How Jeffrey Epstein Weaponized Humor

What the newly exposed emails between Epstein and former JP Morgan banker, Jes Staley, show about Epstein's manipulations

One of the many things people may not understand about Jeffrey Epstein is the way he deployed black humor as a seduction method.

He used it to lean into the darkness about him, not away.

For example when I first met him in person, I am fairly certain that he left out a copy of a book by the Eighteenth Century sexual libertine, the Marquis de Sade in his townhouse in New York, as a joke. His idea of a joke, that is. He knew that I’d already learned that he had a reputation for sexual something - at that point in my reporting, I wasn’t yet fully sure what - and his way of trying to diffuse the tension and probably distract me from the seediness of what I was hearing, (I hadn’t yet got to any alleged criminality) was to make light of it.

It’s also why he kept a vast stuffed elephant in the living room of his Paris apartment. The Epstein “joke” was that this was the “elephant in the room”…ie a metaphor for his sexual crimes. It was effective because people who had heard he went to jail in 2009 for soliciting a minor bought into his “I didn’t know her age..this whole thing is so misguided” shtick, because why would anyone who had abused an underage woman (let alone hundreds of them) make such an enormous, apparently hilarious joke of it? It defied belief.

Welcome to who Jeffrey Epstein really was, in addition to being a sexual pervert. A brazen but brilliant manipulator, not just of women and children. But of powerful, successful men, too. Jes Staley, the former CEO of Barclays and former head of JP Morgan’s private bank, has said that he never knew of Epstein’s criminal sexual abuse and trafficking. Prosecutors in the US Virgin Islands allege otherwise in papers filed yesterday.

In email exchanges in the new filing, we can see Epstein deploying his black humor on Staley who was essentially Epstein’s point person at JP Morgan until 2013. (I’ve reported before that the US Virgin Islands is suing the bank for aiding and enabling Epstein’s sexual crimes, in order to benefit from his business and that of other high net worth individuals he introduced them to). In this latest filing the US Virgin Islands says these emails suggest Staley, who is not individually being sued, may even have been part of Epstein's sex-trafficking enterprise. He denies this.

We learn that in a series of emails between the two men there were exchanges about Disney characters. And alcohol. Here’s an example:

December 4, 2009

Mr Staley to Epstein: ‘I realise the danger in sending this email. But it was great to be able, today, to give you, in New York City, a long heartfelt, hug’.

Epstein: ‘You were with Larry and I had to put up with….’ (picture of young woman attached)

Mr Staley: ‘Don’t tell me, a French wine’.

Epstein replied “Always thoughts of alcohol.”

Ok, so the bit about “French wine” and Epstein always having “thoughts of alcohol” is intriguing. Because Epstein didn’t drink alcohol. He told me he thought drinking obscured people’s thinking and he also told me that he made Ghislaine Maxwell stop drinking, too. Of course, in hindsight, one can see that if you are running criminal sex-trafficking enterprise and you don’t want to get caught it helps stay focused.

But Epstein also frequently talked in running metaphors and similes. When I began reporting on him, he said: “Let’s play chess. You be white. You get the first move.”

He’d tell me that in order for me to understand how he advised his clients, I needed to think of a house. A house that got two or three new extensions over the years, plus a garage, plus a pool until finally the layout was such a mess that the smart thing to do was knock it down and rebuilt it all over again. The knocking down and rebuilding, he told me, was what he did.

So, back to the wine: unlike Epstein, Staley drank wine. We know this because of another un-redacted email message in the court papers:

November 1st 2009

Mr Staley is on Epstein’s Caribbean island.

He writes: ‘So when all hell breaks lo[o]se, and the world is crumbling, I will come here, and be at peace.

‘Presently, I’m in the hot tub with a glass of white wine. This is an amazing place. Truly amazing. Next time, we’re here together. I owe you much. And I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound’.

So, when Staley writes in the first email: “Don’t tell me, a French wine”. It reads like a riff on one of Epstein’s many running metaphors. Staley’s lawyers have told told the Financial Times, who reported on the emails, that there is no “code” in the exchanges, which are “innocuous” . In November 2021 Staley stepped down from Barclays, after he and the bank saw the results of a probe into his relationship with Epstein, amid questions as to whether it had been previously mischaracterized. Staley said he wanted to contest the findings.

What then to make of this next email exchange:

July 2010

Mr Staley to Epstein: ‘That was fun. Say hi to Snow White’.

Epstein: ‘(W)hat character would you like next?’

Mr Staley: ‘Beauty and the Beast’

Epstein: ‘Well one side is available

The only thing I am fairly certain of, having known Epstein, is that Epstein is saying here that he is the Beast. Unfortunately, given what we know about his sexual crimes, he really is the Beast. That’s why his humor is so sickeningly on point.