Never eat with women

In chapter two of our Epstein Class series, we examine a strange absence in the photographic record -- and the greatest fear of the men in Epstein's circle

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.

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.

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.

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