kevin Spacey, that's Bill Clinton. Oh, good call. With Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker on his new benefactors customized 727, the question of the day has been who in the world is Jeffrey Epstein? It's a life full of question marks. Epstein is said to run $15 billion for wealthy clients. Yet aside from Limited founder Leslie Wexner, his client list is a closely held secret. A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists, yet possesses no bachelor's degree. For more than 10 years, he's been linked to Manhattan London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert Maxwell. Yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes as he scours the world for investment opportunities. Yeah, I'm sure that's what he's looking for. He owns what he's said to be Manhattan's largest private house, yet runs his business from a 100 acre private island in St. Thomas. Is that little St. James? James?
- [40:26]
A
Yep.
- [40:27]
B
Okay. Power on Wall street has generally accrued to those who have made their open bids for it. Soros, Wasserstein, Kravis, Whale Wheel. I don't know some of those last names. The Sturmund Drong of their successes and failures has been played out in public. Epstein breaks the mold. Most everyone on the street has heard of him, but nobody seems to know what the hell he's up to. Which is just the way he likes likes it. Quote. My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money management firm, though you won't get a straight answer from him. Says one well known investor. He once told me he had 300 people working for him and I've also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It's like looking at the wizard of Oz. There may be less there than meets the eye. End quote. Says another prominent Wall Streeter. Quote, he is this mysterious Gatsby esque figure. He likes people to think that he is very rich and he cultivates this air of aloofness. The whole thing is weird. End quote.
- [41:30]
A
Any thoughts?
- [41:30]
B
That's really interesting. Nothing of substance. Just that when I went to St. Thomas a few years ago, we went on a boat ride and saw Little St. James. And it has A dark aura. I will say that from a distance, we actually also saw Jeff Bates. It was Bezos. His yacht was also out when we were on this little boat ride. And, yeah, you just kind of get a sense for, like, oh, that's how the other half lives. That yacht is bigger than my hotel.
- [41:58]
A
Yeah. So this is 2002. Right. And already there are a number of details that are not from the record. Right. Like, he was fired from both jobs he had before striking out in his own. Okay. He was fired from Dalton. He was fired from Bear Stearns. Already we have this, like, again, mythologizing. That is starting to happen. You have a high school math teacher without a college degree. He runs investments all over the world. Again, this is a guy who started his wealth building by telling a guy that he had a deal that didn't exist and just stealing half a million from him. We don't know what he's doing. We don't know how he's doing it. We don't care. We're willing to believe what is taking place. And again, this would never happen for a woman. I just want to note, like, how. How unbelievably gendered this perspective is. At one point in this profile, too, Donald Trump interviewed, and he says, and I quote, he's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life. So here is the other profile we get in 2002. It's by Vanity Fair. The title is the Talented Mr. Epstein. So we get references to the wizard of oz, the talented Mr. Ripley, Gatsby. Think about the comparisons they're making here.
- [43:09]
B
Well, and also, wasn't Gatsby, like, famously a con man?
- [43:12]
A
Yes, yes. But no one reads literature, so people just reference Gatsby.
- [43:17]
B
These are all, A, either just like fictional characters. They're not real, or B, they're fictional characters who double as fraudsters, effectively. Okay, all right. This is the Talented. And so was talented Mr. Ripley also fraud.
- [43:31]
A
Right.
- [43:32]
B
Which is kind of funny because it's like, okay, so we are acknowledging kind of a core truth here. It's clear that in 2002, people were like, this guy is not what he. He seems.
- [43:41]
A
Right.
- [43:41]
B
Also funny to be like, we think he's got a money management firm.
- [43:45]
A
It's like, right, right.
- [43:47]
B
Okay. Epstein is charming, but he doesn't let the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. Quote, let's play chess, he said to me after refusing to give an interview for this article. Quote, you be white, you get the first move. It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantages of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely, or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York's moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole quote. He's very enigmatic, says Rosa Moncton, the former CEO of Tiffany Co. In the UK and a close friend since the early 1980s. Quote, you think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there's something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand. He's a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get. God, people are working so hard to make him sound so hard, so special. And it's. It's like when your friend's dating like a shitty guy and you're like, dude, he's just some guy. Like, he is. He is just some guy. Even acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy. Yes, he lives like a modern maharaja, as Leah Kleiman, one of his art dealers, put it. Yet he is fastidiously, almost obsessively private. He lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym. He rarely attends society gatherings or weddings or funerals. He considers eating in restaurants, like, quote, eating on the subway. In other words, something he'd never do. There are many women in his life, mostly young, but there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit. He describes his most public companion of the last decade. Ghislaine Maxwell, 41, the daughter of the late disgraced media baron Robert Maxwell, is simply, quote, his best friend. He says she is not on his payroll, but she seems to organize much of his life. Recently she was making telephone inquiries to find a California based yoga instructor for him. Okay, red flag.
- [45:55]
A
She's so down bad.
- [45:57]
B
Epstein is still close to his two other long term girlfriends. Paula Hale Fisher, a former associate of his at the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and now an opera producer, and Eva Anderson Dubin, a doctor and one time model. He tells people that when a relationship is over, the girlfriend, quote, moves up, not down, to friendship status. Oh, that's a chilling line.
- [46:23]
A
Yes. Yeah, I understand that. I'm kind of like beating us over the head with how people view him as this mysterious figure. But I just, I cannot overstate how many times I was struck by the level of scrutiny we give to any women who make any money. Like, I think about the uproar over Kylie Jenner and whether or not she was a self made zillion. Show us your books. Show us where you made your money. This guy is a liar. And they're basically all skirting around that. Katie, you hit the nail on the head. Even the references that they are using to describe this man refer to con men and liars and fictitious characters. And we are so willing to find men attractive as liars and as con men that it's all like, all good. Again, these were flattering profiles.
- [47:12]
B
Oh. I'm also just struck by how often already in these articles from late 90s, early 2000s that there are passing references to a lot of young women around.
- [47:25]
A
Yes.
- [47:26]
B
And it's like there is a strange degree of comfort with that fact, but it's never really probed, like, what do we mean by young women? Are we talking like 25 or are we talking like 15?
- [47:39]
A
He's in his 50s by this point.
- [47:41]
B
For the record, it feels like something that Maybe hindsight is 20 20, but that sort of detail in a profile of a very rich man today, I feel like would elicit it. Like a follow up. You would be like, well, what's going on there? Like, if there is so much mystery surrounding this figure. And he also seems to be constantly surrounded by hordes of very young women. Like, I don't know, it's. It's funny to me that even back then that was being.
- [48:08]
A
Yeah.
- [48:08]
B
Noticed and reported on. It's like, this was not some big secret. It doesn't seem like it was not
- [48:13]
A
a secret at all. So again, this Guy's in his 50s by now. He has created an entire career being known for being shady, essentially. So now we're going to spend a lot of time in Palm beach in the mid 2000s, and we are going to focus exclusively on the narrative perspective of the investigators who start to figure out what the fuck is going on at Jeffrey Epstein's Palm beach estate.
- [48:34]
B
Do you know, like, what initially prompted investigations?
- [48:38]
A
Yes.
- [48:38]
B
Okay, I want to get into, like, what allowed us here to transcend the like, ooh, he's. He's so mysterious and rich. To like, oh, he's a criminal.
- [48:46]
A
Yes. So this episode, it is an anomaly in a lot of ways. Number one, I'm not focusing on someone's billionaire status. And number two, I'm gonna defend cops. So Weird episode today. So this information is pieced together largely by the genuinely excellent reporting of the Palm Beach Post during those years. Like I said, I went through the archive. So I was trying to get information as it was being released and not as it has since been summarized. Great reminder of what you lose when local papers die. Because these people were reporting on this early investigation into Epstein, they have since sued for the release of multiple transcripts from private grand jury investigations. So I just want to highlight that, like, I relied almost entirely on local papers in Tampa, in Palm beach, to understand what happened. So in March 2005, so three years after these profiles come out about Epstein, a mother calls the Palm beach police saying another parent had overheard a conversation between their 14 year old daughter about going to Epstein's compound. Apparently what happened is the daughter was talking to her friends about what had happened to her there, and someone called her a derogatory word. So maybe like a slut or a whore. The daughter gets upset. This woman is worried that her daughter was molested. So detectives interview the girl. And she says a friend invited her to the house to give a massage and that she was told to say she was 18 years old. the house, this young woman goes on to do what a lot of these women have since reported that they were asked to do, which is give Epstein a massage in their undergarments. And he will often masturbate. Sometimes he ends up having sex with them. All kinds of assault take place. So this girl, this first victim, is able to identify Epstein in a photo, and that is why the investigation begins. The Palm beach police.
- [50:30]
B
Interesting.
- [50:31]
A
Go through his trash. They set up video surveillance. They monitor his airport hangar. Numerous kids are observed going into the house with braces, wearing their school backpacks. Okay? They find the girl who had brought this young woman to the mansion. She was 18 years old, a local college student, and she admits to taking at least six young women to the house, all younger than 16 years old. She was paid for each visit. The Police then interview five alleged victims and 17 witnesses. At least one of those victims says that she had sexual intercourse with Epstein. I think that you and I understand this as rape, but I also want to note that there is a lot of moving back and forth in the records, in the media coverage about whether or not this is conceived of as sexual intercourse. So I'm just repeating what they said.
- [51:21]
B
Okay?
- [51:21]
A
Numerous girls say that they were told to have sex with another woman in front of him.
- [51:25]
B
Oh, my God.
- [51:26]
A
This is illegal by Florida state law. Okay. Whether the girls were 14 or 17. Doesn't matter. In October of 2005. So several months into this investigation, police searched the mansion. They find naked pictures of young women. They find a high school transcript on Epstein's desk. They find hidden cameras in the garage. There are a bunch of computers that they expected to find there that are missing. So they're pretty certain that Epstein knew they were coming. Some of Epstein's employees say that he had young women coming two or three times a day. Others say that there were dozens coming in and out on a given day.
- [52:00]
B
Oh, my God.
- [52:01]
A
We find out that Epstein was giving them hundreds of dollars, again, cash. He sent a dozen roses to a teenager. Her high school performance. We now know that Galaine Maxwell was present during this time period. She had already begun to do the work that she has since been convicted for, which is essentially like operating as a pimp and an accomplice. But she was not included in this investigation. Like, in these early reporting things. She is not mentioned. That comes away later. So this is coming together to be like, a slam dunk of an investigation, right?
- [52:30]
B
Totally.
- [52:31]
A
They have eyewitnesses. They have video surveillance on of kids with braces entering this compound. They have a high school transcript on his desk. They've got photos of young girls. Right. Like, if we do the thing that I talk about of, like, an alien drops down to earth and is like, what does it take for you to know that a guy is abusing young women? It's like, ah, I think we're good. So what's important here is that the police could not charge Epstein. They needed to present their evidence and their desired charges to the Palm beach prosecutor at the time. Time, this guy named Barry Krisher. The Palm beach police department is extremely aware of trying to keep their investigation tight. Right. Like, epine is already an incredibly successful man. They were typing up reports and putting them into a hard drive, and then that hard drive would go into a safe. Like, that gives you an idea of how worried the police were that their investigation was going to get interfered with.
- [53:22]
B
Wow.
- [53:22]
A
But again, at some point, it sounds like Epstein caught wind of what was happening. So, of course, what happens next? Private investigators start reaching out to certain victims. Whatever they say to them causes the girls to refuse to talk to the police or to say nothing happened. The same goes for Epstein's former employees. Police will subpoena them, trying to get more victims, more witnesses. They will say, oh, I have nothing to say. The police will ask them, have you met with any private eyes? And they will say, yes. Detectives start hearing from parents of the victims who are saying that people are tailing them when they drive around town. They're being surveilled at home. They are sometimes being called and threatened. The police find out that these investigators all work for the same Miami lawyer who works for Epstein. And then Alan Dershowitz, famed pedophilic asshole Harvard law professor, flies down to West Palm beach to meet with Krisher as well. Remember, Krisher is supposed to be the prosecutor. Do you know anything about Allen?
- [54:15]
B
I really don't.
- [54:16]
A
Okay.
- [54:16]
B
I really don't.
- [54:17]
A
He's a creep. He'll come in and out of this story.
- [54:19]
B
I mean, I know that much, but I don't know the details.
- [54:23]
A
The tldr he taught at Harvard law school for decades. He is riddled with implications related to Epstein. He has been accused of, again, the phrase would be having sex, I would say raping these young girls. With Epstein, he has defended Epstein. So he meets with these prosecutors and he shows them all these screenshots of the girls MySpace pages, and he's like, look at these chicks. They're using drugs, they're using alcohol. They're not credible. Some of these women have petty criminal records of shoplifting. At least one of them, she admits to saying she was 18 and she's a liar. Right? Like, she's not actually 18. That's not our problem. Oh, my God. So this is dragging on and on, right? And the police are becoming incredibly frustrated with this prosecutor. They want to get approved for warrants for arrest on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. At one point, the Palm beach police chief hears rumor of a plea deal that wouldn't allow for jail time or felony conviction. The police chief gets so concerned about this that he writes a letter to the attorney, Kisher saying, maybe you should disqualify yourself from this if you're not going to act on it.
- [55:28]
B
Well, wow.
- [55:28]
A
Again, I want us to think about what it means for a police department to care so much about sexual assault. Like, I think we all know this is not common. That's rare. Unbelievable, the extent to which they are providing evidence that they are doggedly chasing this down. They are trying to make sure that they get the right charges.
- [55:45]
B
What do you make of that? Just because it was so egregious like that. It was. It was that unsettling that they were like, this is a very serious criminal.
- [55:54]
A
What I make of it is that there are a lot of people in the legal system who frequently work very hard, but there are so many stop gaps at every step of the way. That unless you have everyone who wants to basically convict and that almost never happens. It just doesn't matter. Like you have these police again, you have an entire police department that's working on this. So the police want to get approved for these four accounts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. They want to charge one of his assistants with her role in arranging these visits. So kind of a Ghisain Maxwell thing. If convicted of the charges that they wanted to slap on him, he would have faced upwards of 75 years in prison. Okay.
- [56:31]
B
Oh my gosh.
- [56:32]
A
So what does Kritcher do? He ignores this and he punts to a grand jury. Do you know what a grand jury is?
- [56:36]
B
Yeah. Isn't that where there's like no trial, you just like vote to indict or whatever?
- [56:41]
A
Yeah. A grand jury is like basically a trial before a trial. It's like you go to this kind of secretive thing. There's a jury, it's almost ever used for a murder trial. And the person purpose is to determine if there is probable cause to charge anyone. It's basically the prosecutor saying I don't want to bring any charges forward. I'm going to punt it to this grand jury where all of the files are basically going to be sealed for eternity. So two months later the grand jury hands down a totally different indictment. One count of solicitation of prostitution. Oh, and one count of procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution. It looks like that first charge was the only one people knew about for a long time time because it was a charge of prostitution. And the whole point of what Epstein's lawyers were doing was that they were like young girls. What are you talking about? This is prostitution and this is just an acc. We're not, we're not admitting any guilt here but like pretty big distinction between unlawful sexual activity with a minor.
- [57:35]
B
Yeah. That's interesting. I kind of think of like pedophilia and incest as the two crimes that are still pretty taboo. But I think think like raping a woman, a full grown woman or soliciting a prostitute. It's like that just does not elicit the same level of judgment or distancing one would think. Although it does sound like a lot of people in his inner circle did know about the other charge.
- [58:01]
A
I think we'll never know. What I will say is by calling it a prostitute, I mean no one cares.
- [58:07]
B
And I mean the pedophilia, the outrage about pedophilia is more about the fact that they were children.
- [58:13]
A
Right.
- [58:14]
B
Than about the fact that they were female.
- [58:16]
A
Right.
- [58:16]
B
Once you become a woman, it's like, who fucking cares about you?
- [58:19]
A
Exactly. So can you read this statement by Epstein's lawyer at the time on the young girls who accused him of assault?
- [58:24]
B
Quote, they are incapable of being believed. They had criminal records. They had accusations of theft made against them by their employers. There was evidence of drug use by some of them.
- [58:36]
A
So again, Jeffrey Epstein has made a career out of lying. Yeah, but like these 14 year old girls who have nothing to gain are the liars. So grand jury proceedings are almost always locked and sealed. The Palm Beach Post basically sued to release these records for almost a decade. Wow. So in 2024, the Tampa Bay Times reported on the unsealing of these grand jury records. So we're going to read a little snippet of this that gives us some insight into what happened at this grand jury proceeding.
- [59:06]
B
Okay. A Palm beach county prosecutor painted two girls molested by Jeffrey Epstein as prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves and liars in front of a grand jury impaneled in 2006 to review the state's criminal case against sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Both Krisher and the lead prosecutor in the case, Lana Bello Halvak, told Palm beach police that they didn't intend to prosecute Epstein because they believed the girls were prostitutes. Insane. But Palm beach police chief Michael Writer and the lead detective, Joe Ricare, both protested the decision, noting that the victims were as young as 14 and that Epstein, who was in his 50s, had used fraud and coercion to lure the girls to his home on the pretense that they would be paid to give him massages. What is clear is that below, Hellvak painted an unsympathetic portrait of the girls, both of whom came from broken families. One of the girls and her sister had been passed back and forth between parents and were taken to a school for troubled juveniles. The girl ran away several times before meeting a group of older kids, one of whom brought her to Epstein's mansion. She described for the jury how she was ushered into a large bedroom and instructed to strip down her underwear. Alone in the room with Epstein and confused about what was happening, she reluctantly complied. After he molested her, he gave her $200. Quote, you're aware that you committed a crime below helvec and asked the girl, who was 14 at the time she met Epstein. Holy quote. Now I am. I didn't know it was a crime when I was doing it, said the girl. Like, I. I don't know. I guess it was prostitution or Something like that.
- [60:41]
A
Keep going. Oh, my God, it gets worse.
- [60:44]
B
Below. Helvac also allowed the grand jurors to question the victims. And some of them voiced their disapproval at what they had done. Quote. Did you have any idea that deep inside of you that what you were doing was wrong? Asked one juror. Yeah, I did, the girl replied. Oh, do you? The juror said, pointing out that the girl should have known that it would harm her reputation. Asked another juror, did it ever occur to you that he could have hacked you up? Yes, she stammered. I thought about it a lot, said the juror. You should give it a little further thought. Oh, my fucking.
- [61:18]
A
Yeah, dude.
- [61:20]
B
2000. That was 20 years ago.
- [61:22]
A
Yep. This is the grand jury proceedings for the 50 year old man who was accused of molesting, sexually assaulting.
- [61:31]
B
This is, like, unbelievably egregious.
- [61:33]
A
Yes. Keep going.
- [61:35]
B
Okay. David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor, was astonished at the way the case was presented to the jury. Quote, how is that not statutory rape? He said of Epstein's crime. I can see how people think that a wealthy, powerful man got away with abusing all these girls.
- [61:50]
A
Girls, right. Any thoughts? Oh,
- [61:55]
B
it's just appalling.
- [61:56]
A
I want to go back to the point that you made very fairly about how we are no longer in the period of time with the 80s and 90s. But I think people also forget that we are nowhere near the period of utopia that people claim us to be located in. I mean, we've had so much conversation of the last few years over, like, are we done with feminism? You know, have we gotten everything we wanted? I think you and I spend a lot of time deconstructing that belief. I understand that we're no longer where we were in 2005. I also want to point out we would never know that these young women were spoken to in this way if again, local newspapers hadn't sued for years and years and years to unseal these conversations. There's a reason why the prosecutor pushed this to a grand jury. It's so that you never find out what happened there. So the Palm Beach Police Department is furious. They're so pissed that they return a 90k donation that Epstein had given them like a year earlier. And so they go to the FBI. They ask the FBI to look into this. Those investigations seem to stall out. At one point in a recent testimony, the police chief at the time recalls Trump calling the summer of 2006, saying, I hear you're looking into Epstein. He's a creep. Trump says he's Seen epstein with teenage girls. The only reason the police chief has since given these testimonies Is because he felt very defensive that people would think that epstein paid off the police department department or that the police department wasn't doing their job. So to summarize, we're only a few years into this kind of investigation. To episteine, you have a man who is famous not for being a savvy finance man, but for being extremely shady, Having an extremely weird financial company that is shrouded in secrecy. You have mountains of evidence that adolescent girls are being abused at an astonishing clip. You have a police department which is eager and willing to prosecute a sexual predator. Predator. How often do we say that a police department was eager and willing to prosecute a sexual predator to help victims of sexual assault. You have proof that epstein is working to blackmail and terrify victims and investigators alike. Nothing happens. Okay? So remember, that grand jury proceeding Was just a process to formalize charges, and so epstein has not gone to trial for those charges. Right. So in August 2007, Epstein and his lawyers enter into negotiations for a plea deal deal. At the same time, the FBI has opened a federal investigation that they call operation leap year. They're looking into epstein's crimes finally, including but not limited to what the term child prostitution. So this is where it gets incredible. Summer of 2007, the u. S. Attorneys, this is the federal level, is preparing a 50 plus page indictment with the intent of presenting the case to a federal grand jury. So they want to do the whole thing over and be like, can we bring charges to this, this guy? They issue subpoenas for his computers. His legal team is simultaneously negotiating with the state on the original charges. So if a plea deal is reached with the state, Then the case is moot on the federal level.
- [64:48]
B
Oh, my God.
- [64:49]
A
If a plea deal is not reached, then epstein can be federally prosecuted.
- [64:53]
B
That seems like a weird loophole.
- [64:55]
A
This plea deal that he eventually reaches has been, like, deeply legally scrutinized. And we'll get into that. So epstein reaches an insanely cushy plea deal. It is often called the deal of the century when people talk about this, in which the victims will not be notified. The details of the plea deal will be sealed so you can't access from the public. The grand jury subpoena will be canceled on the federal level, and he will go to rich person jail for, like, a few months. He does all this and then he's released early. So that's kind of the end of that. Right. Following his, like, three months in rich guy jail, he continues to break the rules. He's supposed to be on probation for a year, confined to Palm Beach. He's traveling all the time. He's caught at one point by a Palm beach police captain walking in an area where he's not supposed to be. Be. The police officer calls Epstein's probation officer, and the officer goes, he's just getting exercise again. It's just like, nothing matters.
- [65:46]
B
He's, like, outside of Catholic old girl high school. And they're like, no, he just likes their track. They have a really good track at that school.
- [65:52]
A
Epstein was doing, like, the original ICE strategy of just, like, loitering around churches and elementary schools. During this time period, women have started filing dozens and dozens of civil lawsuits alleging that they were molested, alleging abuse by him. He's settling them out of court one after another. Like, just settle, settle, settle. Now, in 2008, a Florida lawyer named Brad Edwards enters the picture. Brad is an unproblematic king. He files a lawsuit under the Crime Victims Rights act on behalf of two victims. This case. It will take 10 years to reach a conclusion.
- [66:25]
B
Oh, my God.
- [66:26]
A
A judge will eventually determine that this plea deal did break the law by granting Epstein immunity without telling the victims. You have to tell the victims what's happening. Happening. But I want to pause for a moment and have us watch a deposition between Brad Edwards and Epstein in 2010. So you're gonna listen to Jeffrey. Epstein has, like, a bit of a New York, Long island accent, and then occasionally his lawyer will pop in, and then the guy asking him questions is Brad Edwards.
- [66:49]
B
Okay.
- [66:50]
C
Mr. Epstein, how long have you been sexually attracted to underage minor females? Objection. Harassing. Argumentative. Are you kidding? No. I. I mean, I don't feel like I'm divulging any secrets here. Right. Move to strike. Oh, that's. That's the question. I'd like to answer that question as well. I get all your other questions today. However, I have to follow my attorney's advice. They have told me that I must invoke my 5th, 6th, and 14th amendment right to not answer those questions today or any questions relevant to this lawsuit. What was the name of any of the underage minors that were the subject of the criminal charges to which you pled guilty? I don't know. So tell me about those charges. What were the. What was the. The allegations of those charges? Form solicitation of prostitution. Okay. Not underage prostitution. Prostitution. Were the victims or the prostitutes, as you would say, were they minors? Form. I pled guilty to solicitation of prostitution. Okay, so. So tell me what those cases were about. What happened?
- [68:28]
A
I. I form.
- [68:29]
C
I have no more. I can't tell you any more than that. You don't know what you pled guilty to? I just told you. Objection. Form. That's as an answered. Do you know what you pled guilty to? The fast solicit. Solicitation of prostitution. I understand that's the charge. What were the underlying facts? Sorry, what'd you do? Did you pull up in a car, talk to the person? Did they come over to your house? How did you get them? Those kind of things? Tell the jury what. What were the underlying facts about the charge that you pled guilty to? Form moved to strike. I don't know. You don't know what you pled guilty to? I. I pled guilty of solicitation of prostitution. Of not underage prostitute, but prostitution. And just so the jury understands this, the these three females that were the subject of the guilty pleas in state court were procured by your method of having underage minor females locate other underage minor females and bring them to your house. Is that correct? Objection. Argumentative. Compound harassing. Seems facts not in evidence. You have to strike. I have to repeat the question. Okay.
- [69:40]
A
It's like Donald Trump.
- [69:43]
C
Are all people that were at the time you. You engaged in sexual activity with them were underage and were brought by other underage minor females. That true? Same objections incorporated, as well as the virtual strike. I don't understand. I'm sorry. I don't even understand the question. Isn't it true that you used underage minor females to bring other underage minor females to your house for sex? Ask an answer way earlier on.
- [70:28]
A
Not a problem.
- [70:29]
C
But it is. Ask an answer. As your firm, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Jaffe have been described by the U. S. Attorney as perpetrating one of the largest frauds in south Florida's history by crafting malicious cases of a sexual nature against people like me and others in order to fleece using bogus Shemes, in the U.S. attorney's words, investment schemes. Unfortunately, though, I'd like to answer every one of your questions if I'm able. My attorneys have advised me I must assert my Sixth Amendment, 14th Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights under the U.S. constitution. At the moment, I cannot answer that question.
- [71:08]
A
All right. Any thoughts?
- [71:10]
B
Well, you know, I think that lay people like me have an assumption that the legal system is functional.
- [71:18]
A
He's gonna do anything for you.
- [71:20]
B
That it works. And I think it's so unbelievably frustrating to watch an attorney. And I assume if the attorney was objecting to these questions and the. The objections are being sustained, that, like, a judge was like, okay, yeah, true. The questions were like, what were the facts of the underlying lawsuit? The fact that that is something that can be objected to, it kind of leaves me feeling like, what is the point of the legal system?
- [71:45]
A
That's a very good question for this conversation. I read so many depositions where actually, you and I are going to role play shortly. Another deposition.
- [71:54]
B
Hot.
- [71:55]
A
I read so many depositions, both with Epstein and with his victims. And again, all due respect to the wonderful lawyers who do a lot of work, who are. Maybe some of them are listening to this episode.
- [72:06]
B
The three White Shoe attorneys. Yeah, White Shoe Law firm attorneys in our audience.
- [72:10]
A
I have to imagine that, like, any person who shares the beliefs that you and I hold and who is also a lawyer lawyer probably finds this to be more infuriating than we do.
- [72:18]
B
Yeah.
- [72:19]
A
But yes, again, number one, I want to highlight again, the fact that he was able to plead down to solicitation of a prostitute. And he gets to say, I didn't plea to solicitation of sex with a minor. I pled to solicitation with a prostitute. That is massive. That is one thing when I was thinking about, like, what are some things I would try to fix? There's a lot of cultural problems that I don't think you can wave away with a hand. But, like, you should not be able to plead down to that if these are the charges that you want to take with someone. Because, again, they just mean something entirely different. It's just a totally different accusation. And then what you're kind of stating is also what I felt, which is like, are we getting any closer to the truth here? Like, has this legal system been set up in any manner to actually find the truth about someone committing a crime? It's just kind of mind boggling to witness.
- [73:09]
B
I think that you just put it perfectly. It's like, this isn't about getting to the truth. This is about whose legal team can navig the various loopholes more adeptly. And so it's like, if we're expecting the legal process to help us get to something like the truth, we're probably already kind of behind the eight ball a little bit.
- [73:27]
A
Right. And another point I would raise is like, again, there has been so much fixation on how he avoided scrutiny and he avoided all this spotlight because of his friends and his connections and his wealth. And I'm like, did he or did the legal system just function the way that it often functions. And like, he actually received quite a bit of scrutiny from a lot of police officers and a lot of investigators. But when this is how a deposition works for a sexual assault case, is the problem the money, or is the problem something maybe more foundational taking place here?
- [73:59]
B
For sure. And I think to the extent that money is implicated, I think it's just that if you have an endless amount of money, you can hire the best attorneys and rack up as much as you need to in legal fees and basically just outlast the state's case.
- [74:17]
A
Outwit, outplay, outlast. Yeah.
- [74:19]
B
That, I think, is like, the crux of most people's criticisms of the US Legal system and the US justice system is it's actually, like, super untenable for an average person to achieve justice if they can't afford representation. And representation is often very expensive and reserved for the people who can afford it. It's the same reason that like, like corporations, they'll break labor law and they don't care. Because A, if a corporation you over you, in order to, like, hold them accountable, you have to hire legal representation to make a case against them, which is very expensive, and most people can't afford to do that.
- [74:57]
A
Right.
- [74:57]
B
And B, you're going to go up against a corporation and their legal team and their resources. It's like, even if you can hire a lawyer, you're not going to hire a lawyer that can compete with their legal team. So it's just like, through and through, completely skewed in favor of the rich. And to your point, that is like, a more structural critique than like, oh, Jeffrey Epstein was so unique and specific in his evasion of justice.
- [75:20]
A
Right. So a few small details that we have since found out in the last few years about this time period of these mid 2000s. Again, the former Palm beach police chief has since recalled that prosecutors told him that they wouldn't level charges for any victim 16 years or older unless it was under extraordinary ordinary circumstances. So they just had, like, a predisposition to not leveling those charges. Another thing, one of the child sex crimes prosecutors who was assigned to the case against Epstein had to bow out because Epstein decided to hire her husband's law firm. So there was this, like, really savvy decision that he made there. This is like, a little aside, but I can't not address it. In the mid 2000s, the attorney in Florida who cut the plea deal with Epstein was this guy named Alex Acosta. Do you know this? This guy?
- [76:04]
B
Oh, Alex. Oh, I Do know that name? Why do I know that name?
- [76:08]
A
So he would go on to serve as the US Secretary of Labor during Trump's first term in office. Oh, my God. Yeah. He cut the non prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys. According to a Daily Beast report. He did so because he had, quote, been told to back off and that Epstein was above his pay grade. He said, and I quote, I was told Epstein belonged to intelligent and to leave it alone.
- [76:30]
B
Oh, my God.
- [76:31]
A
So they then hired him to be the US Secretary of Labor. He was interviewed again about this in 2019. So again, after, like the Epstein fallout had really begun to take place. I want you to read what he said about his earlier statements, that Epstein was basically like an intelligence operative.
- [76:48]
B
So there has been reporting to that effect and let me say there's been reporting to a lot of effects in this case. He's already lawyering them. Not just now, but over the years. And again, I would hesitate to take this reporting as far as fact. This was a case that was brought by our office. It was brought based on the facts. And I look at the reporting and others. I can't address it directly because of our guidelines, but I can tell you that a lot of reporting is going down rabbit holes.
- [77:12]
A
What the most non answer, that's the
- [77:15]
B
legal equivalent of my job, is to make sure people don't lose money. And that's my grand strategy.
- [77:19]
A
Right. So anyways, like, again, what are we doing? One of the many rabbit holes I didn't want to go down. Like, I think that there's a lot of interesting shit taking place. Like, Epstein at one, at one point had a passport for a different country with his name on it. He had very weird emails with a number of Israeli officials. There was a lot of weird shit going on. That's like, not the focus of this conversation, but I just find it hilarious that a Trump guy was like, yeah, no, he was, he was an intelligence operative. And then later he was like, there is a lot of things happening in the world. And I have said a number of
- [77:50]
B
things and I've seen those things and I've read those things. And what I'll say about those things is that while I have seen them and read them, it's just like you
- [77:59]
A
could have just said, that's not true.
- [78:01]
B
Thanks. Cleared it right up. Cleared it right up.
- [78:04]
A
So I want to take some time to talk about Virginia Giuffre. She is one of the most famous Epstein victims, slash survivors. I will note that she had a memoir that came out posthumously. I Believe last year it was out with my imprint, Knopf. It's incredible. It's called Nobody's Girl. Highly encourage people read it. And she tragically died by suicide a few months before her memoir came out. So I encourage people to read that book. So Virginia grows up in Florida in the 80s and 90s. She will later say that her family life was very troubled. She was molested by numerous people while she was a child. A family friend, she claims her father molested her. She is abused by a sex trafficker from 13 to 15.
- [78:45]
B
Oh, God.
- [78:46]
A
This is a guy who, I guess ran a fake model agency in Miami that would later get investigated by the FBI. So just generally speaking, it seems that Virginia has a really tough life. She has stints as a runaway. She has stints in foster homes. She, I guess participates at some period of time in, like, the troubled teen industry, going to this camp or school thing. Eventually, when she's 16 years old, her father hooks her up with a job at a place where he's working. He's working as a maintenance man at a golf resort called Mar a Lago.
- [79:16]
B
Oh, fuck.
- [79:16]
A
So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what there is one I wanted for you.
- [79:21]
B
The opening scene of a horror movie where, yeah, true. She hears the rattling in the basement, and she's like, I'll just go check it out by myself. Defenseless.
- [79:28]
A
Well, and this is also why, like, the Trump Epstein connection is so deep. Like, not to give a lot away, but Ghislaine Maxwell was very clearly, like, trolling at places like Mar a Lago. You know, there's a lot of interconnection here. So anyways, Virginia starts working as a spa attendant. And then one day in the year 2000. Okay, so two years before any profiles come out, five years before the investigation begins, Virginia is at Mar a Lago reading a book about massage therapy, when a woman approaches her and asks what she's reading. That woman is Ghislaine Maxwell. So they talk a little bit, and Ghislaine says she has a job for her. It's a traveling masseuse job. At this point, Virginia is only a spa attendant. It would pay very well. Obviously, she wants to become a certified masseuse. So it sounds like. Like an incredible gig. Right. And again, I want us to think about the parallels here with Epstein himself. When you think about Epstein at the beginning of his career, he was a young man who was poor, smart, and desperate. He didn't have a college degree. He lied to get into a place he didn't necessarily have, quote unquote, legitimate access to. And then you have Virginia, a young woman who is poor, smart and desperate to have some stability. And she's being given this chance to access a type of comfort and stability that she has never had before. Again, remember, she's at Mar a Lago. Her father got her the job. She's surrounded by wealth. This is probably like the most legitimate place she's ever been. So I think it's very easy for me to put myself in her shoes and imagine this incredibly well dressed British woman walking up and to think the whole thing is legitimate. So the rest of the story is obviously pretty dark. We're not going to go into all of the details of what happened. We know that Virginia, of course, became one of Epstein's views victims. She is groomed by Galain to provide sexual services to Epstein and to others under the guise of being a professional massage therapist. The majority of her abuse happens from 2000 to 2002.
- [81:18]
B
Right before the profiles.
- [81:20]
A
Yes. So like at the time when we're reading about this man of mystery, he has already begun, and Ghisain Maxwell has already begun the process of essentially pretty explicitly sex trafficking, trafficking these young women. So Virginia has since said that she was trafficked to Prince Andrew. She was paid $15,000 cash for one of her interactions with Prince Andrew. She said she was trafficked to Alan Dershowitz. A number of high profile men, they. Oh, my gosh, they all claim she's lying, but, like, I don't give a shit about them. In 2002, she basically gets out of this situation by meeting a man at a Thai massage institute that Ghislaine and Jeffrey had sent her to. Like, literally in Thailand. She meets him and 10 days later she marries him. I don't know much about her marriage. I can understand why that would feel exciting and why you would want to get out by marrying someone. That's another way to kind of establish stability. She cuts off communication with Epstein and Ghislaine and does not speak to them for five years.
- [82:18]
B
Also wild that they sent her to like a legit massage place.
- [82:21]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:22]
B
Like the massages I thought were always just a cover.
- [82:26]
A
I think he shows me that this
- [82:27]
B
guy wanted real massage massages. I'm like, dude, holy shit.
- [82:33]
A
Yeah. I think he genuinely liked massages.
- [82:35]
B
Like, you care about technique and you're
- [82:38]
A
gonna have to use these people.
- [82:40]
B
That's so fucked.
- [82:41]
A
Again, people can read Virginia's memoir. She was very involved in Ghislaine and Jeffrey's lives. Like, she was Traveling with them. She was completely intertwined with them for years. So I think maybe they sent her to, like, talk to other women, but I'm pretty sure they sent her because she was like, yeah, I want to do a massage thing. And probably because she wanted to do get out. So maybe it was a. A little bit of strategy on her part. So in 2007, Virginia is married, she has children, and she receives three phone calls rapidly. The first is from Galain, the second is from Jeffrey, and the third is from an FBI agent. And they go in that kind of order. Galain and Jeffrey basically are like, have you spoken to anyone? She says, no. And the third call is an FBI agent saying, you have been identified as one of the victims. Whoa. She does not want to talk about, about this. And as a reminder, most victims do not want to go to trial. They do not want to press charges. They want to move on with their lives. So she ignores it. They keep calling. They keep calling. And finally, one day, the Australian police show up at her door. So eventually, through a relative amount of strong arming from these investigators who are trying to get to the bottom of it, she does decide to get involved. She files a lawsuit in 2009, one of the many civil lawsuits against Epps Epstein. And then in 2015, she will file a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell explicitly. So by this point, 2015, Epstein has been required in New York to register as a sex offender. He has been embarking on a PR campaign to donate millions of dollars to all these philanthropic causes. The heat has been kind of quietly building, but still has not broken. Actually, can you remember when you first heard about Epstein? Epstein?
- [84:21]
B
That's a good question. I don't have a memory of, like, the first time that I ever heard about this guy. It. He feels like kind of the way Trump feels now, where he's just like a cultural totem that's just always been there. But no, I don't have a distinct memory of, like, my first interaction with Epstein news.
- [84:39]
A
So I would be willing to bet that for both you and I, Katie, we learned about him relatively recently. 2018 or 2019, I think it has become like, you're saying such a massive story. It's like the water we swim women. But by 2015, when Virginia Giuffre sues Ghislaine Maxwell, basically accusing her of being a recruiter for sex trafficking, this is still like, not known in terms of, like, the public awareness. I think it was almost non existent. So in 2015, she files a lawsuit. This kind of requires Ghislaine Maxwell to enter the chat. I want to have you read something that Virginia said in a video interview with the Miami Herald about her relationship
- [85:19]
B
with with Ghislaine, quote, the training started immediately. It was everything down to how to give a blowjob, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Geoffrey what he wants. A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself. Being a woman, it kind of surprises you that a woman could let stuff like that happen. Not only let it happen, but to groom you into doing it.
- [85:46]
A
So, yeah, I think something that I have noticed when reading about Virginia Giuffre and we're about to read a deposition that she was involved in, is that it's very difficult to be a good victim. And so one example of that I would give would be that in 2011, Virginia gave a paid interview to the Daily Mail. They paid her reportedly $160,000. And I was thinking about how that could so easily be spun into making someone not look credible.
- [86:14]
B
Totally.
- [86:14]
A
But also when you are a woman who is claiming sexual assault, no one will think you're credible. And so it's not surprising that the tabloid is the only one willing to basically run with your story, because the verification requirements for, say, a New York Times are so high for survivors of sexual assault that it's kind of like this game of chicken that you're playing with trying to be a relatively trustworthy appearing person.
- [86:38]
B
Oh, totally. And I mean, mean to your point, because credibility is already so hard to come by and because people already the first thing that they say when women come forward. Like, I think about a Christine Blasey Ford. She's just after fame, she's just after money. As though anyone wants to be known for accusing a powerful man of something. As though we don't immediately tear people like that down in the press and make their lives a living hell.
- [87:07]
A
Right.
- [87:08]
B
If you actually do have the opportunity to be paid a life changing sum of money and to get your story out there, I could see why you would be like, oh, well, people aren't going to believe me anyway. Like, I might as well get something out of this if I'm going to put myself into the public eye in this way.
- [87:25]
A
Right. A few other things happen with Virginia that I think are just very emblematic of what happens to survivors of sexual assault point blank when they speak out. First and foremost, she's literally providing photographic evidence. She provides a photo of her with Prince Andrew and with Glenn Maxwell.
- [87:39]
B
I know, I just googled her name. And that was one of the first. And I was like, oh, I've seen this picture. I do know this woman.
- [87:46]
A
Exactly. And so as soon as she starts providing evidence, she is slammed with defamation lawsuits. So Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, I believe Jeffrey Epstein, One of these lawsuits of hers, not the defamation lawsuit, leads to an out of court settlement. And this is initially rumored to be massive money. So everyone at the time is like, oh, she made $12 million. Like, you make so much money as a victim of sexual assault.
- [88:11]
B
So fucking disgusting.
- [88:13]
A
Later we find out it's closer to 3 million, and it looks like she didn't get it. It's kind of like the Sandy Hook families fighting forever to actually get the money that they're owed.
- [88:23]
B
Yeah, like, the court will rule in your favor, but then, like, you actually have to be paid. And that's a whole nother thing. That's another thing, dude, about the justice system. It's like, not only expensive to win, but even if you win win, there's no guarantee that you're actually going to be made whole.
- [88:37]
A
Exactly. Another example of the justice system, I personally think, failing both Virginia and failing us, the people, is that again, remember Brad Edwards? He has an ongoing civil lawsuit which will eventually be like, a critical lawsuit for bringing down Epstein. A federal judge rules that Virginia cannot enter it. She wanted to enter it basically as a victim. And this judge, a guy named Kenneth Mara Republican, said these, quote, lurid claims that she had made about Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz were, quote, unnecessary to decide the civil case. So I want you to read something he said about the evidence that she tried to submit as an additional Jane Doe for this lawsuit.
- [89:16]
B
Quote, the factual details regarding, with whom and where the Jane does engaged in sexual activities are immaterial and impertinent to this central claim. Wait, who the women were being trafficked to is not relevant to the central claim. Where they were trafficked is not that.
- [89:35]
A
Yeah, lawyers sound off.
- [89:36]
B
I'm not a lawyer, but that seems dumb. Can we get a lawyers weigh in? Is this dumb?
- [89:42]
A
That's my point. I don't doubt that this is all technically correct or that the majority of it is, but, like, again, alien on planet Earth. I'm like, what is the point of this then? How was it not relevant that this young woman is providing not just testimony, but evidence of what was happening with her and Epstein, and it's just like, she's not allowed to be included. It's just like, totally struck in the record. At another point, the judge describes her presence basically as duplicative like, eh, it's redundant. She's not really adding anything. And it's like, well, doesn't the presence of an additional victim add a layer of context and legitimacy and scale. Exactly.
- [90:20]
B
It's akin to saying like, oh, well, we already have two murders on the books for this serial killer. The other three aren't really relevant. It's like, no, they're pretty relevant to the case of whether this person is a serial killer.
- [90:33]
A
Right. So the last thing I want to talk about with Virginia Giuffre is a deposition that she gave in 2016. It wasn't her defamation lawsuit against Maxwell, but she was basically like, subpoenaed to speak on behalf of this. And I'm going to have you and I basically role play. Do you want to be the prosecutor who is asking her questions, or do you want to be Virginia?
- [90:53]
B
I'll be the prosecutor. Also really wild to learn that you pronounce Subpoena. Subpoena.
- [90:58]
A
Wait, how do you say it?
- [90:59]
B
Subpoena.
- [91:00]
A
You know, subpoena, subpoena.
- [91:02]
B
But you better keep this in.
- [91:03]
A
Subpoena. Subpoena, subpoena. Do you know what I also say that Riley is always ragging on me about is. I don't say ancient. I say ancient.
- [91:11]
B
Ancient.
- [91:11]
A
Like you add a K. Ancient. Yeah. So anyways. All right, so we're going to read this deposition. It's a few pages long, so we can kind of go rapid for fire. And I want to guess, Katie, if you. By the end of this, why I wanted to include this subpoena. Okay, Subpoena. So this is a 120 page deposition that Virginia went through.
- [91:31]
B
Did you read the entire. We're on page 72. Did you read this entire thing?
- [91:35]
A
I read the entire thing. So we are at a section where Virginia is being asked about a resume that she used.
- [91:43]
B
This is going to be like, well, technically, you lied to get the job.
- [91:46]
A
Yeah. This is about a resume that is relevant for the time period after she was no longer in contact with Epstein. So that's what's really important. Like, this is for a time period that is arguably not related to the time period that she was involved with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. It was after. So, like the decade or so after she lost touch with them. So, like, again, how related is this to the time that she spent essentially being trafficked? We'll find out. Out.
- [92:12]
B
Okay. Okay. Is the content in defendants exhibit 14 that you believe you sent out to an employer, correct?
- [92:20]
A
Unfortunately, I have to tell you that they are not correct through my Experience. I was in the mindset that I was unemployable. I had been abused for many years, and I was told by a job agency that I need to show that I've consistently worked at various places and given experience. So it's not something I'm proud of, but I have had to plump up my resumes to make it look as though I could be employed.
- [92:38]
B
What do you mean by plump up your resume?
- [92:41]
A
Well, I couldn't. I didn't feel that I could go to an employer and tell them that I had held, you know, one job in the last 10 to 12 years, and before that I was trafficked for the purpose of sex. And that's definitely something you don't want to put down in your resume. So I did add places in, such as Indigo Bar and Grill, Caleo Flamenco Bar and Restaurant.
- [92:58]
B
Wait, wait, which one?
- [93:01]
A
On exhibit 14, underneath Experience. The dates are all incorrect as well. It's just to show that I was consistently working, which I was not. And I needed a job to help my family. I've got a family of five. So like I said, it's not something proud that I had to do, but I felt that it was the only way I could actually get employed.
- [93:20]
B
You lied on your resume?
- [93:23]
A
I made it look as though I had continuously worked throughout the years, so that way an employer would see me as a potential candidate.
- [93:29]
B
Okay, well, let's start with employment training and recruitment. ET Australia. Did you work at that place of employment appointment?
- [93:36]
A
I did work there.
- [93:37]
B
What dates did you actually work there?
- [93:40]
A
I know I finished working for. We call it ET Australia. So if you don't mind me abbreviating
- [93:44]
B
it however you want.
- [93:46]
A
I know I finished there In January of 2006, right before my son was born. My first son was born. And I believe I worked there for a year. I believe. So it might have been a little bit over a year, but just around a year.
- [93:57]
B
All right, so you worked at a place for about a year, and on your resume you typed that you worked there for nine years, Correct?
- [94:03]
A
Correct.
- [94:04]
B
And you did that? Correct?
- [94:06]
A
I did.
- [94:07]
B
Nobody else typed that for you?
- [94:10]
A
No, I. I did it myself.
- [94:12]
B
All right, and the next employment you list here. Well, is your job description accurate?
- [94:16]
A
Yes, that is actually accurate.
- [94:18]
B
Okay. And everything in there is what you actually did?
- [94:20]
A
Yes, for ET Australia.
- [94:22]
B
Okay. Indigo Bar and Grill. Did you type that in?
- [94:25]
A
I did type that in.
- [94:27]
B
And did you actually work at Indigo Bar and Grant Grill?
- [94:30]
A
No, I did not.
- [94:32]
B
All right, so the dates that you put on your resumes are not True. Correct.
- [94:36]
A
That's correct.
- [94:37]
B
The title of your job at that place was not correct. You didn't work there, right? Oh, my God. Dude, leave this.
- [94:43]
A
I never worked there.
- [94:44]
B
Oh, my God. Are we still going? This is. This is painful.
- [94:48]
A
Yeah, it should be.
- [94:49]
B
The description that you typed out about the things that you did at the Indigo Bar and Grill is made up, correct?
- [94:55]
A
Well, it's generally what you would do if you were a server or a waitress. But like I said, I did not work at Indigo Bar and Grill.
- [95:00]
B
So when you represented to an employer that you were applying for a job, that you had done these things, you had not actually done these things at Indigo Bar and Grill, correct?
- [95:08]
A
Not at Indigo Bar and Grill, no.
- [95:10]
B
All right, can you read the first sentence of your job and description for
- [95:14]
A
Indigo Bar and Grill?
- [95:15]
B
Right.
- [95:16]
A
At this restaurant located inside of an rsl, we were never slow.
- [95:21]
B
Okay, so when you said we were never slow, you just made that up. Correct. And then. Objection. Form.
- [95:27]
A
And then Virginia says, I tried to give as much information to my potential employer to show that I could handle a large amount of pressure in guests. So, yes, I put that in there.
- [95:35]
B
But you represented. You were there working as a server or waitress and that we were never slow. That is not true. Correct.
- [95:41]
A
Well, I never worked there. So it's. Again, I was very highly unemployable given my past, so I did whatever I could to make it look as though my potential employer could hire me.
- [95:51]
B
Okay. You described your duties that were not. Those were fictional duties, correct?
- [95:55]
A
They were duties that a waitress and server would do. Do.
- [95:58]
B
But you did not do at Indigo Bar.
- [96:00]
A
I did not do them at Indigo Bar and Grill.
- [96:03]
B
Okay. You described your energetic service and your service with a smile to the guests. That is not true. Correct.
- [96:09]
A
Everything in Indigo Bar and Grill is not Correct.
- [96:12]
B
And you created that entire description. Correct.
- [96:15]
A
For the sole purpose of being able to obtain employment. Yes.
- [96:19]
B
To get money. And then. Objection.
- [96:21]
A
Form. To make a wage for my family. Family.
- [96:25]
B
All right. The next job. Gemma Catering and Wedding Receptions did it. Is that a job you actually held?
- [96:30]
A
I did actually work there. I don't know the dates, but I was a server, waitress and bartender.
- [96:35]
B
March of 2003 to April 2004. Is that about when you worked there?
- [96:40]
A
It could be very close to it. I'm not too sure.
- [96:43]
B
You're not sure?
- [96:44]
A
No, I'm not sure.
- [96:46]
B
Did you have children? Had you already had children at the time you worked there?
- [96:50]
A
No, I. I don't believe I did. I became a stay at home mom when I had my first child.
- [96:54]
B
And what year was that?
- [96:56]
A
2006.
- [96:57]
B
Okay, so you believe you worked at Gemma Catering and wedding receptions before 2006?
- [97:03]
A
I believe so.
- [97:04]
B
And other than that, you can't recall what dates you worked there?
- [97:07]
A
I'm sorry. I couldn't help. No. So, Katie, that's four pages.
- [97:14]
B
Why are we grilling someone on their. Okay, I know. I know the answer to this. They're trying to make her look not credible. They're trying to. This woman is a liar. Look, she's lying about her job history to employers. Look how much we can't trust what she tells us about what happened with Jeffrey and Galain. And it's absolutely nauseating to hear them grill her like this when this is, what, a deposition about sexual assault? And we're like, so were you actually a waitress? So you don't remember the specific years that you worked at this restaurant?
- [97:49]
A
I think one section of what the prosecutor says is really critical, where Virginia basically acknowledges for the millionth time, like, yeah, I lied on my resume. Again, this is 2005. 2006.
- [97:58]
B
So, like, by this point in time, just to ground us in context, by this point in time, there's been at least one profile in a mainstream publication that is lauding the fact that Epstein lied about his experience to get a job. Job?
- [98:13]
A
Yeah.
- [98:14]
B
In Vanity Fair, it's like, ooh, this scrappy guy lied about completing college so he could get a job in finance. What a maverick, right? Meanwhile, his victim is being scrutinized heavily for lying about employment history so she could become employable because the reason she was not employable is because she was being sex trafficked. Fuck.
- [98:34]
A
A really key question that the prosecutor asks once Virginia says, for the millionth time, yes, I lied. Lied. She says, to get money. Did you lie to get money?
- [98:43]
B
It's so funny.
- [98:45]
A
And that's where you also connect it back. Oh, these girls lied because they wanted money. These girls put Jeffrey in a bad position. They lied about their age because they wanted to extort him. That is the kind of vibe we get. There were other sections throughout this deposition that, again, I couldn't stop flagging all of them. I liked this one because of how unbelievably banal it was. There was another section where, for 10 pages, so the equivalent of anywhere from five to 20 minutes, depending on how fast they're talking. They're asking about the book she was holding the day that Ghisne Maxwell walked up, and they're like, what color was the book? What size was the book? Well, if it was this size. Would it really make sense if you did this? At another point, they acknowledged that she said she met Galain in 2000, but it was actually 1999 or vice versa. And so they spend 10 minutes being like, so you lied about when you met her? And she's like, no, I didn't lie. I just, I couldn't remember the exact date. Like, I was 15. Like, I don't know. Yeah, whatever.
- [99:39]
B
Can you remember the dates that you worked your part time jobs when you were 15?
- [99:43]
A
Exactly.
- [99:44]
B
Something that this is also making me think of is like, I'm pretty aghast at the line of questioning here, but I think the most shocking and horrifying part of this is that I assume that this is actually quite common. This is the standard line of defense question when you are trying to make a victim of abuse look not credible. This is just what it is. And it's shocking to read it, you know, word for word for four pages. But like, I'm sure this happens in courtrooms across the country every single day. We just aren't reading those depositions.
- [100:20]
A
Yeah, you know, it kind of was funny because it struck me as being very similar to a lot of the conspiracy theory social media accounts that we see online. Like, you see the way Candace Owens is creating this whole world of Erica Kirk and what she's done to Charlie Kirk. And you can make a conspiracy out of anything. You can find a lie that a person said for absolutely any reason if you work hard enough. And so, yeah, I just wanted to highlight, like, when we talk about women being liars, this is what we're talking about. Like, this is the level of lie that we are often operating on, where you have all these nitty gritty things. And then, you know, in, in a closing statement to a jury, someone will say they lied about employment, they lied about their family, they lied about the day they met my defendant. And all of it is like, technically true in a court of law, but like, not in any rational sense and not at all relevant to the actual conversation we're having here.
- [101:18]
B
Yeah, the material reality of what's, what's happening, not at all relevant. And I think that that absurdity is so clear when you contrast what happened to her with this line of questioning. It's farce. It feels like farce. And the other thing that it's making me think of truly is, like, the extent to which the swift MeToo moral panic backlash, as in, has MeToo gone too far?
- [101:44]
A
Right.
- [101:44]
B
Should we really believe women? Well, what about due process?
- [101:47]
A
Bari Weiss is Like, ahem.
- [101:52]
B
It just really, really drives home the. The absurdity of the panic that followed me to that we were, like, being a little too quick to take women at their word. It's like, no, this is the reality of how abuse victims are treated. This is the level of scrutiny that they are subject to every single thing they've ever done. To your point, the most morally upstanding person in the world would not fare well enough under this level of scrutiny, because nobody is perfect, and nobody should have to be perfect to get justice for abuse.
- [102:29]
A
Right.
- [102:29]
B
But it just is like, oh, my God. All of that backlash felt silly in the moment, but this really escalates it to a level of severity and almost, like, nefariousness that, like, hadn't quite landed with me before in the same way.
- [102:44]
A
I'm glad you feel that way, because I have felt that as well. I think the real shock from a lot of people has been, like, how. How banal these communications are. They're. They're kind of horrifying and shitty, but they're also like, hey, you.
- [102:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, hey, want to do crimes later?
- [102:57]
A
Yeah. It's just. It's all so boring. I felt the same way reading a lot of these victim depositions where it's like, you would expect that to be very lurid. You would expect that to be where you're talking about all of the crimes. And I know that that does happen. But so much of what these victims are forced to talk about in these, like, marathon conversations with lawyers have nothing to do with what happened to them. And I think that that is a type of mind. It's actually hard for me to put myself in the position of their shoes, where it's like, you have to be careful about absolutely everything you're saying, but everything you're talking about is not the trauma you experienced. It's everything around it. It's like, well, who was your friend at the time? And what color car did they have? And, oh, well, was your sleepover. It was on Friday night. Oh, you said it was on Saturday. Saturday night last time. So was it Friday or Saturday? And meanwhile, it's like Epstein had photos of nude young women in his house. And it's like, what are we doing here? What are we fucking doing?
- [103:52]
B
And in his. He's like, I've been advised by my lawyers to plead the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th. Sorry.
- [103:58]
A
Right. So the big breaking point, the watershed moment for Epstein happens in 2019.
- [104:04]
B
That's probably when I first heard about it then.
- [104:06]
A
Yeah. Same. So a full 19 years after Virginia was first trafficked, Jeffrey Epstein is arrested by New York prosecutors on sex trafficking charges. From there, things move very quickly because less than a month after he has been arrested, Epstein dies by suicide in jail. Air quotes. Dies by suicide in jail. Whoa.
- [104:28]
B
I didn't know it was that fast.
- [104:30]
A
Yes, very fast. And I just wanna say there's no fucking way he did not die by suicide. I. It's the ultimate example of what an absolute shame everything about this coverage is.
- [104:43]
B
Can we have a Candace moment for a second?
- [104:45]
A
Sure.
- [104:46]
B
Who killed him? Who do you think killed him?
- [104:49]
A
So here are the details. All the cameras go off at the time that he dies. He was mysteriously bunked up with like a very violent criminal. And he had been talking for weeks being like, why am I bunked with this guy? He repeatedly was talking in the weeks leading up to his death saying he was worried he was gonna be killed. I think that someone paid his roommate to kill. Kill him.
- [105:09]
B
Who do you think paid him?
- [105:10]
A
Who do I think paid him? I mean, apparently it could be Noam Chomsky, which is a bummer. Oh no, jk, I'm kidding. Noam Chomsky just doesn't think me too was worthwhile.
- [105:19]
B
Says manufacture this.
- [105:21]
A
Yes, Seriously. Another detail that I kind of spent a lot of time with was that his neck indicated like serious blunt force. So he allegedly hanged himself, but like his bed wasn't in the right disarray. I mean, it was very obviously just like not a thing. I think it could have been anyone. I think it could have been like some. A high up Republican. I think it could have been a fucking high up Democrat. I think that so many people were incentivized to not let him talk. Frankly, I don't think this was his choice. I think he was very worried that he was going to be killed. And it's also weird that they didn't put him in like cushy rich guy solitary confinement. Exactly. He was such a important person.
- [106:00]
B
Well, and that's what I was going to say is if you think about, about his experiences with the legal system up until this point, that's why I was surprised by how fast he died after he was arrested. Because you would think that someone of his stature that has gotten away with so much for so long probably fully expected his legal team to be able to get him out of this one too. Not to speculate, but like, I'm, I'm doing a Candace. I'm going to do a Candace and I'm going to speculate. You would not kill yourself after being in jail for, like, a matter of. Of weeks.
- [106:31]
A
Right.
- [106:31]
B
After 20 years of getting away with it.
- [106:34]
A
Right? Yeah, 100%. And, like, Epstein was probably more aware than anyone of how hot the temperature was. Like, he was aware when they were investigating him in the 2000s. I think that, you know, from 2010 to 2019, he must have been increasingly aware that things did not look good. You can only settle so many civil lawsuits.
- [106:53]
B
Yeah.
- [106:53]
A
And then when MeToo happens, all of a sudden, for a brief moment in human. Literally a month, people give a shit
- [106:59]
B
before Barry Voice is in the op Ed section being like, but what if we didn't believe them?
- [107:04]
A
Right, right, exactly. Believe all women. Well, oh, my God, she's such a fucking bitch. Okay, so anyways, he dies, and that is a real buzzkill. Honestly, it sucks. It is. You know, and I think there's a lot of truth to people saying that. There is great irony that Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman, is the only person who has truly been convicted. Yeah, that's true. But also, there is a certain reality that, like, the guy that people wanted to convict died. And in a real justice system, we would be like, hey, why did all the cameras go off? Like, maybe this is worth investigation.
- [107:45]
B
Yeah.
- [107:46]
A
But no, well, and also, I. I
- [107:49]
B
cut this out if this is, like, totally off track and wrong keeping it. I haven't been paying that close of attention to the coverage again, because I knew we'd talk about it, and I wanted to come in, like, more or less blank slate for this. But of the push notifications that I have been unable to avoid, it sounds like the British people that were acquainted with him or have shown up in the files have been arrested like Prince Andrew facing just. It's like the people in the UK are actually being prosecuted and the people in the United States are. President of the United States.
- [108:26]
A
I don't think Prince Andrew was arrested. I think he was. Yeah, he was. Okay, what was he arrested on? Because I want to look into this. I think it was, like, kind of disappointing.
- [108:35]
B
He was arrested a week ago or two weeks ago. Misconduct in public.
- [108:40]
A
In public office.
- [108:41]
B
Released regarding allegations. But okay, so it sounds like they. It hasn't really. Nothing has really come of it. To me. It just seems striking that, like, oh, I'm seeing. Seeing reports from across the pond that the people that have been affiliated in these emails are actually now facing some sort of legal scrutiny.
- [109:01]
A
Yeah.
- [109:01]
B
And that's just not happening here.
- [109:02]
A
Exactly.
- [109:03]
B
Which to me, the thing that is so striking about that, to me is that I think there's a really interesting thread to pull here about how the abdication of responsibility to the public itself kind of replicated, represents a real shift. Like, there is no expectation at this point that anyone will face charges. They just hand over all the files to the public and go, you can have the information, but you cannot have the justice. And it just feels so reminiscent to me of, like, the broader information landscape right now, which is you are allowed to know how fucked up everything is. You are allowed to see the children being bombed in Gaza. You are allowed to know that this is happening, happening, but we aren't going to do anything about it. I wrote this in the newsletter a couple weeks ago that the nature of the document dumps and the fact that we're getting all of this information, but with no follow up almost feels like they're gloating a little bit. It feels like bragging.
- [110:00]
A
Yeah, well, and it's. I believe it's a very common government strategy to, like, flood the airwaves. Like, all right, if you want the files, we're going to give you 6 million. I think it's worth noting that, like, do we have the information? That's not really clear to me. Like, some of it's redacted. They were selective about what files they released.
- [110:17]
B
And also, didn't they pull any. Like, nothing about Trump has been released, which is obviously false.
- [110:23]
A
Yeah. I think in the same way that it's obvious to me that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, it's very obvious that, of all people, Trump was very involved in this. Something that I have been thinking about a lot is, like, when you think about information, the information is tainted. Hinted in a bias towards Epstein from the very first file because the FBI is biased against women. Not to sound conspiratorial, these police officers, even the best ones at the Palm beach investigate, like, those guys were, like, top of the line. And you still have them arguing with prosecutors over whether these women were prostitutes. I mean, in the very beginning of my reading, I was spending so much time reading about, like, FBI tips and all the stories of women about their alleged experiences with Epstein and how many of them have been been officially deemed uncredible. But there's very little. What's the word? Rubric for that. It's like, well, what level of credibility? Why is this one incredible? Why is that one incredible? And so then you're sorting through all this information, and you're like, well, how am I supposed to trust any of these women? And that's the point Honestly, it's kind
- [111:24]
B
of funny because at the beginning of this, I said that part of the reason I haven't spent much time with it is because I felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it. I'm like, I wouldn't even begin to know how to make sense of any of this. I know that really bad stuff happened to a lot of people, but it's like, well, do I need to read the heart wrenching and fucked up details of it?
- [111:44]
A
Even substack for an example? Our. Our beloved platform. The misinformation that's being spread around right now is kind of overwhelming. Like, I was scrolling through and the newsletters I were reading that were like, either blatantly misrepresenting certain aspects of the files or just diverging from them entirely or. Or taking information from a tip that was, again, not verified in a way that I am conflicted with, but also was not verified. Stories of, like, babies getting dumped over boats and like, bodies getting buried. And so you really understand why this becomes a conspiracy theory? Because totally sexual assault is a conspiracy theory. So.
- [112:19]
B
Well, and that's what I was gonna say is like, when it becomes about babies being dumped overboard, to me the implication is like, the actual crimes themselves that we know about are not enough to legitimate or justify the outrage as it exists now. And it's like, well, that's because, as stated previously, we don't fucking care about adult women being trafficked and raped. We need to somehow up the ante and make it about kids. Or make. And again, kids were involved. Not saying they weren't. But there is a level of truth underlying all of this, which is that there is such a level of comfort with the abuse of women in society that the abuse of women alone is not a story.
- [113:05]
A
Exactly. I have been thinking about that nonstop, that you have this weird irony that there is such a. I don't want to use the word moral panic, because it's a real panic this happened. But there is such an obsession with what Epstein did to these young women and there is such a desire to make it worse than it even was. And it's like, so was him abusing hundreds, if not thousands of women. Women not sensational enough? Are we bored of that?
- [113:32]
B
Yeah.
- [113:32]
A
And the truth is that we are, because it actually isn't that sensational for anyone to believe.
- [113:37]
B
Yeah. To use your word, it's kind of banal. Abuse of women. Sexual abuse of women happens every day. The scale is different here. The wealth, the connections, the implications are certainly different. But abuse of women is very common. But also, I do think Trump killed his wife and buried her on the golf course.
- [113:58]
A
I completely agree.
- [113:58]
B
That's all I'm saying. Saying allegedly.
- [114:01]
A
Allegedly. All right, so in 2019, after Epstein is dead, JP Morgan, who was one of his biggest banking partners, steps forward and is like, hey, we do have some information. Thank you guys for giving us nothing. They come forward and they're like, we just want to flag some transactions that we didn't notice before.
- [114:21]
B
We've been keeping an eye on them.
- [114:23]
A
Yeah. It does, in fact, look like we opened dozens and dozens of accounts for Epstein's, including ones based on his island. It looks like, you know, we manage the deposit and the cash withdrawals of millions of dollars, many transactions of which match the exact patterns of sexual trafficking that we know that we're supposed to look out for. We know that he was, like, withdrawing hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash every year. And that's always a little bit of a red flag. We didn't really say anything about it. The money that he withdrew each year was matched almost exactly to the money that he was paying women. So nothing really comes of that. It's not like JP Morgan is punished for that, but they're just like, Pat's back on shoulder. You're welcome for the help of the case. 2020, Ghislaine Maxwell is arrested. She's charged by New York prosecutors with charges related to conspiracy to commit trafficking of minors. A year later, she's found guilty. So, again, amazing how quick the legal system can work if it wants to. It's quite astonishing. She's sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in a low security prison prison in Tallahassee, and she is currently teaching etiquette classes in prison. So.
- [115:27]
B
Well, having to live in Tallahassee is, to be fair, a pretty bad punishment.
- [115:35]
A
Touche. So. So I want to pause here and address again the way we started this conversation, which is to think about, like, the most sort of common arguments we see taking place about Jeffrey Epstein. Okay. Jeffrey Epstein was an inordinately wealthy man. He was savvy and well connected. He used his inordinate wealth and his elite connections and his incredible intellect to avoid the law for decades. So the main question for people who hold this belief seems to be, did his friends know? Like, Ezra Klein at one point is trying to reconcile this by being like, there must have been a separation of church and state, otherwise these people wouldn't have associated with the sex predator. So I just want to pause and just say, like, clearly all of these people were predator already. Like, Whether or not they were involved in Epstein's ring. Bill Clinton pressured a White House intern into a sexual relationship, has been accused of sexual assault and in some cases rape by at least four women. Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist. Noam Chomsky has said in emails to Epstein that MeToo was essentially a hysterical witch hunt. Peter Thiel thinks women's suffrage does not go hand in hand with democracy. Elon Musk has had who knows how many kids with who knows how many women and routinely talks on X about the need to strip back women's rights. Les Wexner. Yes.
- [116:52]
B
You were not going to skip the. Eli, can we do a live reenactment of the Musk emails?
- [116:56]
A
Which. Yeah, sure. Which ones do you want to do where he's like, where's the cool party?
- [117:01]
B
Yeah, he's like in parentheses, Girls for the win, exclamation point. And Epstein's like, forward to assistant handle this fucking guy.
- [117:09]
A
Fucking loser. Oh, my God.
- [117:11]
B
God. So maybe the best part of the dump is that like, sure, he's innocent, but not for lack of trying to be guilty. He really tried to get invited to the island.
- [117:23]
A
He's such a loser that he couldn't go to the billionaire exploitation party.
- [117:28]
B
The sex pest island. Oh, my God, dude. Yeah. So something that I just want to highlight here too is like.
- [117:34]
A
So, like, is the separation of church and state with us in the room right now. Like, what the fuck are we talking about?
- [117:40]
B
That's what I want to highlight is like the layers of systemic failure here. I mean, we are checking every box. The justice system obviously completely failed.
- [117:51]
A
These people.
- [117:51]
B
Obviously the largest financial institutions and whatever checks and balances and regulations and flags that are supposed to interrupt patterns like this, right, to pick up on financial crime. Crimes obviously failed here. And again, it's, it's, it's funny that, like, if you are committing large scale white collar crime, the extent to which you can just sort of like skate by unnoticed, right on. Technicalities and loopholes or just like having a friendly relationship with the banker while like George Floyd was killed for what, a 20 counterfeit bill? I think, like, it's just, it's mind boggling, right? So you've got the legal system, system, you've got the financial infrastructure. You've obviously got like rampant and horrifying levels of political complicity. And, you know, very powerful people, People covering up his tracks.
- [118:42]
A
Very powerful peeper peepers.
- [118:45]
B
Very powerful peepers are covering up his tracks. What is the one pillar of society that did not completely fail repeatedly? Local Journalists.
- [118:56]
A
Yeah, local journalists, many of them women.
- [118:58]
B
Local journalists are the only reason that we know that this fucking. Who knows if he would have ever been caught if you didn't have local newspapers that were like, this guy is a fucking predator. And now the only force that is continuing to call attention to this and care about it is, like, Thomas Massie. And like women on Substack, there's still stories about it, but again, it's like the public outrage feels like the. The most potent component that we have right now.
- [119:33]
A
Yeah, I think that there is a massive, almost subconscious distinction taking place here with a lot of talking heads, nearly all of them male, when they think of Epstein as the one with a secret, essentially, and his friends are all divided into camps of did they know the secret or did they not know the secret? Yeah, but I think, quite frankly, all of these people are birds of a feather. Like, these are men and some women who do not see women as people. And it's funny to remember something that you and I might often forget because we have our little, like, well, actually bitches eating crackers silo that you and
- [120:08]
B
I have woke blinders.
- [120:09]
A
Yeah, you're woke blinders. I think it's important to remember there are plenty of smart people in the world, experts at the top of their field, who can talk about, like, astrophysics at a gala, and also think women are not doing people. It is not hard for me to believe that. In the same way that Ta Nehisi Coates has said, it is not hard for me to believe that a person can present as nice and also be racist. The only people who don't manage to understand that are people who either don't have the lived experience or don't read the work of people who do know about that. I think it has really spoken to these blind spots in these conversations to suggest that what Epstein was doing was so beyond the pace, pale and so impossible to reconcile that these people didn't know. No, these people were reconciling it all the time because that's what people do all the time. That's what Republicans do with Donald Trump. That's what we do with Bill Clinton.
- [120:58]
B
That's why he became their go to kind of confidant about their own indiscretions. That's why they trusted him, because they're like, this guy's a scumbag too.
- [121:08]
A
Right.
- [121:08]
B
There is, like, a general sense that Epstein is somehow aberrant. It very much mirrors the, like, one bad man theory of maga. Once Trump is gone, none of this will matter. Anymore. And all we have to do is beat Trump. It's like, well, Epstein was the ringleader. And I think what's so disconcerting and I think what people are slowly coming around to, and part of the reason the dump has been so horrifying is because it completely blows a lid on that theory.
- [121:36]
A
Right?
- [121:36]
B
And some people, I do think some people are recognizing. Oh, it really is all of them. There was a really, really moving and challenging feature in one of the more recent New Yorker issues about Gisele Pellico.
- [121:52]
A
And, oh, yeah, this is like the Alice Monroe thing.
- [121:55]
B
The men that raped Giselle in that small French village.
- [121:59]
A
This is about her daughter, right?
- [122:01]
B
Yeah, the piece was about her daughter. I actually think Celeste Davis made this connection in a recent piece that she wrote called There Is One Woman that explains how so many men can be in the Epstein files. So why is no one saying it? And the takeaway was like, it's patriarchy. Like, you, like, rip the mask off the Scooby Doo villain, and it's like,
- [122:19]
A
ta da, it's the hockey team laughing with Donald Trump behind in the fucking locker room.
- [122:23]
B
But she connects it back to Giselle as well. Because one of the things that I think was so horrifying about that case was like, so wait, there were 70 men in this small, remote village that were like, down to rape and unconscious woman. It was like the mailman and the fucking, you know, just these like, average ass guys that you would think they're doing this, like, horrific and evil and, like, unthinkable act, and yet there is something so banal about the people who were committing it. And again, it. It gives you that sensation of, like, oh, this rot is at the root. This is very deep. This is not specific to or unique to this one guy.
- [123:03]
A
Right? And in the New Yorker article you're referencing is one that kind of exposed that Gisele Pellico's daughter was also exposed to abuse and Gisele Pellico didn't believe her. That's kind of. It summarized this, the same thing with Alice Monroe, famous writer whose legacy has been, you know, called into question when it has since come out that her daughter suffered sexual abuse and Alice Monroe did nothing about it and knew about it. This, I mean, is another conversation about, like, once again, if you view people as good and bad, you will never be able to reconcile that. But if you view people as people, it becomes very easy to understand why someone can experience horrors and speak beautifully about it and still not be there for someone else. But on the Note of Gisele Pellico. I'm glad you brought that up because that is another example of what I'm talking about, which is bringing this out of the scope of the billionaire class and recognizing that everyone does this. It's not just all of them, it's all of us. Gisele Pelico's husband was not wealthy. He was not influential. He was a random fucking dude who drugged his wife and exposed her to mass rape. I want to highlight the grand jury that we referenced at the beginning of this conversation. Those were regular people looking at 14 year old girls and going, do you know that you caused a crime? And again back to the question, how did he get away with it? How did he manage these two totally different worlds? Well, they're not different worlds. It's all one world. And again, I think that's really important to highlight. But that brings me to one of the conclusions that I had. After reading so, so much Epstein discourse, I found myself asking again and again, if it were true that Epstein represents an anomalous case in how this nation views and treats men who harm women. Like, if it were true that his unprecedented fame and power and wealth were what caused such a perversion of justice, then it would follow that the justice system would do a better job finding justice for other sexual assault survivors. Like if the implication is that it's his money and his power and his networking that causes caused this to fall apart, then it would follow that predators who are not billionaires or well connected or savvy would be brought to justice. And that is not the case. So Katie, do you want to guess what percent of sexual assault cases, meaning cases that are opened with police? A woman goes to a department and says, hey, I want to report something.
- [125:13]
B
Oh, wow, okay.
- [125:14]
A
What percentage lead to convictions that would require any level of incarceration for any amount of time or any sort of possibility punishment?
- [125:22]
B
I'm gonna guess somewhere in the range of like 8 to 12%.
- [125:26]
A
2.5%.
- [125:27]
B
Oh. Oh God. I thought I was being really conservative with that. I was like, surely this is now,
- [125:35]
A
babe, it's worse than that.
- [125:36]
B
Two and a half percent.
- [125:38]
A
I would like you to read this report from Rainn, which is the Rape, Abuse and Incest national network.
- [125:44]
B
According to the Rape, Abuse and incest national network, RAIN, every 68 seconds an American is sexually assaulted. Oh my God. My God. And yet only 25 out of every 1000 perpetrators will end up in prison for it. Additionally, only 310 out of 1000 sexual assaults are reported to the police, which means more than two out of three go unreported.
- [126:08]
A
So the number is actually smaller than 2% if you want to talk about people reaching justice. So I want to pause for a second and talk about something called the justice gap. It's the gap between reported cases. So again, that's already a small percentage of actual events.
- [126:21]
B
A third?
- [126:22]
A
Yeah, a third. The gap between reported cases and the cases that result in actual prosecution and conviction. So there are three stages of attrition with this justice gap. There is police decision making, there is prosecutorial decision making, and there are court outcomes. So Katie, I would like you to read from this meta study on how the legal system fails survivors of sexual assault. This was published in 2024 and reviewed decades of sexual assault. Basically data of court cases of police transcripts, et cetera. Etc.
- [126:54]
B
Extralegal factors affecting police and prosecutorial decision making in cases of sexual violence include rape myths, which are, quote, descriptive or prescriptive beliefs about rape, in other words, about its causes, context, consequences, perpetrators, victims and their interaction that serve to deny, downplay or justify sexual violence that men commit against women. Rape myths shift the blame from the perpetrator to the victim's report. Survivor examples of such beliefs are that women commonly lie about rape and that most rapes are committed by strangers in a public place involving the use of physical force or threats of physical harm. Factors such as the voluntary consumption of alcohol by the complainant prior to the rape, perceived intoxication or lack of physical resistance of the complainant during the rape, and a history of consensual sex with the perpetrator may amplify victim blaming attitudes. Moreover, the ethnicity of the suspect, with white males being more likely to have escape further investigation and the credibility of the complainant have been found to influence police decision making. Prosecutorial decision making has been found to be influenced by the complainant's willingness to cooperate, whether the case is likely to result in a conviction, the complainant's perceived credibility, the presence of injuries, and whether the complainant and perpetrator were acquainted. If a survivor decides to report the crime and the case moves to trial, the court proceedings can be re traumatizing for the survivor and conviction rates remain low low in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. This can be attributed in part to the adversarial nature of the legal system, where survivors often face challenges to their testimony and character during trials to weaken their case, but also to a broader context of institutional distrust. This distrust stems from systemic issues such as high workloads and lack of resourcing for investigators and investigative processes, and procedural complexities that create significant hurdles for victim survivors seeking justice. Research on extralegal factors influencing judges decision making is darth. However, there is ample research indicating that extralegal variables, including rape myths, affect jurors and their decision making. In recent years, efforts have been made to address these issues and improve outcomes for victim survivors, particularly in the wake of the MeToo movement. For example, states in Australia are reviewing their criminal justice system responses to sexual violence to to ensure victim survivors are supported and receive a justifiable outcome. However, barriers persist within society and the criminal justice system, impeding the formal reporting and case outcome of sexual victimization.
- [129:29]
A
That is the justice gap. From start to finish. It's the moment you walk in to the moment you get conviction. And I think there is this kind of horrible dance of culture and law where, like, you can have an entire legal setup in place to, quote, unquote, protect women. But if no one believes women when they say something, it really doesn't fucking matter if rape is illegal. Like, at some point, there has to be a cultural shift. And so when I was reading that, that was when I was kind of like, wow, Jeffrey Epstein was different than a lot of people in some ways. But boy, am I seeing a lot of similarities with what happened with the Epstein case and what happened here. So to run through that rape myths. Check. These women wanted it. These women sought out the opportunity to give them massages.
- [130:08]
B
They wanted money.
- [130:09]
A
They wanted money. Women are liars. Check. Every single one of these victims has been painted as uncredible. The women consented to the encounters. Check. The alleged credibility of women impacting trials. Remember the grand jury, the desire of victims to avoid these trials, to avoid retraumatizing themselves. Check. Think of Virginia prosecutorial decision making. Check. You think about the prosecutor punting the trial to a grand jury, deciding not to move forward with those charges. The traumatic experience of going to trial for witnesses. Check. You have those young women being told that they were the ones who committed a crime in that grand jury, Let alone all the depositions that they were forced to go through, let alone being tailed by private investigators, having their parents get called at work. All of these horrifying experiences, the reinforcing via these trials to women who have not yet stepped forward, that they will not be believed, that they will be terrorized for trying to say anything to begin with, that they might in fact fact be slapped with a defamation lawsuit if they dare come forward and say anything happened. The threats from predators, once they know that someone is filing a case against them. I was thinking about how common it is for women to attempt to get a restraining order and be told, sorry, your partner hasn't tried to kill you yet. So we can't really do anything about that yet. The fact that it's not just legal, but common and expected for predators to file countersuits against the victims. When you take it a step further, think about the legal technologies, technicalities like you can enter this case, but you can't enter this one. Virginia giuffre not being allowed to enter the civil case. That would eventually break it wide open for Epstein because of a technicality. Because the judge was like, this is redundant. And then the fact that it is common for men to plea down. 60% of trafficking cases end in a plea down negotiation.
- [131:46]
B
Oh my God.
- [131:48]
A
So it's true that in this case, the wealth of Epstein allowed him to hire a great team of lawyers and hammer away at these court cases. But it's also true that poor men have their advantages as well. And the advantage that they have is that when a woman walks in and says, this guy raped me, the police say, don't care.
- [132:05]
B
Prove it.
- [132:06]
A
Why would we look into this? Prove it. We're not going to go chase down this random Joe blow.
- [132:10]
B
Yeah, dude, the restraining order thing is also crazy.
- [132:12]
A
Yeah.
- [132:13]
B
Cuz it's like the cops are like, okay, buddy, we're going to give you one try, one more chance.
- [132:19]
A
Right, Exactly.
- [132:20]
B
To kill your girlfriend. And then men.
- [132:23]
A
Right. It really gets down to this like half dozen of one and six of the other where it's like, yeah, powerful men are impossible to take down, but no one cares about taking down non powerful men. So the women regardless, are never actually served. You have this kind of thing where you're screwed no matter what. It's just what stage of the justice gap you are failed. Are you failed when you walk into the station or are you failed when this rich guy basically sues you into obliteration?
- [132:49]
B
Well, and also it's like, why are we doing so much raping, fellas? Little boys are abused as well. Victims tend to skew female, if I had to guess. But young men and boys can also be victims of sexual assault and abuse. But perpetrators are pretty exclusively men. Let me just google. If I had to guess, it's in the 90s.
- [133:12]
A
I was just about to say I would guess it's like 98%.
- [133:15]
B
How many perpetrators.
- [133:22]
A
Grok is like 100% of women are responsible for sexual assault.
- [133:27]
B
What Was she wearing? 92 to 99% of sexual perpetrators are male. While women can commit sexual offenses, the vast majority of cases involve male offenders. Okay, so what's going on on there? Like, that is also such a huge piece of this, which is like, yes, this was anomalous in its scale and scope, but not anomalous in its content. But to go back to Celeste Davis's conclusion, like, that is patriarchy. One thing that she brought up in the piece that I thought was interesting is that one of the common defenses for why men are so much more likely to sexually abuse or assault somebody is like testosterone levels. But they've debunked this. You can study men with high testosterone, and they are not more likely to rape a woman than a man with low testosterone. So the kind of biological explanations here don't really hold up. It is cultural. It is.
- [134:26]
A
Right.
- [134:27]
B
Part of our kind of shared collective belief system. If you don't believe women are people.
- [134:33]
A
Yeah. I mean, to show my hands a little bit, I think part of how I went into to this episode was I wrote my master's thesis in grad school to get my MFA on sexual assault myths and how they're often propagated in popular fiction.
- [134:46]
B
That's really interesting. Caro.
- [134:48]
A
I've got stuff to show you. I can. I can. I can show you a good time at a coffee date. I started to pay attention to the way that we were covering Epstein, and it really started to infuriate me that there would be literally literal titles like How He Got Away With it, how the Justice System Failed Epstein Survivors. And there was never a couching of how the Justice System Fails All Survivors. How so many of the things that happened in Epstein's case were actually not unusual to him. And the implication that the average person I would think would read this would be like, oh, it's because he was a billionaire. He got away with this because he was a billionaire. And I think that because of. Of that, there would be a very different conclusion that people would take away if it was. Yeah, this is the latest egregious case of the rot that is inherent to how we treat women. But I think that what happens here, and I think it's subconscious, it's like this kind of cultural, communal dog whistle that we do is that we end up elevating the men who we have to recognize as predators. We have to elevate them into something, because if we don't elevate them into these superhuman, evil masters minds, then we would be forced at some point to reckon with why they actually got away with what they got away with. So this finally brings me to Jessica N's bright young women. We've talked about this, Katie. This is a novel. I thought it was excellent. It's a reimagining of the Ted Bundy story. The famous serial killer that not only places his victims front and center, but challenges the very ideas that we are talking about today. So I want you to to read a section from this novel that I've been thinking about nonstop while kind of doing this research for Epstein. And all you have to know is that at his trial, when Ted Bundy finally went to court, he represented himself. So this is from the perspective of the narrator who was not a victim of his, but whose friends essentially were.
- [136:45]
B
Okay, quote. I read his rather prosaic sounding name for the first time in that moment. But some years ago I vowed to stop using losing it. This is no symbolic abstinence on my part. His name has been said enough and ours forgotten, yada yada. I mean, sure, fine, that can be part of it. But who I want you to remember every time I say the defendant is not him, but the 22 year old court reporter dressed for success in a pussy bow blouse. She was the one who recorded him in the official transcripts, not by his government name like the licensed attorney attorneys on the case, but by the two most honest letter combinations her sensitive ear and flying fingers could produce. The defendant. What people forget, or rather what the media decided muddied the narrative is that although the defendant would go on to represent himself at his murder trial, he was never a lawyer. And Joe off the street can fly pro se litigate their own case without graduating from law school or passing the bar. But it made for a more saleable story if he was portrayed as someone who did not have to kill to get his kicks, who had prospects in his romantic life and his career. To this day I revere that scrubbed faced court reporter younger than me by only a year because she is one of the sacred few who did her job without so much as a sliver of an agenda. The truth of what happened lies in those transcripts where he is the defendant and he is full of bullshit. On the wanted poster I held in my hands that dingy afternoon in Tina's rental car, the defendant peered back at me with black vacant eyes. They are scary eyes, don't get me wrong. But what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn't anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious Attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout, through which a college dropout out with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity. For the better part of the 70s, law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow. And I am sick to death of watching them in their press shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs and hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm. Charm, oh my God, and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that.
- [139:18]
A
Any thoughts?
- [139:19]
B
Damn. From the didn't graduate college to the charm and wiliness and intelligence. I mean, it's like. I can see why you were thinking about this novel while you were reading this coverage.
- [139:30]
A
The whole thing is a media circus. It's all a media circus. And is there good intention behind it? Sure, you know, I'll take that. There's good intention, but I think that it. I found myself also infuriated by the end of my time reading about this, with the effort that we made again, to turn an ordinary misogynist, which is what Jeffrey Epstein was, into this superhuman God, and to, in doing so, really effectively obscure the reality of what it means to suffer from sexual assault in America, regardless of if you're Epstein's victim or the victim of your neighbor down the street in, oh, Ohio. I feel like we have this almost necrophilic obsession with reviving the reputations of disgraced predatory men and elevating them into this, like, deity status. And we do it because to admit the real truth here would require us to see that at the base of our society, if you are a woman who is hurt by a man, no one will do anything about it. And that's true if the guy is poor and it's true if his rich.
- [140:32]
B
I think that's actually what makes Pellico's case so unique. Beyond the obvious, the scale of her abuse is that those men did face consequences. They did go to jail.
- [140:44]
A
Right. Not America.
- [140:46]
B
That's unusual. And yep, it happened in another country.
- [140:50]
A
Yeah. With the argument that I'm making, I think that there is an inevitable question, which is, well, then why did we finally catch him? I think that we caught him and brought him to justice. Not because we finally had evidence, because we had all the evidence we needed in the 2 and 20,000 2000s. Yeah, we caught him because of me too. There was a brief window of time from 2015 to about 2020 where we completely upended cultural norms. Okay, so if you want to consider the power of this movement, I'm going to list out some of the men who were brought to justice. Not even remotely enough justice, but who at least suffered cultural disgrace during this time period. Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nash, Nassar. Let's pause and talk about Larry Nassar for a moment. Several parallels to Epstein. Like Epstein, he got away with molesting women at an unbelievable scale for decades. He was the US Women's gymnastic coach who was basically accused of molesting hundreds of women, if not thousands. Women first began reporting abuse in the late 90s. No one did anything about it until 2015.
- [141:49]
B
Wow.
- [141:50]
A
Larry Nassar, like Jeffrey Epstein, was white, but he was not powerful. He was not rich. He was not well connected. He was assaulting young women who were, in theory, far more powerful, far more well connected, far more wealthy than him. A lot of women who had millions of followers who were making millions of dollars. That didn't stop him with getting away with it for decades. Again, purpose of a system is what it does. If me too, hadn't happened, we never would have known about Nassar. We never would have known about Epstein. I don't think anything would have happened to these men. I don't think that what these men did is as unusual and as abnormal as this media coverage would suggest it to be. I would say that those are just the only men we know about. And in fact, I would be willing to bet that there are a terrifying number of men in America alone who have abused at the scale of Epstein and who we will never know about because the MeToo window has closed. It's like the Tomb Raider scene in Indiana Jones. It's like a few men. We dragged a few men out. And even those men a lot. You know, one of Harvey Weinstein's cases was overturned. Bill Cosby, I think, had his case overturned.
- [142:55]
B
And Barry Weiss rolled up our sleeves and was like, not on my watch, boys. Not on my watch.
- [143:00]
A
Yes. So I don't want to say I am downplaying what Epstein did. I want to amplify what happens to everyone else. I am trying to say that Epstein was finally caught because we finally had a moment where there was a cultural willingness to believe women.
- [143:16]
B
Wow.
- [143:17]
A
And it has turned into, like, a bumper sticker. But you needed that cultural willingness in order for juries to convict, in order for police officers to carry cases thinking that they might be able to move them through to prosecution, in order for lawyers to think it's Worth their time. And that actually worked. All of the big cases, I mean, P. Diddy, that started happening during MeToo. Michael Jackson, there was a reawakening of that case. All of these things that we now think of as like big men who got caught. They were hurting women for decades, and MeToo was what brought them down. It wasn't new evidence. It wasn't a new guy at the FBI. It wasn't a change to the legal system. It was that for a small moment we gave a shit and now we don't. And so now we're kind of like living in the wreckage of that. And I think that Epstein is now being used as like this political pawn for the Republican and the Democratic Party alike. And we are no closer to recognizing so many of the metaphorical resonances from Epstein's case that carry through to everyday women and everyday predators. And I think that that is like a massive loss when we confine it to the billionaire class.
- [144:25]
B
And I think when you think about how MeToo started, it did start as a hashtag, Right. It was a Twitter driven hashtag. And I think that this realization of like, actually MeToo did open a window that we were able to drag a lot of predators through for a short window of time.
- [144:44]
A
Right.
- [144:45]
B
It does cast the decision of these powerful men to begin buying media companies. Companies in a slightly different light.
- [144:55]
A
Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [144:56]
B
Well, why wouldn't that work on X today?
- [144:59]
A
Right?
- [144:59]
B
Ask Rock.
- [145:00]
A
Yeah. I would also say, I think that we view these events as like, well, these were men who were unbelievable predators. One might argue that the only cases we could bring through, even with me too, were ones where you have 30 to 50 women. Because it requires 30 to 50 women. Women for us to believe any of them. You need to have like an unbelievable amount of women saying the same thing again and again and again for us to believe any of them. And thinking about it from that perspective is also just so infuriating to me that we view it as like, oh, this is going to be a great crime documentary. And it's like, well, have we thought about the fact that we need like a hundred girls to come forward in order for anyone to believe that any kind of guy has done anything?
- [145:45]
B
It seems like when it's quote unquote, just one woman, it's almost like there is a bit of a hall pass. Or like, well, it's not a pattern of abuse. It was just one time. The pattern of abuse becomes this sort of like sick and twisted math problem where it's like, how many women equal One man's reputation.
- [146:04]
A
How many women abused does it take for a man to screw in a conviction? Light bulb or something?
- [146:08]
B
Yeah.
- [146:11]
A
I think Jeffrey Epstein's wealth and connections and very strange financial maneuvers are all worthy elements of this conversation, obviously. But I do not think they are the most important factors in explaining why he got away with what he got away with. I think the simplest explanation here, the Occam's razor, is that he got away with it not because he was an extraordinary man, but because he was an ordinary misogynist. And this is what happens to ordinary misogynists who commit violence against women. They get away with it. If the man is rich or poor or black or white. There will be a thousand contingencies regarding how the system will treat these men. But the facts remain the same in that the odds are always going to be profoundly stacked against the survivors who dare to step forward and say that a man has assaulted them. Everything about Epstein's case represents the features and not the bugs of the legal system as it pertains to sexual assault cases, cases, and prosecution. And if we want to move towards a world where this changes, I think it's essential for us to stop treating these famous men, these predators, as singular in their violence or extraordinary in their habits. They are not singular or extraordinary. Their desire to hurt women and children is not unique, and the legal system's treatment of them is not notable. And most importantly, these men are not infallible. They are not evil, impenetrable forces who cannot be taken down. They did not outwit the system. They do not outwit the system. They are simply existing inside a system that has no interest in operating to protect women. And I think the most positive aspect of what I want this conversation to become is when we think about what we have learned from MeToo, the cultural shift of momentum and force that is needed to hunt down these predators and convict them. Within our current legal system, system can be located. It can lead to profound change in less than a matter of years. And we now know that for a fact. We saw that happen from 2015 to 2020. All it requires is for us to demand that change again and to hold to those beliefs. And I think it can happen, and I think it will happen. And I look forward to being there when it does happen. So that's what I have to say about Jeffrey Epstein.
- [148:21]
B
I would say that was fun, but.
- [148:26]
A
But it wasn't.
- [148:26]
B
What a joy. Great job.
- [148:29]
A
Yeah. So that's what I wanted to contribute to this discourse.
- [148:33]
B
Thank you. It is richer for it.
- [148:37]
A
All right, that's the end.