Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other material in the Epstein files. They span two decades and an astonishingly wide range of topics: his Amazon purchases, missing laundry, the banning of his Xbox Live account, his reaction to photos of young women, how he considered potential plea deals and exchanges with famous people.
There’s Sarah Ferguson’s message:
To: Jeffrey Epstein [jeevacation@gmail.com] From: Sarah Sent: Sat 1/30/2010 10:22:44 PM
You are a legend. I really don’t have the words to describe, my love, gratitude for your generosity and kindness. Xx I am at your service. Just marry me.
Then there’s the one from Peter Mandelson’s partner, looking for funding from Epstein for his training course in osteopathy:
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 5:04 PM, REINALDO AVILA DA SILVA
Hi Jeffrey Hope you are well. Sorry to disturb you but… Just sent an email back to Rich regarding the £10,000 with my personal bank details. I would like to clarify if this amount includes my school fees or if the amount of £3,225 (school fee) will be sent directly to the school itself. Thanks for this! Best, Reinaldo
Reinaldo Avila Osteopath in training
And Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor:
To: jeevacation@gmail.com From: The Duke Sent: Wed 12/8/2010 5:37:24 PM Subject: Troublesome one.
J, Kate has agreed to a deal in London. It’s down to you to bring J over the line. God it’s cold and dank here! Wish I was still a pet in your family! A
You’ll have identified the salient feature about these messages besides their rank venality. They’re from about 15 years ago, from what the correspondents probably thought was the long-buried past. But it’s not buried anymore; the emails are from Epstein’s personal email accounts – as well as other stuff from multiple FBI investigations. The most devastating aspect is the detail, and in this it’s reminiscent of the revelations from the MPs’ expenses scandal published by the Telegraph in 2009.
There is a passage in the Dies Irae, the 13th-century poem about the Last Judgment, which talks about that day when quidquid latet apparebit – when whatever is hidden will be revealed. And that is precisely what is happening here; the Day of Wrath has come early. All those messages that seemed to be just between the sender and the recipient, in which both parties could let themselves go because no one else was reading, are now all over the newspapers a decade and a half later, scrutinised by millions.
That isn’t what most of us thought when emails came on the scene. We thought electronic communications were transient, that once deleted, they would disappear into the ether. We mourned that future generations of historians would no longer be able to finger personal material from individuals of our generation. How different emails seemed from the vast archives of the Victorians: John Henry Newman’s 50,000 letters (of which 20,000 survive), or A.C. Benson’s 180 bound journals tucked away in Magdalene College, Cambridge. Now we know different. Emails may not be as pleasurable to read as physical letters, but they do indeed survive – in this case, in unmanageable quantities.
Interestingly, one author described the problem with remarkable prescience. Ian McEwan in his most recent novel, What We Can Know, describes a post-apocalyptic Britain of a century hence in which an academic, Thomas Metcalfe, is in search of a poem by one Francis Blundy to his wife from 2014. We learn that in the world of the future, every-one has access to our emails, our electronic exchanges, and that vast digital archive is kept in Nigeria. And it is this that makes Metcalfe reflect: ‘I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: If you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.’
The thing is, we don’t have to wait a century for that to happen, just a decade or so. Be warned. If you want control over your messages, put them on paper. You can burn a letter. Emails seem indestructible.
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