Epstein's network of bystanders
In the first chapter of our Epstein Class series, we dig into the elite culture that enabled so much abuse: obsessive network maintenance, "optionality" chasing, and the evaporation of courage
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Fascinating, and very enlightening, makes one so grateful to be a nobody!
I'm thinking back to earlier this year when your numerous speaking engagements were discontinued. As difficult as that must have been, after reading this, I'm so happy for you that you don't have to live and succeed only via powerful networks of corruption. It's as if these people willingly enslave themselves. What a way to live.