A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein
By Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper

The crime:

While awaiting trial at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, the notorious sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on the morning of August 10, 2019. The official story is that he hanged himself, but questions have since been raised.

The book:

With any unsolved crime you’ll be able to find plenty of armchair sleuths willing to tell you that they know whodunit. They know the real identity of Jack the Ripper. They know that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy. They know who killed JonBenét Ramsey. And they know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

All we can do is assign probabilities to the various theories in each of these cases. My own feeling is that Epstein really did kill himself, but that’s only on a balance of probabilities. It’s not something I’d say has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. As has been endlessly pointed out, his demise was surrounded by a web of suspicious circumstances: what the authors describe as “a confluence of egregious mistakes” and what then Attorney General William Barr called “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” Most notably, the guards who were supposed to be checking in on Epstein every 30 minutes left him alone for 8 hours while they slept or were online shopping, all while the video camera monitoring his cell wasn’t working.

A general rule I’ve invoked before is that we shouldn’t ascribe to malice what is more easily explained by incompetence and laziness. That may be all that was happening here – and I loved how the prison guards’ union tried to defend its members here by complaining about how “severely overworked” they were, a condition that made such an event as Epstein’s death “inevitable.” That said, I can understand seeing darker forces at work.

I’ve already given some of my thoughts on the Epstein case in my review of Julie K. Brown’s Perversion of Justice. Goodman and Halper are more gossipy, though not conspiratorial, but they also delve into some of the other points about Epstein’s case (that is, other than his “convenient death”) that remain most mystifying. In particular, his sexuality and how he made his money.

When considering Epstein’s sex life I found myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock. There has been a lot of in-depth biographical research into Hitchcock but the matter of his sexuality has never been clarified. Indeed, it’s been reported as being all over the map. Some say he was impotent and asexual (he described himself as “Hitch . . . without the cock”), others say he was a sexual predator, and still others offer up that he was gay.

The same range of interpretations have been placed on Epstein. He apparently received “massages” three to four times a day, and one woman who knew him says that he explained to her that he needed to have three orgasms a day. “It was biological, like eating.” One of the masseuses, however, also said “he can never get fully hard, ever. . . . I don’t know if that’s some sort of thing that’s wrong with him, but it definitely was not normal.” Was there some connection between this and his plan to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies? Why insemination? Was he, as several people who were close to him and knew him well insisted, gay? And was he so ashamed or closeted that he adopted a macho persona to compensate? That was the theory of one associate, who immediately adds that it’s only speculation.

The second point has to do with how Epstein made his money, and more broadly what exactly it was he was good at and whether he was all that smart.

Julie K. Brown writes that “One thing that most people agree on was that Jeffrey Epstein was brilliant.” Really? What exactly did they mean by that? Epstein wasn’t some autodidact genius. It’s not even clear he was above-average smart. He was good at math and could play the piano. To be sure, intelligence can be measured in many different ways and take many different forms, but while smart people are often associated with being good at math and music I still think they’re very different things.

Nor was he particularly book smart. He’d dropped out of college, and while surrounding himself with prominent intellectuals for exclusive get-togethers this was all for show. As his “best pal” Stuart Pivar, himself a scientist, put it: “He brought together scientists for the sake of trying to inculcate some kind of higher level of scientific thought, even though he himself didn’t know shit from Shinola about science. . . . He never knew nothing about anything.” Large donations got him designated as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, but it was just a title meant to impress people.

Did any of that matter? Not if he was good at making money, or making rich people richer. But was he? As the authors here insist, his business “most assuredly was not – and never was – money management.” Like everything else about him, his financial acumen seems to have been in large part a fraud and a con. What did people pay him for then? It’s questions like these that lead to deeper speculation, some of it related to his sexuality. Rumour was apparently rampant, for example, that he was his chief benefactor’s secret lover, and that he was blackmailing other rich and famous personages with secret surveillance tapes he’d made.

It’s a short book and a quick read, with an obsessively right-wing political bias. The chapter on Bill Clinton’s links to Epstein is the longest in the book, with contempt dripping from nearly every paragraph. It’s even suggested that without Trump’s election in 2016 Epstein would have gone free, since “the whole reason . . . or at least one of the rationales” for the Miami Herald running their “Perversion of Justice” series was to take down Alex Acosta, Trump’s labor secretary.

Even on a more personal level the Clinton-bashing is egregious, with the hunt for dark connecting threads between the two “friends” (they actually didn’t like each other) taken down to the level of insisting on their shared personality traits. Yes, in a facile and not very significant way. Personally, I thought something more might have been made about how both Epstein and Trump used charities and foundations as piggy-banks (the Clinton Foundation, in comparison, was a model of probity). I think it’s also likely that Epstein and Trump shared similar attitudes toward women: not liking them very much, paying them (as little as possible) for sex, and otherwise just using them as trophies. Clinton certainly had issues relating to women as well, but they seem to have been of a different order.

Finally, I did get a guilty kick (the book has a number of guilty kicks) out of the depiction of some of the most distinguished intellectuals and academics in the world being such shameless money-grubbers.

Noted in passing:

Epstein didn’t care about his legacy. This is a subject that interests me, and that I’ve written about with relation to American politicians in the Trump years. I feel like it’s related to the old question of how we can be good without God. If we’re just here to make as much money and live as large as possible, wouldn’t we all behave really badly? It’s similar to the question of fame. Is it an absolute good, so that it doesn’t matter what you get to be famous for as long as it gets you attention that you can monetize? In any event, here’s Epstein’s deep thoughts on the matter: “I don’t care about my legacy. The minute I’m dead, I’m dead. It’s over. . . . I don’t care what people think of me. I only care about what’s happening to me while I’m alive.”

Takeaways:

I still lean toward suicide, but it’s easy to suspect the worse of the worst people in the world. By which I mean not Epstein himself but his enablers. As the authors conclude:

It’s only fair to say . . . that we will probably never know the true story in full. The reason for this is simple. Consider this question: Who would you believe to tell you what happened? The elite, the press, our political leaders, or law enforcement? These are the institutions every American has been told since childhood that can and should be trusted, because they have the best interests of all people at heart. But these are the very same institutions that shielded Jeffrey Epstein for years.

The Epstein case didn’t break public faith in these institutions, but it revealed a hole in the social compact that had been growing for years.

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