Why the rich and powerful couldn’t say no to Epstein

It was one of the big scenes in Washington in 2019.

All eyes were on Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who was testifying before a House committee about his former boss.

A Democratic committee member, Stacey Plaskett, was preparing to question Cohen and was seen on camera texting someone on her phone.

This week, the public discovered the identity of the other person in that exchange: convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

According to emails made public by his estate under a subpoena, he was encouraging her to ask about a Trump Organization employee. After Plaskett did so, Epstein responded, “Good job.”

In retrospect, this incident has struck a chord with many, who say it highlights the extent of his influence on the American elite.

Plaskett has denied that he was seeking advice from Epstein, saying he was texting many people that day, including Epstein, who was one of his constituents. She says that as a former lawyer, she had learned to seek information from all sources, even from people she didn’t like.

“I am disgusted by Epstein’s deviant behavior. I firmly support his victims and admire their courage. I have long believed and supported the making public of all of Epstein’s files,” she said in a statement sent to the BBC.

She says their exchange occurred before her arrest for sex trafficking. But it was long after her 2008 prostitution conviction.

His private island on US soil had also been mentioned in a damning Miami Herald investigation just a year earlier as one of the places where he sexually abused several underage girls.

Just six months after his exchange with Epstein, the disgraced financier would be dead in his prison cell, the result of suicide, according to a medical examiner. His death, and the conspiracies that revolved around it, would trigger a reckoning that has caused ripple effects across Washington and Wall Street, and wiped out some of his former friends.

Their exchange was just one of many in the latest trove of more than 20,000 pages of personal documents, which revealed Epstein’s ability to maintain elite social circles even after his criminal conviction and the Herald’s exposure.

How and why these relationships survived while other friends interrupted him tells us as much about the dynamics of social circles at the top of American society as it does about Epstein’s influence.

“He was an evil monster, but at the same time he was brilliant in the sense that he was able to maintain this incredible network of some of the most powerful individuals in the world,” said Barry Levine, author of The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

“He had a certain charisma that put him in a position where people turned to him.”

Epstein considered himself a “collector of people” who made connections for transactional purposes, Levine said.

“He would use the information that he obtained … with the intention at the end of the day to obtain favors from them, finances from them or, in a darker sense, I think, blackmail from some of these individuals.”

The relationship between Epstein and the Labor Party’s Lord Peter Mandelson has come under particular scrutiny in the United Kingdom, and Lord Mandelson was eventually fired in September from his role as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the United States.

Documents released by Congress show he maintained contact with the pedophile until late 2016, before the Herald revealed him but after his conviction.

In a November 2015 email, Epstein tells her after her birthday: “63 years. You did it.”

Lord Mandelson responds less than 90 minutes later, saying: “Simply. I have decided to extend my life by spending more time in the United States.”

He has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, any wrongdoing, and has expressed regret over continued communications with him.

Documents released by Epstein’s estate reveal his eclectic social circle of distinguished academics, business titans and politicians.

Levine said it’s not a stretch that some of Epstein’s more casual acquaintances didn’t know about his abuse, or were impressed enough by his influential connections to ignore it.

“People forget things,” he said. “His credentials among the powerful were extremely high, and I think many individuals probably simply dismissed the conviction against him.”

Others may have been simply dazzled by his wealth, journalists and those who knew him have suggested.

“A prison sentence doesn’t matter anymore,” David Patrick Columbia, founder of the New York Social Diary, told The Daily Beast in 2011, after Epstein’s first conviction. “The only thing that rejects you in New York society is poverty.”

Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary turned president of Harvard University, asked Epstein for romantic advice, including an exchange in November 2018, the same month the Herald investigation was published, in which he appeared to forward an email from a woman to Epstein asking him how he should respond.

Epstein responded: “She’s already starting to look needy 🙂 nice.”

Summers’ interactions with his former confidant came back to haunt him last week, prompting him to announce that he was stepping back from public engagements and stopping teaching at Harvard.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” Summers said.

Epstein also reportedly used his money skills to help famed linguist Noam Chomsky, with whom he exchanged several messages over the years and invited him to stay at his homes.

The compliments went both ways. In an undated letter of support included in the trove of emails, Chomsky praised Epstein and said the two had had “many long and often deep discussions.”

The 96-year-old previously told the Wall Street Journal that Epstein had helped him move money between his accounts without “a dime from Epstein.”

“I knew him and we saw each other from time to time,” he said.

In the same article, it said: “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. Under American laws and regulations, that is a clean slate.”

He did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Chomsky was one of Epstein’s famous financial clients, many of whom Epstein helped save billions of dollars, Levine said.

He was able to do so because “he understood the tax code and finance to some extent better than perhaps the highest-paid people on Wall Street,” Levine said.

Throughout the 23,000 pages of Epstein’s documents, one man’s name appears perhaps more than any other.

Trump did not send or receive any of the messages included in the thousands of documents, having cut ties with Epstein.

In 2002, Trump described Epstein as a “fantastic guy.” Epstein would later comment, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

But the relationship would eventually deteriorate. According to Trump, they fell out in the early 2000s, two years before Epstein was first arrested. In 2008, Trump said he had not been “a fan of his.”

Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking. The White House has also said that Trump kicked Epstein out of his club “decades ago for being a creep to his employees.”

Levine said there were many people whose messages with Epstein after his conviction will leave them embarrassed, although that does not suggest they participated in any of his crimes.

“Each and every one, of course, rue the day they communicated with Jeffrey Epstein or spent time with him,” he said. “It’s one of the most incredible stories of our time: power, privilege, predation.”

But there was at least one person who said they immediately understood that Epstein was “disgusting.”

Howard Lutnick, the president’s Commerce Secretary, was Epstein’s neighbor for 10 years. He told the New York Post podcast that his first meeting with Epstein was his last.

Shortly after Lutnick moved into his Upper East Side estate in 2005, he says Epstein gave Lutnick and his wife a tour of his grand residence.

In Epstein’s dining room, after seeing a massage table surrounded by candles, Lutnick asked him how often he used it.

“He says, ‘Every day.’ And then he walks up weirdly to me and says, ‘And the right kind of massage.'”

Lutnick said he and his wife exchanged glances, apologized and left.

“I decided I would never be in the room with that disgusting person again,” she said.