Talking to Jeffrey Epstein

The paedophile’s emails reveal a vile but ordinary abuser

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

The US Department of Justice calls it the “Epstein Library”, as if it were a legacy, even a bequest. Evidence, government documents, text messages and, most numerously, emails – we read it for a sense of the man, something absent from the books about Epstein. Those studies and biographies all failed, finding nothing to fix on. But it’s the same with his emails. They have a brevity – after all, there were girls to rape – and a terrible banality. He has no authentic voice, and no hinterland. He is both familiar and monstrous.

Sea Gate, Coney Island, the suburb where he grew up, has only 72 hits. Most relate to his declining to attend a reunion there in 2017. He said it was his birthday. It wasn’t his birthday, but Epstein lied about everything, even being dyslexic. His spelling was part of his contempt. Judaism, his religion, has only 86 hits. Park attendant – his father’s job – has four. Pauline Epstein – his mother – has one, but Epstein wasn’t interested in middle-aged women. When Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway asked him, “Is it inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons wallpaper?” he said, “mother shoudl stay out of it.” That could be his elegy. For comparison, “girl” has 11,327 hits, “president” has 30,010, and “money” has 58,822.

Epstein mirrors, because a pimp is a salesman, and salesmen give people what they want. Steve Bannon gets an Ernest Hemingway impersonation, all blood and fists and geopolitics: hail fellow, well met in Washington. Peter Mandelson, clearly pathologically bored, gets rude talk. “Naughty boy,” Mandelson purrs at him when Epstein tells him freedom from prison feels “fresh, firm and creamy”. Soon-Yi Previn gets sympathy, but she is married to Woody Allen. She asks Epstein to remember her birthday, and she wants jewellery. Epstein promises, “i have it [the birthday] tattooed on my arm from last year like a concentration camp victim,” a bad Woody Allen-style joke if ever there was one. The mirror again. “I’m glad it’s on ur arm,” Previn replies, “I was nervous you were going to say another body part.”

But others – women and Noam Chomsky – get more intimacy. In 2016 he tells Chomsky, “i will be free anytime you like for as mjch time as you like,” which is quite giving for Epstein. He advises Chomsky on his finances. Was Chomsky the father Epstein wanted, being the opposite of a park attendant, a man living on a tiny wage at the very end of America? Chomsky writes to Epstein like a loving father, counsels him and soothes him: “What the vultures dearly want is a public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts.” He is telling Epstein he is sane.

This is the closest Epstein comes to expressing need: he sounds childlike. Epstein: “im not sure how to say chicken little in Hebrew”. Chomsky: “In Yiddish, which always has a simple phrase for such things, it’s ‘Oy vey’.” Epstein: “if worrying about things, keeps you alive longer than i hope you stay terrified.” Is this projection? Is any part of Epstein terrified? Chomsky replies: “In the genes”.

Chomsky is writing about inherited Jewish trauma but, as ever with Epstein, his Jewishness is subject to the predation: to the mirror. Everything is. Epstein says he dislikes Israel (“I do not like Israel. AT ALL”) but entertained its former prime minister Ehud Barak more than 30 times. He gives money to Zionist charities, but loves Chomsky the famous anti-Zionist. He also loves what he calls “Jew food”, a phrase heavy with contempt. He asks Valeria Chomsky: “any special JEW food or other new york treat wanted for Sunday?” When his assistant Lesley Groff writes, “Steve Bannon will come for lunch at noon today… Jeffrey would like ‘Jew food’,” the quotation marks feel like rubber gloves.

Chomsky aside, the most interesting emails I read are to nameless women Epstein has fucked (their names are redacted). I do not think they are under age, though it is impossible to tell, so I cannot think of any word for them other than women. I suspect they have aged out of Epstein’s taste, hence his rage in these messages: he liked them both malleable and corruptible. This is the most authentic he sounds: aggrieved. He writes as if they have wronged him, but then you only rape girls if you think you are owed their bodies. I find them by typing “c**t” into the search box.

In 2010, he chides one. “You wanted to fly, you did,” he writes, “you wanted classics you did. you wanted intro with no eyes” – what is that? – “you wnated truth [redacted] sex” – and what is that? – “you got it. you wanted money you got it, you wanted starbucks in florida you got it, you wanted hugs and kises you got it.” He babbles about breakfast muffins, and her walking through the house calling him a “fucking c**t”.

He mimics – he steals – their speech. Again in 2010 he writes, in response to a plaintive request for new shoes: “Do you want to spend the night in bed ? No I’d rather see sex and the city. Ok. The maid should clean up the dog shit… I want food… I want to go… I need more money.” It is projection, of course – he is the hungry one – and I doubt she got the shoes.

To another he writes, “yesterday was emblematic of what appears to be an impossible situation.” (He can spell perfectly when he wants to.) She was non-compliant. “you didnot ask if you could help serve lunch… i had to ask for a bath 5 times, you sat in the chair and refused to share a bath. I tried,” he ends, soaked in self-pity, “i really tried.”

In 2015 he accuses a woman of theft, because she spent $10,000 at Hermès in Paris. And yet, “you get indignant when i suggest you find a girl that you and i can play with together, and say you do not want to be a pimp. ( not for me, but for us ) or a whore . I guess you think that stealing money from someone who trusts you is a step above the rest.”

“I forgot that you used to sleep all day,” he tells another, “that i had to push you to excercise. That you were told that there had to be consequences for you following what i thought was a bad path… it is embarasssing for me to read to see what i put up with.” She had, he writes, “outrageous expectations. for doing little and then on top not doing what you had promised to try.” Even though he is describing a contract, he ends: “I must have really loved you.”

Because Epstein’s cruelty is exhausting, I thoughtlessly type in “Jane Austen” and find a hit. Epstein is writing – well, cut and pasting – to a woman about Mansfield Park, because she is an academic and he is a mirror. The reference is found in a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov – we know Epstein read Lolita – which begins, “Next year I am teaching a course called ‘European Fiction’.” (I had to double-check that Epstein didn’t teach a course in European fiction – read enough of him and you will believe anything.) “What English writers (novels or short stories) would you suggest?” It is, I learn, a question from Nabokov to the literary critic Edmund Wilson.

He quotes the correspondence between the two writers. Wilson: “Jane Austen is worth reading all through – even her fragments are remarkable.” Then Nabokov’s reply: “I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers… Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice.” Wilson then responds: “You are mistaken about Jane Austen. I think you ought to read Mansfield Park”. I doubt Epstein knew that Fanny Price is Austen’s most principled heroine, and her most famous line is, “Oh! What a corrupted mind!”

Some of the emails Epstein received are automated, but still they provide clues. In fact, I suspect the Quora algorithm knew him better than anyone. Based on the questions a user enters or explores on its crowd-sourced expertise platform, Quora will send follow-up emails with related information – and the questions from Quora which appear in his inbox perhaps give us another authentic Epstein. How would Earth forces do if a Star Destroyer appeared in orbit? How similar is Leo McGarry’s role in The West Wing to being the actual chief of staff? Why don’t chickens (and other animals and birds) evolve a protective layer over the neck to prevent being butchered? Does Trump have a 30 per cent chance of winning the general election? Do lobsters die of old age? And is Han Solo really dead?

Across the whole “Epstein Library” there is almost no consolation. One woman, perhaps obliviously, gets the better of him – but this is a man who owned a book called Face Exercises That Prevent Premature Aging. He tells her to buy the first and second parts of Fifty Shades of Grey: “everyone thinks [it] is about me, you can down;oad on kindle.” She replies: “I’m already on the 3rd book. ;-)” He asks her: “any similarity [to me]?” “I don’t think so,” she replies. Because Christian Grey is 27, and Jeffrey Epstein, then, is 59.

This, then, is his legacy, dumped by the Department of Justice with what feels like fitting contempt. Why so many glib friendships, so many emails asking for “Jew food” at nightmarish suppers with Chomsky, Allen and Barak? Because he was an inadequate man with secrets, and men with secrets are always lonely. Maybe the suppers with famous pessimists felt like warmth.

Now, much too late, we know him. He is, by turns, soothing, coarse, dismissive and cruel, but always without culture (excepting Lolita). I think Epstein was an ordinary abuser of women and girls: what is different is the scale, and money made that. The library cracks him open, and his voice is exposed. But this is what his voice amounts to: he had no voice.

[Further reading: How the Epstein story sidelines women]