I have a theory about Epstein, and I think it’s a pretty compelling one. Let’s give a bit of background in case you’re the one living human who doesn’t know who Epstein was. I have been interested in Jeffrey Epstein since this Vanity Fair article about him from 2003 written by Vicky Ward. This was from back when VF was indispensable journalism and hired great essayists to do great journalism. Now all of those essayists are on Substack.
Jeffrey Epstein was a math teacher at Dalton, a private school in NYC. He never went to college. He had no advanced degrees. By all accounts, he was a fairly charismatic guy.
Around 1979, Epstein got linked up with Les Wexner, the founder of Victoria’s Secret. Who’s the kind of guy who creates Victoria’s Secret? Presumably, that’s a guy who’s pretty obsessed with young women in their underwear.
Somehow, Wexner was so captivated by Epstein that he decided to buy him the largest townhouse in New York City and give him many tens of millions of dollars.
Why, you might ask, did he do that? Great question. I don’t know! But I can’t think of an aboveboard reason why he would. It’s not like Epstein was known as a great stock picker. He wasn’t Warren Buffett.
Maybe this was where the blackmail started. What sort of kompromat did Epstein have on Wexner? I don’t know, but it can’t be that hard to guess.
All of this money and the fancy townhouse gave Epstein a good entry into polite society. Together with his buddy Ghislaine Maxwell, they threw parties, they invited the great and the good, and they attracted a real crowd.
I think Epstein and Maxwell figured out that there were a few types of people. Some were totally honest and were just interesting. Those kinds of people are good to have around. If you can bring in the brilliant scientists or philosophers, that is a draw for the next two categories of people.
The second category were rich and powerful businessmen and politicians who were generally ethical. They were wealthy, honest, and most importantly, could keep their dick in their pants.
The third category were the rich and powerful businessmen who had a wandering eye. They were married and had appearances to maintain, but also, they liked to fuck around.
One interesting question is whether you can always distinguish between category two and three. I think you probably need to run a controlled experiment in order to do so. But thankfully that isn’t so hard to do.
You host a dinner party, and you invite a few people from each of our three categories. At the dinner, you have a few attractive women who are walking around. Maybe they are invited guests, maybe they are waitresses, maybe a couple of each. And then you watch. Pay attention. Some men will enjoy talking to the chemistry professor and learning about cutting-edge science. Others will multitask, focusing on the conversation while also eyeballing the waitress. This is how you sort between category two and three!
I think in practice you can probably smell it on people pretty quickly whether they are in one group or another, but it’s helpful to know as precisely as possible.
As you categorize people, you can start to lay traps!
The easiest trap is to host another event, only this time you exclude the guys who are more upstanding and you focus on the ones who were salivating at the last dinner.
So you have a few of them at the party, and you have a couple of paid girls or women. Are they 17? 18? It probably doesn’t matter a ton for his purposes. Epstein pays the girl $500 or $1,000 to make sure she sleeps with whoever her assigned mark is. Not just that, but make sure she does it in this particular room on this particular bed, where it just so happens there is a hidden video camera set up to record the whole thing.
Then the next day, Epstein calls his guest.
“Wow, great dinner party last night. That was so much fun!”
“Totally! That was great. <lowers voice> Listen, remember that girl that you fooled around with? She was so hot. But this is crazy. It turns out that she was only 17.”
“Oh my god! I’m ruined. Oh no! What am I going to do?”
“Listen, calm down. I know this is scary, but I can help. I can make this all go away. I am going to fix this.”
“Ok, but how?”
“So you know how you’re a billionaire? Here is how we fix this. I have a ‘money management business’ that is headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Tomorrow, I want you to wire $100 million to this account. This money management business will charge you a fee of $5 million to look for investments and for ‘tax advice.’ The other $95 million will just sit in a bank account collecting interest. After one year, you write a letter saying that you want to redeem your investment. The money management firm wires the money back to you, and I will use that $5 million as hush money to make sure everyone stays quiet.”
“Wow. Great idea. You’re a lifesaver, Jeffrey Epstein.”
Of course, none of the girls ever got that money. That all went to Epstein to keep himself quiet.
There is so much talk about Epstein trafficking underage girls. And I think that some of these girls were likely 17. But I think for all intents and purposes, the difference between a 17- and an 18-year-old is not very significant. Both offer major blackmail potential.
I think there are a lot of folks who are salivating, imagining that Epstein was bringing in 7-year-old kids to get fucked and slaughtered by some private equity titan. One of my dear friends, and a loyal reader of this newsletter, said to me last week “I can’t imagine how many kids were killed on that island.” I don’t think that is the right way to think about this.
Picture in your head a guy who sleeps with 7-year-olds. That’s just not the CEO of a company or the founder of a private equity firm. It’s some dweebish freak who has a crazy compulsion and cannot control the urge. That guy is surely going to end up in prison. I just don’t think that compulsion is often found in overlap with the skillset of becoming a billionaire. In fact, I would guess most of these guys would be utterly repulsed at the idea of something like this.
But then picture a billionaire who likes to bang a 23-year-old yoga instructor. That Venn diagram has huge overlap with the CEO crowd!
Now Epstein managed to do this for years. He did it so much that he built an operation at scale. He bought an island and a jet and threw parties on the island. That must be the most lucrative blackmail ring in history.
But it also doesn’t need to be a one-time thing. Some of his marks may have been totally aware that they were being blackmailed, and they may not have cared. Once you’re already paying Epstein $5 million a year, if you can afford it, why not just keep going? Make it an annual payment and then you can take down all the girls he can get for you!
Epstein got creative about it too. Call it “estate planning advice” or “tax advice” and charge a fee for that service. There are surely lots of ways to create a Caribbean shell company and provide nebulous services.
In 2021 I wrote:
“Also, let’s take a moment to discuss something else. There is a conspiracy theory called Pizzagate. It became popular at the time of the 2016 presidential election. If you remember back then, John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, had his email hacked. Wikileaks published the emails. And the theory was that his emails somehow connected several well-known Democratic politicians and several restaurants to a human trafficking and molestation ring. One of the establishments that was implicated was a pizzeria in Washington DC called Comet Ping Pong Pizza. Hence the name, Pizzagate. People went wild with this theory on social media and some nutjob even drove to the pizza restaurant from North Carolina armed with a rifle to try to break the lock on a closet in the restaurant and free the children he believed were trapped inside.”
This theory always seemed pretty farfetched. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. But a lot of rubes fell for this. The intellectual crowd (always liberals) mocked the idiots who believed this theory, and it provided confirmation that all the things that group believed must be stupid and should be ignored.
“But for a moment, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of some random guy from Indiana. I’ll describe the persona. He worked in a factory, and his father worked in a factory, and he had a decent middle-class life. Then over the past 20 years, he has seen the factory shut as the company relocated the plant to China to save costs. Life in his town has deteriorated as people have become hooked on pain pills.
Now, this guy sees on the news this crazy thing about Jeffrey Epstein and all these powerful people flying on his plane to an island in the Caribbean where they can sleep with underage girls. The news tells him that everyone from powerful business leaders to Bill Clinton was flying there over and over.
Then this guy reads about Pizzagate. Does one of these stories seem obviously more stupid or implausible than the other? Why would you automatically believe that one of these is true and the other is false? They are both total abstractions. So why is it so obviously stupid to believe one and not the other?”
In the early 2000s, Epstein was living in Florida and he was arrested for soliciting underage girls. The story at the time was that Epstein wanted these girls to give him naked massages. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe he liked testing out the merchandise and also wanted them for use in his blackmail ring. He went to prison for over a year for this, in a plea deal that never really made much sense. The prosecutor was forced to drop most of the charges and agree to a deal that no one else would have gotten. Did Epstein have kompromat on someone higher up? I don’t know! But it sure seems like it.
When he got out of prison, he went right back to it! And that makes sense. He had a lucrative thing going, and they didn’t really dismantle any of it, so why not?
About 12 years later, in 2018, it all started to fall apart. MeToo! Harvey Weinstein! And Epstein got arrested. Somehow, while he was in jail at the Metropolitan Detention Center, he died. And amazingly, when he died, the camera focused on his jail cell malfunctioned, the guards who were supposed to be watching him were asleep, and Epstein died. Did he kill himself? Was he murdered? Was he forced to kill himself? I don’t know. I think we can speculate about this, but until we have a witness or evidence, it is just pure speculation.
It's very possible that Epstein was embarrassed and didn’t want to go through with another trial. It’s also possible that he was killed to stop him from talking.
So how do we get to the bottom of this? I can think of several ways, and to my knowledge, I don’t know that these have been pursued. The first is, follow the money! Epstein clearly was not running a legitimate money management firm. So whoever paid him must have been doing it for a reason. Who paid him? He amassed >$500 million. Follow the money!
The second is, look for witnesses. This is the toughest one. As far as I know, only one witness has come forward to say that she was used by Epstein as a hooker. Her name was Virginia Giuffre, and as far as I can tell, she was nuts. Maybe she went nuts because of what happened to her, but more likely she was just a nutbag. She claimed that she was forced to sleep with Prince Andrew when she was 17 in 2001. She provided all kinds of details about him that sounded incredibly weird. She claimed that they were at a nightclub and he was drunk and dancing with her and sweating all over her. And then his response was to deny it and claim that was not possible because he has a skin disease and is incapable of sweating. I don’t know—it’s all pretty bizarre.
She also made other allegations, including claiming that Alan Dershowitz also engaged in some kind of sexual activity with her. They got into an 8-year battle of lawsuits and eventually settled with each other.
You don’t get to choose your witnesses. I’m sure if Virginia Giuffre was totally stable and normal and brilliant she wouldn’t have been in a position as a vulnerable hooker. But also, she seemed pretty crazy. She killed herself (maybe) in April of this year in Western Australia after claiming that she was hit by a bus and went into kidney failure.
So wouldn’t there be someone else who would step forward? Another girl who got mixed up in this scheme? Maybe, but so far we don’t have any good ones.
The third piece of evidence would be the data. Where are the videos and the kompromat? Can we just focus on the flight logs of who went on his plane? I think probably not—we don’t know who was in the first category of entertaining scientist, and who was in the category of businessman with a hard-on.
One offshoot of this theory about Epstein is that he was doing a lot of this on behalf of government spy agencies. Some say the CIA, some say Mossad. It’s possible. But I doubt it. For a few reasons. First is that I think the CIA is just much too afraid to do anything like this. Maybe in the 1970s or 1980s they would have had the balls for an operation like this. But now the CIA is entirely Mormons and it’s a largely ineffective agency for gathering electronic data.
Mossad is pretty badass, but I just don’t really buy that the Mossad was focused on getting intel on Alan Dershowitz or whatever. He doesn’t matter. So it’s possible, but it just doesn’t really ring true to me.
Epstein was back in the news this week because Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised that she had the files. She had all the documents. She had the records and the “list” and was going to release it all. She claimed she had it sitting on her desk. But then suddenly the entire government claimed that actually she didn’t have anything and there never was a file and Epstein was just some guy who acted alone. That’s both unsatisfying and doesn’t seem credible! I don’t know if the government has anything useful—I would tend to doubt that they do. Some said that they weren’t releasing it because there was dirt on Trump, but I think if there was anything bad about Trump, it is pretty obvious that it would have been released by the Biden administration. They prosecuted him for having paperwork in a closet, so it’s not like this would somehow be beneath them.
I think Bondi just overstated what she had and looks like a dunce. I also think that doesn’t mean the evidence isn’t out there for anyone who has the resources to look hard enough. I don’t think it’s appropriate for the administration to claim that it’s case closed and nothing to see here.
Instead I think they just haven’t looked very hard. I think they haven’t pursued this investigation to the ends of the earth to find the data and the witnesses and to follow the money. So do it! Follow the money. Until then, the case isn’t closed.