The Club That Hid the Epstein Story

Melinda Henneberger
Melinda Henneberger is a RealClearPolitics columnist based in Kansas City. She won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary in 2021, for editorial writing in 2020 and for commentary in 2019, all for her work at the Kansas City Star. For 10 years, she was a reporter for the New York Times, based in New York, Washington, DC, and Rome. 

If Jeffrey Epstein’s victims ever get any measure of the justice they deserve, it will be, as so many others have said, thanks to their own guts and to the reporter-with-a-bone efforts of Julie K Brown of the Miami Herald. In 2018, she began exposing his “cult-like network of underage girls” and sweetheart deal from prosecutors, and she still hasn’t given up.

Until this September, I worked for the Kansas City Star, which, like the Miami Herald, is owned by McClatchy, so I take a certain sisterly pride in Brown’s work, though we have never met.

As local news outlets continue to wither, it’s this kind of accountability we are losing nearly everywhere. And since more Epstein emails came out last week, I’ve been thinking about how it was really no accident that a local news outlet broke this story. How’s that, when national outlets with many more resources regularly publish brave and difficult investigative series? 

In New York, where Epstein somehow made major power players too weak even to say no to dinner invitations, his victims gave interviews that mysteriously never were published or broadcast anywhere. And I suspect that’s because of what the New York Times just this weekend wrapped in gauze and presented with clueless nostalgia as “a clubby world that is all but gone.”

Wherever an attitude of ‘we’re all friends here’ creeps in, there are just more pressure points for creeps like Epstein to exploit, and more temptations for those being pressured to believe that the story in front of them is not a story at all. 

“We would go to the media to try to explain what was going on,” the victims’ attorney David Boies told NPR six years ago. Yet long after lawsuits were filed, alleging that Epstein had trafficked girls at his homes beginning in the ’90s, “with the exception really of the Miami Herald and the Daily Beast, prior to the arrest there was no substantive coverage.” That arrest was in 2019.

In the 2008 plea deal that Brown revealed as so upside down, the US Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, dropped everything they had on Epstein in return for his guilty plea to two state charges: solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor. 

He went to jail, but was released every day for office work, walked away free after 13 months, and was not charged with federal crimes, including sex trafficking, until 2019, the same year he died in jail.

Do you think it would have taken that long for federal charges to be brought if the victims who risked so much to speak out had been quoted or seen on air sooner? I don’t.

Epstein victims Maria and Annie Farmer and their mother, Janice Farmer, all spoke on the record to a Vanity Fair writer way back in 2002. They have said they were devastated when the story about Epstein’s finances and high living that ran the following year “erased our voices.” 

Then-editor Graydon Carter has said at different times that it was because there weren’t three on-the-record sources that met the magazine’s “legal threshold.” 

He’s also said that later finding a bullet outside his Manhattan home – in 2004, he thinks it was – and a severed cat’s head outside another home in 2006 in no way scared him off the story. He, in any case, fearlessly invited Epstein’s fellow abuser Ghislaine Maxwell to Vanity Fair’s post-Oscar party in 2014. 

Maria Farmer, who first reported what had happened to her to law enforcement in 1996, told the New York Times this year that “after she was asked to give Mr Epstein a foot massage, he and Ms Maxwell violently groped her until she fled the room and barricaded herself in another part of the building.” Yet a dozen years after she spoke to Vanity Fair, and Graydon Carter decided against publishing anything she and her sister and mother had to say, Epstein’s partner was still on the party list of an event he hosted.  

Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was never told why what she told ABC News never aired, but Alan Dershowitz confirmed to NPR News that yes, he spoke to several people at the network about spiking the story: “I did not want to see her credibility enhanced by ABC.” 

Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, at one point accused Dershowitz of assaulting her when she was a teenager, but later said she may have made a mistake in her identification of him. She sued him for defamation after he said she was only looking for money, and he countersued. Both lawsuits were dropped in 2022. Dershowitz, who was part of the legal team that negotiated Epstein’s plea deal with Acosta, tried publicly to discredit Brown’s work as “fake news.” 

Epstein’s friends also included a financial reporter at the New York Times named Landon Thomas Jr. 

In his 2002 New York Magazine profile of Epstein, Thomas wrote that his subject had “a keen eye for the ladies,” was to his credit “not a self-promoter,” and was, according to a “society journalist,” in a “nice conventional relationship” with Maxwell, “where they serve each other’s purposes.” Epstein was sorry to have attracted unwanted attention to himself, Thomas wrote, by flying Bill Clinton and his “close friend” Kevin Spacey around. That last part was definitely true. 

Okay, that was 2002. But in 2008, when Epstein was literally on his way to jail, Thomas wrote yet another admiring piece about Epstein, for the Times.

“Sitting on his patio on ‘Little St Jeff’s’ in the Virgin Islands several months ago, as his legal troubles deepened, Mr Epstein gazed at the azure sea and the lush hills of St Thomas in the distance, poked at a lunch of crab and rare steak prepared by his personal chef, and tried explain how his life had taken such a turn,” Thomas wrote. “He likened himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput.” 

The piece went on: “Gulliver’s playfulness had unintended consequences,” Mr Epstein said. “That is what happens with wealth. There are unexpected burdens as well as benefits.”

Whoever edited this ode to an admitted abuser – yes, that’s what soliciting a minor is – should also reflect on the unintended consequences of living on a different kind of island. 

Thomas became so confused about his role that, in 2017, he warned Epstein that another reporter was working on a story about him. That same year, he solicited and received a $30,000 donation from Epstein to a school in Harlem. That’s apparently why Thomas is no longer with the paper, but when this lulu of a lapse was discovered, it should also have been disclosed.

Magazine writer and author Michael Wolff was either another pal or only pretending to be one. He gave Epstein advice on how to use his connection to Trump to his own advantage. That was just play-acting, Wolff says now, I guess like Trump was just pretending to be Epstein’s friend for years.

“I believe Trump offers an ideal opportunity,” Wolff wrote Epstein in 2016, in that “becoming an anti-Trump voice gives you a certain political cover which you decidedly don’t have now.” In this highly transactional world, can even the pretenders themselves tell the difference?

We all know about the proximity to power, but the proximity to perversity was apparently irresistible, too. 

New York media heavies of the day included many who might have had reason to sympathize with poor Jeffrey Epstein. In 2010, the year after he was released from jail, Charlie Rose was among those who came to his Manhattan mansion for his dinner for then-Prince Andrew. 

Does any of this mean that the Epstein story could only have been broken by a faraway local news outlet? No, and today, just a few years later, I’m not sure how many local reporters anywhere would be given the time to pull off something this ambitious, no matter how many extra hours and unpaid expenses they were willing to put in. 

But just as it was not exactly an accident that the Harvey Weinstein scandal was broken by reporters from New York rather than Hollywood, distance from Epstein’s “clubby world that is all but gone” can only have been a help.

It isn’t only Big Media that let those victims down, of course. Epstein ingratiated himself so widely that you wonder how he had time for predation: He gave Steve Bannon basic financial advice, weighed in on Elon Musk’s hiring decisions. Even after Brown’s investigation about Epstein came out, he seems to have been giving former Harvard President Larry Summers relationship advice. 

Summers, who has previously said his relationship with Epstein was “a major error of judgment,” also sought and got support for a nonprofit backed by his wife, Elisa New, who in her own embarrassing email to Epstein joked about intending to reread Lolita with him in mind. She recommends Willa Cather’s My Antonia, because the book has “come to think of it – similar themes to Lolita in that it’s about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.” We’re not only all friends, but all too sophisticated to mind what donors do.

Finally, President Trump has stopped fighting the release of the Epstein files and, at least for now, says he’s all for it. This has never been a hoax, Democratic or otherwise, and should never be a partisan exercise, either. Because the only thing that matters, or ever has, is holding whoever hurt those girls accountable at long last. 

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.