Now We Know What All
Those People Got From Epstein
Feb. 7, 2026
By Molly Jong-Fast
Ms.
Jong-Fast is a contributing Opinion writer.
Jeffrey Epstein, as has
become clear again with the latest Department of Justice file dump, will go
down in history as perhaps this century’s most horrifically accomplished social
climber. He knew pretty much everybody, name-dropping, favor-trading, sex-trafficking
and possibly blackmailing his way all the way up, up, up.
Only Vladimir Putin, it
seems, was beyond his Mephistophelian charms.
Many of the people
revealed as knowing him well had previously claimed they hardly knew him, and all of them are
now claiming they certainly didn’t know him well enough to witness the
pedophilia. Now they are disgraced by their connection, and often, out of a
job.
Many people stuck with
him even after he had gone to jail in 2008 in Florida for sex crimes, and in
some cases even after he landed in jail again in 2019 on sex-trafficking
charges. Back then, the plight of the victims often seemed to be an afterthought. That’s most likely because whatever they
received from him in the past — access to career-enhancing people, access to
young girls and an endless supply of freebies — might still be on offer. This
is the nature of the Epstein files: It’s the record of what a global class of
very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted.
Sometimes it was a Prada bag. Other times it was a flight on Mr.
Epstein’s jet, or a weekend at his island. Sometimes it was a donation to a
charity or school. Or a job for their kid working on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for
Mr. Allen’s own kid to get into Bard. Sometimes it was a “tall, Swedish blonde.”
Other times it was a young woman who might
be a “a little freaked by the age difference.”
In writing about an
earlier tranche of emails, in The Times, Anand Giridharadas asked: “How
did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a
barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a
world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner.”
Inside dope wasn’t the
only thing Mr. Epstein had on hand. The picture provided by the latest files
shows how Mr. Epstein won favor and friendships by acting as a kind of
superconcierge. Sometimes that meant sending the helicopter to pick up guests,
as Mr. Epstein offered to do for Elon Musk in a 2012 email,
writing, “How many people will you be for the heli to island?” On another
occasion, Mr. Musk asks his concierge Epstein,
“Do you have any parties planned?” Mr. Epstein provided private plane trips,
internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts (those
went to Steve Bannon), nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen)
and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky). And then there’s the
resistance Substack star Michael Wolff, who is all over the Epstein files,
who emails Mr. Epstein, “Shoes are very nice. Thanks.”
There are numerous ways
to look foolish and creepy in the Epstein files, the worst of which is
obviously emails like the one Peter Attia wrote to Mr. Epstein in 2016, eight years
after Mr. Epstein became a registered sex offender: “Pussy is, indeed,
low-carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” Everyone has
surely by now seen the photo of the erstwhile Prince Andrew with his arm around
a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre.
There’s also a photo of Bill Clinton in a hot tub.
There are other,
seemingly more innocuous, emails that are somehow just as damning, because they
show a world where it’s fine to bring your children to the island of a
registered sex offender. In 2012, the wife of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
wrote to Mr. Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff,
“We will be coming from Caneel Bay in the morning,” bringing “two families each
with four kids ranging in age from 7-16! Six boys and two girls. I hope that’s
OK.” Later, Mr. Lutnick lied about his association with Mr. Epstein, saying he
was so “disgusted” by Mr. Epstein in 2005 that he had no more contact. In 2017,
Mr. Epstein donated $50,000 in honor of Mr. Lutnick to an unknown organization.
Many of the emails show a world that
includes a form of status upselling. Mr. Epstein used his Hollywood friends
(Mr. Allen and Brett Ratner, the future director of the “Melania” documentary)
to entice his rich, smart but unglamorous friends. A free plane flight for a
high-status person (perhaps even a royal) who otherwise doesn’t have access to a private
plane will go a long way.
In 2016, Brad Karp, the chair
of Paul Weiss, the fanciest law firm in New York and one of the first to settle
with the Trump administration, wrote to Mr. Epstein,
“Can I raise a personal issue with you concerning my son David?” He went on,
“He would love to work, in any capacity, with Woody on his upcoming film
project, if that’s a possibility. He certainly doesn’t need to be paid and he’s
a really good, talented kid.” A parent asking a friend for a job for their kid
is hardly illegal. But it’s interesting that Mr. Karp’s law firm was one of the
first to make a deal with the administration of another person who
appears thousands of times in the Epstein files, Donald
Trump.
And what does Mr. Trump
have to do with it? He’d promised to rid America of exactly the sort of
self-dealing global elite that Mr. Epstein was in the middle of. “Nobody knows
the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Mr. Trump said in his 2016 speech accepting the
Republican presidential nomination. It was a message that resonated, and when
you watch the speech again as I did the other day, the enthusiasm of the crowd
is striking. Finally, someone was letting the American people know the terrible
secret that no matter how hard one worked, no matter how smart one was, there
was no getting ahead in America circa 2016. It wasn’t their fault. It was the
fault of the elites. Around this time, we saw the rise of QAnon, a conspiracy
theory that claimed that a sex-trafficking ring was being run by elites out of
the nonexistent basement of a pizza shop.
QAnon sounded crazy to
the rest of us at the time — and it’s still crazy — but the Epstein files show
it had parallels in reality.
There are many terrible secrets buried
in the Epstein files, which mix the mundane and the horrific, the thirsty and
the criminal, and perhaps that’s the most upsetting part of all of this.
Casually wrapped up together with a bow are canceled men and sex trafficking
and media advice from Michael Wolff. Being a convicted sex offender did not
make Mr. Epstein an outcast, not when he seemed to have something to offer. His
transactional amorality actually seemed to add to his appeal to people who were
convinced that the rules didn’t apply to them.
