• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

• The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most

• The third chapter: Rich Brain, on the mundanities that preoccupy the ultrawealthy

• The fourth chapter: The most overlooked Epstein email, on a philosopher, a pedophile, and Epstein’s mind harem

To support independent journalism like this, become a subscriber:

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The Epstein Class’s secret weapon

Already, it feels like the world has moved on.

There was a dark shining moment when all the world, it seemed, was focused on the crimes and schemes of Jeffrey Epstein and his coterie of associates and enablers. And then new stories vied for attention: a war broke out, human beings circled the moon, Kim Kardashian was spotted with Lewis Hamilton, memories faded, and the virus of collective rage went hunting for new hosts.

Was the Epstein story just another story? Was it just more grist for the mill? Was it a chance to vent the frustrations of an age in which some get away with anything they do and others never get anything they need? Will we take this phenomenon of a story as a spur to charting a new course — or “enjoy” the catharsis of fury and move on?

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As I reflect on what I’ve learned spending time in this muck and putting together this series, two broad themes stand out; I believe our responses to each of them will help determine which way we will go. One is the culture of impunity, of a lack of accountability, that the Epstein saga highlights but that is endemic far beyond it. The other is the opiate of tribalism that allows the impunity at the top to go on.

This has been an era of infinite second chances at the top, facilitated by an underlying solidarity, and of fewer and fewer first chances for everyone else, exacerbated by their inextinguishable hostilities. Mostly, the Epstein files are an education in how not to be. But if we want to change this dismal status quo, we have to do something that I generally don’t advise: learn from the Epstein class. That’s because on one point, at least, this network is actually worth emulating.

They always have each other’s backs.

When Epstein was accused of sex crimes involving minors in 2007, he built a legal team and fought the charges. The following year, as later laid bare by Julie Brown’s heroic reporting in the Miami Herald, he secured a sweetheart deal that required him to serve just over a year in prison. Except that it wasn’t really prison: Epstein finagled a work-release allowance that let him come and go and allegedly put in time at a nonprofit. A local news outlet that obtained logs of his movements while “imprisoned” reported that Epstein was “[p]icked up by his private driver in a limo and allowed to make stops at his own home,” that he was permitted by a judge “to leave his cell six days a week,” that he was assigned a kind of police detail that “took him to his house at least nine times while he was on work release, and left him in his home unsupervised for up to three hours.” At one point, a confused police officer asked a sergeant for “some clarity of my duties and responsibilities while at the residence.” The sergeant reportedly answered that the officer’s function was to “provide security” for Epstein. Against the public, not the other way around.

So at the heart of this story is a galling impunity. But in this as in other ways, our principal character’s way of moving through the world was not unconnected to the ways of the larger circle that surrounded him.

One of Epstein’s lawyers in the matter, the late Kenneth Starr, had spent much of the 1990s hounding President Bill Clinton for sexual misconduct, wasting vast sums of public money on a political witch hunt and destroying lives in the process. Now, in 2007, Starr signed on to Epstein’s legal team, becoming an avid defender of a Clinton friend’s considerably worse sexual misconduct. This is how it works in this world: you never have to take a beat and say, I was wrong. You just move on to the next thing.

The doom loop of causing problems, ducking accountability, and even being promoted is a defining feature of this circle. Larry Summers pushed for financial deregulation under Clinton, and when, in 2008-9, thanks to advice of that kind, the markets melted down and the world economy collapsed, he was brought in as a top economic advisor to President Barack Obama. Bill Gates operated a monopoly that crushed competition (which is to say other people’s dreams), reaped a fortune anyway, and parlayed it all into an even more august position as unofficial global health czar.

As David Sirota has argued unflaggingly, the lack of accountability for anyone at the top has become a driving force of this American age. Helped cause Iraq? Cable gig for you! Helped ignore Katrina? Professorship! Pushed subprime mortgages? Cabinet position! Built a tech behemoth that hurts kids? Presidential advisory commission!

In the Epstein class and far beyond it, across the commanding heights of American life, the best way to get ahead is to really majorly fuck something up along the way.

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Why does our society function as a protection racket for elites who have made it big by making big mistakes, even as it becomes less merciful to everyone else? One answer that emerges from the Epstein files is that the super-elites who are all over it have a loyalty to each other that transcends opinions. They are connected on the basis of their interests, not their beliefs, and quite willing to sacrifice these “beliefs” on the altar of their interests. And this gives them a certain undergirding of compassion for each other, helpfulness to each other, that endures regardless of which way any given election goes, which ideological currents are ebbing and flowing, who is up or down.

One of my “favorite” emails is among the more indecipherable of the lot. The subject line is simply “list for bannon steve.” It says:

Who knows what this list was about. But it brings together people, many of whom were known to be in Epstein’s orbit, who don’t share a philosophy or race or religion or profession, but a membership: they are on a list of people who are on the list.

And what you see in the Epstein files is that people on the list generally treat each other as though deserving of brotherhood. Their elevation of network solidarity over principles and beliefs gives a resiliency and flexibility and even gentleness to the group. There is a moment in which Epstein appears to invite Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel to President Obama, to join him on some panel (the exact details are not clear), along with Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, and former President Clinton. Epstein assures Ruemmler the event would be “off the record” and the collaboration “very funny.”

The email captures something important. Out there, in the world, these people have serious-seeming beefs with each other. But off the record, it’s all very chill — kind of funny, even. For people in the network don’t stress about their beliefs, no matter how publicly proclaimed. Beliefs, in fact, are often mere performance, and these elites, with their solidarity for each other, never forget that. Another of the exchanges that has stayed with me is between Epstein and Bannon about getting an Epstein friend into the Augusta National Golf Club. The friend is the super-lawyer Brad Karp, then running the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss. Karp had reportedly been a financial bundler for Democrats, and Paul, Weiss is known for its ties to the Democratic Party. But Epstein thinks nothing of asking Bannon for help getting Karp into Augusta.

Bannon’s first response is: “Can he convert to Southern Baptist???”

Karp is Jewish. Epstein attempts a joke: “Difficult to put the foreskin back on.”

Bannon then explains that Augusta historically was strict about “no catholics, Jews, blacks or women.” But Bannon seems determined to try — not because he and Karp agree on the issues but, one assumes, because they are ultimately on the same team.

Epstein asks who runs Augusta.

“These are real crackers,” Bannon writes. “7 Atlanta and Augusta families.” And then he adds, in case he has been too subtle: “Real crackers.”

So here we have the political figure who has done as much as anyone in America to revive white nationalism and populist fury referring to exclusionary white people in Georgia by the racist term “crackers.” It’s all a game — not the golf, but the republic itself. And then, in the early months of the second Trump term, Trump came after big law firms like Paul, Weiss, threatening to sever their government contracts if they didn’t come to heel, and, matching the spirit of flexibility Bannon had displayed, Karp bent — bent the knee and forever bent his law firm’s credibility. For many (including within the firm itself), it was an unconscionable capitulation. But the people who think that way are burdened by beliefs that depress their side of the seesaw. It’s why they may never find themselves at the very top, where beliefs are featherweight.

It’s not that members of the Epstein Class don’t possess beliefs. It’s that they seem to treat them, well, like that: as possessions. Their beliefs are tools to help them win; if they don’t continue to spark the joy of winning, throw them out. There can always be new beliefs; but the network is forever.

We down here, on the other hand — well, that’s a different story. We down here are at each other’s throats. This is the age of division, the age of polarization, the age of civic fracture…the age of impending civil war?

And what does this consist of, in practice? People who vote differently but share, more or less, similar interests becoming convinced that the neighbor two doors down is a mortal enemy. His vote is literally violence. Their protest is literally anarchy.

People without much power beyond their vote have become so convinced that other people without much power are their problem that it can be provocative to even suggest to some activists that they woo voters to their side in order to win elections. Why should they have to engage with such toxicity? On the right and left both, you will find fantasies of elimination — which is to say, the dream of living in a country cleansed of these different-thinking people.

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In other words, among regular people, beliefs have been elevated over interests. Who you voted for has come to matter more than how you live. Ideology has superseded materiality, and so there is none of the suspension of judgment we see in the Epstein class. There is none of the bracketing. There is none of the tabling of this issue we don’t agree on in order to advance on that thing. No, down here, everything is war, and there is no give, and there is no mercy, and there is a dearth of genuine solidarity.

Is this, in the end, what we might learn from the Epstein files? That these people do their kabuki fighting in public and have each other’s backs in private when shit gets real; and we live lives with many of the same challenges but imagine our neighbors to be as bloodthirsty and ignorant of the world as an uncontacted tribe of cannibals. Nothing can reach those dolts; they are who they are; nothing will ever change their mind. We have none of the sense of mercy for each other that the Epstein class displays for its own. That mercy, in their case, comes from class solidarity; it comes from the solidarity of patriarchy. And in their abiding mutual support, they encourage us, through the media organs they own, through the social media platforms whose algorithms they code, through the political levers they operate, to keep bickering.

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Our tribalism protects their impunity. Their solidarity sustains our being deprived of nice things that we could very easily have. Their ability to hold their beliefs lightly, and to take their own interests, on the other hand, very, very seriously indeed — this ability explains a lot about the society we live in. And it raises the question of what the world would look like if we beat them at their own game. If, instead of Bannon and Karp being the ones to battle on the surface and help each other below, it was us, that we held our noses at differences in our ranks, endured people who say things that sting, had tolerance for different locations on the on-ramp to change, but in some basic and fundamental way elevated our shared interests over our clashing beliefs.

On good days, you can see glimpses of it. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing more than bringing a leftist approach to governance. In ways that have not been properly appreciated, I think, he seems to aspire to a formation of the political left more interested in finding converts than heretics, more smiling than judging, more interested in mercy and expansion. It is an approach less interested in the dividing lines of identity and more interested in the binding agents of solidarity and shared hardship. His culture war is filling potholes.

It is one model in one place. We will see how many others of us can absorb these lessons. But this is what I am left with. In these Epstein files, we got an ugly and at times evil master class in elite solidarity. The ball of change is now in our court.

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At The Ink, we work for you. When you join us, you stand up for independent media that isn’t afraid to tell the truth. Subscribe today and help us keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, reach more people, and build the kind of media that you want to read.

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Photo: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty

This is the fourth chapter of The Ink’s series The Epstein Class — our investigation into the inner workings of Jeffrey Epstein’s world and the operating system of power today. For more:

• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

• The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most

• The third chapter: Rich Brain, on the mundanities that preoccupy the ultrawealthy

To support independent journalism like this, become a subscriber:

Subscribe now

By Anand Giridharadas

For friends and associates and collaborators of Jeffrey Epstein, the go-to plea has been the “slice of life” defense. I knew him only as the Wall Street Guy, not the Rape Island Guy. I knew him only as a party boor, not a child trafficker. I knew him only as a donor, not a convicted pedophile...

In some cases, the Epstein files undercut this defense. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president, tried to minimize what he knew, but he is found in the files emailing Epstein about press reports about his crimes. The longevity expert Peter Attia may have denied visiting Epstein’s island or ranch, but in one email he bro-coos to Epstein that “the biggest problem with becoming friends with you” is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

In the main, though, the hodgepodge, context-free nature of the Epstein files is frustratingly helpful to the “slice of life” petitioners. This guy only talks to Epstein about philanthropy. This guy only talks to him about changing his reputation online. Another guy only talks to him about cognitive science. It is not exactly straightforward to assemble all these threads to weave a tapestry of the complicity not merely of individuals but of a whole network.

Then, four months into reading through the files, I found an email that stunned me.

It is not the most salacious email I’ve seen, nor the one with the most boldface names. But it’s the only one in which Epstein, who in that same thread professed an inability to decipher how others saw him, seemed to be interested in just that: both the conventional wisdom in the ether, and what people really knew. And, for once, someone in his network did what no one around Epstein ever did: told him the truth.

This may be the single-most-overlooked email in the whole trove. When I have Googled phrases from it, only one link comes up — a lonely Reddit thread. But here is testimony to the thing so many in the network prefer to deny existed: a common sense of who Epstein was and what he had done and how and why, a 1,500-word, 360-degree assessment of his character, his criminality, his manipulations, his gifts, his network cultivation — written by someone who wasn’t especially close to him, but seemed to believe that this is how others saw him, this is what many people knew about him.

Long before the “affordability crisis” was a top-tier issue in American politics, Joscha Bach was having one of his own.

In late October 2013, emails show Bach, a German cognitive scientist and AI researcher (and philosopher), contemplating a move from Berlin to Boston, to take a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab. There was an issue, though: Joi Ito, then the head of the Media Lab, had offered Bach just $60,000 a year. “We are a family of four,” Bach wrote, “with a need to rebuild a household, send a kid into daycare and even visit the relatives sometimes. I imagine that survival in Boston will be hard on 60K; it would not be easy for a family even in Berlin.” The family’s “burn rate,” Bach wrote, using a startup term for family life, was €5,000 a month (about $82,000 a year then), and Boston was pricier than Berlin. How was Bach going to make it all work?

Epstein.

Ito wrote to Bach, telling him that “Jeffrey said that he’ll figure out a way to cover the difference outside of the MIT relationship. Can you talk to him directly about that?”

Bach did just that, telling Epstein that $100,000 a year was necessary “to keep the family fed.” Epstein responded, “no problem.”

According to the law firm Goodwin Procter, which compiled an extensive report on Epstein’s relationship with MIT, new Epstein donations began to flow to MIT the very next month. These $300,000 in gifts “were made to support research by Joscha Bach,” the report said, taking care to note that the “Media Lab hired Bach in large part because Epstein subsidized the cost.”

In the coming years, Bach would grow so comfortable as the beneficiary of a convicted sex offender that he would simply email his desired Lufthansa or JetBlue flights to Epstein’s office or travel agent when he wanted to take a family trip to Germany or speak at a conference somewhere. Others might have shuddered at the idea of Epstein having any connection to their children, but Bach got in the habit of forwarding school tuition bills to Epstein, who ostensibly paid them. He even began to forward his rent bills of $6,500 a month.

What was Epstein getting out of this deal? Seemingly, what he sought from many big thinkers: adjacency to the intellectual edge, the ability to send rando musings and get speedy responses, access to a kind of mind concierge to go with the credit card concierges, hotel concierges, and spa concierges he was used to pinging. Epstein thought of thinkers the way people now think of ChatGPT: as a high-quality source against which to bounce low-quality prompts.

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In a recent statement on his Substack, Bach described Epstein’s use of intellectuals:

Epstein was not a scientist himself, and regarded the consensus mechanism of peer-reviewed science with skepticism. Instead, he generated his own models of the world, and bounced them against the best minds he could find….

During some of my time in Cambridge, Epstein sent frequently short, dyslexic emails with random thoughts in my direction. I tried to probe and understand his world view, which was highly unusual and often darker and more radical than anyone else I’ve ever talked to.

“have not heard from you . what are you up to . new thoughts?” Thus began an email from Epstein to Bach in October 2017. (Well, “began” is not the right word, because that is the whole message.)

No academic could get away with writing this way to a respected colleague. But for the thinkers indentured by Epstein into service as mind concierges, the customer was always right, and every query should be answered, swiftly and at length.

At the moment I am writing an article to explain the likely relationship between conscious attention and credit assignment, i.e. to figure out which parts in our control architecture contributed to success or failure in a learning task…

Actually, I refuse to keep typing whatever this is, but this was how it went between them — and between Epstein and other thinkers. Epstein would burp a little question that was more of a comment, and his obedient servant (in this case, Bach) would write a long reply performing smartness in just the way rich guys like Epstein liked it done:

a lot of people are coherentists instead of foundationalists….

I wonder if it is possible to simulate the adversarial evolution of emotional expression in a game theoretic setting….

While the hope construct can be used to model rational investments, it often does not approximate the actual distribution of expectations….

Personally, I would donate to MIT to be removed from emails like these.

Sometimes in the Bach-Epstein emails, there is a glide from intellectual peacocking to money that reminds one of the bargain at work here. “PS: Our account is emptied,” Bach writes. “Could you please pitch in?”

In February 2019, with Epstein increasingly a household name thanks to the explosive reporting of Julie Brown in The Miami Herald the previous year, Bach wrote to his academic sugar daddy with concern — for Epstein: “I hope you are well, and the current turmoils don’t provide worries to you!”

There is no mention of the survivors, nor questions about the sweetheart deal exposed by Brown that let Epstein slip out of real accountability for his crimes, nor any sense of betrayal over new revelations in the reporting that Bach had not known about.

Why, even now, does Bach not feel moved to speak up? If you jump a paragraph or two down, there is a possible answer: “Our funds are currently down to 11000…” The philosopher is a seeker of truth, in theory. In practice, telling the truth can cost you.

It may seem striking enough that the Miami Herald revelations, which exploded around the world, did not end Bach’s relationship with Epstein. But there is evidence, in Bach’s own words, that the Herald findings were hardly the first he had heard of Epstein’s ways and transgressions. And on one occasion, he played all of this back to Epstein with a frankness otherwise largely absent from the ocean of released files.

It began with a stray musing on email. On July 2, 2017, Bach wrote to Epstein that he

would be curious to learn how you think that other people perceive you, and how much they can glimpse behind your curtain.

Bach explained his interest in the question as a function of his own growing journey toward seeing himself from the outside in:

In the last three years, I have developed a lot more self-awareness, not least thanks to you. (It does not mean that I now perfectly understand how others see me, but that I notice that my self model and the perspective of others, and the more importantly, my model of how others model me, have serious discrepancies.)

This kind of invitation to self-awareness from Epstein was unusual. Frankly, asking Epstein to do anything was unusual. How often does the concierge ask something of you? But here was an opening.

Epstein responded with some blather about not caring about how people see him, which segued into a story about Epstein making a move on a college student:

I dont spend much time thinking about how people perceive me. I try to maintain my own compass. I dont admit an age or power difference in my intereactions . In the past if i did things in order to satisfy someones perceptions ( within bounds) . I often ended with an unintended result. ex. I recently met very smart college student . very cute. . I told her I would help her getting grants. she was insulted . and when pressed said she couldnt be bought.

Then, strangely, there was an invitation. Epstein, seemingly referring to social limitations he shared with Bach, asked his supplicant/friend to assess him:

Joscha. .both you and I have lived the consequences of not being aware of others motivations. Perceptions etc. So I am happy to explore your views. I rarely get insulted. so if you would like to give me some of yours , feel free. -- your funding is intact:). No matter what

And this is what occasioned a rare dose of real talk, in an email longer than the Declaration of Independence. At the top:

I can only extrapolate over the things I get to hear and rationalize over the distribution, and I am not actively trying to solicit opinions about you.

If you remove the performative smart-speak, Bach is prefacing with something important: What he is about to say is based on what others were saying. He wasn’t looking for it. He wasn’t privy to lots of private information. It was just floating in the air; as a mortal, he breathed some in.

Bach now makes clear that he knew that Epstein was a sex offender, but Bach offers that the problem might lie elsewhere, in the culture that judges sex offenders:

The first sentence of your Wikipedia entry introduces you as a sex offender, which due to contemporary America’s fascinating difficulty of dealing with all things sex related establishes a strong prior on you being a pariah. It is also pretty much the only thing that people outside of your circles know you for.

The prevailing assumption about Epstein, Bach continues, is that “you combine the apparently suspicious trait of being wealthy with the apparently horrible trait of being too much interested in too young girls.”

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Now Bach explains, with more self-awareness than most Epstein associates, how those in Epstein’s orbit rationalize their ties:

Once people get to know you in person and are interested in you, they tend to either compartementalize the topic (as a somehow difficult to accept aspect of an important friend), or treat it as somehow interestingly dark and edgy. It seemed to never have been met with outright approval, and very rarely not been an issue at all, even when it is balanced against your sharp, original and interesting mind.

Then Bach, still the dependent that he is, throws in more softeners. The college student who rejected Epstein’s help is hypocritical, because “[w]hile she might be happy to accept any amount of nepotism from a female benefactor as laudable mentorship and empowering feminism, accepting your support would have meant to join into the corruption of the darkest imaginable notions of patriarchy.” Bach even goes so far as to utter a talking point that has become a favorite of Epstein defenders: that he is not a pedophile pedophile so much as an “almost adult” pedophile, since the girls were basically adults, right — 16, 17, come on, right? These defenders even have a special word for it, one Bach now leans on:

If people are able to think outside of moralistic terms, they may simply mark you down as an ephebophile but are bound to notice a few quirks.

No pedophile to see here, folks, just a garden-variety ephebophile! A man drawn not to children but to practically geriatric teens.

Back in diagnostic mode, Bach asks: Why did Epstein, so savvy about risk, take such giant ones?

A power trip? What does that recklessness mean for your relationships to others? Or is it simply due to having grown up in a different time and culture, and having not noticed how the culture has changed?

And why did Epstein so flagrantly flaunt his relationships with young women and girls? Bach mentions the physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram refusing to meet with Epstein because he’d gained awareness of the sort of company Epstein kept. And here Bach gets to something even more profound, burrowing into the heart of patriarchal thought and practice in Epstein’s circle: Epstein wanted to be around women and girls, but didn’t actually like them. What he liked was to dominate them:

your relationships to young women appear not to be on equal footing but dominant-submissive, with little apparent regard for hurt feelings. While you are brutally honest and direct with men, too, you don’t come across as reveling in the power difference when interacting with men, or making an example of their intellectual and personal limitations in front of others.

It is as if you are attracted to women (as long as they are not too womanly), but you don’t like them very much. While individual women gain your respect, it seems to be much harder for them than for men, and it is as if they are inherently less trustworthy.

What follows is a strange twisting of reality that offers a useful insight into this Ivory Tower annex of the manosphere. Bach suggests to Epstein that he tends to “mismodel” women as “intrinsically dangerous,” but then Bach makes an aside that takes the breath away: “Obviously, you are at much greater risk of exploitation by women than me, of course. In many women I wake somewhat motherly instincts.” While others might have emphasized the risk Epstein posed to women, Bach here was speaking of the risk women posed to Epstein. Perhaps because sometimes women summon the nerve to press charges for rape.

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Now Bach seemingly pivots to advice, sketching out “probably the only plausible path to possible redemption in the eyes of the circles of the US intelligentsia.”

The easiest explanation for your unusual choice of partners and the nature of your public relationships to them is obviously childhood abuse. If most of these people suspected that you suffered something unspeakable at the hands of an adult female caregiver, and it just took you decades to work through it (understanding that someone likely abused her, so she turned against you etc.), they would be able to feel that they understand you, and many more would feel acceptance. Some people might even realize that you paid a much higher price than your purported victims.

It is unclear here if Bach is simply speculating about narratives that would work or is referring to a story Epstein told him. In either case, the strategy is clear: make women the real perpetrators, and Epstein the real victim.

Bach continues:

while such a story could probably be planted, I cannot imagine what that would mean for you and your relationship to yourself.

Bach concludes with a 30,000-foot-view summary of his patron’s life and reputation and ways of interacting with people:

What people see of you is that you are effective, reliable, ruthless, provocative, twisted, sometimes utterly crass, unconventional, likely not vain, and completely unafraid. You incentivize the people in our shared circle extremely well for cooperation, by being generous, loyal, curious, intellectually interesting and benevolent. But to regain your place as a socially accepted cultural force you cannot present an image as an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.

Bach deserves credit for this candor. Few in the Epstein circle had the courage to call Epstein “an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.” Yet, curiously, a few months ago, when Bach released his statement on his Substack, the narrative of their relationship read like this:

While Epstein’s public reputation was forever destroyed, many people whose judgement I trusted assured me that he had reformed himself and was committed to staying on the good side of the law. I have not met a single person from his network of academics who was aware of any instance of him breaking the law after his conviction, or who witnessed or condoned any illegal or questionable activity by Epstein.

I am not as brilliant or credentialed as Joscha Bach, so maybe there are levels of understanding I don’t have that would bridge this gap. I reached out to him, asking to hear his perspective. I told him I read his statement and “was struck by the idea that we don’t always understand context from these documents. I would like to give you the chance to speak with us directly, so that it’s not looking from afar, but giving you the chance you deserve to answer questions.”

He responded by thanking me for my “friendly message,” before pivoting to an assessment of the work I do, seeming to find it beneath his dignity: “I am generally not interested in partisan culture war topics or in judging people from near or afar, which seems to be the main area of your reporting.” (This is a common move in the Epstein Class: casting criticism or even scrutiny as belonging to a world of tribalism and conflict, a world that the high sages and masters of the universe endeavor to transcend.) But he asked me to send questions, which I did. I haven’t heard back.

One of my questions was: “You describe how people around Epstein compartmentalized or rationalized their relationship with him. In what ways did you yourself participate in that pattern? If a young researcher today were in your exact position — financially supported by a wealthy figure known to have abused young women — what would you advise them to do differently than you did?” I hope he will consider answering in the public interest.

In his Substack statement, Bach did write about the survivors — well, to be more precise, he wrote that “I understand why targets of this sort of media maelstrom do not always survive, and need a long time to heal.” This is the only use of any word beginning with “surviv-” that appears in his statement; the survivor that he was writing about appears to be himself.

The experience of standing in the middle of this storm is traumatic. It is hard to feel my body. At times, I find it nearly impossible to breathe….

At the same time, my family and friends need me to go on, and my work is too important to give up on it. It has just gotten harder for a while.

I feel pain and despair, but I don’t feel any anger. Not at myself, because I know that I tried to do the right thing. I am not angry at the people who hound me, because this is just how public discourse works today.

In his honest appraisal of Epstein, Bach said one other thing that stuck with me. For all his own, just-stated concerns about Epstein, this was far from a breakup letter:

On a personal level: I cannot say how grateful I am for your unwavering support. I have gone through a pretty bad year (nothing like what happened to you, of course). If there is ever anything I can do to help you, please let me know.

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At The Ink, we work for you. When you join us, you stand up for independent media that isn’t afraid to tell the truth. Subscribe today and help us keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, reach more people, and build the kind of media that you want to read.

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Photo illustration: Jeffrey Epstein by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images; Joscha Bach by Rama/Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr; Email courtesy House Oversight Committee, jmail.world

This is the third chapter of The Ink’s series The Epstein Class — our investigation into the inner workings of Jeffrey Epstein’s world and the operating system of power today. For more:

• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

• The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most

To support this work, become a subscriber:

Subscribe now

By Anand Giridharadas

Compared to other places, the United States undertaxes billionaires and the enterprises and inheritances that have made them so wealthy. We justify this choice in many ways, but the most reasonable-sounding may be this: “If you let the rich think up new ideas, the results will make the rest of us better off”; the logical flipside is that restraining our idea generators would hurt us all. In a very real sense, these propositions establish the system we all live under. But since fire departments and public schools and Tomahawk missiles don’t pay for themselves, the only way to raise the might-have-been revenue is to get it from regular people. The result is that we raise a lot of money from people already strapped for cash in order to spare the idea-pregnant billionaires, their stockpiles protected by our consent and resignation.

Having anchored their case for holding on to so much wealth in the special powers of their minds, America’s oligarchs have made the contents of those minds a legitimate subject of public debate. We all have a kind of equity stake in what they spend their waking moments thinking about, because, at the margin, you are working longer hours, eating less food, and buying fewer clothes for your kids to spare billionaires from having to pay more in taxes.

So — are you getting your money’s worth?

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One of the things that struck me most in reading through the Epstein files over these last few months is the stark and clear view they provide of what a number of super-rich people are actually focused on. Here was a network that included a great many wealthy and powerful people, including Jeffrey Epstein himself at the center of things, corresponding in emails they must have assumed would remain private. Here were their unvarnished preoccupations.

What I found notable is the absence of what they claim to spend their time thinking about whenever talk of a wealth tax resurfaces: grand visions of transforming the world through commerce, of nation building, of transformational schemes, of heroic creation. Their alibi of dreaming up ideas to make the world a better place didn’t seem to be much in evidence. What they thought about far more often was the highly boring, tedious, and technical work of maintaining and defending their wealth and ensuring that their children would become oligarchs, too.

This is one reason why the Epstein files’ release is such a crisis for their class. For a small number, there is the possibility of enmeshment in an actual ring of human trafficking and pedophilia. But for a far greater number, there is the quieter embarrassment of the world discovering the utter societal uselessness of how many of them invest their mind, energy, and time.

There are different flavors and expressions of this banality of oligarchy. But the most telling, in my estimation, is the voluminous, weedsy, and sometimes bizarrely melodramatic discussion of how to preserve a fortune. These are conversations that veer into art, law, aviation, children, wastefulness and care, legacy, death, life, taxes, and more. Perhaps no subset of these conversations is as rich and societally useless as the one involving the billionaire Leon Black.

“Deciisions needed asap,” Epstein at one point writes to Black, a billionaire Wall Street private equity titan who was paying a convicted pedophile to manage his money. “1 phaidon. topco etc. . ( cash needs) many wires needed !! 2 new trustee or not. - new decantings 3 art in art partnership.??! .overdue ?! 4 grats? window - 5 art space. .6 regan arts..7 plane simplify re strucuture re finance. re purpose . 8 .boat restrucutre , sister, 9 re fresh estate plan.”

If you have spent time in the Epstein files, you already know what I’m about to say, but if you haven’t, you should know this: to read through the emails is to spend a lot more time with emails like the above than with anything having to do with sex crimes. In retrospect, that is obvious: powerful men don’t usually email about their abuses. But when I began working on the files, I suppose I had been expecting an unprecedented window into a barbaric story of trafficking and exploitation. And I was struck: These — these — were the emails? For every message that felt like even a wisp of smoke possibly tied to some unseen smoking gun involving the sex crimes, there were, I don’t know, 20, 50, 100 of these.

As the media and the public began to dig in, the search settled into a classic needle-in-a-haystack situation, with highly trained professionals and armchair amateurs wading through the muck of art partnerships and decantings to get to the criminal stuff. Sex crimes were needles, world leaders and corporate captains were needles, President Trump was the biggest needle of them all.

But the more I read, the more I found myself thinking about all the haystack emails. The more boring they were, the more I somehow convinced myself that insight was lurking there, too. It began to seem like this was a historic, unfiltered view into how a bunch of very rich people conceive of life and shape the world for the rest of us.

As I have argued before in this series, the most salacious, extreme, and unlawful things that occurred in the Epstein network were nested within a larger culture of behaviors, beliefs, mores, and systems that enabled the worst of the worst conduct. This is a story not just of predation but of power, and of power enabling predation.

This chapter is about the haystack, the truths hiding in plain sight in the most abstruse and boring emails. It’s a glimpse into what I came to think of in reading the files as Rich Brain: an approach to the world that is all about how to protect what one already has — and very little about how to create anything new for anyone else.

Until his Epstein-related fall from grace in 2021, Leon Black was a Wall Street high flyer. Co-founder of the private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which managed more than $1 trillion in assets on behalf of institutions like pension funds and unions, Black was one of many ultra-wealthy people who let Epstein worm his way into their lives, first as a friend, then as a financial consigliere. Epstein began to handle Black’s financial affairs in 2012, helping him set up his estate, organize art purchases, establish his family office, avoid unnecessary taxes, and more. All told, Black, a billionaire, would end up paying Epstein some $170 million in fees.

As The New York Times reported last October, Black’s friendship with Epstein spanned the gamut of the two men’s range of interests: from young women to money to the arts. Black has been tied to various young women introduced to him by Epstein, and has reportedly paid settlements to some who have accused him of sexual misconduct. He denies these claims.

Black was just one of many Epstein helped with wealth management. Strangely, Noam Chomsky was another, when a dispute arose over his family trust. Epstein also reportedly worked in this capacity for Ariane de Rothschild, among others. But it is Epstein’s emails involving Black that provide the most vivid portrait of Rich Brain, of how all-consuming it must be to devote oneself to mummifying money.

The poor think the rich have it easy, and they do. But they also don’t, because wealth on a scale like theirs is not natural, and it takes a lot of contorting to keep it theirs. The price of being rich, it sometimes seems from these emails, is that you have to think all day about being and staying rich.

A notable fact about the Epstein-Black emails is that many, but not all, were sent by Epstein directly to Black, via his assistant. Though Black was a billionaire with lots of people working for him, these were evidently things he had to think about and decide himself. This was what his brain had to be focused on. This was a mental load he accepted, because it was a priority.

Here is one such email from October 2015:

Office, ada goes. , hire heather a paralegal. Joslin goes or is closely managed by new cfo with tax experience. castrucci goes asap as he merely adds to mess. too many people, ex 7 people or more to pay a bill. eva goes. outsource as much as possible. bookkeeping systems built from scratch, airplane restructure, boat same, new grats. phaidon sale, decide on artspaceregan, do the kids really want these? children accounting ie bens house. re do estate for new facts. redo loans, trading accounts activity, gaming -foreign- disclosures. BRH TRA re thinks. household and construction architects. redone. art partnership, choice of paintings. re do structure of consultants. tax re family office. decide if investments are a realistic option in the next three years. insurance. operations. airplane, etc. art foundation, private. max charity contributions. financial reports. still waiting. on line banking, tax planning, family office deductions (profit center). airplane certificate, redone jet aviation redo. paper gigi trust to avoid gift tax.

So here we have Epstein first of all recommending various personnel changes to Black. You need a new guy with tax experience, presumably not out of a desire to pay more in taxes. You need to restructure your airplane, which one takes to mean financially. And your boat. You need to deal with what your children are getting, keeping. You need to deal with estate plans and architects, set up entities to purchase art instead of just, you know, purchasing it. You need to maximize your charitable contributions — again, the drive to maximize may or may not have been related as much to taxes as to a love of humankind. You have to figure out how to duck the gift tax. And on and on and on and on.

Is it me, or are you exhausted right now? Maybe I’m just singularly bad with mail and paperwork and things like that. But if I had Black’s kind of money, I can assure you that the first thing I would buy with it is not having to think about arid shit like this.

But I’m no longer surprised. When I first began to encounter people in these worlds, I was taken aback. I guess I had assumed that having more money would liberate you from thinking about it and stirring it every ten minutes like some tomato sauce.

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I will never forget The New Yorker’s devastating portrait of Julian Robertson, another billionaire financier who some years ago became embroiled in a case about whether he had evaded New York City taxes. The city levied a top rate of 3.6 percent, which you could avoid if you spent less than 183 days in the city. Though Robertson was in his late sixties at the time and worth billions of dollars and had an estimated income in the contested year of more than $700 million, he went to staggering lengths to organize his life to avoid needless city days:

This was nearly a full-time job. One of Robertson’s assistants, Julie Depperschmidt, scheduled his appointments and maintained a contemporaneous computerized record of his whereabouts, carefully distinguishing between “NYC days” and “non NYC days.” Different colored boxes indicated confirmed and anticipated non-New York City days. Whenever the combined number fell below a hundred and eighty-three, she advised him to add more non-New York City days to his schedule. She said that she reminded him “ad nauseam” about what he needed to do to reach a hundred and eighty-two non-New York City days.

Friday nights were particularly risky, since Robertson or his wife often had social events scheduled in the city. In order to “earn a tax day,” as he put it, he usually left town on Friday before midnight, even if his wife stayed at the apartment. Robertson’s driver had to be on alert: as long as they crossed the Queens border en route to Locust Valley by midnight, Robertson didn’t have to “waste” a Saturday as a New York day. Even one minute of a day spent in the city counts as a day of residence.

I remember reading that article and having the same thought I have had more recently, reading the Epstein-Black emails: This is what you spent your time thinking about? This is what interested you when you, more than almost anyone, could have spent your time thinking about anything?

Epstein had a knack for poking into insecurities. The rich worried they weren’t smart enough — hook them up with academics. They also worried they were ugly and boring — hook them up with young women. The academics worried about funding — hook them up with rich people. The former government officials worried about staying in the game — hook them up with access and pry information out of them.

In his emails to Black, Epstein displayed another of these astute understandings: a billionaire like Black wasn’t necessarily consumed by what could be built, but by the fear of squandering what had been amassed. Notice the use of the past tense here:

i architected and built you an amazingly elegant house... your house manager has let the water run in many of the rooms, shut the doors. told some of the staff to mind their own business, the basement is flooded and gets worse every day. your school chum is standing knee deep in rising water (tom is affable, brad is trying and your in house counsel is trying to decide jurisdiction and liability if she turn off the taps. your family office is comprised of super cheap furniture, cheaper IT and low priced help. I believe you need an office for your family, your future and IT that is technologically up to date and upgradable. you want to leave your kids the quality equivalent of your art collection. Leon ITS NUTS

Here, again, there is a lot going on. Wealth is not a tool for creation in the world. It is a metaphorical house you own, one Epstein helped build. In this telling, the outside world is less a place to make things happen than a source of threat to the wealth you have accumulated. It is water seeping in. It is time wearing things down. The way to live is to resist this financial entropy.

At one point, Epstein appears to be trying to collect more money from Black, and he lays out the challenges of wealth defense:

You and your family are a 6 billion dollar corp. with an income between 250 -500 million dollars per year. It contains a few operating biz’s , a large wide array of existing investments, in various categories , a desire to enter into others. A panoply of loans, notes. purchases, wide range of all types of taxes. , planes. boats homes.. trusts ,grats. a crazy number of bank accts. ( with no oversight ) . law firms, acct firms, 800 page tax returns, foreign firms. art consultants. construction consultants bill payers, home mgmt.,vast multitude of Ilc’s , including foreign.

This is obviously a lot to think about, and it must be thought about constantly, and here Epstein hoped to make himself valuable: “Your family office needs a daddy,” he wrote, meaning…himself. “children with good intentions are running around , sniping , nitpicking with little direction.” And on the message went, with talk of lines of reporting and employee training and, above all, the desire of Epstein to get paid.

The decision list that Epstein was leaving on Black’s doorstep could be maddening:

…10. tra review , sale. , 11 brh, doc review, 12. sale of stock or art ? tax, rent sale 13 . gifts of art. 14. charity current and future pledges , gifts, 15 cash flow. . 16 . new IT and new personnel. 17. operational re-do ( bill pay etc) . 18 debra and children ? current and future involvement . notifications etc.. new dynasty trust ? 19. tax plan and dislosures gaming. foreign apollo and phaidon related . 20. investments rationalize incl trading accouints . 21. bank loans . rates ? ? terms etc. consolidate. plane boat houses. disclosures? 22 . consolidate and review and reduce the number of all bank accounts and legal entities. decanting liquidating etc. . 23 all outside consultants? valuations etc. 24 review legal bills carefullly. 25. third party responsibilty Bens house , alex films . Etc…

I understand that little of this will make sense to you. It doesn’t make a whole lot to me. But amid the typos and grammatical scree is a crystalline clarity about priorities.

If “wealth creation,” a phrase we often hear in our politics and discussions about taxation and entrepreneurship, is something that happens “out there” in the physical world, here the conversation was more about wealth conservation for the next generation.

In our discussions of whether or not to tax wealth, this kind of wealth, conserved in these kinds of ways, isn’t typically the focus. But it accounts for a huge portion of the wealth we are talking about. And it is worth thinking about whether we want to extend the deference we do to the allegedly societally fruitful work of crafting trusts that own LLCs that own shell companies that hold art that may one day be donated to a museum that will give a tax deduction.

Epstein played on this universal parental anxiety for one’s children — in this case, an anxiety inflected by Black’s immense wealth: “the tasks at hand are the following. You have a bomb of colored string that your retarded children have formed, It has to be very carefully unwound.”

Black is being warned of the thing ultrawealthy people fear most: a return to the mean. Black was unimaginably successful. But his children, in Epstein’s telling, were incompetent at holding the wealth. Left to their own merits, the wealth may vanish. Some might say that is as it should be — nature healing. But no: if the rich man is willing to keep his mind set in Rich Brain mode all the time, he can make moves to spare his children from meritocracy. He can ensure their wealth without the burden on them of having to generate ideas. He can secure their right not to be societally fruitful but societally useless.

A tweet — they were still called that then — I think about often is by Michael Roston, an editor at The New York Times. He seemed in turn to be paraphrasing a quote I can’t find from Choire Sicha. He wrote:

Was it @choire who wrote that while you’re worrying about the future of journalism, the people who control the money are trying to make sure the right car goes to the right house?

I think about that quote often: its suggestion of a mismatch between the responsibilities of our elites and their actual mental investments; its insight that wealth doesn’t necessarily liberate you from life maintenance but can actually so overcomplicate your life that maintaining it becomes the overwhelming project; its observation that, in an age of epic and existential societal challenges, those with the resources to think about them may…not be.

To the extent that the easy ride we give our billionaires, tax-wise, is premised on the pregnant thoughts they are gestating all day, it may be useful information to know how much of their effort is spent on such thoughts and how much is spent trying to establish modalities of the kind Epstein was offering Black and so many others. No matter what they tell you on Instagram, the central anxiety of our oligarchs may not be that extraordinary things won’t be created. It may be that one or more of their descendants will have to return to the cursed ranks of that great mass of human beings who exchange their labor for money.

Something middle-class people may not realize is that an age of yawning inequality actually makes very rich people more anxious, too. Once again, you might imagine a liberating effect of extreme wealth. But that isn’t how it turns out to work. The cost of sinking into the below-ground becomes more unimaginable. The abyss becomes more terrifying. And, therefore, changes to the system, higher taxes, rising populist tides — all of it is terrifying. Wealth taxation, specifically, like the new proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna for a 5 percent annual wealth tax on America’s nearly 1,000 billionaires, triggers especially visceral feelings. The billionaire class often takes it like a punch in their grandson’s stomach.

In an environment like this, the mythmaking becomes all the more important. That we collectively extend the billionaire class this deference, hitting many working-class families with a higher effective tax rate, must be even more strenuously justified. This paternalistic idea of the billionaire class — don’t disturb our national daddies, sweetie; they are busy inventing ideas for us — acquires an existential importance.

But in the crack in the edifice of oligarchy that is the Epstein files, what we see tells a different story. I didn’t come across many nation builders in the files; I saw a lot of maintainers. I didn’t see a lot of job creators; I saw rent seekers. I saw a lot of worrying about how to hold, not build. I didn’t see people thinking along the lines of the abundance movement; I saw a lot of high-end scarcity thinking, the anxiety of bank account conservation. I didn’t see a lot of dreaming about the transformation of the landscape of the country and the lived texture of daily life; I saw a lot of stuff about LLCs for the purchase of paintings. I didn’t see a lot about what tomorrow could be made like for all; I saw a lot about ring-fencing yesterday’s spoils for a few.

To the extent that we have chosen — and keep choosing — to maintain this oligarchic class at our expense, through the tax rates we set, the regulations we impose, the programs we create, and do so out of a belief, conscious or not, that, even if they are gaudy, our overlords are of societal value, that there is a method in the madness of some people not eating so they can have a tax break for their jets, maybe let’s not?

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Photo illustration: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Museum of Modern Art, House Oversight Committee, jmail.world; Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein, private plane on tarmac, House Oversight Committee; Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images

This is the second chapter of The Ink’s series The Epstein Class — our investigation into the inner workings of Jeffrey Epstein’s world and the operating system of power today. For more:

• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

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By Anand Giridharadas

Where did the women and girls go when Jeffrey Epstein and his friends were eating?

As I browsed through the Epstein files, including thousands of photographs released to the public, I couldn’t help but notice a recurring, conspicuous absence. The archives are full of pictures of women and girls — naturally, as these files were compiled as part of an investigation into sex crimes. For the most part, the faces of these women and girls are redacted, little black squares abstracting the bodies sitting on laps, posing nude, standing beside powerful men whose arms are frequently tentacled around the women’s and girls’ waists. But while the faces of the victims are blacked out, preventing us from fully seeing them as people, many of the men wear a delusional grin, a fearless conviction that this is the natural order of things.

But there is an exception: photographs of people around a table. In these photos, we see the gesticulation and focused intensity of conversation. There is often food and/or drink in front of the speaker and his attentive listeners, but the vibe is less cocktail party chitchat than weighty intellectual exchange, important people talking about important things. In this genre of Epstein file photos, there are almost never women and girls to be seen — no wives, no female colleagues, and certainly not the women and girls Epstein kept around him.

At first blush, it doesn’t make sense. Wasn’t the whole point of the Epstein hangouts to spend time around women and girls — in some cases, to abuse and rape them? Wasn’t this what he was always promising when he wrote to powerful men about introducing them to friends who were “cute”? Wasn’t that the whole draw of an Epstein invitation? Then why the mealtime sausage fests?

Here is my theory of an answer. Yes, many of the men in Epstein’s network coveted contact with women and girls — but not all forms of contact. This is their general delineation as far as I can make it out: You would swim with women and girls, but you wouldn’t attend a lecture with or by one. You would sit across from women and girls at a private jet table, but you would avoid a sit-down dinner with them. You might pose for smiling photos with women and girls, but you were unlikely to be photographed getting lost in an idea with them. A woman or girl might sit on your lap, but you wouldn’t want her sitting to your left.

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To browse through the Epstein photos is to identify, through its absence, what must be most terrifying to men in this circle: a forty-something woman with thoughts. Opinions, a voice, and the sense of safety to deploy them were plainly so threatening to this little society that great care might have been taken to avoid them. Perhaps no one was more terrified of intellectual and emotional maturity than Epstein, whose taste ran to girls too young to have been offered Algebra II in school.

It is revealing that this female absence appears to be most pronounced during meals, a time for conversation. Conversation has the problem of being two-way. Women and girls in this world were for receiving — for doing things to, not with.

More than deferential, women and girls were expected to be unquestioningly acquiescent. In the Epstein photos, it is clear: the time for women and girls was bedtime, massage-room time, frolicking time, pool time, when the real talk ended. Epstein, the late survivor Virginia Giuffre wrote in her book Nobody’s Girl, “liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life-support system for a vagina.’” Perhaps some of his friends agreed. “My impression of many of these men is that they didn’t know how to pursue women,” Giuffre wrote. “Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people.” She wrote that “[b]y giving them obedient girls, Epstein eliminated their need to persuade or entice potential sexual partners.”

For some of these men, the fear of being caught out in a debate with an adult woman must have been greater than the fear of being caught in bed with an underage one. These are the kind of men who, even when they are not creeps, will often leave women with the impression that the last thing they wanted was a response. These are men who are uninterested in engaging at more than a superficial level with those not of immediate, obvious use, which in their mind often seems to encompass most women. The tiny handful of women who made it onto the dais at an Epstein-funded event did so not as respected equals but as resented alibi, a public to be bitterly checked before boarding the private jet to Rape Island.

Looking through the photos, I couldn’t help but think of the many highly traditional societies I’ve visited around the world where the women make the food and sit silently as men eat and talk Great Big Things. With exaggerated pomposity, braided with a sense of solemn duty to opine on the prime minister’s latest move or stock market churn, the men declaim and “solve”; the women later quietly forage for leftovers.

What we are seeing in the Epstein circle is a strange hybrid of patriarchies new and old: There is, as Kate Manne has brilliantly articulated, a new-world commodification and fungibility and trading of women and girls, on one hand; and, on the other, a persistent old-world sense of where women belong and don’t belong. A hybrid of women as crypto and women as servile daughters-in-law. What women are not, in this view, is beings to negotiate with, trade ideas with, study the world with. They are vessels for what men put out. They nod at ideas, don’t make them. They don’t eat with the menfolk. They are, one supposes, meant to lie in bed while food and fat are being chewed. The ones who are around are never going to be the age of the men, if at all possible. They will be younger, poorer, on more precarious footing, with less power.

Women and girls in this world function as the bonding agent of those who see themselves as beyond borders, even as they hide their victims’ passports.

“I was trafficked to other billionaires,” Giuffre recalled. “I was trafficked to politicians, professors, even royalty. So the circles that Jeffrey Epstein ran in weren’t your typical setting of human trafficking. It was the elite of the world. It was the people who run the world. It was the most powerful people in the world. And those are our leaders. Those are the people that we are supposed to look up to. It’s corrupt. It’s corrupt to the core.”

What is most egregious about the Epstein files — that these eminent people could stoop so low in their conduct or, at a minimum, their associations — is also an analytical boon. Rarely do we get to make the connections between what people do in the hot tub and what they do in the conference rooms of banks and treasury departments and foundations. This connection-making is complicated and fraught, because, for example, hurting people through enabling a mortgage crisis that throws millions on the street is obviously a universe away from raping someone. And yet, done with care, there is value in identifying the common themes of dehumanization, insulation, indifference, and attitude that make possible the extreme things and the less extreme things, the economic pain and the trafficking pain, the acute cruelty visited on one person at a time and the chronic cruelty thrust upon millions.

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This was a group of men whose ideas of what made women and girls valuable, whose sense of where they belonged and where they didn’t, whose comfort with women and girls only in the context of a power distance so extreme as to be cruel — whose ideas about these things were not altogether unrelated to their other ideas.

These are men who do not like resistance. Friction. Pushback. Any obstacle to the sprawl of their ideas and needs. The most extreme manifestation of this tendency is the pedophilia at the heart of the story, in which Epstein and some of the men around him participated. There can be no more acute expression of the desire simply to act on the world without countervailing force than child rape. But as with so many behavioral habits revealed by the Epstein files, this allergy to pushback lies on a spectrum, and the same basic avoidance of friction can be found in men not associated with sex crimes, and in rituals as innocent as dinner. A woman your own age opposite you at dinner is, evidently, for these men, hindrance in its own right.

In some corners of traditional media, you will hear a view that it is inappropriate to put the sexual depravity and criminality at the heart of this case in conversation with other behavior. But I continue to think — and many women survivors have continued to insist — that, in fact, it is more inappropriate to refuse to make these connections.

Travel for a moment to the most benign end of this spectrum — the well-documented desire in this elite network to avoid life friction. On the private ski mountains where these elites buy houses, on the yachts they acquire, in the realm of private jet travel where they spend so much time, everything is designed to minimize what is known in the catering-to-billionaires industry as “touch points.” Jeff Wise, a private pilot and science journalist, describes the ethos thus:

Given their escape from the confines of mundane reality, many high-net-worth individuals prefer to avoid unnecessary contact with unknown humans. A big selling point is the ability to minimize what are known as “touch points”: the individual micro-interactions that take place as we move through the world, like saying hello to a gate agent or asking a fellow passenger to switch seats. “When you fly commercial, there are more than 700 touch points,” says Alexandra Price, brand communications manager at the jet-charter company VistaJet. “When you fly private, it’s just 20.”

It is a different experience of life never to have to wait for your turn on the ski lift. Never to have to contend for space in the overhead locker with another person. Never to have to be charming to get into a restaurant. After a time, one imagines, all the not-having-to-dos will change you. You will become less capable of exerting yourself in ways you once did without a care. And one can even dig deep and muster the empathy to appreciate that, the smoother and easier and more frictionless many parts of your life become, the more intolerable is whatever continues to resist you. It may be no accident that the time of gaining access to this more resistance-free ecosystem often correlates with the time of second and third wives. (When no one talks back to you but your wife, you upgrade — although these “upgrades” are never complimentary.)

I don’t believe it’s an accident that this promise of seamlessness, of a touch-point-free existence, of the removal of anything indifferent to one’s wishes, of the outer world rendered as an extension of the self — it simply cannot be an accident that sometimes, for perhaps a small subset of these men, this expectation goes beyond skipping the line at Newark, and beyond even having the 25-year-old girlfriend who is simply grateful to be kept around.

Sometimes, it seems in reading the Epstein files, this expectation of a pliant world extended into the realm of public policy — and sometimes into the massage room. In this worldview, which is worth understanding because it still holds great sway over us, various unlike things are smushed into likeness: regulations and laws and critics and law enforcement and antitrust scrutiny and the #MeToo movement and women demanding equality on the job or sitting across from you at the table talking.

What these things have in common is being hindrance. These men won’t be hindered.

Lina Khan is more qualified than most to think about this spectrum, these connections between the most extreme acts and the culture and structures and incentives surrounding them. She is a law professor. She was chair of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden, enforcing competition policy and pursuing antitrust cases. Having taken that job more seriously than anyone in a generation, she earned the wrath of very powerful men in Silicon Valley and beyond. Even Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and one of the only big-time Democratic Party donors left in the tech world, declared that he wanted her replaced if Kamala Harris won the White House. Like everyone else, Khan has been reading the revelations of the Epstein files, and it has not been lost on her that, as she put it to me, “there has been a really interesting Venn diagram and kind of an overlap of the people who, it seems, were part of this really horrendous pedophilia ring and the kind of people who have been opposing working-class policies in the last Democratic administration.”

To be clear, Khan’s argument here is not that being against certain kinds of economic policies makes you a pedophile. It is, rather, that the kinds of well-heeled critics she acquired seem to have an expectation of deference that extends to many spheres of their lives — an expectation she violated:

One of the things that was most striking during my tenure at the FTC was the just level of pushback and, honestly, sometimes even just hysteria that we saw from elites when you had a government agency holding them accountable and applying the law to them and their companies just in the same way that we do to some fly-by-night fraudster or scammer…When put against now the Epstein file revelations, it just does underscore how there does seem to be a class of people in this country that have for too long enjoyed a level of elite impunity. And no matter what the domain of their wrongdoing, they have enjoyed protection. They have protected one another.

And she spoke incisively of the touch-point-free existence and the cost of the expectations it sows:

For a lot of these individuals, they have come to occupy positions of power that really do surround them with people who are constantly enabling every whim and desire, be it in their personal lives, be it in their businesses. And so to actually have to reckon with law enforcement or people holding them accountable — it’s a very foreign and offensive experience for them.

It is difficult to make sense of “The Wrath at Khan,” as The Atlantic once put it in a headline, without entering the mind space of a network of overwhelmingly white men who identify as swashbuckling builders in a chattering, do-nothing world who were shocked to learn that the federal government has longstanding powers to block monopolies, and that those powers, until President Trump retook office, were vested in a woman who, even more offensively, was young and brown. If you’ve spent time with these men on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, you know their lingo is…revealing. “Seed rounds” of investment. “Incubators” where startups are born. Project “gestation.” There is endless talk of “market penetration” and “dominating the category” and “founder DNA.” Those with concerns are “pussies” and lack “balls.” And there is a common tendency to associate all forms of pushback a company gets with a feminine archetype of resistance. Every nonbeliever is an annoying nag.

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The wrath at Khan transcended mere policy. It was wrath about the very existence of resistance to these men’s world-historical designs. It was wrath about needing to ask for consent to consummate a business acquisition. It was wrath about being told “No” by people who are almost never told “No.”

So then you decide how surprising or not surprising it is that Hoffman had no problem associating with Epstein, who in his infinitely more extreme criminal ways pursued the ideal of zero resistance, of not needing consent. Yes, yes, it must be said again and again: antitrust violations and sex crimes are fundamentally different. But there are rhymes between what these men thought reasonable, or not unreasonable, to expect in private life and in public life. That common expectation is partly how one can explain the more law-abiding friends of Epstein, like Hoffman, not having a problem with a monster like Epstein: on one level, they lived completely differently; on another, they shared an attitude, a contempt for resistance that was visceral.

It may be no less coincidental that Peter Thiel, another Valley stalwart, shows up in the Epstein files and that he, too, has articulated a vision of monopoly as an ideal — of the absence of competition not as a policy problem but a nirvana. Thiel had no interest in the women Epstein provided, but perhaps there was a mutual sympathy of Übermenschen.

Thiel is often, and erroneously, maligned for suggesting that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. He never said that. But what he did say may be even more revealing:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron.

He is saying that letting women vote added a source of regrettable electoral friction to the political prospects of his preferred ideology, which itself is an ideology premised on removing friction from the creative spawning of Promethean creators like himself. Underlying it all is the sense of a desire to be unbound, and a hostile world of governments and ladies standing athwart you.

And, of course, there is Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, Harvard president, and Epstein friend, who famously came to the convicted pedophile for advice on wooing one of his own mentees. (Suffice it to say, there are few positions that so allow one to avoid contact with non-elites as being the president of Harvard.)

Summers isn’t one of those Epstein friends who can claim he had no idea who the guy was. On November 29, 2018, he wrote Epstein: “U have returned to the press.” One day earlier, The Miami Herald had published a bombshell report by the investigative journalist Julie Brown, titled “Perversion of Justice,” detailing how “a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime,” and how “Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day.”

“short lived , no worry,” Epstein wrote back. (Among the rules Epstein and many of his confederates had no respect for were grammatical.)

Now, one can try to ring-fence this willful blindness, this indifference to women’s suffering, or one can pursue connections. Is it irrelevant, for example, that Summers had eventually resigned from the Harvard presidency in 2006 (though he remained as faculty until his resignation this year due to his Epstein connections) in part because of his comments about the inferior natural aptitude of women in science and engineering?

More to the point, Summers has been, for as long as he has been in policy debates, part of that great blob of men of stature who are contemptuous of all resistance. As The American Prospect once wrote in a retrospective on his career, “Applying free-market theory where it didn’t fit, Summers’s record on financial deregulation, Russia policy, Third World capital market liberalization, trade, and labor policy was marked by one avoidable disaster after another.” (Among them was his suggestion when chief economist at the World Bank that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that” — a comment he later claimed was “sarcastic” when the memo was leaked.) Here, again, are connections needing to be drawn among the tolerance of Epstein, the more general views of women, and the policy prescriptions for the world. Those are many different domains, and they were all visited by the same underlying instinct: to remove the nettlesome constraints that let alpha actors in the economy act.

In a figure like Elon Musk, another eager correspondent of Epstein, this instinct can become a chainsaw rampage through the agencies of the federal government itself, and it can become the dream of artificial intelligence (shared by many in this circle) in which prosperity for the few can be assured without having to rely any longer on dealing with actual human beings, who have always been the greatest source of resistance to the Promethean creator. A.I. offers so many of the men in this network their fantasy: economic heaven without the sublunary friction of humans.

“The world lives by the prime movers, hates them for it, exploits them and always feels it has not exploited them enough,” Ayn Rand wrote in her journal in 1945, articulating a philosophy that would become an inspiration for many of these men. “They have to fight a terrible battle and suffer every possible torture that society can impose order to create things from which society benefits immeasurably and by which alone society can exist.”

These men give us so much, at least as they see it. Is being left alone, at dinner and in the economy and after crimes, too much to ask?

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Photos: House Oversight Committee

Long before I found my friend’s name in the Epstein files (jet ride, lunch), there had been a dinner I would never forget.

My wife and I had recently moved to New York City. Our friend was an entrepreneur, a vivacious soul. Her highest pleasure was connecting people, and she was generous on that front. Her collection of people was vast, encompassing her professional world and far beyond. At dinner one night in a little semi-basement restaurant in Brooklyn, she opened up to us about some of the challenges beneath the surface of what seemed to be a thriving life. Much of it had to do with her startup, which was not growing the way she hoped or funders expected. We listened, commiserated, gave advice as best we could.

Not long after, she sent an email that read as if written under duress. She worried we had heard her in a low moment and had never gotten the high corrective. She insisted her pessimism was due to a lack of sleep. Now, however, everything was fine — actually, better than fine. What followed sounded more like a pitch for an increased equity stake than anything personal, antiseptically recounting a huge week of growth and new investor meetings. All, she made clear, was well.

I was hardly a monk or a naïf; I understood the importance of cultivating a professional network. But that email was a jolt — and an introduction to a certain group of people whom we lived among but who, we were realizing, saw the world differently. To me, she was a friend, which is someone to share struggles with. To her, I realized, we were also nodes in a network — of people who might one day connect you to opportunity. She had gone home and realized vulnerability was a liability.

When you live and die by the network, you never know whom you’re going to need, when, or how. Every friend is a potential steppingstone. Every phone number is a key. Every door must remain ajar, no matter what you might glimpse through its crack.

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Years later, this friend appeared in the Epstein files. She was a bit player; her husband seemed to know Epstein better. I have no knowledge of what they knew and when; we haven’t really been in touch for some years now. Perhaps if asked, she would say she had no idea of the man’s monstrosity. That is, predictably, the response of many whose names litter the files. I don’t know, as she won’t answer my emails. What I do know is that several of the people who show up often in the Epstein files happened to pass through the couple’s parties.

My point is not that our friend and her husband are implicated in Epstein’s crimes. Rather, it is that they belonged to a particular elite social circle, which included several other Epstein contacts, in which maintaining one’s centrality in the network was such a vital goal that a great deal could be sacrificed for it. All was fine — better than fine — as long as you continued to receive intro emails and requests to RSVP.

Start at the burning heart of the story: the girls. In books, in depositions, at press conferences, on television, they have told us. Recruited at 14, 15, maybe 16. Raped, farmed out to other men, coerced, trafficked — stolen. In their testimonies, it is clear. It wasn’t just a one-man enterprise. There were other men, a small subset of the multitude of Epstein friends, associates, banter buddies, and others lurking at the center of several concentric circles of enablement. One loop out was a larger group who may not have committed crimes themselves but saw enough, heard enough, knew enough that they would surely never have left their own children alone with him.

Move another circle out and you find the people who may not have witnessed anything firsthand but sensed the reputational cloud around a convicted sex offender. They heard things from people who knew, or from others who had heard things from people who knew. This common sense is reflected in Epstein’s so-called birthday book, in which many big-name people, chief among them Donald Trump, saluted him, and many spoke of secrets and girls and a taste for the wild life. Some, while not having seen things directly, knew enough to suggest P.R. advice to their friend Jeffrey. (You don’t generally offer reputation-cleansing advice to people with no reputation problem.) Some in this group knew enough to joke around with him about how the #MeToo revelations were going to make people hate Epstein less by dissolving his sins in an ocean of abuse.

Move one circle further out still: people who sensed something was off, or chose not to investigate too closely, or shrugged with the thought that everyone has a past. Being in his company at the dinners at Harvard, the hangouts at TED, the gatherings at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan, the island visits, the flights — the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of encounters — it is hard to imagine there was no ambient awareness. No one person knew everything. But many people were in a position to have misgivings, raise questions, withdraw.

So think, then, of all that didn’t happen. Where were the people who screamed bloody murder? In this mountain of emails, how many people do we meet who broke up with Epstein, tore into him, cut him off? Where were those for whom his conduct was a dealbreaker? Where were the dinners that blew up because someone stood up, said something, and stormed off? Where were the universities where professors spoke out against their colleagues for wining and dining a pedophile? Where were the bank executives who resigned rather than take his money? Where were the conferences that banned him? Where were the people of influence who refused to go along?

All the while, survivors were trying to tell the world something. It has become clear they were up against not only the powerful legal and P.R. machinery of Epstein and those closest to him, but also, and more banally, a common culture of door-propping avoidance in those a rung or three out.

It is crucial to understand the culture of neoliberal politesse and network anxiety in this group, and the attitude that, amid the ruins of institutional collapse and economic precarity and a world order out of whack, a spine is a luxury even the most privileged of people can no longer afford. After all, elite network anxiety didn’t just protect Epstein. It helps to explain so many calamitous elite capitulations and silences today. There is much that goes unseen by people whose lodestar is being invited back.

In an age when courage is vital, network anxiety seems to be making it more elusive.

Jeffrey Epstein would not have been able to pull off his past-washing redemption act in any random community of human beings. The network he nestled in is significant. Its habits and ways of being are of interest.

What continues to befuddle people is the range of people and institutions in that network. But not only does the diversity mask a deeper solidarity, as I argued in The New York Times last November. The diversity itself may not be as diverse as it appears. Many people Epstein dealt with tended to be citizens of a network I termed MarketWorld in my book Winners Take All — a group living at the intersection of the private and public sectors, circulating among a set of intertwined institutions in higher education, finance, philanthropy, technology, government, the arts, and the conference circuit that binds them together. Harvard. MIT. Goldman Sachs. Silicon Valley venture capital firms. The White House. The Gates Foundation. Davos. TED. The Milken Institute. The Aspen Institute.

Most Americans will never spend time in any one of these institutions. But in the circle around Epstein, it was common to have ties with many of them. In each Kathy Ruemmler, each Joi Ito, each Boris Nikolic, you won’t find a single relevant affiliation, but several. In short, the universe portrayed in the Epstein files is not some generic elite; it is a networked elite highly specific to our age, with particular training and mores.

Rising in the era of globalization, it is geographically nimble — Dubai today, London tomorrow — and its members tend to show more loyalty horizontally to others in the network than vertically to the places they come from. Vocations and beliefs are fluid. Consistent with the neoliberal era, members rotate with ease among government, corporations, philanthropy, nonprofits, academia, media. If you’ve spent time in this world, you know it is a group that takes networks seriously. A 2015 New Yorker magazine profile of Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, proclaims that

[w]ork is already becoming more temporary, sporadic, and informal, and this change should be embraced. Many more people will become entrepreneurial, if not entrepreneurs. The keeper of your career will be not your employer but your personal network.

Step aside, Organization Man, the writer of that profile, Nicholas Lemann, argued, channeling Hoffman. Enter the “Network Man,” of which Hoffman, and certainly Epstein, was a paragon. (Around this time, Hoffman was in active touch with Epstein, coordinating meetups with him in Silicon Valley and receiving from Epstein messages like “ok, come to island , ranch , lets play.”)

Hoffman and Epstein may have represented two sides of the Network Man coin — one using networks to transform careers and our collective economic life, the other to commit crimes and cover them up — but their network obsessions were not unconnected to the larger habits of the modern network-obsessed elite. In this social world, it is common to send out pestering emails asking for all of a recipient’s updated contact information; in the networking mind, maintaining all possible ways of reaching someone is vital, because you never know. Epstein’s own “little black book” reflects this obsessive maintenance, sometimes listing a dozen numbers for one person — so many houses, so many land lines. The academics Epstein kept around him were proof of the value of this network-mindedness: they weren’t always among the most accomplished members of their fields; instead, they were more likely to be the physicist or cognitive linguist who cultivated influential bridges to other fields and other worlds, including Epstein’s.

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For some members of these circles, there is a popular concept known as “optionality.” Originally a term from high finance, the word translated to lay usage means the state of having many alternatives in hand and, even more, a way of operating designed to maximize future options. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former options trader turned professor, writes in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, that “the power of optionality as an alternative way of doing things” is a “way — the only way — to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future.” (The book was among those purchased for Epstein’s Kindle.) So widespread has been the adoption of “optionality” beyond finance that Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard Business School, actually felt compelled some years ago to warn students of “the trouble with optionality.” Options, he wrote,

have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character — what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.”...Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.

The cult of optionality means doing every job with an eye to what other jobs you might yet need — being the kind of regulator who could plausibly end up at a bank, or the kind of prosecutor who could get book and television deals, or the kind of thinker who could score a big TED talk. It means striving never to be a problem, which means not telling your own friends your hardships. All is well — all is always well.

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Optionality was not just a term that showed up in Epstein’s inbox because of his trading activities, though it did often. It was a way of life — from women and girls to finances to politics to the way he spent his time. Hoffman once wrote to Epstein that the latter man appeared to “live a life of great spontaneity (and perhaps optionality).” More to the point, though, Epstein’s optionality was protected by the cult of optionality in those around him — those who have come to associate the well-lived life with keeping network ties alive at any cost.

In some of these circles, there is a quiet lurking dread that never entirely lifts about how badly things could go for you. The network is global, and while your centrality in it can bring you global opportunities, your downfall, too, can cascade globally. In a networked world where careers flow across sectors and borders and institutions, the cost of dissent is unbounded. In the old days, you might have gotten fired from a job; now you can lose an ecosystem. Most scarily, perhaps, at first you may not realize that the rug has been pulled. A termination announces itself. A network ghosting is quieter: the speaking gigs that stop coming in, the intro emails that don’t get sent, the information that ceases to be shared, the dinner invites that aren’t. When your next big thing could come from anyone, anywhere, and not only from your own field or sector but any, the cost of sticking your neck out starts to feel too great. In a network age, you don’t even have to be excluded; to satisfy those whom you unsettle, you just have to not be included. Your options shrink.

I have seen this reticence in many of the spaces people in these circles move through. You can observe it in the culture of politeness at foundations that discourages staff from raising questions about the business activities of their benefactors. On the TED-Davos-Aspen conference circuit, where disagreement is treated like ugly tribalism rather than intellectual engagement. In universities and corporations that bowed to Trump before even really being asked. In meetings about the future of the Democratic Party, where all answers are on the table except any that would challenge donors.

These are all different things, and ultimately they are the same thing, and they are the thing that somehow resulted in so many network maintainers prioritizing their own continued centrality in these networks over airing concerns that might have saved unknowable numbers of women and girls and even helped to bring about justice.

But the benefits of maintenance are real.

In January 2014, a couple named Andrew and Kelly Friendly found themselves stranded in St. Thomas, in the Caribbean. Kelly, who didn’t seem to know Epstein personally, nonetheless sent him a cold email, leading with the couple’s credentials in the MarketWorld network of fluid public-private endeavor, revolving-door cashing-in, and information- and favor-trading in which Epstein was a key node: she worked for Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who, when he ran Harvard (he recently resigned over his ties to Epstein), moonlighted for a hedge fund; her husband, she said, might have met Epstein with his old boss Bill Clinton, who had managed to earn tens of millions of dollars after his presidency while also running a charity.

These were the right keywords. Epstein replied instantly, offering the platinum-tier service he must have felt he owed to people who, while not well known, were members in good standing of his circles.

The Friendlys’ LinkedIn pages read like a Mad Libs of this MarketWorld network. For her: from the Oval Office to the Treasury Department to a bank to a venture capital firm to a position at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. For him: from the White House to tech and clean-energy firms to a job as a lobbyist for the software firm Autodesk, which aspires to “empower everyone, everywhere to design and make anything.”

In other words, Epstein didn’t have to know the Friendlys to know they were friendlies. That’s what the network does.

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Like an island genie, Epstein offered them the last two seats on his friend Andrew Farkas’s jet; for any Friendlys who remained, Epstein’s car would be at their disposal for touring the island. The Friendlys sent profuse thanks.

A year later, Kelly Friendly was still feeling thankful and wondered how she might help Epstein. She sent her boss, Summers, an email. Epstein, high-profile sex offender that he was, was having media problems. Kelly, a public relations specialist, wondered if maybe he should talk to Joe Lockhart, an old friend who had been Clinton’s press secretary and had also helped General David Petraeus (whether with his combat reputation or his sex scandal, the email did not specify), in addition to doing P.R. for Facebook.

This is not to pick on one family trying to get off an island. It is an illustration of how helpful a position in a network like this can be, and of why, perhaps, people are so willing to maintain it no matter what. After all, the island rescue took place six years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor. The case, and his incredibly lax jail sentence, was not a secret. His crime was not trivial.

A network is a web of relationships. For that single Friendly-Epstein-Summers-Clinton-Farkas-Lockhart chain of requests and references and reassurances to function, think of how much maintaining had to be done — over years. Networks like this depend on lots of people not saying and not doing lots of things. A lot of people had to not have a problem with a lot of things. Perhaps some opinions had not to be shared; perhaps some punches had to be pulled. Be too critical of financial elites as an academic, and you won’t have rich friends with islands. Tax billionaires too heavily while in the White House, and you won’t have anyone to raise money from for your foundation or to fly you on philanthropic missions after your time in office. Regulate tech firms too harshly while in public positions, and they won’t hire you later. One drawing of one line by one person over one thing could have broken the web and rendered the eventual rescue impossible.

This is a network where one can move profitably and seamlessly from lane to lane, and the people who thrive at this hopping are the kind who don’t make enemies, and if you can pull that off, when you happen to need a private jet escape — wheels up.

In April 2019, I was asked to serve on the jury for an award given by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. It was called the Disobedience Award. It was funded by Hoffman. When Joi Ito, who ran the Media Lab then, emailed to invite me to join, he said the award “is about speaking truth to power, taking responsibility, and demanding systemic change.” I accepted.

That summer, news stories emerged detailing Epstein’s ties to MIT. Ito emailed our group an apology, in which he confessed not only to meeting with Epstein, not only to fundraising from him, but also to raising money from him for his personal business ventures. As ever in this network, satisfying only one need, devoting oneself to only one lane, was apparently insufficient. There was a time when running the MIT Media Lab would have felt like enough to occupy one. (Ito’s excuse: “This incident has also made me even more aware of how vulnerable I am to exactly the power structures I am trying to resist.”) In a gesture typical of our time, Ito vowed to “raise an amount equivalent to the donations the Media Lab received from Epstein and will direct those funds to non-profits that focus on supporting survivors of trafficking.” Like a carbon offset, but for the rape of young girls.

I wrote to Ito, Hoffman, and the whole group, requesting them to “make public all your correspondence with Epstein and any related people, so that we can all make decisions with full information.” The request was denied; there was vague talk about an ongoing process. Ito never deigned to respond. It has since been revealed that both men had extensive interactions with Epstein.

I wrote again in the evening:

I’m struggling to find a way to make sense of this situation that does not lead me to write the sentence “Respected tech and academic leader raised money from convicted pedophile and leveraged that institutional connection to personally profit from the relationship.” I am not trying to be unkind, but I would need help to understand why this sentence isn’t true.

I titled the email “A choose-your-own-adventure resignation letter,” with the suggestion that either I “stand down if any Epstein-affiliated members want to remain on the committee. Or if it’s preferable to have new blood that is totally Epstein-free, I’m happy to stay on in their absence, along with others.”

Ito never responded to that, either. Hoffman did, copying everyone on a message that accused me of being problematic: “Your responses frankly make me concerned about your ability to serve on an awards committee.” That was that for me and MIT.

But here’s what I remember most from that day and the days that followed: the silence. Only one person in the group — an eminent scholar of media and democracy — sidebarred with me (with nobody copied, as is often the case when there is bravery in these networks) to say he agreed with me. Everybody else — including people linked with some of the most prestigious institutions on earth — played ostrich.

Hoffman and Ito happened to be friends with our Brooklyn dinner date and her husband. Shortly after my conflict with Hoffman and Ito, and my speaking out in the press, I pretty much stopped hearing from her and her husband. I didn’t know about their ties to Epstein until later. I guess I was no longer a useful node in their network.

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Further reading on the Epstein class

Vicky Ward’s 2003 Vanity Fair profile that put her on Epstein’s trail (and make sure to follow her work at Vicky Ward Investigates)

Julie K. Brown on Epstein’s political life (and follow her Substack newsletter, The Epstein Files)

Fintan O’Toole on the line between conspiracy theory and reality

David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Matthew Goldstein on how Epstein made his money

Kate Manne on Epstein’s commodified patriarchy

Celeste Davis on the culture of rape

Jessica Kutz on how Epstein broke science by gatekeeping women

David Dayen on Epstein’s class war

Tina Brown on the pedophile ball

Philip Ball on the amorality of the intellectuals

Jmail puts the Epstein files in context

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Photo by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

With great power comes great obscurity.

In an age of historic inequality and democratic erosion, the wealthy and powerful present the public with highly curated images of themselves while arduously concealing their actual machinations. Their weddings and watches and podcast interviews are readily available to us; their working of the levers of power is not. Downstream of these elites, millions simply sense that something is amiss, wonder how decisions are made, and grow alienated from the system. Life feels hard, but it’s even harder to see upstream through the fog and understand why.

This is why the release of millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein has become such a global moment. Rarely do we gain access to such an unfiltered view into the private workings of a powerful elite.

But access does not equal understanding.

A data dump is not an explanation. A scandal is not a theory. Meaning does not make itself. And as reporters, influencers, and the endlessly scrolling public sift through the documents, there has been more of the heat of gotcha revelation than the light of genuine understanding.

My new series in The Ink, the Epstein Class, aims to add more light.

This is not just about the naming of names. It’s about making sense of an operating system — one that enabled gross barbarism against so many women and girls, one that influences our lives in so many ways still.

Our goal is not a posthumous trial of one man. It’s explaining a structure — a modern power elite still very much with us — and how it operates here and now. In our first chapter, next week, we will ask what a networked age did to bravery. We will also examine the hidden link between the private transgressions of many powerful men and their policy views. We will see how philanthropy is used as a reputational laundromat. And more.

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This project began with my New York Times essay last fall. It gained steam after my recent appearance on “The Ezra Klein Show,” and the flood of responses that followed from all around the world. I have learned to trust that when people hunger to understand something, they are often pointing you in the right way. (And credit to Congressman Ro Khanna for coining the once very, now less controversial term “Epstein Class.”)

Recently, the Hollywood writer-director Judd Apatow said I was wasting my time. In an Instagram reply to me, he wrote:

What is troubling is we are spending all of this time dissecting an old network. The one happening right now between world powers, elites, technocrats, Middle Eastern countries, oil companies, white supremacists and Christian Nationalists and others is in full effect right now.

But, with all due respect to Judd, this is not “an old network.” The same names, institutions, incentives, and relationship architectures remain in place. The party in power may change; the network persists.

To understand the present, we must understand the machinery that produced it.

Our Epstein Class series is here to help.

And now: three small requests.

If you want to read along, sign up to get The Ink delivered to your inbox. And if you believe in this kind of independent journalism, support us as a subscriber today.

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And tell us what you want us to dig into by leaving us a comment.

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And spread the word by inviting a few other people.

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Click on the links below for some background reading and viewing:

Photo by Martin Bureau / AFP via Getty Images

This week, Anand visited “The Ezra Klein Show” to talk about the latest revelations from t…

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As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.

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At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?

But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

It is no accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr. Epstein in. His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.

The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.

The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.

What his correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing, profiting, thinking and giving back. Some members, like Mr. Summers, are embedded in all aspects of it; others, less so.

If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen.

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Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.

Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through JFK, LHR, NRT and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. They occasion the connection-making and information barter that are its lifeblood. If “Have you eaten?” was a traditional Chinese greeting, “Where are you today?” is the Epstein-class query.

Their loyalty, it appears, is less downward to people and communities than horizontal to fellow members of their borderless network. Back in 2016, Theresa May, then the prime minister of Britain, seemed to capture their essence: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Mr. Epstein’s correspondents come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air, ready to connect.

And the payoff can be real. Maintain, as Mr. Epstein did, a grandmother-like radar of what a thousand people are doing tomorrow and where, and you can introduce a correspondent needing a lending partner to someone you’re seeing today. Or let Ehud Barak know a Rothschild has the flu. Or offer someone else a jet ride back to New York and reward the journalist who tipped you off by setting him up to meet a Saudi royal.

But the whereabouts missive is just the first flush of connection. Motion is the flirtation; actual information, the consummation.

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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 and that’s it. You bring what financiers call “edge” — proprietary insight, inside information, a unique takeaway from a conference, a counterintuitive prediction about A.I., a snippet of conversation with a lawmaker, a foretaste of tomorrow’s news.

What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private, bilateral social media for people who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of single-subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning.

“Saw Matt C with DJT at golf tournament I know why he was there,” Nicholas Ribis, a former Trump Hotel executive, wrote to Mr. Epstein, making what couples therapists call a bid for attention. Jes Staley, then a top banking executive, casually mentioned a dinner with George Tenet, the former Central Intelligence Agency director, and got the reaction he probably hoped for: “how was tenet.” Mr. Summers laid bait by mentioning meetings with people at SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Epstein nibbled: “anyone stand out?” Then Mr. Summers could offer proprietary intel. On it went: What are people saying? Who are you hearing for F.B.I. director? Should I drop your name to Bill Clinton?

Sometimes these people give the impression that their minds would be blown by a newspaper. Mr. Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Love to get your sense of Trump’s administration, policies.” And while it may seem strange to rely on Mr. Epstein for political analysis when you can visit any number of websites, for this class, insight’s value varies inversely with the number of recipients. And the ultimate flex is getting insider intel and shrugging: “Nthg revolutionary really,” the French banker Ariane de Rothschild wrote during a meeting with Portugal’s prime minister.

Nomadic bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money.

Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: “U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.” Mr. Epstein replied: “And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.”

In another email, Mr. Epstein offered typo-strewn and false musings on climate science to Mr. Krauss, including that Canada perhaps favored global warming, since it’s cold (it doesn’t), and that the South Pole is actually getting colder (it’s melting rapidly). Mr. Krauss let Mr. Epstein indulge in his rich-man theorizing while offering a tactful correction and a hint that more research funding would help.

For this modern elite, seeming smart is what inheriting land used to be: a guarantor of opened doors. A shared hyperlink can’t stand alone; your unique spin must be applied. Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: “I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side. . sorry.” This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island.

Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s “ideas.” “Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation,” muses Joscha Bach, a German cognitive scientist.

The nature of this omnidirectional capital exchange comes into special focus in the triangle of emails among Mr. Epstein, Mr. Summers and his wife, Elisa New. Mr. Summers seemingly benefited from Mr. Epstein’s hosting, tip-offs, semi-insight into Trumpworld and, most grossly, dating advice many years into his marriage.

Ms. New sought Mr. Epstein’s help contacting Woody Allen and revising her emails to invite people on her televised poetry show. Mr. Epstein tutored her in elite mores and motives: Don’t say, Come on my show; say, Join Serena Williams, Bill Clinton and Shaq in coming on my show. Mr. Epstein reaped the benefits of smarts by association in hanging around them, of the reputation cleanse of affiliation with Harvard professors and a former Treasury secretary, and of getting to cosplay as statesman, once sending an unsolicited intro email to Mr. Summers and a Senegalese politician, Karim Wade, who, Mr. Epstein informed Mr. Summers, is “the most charismatic and rational of all the africans and has there respect.” There are 1.5 billion people and 54 countries in Africa.

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This class has its status games. One is, when getting a tip, to block the blessing by saying you already know. Another is to apologize for busyness by invoking centrality — “trump related issues occupying my time.” When an intro is offered, the coldest reply is “no.” The ultimate power move is from Mohamed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives, whose emails ended: “Sent from President’s iPad.”

If you were an alien landing on Earth and the first thing you saw was the Epstein emails, you could gauge status by spelling, grammar, punctuation. Usage is inversely related to power in this network. The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas.

The status games belie a truth, though: These people are on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.

Mr. Epstein may despise what Mr. Trump is doing, but he still hangs with Steve Bannon, the Trump whisperer and attack dog, seeking help on crypto regulation. Michael Wolff is a journalist, but that doesn’t stop him from advising Mr. Epstein on his public image. Kenneth Starr, who once doggedly pursued sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Clinton, reinvented himself as a defender of Mr. Epstein. These are permanent survivors who will profit when things are going this way and then profit again when they turn.

“What team are you pulling for?” Linda Stone, a retired Microsoft executive, asked Mr. Epstein just before the 2016 election.

“none,” he replied.

In one email, he commiserates with Mr. Wolff about Mr. Bannon’s rhetoric; in another, he invites Mr. Bannon over and suggests an additional guest — Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel.

His exchanges with Ms. Ruemmler are especially striking — not for the level of horridness, but for how they portray this network at its most shape-shiftingly self-preservational, and most indifferent to the human beings below.

Like so many, she had gone from Obama-era public service to private legal practice, eventually becoming the chief lawyer for Goldman Sachs. That people move from representing the presidency to representing banks is so normal that we forget the costs: the private job done with the savvy to outfox one’s former public-sector colleagues, the public job done gently to keep open doors.

In some exchanges in 2014, Ms. Ruemmler appears to be contemplating a job offer: attorney general of the United States, according to contemporary reports. And who does she seek advice from? A convicted sex offender.

In another email, Mr. Epstein asks a legal question about whether Mr. Trump can declare a national emergency to build a border wall. She responds that a prospective employer has offered her a $2 million signing bonus. The glide from tyranny to bonus distills a core truth: Regardless of what happens, the members of this social network will be fine.

Ms. Ruemmler told Mr. Epstein she was going to New York one day. “I will then stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, will observe all of the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation, and will then decide that I am not eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one of these people,” she wrote in 2015.

But in the class of permanent survivors, today’s jump scare may yield to tomorrow’s opportunity. A few years after she joined the company, Goldman Sachs declared anti-obesity drugs a “$100 billion opportunity.”

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Generally, you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.

American democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking and doing — taking care of one another instead of the general welfare — before it got really bad.

This era has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including about Mr. Epstein, because of an underlying intuition people have that is, in fact, correct: The country often seems to be run not for the benefit of most of us.

Shaming the public as rubes for succumbing to conspiracy theories misses what people are trying to tell us: They no longer feel included in the work of choosing their future. On matters small and big, from the price of eggs to whether the sexual abuse of children matters, what they sense is a sneering indifference. And a knack for looking away.

Now the people who capitalized on the revolt against an indifferent American elite are in power, and, shock of all shocks, they are even more indifferent than anyone who came before them. The clubby deal-making and moral racketeering of the Epstein class is now the United States’ governing philosophy.

In spite of that, the unfathomably brave survivors who have come forward to testify to their abuse have landed the first real punch against Mr. Trump. In their solidarity, their devotion to the truth and their insistence on a country that listens when people on the wrong end of power cry for help, they shame the great indifference from above. They point us to other ways of relating.

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