Tag: sex abuse

The Powerful Man publishing event of the season—what “Steve Jobs” or “The Lives of John Lennon” or “Iacocca” were to their respective moments—is “The First Fifty Years,” a set of three leather-bound tomes commissioned by Ghislaine Maxwell to celebrate the milestone birthday, in 2003, of her onetime boyfriend and, eventually, fellow convicted child-sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “The idea behind this book was simply to gather stories and old photographs to jog your memory about places people and different events,” Maxwell writes in the prologue. Her pen swoops and dives, like a ravenous moray eel. She seems so pleased with herself, for what’s about to unfold. And what a team she’s put together: the business executive Leslie Wexner, the private-equity investor Leon Black, the venture capitalist William Elkus, the Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, and Alan Dershowitz—among many other friends and associates—are all named as contributors, gathered here in honor of the birthday boy.

You have likely heard about the Presidential submissions to this anthology, which the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform obtained from Epstein’s estate and released to the public this week. A vapid, near-illegible note attributed to Bill Clinton salutes “all the years of learning and knowing” that Epstein has logged, and praises his “childlike curiosity” and his “drive to make a difference.” The entry attributed to and apparently signed by Donald Trump invents an innuendo-heavy conversation between himself and Epstein, who was later revealed to be a serial rapist of girls as young as fourteen. Surely taking inspiration from the concrete poems of John Hollander or perhaps James Merrill’s “Christmas Tree,” the author fits the lines of dialogue inside a female silhouette, adding pen strokes that represent breast buds. He alludes to a shared love of secrets. Epstein, Trump once observed, likes women “on the younger side.” (The White House has denied that Trump contributed the drawing or signed it.)

The second Trump Administration has been dogged by a somewhat amnesiac fixation on the President’s long-established ties to Epstein, whom Trump once described as “a lot of fun to be with,” and who died in a jail cell under bizarre circumstances during Trump’s first term, in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. This summer, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, reversed her promises to release new investigative files related to Epstein. Maxwell, who is appealing her conviction and seeking a pardon, met for two long sessions with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, as part of what my colleague Ruth Marcus called a “damage-control operation.” (As ABC News put it, “It is almost unheard of for a convicted sex trafficker to meet with such a high-ranking Justice Department official, especially one who used to be the president’s top criminal defense attorney.”)

It’s therefore understandable why most of the media response to “The First Fifty Years” has focussed on a couple of pages of Trump-related content. But this framing may actually undersell the book’s hideous, maggot-crawling depravity. Reading it from start to finish—there are two hundred and thirty-eight pages, with redactions throughout, in the PDF that the House committee released—is to immiserate oneself in a uniquely cheap and idiotic genre of degeneracy. Sometimes it’s like you’re leafing through the visitors’ book at the Museum of Carcosa. Sometimes it reads like a catalogue raisonné of outsider art by registered sex offenders. Sometimes it’s like you’ve stumbled into the masked ball in “Eyes Wide Shut” and everyone is wearing Shein, and smells like Burger King, and there’s that tacky gold shit that Trump likes all over the walls. Sometimes it’s like you’ve discovered a rich man’s contract with the devil, and, next to his signature, he’s drawn a little penis cartoon.

Epstein’s air of mystery is a refrain among the admirers who made contributions to his birthday book. He has both a “Mona Lisa smile” and a “Cheshire cat grin”; he is “always grinning” like a “mischievous lad”; his friends “think he works for the CIA.” (Maybe?) He is surrounded at all times by gorgeous babes. He “can create them out of thin air,” one pal writes. The section “Girl Friends” includes two pages of densely collaged snapshots of young women, predominantly in bathing suits or lingerie, all with their faces blacked out. The “Assistants” section reads as if someone asked a prospective employer for a job description and was given a millennial issue of Maxim: skimpy-bikini shots, butt shots, and a blacked-out horizontal shot with a caption asking, “Who Am I???” A photo of a couple taken from behind—the man’s hand is pushed deep into the waistband of the woman’s jeans—is captioned “Thank You!!!” Another grateful former employee lists the men of wealth and taste whom she has met through her work with Epstein: Clinton, Trump, Prince Andrew, the Sultan of Brunei, Kevin Spacey, Michael Jackson, and so forth.

The Epstein of the birthday book is charming and suave but also menacing. He looms. A slim young woman in a thong turns toward the camera: “Visiting you down in Palm Beach . . . Can’t get a second of privacy with you and a camera around Ha! Ha!” He augurs violence; he must be placated. A friend imagines threatening girls at knifepoint to strip off their bathing suits. In another snapshot, Epstein is masked and holding what appears to be a gun; the caption refers to a “first victim” who will “be attacked and brutally plundered.” Everyone surrenders to him. It’s wonderful and terrible. “You’re my kid’s role model,” one friend tells Epstein, adding that when he and a mutual friend “get together, who and what do you think we talk about ? You, You, You, You, its constant—I can’t stand it anymore.” That was twenty-two years ago.