00:00:00.580Today's episode of Diabolicalize is brought to you by QAnon and all the freaks who believed in it way back in 2017.
00:00:06.980On 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.
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00:00:57.280All 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 U.S. imprint for yesteryear, my debut novel, wants to send you a little treat if you pre-ordered yesteryear.0.95
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00:01:54.440So today we are talking about Jeffrey Epstein. How are you feeling, Katie?
00:01:59.340apprehensive i told thomas that we were doing this and he's like oh good super niche no one's
00:02:07.840covering that yeah exactly what could go wrong he's like this will really set you guys apart
00:02:12.380i know it's funny because i feel like you and i are very careful about when we dip into zeitgeist
00:02:16.980stuff like we sometimes lean into it and sometimes avoid it i've been reading jeffrey epstein stuff
00:02:22.920for like a month and a half now which has really impacted my personal psyche there is so much to
00:02:28.500talk about. And there are so many angles, and I want to highlight some of the angles that we're
00:02:32.240not talking about today. So obviously there are the victim testimonies, the stories of what young
00:02:37.120women went through, a number that is now estimated in the thousands. There is the rare portal of
00:02:43.360access we've been given into the billionaire class interiority with the dumping of Epstein
00:02:47.520files over the last year. We'll talk about that briefly, but we're not really going to focus on it.
00:02:52.100There's the politics of the Trump administration wielding the Epstein files, like a weapon that
00:02:56.440they will eventually cut their own heads off with. I think that you could write several books on the
00:03:01.220fracturing of the Republican Party over this story. You could literally fill several books
00:03:05.860with all of the redacted Donald Trump mentions, let alone the millions of files that the Department
00:03:09.720of Justice has refused to release. There is the Ghislaine Maxwell of it all, the Donald Trump of
00:03:14.900it all, the conspiracy theorizing of it all, the QAnon come to life of it all. And all of this shit1.00
00:03:19.580is like worthy of critique and people have talked about it. Okay, so we're not talking about any of0.99
00:04:04.280I feel like the way we see Epstein discussed
00:04:06.920in the cultural narrative is like not so much a man
00:04:10.580or a pedophile or a con man or whatever word,
00:04:14.340but like basically this evil and impenetrable force0.67
00:04:18.000of someone who had like so much money and so much power,
00:04:21.360Like, 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?
00:04:42.140Well, 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 about it.
00:04:56.220Like 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.
00:05:09.480but what I did notice in the brief reading and listening that I did about it was that
00:05:15.680Epstein is often discussed as a figure that's almost like preternaturally charming like they
00:05:22.320would they were talking about his correspondence with these other very powerful people and the way
00:05:27.360in which these powerful people were opening up to him about these very intimate matters
00:05:33.600existential matters, spiritual matters, sexual matters, that he almost elicited a degree of
00:05:40.460unusual trust from people. And so I definitely picked up on that superhuman, oh, there's something
00:05:48.240very different about this person vibe. And I think that more broadly, my takeaway from the
00:05:55.060discourse that I've seen so far is that it almost feels like because the QAnon theories were more0.56
00:06:02.800correct than they were wrong, that we've kind of collectively begun to treat Epstein almost
00:06:09.540like a skeleton key for understanding or unlocking the Trump phenomenon more broadly,
00:06:16.060because Epstein has turned out to be so central to a lot of the dark mythologizing that Donald
00:06:22.040Trump himself did about the United States and about the quote-unquote elite or the swamp during
00:06:28.280his ascendance of his first term and kind of like how he became the center of gravity
00:06:32.960in American life, that Epstein feels so connected to Trump's ascendance that it kind of feels
00:06:39.500like there's this sense that if we can just understand Epstein, if we can just make sense
00:06:43.660of and uncover and reveal what this man has been doing, that like, we'll understand all
00:13:00.180And 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?0.98
00:13:24.980And 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.
00:13:38.040I 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. It's 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.
00:14:07.780So, I'm going to have you read some little info from the New York Times about Epstein's early years at Bear Stearns.
00:14:16.380It's Bear Stearns. I can't for the life of me remember or care.
00:14:19.480So, I'm going to move back and forth, and I won't really apologize for that.
00:14:22.980Before I read this, what's interesting is, like, a lot of the defenses that have been leveled,
00:14:28.120particularly, I think there's a pretty famous clip from the Megyn Kelly show where she's like,
00:14:31.860they weren't children, they were teenagers.
00:18:48.060is crazy. It honestly just to me is such a funny reminder of A, how fake money is, and B, how fake
00:18:55.920capitalism is. Yes, yes. There does seem to exist like an Anna Delvey style person, like the type
00:19:02.440of person who can essentially delude themselves and everyone else around them into creating a
00:19:09.520lifestyle and accessing a level of wealth that is like basically unthinkable to anybody who is just
00:19:16.020going about life trying to play by the rules of the system. It's kind of mind-boggling.
00:19:22.520It is mind-boggling, and you're kind of hitting on what I'm clearly trying to communicate here,
00:19:26.260which is it's clear that he has skills. I don't think anyone would deny that. But the idea that
00:19:31.380we have framed these skills as a financial genius are very interesting to me, and either A, say a
00:19:37.860lot about how we actually perceive the financial system in America, or B, say a lot about the
00:19:43.400leeway that we give men who end up making a lot of money and like basically try to find excuses for
00:19:48.960how there is legitimacy here. Like when I read about Epstein's money foibles, I'm like, this
00:19:54.280guy should be in the LuLaRoe category. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And instead he is being framed
00:19:59.120as, well, he's with Bill Gates and he's emailing all this geniuses. Yeah, financier. Well, and also
00:20:05.160famously, Bear Stearns is one of the firms that went under because of the great financial crisis.
00:20:10.080I'm clearly so averse to learning anything about Bear Stearns.
00:20:13.960Bear Stearns is one of the firms where its collapse because of the mortgage-backed securities fraud was one of the first major events that then, like, created the great financial crisis and, like, the unwinding of all of that fraud.
00:20:30.800And so it's just, it's like Lehman Brothers, like, when you hear one of these names, you can basically equate those firms to, like, large-scale fraud.
00:20:37.920It makes sense that he would, like, basically thrive there because probably everyone was insider trading.
00:20:42.600Totally. 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.
00:20:57.120Right. So, Epstein very quickly and efficiently pulls together this career.
00:21:02.240And again, I think 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.
00:21:25.740In 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.
00:21:47.580One evening, Schubach, who was a senior managing director,
00:21:50.740asked her to deliver a sheaf of papers to Epstein at his apartment in the Solo Tower,
00:21:55.040a gleaming black glass building on the—
00:21:57.440Dude, he, like, lives in, like, a Batman villain lair.
00:22:00.760A gleaming black glass building on the Upper East Side.
00:22:04.420Epstein welcomed her in, made her tea,
00:22:06.440and invited her to come back anytime to use the building's rooftop pool.
00:22:10.000Schmitz suspected that she was dispatched to Epstein because she was an attractive young woman.
00:33:48.640I'm 13 years old and I'm ready to wear my D cup push-up bra to math class.0.99
00:33:56.060This is where anecdotes turn teary, Katie, because I was thinking about how someone in
00:33:59.780our subscriber chat said something like maybe a month ago or something when people were talking
00:34:03.880about Epstein. And she said the most that she was ever sexualized was when she was underage
00:34:08.660and how once she actually became an adult, the sexualization kind of ended. And I was sitting
00:34:15.280with that. And I was like, wow, that was actually true for me too. The most that adult men ever
00:34:21.100overtly sexualized me was when I was underage. It was when I was 15 or 16. That's crazy. And that
00:34:28.440is really notable to think about that Epstein was partnering with the guy who basically commodified
00:34:36.060sexualization of little girls in a way that is kind of hard to compare to any other company.
00:34:41.140so yeah it's not at all clear to me that jeffrey epstein was manipulating the market or trading
00:34:48.500like crazy there are a lot of smart guys in finance there are over 33 000 hedge funds in
00:34:53.240the u.s every single person who runs a hedge fund has had to convince at least a small number of
00:34:58.060people that they're a genius that's how it goes you have to be convinced that these people can
00:35:01.620like outperform the market in order for you to give them money it's not clear to me that epstein
00:35:06.080was better than any of these men and understanding the market it's clear that he was willing to lie
00:35:10.520cheat, and scramble to take money from other people. And it's clear that once someone becomes
00:35:14.940rich in America, that signifies to us a level of value and intellectual worth that is very hard to
00:35:23.060claw away, even if they don't actually earn it. That does feel like an extremely important part
00:35:28.760of this, that A, again, I'm going to double down on the tax code loopholes of it all and the nature
00:35:35.640of compounding. Once you become rich, it is very easy to stay rich. You actually have to work
00:35:40.740pretty hard to fuck that up because your money starts making so much money for you. That's just
00:35:46.100the nature of capital markets and financialized economies. But B, to your point, the very nature
00:35:53.840of wealth, consciously or subconsciously, does lead people to assume that you must have done
00:36:00.160something impressive to get it. It's so intertwined with the Puritan work ethic. And again,
00:36:05.640the way that meritocracy and work ethic is weaponized against regular working and middle
00:36:11.300class people to believe that if they work hard enough or are smart enough or can, you know,
00:36:16.540what's the survivor slogan? Outlive, outwit, outplay, or whatever. If you can do that,
00:36:21.040then you too will become rich. I mean, I think I saw something the other day that said
00:36:24.100something like 53% of Americans say they look up to billionaires. And again, I cannot emphasize
00:36:30.180enough, one of the smoothest paths to becoming ultra-rich in the United States is going into
00:36:36.560finance and banking, where you are not adding any value to the economy. You are not inventing
00:36:41.800anything. You are not starting a company. You are not innovating. You are literally skimming off the
00:36:46.700top of somebody else's fortune, or you are skimming in a more egregious way. You're skimming
00:36:52.060off the top of pension funds, and you're getting a percentage of thousands of people's retirement
00:36:57.420savings. The people who are actually doing the work in the economy. You're fucking over the
00:37:01.820firefighter. I'm so happy that this is a thread that you're pulling on and highlighting that like0.99
00:37:06.940the assumption that somebody has money has money because they are smart or savvy or are in some way
00:37:14.640intellectual and that you can then apply that expertise or intellectualism like across the
00:37:19.920board broadly. We lend so much credibility to rich people in subjects that they know nothing about.
00:37:25.980And 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.0.68
00:37:43.280So 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.0.52
00:38:07.680Okay. 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 fucking 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.
00:38:31.900What 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.
00:39:36.980Epstein is said to run $15 billion for wealthy clients,
00:39:40.920yet aside from limited founder Leslie Wexner, his client list is a closely held secret.
00:39:45.580A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists,
00:39:51.700yet possesses no bachelor's degree. For more than 10 years, he's been linked to Manhattan
00:39:56.400London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert
00:40:02.200Maxwell. Yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes
00:40:08.800as he scours the world for investment opportunities. Yeah, I'm sure that's what
00:40:14.840he's looking for. He owns what he's said to be Manhattan's largest private house, yet runs his
00:40:20.880business from a 100-acre private island in St. Thomas. Is that Little St. James? Yep. Okay.
00:40:27.360Power on Wall Street has generally accrued to those who have made their open bids for it.
00:40:31.900Soros, Wasserstein, Kravis, Weill, I don't know some of those last names. The Sturm und Drang of
00:40:38.820their successes and failures has been played out in public. Epstein breaks the mold. Most everyone
00:40:45.100on the street has heard of him, but nobody seems to know what the hell he's up to, which is just
00:40:50.100the way he likes it. Quote, my belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money management firm,
00:40:56.920though you won't get a straight answer from him, says one well-known investor. He once told me he
00:41:03.460had 300 people working for him, and I've also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one
00:41:09.580never knows. It's like looking at the Wizard of Oz. There may be less there than meets the eye,
00:41:15.060end quote. Says another prominent Wall Streeter, quote, he is this mysterious Gatsby-esque figure.
00:41:21.160He likes people to think that he is very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness.
00:41:26.520The whole thing is weird, end quote. Any thoughts? That's really interesting.
00:41:33.380Nothing 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.
00:41:39.540And it has a dark aura, I will say that, from a distance.
00:41:43.580We actually also saw Jeff Bezos, his yacht was also out when we were on this little boat ride.1.00
00:41:51.020And yeah, you just kind of get a sense for like, oh, that's how the other half lives.1.00
00:41:55.240That yacht is bigger than my hotel.1.00
00:41:57.500Yeah. 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 on 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.
00:42:14.920but you have a high school math teacher without a college degree.
00:42:17.900He runs investments all over the world.
00:42:20.140Again, this is a guy who started his wealth building
00:42:22.720by telling a guy that he had a deal that didn't exist
00:42:25.220and just stealing half a million from him.
00:46:53.480Even the references that they are using to describe this man refer to con men and liars and fictitious characters.
00:47:01.380And we are so willing to find men attractive as liars and as con men that it's all like all good.
00:47:09.660Again, these were flattering profiles.
00:47:11.700Oh, 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.
00:47:25.620And it's like there is a strange degree of comfort with that fact, but it's never really probed.
00:47:34.560Are we talking like 25 or are we talking like 15?
00:47:39.100He's in his 50s by this point, for the record.
00:47:41.100It 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 a follow-up. You would be like, well, what's going on there? If there is so much mystery surrounding this figure, and he also seems to be constantly surrounded by hordes of very young women, I don't know.
00:48:04.660It's funny to me that even back then, that was being noticed and reported on.
00:48:09.780It's like, this was not some big secret, it doesn't seem like.
00:48:38.420Okay, I want to get into, like, what allowed us here to transcend the, like, ooh, he's so mysterious and rich to, like, oh, he's a criminal.
00:48:46.140Yes. So, this episode is an anomaly in a lot of ways.
00:48:49.560Number one, I'm not focusing on someone's billionaire status.
00:48:52.440And number two, I'm going to defend cops.
00:57:36.460I kind of think of, like, pedophilia and incest as the two crimes that are still pretty taboo.
00:57:44.540But I 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.
00:57:56.200although it does sound like a lot of people in his inner circle did know about the other charge.
00:58:01.560I think we'll never know. What I will say is, by calling it a prostitute, I mean, no one cares.0.65
00:58:06.880And I mean, the pedophilia, the outrage about pedophilia is more about the fact that they0.92
00:58:12.200were children than about the fact that they were female. Once you become a woman, it's like,0.58
00:58:17.360who fucking cares about you? Exactly. So can you read this statement by Epstein's lawyer at the1.00
00:58:21.780time on the young girls who accused him of assault? Quote,
00:58:24.420they are incapable of being believed. They had criminal records. They had accusations of theft
00:58:30.540made against them by their employers. There was evidence of drug use by some of them.
00:58:35.780So again, Jeffrey Epstein has made a career out of lying.
01:10:32.020As 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
01:10:40.900by crafting malicious cases of a sexual nature against people like me and others in order to fleece using bogus schemes,
01:10:50.440in the U.S. attorney's words and investment schemes.
01:10:54.020Unfortunately, though, I'd like to answer
01:10:55.240every one of your questions if I'm able.
01:10:57.480My attorneys advise me I must assert my Sixth Amendment,
01:11:00.300Fourteenth Amendment, and Fifth Amendment rights
01:12:34.060That is one thing when I was thinking about like,
01:12:35.560what are some things I would try to fix?
01:12:37.200There's a lot of cultural problems that I don't think you can wave away with a hand.
01:12:40.360But like, you should not be able to plea down to that
01:12:44.000if these are the charges that you want to take with someone.
01:12:46.200Because again, they just mean something entirely different.
01:12:49.580It's just a totally different accusation.
01:12:52.180And then what you're kind of stating is also what I felt,
01:12:54.920which is like, are we getting any closer to the truth here?
01:12:58.820Like, has this legal system been set up in any manner
01:13:02.280to actually find the truth about someone committing a crime?
01:13:05.620It's just kind of mind-boggling to witness.
01:13:08.920I think that you just put it perfectly.
01:13:09.960It's like, this isn't about getting to the truth.
01:13:12.280This is about whose legal team can navigate the various loopholes more adeptly.
01:13:18.720And 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.
01:13:26.960Right. 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.
01:13:38.340And I'm like, did he or did the legal system just function the way that it often functions?
01:13:43.000And like, he actually received quite a bit of scrutiny from a lot of police officers and a lot of investigators.
01:13:49.000But 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?
01:13:58.720For 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.
01:14:17.820Yeah, that I think is like the crux of most people's criticisms of the U.S. legal system and the U.S. justice system is it's actually like super untenable for an average person to achieve justice if they can't afford representation.
01:14:32.300And representation is often very expensive and reserved for the people who can afford it.
01:14:38.380It's the same reason that, like, corporations, they'll break labor law and they don't care because, A, if a corporation fucks 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.
01:14:57.160And, B, you're going to go up against a corporation and their legal team and their resources.
01:15:01.640It's like, even if you can hire a lawyer, you're not going to hire a lawyer that can compete with their legal team.
01:15:06.080So 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.
01:15:19.740Right. 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 circumstances.
01:15:38.420So they just had like a predisposition to not leveling those charges.
01:15:42.280Another 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.
01:15:51.540So there was this like really savvy decision that he made there.
01:15:54.760This is like a little aside, but I can't not address it.
01:15:57.560In the mid-2000s, the attorney in Florida who cut the plea deal with Epstein was this guy named Alex Acosta.
01:16:30.740So they then hired him to be the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
01:16:34.900He was interviewed again about this in 2019.
01:16:36.980So 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.
01:16:47.800So 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 fact.
01:17:00.200this was the case that was brought by our office it was brought based on the facts and i look at
01:17:04.420the reporting and others i can't address it directly because of our guidelines but i can
01:17:07.940tell you that a lot of reporting is going down rabbit holes what the most non-answer that's the
01:17:15.360legal equivalent of my job is to make sure people don't lose money and that's my grand strategy right
01:17:19.660so anyways like again what are we doing one of the many rabbit holes i didn't want to go down0.68
01:17:23.440like i think that there's a lot of interesting shit taking place like epstein at one point0.93
01:17:27.320had a passport for a different country with his name on it. He had very weird emails with a number0.96
01:17:32.360of Israeli officials. There was a lot of weird shit going on. That's like not the focus of this0.99
01:17:36.580conversation, but I just find it hilarious that a Trump guy was like, yeah, no, he was an
01:17:42.140intelligence operative. And then later he was like, there is a lot of things happening in the world
01:17:47.840and I have said a number of things. And I've seen those things and I've read those things.
01:19:38.140You know, there's a lot of interconnection here.
01:19:39.760So anyways, Virginia starts working as a spa attendant,
01:19:42.320and then one day in the year 2000, okay,
01:19:44.960So 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.
01:23:38.600And finally, one day, the Australian police show up at her door.
01:23:42.140So 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.
01:23:50.260She files a lawsuit in 2009, one of the many civil lawsuits against Epstein.
01:23:54.980And then in 2015, she will file a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell explicitly.
01:24:00.280So by this point, 2015, Epstein has been required in New York to register as a sex offender.
01:24:06.020He has been embarking on a PR campaign to donate millions of dollars to all these philanthropic causes.
01:24:12.780The heat has been kind of quietly building, but still has not broken.
01:24:17.460Actually, can you remember when you first heard about Epstein?
01:24:51.420But 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.
01:25:11.500I want to have you read something that Virginia said
01:25:14.680in a video interview with the Miami Herald
01:25:17.100about her relationship with Ghislaine.
01:26:39.120And I 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.
01:27:07.260If 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.
01:27:24.120Right. 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.
01:27:39.200I 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.
01:27:45.780Exactly. And so as soon as she starts providing evidence, she is slammed with defamation lawsuits. So Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, I believe Jeffrey Epstein.1.00
01:27:56.560One 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.
01:28:04.580So everyone at the time is like, oh, she made $12 million.
01:28:07.800Like, you make so much money as a victim of sexual assault.1.00
01:28:12.620Later we find out it's closer to $3 million, and it looks like she didn't get it.0.99
01:28:17.820It's kind of like the Sandy Hook families fighting forever to actually get the money that they're owed.
01:28:23.100Yeah, like the court will rule in your favor, but then, like, you actually have to be paid, and that's a whole other thing.
01:28:28.260That's another thing, dude, about the justice system.
01:28:30.320It's like not only expensive to win, but even if you win, there's no guarantee that you're actually going to be made whole.
01:28:37.380Exactly. 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.
01:28:50.720a federal judge rules that Virginia cannot enter it. She wanted to enter it basically as a victim.
01:28:56.900And this judge, a guy named Kenneth Mara, Republican, said these, quote, lurid claims
01:29:02.300that she had made about Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz were, quote, unnecessary to decide
01:29:06.960the civil case. So I want you to read something he said about the evidence that she tried to submit
01:29:12.320as an additional Jane Doe for this lawsuit.
01:29:16.340Quote, the factual details regarding with whom and where the Jane Doe's engaged in sexual
01:29:21.140activities are immaterial and impertinent to this central claim. Wait, who the women were
01:29:28.880being trafficked to is not relevant to the central claim? Where they were trafficked is not that?
01:29:34.460Yeah. Lawyers sound off. I'm not a lawyer, but that seems dumb. Can we get a lawyer's way in?
01:29:41.420is this dumb? That's my point. I don't doubt that this is all technically correct or that0.99
01:29:47.180the majority of it is, but like, again, alien on planet earth. I'm like, what is the point of this
01:29:51.800then? How was it not relevant that this young woman is providing not just testimony, but evidence
01:29:57.600of what was happening with her and Epstein. And it's just like, she's not allowed to be included.
01:30:02.280It's just like totally struck the market. At another point, the judge describes her presence
01:30:07.020It's basically as duplicative, like, eh, it's redundant.
01:37:18.420They're trying to make her look not credible.1.00
01:37:20.700They're trying to go, this woman is a liar.1.00
01:37:22.660Look, she's lying about her job history to employers.0.99
01:37:25.960Look how much we can't trust what she tells us about what happened with Jeffrey and Ghislaine.
01:37:32.200And it's absolutely nauseating to hear them grill her like this when this is what a deposition about sexual assault.
01:37:42.420And we're like, so were you actually a waitress?
01:37:44.480You don't remember the specific years that you worked at this restaurant?
01:37:48.900I 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.
01:37:58.040So, 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.
01:38:44.520And that's where you also connect it back.1.00
01:38:46.460Oh, these girls lied because they wanted money.1.00
01:38:48.700These 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 5 to 20 minutes, depending on how fast they're talking, they're asking about the book she was holding the day that Ghislaine Maxwell walked up.1.00
01:39:16.160and they're like, what color was the book?
01:39:43.680Something 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.
01:39:57.940This is the standard line of defense questioning when you are trying to make a victim of abuse look not credible.
01:40:07.580This is just what it is, and it's shocking to read it, you know, word for word for four pages.
01:40:12.700But, like, I'm sure this happens in courtrooms across the country every single day.
01:40:17.300We just aren't reading those depositions.
01:40:20.320Yeah, 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.
01:40:28.040Like, you see the way Candace Owens is creating this whole world of Erica Kirk and what she's done to Charlie Kirk.
01:40:36.140And you can make a conspiracy out of anything.
01:40:39.200You can find a lie that a person said for absolutely any reason if you work hard enough.0.77
01:40:44.540And 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 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.0.76
01:41:05.220And 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.
01:41:18.100Yeah, the material reality of what's happening.
01:41:31.060And the other thing that it's making me think of truly is, like, the extent to which the swift Me Too moral panic backlash, as in, has Me Too gone too far?
01:47:53.640I 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.
01:48:02.340But 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.
01:48:14.920like Prince Andrew facing just it's like the people in the UK are actually being prosecuted
01:48:22.680and the people in the United States are president of the United States I don't think Prince Andrew
01:48:28.220was arrested I think he was yeah you okay what was he arrested on because I want to look into
01:48:32.960this I think it was like kind of disappointing he was arrested a week ago or two weeks ago
01:48:37.900misconduct in public office released regarding allegations. But OK, so it sounds like it hasn't
01:48:45.880really nothing has really come of it. To me, it just seems striking that like, oh, I'm seeing
01:48:51.220reports from across the pond that the people that have been affiliated in these emails are actually
01:48:57.180now facing some sort of legal scrutiny. Yeah. And that's just not happening here. Exactly.
01:49:02.940Which, 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 represents a real shift.
01:49:18.500Like, there is no expectation at this point that anyone will face charges.
01:49:22.820They just hand over all the files to the public and go, you can have the information, but you cannot have the justice.0.92
01:49:29.320And 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, but we aren't going to do anything about it.0.78
01:49:47.060I 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.
01:49:59.880Yeah. Well, and 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 six 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.
01:50:16.500I mean, didn't they pull – like, nothing about Trump has been released, which is obviously false.
01:50:22.960Yeah. 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.
01:50:31.020Something that I have been thinking about a lot is, like, when you think about information, the information is tainted in a bias towards Epstein from the very first file because the FBI is biased against women, not to sound conspiratorial.
01:50:44.980These police officers, even the best ones at the Palm Beach Investigators, those guys were 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 FBI tips and all the stories of women about their alleged experiences with Epstein and how many of them have 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 uncredible? Why is that one uncredible?
01:51:14.820And 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.
01:51:23.060Honestly, it's kind 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.
01:51:30.180I'm like, I wouldn't even begin to know how to make sense of any of this.
01:51:34.480I 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?
01:51:43.520Even Substack, for example, 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 was reading that were like either blatantly misrepresenting certain aspects of the files or just diverging from them entirely or taking information from a tip that was, again, not verified in a way that I am conflicted with, but also was not verified.
01:52:06.720stories of, like, babies getting dumped over boats
01:58:06.180And again, 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 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?
01:58:57.060many of them women. Local journalists are the only reason that we know that this fucking,1.00
01:59:02.820who knows if he would have ever been caught if you didn't have local newspapers that were like,1.00
01:59:08.640this guy is a fucking predator. And now the only force that is continuing to call attention to this1.00
01:59:17.120and care about it is like Thomas Massey and like women on Substack. There's still stories about it,
01:59:24.420But again, it's like the public outrage feels like the most potent component that we have right now.
01:59:32.940Yeah, 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.
01:59:46.180And his friends are all divided into camps of did they know the secret or did they not know the secret?
01:59:52.320But I think, quite frankly, all of these people are birds of a feather.
01:59:55.500Like, these are men and some women who do not see women as people.0.82
01:59:58.480And 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 I have.0.96
02:00:10.500I 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 people.0.79
02:00:20.760It 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.
02:00:39.060And I think it has really spoken to these blind spots in these conversations to suggest that what Epstein was doing was so beyond the pale and so impossible to reconcile that these people didn't know.
02:00:51.460No, these people were reconciling it all the time because that's what people do all the time.
02:00:55.380That's what Republicans do with Donald Trump.
02:01:07.980There 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.
02:01:36.020And some people, I do think some people are recognizing,
02:02:00.800Yeah, the piece was about her daughter.
02:02:02.020I actually think Celeste Davis made this connection in a recent piece that she wrote called
02:02:08.120there is one word that explains how so many men can be in the Epstein files so why is no one
02:02:12.680saying it and the takeaway was like it's patriarchy like you like rip the mask off the
02:02:17.520Scooby-Doo villain and it's like ta-da it's the hockey team laughing with Donald Trump behind in0.93
02:02:21.780the fucking locker room but she connects it back to Giselle as well because one of the things that0.98
02:02:25.480I think was so horrifying about that case was like so wait there were 70 men in this small0.99
02:02:30.940remote village that were like down to rape an unconscious woman it was like the mailman and1.00
02:02:38.020the fucking you know there's these like average ass guys that you would think they're doing this1.00
02:02:44.040horrific and evil and like unthinkable act and yet there is something so banal about the people1.00
02:02:51.420who were committing it and again it gives you that sensation of like oh this rot is at the root
02:02:57.940This is very deep. This is not specific to or unique to this one guy.
02:03:03.340Right. And in the New Yorker article you're referencing is one that kind of exposed that Giselle Pelico's daughter was also exposed to abuse and Giselle Pelico didn't believe her.
02:03:13.120This is the same thing with Alice Munro, 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 Munro did nothing about it and knew about it.
02:03:22.780this, I mean, is another conversation about like, once again, if you view people as good and bad,
02:03:28.860you will never be able to reconcile that. But if you view people as people, it becomes very easy
02:03:33.940to understand why someone can experience horrors and speak beautifully about it and still not be
02:03:39.840there for someone else. But on the note of Gisele Pelico, I'm glad you brought that up because that
02:03:43.980is another example of what I'm talking about, which is bringing this out of the scope of the
02:03:48.040billionaire class and recognizing that everyone does this. It's not just all of them. It's all
02:03:53.500of us. Gisele Pelico's husband was not wealthy. He was not influential. He was a random fucking
02:03:58.940dude who drugged his wife and exposed her to mass rape. I want to highlight the grand jury that we1.00
02:04:04.900referenced at the beginning of this conversation. Those were regular people looking at 14-year-old
02:04:09.280girls and going, do you know that you caused a crime? And again, back to the question, how did
02:04:14.900he get away with it? How did he manage these two totally different worlds? Well, they're not
02:04:18.820different worlds. It's all one world. And again, I think that's really important to highlight.
02:04:23.480But that brings me to one of the conclusions that I had after reading so much Epstein discourse.
02:04:28.100I found myself asking again and again, if it were true that Epstein represents an anomalous case
02:04:34.540and how this nation views and treats men who harm women, like if it were true that his unprecedented
02:04:39.300dented fame and power and wealth were what caused such a perversion of justice, then it would follow
02:04:44.860that the justice system would do a better job finding justice for other sexual assault survivors.
02:04:51.080Like if the implication is that it's his money and his power and his networking that caused
02:04:55.000this to fall apart, then it would follow that predators who are not billionaires or well-connected
02:05:00.920or savvy would be brought to justice. And that is not the case. So Katie, do you want to guess
02:09:14.080to ensure victim-survivors are supported and receive a justifiable outcome.
02:09:19.340However, barriers persist within society and the criminal justice system,
02:09:23.480impeding the formal reporting and case outcome of sexual victimization.
02:09:28.300That is the justice gap from start to finish.
02:09:30.560It's the moment you walk in to the moment you get conviction.
02:09:32.840And I think there is this kind of horrible dance of culture and law
02:09:37.120where, like, you can have an entire legal setup in place to, quote-unquote, protect women.0.97
02:09:40.620But 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 massages.0.87
02:13:40.840Like, 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.
02:13:58.540One 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.
02:14:12.780You 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 part of our kind of shared collective belief system, if you don't believe women are people.
02:14:33.000Yeah. I mean, to show my hands a little bit, I think part of how I went into this episode was
02:14:37.340I wrote my master's thesis in grad school to get my MFA on sexual assault myths and how they're
02:14:44.120often propagated in popular fiction. That's really interesting, Kara.
02:14:47.860I've got stuff to show you. I can show you a good time at a coffee date.
02:14:55.720I started to pay attention to the way that we were covering Epstein,
02:15:00.020And it really started to infuriate me that there would be literal titles, like how he got away with it, how the justice system failed Epstein's 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.
02:15:21.000And 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 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.
02:15:39.360But 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.
02:15:53.020We have to elevate them into something because if we don't elevate them into these superhuman evil masterminds, then we would be forced at some point to reckon with why they actually got away with what they got away with.
02:16:05.020So this finally brings me to Jessica Knoll'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.
02:16:23.520So I want you to read a section from this novel that I've been thinking about nonstop while kind of doing this research for Epstein.
02:16:32.020And all you have to know is that at his trial, when Ted Bundy finally went to court, he represented himself.
02:16:38.260So this is from the perspective of the narrator, who was not a victim of his, but whose friends essentially were.
02:19:19.380Damn. From the didn't graduate college to the charm and wiliness and intelligence, I mean,1.00
02:19:24.620it's like, I can see why you were thinking about this novel while you were reading this coverage.
02:19:29.320The 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 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.
02:19:53.040And 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 Ohio.
02:20:05.500I 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.
02:20:28.180And that's true if the guy is poor, and it's true if he's rich.
02:20:31.360I think that's actually what makes Pelico's case so unique, beyond the obvious, the scale of her abuse, is that those men did face consequences. They did go to jail.
02:21:19.700but who at least suffered cultural disgrace during this time period.
02:21:23.680Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Larry 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 U.S. women's gymnastic coach who was basically accused of molesting hundreds of women, if not thousands.
02:21:42.900Women first began reporting abuse in the late 90s.
02:21:46.460No one did anything about it until 2015.
02:21:50.000Larry Nassar, like Jeffrey Epstein, was white, but he was not powerful.
02:24:33.660And I think that this realization of, like, actually, Me Too did open a window that we were able to drag a lot of predators through for a short window of time.
02:25:00.460Yeah, I would also say I think that we view these events as like, well, these were men who were unbelievable predators.
02:25:07.480One 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 for us to believe any of them.
02:25:20.580You 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.
02:25:29.220And 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.
02:25:37.580And it's like, well, have we thought about the fact that we need like 100 girls to come forward in order for anyone to believe that any guy has done anything?
02:25:44.640It 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.
02:25:53.640it was just one time, the pattern of abuse becomes this sort of like sick and twisted
02:25:58.520math problem where it's like, how many women equal one man's reputation?
02:26:04.480How many women abuse does it take for a man to screw in a conviction light bulb or something?0.91