“Women are on the upswing to power,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in October 2017 to a friend. “Their methods I might not agree with but I recognize the weapons are limited.”
The friend was Kathryn Ruemmler, a prominent attorney and former White House Counsel to Barack Obama whose close relationship with Epstein is now one of many under renewed scrutiny. The email exchange happened during the dawn of what would become the MeToo movement, when numerous powerful and some less-powerful men were accused of sexual abuse and harassment. In hindsight, the cultural reckoning created by MeToo was short-lived; many of the men accused went back to their original prominence, and some were even elected president of the United States. But at the time, it seemed that the movement might shake a lot of important men loose from their pedestals. And a lot of people—the accused themselves, lawyers, journalists, various curious gawkers—wanted to talk to the man who knew more about sexual abuse cases, and getting out from under them, than anyone else in their orbit: Epstein.
Epstein seems to have been captivated by the emerging MeToo movement.
In 2008, Epstein had been given an infamously lax plea deal by then-top Florida federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, which kept him out of prison and paved the way for him to continue to sexually assault women and girls for the next 11 years, until his eventual re-arrest and 2019 death in a Manhattan jail. Newly released emails show him acting as an armchair media critic when it came to coverage of other powerful sex pests and related discussions of sexual abuse in the news.
The extent of Epstein’s involvement and interest in other men’s alleged sexual abuse cases—and the advice and lavish sympathy he was given about his own legal issues by his many famous friends—is further revealed in the newest dump of some three million pages of Epstein emails, released on January 30 by Donald Trump’s version of the Justice Department. In keeping with past releases, the new documents are heavily redacted, highly repetitive, and chaotically organized, meaning the full scope of what’s within it is just becoming clear.
But they show that Epstein seems to have immediately been captivated by 2017’s emerging MeToo movement, perhaps, as a malevolent sex criminal himself, understanding it better than the general public. In late October of that year, he sent around a recent New York Times story about his friend, film producer Harvey Weinstein, who the paper reported had paid numerous sexual assault accusers to stay quiet. (This was, of course, exactly what Epstein himself had done for many years.)
“It’s so interesting from a revolutionary point of view,” he wrote to Ruemmler. “The masses uprising, vigilanti [sic] gossip. but a long time coming.” (As in previous Epstein document disclosures, his writing is littered with astounding typos and misspellings; his iPhone signature even contained the words “Sorry for all the typos.” The newly released files also bear encoding errors. We’ve minimally cleaned quotes for legibility.)
In another email from that October to Brad S. Karp, a top corporate lawyer, Epstein wrote, “How bad does the Harvey Weinstein story get?”
“I think it gets pretty bad—and a little bit worse every day,” responded Karp.
The two also emailed in March 2018, lamenting the resignation of William Voge, the chairman of rival firm Latham & Watkins, following a sexting scandal. “Really awful,” Karp wrote. “I really liked Bill Voge.” (Karp himself stepped down Wednesday night from his position leading Paul Weiss; the announcement conceded that recent “reporting” had become “a distraction” but did not mention the emails or Epstein’s name.)
Epstein also emailed an October 2017 New Yorker story about Weinstein to Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of director Woody Allen—one of a series of exchanges that make clear he and the couple were longtime friends. Allen has, of course, been accused of sexual abuse by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow. (Allen has denied her allegations.) Previn and Epstein discussed other people’s sexual abuse allegations at least twice: besides Weinstein, in 2016, they corresponded at length about Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a 15-year-old girl, belittling his accuser and rationalizing the former congressman’s conduct. (Weiner ultimately served time in prison.) In that exchange, Previn called the girl “disgusting” and “despicable,” adding, “I hate women who take advantage of guys and she’s definitely one of them.”
“[H]e hasnt had sex in a year,” Epstein responded. “what is he supposed to do. he cant have a girlfriend, cant have a hooker. so hey thought he was safe.”
In another email Previn sent to Epstein, she put a finer point on it, writing that MeToo had “gone too far.”
As time went on, Epstein and his friends expressed frustration with MeToo. Epstein exchanged numerous emails with Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist who began facing public accusations of sexual harassment by employees and other women in science in early 2018. In September, Krauss sent Epstein an article about New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma stepping down. Buruma had published an essay by Canadian radio personality Jian Ghomeshi, who was accused in 2014 of serial sexual harassment and abuse. Ghomeshi was found not guilty of five of six criminal charges during a 2016 trial; the sixth was dropped after he apologized to his accuser.
Buruma’s publication of Ghomeshi’s essay in 2018 had created an immediate backlash against the editor and prompted his resignation; in his email to Epstein, Krauss fumed: “Impossible to publish anything about metoo, even if the author was acquitted! Now that publisher of NYRB has had to leave, who will want to publish authors!”
Epstein was also involved in an email exchange about the Shitty Media Men list, a short-lived Google spreadsheet created by journalist Moira Donegan and circulated to collect women’s knowledge of sexual harassment and abuse allegations against men in the magazine and publishing worlds. One man put on the list by an anonymous accuser, writer Stephen Elliott, sued Donegan for defamation in October 2018. Elliott sent an appeal in August seeking help mounting his lawsuit. The appeal was sent to Lorin Stein, the former Paris Review editor who resigned in 2017 amid an internal investigation into his conduct towards female employees and other writers. (Stein denied harassing anyone, but admitted that expressing sexual interest in writers and interns who he had power over was, as he put it in an apology letter, “an abuse of my position.”)
“the story is false allegations”
Stein, in turn, forwarded the email to prominent journalist Michael Wolff, another longtime friend of Epstein’s who has defended their warm relationship—one that the new emails provide fresh evidence oversteps the boundaries and ethical guidelines that usually govern reporters’ dealings with sources.
Wolff asked Epstein to consider helping Elliott, as a battle in some broader anti-#MeToo war. “I don’t know Stephen Elliot but I have always thought that the way back from this climate is through specific instances of individuals successfully challenging their persecution,” Wolff wrote. “If his story is solid he might be worth supporting. Thoughts?” In another email, Wolff added, “I think there is an opening here. What you need is an excuse—or opportunity—to make the public argument.”
“ill help anyway i can,” Epstein wrote back, “if you like.”
It’s not clear if Epstein ultimately got involved in any way with Elliott’s lawsuit, or if Elliott even knew that Wolff had reached out to Epstein on his behalf; Elliot didn’t respond to another journalist writing about the emails, and two emails to him seeking comment were not delivered successfully. Elliott and Donegan settled out of court for what has been described as a “six-figure” sum; Donegan told me this week that it was about the total raised by a GoFundMe set up on her behalf.
Donegan, the subject of Elliot’s lawsuit, was unaware that Epstein had discussed it. “I did not know that Epstein had been aware of the case; I came to know of his exchange about it yesterday morning, when it was forwarded to me by my boss,” Donegan, now a columnist for the Guardian, told me via email. “But having now read the exchange between Epstein, Wolff, Stein, and Elliott, I can say that it is no mystery to me why someone like Mr. Epstein would take an interest in the lawsuit against me, or why he would wish to help with it.”
Epstein was also notably interested in finding out how to shape public reaction to his own sexual abuse scandals. In December 2018 exchange, Epstein seemed to ask Wolff about how to steer press coverage of his own lawsuits.
“Do you think the press would react to the fact that all the settlement money is going to the attorney and none to the girls?” he wrote. The email’s context isn’t entirely clear, but earlier that month, Epstein settled a defamation suit brought by some of his underage victims.
“I think it’s a useful point, potentially a powerful one,” Wolff replied. “But I don’t think anything is going to get attention now. I would look for some reporter to do a more nuanced post-mortem on the case—with its Trump overtones, legal joustings, #metoo-isms, and profit-motives.”
In a 2015 email exchange with Ruemmler, Epstein suggested he thought he could undermine accusations against him by mining the fallout of another journalistic scandal: the recently retracted 2014 Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus,” whose main character was found to have fabricated what she told reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
As Ruemmler and Epstein workshopped a statement responding to new accusations against him by Virginia Giuffre, who said that she was trafficked by Epstein and his longtime partner and procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote that “i thought we might suggest , something like we would hope that after the UVA debacle that journalists should be more on notice regarding their obligations to verify the veracity of tabloid allegations.”
“these stories are made out of whole cloth”
Epstein referenced the retracted UVA story again in another 2015 email to Wolff writing, “think about if there is a way to captialize [sic] on the new ruling against girls, and the uva case where false accusations are apparant [sic].”
“The media is loathe to use the L word. Liar,” he added. “Millions of dollars involved in the uva issue and not media outlet said the girl lied… these stories are made out of whole cloth.”
Besides acting as a window into how the world’s most pernicious sex pest thought about MeToo and journalism, the emails also show some of the sympathy and advice that Epstein received over the years from friends and admirers, including actor Val Kilmer and famed public intellectual Noam Chomsky. Whenever Epstein came up in the news, friends noticed and reached out.
“I see they never miss an opportunity to try to drag you in—saw an article the other day asking how you missed the #metoo press and tying you to trump,” wrote David Schoen, an attorney who represented Epstein as well as Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial. “Didn’t mention much of all you have been put through already. I hope the cases are all behind you now.”
At the same time that Epstein was having these warm exchanges with famous and powerful friends, he was, of course, also continuing his predation on women and girls. The newly-released documents contain numerous examples of him soliciting nude photos from very young women; one declines because she still lives with her parents. Another declines his repeated requests to meet up, explaining that her virginity is important to her and clearly understanding what he had in mind. A third woman complains that she developed a painful vaginal infection following one of their meetings; Epstein responds only by asking if she’s gone on birth control yet.
These seedy predations are even more disturbing in light of his warm relationships with the rich and powerful, who, it is clear, didn’t much care much about what their infamous friend was doing with his time. In the exchanges, friends would occasionally tell him they stood by him, and that as far as they were concerned, the allegations against him were overblown, and that anyway, he’d served his time.
“I said that i thought you had acted with integrity,” evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers told Epstein in 2018, relating a conversation he’d had with a friend about him. “In both in the protection the young women received from you and your woman friend whom i knew well, having met her through you several times, that most were not in fact under age of consent (17), almost always massages, you had served your time for the crime and then, if i have this correct, paid several additional young women circa a million a piece—not to silence them but rather to minimise any harm caused by the publicity.”
When the accusations against Epstein do come up in these email exchanges, he can wave them away, often in the crudest and most cavalier of terms.
Epstein wrote in 2011 to British journalist Dominic Lawson, seeming to refer to an accuser of Prince Andrew, a longtime associate and party pal of Epstein’s who has repeatedly denied allegations that he engaged in sex trafficking involving Giuffre and other Epstein victims. Epstein and Lawson were also discussing allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a powerful French politician and former IMF chief who stood accused of sexually assaulting a maid in a New York hotel. (The charges were soon dismissed.)
“In a world of google. unpunished accusers. fear of appearing insensitive,” Epstein wrote, in his trademark mix of incoherent and insensitive. “My favorite take away line from the Strauss Kahn feminazis ‘These revelations mean little. don’t forget that even liars can be raped.’”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.