← The Tara Palmeri Show
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
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B
New information about the bond between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump under scrutiny ahead of the release of the Epstein files is where we start the hour. Some of our favorite reporters and friends. New York Times reporter Nick Confessori is here. He's bylined on that stunning new piece of reporting we just read from. He's also a political analyst for our network. Also joining us, Tara Palmeri. She writes the Red Letter on Substack. She has hosted two acclaimed podcast series on the Epstein case. This they are called Broken Jeffrey Epstein and Power the Maxwells. Harry Lippman is here. He's a former deputy Attorney general and former U.S. attorney. He is the host of the Talking Feds podcast. And perhaps most importantly, Danielle Bensky is here. She's one of the Epstein survivors who has bravely shared her story. She's done it here. We're so happy she's back. And she has been advocating for transparency from whoever's in power, in this case, the Trump administration. Danny. We can call you Danny. Yeah, yeah. I am always upset when I read these stories, but to read them sitting next to you is like, next level. How are you?
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C
Yeah, thank you for asking. I think it's, you know, these days are so hard on survivors because we just don't know what is going to come out and when. And we anticipate so, so much for Friday. We're hoping for so much on Friday.
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B
The deadline to release.
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C
The deadline to release is tomorrow. And so I think we survivors have really been. It's that feeling of waiting in line where, you know, you have to wait. Right. So you set yourself up to be able to wait. And then when you see these bits and pieces and you're told maybe it won't happen, or there are so many variables here that it's really hard to brace yourself for 1,000 different outcomes, a through Z. So I think survivors are really feeling that right now, and tension is very high.
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B
One of the things that you and other survivors have helped me understand is that it is the push for transparency and accountability that has brought some of you together, but that you're not like some monolithic group that has like a morning staff meeting, like, how are we gonna achieve accountability and transparency after gazillion Years.
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C
That's right.
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B
And so are some of these relationships still. Just, can you tell me a little bit about what that is like to go through this with people that you may not have even have known that went through the same thing?
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C
It's such an important thing to talk about because each survivor has their own experience, and it's all very unique. We're in different locations, we come from different backgrounds, different places, and we had this extraordinary moment where we all fought together, and there is a sisterhood in that, and it really does bond you. Like, I love these women. There is such a. An extreme bond between us where it's like, if I knew I couldn't be there at some point for my child, five other people would step in, you know, and it's just incredible to have that. And we needed that strength. And it wasn't just within the Epstein Maxwell survivor community. It was really the survivor community as a whole. We were getting all these emails, we were getting all these calls from people that had never faced what happened to them, and they're saying, like, you're doing this for women everywhere. And there's so much power in that moment. Now that we're getting closer, it feels like now we have to retreat to our own stories a little bit more because we're all looking for very different things, and that can bring up some very different things. This was classic sex trafficking, right? And a lot of people don't understand what that means. And there were people that were forced to recruit and heavily manipulated into. So there are all these layers, right. And people are dealing with a lot. So I think as a server, as a survivor community, we are really trying to figure out what is the best way to support one another through this time and give people the space that they need, or for the verbal processors, how can we be supportive of that, but just really caring for one another. It's a lot of calls all day with a lot of different survivors and a lot of different groups, but just really checking in on one another is where it starts.
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B
Are there people who hadn't talked about this? I mean, I know there are. I mean, there are people who hadn't told their close circle now as women, about what happened to them as girls. Are you in that category or what has this been like for you?
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C
So for me, you know, I came forward in 2021, and it was sort of. It was on a whim. I had gone to thank my lawyer, Sigrid McCauley. I love her. And we had worked together on things. So I went to Ghislaine's hearing in 2021 with no intention of coming forward. And I just wanted to be present to start to face my own story, because it had been a long time of just hiding in shame. The secrets all hide, you know, in the dark. And so I was just trying to bring. And in that moment, when I came forward, I was on the steps of the. Not the Capitol, but we were on Courthouse. The courthouse. Thank you. So we're on the steps of the courthouse, and we're leaving, and there are a bunch of reporters who are saying, is it Virginia? Because I was masked at the time. And Sigrid said, no, this is another Epstein survivor. And we had just spoken about Virginia Giuffre and her power and the original survivors that came forward. And I just felt like this amazing sensation of it's my turn to, like, I need to help pass the torch. They carried this burden for so long. Maria Farmer, Annie Farmer, Jenalisa. Like, these people who just were tremendous in all these efforts that I felt like if I don't say something more, girls are gonna feel like the way I've been living and living in this shame. So it's time.
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B
Do you think about Virginia now as you head toward the deadline tomorrow?
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C
Like, every day? Yeah. This moment would have been everything to her. I think she. It's such a shame that she was not here to see what happened with Prince Andrew and see the level of accountability that American people are pushing for. And I think she'd be proud of her survivor sisters. And I think that there, you know, not a moment goes by that all of us feel like, you know, we carry her message all the time.
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B
Tara, I think about your coverage of her. I think about journalists like you who've been on this story the whole time, aiding and helping hosts like me filling in the blanks. But I wonder what your thoughts are as we head toward tomorrow's deadline.
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C
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D
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C
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A
You know, I just got off the phone with one of the survivors, Jeffrey Epstein, and they're not really expecting a lot Tomorrow, as, as happy as they were to finally, you know, have this law passed, they're, they want accountability. Like, that's not enough. And I think they worry that some of the lawmakers, you know, they feel like they did enough, like, our hands are clean. You know, it's up to the DOJ now, but whatever happens, happens. They want follow through. And so they're worried that they're not going to get much tomorrow. And, and there's, there's really no way to, to make sure the DOJ is accountable. Right. I mean, there would need to be a congressional investigation. You have Mike Johnson sending them home. I mean, you're sending all the lawmakers out of town to not even be able to answer questions for this, for what we're going to see tomorrow, which could just be more blank pages. So I think they've been, they're happy with the victory, but they, they were jaded by the process, and I'm just incredibly proud of them. After three decades, I mean, they were able to literally stand up to the most powerful man in the world and essentially bring him to his knees. But we'll see if they end up getting the follow through that they deserve.
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B
Harry, what will they. I don't want to say what can they do? Because that's not the right frame to put around the Trump doj. But what should they do based on this law?
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E
Oh, it's quite straightforward. They should play it as an open book. But I think, as Tara says, it's just not very likely. There's so much that they can do to kind of keep things, keep a lot of question marks on the whole effort. And of course, remember that until he was forced to capitulate, Trump did everything to keep these materials from coming forward. So there are, there's a whole, like, busy squadron of people doing redactions now. That's part of it. But there's of these hundred thousand documents, three hundred thousand pages, so much we have seen before. And you have to imagine, I think it's likely consistent with Nick's reporting that there's going to be at a minimum in that trove, real evidence of there being buddy, buddy and wingman being competitive about getting sexual conquests and the like. But that could be a handful of documents. And if I'm betting we don't see them tomorrow for whatever reason, oh, there's an investigation going on. We just haven't got to them. It's such a big ordeal. On the other hand, this isn't going to stop. Right. The clamor for you Know, people, I think, are pretty aware that there's something incendiary there. And if everything tomorrow is just kind of bland, I think the drumbeats will continue. But if I. My bet is nothing too sensational emerges tomorrow.
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B
You've developed reporting on the relationship between Trump and Epstein, which is, I think, most people believe, and it has been reported out, is one of the greatest hurdles to transparency.
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F
Look, these two men were close friends for a span of years, and Jeffrey Epstein felt that he was Donald Trump's closest friend. And they spent a lot of time together. Their passion was not golf. It wasn't video games. It was chasing women. And that's what they did for fun. They invested a lot of time and effort in arranging events, parties, occasions where they can meet women, usually people who were kind of much younger than they were, right? Adults, mostly. And they had all these parties at Mar a Lago where there would be women. Some of them were of age, some were 17 models from Miami. That was the scene that was created that they spent time in. And we have not found any evidence that Donald Trump was a part of Epstein's trafficking of minors. But I think it's important to just expand the scope of our thinking about this a little more. These were two guys who wanted to get girls and women and went after them. And you can read all about it in the story. They had a practice. They had ties to modeling agencies. There were modeling agencies there. Sorry, there are agencies that would send busloads of women to Mar a Lago for parties. I've talked to women for this story who were underage and were served alcohol at Mar a Lago. And so I just want to think about the broader environment that they were operating in over that time as friends who wanted to find women. And I think there's a lot to be sensitive there. One thing we should think about is witness statements from people who went to the FBI over the years, especially after Epstein's death. I don't want to speculate as to what's in them, but there is, in their files, there are witness statements of women who went to the FBI, did interviews, and said, this is what happened to me. And I think people that I've talked to, the survivors I've talked to, would like for safe versions of their stories, redacted of their information, but not what happened to them to make it out to public view.
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B
And your sense is that that is going to be the last kind of information that is disclosed?
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F
It's hard to know. You know, as Larry was saying, there are. There are loopholes in this law that are pretty wide. And this is not an administration that is shied away from using the full scope of its authority to do what it wants. Right. So we don't know. But, you know, there are women who have talked to the FBI and want their stories out. And I think we'll see over the years if we actually see that.
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B
You're nodding a lot about that because.
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C
I think a number of us have requested our FOIA, our 302. Right. Which means we've requested our files, our own files, and we still have not seen them. So many of us.
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B
Why not? What do they say?
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C
We don't know. I mean, it's just basically, okay, we're working on it, and that's the extent of it. And some people have been requesting this for 10 years. I'm newer to this, so I've had my request in for two months, but nobody has seen their own file. So when it comes to tomorrow, if. If there is a release, it's going to take us a lot of time to look through and figure out what we're even looking at. But also how, like, imagine how much easier this would be if I had my file. And I could say, I know I talked to the FBI in 2008 on this day. Right. Because right now, 2008's a. And so we're kind of shooting in the dark. And I know a lot of survivors that are feeling trepidatious about that.
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B
You were nodding when Nick was describing what he's reported out, which is that busloads of young women and girls were taken to Mar A Lago.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I don't personally have knowledge of that. As far as, you know, I was New York based, but it seems right. And it's. The closer the survivor community gets, the more, you know, other stories and you carry them with you with your own as well. And it becomes like, that's when we say that we're like a mosaic. It's real. And, you know, although you don't speak for anybody else, you can still feel the empathy and feel what they've been through. So hearing that is just really heartbreaking to listen to.
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B
I mean, I hear it with my chest and my stomach.
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E
Just two quick points. One is these 302s, which are really are going to be the most valuable nuggets, and we'll see if they try to.
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B
So explain what they are.
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E
Yes, I will. You come and you want to talk to the FBI and they just take a report and pretty much everything you say I would. I'm surprised that you can't get it as a foia. They must give some excuse pending criminal investigation. But that's the real stuff. That's people have come to the FBI that wasn't part of the law of the prosecutions early on or the one of Ghislaine Maxwell. They didn't focus on the victims. But that's going to be the real deal. These FBI statements within and then, you know, to Nick's point, I just want to say this is the Trump of, you know, Access Hollywood. We shouldn't be surprised if what comes out is the, you know, before he's president, really a kind of roving guy.
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B
You can quote Suzy Wiles, I mean, Susie Wiles described them as, quote, young playboys.
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E
There you go.
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B
Yeah, we've got Susie.
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E
No better source than that.
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B
Correct.
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D
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B
Week, the phone would ring in Mr. Epstein's office in the Villard Houses on Madison Avenue. Trump would be on the line. On one occasion, recalled an Epstein assistant from the mid-90s. Trump refused to give any name at all. The first assistant, who often worked late, recalled that sometimes when the office emptied out, Epstein would check to see that she was at her desk and put Trump on speaker. Trump, she said, seemed to enjoy regaling Epstein with tales of his sexual exploits. And Epstein seemed to delight in how uncomfortable it made her to overhear them. Because the crimes of child sex trafficking are so heinous and known that way the world over. The casual cruelty and indifference and misogyny and predatory conduct and attitudes towards women sometimes get short tripped in our conversations about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. But I wonder what you think of what Nick and his colleagues add to our understanding of that.
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A
I thought it was amazing reporting. It really dug deep and it brought forward a number of women who remember Donald Trump. Because you have to remember there were a lot of men around Jeffrey Epstein. And if you read the reporting closely, which I'm sure you did, you saw that some of them said that Jeffrey told them to service his friends. So for all the people who ask, oh, was it just Jeffrey who had all thousand victims? No, it's clear that that's not the case. It's what the survivors have said all along. There are other perpetrators, there are johns who are out there who have not faced justice at all. But they all remember Donald Trump because Donald Trump was a celebrity. You know, he wasn't even Bill Gates. I mean, he is a famous philanthropist. He's one of the richest men in the world. But for some of these girls, being so young, he wasn't on TV every night on the Apprentice. He wasn't a household name. But they remember Donald Trump because he was. And they remember the Prince, of course, Prince Andrew, because these were famous men. They weren't, you know, heads of banks, heads of academia, heads of financial institutions. And, and they didn't. And they didn't forget the way that he demeaned them or treated them, you know, like, like meat. And the way that these are. Men are talking about their sexual exploits around another woman to make them her feel uncomfortable. It's a power play. It's a. It's a way of saying we don't really care about you and how you feel and your feelings right now, because we have than you. And this is all about power. It seemed to me from the way they talked about sexual exploits and rape in general is generally about power and having power and dominance over somebody else. So it's, it, it's just a disgusting scene. I, I'm glad that so many of the survivors have come forward and started to talk about what these scenes are like. Unfortunately, this has been happening in the modeling, in the modeling world for a really long time. And I do think that the beauty pageants also feed this kind of behavior where women become objectified and they feel like the only way to survive in these cultures that are controlled by men, where sometimes they have to hand over their passports for these foreign models, then they're controlled by Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, it's just a sick, sick world. And these men who were, as Susie Wiles said, playboys, they weren't boys, they were men in their 50s, were lording over these girls who had such little power in the situation.
- [20:04]
B
Are you still doing okay?
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C
Yeah. No, I mean, everything that she said is so spot on. It's all about power. And I think survivors get a lot of, why don't you just come out with a list, give us all the names, say the names. You have to understand that of course there's fear, tremendous fear around that. And some of us don't know Last names. It was all a power play and it was all manipulative and it was a game to Jeffrey. So I think it's just really important to have some clarity on that, that it's not cut and dry. And that's why we're still talking about it, because we need to get the answers. And in order to get the answers, we need to see the files.
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B
I mean, the threats that he has issued against members of Congress who said something about the military only following lawful orders are to try them for sedition, which is punishable by death. What kind of threats do victims face for speaking out?
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C
It's a really good question. Again, I can't speak for the whole, but I think I have heard of threats. You know, there's manipulation that happens everywhere. And so you might not know it's coming from one source, it might come from a very back ended way in, but I think that people are manipulated. And then we'll reach out to a survivor and maybe it starts with comments on, you know, Instagram or starts with in your email and then it can continue to. I've heard some survivors talk about their families being threatened and that's, that's kind of where it, where it ends up.
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B
Marjorie Taylor Greene talked about her kids being threatened after she broke with Donald Trump. It is a pattern in practice.
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F
I have to tell you, I have been a reporter for over 25 years and I have never done a story where people were so terrified of even responding to an email or returning a call. In my entire career as a reporter, I have never encountered this level of fear and terror simply to respond to a phone call or respond to an email about some of the topics.
- [22:13]
B
It makes me cry. I don't know why that makes me cry.
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E
But the idea that everyone, and this.
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F
Is not a me problem, it's a transparency problem problem. If the audience is wondering, why is it coming out so slowly? Why are so many of these people anonymous? They're terrified. They're terrified of being sued, they're terrified of death threats. They're terrified for their families, for their reputations, and they want to bring their stories out, but they're scared.
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B
Well, it takes an incredible.
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C
I would love to talk about that for a moment. I think that Jeffrey Epstein was the ultimate groomer. And I think it's something that we don't. We've talked about grooming quite a bit with Ghislaine and Jeffrey, but I do think that his end goal was to break as many girls as humanly possible. And so I just, I think about the manipulation tactics, and you can use that word manipulation lightly, but until you know the mental gymnastics of being in a room with a person that is a predator of that caliber, you don't know what it feels like. And so I think that the public just needs to be incredibly kind to anybody that's coming forward in this case, because.
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B
It takes a lot to climb out from that. That the abuse wasn't just physical.
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C
It was mental as much as it was physical. Sometimes the mental would be so much harder than the physical. It was like you were inside of a cage all the time and you had to abide by his rules, and that was it.
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B
And even though he's dead, that's still.
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C
Scary because it lives on through these other powerful people. We've never gotten to the root source of it all. We don't know where the money came from. We don't where the money went. We don't know how he ran, you know, three or multiple properties, more than three. But I think about them all running as different enterprises. So who ran the property when he wasn't there? Like, how did so many people facilitate this? So he might be gone, but it doesn't matter if this is still. This is still continuing. It might just not be with Jeffrey and Guylan. So we have to stop it.
- [24:14]
B
Danny, I'm in awe of you. Thank you for being here. An awe inspiring piece of reporting on this. Thank you so much. Tara. Thank you as always, for being here for these conversations.
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A
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