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Although he has spent more than a year in jail and paid out what may be as much as $20 million, he yet seems somehow to have gotten away with it—that worst sin of all. He is the unrepentant catch all of up-to-the-minute badness: the financier whose wealth is a product of Wall Street math rather than work; a rich middle-age white man who not only parades his wealth and entitlement, but has a Peter Pan complex to boot; an insistent Playboy in a correct and prudish world; someone who somehow didn’t get the memo about vast changes in mores and culture. When I suggested recently that one obvious way to blunt the animus is to get married, he said he would rather go back to jail. He is Calvin Harris’s song, It Was Acceptable in the 80s, come to life. This is all, inevitably, a Gatsby-like story. But Gatsby in New York Post and Daily Mail parlance would likely be a freaky financier too. And it’s a story about the limitation of journalism, in which the most compelling parts of the story—it would take a long running cable show to do justice to the meaning of Epstein’s ambitions and impulses—need to be sacrificed for not just moral certainty but for a rather preposterous fantasy of moral certainty. Anyway, I hope I get invited back to Jeffrey’s house. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022745