Even someone as deeply cynical as I am about the lack of morality of Trump and his willingness to do anything to further his personal interests find myself gagging that the suggestion that he would start a major war with Iran just to get the embarrassing Epstein story off the news focus. But there is no doubt that the result of the war has largely been that the demands for the full release of the files has been shunted to the back burner. So here is my measly attempt o bring it back to the front.

One of the big puzzles in the Epstein story has been how this one-time math and physics teacher at a private school without a college degree started the process by which he managed to acquire all the wealth that enabled him to live a luxurious predatory lifestyle that involved raping young women, while cavorting with a host of well-knowing people in the world of business, science, and the arts. I was not aware that back on December 16, 2025, the New York Times published a long story that traced his origins from the beginning and filled in many of the missing details. I will provide just the basic summary.

In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.

Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.

It is quite a story of how he bluffed his way into the world of the elite and once there, worked as a kind of fixer, convincing people that he could handle their financial issues and solve any problems that came up, all the while siphoning money away from them and into his personal accounts. The article shows that he his main skill was the one possessed by sociopaths, the ability to accurately size up people and find ways to ingratiate himself with them. The story reveals how these wealthy people use their connections to advance their interests in ways that make them less vulnerable to the risks ordinary people face.

There are many big personal and institutional names in the financial world that appear in the story as Epstein’s marks. But one of the things this story cleared up for me is the role of the creep Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer not in the financial world, who had been a crony of Epstein’s. They first met in the summer of 1996 in Martha’s Vineyard, a summer hangout for the elites, when they were introduced to each other by Lynn Forester, a successful telecommunications executive, who was married to Manhattan politician Andrew Stein and moved in elite circles.

The year after meeting Epstein, Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer. He introduced Dershowitz to Jimmy Cayne so that Bear Stearns could manage his money. And he persuaded the investor Orin Kramer, whose hedge fund already held tens of millions of Wexner’s dollars, to let Dershowitz invest, too.

But Kramer’s hedge fund soon suffered calamitous losses, and Dershowitz’s six-figure investment was annihilated. Epstein demanded that Kramer make Dershowitz whole and threatened to make his life miserable if he refused. They eventually negotiated a compromise: Kramer would refund Dershowitz’s investment if Epstein agreed to keep at least $30 million of Wexner’s money in the struggling hedge fund. As a result, Kramer would receive enough fees from Wexner to cover the cost of reimbursing Dershowitz.

Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders. In 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl in Palm Beach told the police that Epstein had sexually abused her; that led to state and federal criminal investigations. Dershowitz and other lawyers engineered a sweetheart deal in which Epstein escaped federal prosecution, pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor and received a light jail sentence. (He also had to register as a sex offender.)

Presumably without intending to, Wexner had subsidized Epstein’s long-term and fruitful cultivation of Dershowitz.

Epstein would find ways to meet wealthy and influential people and then drop their names in conversations with others in order to gain access and their trust and in the process would pocket some of their money for his own purposes. The article lists a whole slew of Wall Street figures, ostensibly sharp businesspeople, and celebrities who seemed to have been easily conned by this huckster. It is quite a tale.

Reading the story of Epstein’s success reminded me of this scene from the 1979 film Being There. It is not quite analogous because Chauncey Gardner, the Peter Sellers character, unlike Epstein, was not a ruthless manipulator seeking to deceive and defraud people. He was a simpleton. But the parallel is that others were only too willing to ascribe to him knowledge and abilities despite any concrete evidence to support that belief, and trust him and give him responsibilities that he should not have had and he ended up rapidly rising in that world (This clip was shown in a TV talk show and thus has annoying audience laughter that was not in the film.)