The Epstein Story Gets Even Darker

The WSJ gets to what went on in his last decade...

To:​ Vicky Ward​

Fri 11/22/2019 1:08 PM

I met Mr. Epstein in 2008 not long before he was sentenced to  jail and since I personally can name businessmen  in Russia who were having sex with 14-15 year-old girls and doing it on a regular basis, I didn’t understand why he was charged and sentenced to jail. 

I received this email (spelling and grammar have been corrected for clarity) in 2019. It came from one of the Russian models referenced in the sobering article in last night’s Wall Street Journal describing how Jeffrey Epstein continued to manipulate vulnerable women long after his jail-time in 2009.

This is something that the numerous plutocrats of Epstein’s acquaintance preferred to either not know or not mention, as is referenced in the article. This suggests many in his influential circle abetted what amounted to a continuation of the sex-trafficking ring he’d begun in the 1990s. The difference in his post-jail life was that he sought out mostly Eastern European immigrants, many of them models.

Reading the article, I was reminded of what the Russian model had said to me in 2019, soon after Epstein’s death. And what she’d written to me in that startling email above — The sexual abuse she’d suffered at just 14 in her native Russia was commonplace. In many Eastern European countries the age of consent is 14.

This meant that at the time she told me she didn’t comprehend the scale of Epstein’s evilness. I recall that at one point she told me with, I hate to say, almost pride that “not one of the women suing Epstein is from Eastern Europe.” Her implication was that they weren’t going to complain publicly about Epstein’s insidious crimes because that sort of behavior was normalized culturally back home.

Well, per the Journal, that has changed.

The article by Khadeeja Safdar is a piece of terrific reportage, piecing together conversations, emails, and discovery from the recent litigation involving Epstein victims and Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan. (The banks settled.)

The statistics she reports are shocking. Two lawyers involved in the class action suits against the banks told Safdar that they’ve interviewed 130 Epstein accusers. Fifty-five of the women said they only met him after his conviction in 2008. Forty-five of the fifty-five are from Eastern Europe. One lawyer said that the women have identified twenty men to whom Epstein allegedly sent them for sex. The names of the men are not publicized in the piece.

Here’s the clever thing: in his last decade Epstein flaunted what he was doing in public. And that cover was remarkably effective.

After he got out of jail, I bumped into him a couple of times at public events, like movie screenings, and he was flanked by young, strikingly beautiful women. I had no idea where they came from, because I didn’t hear them speak.

But I was shocked at the brazenness of their presence given that by then he had, after all, served time for two counts: soliciting a prostitute and soliciting a minor. (These were charges brought by the State. We didn’t know at the time about the federal sex crimes he’d evaded.)

He was amused at the obvious discomfort the spectacle caused. I wrongly thought that that was precisely why he went out with the women: to provoke controversy. Just like he showed up at formal business meetings in his track pants. He liked people staring at him. He liked being different.

I didn’t therefore assume the worst: that the women weren’t just public ornaments, that they provided a private service as well. I couldn’t have imagined him being so sick or so reckless. Surely a year in jail would have been a tiny bit sobering?

But what went on behind closed doors in the last decade of his life is starkly, horrifically detailed in the Journal. As he’d done in his previous life, he was paying the women, ostensibly to mentor them. He gave them apartments, sent them to the hair salon, dentist, and even to school. But in return….they didn’t just have to go out with him in public. They had to gratify him sexually. And, it seems, some of his unnamed friends.

And, per the Journal, he tried to brainwash them into believing that this was somehow in their interest.

That has always been the part of Jeffrey Epstein I’ve never felt has been properly conveyed. His genius at manipulation. What Safdar does so effectively in the Journal article is use his own words to show how he did this.

For example, per Safdar, he wrote to one young model who offered to send his money back after he asked her to undertake sex education:

“again you misunderstood,”…“I am making an investment in your future ,  asking if you should return the money , makes little  sense. if you dont wnat to do as i recommend  thats ok.  , I don’t use money as a means to control you.  only to empower you.”

Imagine how confusing that must be to someone young, ambitious and already abused - legally - by the patriarchy in her native country.

In his screwed-up universe, power lay exclusively with money and men. So if young, poor women wanted to get ahead they needed to service rich men. He flaunted his former “girlfriend’ and Miss Sweden, Eva Dubin, as the ultimate example of what they could achieve – because, after dating him, she became a doctor and married a billionaire. (Eva Dubin and her husband, Glenn, have denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex crimes).

But Epstein’s brainwashing worked.

Per the Journal, some of these vulnerable women wound up working as his assistants in his post-jail years and fawned over him. They strutted around his Island naked and said they were horrified by any negative press.

I’m reminded of how plausible he could be from my own conversations with him in 2003, of which I have the transcripts. Here’s a snippet:

VW:     You said to me earlier that you take an interest in putting people through school and that is something that I have heard of and other people have said you helped them jobs and that you would help them get resumes.

            JE:        I have been paying for this - scholarships is a big part of it.  Some people aren’t lucky enough to have parents who support them in whatever they want to do.  I’ve been lucky enough to be able to - the great privilege is being able to help somebody get an education…

It sounds so plausible, doesn’t it? Just like when he says to the young foreign model that he doesn’t want to control her but to empower her?

What he doesn’t mention to me or, in that instance, to her, is the horrific price he was demanding. He abused so many women so often that in a piece of particularly upsetting imagery, one of the women told Safdar that to Epstein sexual activity with these women was “like brushing his teeth.”

Just when you thought you couldn’t hear anything worse about this guy…there it is. I’m grateful to Safdar and the Journal for this deep, revealing investigation. At the same time I long for the day that Jeffrey Epstein is truly dead and buried.