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.)
Clickbait! I saw your title and eagerly read what you said so I could find out how I, too, could become rich.
It requires becoming a sociopath? That’s a price I’m unwilling to pay.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
I am totally willing to pay it!
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Voltaire -- When You’re Evil (Lyrics)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=QxJrjV4PNXAm
The above excerpts do not include the string “d”, “r”, “u”, “g”, which various articles about the most-redacted of the E files imply matters.
Moreover: FBI never took Epstein’s hard drives and computers — and now Democrats are after them…
(I can’t believe that even under K. Patel, the Fan Belt Inspectors could be that incompetent -- never mind before then.)
There’s a lot more of that cronyism and social networking in the world than I think many people realize. It’s not exclusive to criminal enterprises. Although it may be exclusive to people who are inclined toward that.
I only got my career started because of people who wanted to use or scam me (and others) over and above the normal employee and employer relationship. Some of which was straight up illegal. And I only dug my way out of that by networking with other employees I met at some of my worst jobs.
In my first two jobs in the field I experienced our boss musing about how to fire a pregnant woman to scam her out of maternity leave. Had someone try to scam the staffing firm that connected me with the company. Try to scam me out of overtime pay. Had my hours suddenly cut and pay lowered. And those are just the highlights.
It has seemed to me that there’s a benign seeming networking that tends to exclude people who aren’t already connected. LinkedIn’s entire business model is about artificially fostering that connection. But the ugly side of it is that to get connected you end up dealing with bottom feeders, conmen, abusive people, and assorted other shady assholes. Or you just magically start with money or a family connection.
Im going to be shocked if the answer is not “blackmail” (in any form , explicit or implicit).
@ 5
Reportedly he was good at finding “missing” money and on laundering money among other things. He almost certainly had Mossad backing and I’d not be surprised to see CIA backing at times.
I get the feeling he was something of an evil polymath.
lanir @4, you’re right, being in the “right” networks is so important to success in so many things. And, that is why POC, women, LGBT people, etc., are excluded from many opportunities for advancement. The cry of “They had a fair chance, they’re just not good enough!” is the refusal to recognize the importance of networks, among other things.
My, what a successful serial killer Epstein would have made, had his interests lain in that direction!
PZ, admit it, you’re just not talented in the sociopath field, you couldn’t compete at all with a world-class talent like Epstein.
How did Epstein get any teaching job with out a college degree? Or is that allowed in the USA?
@8 Jazzlet: Depends on the state. In many states (including NY where Epstein taught) private school teachers are not required to have state certifications, the requirements are up to the schools. Requirements are often higher then public school requirements but don’t have to be.
Epstein also may have lied on his resume. He lied to Bear Stearns and got away with it.
Elite private schools would require their teachers to have college degrees. It is very likely that Epstein lied on his resume and nobody checked. It was only after he got his first Wall Street job at Bear Stearns that their personnel department belatedly looked at his resume and found that his claims to have two degrees from California universities was not true. The above link describes what happened then.
Does this story indicate that a remarkable proportion of the “elite” are, in fact, plain stupid, and got where they are due only to birth or other forms of sheer luck? And was that Epstein’s key discovery?
@11 KG:
Given the circles that Epstein started in what he discovered is that finance people may be very good at what they do without being generally smart with money. That people who can calculate their exact win rate and how much they are paying in bookie margins are still making bad sports bets. That people who are heartless profit seekers when processing excel spreadsheets can still be convinced to invest with some guy who claims high profits without any historical documentation.
Epstein himself was playing a big gamble game, designed to either make a fortune and gain political power or get thrown out with the trash. Epstein likely knew this though, and chose to go with it because it was the only way to get the kind of wealth, power and under aged girls he wanted.
“Catch Me If You Can” is a movie based on the real conman, Frank Abagnale, Jr., that shows people’s natural instinct to trust charismatic conmen and, although it doesn’t have any of the sexual predator aspects, I think captures more of what Epstein was probably like than the Chauncy Gardener character in the “Being There” movie.
It’s worth bearing in mind that it’s based on his own accounts, which -- shockingly enough -- are not entirely accurate:
He’s not just a conman, he’s a conman who conned a lot of people about how good a conman he was.
Dunc @14
The pilot stuff is obvious bullshit since he claims to have been allowed to fly the plane while flying as an employee passenger. I find it highly improbable that a pilot riding as a passenger in the jump seat, would be given the controls. Also he was given the controls in a phase of the flight where the plane would have been on autopilot and there was no reason for anyone to hand fly the plane.