Now that Congress has passed a law – not a flimsy resolution, but a law – mandating that the Trump administration release all its files on Jeffrey Epstein, here’s what we know, and what we still need to know.
The basic elements of Epstein’s crimes were established back in 2006 by the Palm Beach Police, who began investigating the previous year after a woman reported that he had paid her 14-year-old stepdaughter for a massage.
Over the next 13 months, the police gathered sworn statements from dozens of witnesses, including five underage girls who said they’d been paid $200 to $1,000 to engage in sex acts with Epstein. “The more you do, the more you get paid,” one of his assistants told a girl in a phone call recorded by the police.
The girls cried as they told police of their revulsion at sexually servicing Epstein, some saying they averted their eyes and watched the clock, waiting for it to be over, so they could get paid and leave. Other witnesses said they’d been paid $200 for every teenage girl they brought to Epstein and described sex toys and dildos lying around after the girls visited.
A search of Epstein’s home turned up computers with the hard drives ripped out, explicit photographs of naked teenage girls, a high-school transcript, a phone message from one girl saying she couldn’t come because she had “soccer practice” and another offering to come over “Monday after school.”
All of this was handed over to the local prosecutor in 2006. Unfortunately, the local prosecutor was a Democratic activist named Barry Krischer, who’d just spent three years maniacally pursuing conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh for abusing back-pain medication.
Based on the prosecution’s presentation to the grand jury, one could be forgiven for thinking the teenage girls were the target. After one girl described how, at age 14, she had been sexually molested by Epstein, who then gave her $300, assistant prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek responded: “You are aware that you committed a crime?”
Despite the allegation that Epstein had raped two teen girls, Krischer accepted his plea to one count of soliciting prostitution, with no jail time. This is the sort of monumental government failure that has shielded Epstein since 2006.
Another great moment in law enforcement was the FBI’s botched search of Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2019. The search turned up a hidden safe containing hundreds of photos of naked girls, labeled with their names and, crucially, also those of “third parties.” And then the agents walked out, leaving the safe’s contents behind, completely unsecured. Days later, the evidence was gone. The media are as guilty as the government. For years, they ignored the story of a billionaire New Yorker molesting hundreds of underage girls in his Palm Beach mansion. (Boring!) They became interested only after managing to attach Epstein to President Trump with Elmer’s glue and Scotch tape.
It seems that, after Krischer’s office failed to hold Epstein to account, then-US Attorney Alex Acosta had launched a federal investigation into Epstein. That, too, ended in an overly lenient deal, the main virtue of which was that it was less appalling than Krischer’s.
A decade later, Acosta was Trump’s first-term labor secretary. Also, decades earlier, Trump had been friends with Epstein.
And with that, the media awoke from their slumber and finally noticed the massive and continuing failure to nail the pedophile. To this day, the New York Times’s sole interest in the Epstein files is whether they will show “significant revelations about Mr. Trump.” Real and fake questions abound.
Fake: is the Epstein case nothing but a “moral panic,” a continuation of the 2017 #MeToo movement? This counternarrative is based more on the joy of sneering than on any actual facts. Epstein’s victims are the virtual opposite of the #MeToo claimants. They were discovered back in 2005, long before the #MeToo craze, and not by their own volition, but as the result of a police investigation.
They were also teenage girls, who’d already experienced broken families, incest, violence, fatherlessness, homelessness and other depredations. Instead of a helping hand, they got Epstein’s egg-shaped penis. (If Epstein didn’t want people making fun of his penis, he shouldn’t have whipped it out in front of so many talkative teenage girls.)
There are surely fake “victims,” who’ve come forward to allege abuse simply in order to get a piece of the Epstein settlement fund. There were also frauds applying to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. That doesn’t mean there was no 9/11.
Real: where did Epstein get all that loot? Amazingly, we still have no idea where his money came from. The only thing we know for certain is that it did not come from where he said it did – his financial wizardry.
Learning the source of his wealth might help explain another mystery that demands an answer: How did “the most infamous pedophile in American history,” as one judge put it, get off scot-free for two decades?
When Acosta was being vetted by the first Trump White House, he explained the lenient plea deal, saying: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” What “intelligence”? Who told Acosta that? Can we talk to whoever it was? Weirdly, the single most intriguing statement from the Epstein saga has been buried and forgotten. Epstein’s sex ring certainly sounds like a kompromat operation. His homes and private plane were outfitted with cameras, allowing him to covertly video rich, powerful men engaging in sex acts with minors – or, at its most wholesome, married men having sex with girls 40 years their junior. (I gather these men are the “innocent victims” that we’re supposed to be so concerned about.) Another real question is: who else participated? Virginia Giuffre and other girls have said Epstein farmed them out to his friends. It’s pretty clear Giuffre was handed off to Prince Andrew (now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor), who has always denied the accusations against him, and French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel (now dead, having hanged himself in jail while awaiting trial for rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking of minors).
Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t much of a witness for the defense on this point. Asked about other men having sex with Jeffrey’s girls, she said: “They’re men that went and had a massage and maybe did something sexual. They’re men. I wasn’t in the room… Now did some? OK. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it.”
Whatever mysterious force has been protecting Epstein must be awfully powerful to have insulated “the most infamous pedophile in American history” for 20 years. Unfortunately, that means it’s probably powerful enough to ensure we never get answers to the real questions.
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