Jeffrey Epstein Was Wicked, but as the Files Show, He Was Also Banal

Mr. Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing Opinion writer.

If you want to recreate an archetypal scene from countless westerns — the one in the crowded saloon where the hero says the wrong name and heads suddenly turn while the piano stops and every voice goes silent — try casually letting it slip at your local watering hole, as I did recently, that you are in the Epstein files.

Let me explain. I am not one of Jeffrey Epstein’s former clients. The only islands I have ever visited are in Lake Huron. My name does not even appear in the documents released by the Department of Justice. Instead my claim to infamy is simply that on April 28, 2019, Mr. Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, emailed Mr. Epstein a link to an article I wrote in The Week.

The email is not especially interesting. It contains no commentary or gloss on my work; in fact, it contains no text at all. I would not have known of the email’s existence if a former colleague had not brought it to my attention two weeks ago. Until then, I had paid little attention to the release of the Epstein files. But after seeing the link to my article, I began looking at the materials.

What struck me most forcefully was the stultifying tedium. Mr. Epstein dispenses conventional stock market advice. He receives an email with a parody video featuring the Minions characters. Pinterest informs him about his favorite topics, sending him links to images of a vintage Bugatti automobile. His written style is tawdry. Double exclamation points (“New York has such great food!!”) are common. Certain adjectives recur — meals and snacks are “tasty.” He dabbles in criticism: A painting purchased by a Saudi prince for $450 million is not “very good,” an impression he attributes to “my art guy.” Occasionally he unburdens himself of abstract reflections. His philosophical opinions (“bliss is not complete happiness. where did you find that bourgoiuis definition.”) are sophomoric.

Then there is his online shopping history. In the period covered by the files, Mr. Epstein made more than 1,000 Amazon orders. There is something odd about the idea of a criminal worth $600 million who owns two private islands qualifying for free two-day Prime shipping. He buys mattress toppers, chinos, Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. He buys an LED bedside reading lamp, gel toe separators, cases of prune juice, cabinet knobs. He buys a pink bucket hat, a swivel chair, a vanity mirror, a Magic 8 Ball, a disco ball, a digital speedometer, Crocs, sunglasses. He buys cheap digital editions of Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain and Joyce — and, separately, a copy of “Finnegans Wake,” which is not yet in the public domain. He buys a pack of 10 novelty $10,000 bills that a guy at a bachelor party might use as a prop for a joke about a hypothetical billionaire handing out $100,000 party favors to his friends.

Not all of the released information is anodyne. You can spend hours scrolling through routine reminders from assistants, bland congratulations, therapeutic gibberish, corny jokes and random N.B.A. chatter and then suddenly hit upon Larry Summers’s lament that he is currently “going nowhere” sexually with a young woman who is not his wife or a lurid description of a massage that Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem received from prostitutes in Tokyo (“whole body massage with feather touch”). One video whose provenance appears to be unknown features a toddler — whose face is mercifully obscured — playing with a toy. It is something I wish I could forget.

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Matthew Walther is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal.

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