When Jeffrey Epstein Was the World’s Leading Expert on Getting Away With It |
Epstein's 2013 mugshot after being charged with procuring a minor for prostitution.Mother Jones; Florida Department of Law Enforcement/AP
“Women are on the upswing to power,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in October 2017 to a friend. “Their methods I might not agree with but I recognize the weapons are limited.”
The friend was Kathryn Ruemmler, a prominent attorney and former White House Counsel to Barack Obama whose close relationship with Epstein is now one of many under renewed scrutiny. The email exchange happened during the dawn of what would become the MeToo movement, when numerous powerful and some less-powerful men were accused of sexual abuse and harassment. In hindsight, the cultural reckoning created by MeToo was short-lived; many of the men accused went back to their original prominence, and some were even elected president of the United States. But at the time, it seemed that the movement might shake a lot of important men loose from their pedestals. And a lot of people—the accused themselves, lawyers, journalists, various curious gawkers—wanted to talk to the man who knew more about sexual abuse cases, and getting out from under them, than anyone else in their orbit: Epstein.
Epstein seems to have been captivated by the emerging MeToo movement.
In 2008, Epstein had been given an infamously lax plea deal by then-top Florida federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, which kept him out of prison and paved the way for him to continue to sexually assault women and girls for the next 11 years, until his eventual re-arrest and 2019 death in a Manhattan jail. Newly released emails show him acting as an armchair media critic when it came to coverage of other powerful sex pests and related discussions of sexual abuse in the news.
The extent of Epstein’s involvement and interest in other men’s alleged sexual abuse cases—and the advice and lavish sympathy he was given about his own legal issues by his many famous friends—is further revealed in the newest dump of some three million pages of Epstein emails, released on January 30 by Donald Trump’s version of the Justice Department. In keeping with past releases, the new documents are heavily redacted, highly repetitive, and chaotically organized, meaning the full scope of what’s within it is just becoming clear.
But they show that Epstein seems to have immediately been captivated by 2017’s emerging MeToo movement, perhaps, as a malevolent sex criminal himself, understanding it better than the general public. In late October of that year, he sent around a recent New York Times story about his friend, film producer Harvey Weinstein, who the paper reported had paid numerous sexual assault accusers to stay quiet. (This was, of course, exactly what Epstein himself had done for many years.)
“It’s so interesting from a revolutionary point of view,” he wrote to Ruemmler. “The masses uprising, vigilanti [sic] gossip. but a long time coming.” (As in previous Epstein document disclosures, his writing is littered with astounding typos and misspellings; his iPhone signature even contained the words “Sorry for all the typos.” The newly released files also bear encoding errors. We’ve minimally cleaned quotes for legibility.)
In another email from that October to Brad S. Karp, a top corporate lawyer, Epstein wrote, “How bad does the Harvey Weinstein story get?”
“I think it gets pretty bad—and a little bit worse every day,” responded Karp.
The two also emailed in March 2018, lamenting the resignation of William Voge, the........