I think there’s a lot of powerful people in this country who would like the story to begin and end with one monstrous man.
And when these emails were released, I decided, maybe against my better judgment, that I was going to read all of them. And it took me four or five days just going through one after another, making notes. And I was really curious about all these other people, right? And some of them are celebrities and bold-faced names like she was talking about. Some of them are utterly ordinary people no one’s ever heard of. Some of them are professors, others. But I was interested in this larger network, because these were the people that Jeffrey Epstein had, in effect, chosen to rehabilitate him socially and redeem him after he was a convicted sex offender trying to reestablish himself in society. And I was trying to understand how these relationships worked.
And what I found was that it’s very convenient for the American power elite to think about this as a story of one depraved man. But, in fact, what the emails show, if you actually read them, is that he had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away at what he did, because it was very gifted at looking away over a generation at so much else, so much else, so much other abuse and suffering, whether the economic crises members of that network often helped cause, the wars members of that network helped push fraudulently, the pain of technological obsolescence that members of that network pushed on the American public. So, this was a group of people well chosen by Jeffrey Epstein, because this American power elite, these circles that he moved in, if they have any superpower, it is the ability to hear the cries of people without power and close their ears.
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Well, as I read the emails, it seemed to me there were a few different things going on. One, this is a group of people who are not really loyal to the communities they come from. They’re not — their loyalty is not downward to places and communities and even countries. This is a kind of borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other than to places. And that kind of network actually needs someone who is a connector. So, a lot of the emails are, “Hey, I’m landing in New York,” “Hey, I’m going to San Francisco.” And then Epstein would say, “Hey, you should meet this guy in San Francisco,” “Oh, you need an investor for your startup? Let me connect you with that.” It’s all about this kind of connectivity. And he was a very good connector.
Second, this is a network that thrives on information barter, and specifically nonpublic information. Again, why would they consort with this guy? Well, this guy ended up being — and not just his own information. He ended up being a kind of convener of these trades of nonpublic information. Investors want information that will help them, you know, make trades that other people don’t know about. You know, professors want insight about things. People in the business world want tips about things that will be the next big thing. So there was this kind of information network. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, wanted dating advice.