00:02:54.700In a pretty interesting exchange, I thought.
00:02:57.160So, listeners might not know my lore, and I'm going to get into it in a second, but like, broadly speaking, Jeffrey Epstein, who, as we said, was initially convicted on child sex abuse charges in 2008, but got this kind of sweetheart deal that got him out of jail very quickly.
00:03:16.360His jail conditions were very, very lenient. And because he was not meaningfully incarcerated with a sentence proportionate to his crimes, he was free to go out in the world and continue raping and abusing children for another 11 years until his death.
00:03:36.640So this is a guy like the failures of the legal system to take seriously abuse, making the state effectively complicit in sexual abuse.
00:03:48.540Like this is a great case study in Jeffrey Epstein.
00:03:51.700But when the Me Too movement sort of erupted in October, November, December 2017 into early 2018, Epstein was very, very interested.
00:04:02.780He was paying very close attention to the progression of the Me Too movement. He was exchanging a lot of communications about the Me Too movement, both with men who were being accused of sexual impropriety during that time, for whom he often served as sort of like an ad hoc, informal PR advisor, legal advisor, sort of strategic advisor, as well as just sort of a fellow traveler and shoulder to cry on.
00:04:32.780He was a sort of clearinghouse for anti-Me Too sentiment among many powerful people, such as, you know, Sunni Previn, the daughter slash wife of Woody Allen, you know, powerful elite lawyers, powerful publicists, men who feel put upon, who would both, you know, go to him to talk about how Me Too had gone too far because they knew that their friend, the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, would understand and would also like sympathize with him.
00:05:02.020Right. So like Noam Chonsky, the linguist and genocide apologist, as it happens, talked about how horribly Epstein was being treated when Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald revived interest in his abuses with a case and referred to the Me Too movement as hysteria.
00:05:20.520And so he was really invested. And one thing that some people wanted Jeffrey Epstein to do was affirmatively support efforts towards backlash.
00:05:31.480So he was sort of cultivating backlash sentiment in his own elite circles, but he was also being approached to materially support formal backlash efforts.
00:07:52.980And something they told me at the time was like, look, our sources are telling us that this lawsuit is funded, that a third party is paying for this plaintiff's lawyers because he doesn't have money to pay his lawyers by the hour.
00:08:09.600And you don't have any money for them to collect in an eventual settlement and take a cut of.
00:08:15.740So it's not clear why he would get lawyers for this case otherwise.
00:08:22.160I don't know if it's true. I don't know if the lawsuit was funded. I don't know who funded it, if it was funded. But that's like what they told me was going on or was likely going on. And that's why these emails sort of like, frankly, when you sent them to me, I was really freaked out. I was like very upset.
00:08:40.440I was not thrilled to find out that I was in the Epstein files, but this is a conversation in which people who have an ideological opposition to Me Too are talking about my case to Jeffrey Epstein.
00:08:57.840Yeah. Maybe I'll read some of these to people. And I must say, I shared your sense. Like on the one hand, when I saw these, there was a feeling of just queasiness. I realized immediately what this was, precisely because I had wondered who had funded the lawsuit against you.
00:09:17.000And on the other hand, there was a little bit of a thrill
00:09:19.280in that something that I had long suspected,
00:09:22.100not necessarily Epstein, but I was like,
00:09:23.440these are going to be men that have an above average
00:09:26.680rooting interest in making sure that survivors
00:09:29.880are not believed and are reluctant to come forward.
00:09:34.120You know, this isn't, they could have gone
00:11:17.040I think like one of the closest parallels to Jeffrey Epstein is like Diddy, whose allegations imply the same sort of like network of coordinated enablers, right?
00:11:29.800And a large number of alleged victims.
00:11:32.460But that's a group of primarily black people, black accomplices, black victims, right?0.84
00:12:20.720The email from Lauren Stein contains what he explicitly calls the writer that ended up suing you, his pitch.
00:12:28.540You know, the way you'd pitch an article.
00:12:30.200This guy's pitching, help me sue this person.
00:12:34.020And this is what Lauren Stein forwards to Michael Wolff alongside a link to the writer's Wikipedia page, which is interesting because his Wikipedia page is blocked out.
00:12:46.540It's like his name's in here, but the Wikipedia page is blocked out.
00:12:49.840The Justice Department didn't have time to block his fucking Wikipedia page and protect his identity that way.
00:12:54.880Somehow, like, there are names of Epstein victims in these files.0.92
00:13:18.620And then Michael Wolff writes to Jeffrey, jeevacation at gmail.com, in case you want to email him.
00:13:26.180At first, being like the lower email is almost self-explanatory, kind of making the connection that all these men have been accused, and then finishing up with thoughts.
00:13:36.880And then he follows up, not actually very long after that, give it some further thought if you would.
00:18:01.060with a couple of extra steps thrown in.
00:18:03.900And what's really telling about these documents to me as someone who's been studying this stuff is, you know, I've thought about the media man list basically since it went viral in October of 2017.
00:18:15.260And the whole fear of cancer culture that sort of washed over establishment journalism and academia, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:18:23.540Especially the fields that were represented on disclosure lists and series of disclosures like this was all about the idea that like, oh, there's this big faceless mob out there uniting against these poor single men.
00:18:37.640But I realized in reading this email that, like, in some way, that story is a complete inversion of the reality.
00:18:47.000My guess is that no two women who submitted a story onto that list have ever spoken about it, right?
00:18:55.560I imagine that they don't know who each other is, and I'm guessing they, after what happened with your lawsuit, are very likely not to admit to the fact that I wrote those words into the Google Doc, right?0.51
00:19:07.300Meanwhile, the guys on the list used it as a fucking Rolodex to get in touch with each other.
00:19:16.420It's really that, like, the solidarity that we've been told to fear, right?
00:19:20.160The online mob that lobs accusations turned out to be essentially, I mean, I think that, you know, in a broader sense, like, yes, it brought feminist consciousness to the front.
00:19:29.480It, like, got people to think about and talk about this stuff.
00:19:32.940But that was essentially, that was an intangible.
00:19:34.780That was about changing the zeitgeist, maybe.0.80
00:19:37.620But the people who were actually using that Google Doc to find friends were the people who were, you know, the shitty media men, right?
00:19:46.540One thing I noticed about men who were named on the list is that some of them seemed to understand it as like a point of pride or a testament to their own virility.
00:19:56.740A couple seemed kind of embarrassed and sort of pivoted away from their naming on that document as quickly as they could.
00:20:03.760It's like 75 people, you know, there's variations among the group, but some of them really made it a badge of their identity going forward and will sort of remind people of this.
00:20:14.540And I think that's partly cynical, right?
00:20:17.180They were trying in the years when cancel culture was kind of a more reliable way to make money for people on the right to enhance their own careers through their proximity to this scandal.
00:20:29.980They were trying to enhance their own careers like sort of simultaneously as victims of an overwrought feminist mob and also as men whose masculinity and virility could be attested to by the fact that they were accused of sexual abuse.
00:20:51.220And they took a little bit of pride in it.
00:20:52.840And some of them made like very affirmative efforts to reshape their careers as sort of like cancel culture victims.
00:21:01.560And I think that's kind of part of what you see in this email thread about me, which I promise we're going to get away from, even though I'm obviously the most important person in the Epstein story and the most important person on earth.
00:21:14.520But I think what you see is not just an effort to find a lawyer and maybe find some funding for a retaliatory anti-feminist lawsuit, but I also think you see some people using the professional networks that have been made more open to them by their entrance into this like sort of comradely group of allegedly, allegedly abusive men to try and further their professional prospects.
00:21:42.020Like, Michael Wolff is doing very well.
00:21:44.680He does not seem to have been significantly, like, professionally damaged by the ongoing revelations of his apparently quite close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:27:08.040And Yellow Peril, for those of you lucky enough not to know, was a racist epithet for Asian immigrants in the 19th century.
00:27:16.000I believe that when the word peril was first introduced into the Epstein discourse, people were like, well, you don't know whether it's a reference to Yellow Peril.
00:27:23.940Well, the new texts have the word Yellow Peril in it.1.00
00:27:27.560So if you were trying to run interference there, just go fuck yourself.0.99
00:27:30.720But yeah, so just to give you an idea of what this can sound like, and I'm just picking at random here, right?0.99
00:27:35.980On April the 9th, 2019, Epstein texts Larry Summers, all quiet on the yellow front, and Larry Summers will reply, fairly, I've worked hard on her IMF presentation and professed some ardor. She is warm but reluctant to plan. Right? Between the lines, like, I think this is someone that is having a horrible time with this quite powerful older man who is exerting real pressure on her.
00:28:04.660One thing, Larry Summers text to Jeffrey Epstein,
00:28:07.300odds of success, I think another encounter at some point, one-third.
00:29:59.600And Epstein is writing back in his typical typoed way, like, you know.
00:30:06.760This is something, if people haven't read these, like, rich people apparently just like, do not know how to spell and do not mind confessing to crimes over email.
00:30:36.080There's like the people who seem to be, I think you can see this with both Summers and Tish.
00:30:40.940They're looking to Epstein not exactly as a pimp, but as somebody who can guide them and offer them sort of like expertise and even mentorship in their dealings with women.
00:30:51.360And I want to emphasize this is all after he has served jail time for child sexual abuse, right?
00:30:57.460And there's also, of course, Mr. Elon Musk, Nazi salute rocket man, who he said in September, he was tweeting this, he's like, Epstein invited me to his island and I refused, all caps.
00:31:11.440And in fact, from a 2012 email, we can see that it was Elon Musk who was requesting an invitation to Epstein's island going, what day slash night will be the wildest party?
00:31:22.400Yeah, he says, I've been working to the edge of sanity this year, and so once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St. Bart's or elsewhere and let loose.
00:31:32.140The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I'm looking for.
00:31:37.800So I think what we see in this kind of bucket, these guys going to Epstein for advice about women, going to Epstein because they want to join him for these wild parties, is the sense of Epstein as an aspirational figure.
00:31:52.400The sense of Epstein as somebody whose dealings with women, whose like sort of pursuits of pleasure are what these guys want to emulate, right?
00:32:03.020It's clearly like a kind of like kid brother relationship, even with men who were significantly older than him, who see him as sort of having mastered something about masculinity and about manhood and about like male heterosexuality that they want for themselves.
00:32:18.960And once again, this is fully after his pedophilia conviction.
00:32:22.400Yeah, we should be clear on this. Like, it's Google-able. They had Google in 2012 when Elon Musk was sending this.
00:32:28.280I mean, like, these men deny wrongdoing, and they frequently say that they were not aware of the extent of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse or the nature of what he had been charged with.
00:32:42.700I'm going to say the amount that I know about people in my tertiary social circle who I've like never had an extended conversation with, especially now in the age of like Instagram, you know, like gossip does not stay localized.
00:32:58.460Other people's sex lives are very interesting to a lot of people.
00:33:02.480And this is not the kind of information that would remain secret.
00:33:07.740It's the kind of information that people may have made judgments about what to do with that they now find embarrassing or inconvenient.
00:33:16.600But I think the notion that it wasn't available to them, that they didn't know, is something that I think we can be more skeptical of.
00:33:23.460You know, one lens with which I approach some of these emails, especially the ones having to do with universities, is as someone at Stanford who deals with donors.
00:33:32.960And it did occur to me at some point, like, as colleagues are, frankly, justifiably getting raked over the coals for how long they took money from this guy.
00:33:44.760I mean, the Klayman Institute is at very low risk of taking money from sex pests in the sense that we have wonderful donors who are, you know.1.00
00:36:22.600And then that brings us to bucket two, which is Epstein as a strategist and fixer for abusive men, working with them after allegations about their misconduct come forward to try and like tell them what to do and how to handle it.
00:36:39.500They come to him and say, what should I do in this situation?
00:36:43.160You were in this situation before, right?
00:36:46.260You know how this works or I want the kind of outcome that you got.
00:37:41.900Or, like, asked out on dates as your undergrads, Lawrence Krauss,
00:37:45.620He was accused of sexual misconduct by colleagues and students, which led to a BuzzFeed article and also a Title IX investigation, I believe at Case Western.
00:37:57.520I think that's where he was when this all happened.
00:40:29.820Yeah, or do, like, salvia and just trip balls while watching the Melania movie.
00:40:37.120So he's also, like, really clearly scheming with his allies to, like, try and develop their own sense of what Me Too means and what it will mean specifically for him.
00:40:49.740So one of the things he says to Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, that axis journalist who tried to conscript Jeffrey Epstein into an effort against me personally, love Michael Wolff.
00:41:02.320He and Jeffrey were emailing about all these men who were being accused of sexual violence and like losing positions of prominence.
00:41:10.500Michael Wolff was very worried about Lauren Stein losing his job at the Paris Review.
00:41:14.380They're talking about Louis C.K. and Charlie Rose and Les Moonves.
00:41:20.080And one of the things Epstein says is you and I are old news.
00:41:24.380And that was conspicuous to me, right?
00:41:27.040He clearly seems to think on the one hand that Me Too has elevated his status among abusive men
00:41:34.200and made him sort of an authority on how to navigate and get away with this kind of controversy
00:41:40.360that a lot of men are going through now.
00:41:44.380but also he thinks that it makes him look good
00:41:48.580because there's sort of like new, more distracting controversies
00:41:52.580or he doesn't understand his own predation on children
00:41:55.200as being as serious as some of what these other people are being accused of.
00:41:59.160Yeah. So then what's the third bucket?
00:42:01.680The third bucket is Epstein is an ideological anti-feminist1.00
00:42:05.020and somebody who, people who are annoyed or frightened or angry1.00
00:42:10.080about Me Too feminists and about their sort of moral claims0.62
00:42:13.760entering in the public sphere, can go to for solidarity and commiseration in their sort of1.00
00:42:19.500like anti-feminist feelings. And this is a role Epstein serves for his circles even before Me Too.
00:42:24.720He was fiercely committed to the idea that women who accuse men of rape are liars who are conspiring
00:42:32.180and are out for money, right? So this is something that's like really conspicuous. In July of 2011,
00:42:40.200He sends a series of emails to different people about this notion of, I think it was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French finance minister, who allegedly raped somebody, and one of his accusers retracted her testimony.
00:42:58.360Epstein sent several versions of the same email to different people with a story about this incident.
00:43:04.520And he says over and over again, the story is false allegations, a world of Google, unpunished accusers, fear of appearing insensitive.
00:43:13.540My favorite takeaway line from the Strauss-Kahn feminazis, these revelations mean little.0.99
00:43:18.160Don't forget that even liars can be raped.0.98
00:43:20.660The accuser in Strauss-Kahn has been found to be a liar.0.99
00:43:24.020The accuser in Andrew's case is worse.
00:43:26.080The accuser in the Andrews case, by the way, being Virginia Giuffre, the woman who was trafficked by Epstein and accused Prince Andrew of rape under Epstein's auspices, who died by suicide in Australia last year.
00:43:40.620Story was brought by News of the World.
00:43:42.600In the Strauss-Kahn case, she hoped to get money in the future and told her boyfriend, unfortunately for her, it was recorded, that she had hoped to get money.
00:43:50.080Not one English newspaper questioned the veracity of Andrews' accuser, all being too frightened of the feminist backlash.
00:45:49.400So Ken Starr is somehow involved with some kind of Title IX case.
00:45:53.920It's not clear from the context of the emails what his relationship to the case is, who is being accused, but it's some kind of like campus sexual violence situation that Ken Starr is involved with and is talking to Epstein about.
00:46:08.260So Ken Starr writes to Epstein, thank you, you're a prince.
00:46:19.400Sent from my iPhone, to which Jeffrey Epstein in November 2016 writes back, relevant to the facts, but doesn't rebuff the culture issue that the feminazis propagate.0.50
00:46:29.460Yeah, so he's keeping this man who is a right-wing ideologue, for all I know, sort of on message.
00:46:35.240This guy, it sounds like Ken Starr is making comments on a specific case, and Epstein is the one who's pulling him to the generalities.
00:46:41.240This is saying, hey, this is not whatever case it is that you're, maybe you're representing someone, maybe you're somehow involved in it, but he's saying it's not just this case.
00:46:52.900Yeah, no, this is not a guy who is understanding himself as being very well attuned to the peculiar nuances of individual rape accusations and the surrounding circumstances, right?
00:47:03.100This is a guy who sees himself on the side of men in a war of men against women.
00:47:25.060Well, it seems like with Epstein, when you got in touch with him, it was because you had a gendered grievance as a man, and you were hoping for some kind of male-on-male help from him.
00:47:35.980The number of people who show up here, and when I Google them, it's like, is a London Times editor or writer known for his controversial and counterintuitive views on society?0.99
00:48:06.420I mean, with that many trips on the Lolita Express, you know, you have to do something to justify several of the moral violations, and I think one of them might be the carbon footprint.
00:48:20.120But, you know, like, which is a thing that you recognize with Silicon Valley billionaires, right?
00:48:25.140Like, that they have these kind of weird fixations that they throw a bunch of money at, and that exists here.
00:48:31.580But you are right that, like, depending on how much of the files we now can look at, it is really striking how central this kind of anti-feminist grievance was in gathering that network around him in the first place, right?
00:48:46.640You don't see him going out of his way to give money or support to someone on a totally unrelated thing.
00:48:54.040It does tend to be like, unless there's a rape accusation within walking distance of this person, Jeffrey Epstein is not going to get interested.
00:49:02.260It's really, it is a network all about that, it seems.
00:49:05.320I will say, like, Jeffrey Epstein is not, like, necessarily a great friend.0.97
00:49:08.240One thing you see sometimes is him, like, consoling somebody in one email and then talking shit about them in another.0.85
00:54:14.940they therefore have to often quite demonstrably
00:54:18.080and conspicuously like throw other women under the bus.
00:54:20.640And I think that's what you can see happening here.1.00
00:54:22.220Not all women are feminists, folks.1.00
00:54:23.780Some of them are in the Epstein files for bad reasons.1.00
00:54:29.020Yeah, you caught yourself there at the end.
00:54:32.760Yeah, the other thing that I think we'll see more of and that's going to be interesting to think about is that, like, by and large, these are not Republican group chats.
00:54:43.440But this is also a story of how elites that ostensibly are often aligned with, not left-wing, but at least not conservative causes, are huge engines of gender conservatism.
00:54:57.000And I think that's another story here that it's going to take a little bit more delving into, but it's something that I would like to do on this podcast eventually.
00:55:03.040Because I think it's fascinating to see that it's not that the Democrats have generally okayed gender politics and then sometimes they get it wrong.
00:55:11.140It's that there are Democratic elites that have, for all intents and purposes, Republican gender politics.
00:55:18.860Yeah, I mean, I think there's been a lot of commentary on how DNC-style elite liberals and Democratic donors were really freaked out by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
00:56:07.220And really are treated with a lot of alarm and contempt.
00:56:10.300Yeah, because they're ultimately predicated on the idea that even if you're a celebrity, even if you're rich and famous, they don't necessarily let you do it.
00:56:25.300And yeah, for some reason, elites don't like hearing that.
00:56:28.440So, Adrienne, before we wrap up, I wanted to take us to one final beat, which is something that's happened really since this latest batch of declassified files, which is some pundits, both on the right for the likes of Richard Hanania and in what we might call like sort of the reactionary centrist vein with the likes of Megan McArdle,
00:56:53.920are now trying to say that the Epstein scandal is overblown,
00:57:00.980that there is a sort of excessive or disproportionate interpretation
00:57:07.220of the wrongness of his sexual abuse of teenagers
00:57:10.040and that the sense that the scandal implicates the broad elite class
00:59:43.300this didn't seem like a big ideal to us.
00:59:44.820Yeah. It's like, yeah, because you have never thought about the experience of another fucking person in your lives because you are deprived of moral compass, because you would need to be thinking about right and wrong and about power and fairness and about a potential obligation to curb your own basest impulses ever, even once. And that's like not something you guys are doing.0.67
01:00:06.240Yeah, I mean, also, I think that's such an interesting throwaway line about the dark web here. You and I have both pointed out that QAnon has at its core clearly at least some adherence that come from a place of genuine hurt and genuine moral indignation over the predation of powerful elites, of men over young girls, largely.
01:00:30.360And part of, I think, why victims advocates are so leery of QAnon in spite of that is that it tended to move predation into this kind of shadowy realm of, like, dressers named after kids and then, like, sold on Wayfair.com or something like that.
01:00:48.360And that's what McArdle is kind of leaning into.
01:00:50.820It's not like it's one of those crazy cabals.
01:00:53.640Like, no, like, these cabals are not particularly sophisticated.
01:00:57.340What did Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation empire look like?
01:01:00.520It's like, come see me in my hotel room.
01:02:24.380It was to just have young girls around, meaning that if and when something did happen, it would be unobservable and indistinguishable from the rest of it, right?0.99
01:02:35.480Which is, like, the reason why, like, the fucking Trump modeling pageants are so fucking creepy.0.96
01:02:39.140Like, does something happen to everyone who shows up at those?0.99
01:02:44.560And, like, the whole point is to kind of create a structure of indifference or indistinction where things are very obviously intended to happen.
01:02:52.420And that's why you have them all there, right?
01:02:54.160A structure of opportunity, I would say, for abusers, right?
01:02:58.480Like, where do you know where to direct your eyes, right?
01:03:00.560If you're like, oh, this feels bad, but there are 200 of them, what do I do, right?
01:03:04.220Like, it's really meant to kind of hide what's really going on in plain sight under the sheer surfeit that Meghan McArdle seems to have actually clocked, but she doesn't understand what it's there for.
01:03:15.380And I think that might bring us to the final point I want to ask you about, Adrian, which is that something I'm seeing in this like final turn among the sort of like conservative and reactionary centrist pundit class towards trying to like rehabilitate or apologize or minimize Epstein is what I think is kind of like the logical conclusion of the cancel culture debate that you have worked on and written about so eloquently.
01:03:42.840both because, like, it always has to say
01:03:45.940that, like, a liberal or, like, social justice-oriented reaction
01:03:49.120is, in fact, morally more serious than the underlying conduct.
01:04:11.180It's a conversation about due process.
01:04:13.140You know, those are process conversations.
01:04:15.680Those are about, like, what is the right way to go about investigating or verifying these claims?
01:04:22.320What is the right way to go about, like, judging an appropriate consequence, right?
01:04:26.480And that was sort of a way to not have the conversation about, like, this guy's groping his secretary.
01:04:30.960And I think what I'm seeing now from the likes of Barrow and McCardell and from the likes of Richard Hanania is this kind of like dispensing with the pretext of having a procedural conversation and just finally getting down to like the underlying values difference, which is like they don't think it's that bad for a 50-year-old man to pay a teenage girl for a handjob, right?
01:05:07.240The other thing, though, I mean, so I think there's two ways of thinking about it.
01:05:10.300One is one could think like the mask is finally coming off.
01:05:14.240The other possibility is that this is just a ramp up to the meta conversation, right?
01:05:19.100There was a moment immediately, I think, after Enduring Me Too, where also people were like, well, this is just sort of like the locker room talk kind of argument.
01:05:27.100and then it took like maybe three or four months
01:05:53.960Yes, young girls are powerful men's property is not majoritarian, even in this society that we live in.
01:06:01.800And that's when you reach for the center of the discussion by being like, why have we not forgiven these people a mere three months after these emails got leaked or whatever, right?
01:06:13.740You know, Jeffrey Epstein was a victim of cancel culture, actually.
01:06:17.280And I think we really need to talk about male loneliness and the male suicide rate.