The Justice Department has an online Epstein Library. If you’re 18 or older and not a robot, you can use it to search many millions of pages of documents that detail the relationships that Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy convicted sex offender who killed himself in 2019, had with his powerful friends.
The files, a large tranche of which were released last week, have led to embarrassment for some of those friends — and in some cases to a dousing of their careers.
Last night, Brad Karp, the longtime chairman of Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s top corporate law firms, resigned after correspondence between him and Epstein emerged in the files. On Monday, Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, resigned his seat in the House of Lords as the Metropolitan Police in London announced an investigation into his relationship with Epstein. A top official in Slovakia also appeared in the files, and also resigned.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, moved out of his stately royal home this week, his departure apparently hastened by revelations in the newest files. “I have a friend I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein wrote to Andrew in 2010. In a later email, Epstein added that the friend was 26, Russian, clever, beautiful and trustworthy. The prince responded that he would be “delighted” to meet her.
The N.F.L. said it was going to look into the ties the New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch had with Epstein, after crude email exchanges between the men appeared in the documents. And yesterday, a department chair at the School of Visual Arts in New York stepped down after appearing in the new batch.
The Epstein files are a lot, and that’s before we get to Trump’s appearances in them. They present such a sprawling, sordid, sometimes inchoate scandal that it can be difficult to understand exactly what they tell us, except that the guy had a lot of powerful friends.
He used them for various reasons, and they used him for their own. Some of it was illegal. Some of it was ick. Some of it was quotidian (my name appears a few times because Epstein subscribed to various Times newsletters). And this week it’s all people want to talk about.
Katrin Bennhold, who writes our excellent global newsletter The World, is one of them. She called Matthew Goldstein, a Times reporter who has covered the story since Epstein’s indictment and arrest in 2019, to talk about the case.
Here are some excerpts from their conversation.
What have we learned?
Katrin: One thing I’ve been trying to understand is, why did all these powerful and rich people want to hang out with Epstein?
Matthew: I think it speaks to how elite society works around the globe. It reveals the way that money, no matter how it’s gained, brings people attention, which brings more money and more attention, and generates this vast network of connections — even for someone like Epstein. So people saw that he gathered powerful people around him and wanted to be part of it, and that way the circle became bigger.
But he was a publicly known and officially registered sex offender since 2008!
Yes, and in that way it’s also revealing of how some people in elite society viewed women. There was very much a class aspect to this. A lot of the young girls came from broken homes and poor backgrounds. Some of them had been abused in their own families. And they were viewed, basically, as objects, if not to be sexually used, then to just be around, almost like furniture. They were viewed as disposable people.
For many, the Epstein story has become a Trump story. How much of a risk is this story for the president?
In a way, Trump did that to himself. His involvement with Epstein was no secret. It was known when he ran for president the first time in 2016. If it had just been about his closeness to Epstein, it would have been embarrassing, but the story probably would have faded.
Trump made himself the story by promising the MAGA base that it would have full transparency about Epstein, but then sort of doing a fakeout. His administration made a big deal about having the Epstein client list, but then put out information that had already been largely in the public domain.
Which made a lot of people think he’s hiding something.
Yes, and that has created political problems for him. In the new batch of files, we found references to Trump that included some unverified claims, as well as documents that were already public.
But from my perspective, I don’t see this story as primarily about Trump. It’s about this world of men in elite society and their treatment of young women.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: Sam Sifton
