No man is an island: Wealth and abuse

Sex in the future must reckon with the very worst parts of patriarchal sex culture, particularly how some rich and powerful men number among the worst serial abusers on the planet, precisely because their wealth and power shield them from accountability.

“Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women—lots of them, mostly young.” So wrote Vicky Ward in 2003, profiling Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair. “Model types have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a familiar face to many of the Victoria's Secret girls.” That’s one of Leslie Wexner’s companies, and Epstein was his financial fixer since 1987. Around this same time, Epstein also flew with late fashion agent Jean-Luc Brunel, whose modeling agency MC2 was started with a million-dollar gift from Epstein. Virginia Giuffre (who escaped Ron Eppinger before fatefully meeting Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago) would later write in her memoir that Epstein bragged to her about raping over a thousand of “Brunel’s girls.”

Ward continues:

“One young woman recalls being summoned by Ghislaine Maxwell to a concert at Epstein's town house, where the women seemed to outnumber the men by far. ‘These were not women you'd see at Upper East Side dinners,’ the woman recalls. ‘Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.’ This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models. ‘Some of the guests were horrified,’ the woman says.”

That was 2003. The signs were there all along.

Where to begin?

The problem with the ongoing Epstein scandal is that it’s too big, too deep, and too far-reaching. Even Wikipedia is struggling to deal with it, with editors debating over the past month whether to merge two pages that are both flagged as too long. Every reputable news article is either a 30,000-foot explainer, or a deep dive into one factor or figure that leaves the rest of the horrid tapestry unexamined. Epstein’s legal issues didn’t even start in 2005 with his first trial, but go back to his trading days in the 1980s and 1990s—or arguably all the way back to when he began teaching at the prestigious Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, despite having no credentials.

Dalton is where Epstein tutored Alan Greenberg’s son, which is how the Bear Stearns CEO heard of Epstein’s math skills, which led to his being hired at the firm where he would make limited partner in just four years. He maintained connections with Bear Stearns all the way until 2008, when its implosion heralded the “too big to fail” financial crisis. In the meantime, he started his own business (Intercontinental Assets Group) in 1981, and among his clients was Adnan Kashoggi—the centermost figure in the Iran-Contra affair. Epstein traveled to Saudi Arabia multiple times on a forged passport during this period, making it a near certainty that he was a spy, as even the FBI cannot access certain details about his Fortelni identity (EFTA00164934). Importantly and confusingly: there is a real Marius Fortelni who may have known Epstein, and the two both owned properties in New York and Florida, so Epstein’s bogus passport might be altered rather than forged.

I’m not here to talk about Bear Stearns, or the housing bubble and toxic assets, or Iran-Contra and identity knots, and I didn’t even mention Towers Financial—Epstein had his hands all over that stuff, and it’s all very important, but none of that is my point. Way back in 1974, this up-jumped college dropout from the tip of Coney Island had already started on his reputation as a creep, because at Dalton he was flirting with his students and attended at least one student party—when he was twenty-one.

That was 1974. The signs were there all along.

Wealth and power cause brain damage

Barry Ferns has done a deep dive on the neuropsychology of wealth and abuse, one of many Sideline Expert Rabbitholes you can investigate yourself. There’s also clinical forensic psychologist Dr. G who has been reviewing the various documents and videos; Lauren the Mortician who makes a strong case that Epstein’s “death” photos do not add up, and her reasoning passes muster with the healthcare professionals in my life; even Chris Hansen himself is speaking with victims, attorneys, and historians.

Ferns discusses studies investigating how extreme wealth and power change us: by reducing empathy, increasing unethical behavior, reducing compassion, rationalizing inequality, and much more. As he puts it: “Being super-rich rewires your brain to make you treat other humans as accessories to use. Society madly calls it ‘success.’ Neurology calls it ‘damage.’ Therapy calls it, ‘We really need to talk, a lot. Sit down.’”

Ferns expands his criticism from the individual monster to the system that enables monsters, explaining how the wealthy and powerful protect their own to create “structural impunity,” whereby the elite have essentially captured so many public institutions that they can flout the rules by simply not enforcing them on each other. Ferns ties this directly to Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, an overtly illegal deal that not only let Epstein off with a gentle pat on the wrist, but also directly violated victim protection laws and contained illegal provisions attempting to stop any jurisdiction from prosecuting any potential co-conspirators.

The other side of this coin is that extreme inequality manufactures vulnerability. If there are ultra-rich who can do whatever they like, then there are also ultra-poor who must do whatever they can just to survive. This was the pattern of Epstein’s abuse, according to multiple witness statements: victims would be approached by a female associate, adult or peer, offered money to do One Little Thing for a very rich man, then got frog-boiled into increasingly abusive scenarios. Virginia Giuffre got her job at Mar-a-Lago because her father (a registered sex offender) was the maintenance manager, and she alleges that he abused her too (which he denies). Whether he did or not, she ran away at fourteen, lived on the streets and then for six months with Eppinger, then was sent to Growing Together, a toxic facility for troubled teens which was shut down after an investigation, and then she crash-landed at Mar-a-Lago.

In such a situation, one could be forgiven for thinking that working for one rich guy would be no worse than working for another. What’s more, Giuffre had been reading a massage book when Maxwell approached her, which gave an even better reason: she could be a traveling masseuse, doing something she actually wanted to do. From there, she was relentlessly groomed until Maxwell was telling her to do for ex-prince Andrew what she had done for Epstein, and finally using her to recruit another victim abroad before she met her husband and called it quits.

We will look closer at the nuts and bolts of grooming and trafficking next week. For today, I want to close with a note on narcissistic domination and abuse.

The transience of fantasy fulfillment

Dr. G is both a forensic and clinical psychologist, as well as a body language analyst, and whatever you may think about those sciences, he does not use them to diagnose Epstein with anything. Instead, he connects images and words from the Epstein files to show real patterns in behavior—and those patterns have disturbing implications.

The most emblematic is his “temple”: there exists on Little St. James what outwardly appears to be a small Jewish temple, domed with gold and sporting blue and white stripes along the sides. But inside, the building is completely unfinished, and contains only two shrink-wrapped mattresses. Dr. G says that he has “no idea” what purpose this building serves, but I know what it’s for. Shrink-wrap is waterproof, and concrete floors and walls can be power-washed, for quick and thorough removal of all DNA evidence.

There are other mismatches: a closet full of boxing stuff, but all inexpensive store brands. A room full of cheap wigs and other tacky costume materials. A well-thumbed copy of Massage for Dummies. Are you seeing the pattern yet?

Why is there a bunch of cheap boxing stuff, when the guy clearly doesn’t box? Why no expensive rich guy memorabilia? Because he doesn't care about boxing; those are just props to act out a role in a consumable fantasy.

Epstein was said to have scheduled three massages a day (hence his absurd collection of massage tables), often with different girls each time—and yes, I mean girl children. He could have hired the best massage therapists on the planet, if all he wanted was skilled hands on tap. But that’s not what he wanted.

Dr. G’s opinion is that Jeffrey Epstein was concerned with massage fantasies more than the massages themselves, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s job was to facilitate these fantasies for him. To that end, she recruited young girls and gave them a crash course in massage skills, coaching them on how to make Epstein’s fantasies as real as possible. He kept his favorites on rotation and discarded the rest, and when girls were “too old” (or just wanted more money), Maxwell would have them recruit other girls to keep the abuse train running. These fantasies are paper-thin, and so is the token costuming that facilitates them—the champion prizefighter, meeting his adoring fans after the Big Bout; the hard-partying rockstar, retiring to his trailer with groupies gone ga-ga; the celibate celebrant, led into temptation by the precocious ingénue.

And all of them, reduced to fuel for the undying fire of his incel bullshit. For that is what it is: incel bullshit. This guy, and all his rich pals, could have had as much consensual sex as they wanted with any number of adults—I know this, because I attend orgies twice a month. I could give these guys tours, for crying out Christmas! But that’s not what they want: they want unlimited sex, with whomever they desire, and they want it to be entirely on their terms. The fact that the women and girls were vulnerable and coerced was the whole point. Their philosophy has long been known: sex isn’t enough, marriage and procreation aren’t enough, they want male domination and female submission. Or as Rebecca Solnit put it: “...central to MAGA misogyny is that women’s needs should not be met.”

David Futrelle of Brotopia found a quote from an incel misogynist that perfectly sums up their worldview, which he cited on his blog We Hunted the Mammoth: “Imagine working hard your whole life and realizing, your only reward is money and power that can’t be converted into the only currency that matters, i.e., sexual access to fertile teenage girls.” Epstein couldn’t have said it more clearly himself.

Domination and access is exactly what Epstein wanted. Everything aside from that was always, and only, disposable set dressing. His air of mystery, too, was a mere veneer, meant to impress as a distraction from the insubstantiality beneath the mask. Or as Ward wrote back in ‘03: “He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York's moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.” Quoting Baroness Monckton, former Tiffany CEO: “He’s very enigmatic. You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there's something else extraordinary underneath… He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get."

Monckton knew him since the 80s. The signs were there all along.