According to the Netflix documentary, Jeffrey Epstein was a smart guy who caught the attention of financiers, lied about his resume (he only attended college for two years, yet somehow got a teaching position in a college, from which he got a personal recommendation that landed him on Wall Street), and eventually became a trusted employee of the man who owned The Limited and Victoria’s Secret. Epstein managed to get that man’s power of attorney and literally robbed him of billions which Epstein invested for himself.
Eventually Epstein owned his infamous island, as well as an apartment in Paris, a townhome in Manhattan, a ranch in New Mexico, a house in Palm Beach. But the key fact was that he cultivated an air of mystery about himself. I would say it was because how he made his money and spent his time didn’t bear very close examination; but it seems he also liked his reputation as a, dare I say, Jay Gatsby. Either way, it helps explain the persistence of the “blackmail” theory. There’s no evidence of it in reality. Epstein invited friends and people he wanted to cultivate to his island (and didn’t do all his diddling of young girls there alone). He suffered enough reputational damage the first time he was arrested. Blackmail would have been poison to him. Active blackmail as an income stream, at least. But by being mysterious about where his wealth came from (because he essentially stole it), after his second arrest blackmail seemed the only explanation left to people who’d never heard of Epstein.
Which was most of us.
From the tale the documentary tells, it’s pretty clear there was never a client list, and the videos Epstein made were, indeed, homemade porn. The guy was a sexual predator, after all. He had an absolute pyramid scheme, paying young girls to bring their friends to him, and paying those friends in turn to bring more friends. And that was just in Palm Beach. He had other sets of young women he took to the island, besides all the women he had in New York.
This was a guy determined to sexually abuse as many women as possible. And he wasn’t running this empire on blackmailing the relatively few people he invited to the island. That would have exposed him more than protecting him. His protection was his low social profile. Even his neighbors in Palm Beach didn’t know what he was up to, and they lived next door (that house wasn’t a compound. People noticed lots of women coming and going, but they didn’t put that together with sexual assault.) The island was used to allow him to be more private, still. That’s where actual sexual slavery took place. Well, once you went there voluntarily, you couldn’t leave unless he let you.
This was one extremely narcissistic sociopath. Or monster, if you prefer. Monster works for me.
By the way, he wound up in jail the first time by pleading guilty to a charge of soliciting prostitution (IIRC; don’t hold me to exact details, I’m remembering the documentary, not writing history). That case started with the Palm Beach police investigating Epstein, and then the FBI got involved. The FBI kept local PD in the loop, until they didn’t. Local agents told them they couldn’t say what was happening, and nobody knew until there was an unannounced hearing that a deal had even been struck. That’s where the story splits into two branches.
One is the plea deal: that was arranged without involving the victims; a violation of law that led to Epstein being arrested again ten years later. The other is the sentence he served.
The case was pursued in federal court, but the deal put Epstein in Florida county jail. He had a private cell. He had private food. But more than that, he had “work release.” He was allowed to go home for 12 hours a day, six days a week. He was supposed to stay home, but he was on the honor system. Investigators for victims followed him to Miami, and had evidence he even went back to his island. After 13 months he was released, for 5 months of equally lax probation.
Ten years later a federal judge voided the plea deal, for violating federal law by not involving the victims in the process. This prompted the DOJ to talk to victims in Florida, and to investigate his victims in New York. The short version is, that led the FBI to arrest Epstein when he returned to New York from Paris.
Jumping to the chase: he went to real jail, and he didn’t win bail. By then the FBI had the child porn (that he may have been using for protection/leverage to keep himself out of jail. How’d that work out for him?), and Epstein wasn’t getting a private cell again, or 12 hour days going walk about. Knowing his “insurance” hadn’t worked and pleading down to paying prostitutes (yes, the US attorney in Florida treated the underage victims as prostitutes, the better to let Epstein off easy. A lot of classism there. Epstein bought his way into the upper ranks; his Florida victims were mostly poor and easily labeled as taking advantage of Epstein. I’m not kidding.) was not an option this time. So suicide was an obvious option.
Or not. Epstein’s brother hired a forensic pathologist, who examined the body and said damage to the hyoid bone was not consistent with suicide. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t suicide. It more likely means autopsies in police procedurals always yield results convenient to the writer’s intentions. Real life is not like that. His information may be good; it may be worthless. It’s a data point, and in my experience, there are always a lot more of those. You can never rely on just one.
But there’s a lot of data that Epstein was a sick bastard, and a lot of people knew it and either benefited from his evil, or didn’t care. And one of those people is the POTUS.
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