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incredulous and apoplectic that Epstein not only walks free but prospers too. 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 would be to get married, he said he’d rather go back to jail. He is Calvin Harris’s song, It Was Acceptable in the 80s, come to life. This is all, of course, a Gatsby-like tale: An enigmatic, and strangely appealing figure, able to invent and inhabit his own world is a mystery to try to decipher. Of course Gatsby in New York Post and Daily Mail parlance would likely be just a freaky financier too. And this story is, in its way, about the limitation of journalism, in which the most compelling parts of the tale—Epstein’s ambitions and impulses would be well suited to a long running cable drama—need to be sacrificed not just to moral certainty but to a rather preposterous fantasy of moral certainty. Anyway, I hope I get invited back to Jeffrey’s house soon. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022765