Anecdotal commentary on Jeffrey Epstein’s social circle and wealth

Perhaps it’s just the ultimate feminist nightmare: Men (and a few opportunistic women) continue to come to Epstein’s because, no matter their public bows to modern manners, they simply don’t care that he offends every aspect of feminist sensibility Or, it’s a guilty pleasure. People who know Jeffrey exchange “Jeffrey” stories. “That’s Jeffrey,” says Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and publisher of the Daily News (ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of Epstein escapades. It is an outréness that Epstein seems delighted to cultivate. In Epstein’s Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet on the Avenue Foch, a neighborhood otherwise occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed baby elephant in his living room—that 1s, the elephant in the room. (At the same time, Epstein is a major supporter of cancer research and the elephant, he says, is also a reminder that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes and humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). Or, in a more sophisticated view, it’s a two tier understanding of the world. There is a media version of the world, which most of us live in and largely accept, and are certainly influenced by. And then there are those people who live in the media itself and therefore know that it’s mostly bunk. If the media says it, as likely some version of the opposite is true. I might guess too that for many of his visitors there’s an order of identification: there but for the grace of God. Any hyper-prominent person might, at any time, run afoul of prosecutors, the political moment, the media, or the Internet hoi polloi. Epstein is the Dreyfus of the rich. And then there is the glue of wealth. Once, at lunch in the Epstein dinning room with Bill Richardson, the former Governor of New Mexico, and past Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a few minutes, I asked the obvious question, the one everybody asks each other, “How did you meet Jeffrey?” Richardson seemed surprised: “Jeffrey,” he said, as though stating what should have been perfectly obvious, “is the biggest landowner in New Mexico.” And then there is Epstein’s yet more structural explanation as to why after prison and with continuing tabloid infamy he can maintain his valued place. It comes back, not unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: “At a certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with an institutional interest. You are part of government, or you want to be in government, or you are connected to a bank or other portfolio, or you have key relationships with certain corporations or industries. Because of my HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022734