Who were the friends of Jeffrey Epstein, the Wall Street billionaire accused of running one of the world’s largest prostitution rings -often involving minors- at the service of Hollywood, Wall Street and some European royal families?
Be careful: we are talking about friends, not clients, the famous passengers of the ‘Lolita Express’, the name of Epstein’s private plane, which makes it clear, with its reference to the Vladimir Nabokov novel, that it has ‘something’ to do with sex and minors, and among those who are, among others, Prince Andrew of England, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Kevin Spacey, or former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, whom the financier-pimp took to visit the Fidel Castro himself in Cuba.
What is at stake now, via a series of Wall Street Journal investigations, is Epstein’s list of friends. In other words, of the people who continued to have a personal relationship with the financier, while he was being investigated by the Florida authorities, first, by the FBI (which is the police that deals with crimes at the national level in the US), later, and, finally, by the French Prosecutor’s Office.
For the most part, they belong to the intellectual and economic elite of the American left. Many are Jewish, because Epstein took advantage of belonging to that community to strengthen his social network. They were the ones who gave Epstein the aura of respectability from which he benefited until the last moment. Ultimately, they are the ones who allowed Epstein, even though he was synonymous with child prostitution, to live a life of luxury straddling Harvard, Hollywood, Washington and Manhattan, shielded from the accusations against him.
They never had the slightest problem relating to Epstein. This is what the great guru of the world left, scourge of Ukraine and Israel, Noam Chomsky, told the Wall Street Journal, who traveled several times on Epstein’s private plane from Boston, where he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). to Manhattan, to parties organized by the financier in which, among others, Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, and the former Prime Minister of Israel, Labor (a term that is equivalent to socialist) Ehud Barak, participated.
“The first thing is that this is not your business or anyone’s,” Chomsky replied when asked by the Journal about his friendship with Epstein. At least, the linguist turned commentator on the world economy has deigned to give some answer, no matter how borderline it may be. Many other friends of Epstein have not. That is the case with Allen and Soon-Yi themselves. Or someone much more influential: the current CIA director, William Burns, who met Epstein three times in 2014, when he was undersecretary of state in the Barack Obama administration.
Nor has Kathy Ruemmer, ‘number two’ of the White House Legal Department with Barack Obama and now the head of legal affairs at the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, who met dozens of times with Epstein over the years, spoken. Fun fact: according to the Wall Street Journal, he gave his secretaries the day off when Ruemmer came to see him, because the lawyer didn’t feel comfortable with the cohort of very young girls who accompanied the financier.
Reading the series of articles from the Wall Street Journal – there are already three and the soap opera seems to continue – is a kind of guide to how money and personal relationships open doors. Epstein was rich. And he was well connected. He had a direct line from the Windsors to Wall Street. Although many of those contacts were not, as far as he knows, interested in his illegal activities, they did know that seeing the ‘global elite whore pimp’ could open doors for them. When Emperor Vespasian was criticized in AD 70 for taxing the Romans for pissing in public urinals, he replied: “Money doesn’t smell bad.” We will never know if Epstein, who hanged himself in jail in 2019, knew the phrase. But he knew it was true.
Perhaps the person who best represents that “anything goes here” attitude is Larry Summers, nephew of two Nobel Prize winners in Economics (Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow), former rector of Harvard, former chief economist of the World Bank, former Treasury secretary with Bill Clinton, and former head of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers (and now that he hasn’t been given a job, Joe Biden’s sworn enemy). In April 2014, Summers’ wife, Elisa New, wanted to launch a non-profit television production company to make documentaries to promote reading and needed a million dollars (900,000 euros). Summers wrote to Epstein asking for “ideas.” He traveled from New York to Boston, where the Summers lived. They dined several times. And Epstein ended up giving a check for $110,000 (100,000 euros) for the project. Epstein never, to our knowledge, bribed. He only made friends, through donations and parties. This is how he created, in full view, one of the biggest brothels in history.
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