This is a subject has been done to death, but are some notes anyway. From the Guardian, July 2008:
A mysterious Wall Street money man who holidayed with Prince Andrew and lent his private jet to Bill Clinton has begun serving an 18-month jail term after pleading guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14.
Jeffrey Epstein, 55, faces a year of house arrest after he is released from prison in Florida. He must submit to an HIV test today and give the results to the families of his underage victims, four of whom have filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits against him.
…Although Epstein pleaded guilty yesterday to soliciting prostitution, he has maintained that he thought the girls he preyed on were over 18.
Embarrassing for Clinton and for Andrew, but two-and-half years later Andrew allowed himself to be photographed walking through Central Park with the registered sex offender. Why did he do it? His explanation is infamous:
I went there with the sole purpose of saying to him that because he had been convicted, it was inappropriate for us to be seen together. I felt that doing it over the telephone was the chicken’s way of doing it. I had to go and see him and talk to him.
Walking through a park in the middle of New York is a strange way not “to be seen together”, and the whole idea that Epstein was owed a transatlantic visit and personal explanation from the son of the Queen of the United Kingdom was implausible. Andrew’s interviewer, Emily Maitlis, pointed out that the park excursion occurred while he was staying with Epstein as “guest of honour” at a dinner party, although Andrew made a vague and unconvincing distinction between this event and what Maitlis called “a party to celebrate his release”.
Obviously, Andrew’s visit and park walkabout were intended to facilitate Epstein’s social rehabilitation. However, whereas it backfired spectacularly due to reporting led by the Mail on Sunday in March 2011, there was less concern in the US. The contrast was noted by Alexandra Wolfe, writing in the Daily Beast‘s “Lifestyle” section [1] a month later under the headline “Jeffrey Epstein’s Society Friends Close Ranks”:
[T]he uproar over “The Prince and The Perv”—as the British headlines screamed—mysteriously drowned in the Mid-Atlantic. New Yorkers barely batted an eye about the scandal-mongering across the pond. “A jail sentence doesn’t matter anymore,” says David Patrick Columbia, founder of New York Social Diary. “The only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty.” [2]
“In the Midwest, where I am from, he would be a social pariah,” says Lorna Brett Howard, a political activist and wife of Irving Post Capital CEO and Aeropostale director John Howard. “What I see here is if you have big money or are famous then you get a pass.”
… The conventional wisdom among his friends was that Epstein has been victimized by greedy, morally dubious teenage girls and unscrupulous lawyers. [3]
…”From a cerebral and business side he’s worshipped,” says socialite Debbie Bancroft. “He’s incredibly charming and handsome. He’s an extraordinary package so I can see why people don’t want to believe what they hear. If people come out of jail and are still successful, people are very forgiving, shockingly so.”
Here, then, we have the mundane explanation for Epstein’s post-2008 standing before his final fall. In some cases, there were doubless bonds of personal loyalty, but more generally Epstein’s wealth and skills as a networker outweighed the reputational hazards of continued association. And the risks seem less real if everyone else has agreed to move on. What would be gained by snubbing Epstein if you met him at some social gathering where all kinds of high-profile public figures were happy to be his presence? Noam Chomsky argued that a served jail sentence “yields a clean slate” (despite ongoing sex offender registration), but it is difficult to believe that this was th guiding principle for most of Epstein’s associates.
Defence of post-2008 “conventional wisdom” is today articulated most forcefully online by Michael Tracey and Richard Hanania. Epstein’s stated belief that the girls were over 18 is taken as more or less exculpatory, and they make much of the detail that Epstein’s conviction and sex offender registration related only to one complainant, who was just short of her 18th birthday. [4] This, though, is a pedantic distinction: the 2008 non-prosecution agreement refers to “victims” in the plural, and includes a provision for civil redress (although Epstein did not have to accept liability). Their position detracts from valid criticisms of more lurid misreporting and claims doing the rounds [5] – some of which are Satanic Ritual Abuse-adjacent.
Notes
1. The “Lifestyle” category has since been retired, and the article is currently categorised as “U.S. News”.
2. Due to a drafting error, the “poverty” quote appears twice, attributed first to Columbia and then to Howard.
3. One example is worth highlighting: Lawrence Krauss stated in the Daily Beast article that “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else”. This was criticised by Rebecca Watson, whose response on her website caught the attention of Richard Dawkins. Dawkins (H/T The Times) fowarded the original link to John Brockman, noting “a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.” Brockman in turn forwarded Dawkins’ email to Epstein. Krauss later said that he was “as shocked as the rest of the world” when Epstein was arrested in 2019, although it’s not clear how “as a scientist” he is so confident that the “rest of the world” shared his surprise.
4. The age of consent of course varies in different jurisdictions, and the plea deal meant that Epstein did not have to register as a sex offender in some states – particularly New Mexico, where he had a ranch. This may explain Peter Mandelson’s private comment to Epstein that his prosecution “just could not happen in Britain”, where the age of consent is 16. However, it is also reasonable infer that in his view the police would not pursue a case involving someone aged 14 years old, particularly if it is claimed that the teenager had lied about their age. The observation has relevance to how “grooming” offences have been handled historically.
5. The AP reported on 6 February:
The FBI pored over Jeffrey Epstein’s bank records and emails. It searched his homes. It spent years interviewing his victims and examining his connections to some of the world’s most influential people.
But while investigators collected ample proof that Epstein sexually abused underage girls, they found scant evidence the well-connected financier led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men, an Associated Press review of internal Justice Department records shows.
As for Virginia Guiffre, who was central to the 2011 Mail on Sunday reporting:
Two other Epstein victims who Giuffre had claimed were also “lent out” to powerful men told investigators they had no such experience, prosecutors wrote in a 2019 internal memo.
…Giuffre acknowledged writing a partly fictionalized memoir of her time with Epstein containing descriptions of things that didn’t take place. She had also offered shifting accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had “engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which have included sensationalized if not demonstrably inaccurate characterizations of her experiences.” Those inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI, they said.
I’ve regarded Giuffre with scepticism, for reasons previously discussed here and here.
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