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new plaintiffs to the old case. This new filing was accompanied by allegations connecting a catch-all of bold-faced names associated with Epstein more than ten years ago, including Dershowtiz and Britain’s Prince Andrew, to a “sex slave” ring—indeed, that Epstein’s purported sex slaves had had sex with Dershowitz and the Prince at Epstein’s command. This seemed to me to be merely a desperate, even comic-book, filing—yjust a lawyer trying to revive a dead case. I responded to Epstein that I doubted this would be seen as credible by anyone. Epstein, who sometimes seems to have an out-of-body attitude to his own fate and bad press, said he thought it might be “quite a show.” Two days later, the Daily Mail, which has become the effective ground zero in the English language for anti-privilege, and moral opprobrium (the more salacious the better), and whose editor Paul Dacre has a long time feud with Prince Andrew, put the story on its front page. (Epstein also has a long relationship with the family of disgraced press baron, Robert Maxwell, another reliable target of the British press.) Flimsy and far-fetched court filings in the U.S. by settlement-hungry plaintiffs might be discounted by skeptical U.S. reporters, but, the U.K. media, constrained by onerous rules about legal proceedings in the U.K., promptly went into tabloid frenzy (even the normally sniffy Guardian, in full anti- royal and anti- billionaire fever, joined the tabloid show) and effectively exported the story back to the U.S., where Epstein’s connection to Bill Clinton, and, hence as a shadow over Hillary, became the news. “T told you so” said Epstein. There is Epstein in his inner world, trying, quite ostrich like, not to look out. Little beyond his strict realm seems palatable or even in a sense familiar to him. He’s a foreigner out here. Not too long ago, I met him for lunch in the West Village, the first time in more than ten years, he said, he’d been out to lunch in a restaurant (a not particularly pleasant experience for him and we were done in under 30 minutes). Then there is the outside world pressed to the glass, appalled and titillated by the monster inside the big house—a kind of Boo Radley of the Upper East Side. I have taken friends by the Epstein mansion, and the reaction to its other-worldly size in Manhattan is almost always the same: a gasp. Press accounts, seldom supplying new information, ever recycle and repeat the mysterious (and monstrous) billionaire mythology, with brief glimpses of him stepping out of the house (the same photos endlessly republished), and the assumption of depravity inside. In fact, the life in the house, without wife or children or conventional domestic demeanor, in some way conforms to the most scripted fantasies: a life HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022847