Loading summary
Transcript58 lines
- [00:00]
Tina Brown
I thought he was a creepy social climber was my instinct. But at the same time, the more she reported, the more kind of alarming it became because of the people on the flight logs. Bill Clinton is on the flight log. Ehud Barak, you know, from Israeli, former prime minister was on the. You know, then you start thinking, oh, my God, the guy's so hugely well connected. There were all these people who were just in this favorite bank of this elite world, and they were all there for different reasons, but at the end of the day, they were all ignoring the elephant in the room that they had no business ignoring. Because after we published those pieces, there was nothing you could say that was ambivalent about Jeffrey Epstein's conduct.
- [00:37]
Hugh Docherty
Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Docherty. I'm executive editor of the Daily Beast, and I'm in for Joanna Coles. But this is a reunion episode today, not for me, but for the Daily Beast. I am going to be talking to the legendary Tina Brown. She founded the Daily Beast in 2008. And we are going to be talking about stories from the. The Daily Beast, but more importantly, why she's in the Epstein files and the amazing, extraordinary, dramatic insights that we have learned from those files about the Daily Beast's groundbreaking reporting back in 2010 and 2011, and how Epstein tried to keep her and Conchita Sarnoff, the Daily Beast reporter who broke the Epstein stories, silent. Let's get right into it. Welcome, Tina Brown. Tina, it is so great to see you. It's so great to have you back in the Daily Beast world, which you. Which you founded. And I feel like we are.
- [01:38]
Tina Brown
Yeah, anything to, you know, any chance to be in the Daily Beast world is always a roaring pleasure.
- [01:45]
Hugh Docherty
Well, we are. Strangely, journalism is usually about the new and pushing forward, but I'm going to go on a very long trip down memory lane. I think the Epstein files, which have just exploded over the last few days, have been, as people will know, we are in them, and especially you are in them. And you wrote about this on your substack. And I'll just say to anybody who has not read Tina's substack, go to Substack Fresh hell on Substack. And it is just an extraordinary story of what happened with Epstein. And we are now 15 years, 16 years, I should say later, finding out some of the other side of the story.
- [02:39]
Tina Brown
Yes, it's absolutely fascinating to find myself in there. I think my favorite line is Peggy Siegel, the PR personage who was so heavily involved with Epstein, much Much more than I ever knew writing to him, like, how can we neutralize Tina Brown? I sort of loved that, I must say, because they weren't able to neutralize me or the baby. East, which has gone on subsequently as well, covering Epstein in every way that it should. But it does give you a sort of an insight into. I mean, he presented it to himself as this cool character who had everything under control. But what you see in the email exchanges with Peggy Siegel over his unhappiness about the Daily Beast coverage in that time was his panic. I mean, they're panicked. I mean, and he. He was like, writing to Mort Zuckerman, for instance, the real estate billionaire and publisher, who was a very close friend of my husband Harry's and of mine, saying, you know, when you see. Next time you see Tina Brown, can you please tell her to stop this, like, sensationalized coverage? That, you know, it's like he's reaching out to everyone to try to sort of figure out how to. How to shut us down. And, you know, he couldn't, and it really frustrated him. It also, frankly, was a kind of very reptilian feeling to see how Peggy Seale, who always presented herself to me as a kind of fake friend and, you know, a sort of, you know, inviting me to screenings. I mean, she was. And, you know, and who had invited me to this. The famous Night of Shame dinner, where she called me in the office and asked if I would go for dinner with Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew and Woody Allen, which had, you know, when I told off on the story of how I shouted across the newsroom, you know, what is this, the pedophile's ball? And yet, you know, she went. She clearly. I mean, she had backed off immediately, of course, when I shouted that and said, you know, oh, no, no, no, no. This is all so overblown. And I don't really do anything much for Epstein, and I just sort of occasionally help him with dinner parties. And, you know, what you see in the Epstein files is how she was absolutely scheming with him all the time. And she was clearly, you know, in his court. Whether she was paid or not, I have no idea. But if she wasn't paid, I don't know why she would be, you know, his constant informer about everything we were doing at the Daily Beast and subsequently Newsweek, when we also sort of bought Newsweek. So that was a kind of unsettling feeling in the sense that, you know, someone could be that duplicitous, frankly. But it also was just so interesting because, you See how panicked he was.
- [05:25]
Hugh Docherty
One of the things that is amazing. And I think I should do some scene setting here. You set up the Daily Beast with Barry Diller in 2008, and in 2010, you published an incredible series of stories by Conchita Sarnoff, which I would urge everybody to go and read. They're still on the Daily Beast. We're very proud that they are there. And they blew open, really, all of the elements that we've come to know as the Epstein scandal, the plea deal, the plane, the flight logs, the rich and the powerful, the appalling exploitation of these poor underage girls, it was all there. And one of the many things that are in the Epstein files that I wanted to talk to you about, Tina, is what you said. The panic and also the really chilling attempts to shut this story down, that you obviously know some of that, and yet some of it was happening behind closed doors as well. And it's incredible. There's an incredible amount of documents. There's hundreds of references to the daily beast. There's 45 specific references to Conchita Sarnoff. And many people, of course, I think everybody searched the Epstein files, and sometimes you get. The website is very unreliable. I. I just tried searching for you to find, to try and work out a definitive number, and I've had one that's in the hundreds and one that's not. So I don't know what the accurate number is. But these are people who were really scared of what was going to come out. And yet here we are, 16 years later, still talking about them.
- [07:06]
Tina Brown
Yes, it is so interesting because people keep saying, all the critics keep saying, how could these eminent people have gone on meeting with, staying with, seeing and Epstein after the conviction in 2008? But that's actually not the point. I feel that the bigger story is, why did they go on seeing him after Conchita Tsiasarov's series in the Daily beast? Because in 2008, when he was convicted, he was able to tell people who were, let's say, willfully incurious. Well, yes, of course, I did make this over to this underage girl. I thought she was 16 at the time, and it was just stupid of me. And, you know, he could have blown that off. And some people who were incurious might have been naive enough to kind of think, okay, well, then, you know, that was foolish of Jeffrey, but, you know, and appalling, and it's awful that she was that age and so on. But he didn't really know. But after the Conchita Sanoff series and the Daily Beast. It was all laid out because the scandal, of course, that she revealed is it wasn't one underage girl at all. It was multiple girls. And all of their affidavits were sitting there in the police files. Girl after girl, underage girl after underage girl. Terrible stories about young girls from Eastern Europe as young as 14 being flown in, and the kind of pipeline between the model agencies and these young, young girls and these sort of traffic from all these places into the Epstein web with a promise of modeling jobs and all of this. It was all. All there. And yet it was after those stories that they still went on seeing him. Now, okay, maybe they didn't sit and read every one of the Daily Beast pieces as they came out, but as the slightest Google, if you've been thinking about, you know, would have just turned everything up. So this is what I find more egregious, frankly, is not just seeing him after the conviction, but seeing him after we had published this series. That is why I was so outraged when Peggy Siegel called me to ask me for dinner, because it was almost like my amour propre was wounded. I thought, wait a minute, we've been doing all this reporting on this guy, this pedophile, this terrible abuser of women, and you are actually calling me to invite me to dinner when you know that I've published this stuff. So that was kind of also. I think that's been sort of under. Under sort of scrutinized, essentially, as it wasn't just the conviction, it was the coverage that had followed that made. No one could say they really didn't know he was such a terrible person because it was all there online.
- [09:40]
Hugh Docherty
And the thing that we definitely know is who knew every word of this coverage was Jeffrey Epstein, because he was, quite frankly, obsessed by the Daily Beast. One of the most insightful documents is an email that he sent to himself which listed all the things that he said were, and I'm using his words, libelous. And the. The things that he said were libelous were that the Daily Beast was calling him a paedophile. We obviously. Tina, you are obviously absolutely right that he was. That he was a child molester and that he committed sex trafficking. And he knew this. He knew that we had written this. It was there on Google.
- [10:25]
Tina Brown
Yeah, I know. And I mean, but you see, he didn't sue us in the end. After all the saber rattling, he didn't. Because, you know, I actually wanted to.
- [10:33]
Hugh Docherty
Bring that point up because we found in the files, and I know, you will have remembered this at the time that his lawyer wrote directly to you a three page letter. And I should say it's worth pointing out to people who maybe don't know lawyers get to invoice more money the longer they write these letters. I didn't know that it might be related, but one of the things he said was that you were committing defamation per se, by publishing. When you got that, what was your reaction?
- [11:08]
Tina Brown
Well, I felt so confident of Conchih's reporting. I mean, you know, we had spent so long, I mean, Edward Felsenthal, who was then my executive editor, really cool, former Wall Street Journal, you know, a tremendously judicious editor. You know, this is not somebody, you know, he spent so many hours, you know, overseeing every granular thing in this series, particularly as we knew that there was a very strong possibility that we would be, you know, actually sued by Epstein. So I was very confident, you know, about the reporting and very confident in Conchita because she is a very serious person. I mean, she was the last thing anybody could say was a tabloid journalist. She was actually and campaigner against human trafficking who had sort of stumbled on the story in that work. That was what was interesting is the way she got the story, not because she was a journalist hunting it, but because she had interviewed a Mexican sex trafficker in the Palm beach stockade in the course of her human trafficking campaigning work. And it was this sex trafficker that said, many of my customers are people who live right here in Palm beach, you know, important business people. And that stunned her. And then she suddenly had a kind of twig because she'd seen a small item about the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in the local papers in Florida. And Contiga had actually knew Epstein. I mean, she'd actually gone out on a date with him a few years before, you know, because she was a woman about town at a time when Epstein was about man about town. So she knew Epstein. And very, very resourcefully, she then decided to go and look at, look up the case, really go into the case. And that's when she was hit in the face by, you know, all of these affidavits from these girls. And that's when she then tried to actually, she approached many people. I think she tried to do a book first, actually, but no one was really interested. And she brought it to me because we at that time, you know, for 10 years, I produced, you know, with my team, the Women in the World Summit, where we had done many, many, you know, great discussions about, you know, the egregiousness of sex trafficking, underage girls, you know, teenage marriage, all of these things that were very much a concern of the whole Women in the World Summit. And she had, you know, she thought, well, obviously we care about these topics because we're doing that. And that's actually why she decided to really bring it to me, because she thought that I would be interested in the topic because I'd shown interest already by what we'd put on the stage. And, indeed, it does interest me and did interest me very much. I mean, I think it is just horrendous, you know, and everything we're seeing since is just increasingly horrendous. I think one of the most awful things that came out, I think the last batch was that pathetic picture of Virginia Giuffre at Naomi Campbell's birthday party in the 90s. And she'd been dragged there by Epstein and Ghislaine. And really, you're stunned because you look at all of these kind of big celebrities that are partying around in this boat with Naomi Cavill. And there's Medea Giuffre. She looks like she's 12. She's so clearly a child that it's kind of shocking because everybody there must have thought, this is a child. And did nobody say, like, what is she doing here? Like, who did she come with? Like, why is she here? And it seems like nobody did, you know? And that is the sort of sad, heartbreaking thing about all this, really. And indeed, all the stories of the girls. Cause, I mean, they're just. They were so. Epstein was such a Satan in the way that he played on their hopes so much. You know, all of these girls, or most of them, nearly all of them, anyway, it was about. They wanted to go to college, they wanted to be paid for their green card, whatever, or to go to. A lot of them wanted to sort of go to college, to be paid to go through college, or were told that he could pay for their training and whatever it is that they were trying to do. There was a sense of their aspirations, which is why they were cottoning onto Epstein. It wasn't just like he was a sugar daddy in a wallet. Most of them were kind of aspirational girls, actually, who seemed to kind of feel that, you know, because he was really good at that. I mean, he would say, I'm terribly interested in your artwork, your painting, your, you know, your desire to be a dentist. I mean, your desire to be an osteopath. I mean, he had all these kind of supposedly paternal interests in all their career and, you know, and he did give them money and so on. And so they became sort of hooked by their own hope of him being a passport out of the life. Didn't realize, of course, that he was the passport into the life. I mean, that they would never get out of the life, really, if they were involved with Jeffrey Epstein.
- [15:41]
Hugh Docherty
One of the most heartbreaking pieces of FBI or police, I think documentation in there is it's just a table of the promises that he had made these girls and in the course of sexually abusing them. And it's exactly all those occupations and aspirations. And there was one he promised he would buy a secondhand car for. But one of the things we're talking about, Conchita Sarnoff, some of the extraordinary documents that are in there as well are her engagement with the U.S. attorney's office down in Florida in the aftermath of the. While she was reporting, in the aftermath of the plea deal and the way in which they tried to shut down her inquiries. Just before she published, Conchita sent a very incredibly detailed 16 question request for comment to them. And the internal documentation shows how worried they were. And one who remains an unnamed assistant U.S. attorney writes another, is stuff pending on this, so we can just take the easy way out.
- [16:51]
Tina Brown
Oh, I didn't see that. That's.
- [16:53]
Hugh Docherty
Yeah.
- [16:54]
Tina Brown
And. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I mean, you know, Epstein had them all in his web. I mean, you know, apparently he had a. You. A mole in the police, in, in the police department as well. I mean, he. Everybody was kind of. There were always people who were on his payroll. I hadn't read that particular exchange, but it is extremely chilling. And was there any explanation there for why they wanted to, quote, take the easy way out?
- [17:21]
Hugh Docherty
Absolutely not. The response was our position is the investigation is still open and pending. And this person wrote back, how is it pending? And there it runs out. And as we know, of course, there are 3 million unpublished Epstein files. So is the answer hidden there? We don't know. But I think what it speaks to is this incredible barrier that you were able to overcome to get that story published and the fear and the institutional cover up that you came up against.
- [17:53]
Tina Brown
Well, I mean, there's nothing like being sort of, you know, aggressive and ignorant at the same time. I mean, it's like at that point, Jeffrey Epstein was not this kind of mythic demon that he is now. Right. I mean, I had met him, you know, in a reception for one of the first Clinton initiative reception in 2005, and you know, briefly, and he was just one of those rich guys, you know, percolating around and who was sort of on the fringes of sort of the action, really. I mean, not an outsider, but someone who certainly wasn't a major figure. This is no, like Jamie Dimon or someone. He was just a kind of slightly. A bit of a kind of user, clearly an operator. He had these dead eyes that I always found very. I didn't, you know, I thought he was a creepy social climber was my instinct. I engaged with him for a few minutes and that was it, and that was the end of that. So he wasn't, you know, considered this. This mighty figure titan or something in American finance. And, you know, but at the same time, the more she reported, the more kind of alarming it became because of the people on those flight logs. I mean, when you find that Bill Clinton is on the flight log, that, you know, former ambassador Bill Richardson is on the flight logistics logs, that, you know, Ehud Barak, you know, from Israeli former Prime Minister, was on the. You know, then you start to think, oh, my God, the guy is so hugely well connected. And it was puzzling. But I also know. And do you know, and I think it is true that the interesting thing about Epstein is the whole sort of. Sort of melange around him. They were all kind of involved for different reasons. In a funny way. I mean, they're the ones who are looking always for the sex and the girls and the fact that he was such a kind of font of just satisfying people's most kind of insidious fantasies, really. And then there are the ones that were just trying to grift in the same way that they're trying. He's trying to grift on them. He's trying to grift on everybody all the time for information, if not for money. And then there are people who are trying to grift on him. You know, they want to ride on his private plane. They want him to get their kid into, you know, into a fancy school. There's a case, for instance, of Brad Karp, who was the erstwhile chairman of Paul Weiss, who says, can you get my son into a film job like on Woody Allen's? So there were all these people who were just in this favor bank of this elite world that we all know very much is the way the world goes around. And they were all there for different reasons, but at the end of the day, they were all ignoring the elephant in the room that they had no business ignoring, because after we published those pieces, there was nothing, you could say that was ambivalent about Jeffrey Epstein's conduct.
- [20:37]
Hugh Docherty
I'm just. You were out in that world to some extent at that time. How did people, what did people say to you after you published.
- [20:47]
Tina Brown
Well, you know, as I say, because he wasn't such a big figure, there were quite a lot of people who would say, that's a really interesting piece about that guy Jeffrey Epstein. Wow. You know, and it's like, I wonder what Clinton's involvement was. Actually the main interest of the pieces was what was Clinton doing on that plane. And I can't remember why that didn't blow up more than it did. And probably a big news thing happened and people got distracted, as we know. I mean, there are stories all the time and they're sort of riding along in that kind of slightly under that level of breaking through. And that's where it rode. It rode slightly under the level of kind of bursting out and didn't get, I don't think, a great deal of TV coverage which I think would have helped to have it break out. It didn't. It was just, you know, people noted it who were in that world and in that swim and software. But it didn't have the same kind of boom that the series by Julie Brown in the Miami Herald had, because her piece, which was published many years later, happened at the time when Acosta, who was of course the Florida prosecutor that she was writing about, was then nominated for Trump's cabinet. So Acosta suddenly becomes a figure that people are looking at. And secondly, it was posed MeToo. When I think things did change after MeToo, I think that people were looking far more closely at the behav of the rich and powerful. And so those two things kind of. And you know, Julie did a great job. I mean, she brought many more much, you know, additional great reporting to that whole story. So that's, I think, why it sort of stayed sort of swimming underneath the radar as it did.
- [22:19]
Hugh Docherty
Tina, hold that thought. We will be right back. And we are back with the legendary Tina Brown. One of the things about being preemie too, that jumps out of that three page letter which on the subject of rich and powerful, was from Kirk Clinton Ellis, who are well known as being one of the most powerful law firms and was from Jay Lefkowitz, who had worked for George W. Bush before he then went to work for Kirklandelis became Geoffrey Epstein's defense attorney. But one of the things that he wrote to you that jumps out was the willingness to attack the victims, to talk about them, not Being innocent. And that seems like language from another era now, but was obviously part of the way that this wall was put up around Epstein.
- [23:11]
Tina Brown
Absolutely. I mean, the whole idea was, again, it was sort of pre. Me too. Essentially, after MeToo, people began to look at victims of sexual assault and underage girls in a disparate, more. Far more sort of heated lens, if you like, a far more understanding lens at that time. It was like these girls, you know, they were sort of semi, semi sex workers at this point. And some of them were sex workers, some of them weren't, but they all knew what they were doing. Well, I mean, it's insane to say that because they were so young, they had no idea what they were doing. None. And of course, the most horrible thing about it was. And we didn't really get the Ghislaine story at that time. The Ghislaine story was a sort of a later development, which, you know, those initial stories, it was all Epstein focus. But, you know, the fact is that Ghislaine, you know, you could argue that he wouldn't have wrapped it up to almost like the industrial level kind of pedophilia that he was doing without, you know, the good offices of Ghislaine. Because it was Ghislaine's ability and willingness to kind of cruise around the high school spas, you know, bars, all these things. And with her upper class, kind of cut glass English accent, disarm the girls who felt not threatened by this attractive upper class woman saying, oh, come, you know, do come over. I've got this marvelous friend who wants to give me, you know, they weren't frightened by her. She wasn't some seedy guy in a truck. I mean, she was this very attractive upper class woman. And that was in a sense part of the horribleness of that whole dynamic because Epstein could send her out and she did it with such eagerness. I mean, you know, she made this her mission. And to bring girls in. I had the late Ed Epstein, different Epstein, no relation, wonderful investigative journalist, you know, told me that one night, because he was a friend of Ghislaine at that time, they used to have dinner with friends. They all went to dinner at Elio's restaurant in Manhattan. And they were all sort of a big group having dinner and there was a bunch of young girls at the bar. They were sort of clearly sort of, you know, sort of just about. Maybe some of them even had fake driver's licenses. But, you know, they were, they were young, very young and very attractive. And they were all kind of gathered at the bar and at one point during the dinner, you know, Jelane kind of disappeared and like, Ed looked around like, where's Ghislaine gone? And he said to his someone at the dinner, where's Ghislaine gone? He said, oh, she's over there by the bar. She's getting phone numbers for Jeffrey. So she was constantly, you know, vacuuming any space she could find, getting these numbers following up. I mean, she was demonically efficient, you know, in his web. And that is why she deserved to sit and rot in that prison, because it was really. But for Ghislaine, frankly, he would have found it much harder. I mean, he did depend on the sort of underground railroad of his horrible French modeling agent friend, who indeed also hanged himself in prison in Paris. A story, by the way, which I find endlessly interesting because it hasn't really been investigated as to his death in exactly the same way in a Paris prison.
- [26:11]
Hugh Docherty
I should just say, by the way, that Conchita Sarnoff's original articles named Jean Luc Brunel as Epstein's chief enabling companion.
- [26:19]
Tina Brown
He was, he was so. So aside from. From Ghislaine, he. He was the other way that he got a lot of girls, you know, which was he. He would get them to come in to, quote, model for his modeling agency. And he did had a lot of. A lot of them coming in from Eastern Europe, Russian girls. It seems to be that. I mean, I think at that period in particular, sort of Russian and Eastern European girls were a big thing, you know, in. In this whole story. Whether or not any of those Russian girls, you know, will turn out to have been Russian assets, who knows? Because they certainly penetrated every aspect of society. I mean, we saw, you know, in the Leon Black case recently that there was this, you know, Eastern European woman who accused Leon Black of sexually assaulting her. And that became a massive. He was also part of the Epstein network. So I mean, it's all such a kind of scheme knitted together that it's going to take really quite. I think it's going to take years to really unpick it all. And I mean, one of the difficulties that every one of these batches of emails and the people in them is kind of another piece of the plot. I mean, there's so many people involved that it's hard to track down the important ones.
- [27:35]
Hugh Docherty
So many of those plot lines are very hard to piece together and partial and as said, 3 million still unpublished. But we have clues and we have directions and we still don't we don't know. Just to use that example of the U.S. attorney's office, we don't know what happened next. We don't know why they wanted to close it down. And maybe the answer is in the files, maybe it's not. Maybe it's in the next set.
- [27:57]
Tina Brown
I know. Well, that's what's so fascinating about it and of course the frustration of it because, you know, if this had been a properly prosecuted case where two years have been spent sort of organizing all of this evidence and these leads and chasing them down and prosecuting a live Jeffrey Epstein, we might have had much better route through it all. But at the moment, we're just looking at the absolutely unfiltered product which is the stuff of major prosecution investigations. And you've got lawyers who poor through it and have those boards where they're sticking things up in the network and who people are. But this is now being done kind of piecemeal in real time by every journalist who can get their hands on and has the time to pour through all these different emails.
- [28:45]
Hugh Docherty
I want to just talk. One of the things that you now devote time to is encouraging and promoting investigative journalism and particularly in the legacy of your husband, who was the greatest editor of, I was going to say, of his generation. That's unfair. Of the 20th and 21st century. Sir Harold Evans, I happen to think so.
- [29:04]
Tina Brown
He was voted that by his peers.
- [29:06]
Hugh Docherty
But yes, well, quite. And you know, we, you know, we at the Daily Beast follow in your footsteps. And I should just say to those, to those watching, I am of British origin, obviously, and you know, grew up on, on Fleet street following in his foot, you know, following the inspiration and literally the training books that he wrote. And a lot of what comes out of the Epstein files that related to the Daily Beast spoke to how the rich and the powerful attempt to silence the free press. It's an extraordinary insight into legal letters, into public relations and even into trying to fool Google into, into suppressing results.
- [29:53]
Tina Brown
It's. Right. And it also speaks to the sort of the power of the club, doesn't it? I mean, one of Harry's, my husband's great exposes when he was the editor of the Sunday Times in London, you know, in the 60s, was, you know, he did expose Kim Filmy, the famous Soviet spy who was at the top of the Foreign Office, actually on the anti Soviet desk, you know, and of course it then became a massive story which we all know it's been made into films, it's been made into, you know, with the Cambridge Spies and all that. But the thing that he came up against again and again in that story was the club. The upper classes, they all protected each other. They were all from the same school. They were all from Cambridge. They were Oxford or Cambridge. There was this class loyalty that protected Kim Philby all that time. Oh, it couldn't be him because of who he was, you know, and I'm afraid that is still true. I mean, that it's. It's maybe less today about what school did you go to, but it's certainly about, you know, where does your yacht birth? In some bath. I mean, that that group has now become what started as some, you know, unicorn, you know, billionaires, has now become an uber race, right? Who. They're all protecting each other. The amount of wealth out there right now is so stunning. And they're beginning to kind of forge their own club of morals and lack of them and sort of feeling of entitlement and feeling of everything is below them, essentially, that other people have to follow. And you really get that sense in the Epstein files, I think.
- [31:30]
Hugh Docherty
And even as you mentioned of yachts, Howard Lutnick, indeed, among the people who volunteered that he just happened to be sailing past Little St. James and would like to come for lunch. So.
- [31:44]
Tina Brown
But it was particularly delicious because of his Oscar performance on that podcast a few months back where he said, you know, I said to my wife, I will never. I will never go to that man's house. He is gross. You know, it's like, oh, and the next thing you have is like, hey, I'm going to be in the Caribbean on the 23rd or whatever, like, can we come for lunch? You know, it was pretty hilarious, actually. I mean, look, I think, you know, I think Howard Lutnick was just, you know, I mean, I don't suggest in any way that Howard Lutnick was involved in doing anything particularly nefarious. But the hypocrisy, it was quite. Was quite delicious, actually, but also speaks.
- [32:26]
Hugh Docherty
To what you said. The willful incuriosity.
- [32:29]
Tina Brown
Yes. Yeah, the willful incuriosity. It's like, oh, we're going to be in the Caribbean. Let's go take the kids to lunch with Epstein. Wait, what a minute. What about the fact we now all know that he's a multiple pedophile, you know, that he is trafficking young girls, that he is. I mean, what on earth would you want to take your wife and family for lunch somewhere like that? It's just a kind of, oh, well, you know, it's overblown. Whatever. I just don't understand that. They certainly wouldn't think it was overblown if it was being done by the super in that building. You know, I mean, there would be like, he's gotta be locked up and like, what the hell? And, you know, it's purely about the wealth, the lifestyle, the network.
- [33:13]
Hugh Docherty
We'll just have to take a quick word from the people who pay our bills. And we are discussing the Epstein files with somebody who is in them to talk about that wealth and lifestyle. You've come up against this for, you know, for many, many years of the powerful, the rich. How do we. Well, I was going to say how do we, as a free press, but how do we as a country deal with what we see in the Epstein files is this sense of the club and also the willingness of the club to protect itself. How can we. What do we do?
- [33:48]
Tina Brown
It's very alarming moment. I mean, we're very dependent on the bravery of lawyers and of individuals who are willing to say no to things. What you discover is there are very few people who, when faced with an enormous amount of money, are not going to sort of capitulate or find a way to tell themselves it's okay. You know, whether it's the sort of comedians going to perform in Saudi or attend, you know, Davos in the desert, which I happen to think is. I mean, I have not forgotten Khashoggi being chopped up. You know, I'm sure an enormous amount of people haven't, but plenty of people are now prepared to forget it. And it's all about the massive amounts of money that are being churned around. So I think the power of money to corrupt is what's really agonizing. But at the same time, you know, what's gratifying is, quite honestly, I mean, here's Brad Karp, right? I mentioned him before, who was the head of Paul Weiss. He was the first of the lawyers to kind of fold in the face of Trump when Trump did his shakedown. And, I mean, it was just. He had no need. I mean, you felt like saying, okay, so when he said, like, well, it was going to affect all their business, et cetera, I mean, okay, so maybe their bonuses are going to go from 7 million a year to 4. Is that a terrible sacrifice for, you know, for some kind of professional and moral kind of, you know, rigor? It seems like it was. So it's like the sense that people have become so corroded by this money thing is really what worries me. And, of course, it didn't really surprise Me that the Brad Karp then crops up in the files, you know, asking, you know, for help for the Hassan or whatever, because the guy's morally elastic. We know that now. And so he's now had to step down, which personally I had no regrets about. But it's quite interesting to see who stands up in the face of things. It's very often quite surprising. I mean, you never really know who the people are who are going to sort of stand up. I mean, I'm very impressed with Mark Kelly at the moment, who's really sort of found his voice in the face of this attempt to shut him down from saying that the military have to not, you know, fulfill orders that are illegal.
- [36:02]
Hugh Docherty
I mean, he has just won a pretty significant ruling from a judge.
- [36:05]
Tina Brown
He's won. He's won a significant ruling from a judge.
- [36:08]
Hugh Docherty
He's been proven a judge who was appointed by George W. Bush, so we can assume is a, you know, a rock ribbed Republican.
- [36:15]
Tina Brown
Yeah, I agree, but. But I mean, you know, I thought. I always thought he was a pretty good guy. I mean, he was an astronaut, but he's proved that, you know, he's better than that, that he's actually got a red line in the sand where he won't go. You know, And I love it when people kind of declare their red lines and they mean something. Right. I mean, it's something we must all. We're all sort of forgetting. I think there is a kind of moral slide, you know, which excess wealth and so on is leading people into. I mean, I look at, you know, what's happened at the Washington Post and, you know, it's been very distressing, you know, to see Jeff Bezos, who was such a good, you know, owner of the Washington Post for the first few years. But, you know, in the time that he's owned the Washington Post, his billions have totally accelerated to the point that he's. I forget the number. He's like. He's like, what is it, 200 billion or something now?
- [37:10]
Hugh Docherty
He's just north of 200 billion.
- [37:12]
Tina Brown
Yeah, north of 200 billion. It's money of such a kind of phantasmagorical, like the GDP of countries that, you know, that I honestly believe that, you know, they've left planet Earth, literally. I mean, you know, I mean, they want to go to Mars, but I think they've gone already. I mean, goodbye. They left just a couple of years ago, actually, mentally and morally. So that is what I think is the biggest anxiety now. And I don't know how people without the tools to fight back. And you say, well, that. Not answering the question. How do you fight back? I mean, I think journalism is a critical tool here, and we must back it. You know, we must. I mean, thank God that you're the beast still roars and that you're still doing your good, you know, smart stuff. I think that, you know, thank God that the New York Times has the Salzberger family in charge of it. Thank God that Reuters has the Thompson family in charge of it, because they don't have the same, you know, sort of cynical attitude towards truth, but they are dwindling as a race. And I think unless we do support investigative journalism, rigorous reporting, editing, that is really prudent. I mean, we're not asking for rash statements. We're asking for serious, undeterred investigations that really do get at things that people don't know and tell the truth. Without it, we're absolutely cooked. I mean, we can't. We have to support journalists. And the tragedy is how very few people are doing so, you know, they're just not. And it's almost as if they've sort of given up on the idea that journalism or feeling that journalism is some kind of optional extra or something, which of course it isn't. I mean, it's. It's absolutely critical. And that's why I started the Truth Tellers Summit in London, which I do every May when I'm doing it again this May in Harry's name, which is a great convening where we actually valorize the journalists. It's not a kind of what I call media bloviation fest. It's actually saying, meet these incredible journalists from reporting on Maduro, from exile in Miami. And they've been doing it, and they're so threatened constantly, all these amazing Russian exile journalists who are in danger every day, and they put their lives at risk to just get the truth out. And they're certainly not doing it for money. There is no money in it, as you well know. As we.
- [39:33]
Hugh Docherty
As we well know. Yeah, we all know.
- [39:35]
Tina Brown
I mean, people in journalism are, you know, they're only doing it for. Because they have a passion for the truth, you know, they're not doing it, you know, to make millions of dollars. It's one of the few professions that this got tracks these people with great, you know, vocational attitudes to their work. And I love them to death, frankly. And, you know, I have a great passion for journalists, actually, and always have. I mean, I love them as a tribe. I really do. I mean, because they just. I love the way they make trouble, they get into trouble and they just keep going. I mean, it's a wonderful thing to see.
- [40:11]
Hugh Docherty
I do want to say, by the way, something I should probably said earlier is that among the many correspondences that Epstein sent, he also wrote to iac, which is the parent company of the Daily Beast. And it's of course, Barry Diller is the. The chairman and CEO and basically owner of iac. And Epstein's lawyers tried to go around you and go above your head or however they saw that. And we, I think, should be very delighted that there was absolutely 100% backing for you. I know, from Barry Dillon.
- [40:46]
Tina Brown
So actually. Interesting. I missed that. But it doesn't surprise me because I would like to see Epstein try to intimidate Barry Diller. Barry Dillon knows who he is, what he thinks he is not a guy who backs down in the face of threats. And he has a moral center, actually. I mean, he does. He doesn't need it. I mean, he is, you know, one of the things that's ridiculous, essentially. I mean, I wrote it in my fresh hell about the Jeff Bezos is like, one thing we've learned is like, we all thought that fuck you money was to say fuck you right, when somebody tried to intimidate you. But it seems like today, fuck you money is all about getting more fuck you money, Right? But I mean, Barry Diller is of the mind and then sort of self confidence to feel that, you know, he, he knows who he is and he's, he's made enough money that he doesn't need to be threatened. And he's not out there trying to kind of scheme and connive for every next billion. I mean, he's, he, he knows how to. He's got a center, you know, and it's not very common actually. So, yes, it's. He's a wonderful person to be owning the Daily Beast. I would very much like him to buy the Washington Post Barrier, if you're listening, he would be a fantastic owner for the Washington Post.
- [41:58]
Hugh Docherty
Well, Tina, we, as I've said before, and we at the Daily Beast follow in incredibly big footsteps. And what these Epstein files revealed to us was some of what we couldn't have known about the raw courage that Conchita Sarnoff and you, you showed getting this story out there and blowing it open to the world and revealing something that resonates now more, maybe more, maybe more every day. It's a crisis.
- [42:35]
Tina Brown
I mean, I think you're doing great work at the Beast now on this story. And I think also that it's wonderful to see the Beast prospering so much in this because we have to be successful in order to keep going. So it's great. I'm so happy that the Beast is still, you know, one of the big voices out there.
- [42:55]
Hugh Docherty
Well, we are merely following your lead. And Tina, thank you for joining us.
- [42:59]
Tina Brown
Thank you.
- [42:59]
Hugh Docherty
And hopefully the Epstein files will reveal more of those truths as we come.
- [43:04]
Tina Brown
Indeed. Thank you, Hugh.
- [43:11]
Hugh Docherty
Tina, thank you for your amazing insights. Thank you for being an inspiration. We here at the Daily Beast are relentlessly scouring the Epstein files. They throw up new information and new scandals every day. To keep up, please subscribe here on YouTube and go to thedailybeast.com to find out every update. And please get into the comments. There is so much to discuss from what Tina has revealed from her opinions on the powerful. And also, also, I just want to say that I have been in the comments myself, looking at them from the last episode when I spoke to Professor Scott Galloway about his Resist and Unsubscribe campaign. Hundreds of you are taking up his call to unsubscribe some of the biggest tech companies and try and get some leverage over Donald Trump. Some people have different views. It's an amazing, fascinating debate. There's even some limericks which I. I'm not going. I'm afraid to read out because my Scottish accent does make the delivery sometimes a bit difficult. Thank you to everybody who said nice things about my accent. I will say, and apologies to those of you who are struggling with it, the biggest thanks of all goes to our Beast Tier members. There are so many now, we can't read all your names. You are supporting our journalism every day and helping us follow in the footsteps of Tina Brown and King Conchita Sarnoff. Thank you to all of our Beast Tier members. There are now so many of you, we can't read out all the names. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Please everybody, remember, as Joanna would say, be beast. And a special shout out to our production crew, Devin Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro and Neil Rosenhaus.
- [44:53]
Tina Brown
Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, the Last Laugh and our Star Studded the Daily beast podcast@thedailybeast.com podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming.
- [45:04]
Hugh Docherty
A Daily Beast subscriber.
- [45:05]
Tina Brown
Subscribing is the best way to feed.
- [45:07]
Hugh Docherty
The Beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline.
- [45:13]
Tina Brown
Head to thedailybeast.
- [45:15]
Hugh Docherty
Com membership podcast and sign up today.