The devil all the time.
Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.
(So this piece started when I randomly wondered what happened to John McAfee’s bitcoins. I got sidetracked, and then it morphed into this walk down memory lane. Cheers.)
TL;DR: No one in power cares.
All of the above - and there are plenty more examples - knew what Epstein was.
The Davos Crowd. These aren’t people who met Epstein one time at a party, and took a quick snapshot with him.
At best, they just didn’t care what he did. At best.
Interesting that John McAfee - like Jean-Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein - all had very weak hyoid bones (Steve Bing tripped.)
McAfee also had this tweet:
I can pretty much guarantee you that Jeff Epstein’s home videos were not erased.
New York Magazine, April 25, 2003 Check out the guest list.
Where: East Side townhouse
Table seats: 30
Guest list: Mort Zuckerman, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, David Blaine, Donald Trump, Leslie Wexner of the Limited, disgraced British Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, Bill Clinton aide Doug Band
Menu: Private chef, though last month Rocco DiSpirito cooked dinner after Epstein bid $50,000 for his services at a Hamptons charity.
Make it MY place: Epstein hates restaurants, so he often entertains at home. “The dialogues are so engaging that serving even the most extraordinary food sometimes seems inappropriate, like eating pizza at the ballet,” he says.
“I had rich shock!” one stunned guest says about Epstein’s house, which the owner claims is the largest private dwelling in the city. At a recent dinner organized by Ghislaine Maxwell, Blaine amused a group of barely clad models with card tricks.Alas, Clinton—around whom the evening had been organized—never showed, though his Secret Service would have appreciated Epstein’s numerous security cameras.
“He really likes her,” said Steven Hoffenberg, a former mentor to Epstein who pleaded guilty in 1995 to running a massive Ponzi scheme, of Trump and [Ghislaine] Maxwell. “He was friendly with her father.”
Bill Clinton’s Intimate Secret Dinner With Ghislaine Maxwell In 2014.
“This is an intimate dinner with Clinton in L.A.,” said one source who was disturbed by the decision. “Think of all the people he knows in L.A., and Ghislaine gets to attend.”
I’ve always been 100% bipartisan on the Epstein network. I don’t care what letter is after your name.
This is from Ben Hunt:
...sociopathic oligarchs – of which club I consider Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew to be charter members – are the necessary & sufficient conditions of the specific evil that was Jeffrey Epstein as well as the more general evil of sexual predation of children.
Katie Couric, from her book, Going There, on her dinner with Jeffrey:
The place, 40 rooms over seven floors, was Eyes Wide Shut with a twist—creepy chandeliers and body-part art. I saw Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos, Woody Allen, and Soon-Yi milling around. We also brought Chelsea Handler; she and I had dinner plans that night, and when this came up, she was game. Suffering from momentary amnesia, Chelsea actually asked Woody and Soon-Yi how they met. Meanwhile, in jeans ripped at the knee, velvet loafers, and an air of studied insouciance, Epstein nursed a drink and held court in front of a massive fireplace. Tables had been set up in the living room in a square where guests ate lasagna out of shallow bowls. Stilted mingling. An early night.
“That was pretty bizarre,” Brooks [Katie’s boyfriend] said in the cab afterward. “Did you see how young the women were who took our coats?”
I couldn’t imagine what Epstein and Andrew were up to, apart from trying to cultivate friends in the media. Which, in retrospect, they must have figured they’d need when the pedophilia charges started rolling in.
“jeans ripped at the knee, velvet loafers, and an air of studied insouciance” - jeez, Katie, get a room.
Odd that Katie the journalist never once considered that Epstein’s “friends in the media” might have been compromised by some of the young women who took their coats.
Ronan Farrow Depicts a Chilling Cover-up at NBC
Throughout the book, there is a sense of suffocating foreboding, the dawning realization that almost no one in the narrative is clean. Early on, Farrow describes a meeting at which he sought professional guidance from Lauer. ”My future felt uncertain, and it meant a lot to me that Lauer was giving me the time,” Farrow writes, noting how, as he reels off a list of stories he wants to pursue, Lauer’s “eyes snapped back” at the mention of one on sexual harassment in Hollywood. Later, Farrow visits another NBC sage, the septuagenarian news anchor and legend Tom Brokaw, for advice as he’s getting stonewalled by network executives on his developing story. Brokaw (who would later be accused by former female colleagues of having made unwanted sexual advances) urges him to keep pushing, to do the right thing; he offers his formidable support.
Then Brokaw asks Farrow who the story is about. When Farrow says it’s Weinstein, he writes, the “warmth drained out of the room.”
“I have to disclose, Ronan,” Brokaw tells him in a voice we can all hear because it was the voice of American news for decades, “that Harvey Weinstein is a friend.”
They’re all friends, it feels, as you read this frightening volume, and it seems as though they all have bad histories with women, sex, and power, patterns they seem to have cultivated within the institutions that made them powerful and brought them together to begin with.
Jeffrey Epstein Is the Ultimate Symbol of Plutocratic Rot (published one month before Epstein was suicided)
The Epstein case is first and foremost about the casual victimization of vulnerable girls. But it is also a political scandal, if not a partisan one. It reveals a deep corruption among mostly male elites across parties, and the way the very rich can often purchase impunity for even the most loathsome of crimes. If it were fiction, it would be both too sordid and too on-the-nose to be believable, like a season of “True Detective” penned by a doctrinaire Marxist.
Nick Bryant, The Jeffrey Epstein Cover Up: Pedophilia, Lies, and Ghislaine Maxwell (outstanding article)
When the Palm Beach police executed a warrant on Epstein’s home in 2006, they found hidden cameras. An Epstein victim, Maria Farmer, told CBS News that the bathrooms and bedrooms in Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion were wired for extensive surveillance by “tiny pinhole cameras.” Farmer said that Epstein even ushered her to the “media room”: “And so, there was a door that looked like an invisible door with all this limestone and everything,” she said. “And you push it, and you go in. And I saw, all the cameras, it was, like, old televisions basically, like, stacked.” In that interview, Farmer said that “men” sat before the monitors.
In the Vanity Fair article noting Maxwell’s statement that the underage girls being molested were merely “trash,” she reportedly said that Epstein’s Orgy Island was equipped for extensive surveillance: “Maxwell also said the island had been completely wired for video; the friend thought that she and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy, as blackmail.” In the same article, Vanity Fair gleaned an Epstein quote via a former “girlfriend”: “… I collect people, I own people, I can damage people.” Epstein himself boasted to a New York Times reporter that he had “dirt” on the powerful.
Epstein, however, as a lone college dropout from Coney Island, could not have blackmailed powerbrokers with impunity. Such men can have access to ruffians, murderers, and even organized crime [check the article for more on Les Wexner]…the most damning evidence of Epstein working for a larger, clandestine network is the abrogation of justice that he left in his wake over the decades. Who or what has the power to order an U.S. attorney to stand down, especially when the Justice Department has a list of 32 underage victims? According to former U.S. Attorney Acosta, “intelligence” has that power. Who or what has the power to make the Justice Department subvert the Crime Victims’ Rights Act? Who or what has the power to make the FBI stand down into an investigation involving child sexual abuse?
In the Epstein case, child sex trafficking has been proven, and the victims have named procurers and perps. The Justice Department’s Southern District of New York was able to circumvent Epstein’s egregious non-prosecution agreement on two criteria. First, the Southern District of New York wasn’t bound by an agreement that was made in the Southern District of Florida. Second, Congress eliminated the statute of limitations on cases of child sex trafficking in 2006, and since the prior 5-year statute of limitations hadn’t expired on Epstein’s child trafficking crimes, he could be charged with child trafficking dating back to 2002. So, every procurer and perpetrator in the Epstein network who has been guilty of child trafficking since 2002 should be charged with child trafficking.
As a society, we must bring the Epstein procurers and perpetrators to justice. We cannot let children be molested with impunity. If the Justice Department is indifferent to victims in a proven trafficking case, then there is little hope for the vast majority of victims. If the perpetrators in the Epstein case are allowed to go scot free, then all perpetrators are empowered. Moreover, the media has expended profuse ink publishing articles that report on the salacious dirt involved in the Epstein case, but I’m not aware of a single article calling for the arrest and indictment of the perpetrators in Epstein’s pedophile network. The mainstream media has also sown a narrative that the girls molested by Epstein and his cohorts were at least 14 years old, but accounts have been published that Epstein trafficked girls as young as 11 or 12 years old.
Meet Ghislaine: Daddy’s Girl, from the great Whitney Webb
Given that blackmail, particularly sexual blackmail, has been used by intelligence agencies – particularly in the US and Israel – since the 1940s and beyond, it is deeply troubling that neither the blackmail or intelligence angle has played any role in the prosecution’s case or in the mainstream media’s coverage of the [Ghislaine Maxwell] trial.
My personal theory is that the “intelligence” which now has the tapes would rather keep them, and use them as needed, rather than put any more perps in prison.
Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women—lots of them, mostly young. 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. 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.
Some of the guests were Horrified! And they did absolutely nothing to help the trafficked women and girls, right Cindy?
(A note on links: Many of the links start with web.archive.org. This is because - to access my old threads, I have to use it. The Twitter “archive” you can download is rather useless if they’ve banned you, which is my situation. Fortunately, much of my old stuff is available on Archive.org, if I know the link. These links can take a while to load. You may think it’s done loading, but it might not be. Please be patient. Without Archive.org, all of my threads - and I had a lot of long detailed threads - are lost.)
I can’t remember which Epstein book I read before he didn’t kill himself, but when asked by a couple of partners about what I was reading, I mentioned the book and commented, “I really can’t believe he’s still alive.” Not long after, he didn’t kill himself.
If people don’t believe pedos rule this world, and yet know that virtually none of JE’s “friends” have been prosecuted, then they are complicit.
Masterpiece. I think this substack format fits you very well. Better than twitter threads and posts. My opinion