The ongoing revelations about the rich and famous who rubbed shoulders with Jeffrey Epstein are receiving extensive coverage in France. Print and broadcast media have pored over the details of the deceased sex offender and the famous names contained in the Epstein files, from princes to presidents to pop stars.
There is a French connection to Epstein in model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who was alleged to have trafficked girls for the pedophile financier. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2020 and was found hanged in his prison cell two years later. But overwhelmingly what the French media have described as l’affaire Epstein is an Anglo-Saxon sex scandal.
‘Isn’t a certain tolerance for infidelity what the French have given the western world, along with great wine?’
Is there perhaps a touch of schadenfreude in the French response? For decades, the Anglosphere has sniggered at the sexual shenanigans of French politicians. Former president François Mitterrand kept a mistress for 33 years and their love child was a well-known secret within the French media. When he died in 1996, his mistress and his wife stood side by side at the funeral.
Jacques Chirac, who succeeded Mitterrand, was a notorious lothario with little staying power. “Monsieur 15 minutes, shower included,” was his nickname among his paramours. François Hollande, president between 2012 and 2017, was widely mocked when he was pictured traveling to assignations with his mistress on the back of a scooter. The LA Times commented, wryly: “Isn’t a certain tolerance for infidelity what the French have given the western world, along with great wine, excellent cheese, chewy baguettes and existentialism?”
The scandal that engulfed Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011 was of a far more serious nature. Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a maid in a Manhattan hotel room. The charges were later dismissed – but the damage to Strauss-Kahn’s reputation torpedoed his ambition to run for the French presidency in 2012.
Strauss-Kahn’s insatiable sexual appetite had been common knowledge in Paris for years. It is said that when president Nicolas Sarkozy nominated Strauss-Kahn for the head of the IMF in 2007, he warned him to watch his step in America: “Be very careful. They don’t joke about this sort of thing, [and] your life will be examined under a magnifying glass.”
The warning fell on deaf ears. One year into his job at the IMF, Strauss-Kahn’s name was splashed across the world’s press after it was revealed he had an affair with a subordinate. The New York Times reported in October 2008 that Strauss-Kahn would “have to work to regain the trust of the staff, particularly female employees.” Then came the 2011 scandal, which unleashed a torrent of opprobrium in the American press. New York’s Daily News adorned its front page with a photograph of Strauss-Kahn under the headline “Le Perv.” The New York Post told him to “get back on that Air France jet and soil your linens back home, Mr. Big Shot. We don’t like your kind.” The New York Times declared that “we knew that French society had a history of shielding powerful and talented men accused of scandalous behavior with young women.”
Such condescension has now come back to bite the American press. French news website Atlantico remarked in July that the naming and shaming of prominent players in the Epstein case distracts from the real scandal, which is “the media and judicial cover-up of the case over the past two decades… a whole system of omertà and impunity.”
Furthermore, America’s pontification about Gallic infidelity overlooks its own philandering presidents, such as Bill Clinton, whose name features prominently in the Epstein files. He conducted a two-year affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky when he was 49 and she was 22. But his supporters – including his wife – for a long time dismissed the story as a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Lyndon B. Johnson was also an inveterate womanizer during his political career, a man with a “desire for random, unlimited sex and the thrill of dominating others,” according to Texas Monthly. Like Mitterrand, he kept a long-term mistress.
But not even LBJ could match John F. Kennedy when it came to “unlimited sex.” His presidential career is best encapsulated by the title of a 2024 biography by Mark J. White: Icon, Libertine, Leader. Describing JFK’s “sexual waywardness,” White says the president wasn’t just a prolific womaniser, he was also a reckless one, betraying his wife with women who were linked to criminals and communists. According to White, JFK’s infidelity was enabled by a compliant media of which he took advantage. Kennedy, says White, “understood that responsible journalists didn’t report on politicians’ private lives… he wasn’t taking a political risk, for instance, in the same way that Bill Clinton was in the 1990s.” Kennedy reportedly boasted: “They can’t get me while I’m alive, and when I’m dead, it’s not something I’m really bothered about.”
Now the French are getting their own back. Xavier Raufer, who in 2023 wrote a book about Epstein, said in a recent interview that “the cream of neoliberal society” are implicated “in Epstein’s schemes, in various ways, sexual or otherwise.” Raufer mocked this elite for their belated declarations of regret for having consorted with Epstein by quoting Cyrano de Bergerac. “Ah no! That’s a bit short, young man.”
The Epstein files have revealed to the French the extent of American hypocrisy. Responding in 2011 to the arrest of Strauss-Kahn, the New Yorker tut-tutted that many people knew of his lasciviousness but that “French habits and French libel laws kept the nature and extent of this reputation circumscribed.” This faux morality fooled the French. The same New Yorker article quoted Gilles Savary, a member of Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist party, saying that such excesses would never be tolerated in Washington because “in Puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism, they tolerate infinitely better the sins of money than the pleasures of the flesh.”
The Epstein files have revealed to the French that America isn’t as puritanical as they thought.
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