Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
When I am found dead in my cell after being arrested for sex crimes, please do not release my personal correspondence because that is the kind of thing that embarrasses people. Ask Larry Summers. The past president of Harvard University repeatedly appears in the latest tranche of Epstein documents, not to pull the strings of world geopolitics but to ask for advice about women. One in particular seems to have put Summers in a state of anguish.
Photo: House Oversight Committee
“Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” is a tragic thing for the former secretary of the Treasury to write on his 64th birthday. I will leave questions of morality to his wife; my interest lies strictly with elements of the text, including but not limited to “Sent from my iPad.” Even in 2018, this default signature was a badge of innocence — a phrase that appeared at the end of your dad’s question about which flight you were on and not, one imagined, in the secret communications of the most powerful people in the world.
The intense media attention devoted to Epstein has painted a vivid portrait of his social and criminal life, but it has failed to explain a central mystery: why so many titans of industry and heads of state were drawn to him. Perhaps the most striking thing about the 20,000-file dump of Epstein’s texts and emails released by the House Oversight Committee last week is the number of wealthy and influential people who regarded him as not just a power broker but also the kind of streetwise figure who could tell them how to move through the world. Readers will recognize in this version of Epstein not the sociopathic blackmail artist he is rumored to have been but a more quotidian figure: the nerd whom other nerds regard as cool.
The “you were good” that begins Summers’s message is his response to Epstein’s question “im a pretty good wing man , no?” This sentence is an example of Epstein’s innovative approach to written English, and it illustrates why so many news reports have described the files as “typo-strewn,” an accurate description that nonetheless fails to convey their bizarre essence. One explanation for these typos is that Epstein was a moron who managed to accumulate half a billion dollars and the power to invite people to Davos only by resorting to criminal activities the meritocracy forbids. But Summers is nearly as slapdash and error-prone — typing “u” for “you” and leaving the subject out of his sentences like he’s sending a telegram — and he is not a moron; he is a Ph.D. economist who entered MIT at age 16 where he presumably had to write papers.
A better explanation for his and Epstein’s sub-literate email style is that it is the written equivalent of the Silicon Valley hoodie: a status signal that shows you are important enough not to have to worry about being formal. By this metric, Epstein — who seems to have been one of the last native speakers of English to separate his thoughts with an arbitrary number of commas, like he had never typed or even seen a book before — was one of the most important people in the world.
Photo: House Oversight Committee
This typographic analysis risks distracting us from the real issue, though, which is that “a pretty good wing man” is an extremely ironic way for a person indicted on federal sex-trafficking charges to describe himself. Lee Harvey Oswald was a pretty good marksman. Yet to many of the people who exchanged chatty emails and texts with him, Epstein was not a criminal procurer so much as the guy who could set you up with a date in any major city in the world — even if you were, objectively speaking, an old gross dork.
Photo: House Oversight Committee
The name of the other party in this conversation was redacted by the House Oversight Committee, but it appears to be Steve Bannon; earlier in the conversation, he says that he is in Paris and has “been with Front Nationale all day,” and Bannon was in Paris and met with representatives of the far-right party at that time. (Metadata tags pertaining to read receipts, invitations, and GUIDs have been edited out of this screenshot for readability; a phone number has also been redacted. You can see the file in its original form here.) In this screenshot, Bannon does one of the worst things a nerd can do to his cool friend. Epstein not only offers to set him up on a date in Paris but also goes so far as to contact the woman in question and secure her agreement in advance. Bannon has already told Epstein that he wants to go out with her, but once it has actually been arranged he chickens out, writing, “She is way too classy for me.”
This kind of behavior is what makes a pretty good wingman give up. The next day, Epstein messages “Did u drop by?” and Bannon answers, “You r wrong on this one.” Reading this exchange was, perhaps, the only time in my life when I felt sorry for Bannon, a person whose politics and behavior I find reprehensible. For God’s sake, man, show a little confidence.
Learning that the architect of American fascism got too scared to show up for his date is one of this tranche’s many jarring glimpses into the insecurities of the ruling class. The documents are a dump in the truest sense of the word, totally disorganized and containing large quantities of useless material, including the full text of several books that Epstein seems to have made people download and email to him. One of those books is The S&M Feminist, a collection of writings by Clarisse Thorn that seems a little too on the nose in this context. More surprising is a book titled The Seventh Sense, which purports to reveal “what all of today’s successful figures see and feel: the forces that are invisible to most of us but explain everything from explosive technological change to uneasy political ripples.” Seeing that Epstein wanted to read this book is like rolling over the dead body of the Grinch to find him clutching a copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. If Epstein, of all people, thought that the world was shaped by unseen forces he could not control, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Maybe we should take this discovery as reassuring. One recurring theme of these files is that very successful, rich, and/or influential people seem to be as neurotic and petty as everyone else. Here is Kathryn Ruemmler, onetime candidate for attorney general of the United States, planning a drive up to New York and predicting that she will “stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike, will observe all of the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation, and will then decide that I am not eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one of these people.”
Hateful? Yes. Relatable? Also yes. Obesity seems to be particularly significant to people in Epstein’s circle, possibly more significant than procuring a child for prostitution. It is an intrusion of the ordinary into rarefied air, a way people who are exceptional — in the sense that they are especially high achieving but also in the sense that they seem exempted from rules of conduct that govern everybody else — are tugged down toward Earth. In a 2015 email, Epstein congratulates LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on the apparent success of his diet. He does not rise to Hoffman’s defense when, in an earlier email discussing an investment in Jawbone, Hedosophia founder Ian Osborne identifies Hoffman as “fatty at LinkedIn.”
This tiny betrayal is in no way comparable to the crimes of which Epstein was convicted and accused or as newsworthy as the email exchange in which Mark Epstein alludes to a photograph of President Donald Trump fellating former president Bill Clinton. That one seems potentially important. But after spending hours reading the intensely banal conversations between the century’s most infamous sex trafficker and the various political leaders, multimillionaires, and name-brand lawyers who were his friends, one begins to see Jeffrey Epstein as a real person — which, of course, he was. Dizzied by the miasma of his correspondence, I found myself asking: Why didn’t you stick up for your friend? That is objectively not the relevant question here, but the most unsettling thing in these files may be the subjective experience of reading them and feeling like he was one of us.
What one looks for in the Epstein files is evidence of conspiracy. What one finds is evidence of humanity — in the man himself, undeniably a monster, and in the various known figures who make cameo appearances and fail to live up to their public images. One of the more shocking discoveries of the past week is that these people seem to be as stupid, scared, and scattered as everybody else. The conspiracy we imagined may be just another gang of pudgy nerds, no better equipped to rule the world than we are.
