The seductive appeal of Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein knew royalty, Silicon Valley techbros, brilliant scientists, Donald Trump, and moneyed people. Ken Starr, who mismanaged sexual assault complaints when president of Baylor University, was both Epstein’s attorney and his buddy. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Bill Clinton … the list of Epstein’s A-list connections was huge.

Andrew Gelman ponders possible reasons: they’re suck-ups, they wanted money, they wanted access to the women, they thought Epstein was cool, they liked him (more detail at the link). Blogging about Larry Summers, whose career has not survived his friendship with Epstein, Paul Campos suggests it’s the cool factor: “Many many people love the feeling that they’re part of the in crowd, and I suspect that this especially true among academics, given that 93.71% were high school losers who never made it with a lady etc.”

Fred Clark quotes CS Lewis making a similar point decades ago: “Nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected.”

This is the point I keep making about how a significant percentage of people aren’t committed to good or bad — it’ll depend on who they’re looking up to, working for, whether random circumstances or a chance meeting nudge them one way or the other. That’s not an excuse for the ones who go bad: turning a blind eye to Epstein’s actions because they thought he was sooo cool is not cool. But it is an explanation. And contrary to columnist Jason Willick who’s outraged that being chummy with a creep like Epstein got Summers fired, I think consequences are one of the ways we nudge people in the right direction. It’s true Summers may not have done anything illegal but knowing the kind of man Epstein was and staying silent is a pretty damning stain.

For the record, so is Kash Patel ducking Epstein questions from Congress.

Rebecca Solnit makes a good point, that the main reason Epstein and his acolytes are an issue is because feminism changed the culture: “feminism that insisted that women were people endowed with rights, that sex, as distinct from rape, had to be something both parties desired, that consent had to be active and conscious, that all human interactions involve power and that the vast power differential between adult men and children meant that no such consent was possible.

It was feminism that exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence, that denormalized these abuses that were so much part of patriarchal society. And still are, far too much, but the dismissive, permissive attitude of the past is past, at least in mainstream culture.”