Why Trump Doesn't Stand a Chance of
Killing the Epstein Story
Nov 17, 2025
Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of
slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path. The copious accretions have
even buried Trump’s futile efforts to browbeat MAGA Congress members to vote
against the full release of the Epstein files. In a total backflip to avoid the
humiliation of a clear loss to his own base, Trump now supports the files
pouring forth into the world, and said he would sign the bill if it passes.
Trump, the product of legendary reality TV, should have known that he could not
kill the Epstein obsession loop. First, because pedophilia is a core MAGA
agitant. And secondly, all those videos and photos of Trump and Epstein make
for an enduring TV story. That clip of the two of them leering at cheerleaders
and models at a louche 1992 Mar-a-Lago party, with Ghislaine Maxwell standing
right behind them, looks more like the Zapruder film every day.
Partners
in slime (Credit: NBC News)
Michael Wolff, the sour savant of American media who has
written multiple bestsellers excoriating Trump, has been caught himself in the
river of ooze. Just when he is the ubiquitous go-to source for everyone looking
for dark insights into Trump’s hide-and-seek with Epstein malfeasance, last
week’s email cache shows Wolff to be another pond eel swimming in the Epstein
access estuary. (Cf. the consigliere tone of Wolff’s “You can hang [Trump] in a
way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you.”) Today, Wolff
defends his tactic as an attempt to ingratiate himself with Epstein for the
eventual blistering story Wolff was sure to write. Perhaps, there, we should
give him the benefit of the doubt. He certainly conned Rupert Murdoch’s
experienced comms team at News Corporation into giving him an all-access pass
to the most powerful man in media, only to violate every agreed-upon ground
rule and sell sources down the river. (After Wolff first made nice, then
trashed me in New York magazine, I retaliated in the pages
of Talk by describing his “baleful masturbatory glare,” which
gave me a modicum of satisfaction.)
Epstein
consigliere Michael Wolff
One of the biggest hazards of releasing private emails is
how much they expose the multiple faces people in high places present to the
world. Money, not sex, is often the embarrassing Achilles’ heel. How much was
former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers’
sustained digital banter with Epstein really about the world of ideas or just
foreplay to secure a handsome grant to his wife’s Poetry in America initiative?
(Summers to Epstein: “My life will be better if I raise $1m for Lisa…Ideas?”)
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson used Epstein as a gushing
human ATM to cover her mountainous debts for years. But after publicly
disavowing Epstein with an “I abhor pedophilia” aria, a leaked 2011 email shows
she almost immediately sent him a suck-up mea culpa: “I know you feel
hellaciously let down by me. You have always been a steadfast, generous and
supreme friend to me and my family.” Exit stage left the erstwhile Duchess of
York.
Even Epstein himself, a prolific, typo-strewn
e-correspondent, pondered to Summers in 2017: “Interesting argument whether
using WhatsApp is obstruction of justice. Deletes after sending?” You wish,
Larry. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren called on Harvard to cut all ties
with Summers, given that the new emails reveal his “monumentally bad judgment.”
Threat Level
Just as piquant as the emails in the latest dump is
an Epstein profile draft in there by Michael
Wolff that was never published. At this point, Epstein has been so demonized,
if one can use such a word for someone so personally depraved, it’s hard to
understand why esteemed figures like Bill Gates, Oliver Sacks, and Stephen Jay
Gould did not recoil from Epstein’s advances. Wolff’s piece gives us a glimpse
of the other Epstein in action—doing Big Thinks as the philosopher of wealth
creation. “It used to be,” Epstein mused to Wolff “that the rich, reaching a
certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better
place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as
examples of social-engineering philanthropy, unique….Now you have legions of
people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or
Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. In the past, only
governments had this kind of money, money of a reality-altering scale.” Epstein
did not see that his own wealth had created a personal distortion field that normalized
his horrific predations.
Penis Envy
Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill, bipartisan members of
Congress, including Reps. Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene,
are hosting a cluster of Epstein survivors for a press conference to “discuss
next steps.” I talked with one of them yesterday: Rina Oh, a 46-year-old
Korean-American artist, who was groomed by Epstein through a pretend interest
in her art. Just as Wolff shows us the intellectual manqué side of Epstein,
Rina, now the serene-faced mother of two sons, offers unsettling details about
the competitive atmosphere inside Epstein’s sexual ménage. When the pedophile
magus made clear to the girls that Maxwell was too old to attract him,
Ghislaine’s own jealousy became a toxic force. By 2001, Rina believes, Epstein
and Maxwell hated each other. “Their relationship was very awful, very
strange,” she told me. “I actually didn’t ever suspect that the two of them
were having any type of a romantic relationship. I thought she was an associate
of his, especially when I saw them fighting. Ghislaine was snickering at him in
that British accent and they were throwing insults at each other.” She recalls,
“He took me and another girl to the tennis court at Mar-a-Lago, where Ghislaine
was playing. He got her attention…and stood behind me and started humping me
through my clothes.…He was shrieking and laughing, making fun of Ghislaine.”
She believes Epstein bought Ghislaine the Manhattan townhouse, which sold this
year for $18 million, to get rid of her, and that Ghislaine ramped up her role
as Epstein’s procuress in the 2000s as the only way she could hang on.
Epstein
survivor Rina Oh (Credit: Jackie Molloy/The Sunday Times)
Rina is also convinced that Epstein’s core issue was that
“he had an extremely deformed penis.…Some people have described it as the shape
of an egg. I think it was more of the shape of a lemon, and it was really small
when it was fully erect. It was probably like two inches.” She does not believe
he was capable of penetrative sex. Strangely, I had this conversation with Rina
right after reading on the Drudge Report about new DNA research on blood taken
from fabric from the sofa on which Hitler shot himself, suggesting that the
Führer had the genetic marker for Kallman syndrome, which can result in the
misfortune of a micropenis.
See what I mean? The angles are endless. Yet Trump still
believes he can quash this story.
