CORRUPTION
Leaders, Journalists & Criminals Save Pedophile Kingpins
A year after Epstein’s death, a cover-up still shields powerful child molesters and their friends from accountability. Why isn’t this a top story?
In the past 30 years, the name “Jeffrey Epstein” has appeared in more than 600 New York Times articles. Some of these articles discuss his financial dealings; others are about men with similar names; and, to be fair, still others meaningfully document his crimes against women and girls.
The paper of record first mentioned Epstein in a 1991 article in the “Style” section, alongside other tycoons who had pledged to raise $2 million for the construction of a student center at Harvard University.
Four and a half years later, Epstein was quoted in the “Home & Garden” section — a fluff piece entitled “Home Sweet Elsewhere,” in which he mused that Leslie Wexner (one of his clients) barely saw the inside of her Manhattan McMansion.
The quote reads (in full), “Les never spent more than two months there.”
Times coverage of recent developments in the Epstein scandal is not so different from those fleeting references in the 90s.
After a fatal attack on the family of Esther Salas — the judge most recently assigned to resolve controversies related to Epstein’s financial empire — the Times barely acknowledged the connection.
Astoundingly, the mainstream TV outlets — which, in general, cover sensational twists disproportionately — had little to say about the attack, even after the top suspect was found dead.
CNN’s only article about the Salas attacks was trending on their homepage, indicating widespread interest among readers.
Just like the Times article, CNN’s piece notes briefly that Judge Salas had recently been assigned the Epstein lawsuit before quickly changing the subject.
MSNBC’s coverage didn’t mention Epstein’s name once.
This story fascinates people within and beyond the American Heartland, and it’s easy to see why.
A billionaire trafficked impoverished girls into the beds of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men on this planet, and wherever that billionaire’s affairs are litigated, people die.
Who was Jeffrey Epstein? And why did the media stop covering the most shocking scandal of our era?
EPSTEIN: Origins
Born to middle-class Brooklyn Jews, Epstein grew up happy, optimistic, and upwardly mobile. According to “The Talented Mr. Epstein” and other gushing profiles that have aged just as poorly, he excelled at piano, mathematics, and physics.
He attended Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School in the late ’60s — just after Rhea Perlman graduated, and just before Steve Schirripa entered his freshman year.
Epstein took courses at Cooper Union and NYU, but never obtained a college degree.
Fortunately for him, the Dalton School in Manhattan was then making “unconventional hires” of teachers from “unconventional backgrounds” under the iconoclastic leadership of Headmaster Donald Barr — the father of Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr.
A Vice article days after Epstein’s death documented growing interest in a certain “Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Space Tale” by the elder Barr:
[It sold] for between $6 and $30 in July.
Today, however, the book is priced anywhere from $150 to $300 on eBay, and is out of print practically everywhere else….
In September of 1973, a year before his tenure at Dalton ended, Barr published Space Relations.
The book is highly unsettling and depicts the rape of enslaved people, especially teenage girls, and other coercive sex acts for the dual purposes of entertainment and controlled procreation.
EPSTEIN: The Profe$$ional
In 1976, a 23-year-old Epstein had a parent-teacher conference that would have enormous repercussions — not only for his own life, but also for the fates of hundreds of girls who had not yet been born.
Epstein’s intelligence so impressed a parent that he put in a good word for the young educator with fellow Dalton parent Ace Greenberg — a rising star at Bear Stearns who would soon become its CEO.
“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’” recalled Lynne Koeppel (née Greenberg), who was also the first woman to own a seat on the American Stock Exchange.
“Give Jeff credit. He was brilliant.”
After Epstein was dismissed from Dalton “for poor performance,” Greenberg made him a junior assistant to a floor trader at Bear Stearns — where he befriended yet another future CEO, according to Bloomberg:
[H]e made partner four years later, with former Chief Executive Officer Jimmy Cayne praising his skills. He left in 1981 to set up J. Epstein & Co., but one bank executive said he remained close to Cayne and Greenberg and was a client until Bear Stearns’ demise.
In 1981, the bank asked Epstein to leave, because he violated Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933: he failed to disclose a $20,000 loan to a friend.
He then founded a consulting firm… and started moonlighting as an intelligence agent.
EPSTEIN: The Spy Who Loved [Underage Girls]
Even inside the Beltway, Epstein’s status as an ex-spy wasn’t widely known until after Trump won. But when Trump transition interviewers vetted Alexander Acosta for the Secretary of Labor position, Epstein’s stint in the IC came to the fore.
An article in The Daily Beast documents how some officials on Trump’s transition team expected Senate confirmation hearings to address the “sweetheart deal” (i.e., non-prosecution plea agreement) that Acosta had extended to Epstein in 2007, in place of meaningful prosecution for sex crimes against children:
“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem?” they inquired.
Acosta’s response: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
The issue arose again when Epstein was in custody last year.
During a raid of Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse, “…feds found dozens of diamonds, piles of cash and a fake passport with Jeffrey Epstein’s photo stashed in a safe….”
It’s hard to distinguish truth from legend, especially since Epstein was known to spin tall tales about his connections to oil wealth in the Middle East.
But a New York Magazine list of Epstein’s “High Society Contacts” includes this entry for Adnan Khashoggi (an uncle of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi):
… [I]n the mid-1980s Epstein said he “worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators” and occasionally subcontracted to those same autocrats to “help them hide their stolen money.” A source… said one of Epstein’s clients was the late Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal who helped smuggle cash for the Marcos family out of the Philippines.
In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland for concealing assets and later faced fraud and racketeering charges in the U.S. (He was later acquitted.) That year, he sold his 282-foot yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, who soon flipped it to Donald Trump.
EPSTEIN: Darling of the Ruling Class
Delving more deeply into this history can result in “Epstein Brain”: an acute neurocognitive condition, the symptoms of which can include paranoia, insomnia, and a deep-seated obsession with the numberless tentacles of this unbelievable bombshell.
Here’s the point:
- Jeffrey Epstein mysteriously accrued billions of dollars and a remarkable Rolodex, which included presidents, prime ministers, royals, public intellectuals, and other wealthy, powerful men.
- At the penultimate moment of his criminal career, when the child-molesting kingpin and his A-list friends seemed poised for a long-overdue reckoning with law enforcement, Epstein was removed from suicide watch, whereupon he mysteriously died.
- When the judicial system probes outstanding legal controversies related to Epstein’s financial empire, people die.
- Media outlets are not following the leads in this story as far as they go, despite persistent, global interest in this story. (Even after I started writing this, search interest in Epstein surged — not only nearby areas like Hawaii, South Dakota, and Alaska, but also in countries like Chile, Uruguay, and New Zealand.)
- News consumers want — and Epstein’s victims deserve — the kind of comprehensive coverage of this far-reaching scandal that only large, international organizations can afford.
Whatever the reason for this reticence, it’s time for the global media establishment to find out just how deep this scandal goes.
