HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022861.jpg

a settlement.) It is hard to find a more hyperbolic intersection of media and lawyers then in Epstein’s case. Edwards, over the six years of his law suit, tries to depose Clinton, Donald Trump, and Dershowitz—almost all of his targets coming directly from the original Vanity Fair and New York Magazine articles about Epstein. In addition to Prince Andrew as a British hot button, first connected to Epstein through Roberts’ interview with the Daily Mail in 2010, Clinton takes on a new role as Hillary spoiler through his connection, real or imagined, to Epstein and sex Slaves. Almost everybody identified in any story about Epstein is approached by other media seeking to write about Epstein, often with financial incentives offered in exchange for a tale. No new stories or even new details emerge. Every aspect of the current story is based on court filings describing events that may or may not have taken place prior to 2007. It’s as though a kind of ground-hog day of moral opprobrium, a desire to repeat and to savor a new the old details. A recent Reuters story identified a charity that Epstein has not given money to in 15 years that said if he does give again, they would give it back. The world cleanly divides, with Epstein (and friends) behind secure walls and the Mail and social media and upholders of new norms ever more incredulous and apoplectic that Epstein not only appears 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 not been sufficiently punished—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 hard 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022861