Behind the Bastards - Part One: Jeffrey Epstein: Pimp to the Powerful
Episode Date: March 19, 2019In Episode 52, Robert is joined by Daniel O’Brien to discuss the story of pimp to the stars, Jeffrey Epstein. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudi...o.com/listener for privacy information.
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What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,
hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood
between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join
us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much
time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut?
That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the
youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new
podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found
himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around
him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on
the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI
isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?
Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after
her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast
where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
And today, as a guest on my show, I have one of the best people in comedy history,
Daniel O'Brien, my once and perhaps future boss, guy who I was the intern for and mentor,
all those things, Daniel. Yeah, that's quite an intro. Thank you for all of that. I will,
just so there are no dangling cliffhangers or anything like that,
once in the future, but I don't think I'm ever going to be a boss again for the rest of my life.
Having been a boss and having now like not be a boss anymore is better this way. It's way better
not being a boss. It's pretty great. I mean, I'm talking about more when the Civil War gets
sparked off and you wind up leading a crude militia in Hell's Kitchen to fight for the
liberation of the East Coast from the tyrannical Midwest. That seems fair. I think whenever a
revolution happens, it seems likely that I'll find myself somewhere in middle management.
Feels right. Well, Dan, speaking of middle management, that's not what we're talking
about today, but we are talking about a really famous child molester. I knew I was going to have
my friend and former colleague, expert on many different presidents, author of the book How to
Fight Presidents, so many exciting people we could have talked about, and I picked Jeffrey Epstein.
Okay. Soon to be president. Soon to be president. Very closely tied to two presidents at least.
Yeah. So are you ready? You ready for this, Dan? I'm ready. I got a slight heads up on who the
person was, and it was one of those names that I knew very little about, just enough to know that
they were bad. Yeah. And deliberately shows not to do any research on it, so I could be
surprised and horrified and hopefully ask you questions that your dumbest listeners will have.
That is what I want from my guests is for them to be surprised and horrified. So I'm going to get
into this story because I didn't know anything about this guy either, other than like, you know,
you hear the odd story here and there about him. You know, he's a creep. Yeah. He's way more than
just a creep. So let's let's strap in and tell this tale. So okay. On December 4th, 2016,
Edgar Madison Welch, a 28 year old man from Madison, North Carolina, walked into Washington,
DC's Comet Ping Pong Pizza Parlor with an AR-15. He fired three shots into the restaurant as part
of a poorly conceived scheme to, in his own words, self-investigate the pizza gate conspiracy theory.
That conspiracy theory, which had its origins in the 2016 election, states that the Clintons and
their longtime supporter, John Podesta, were at the center of a giant child rape and sex slave
ring. Comet Ping Pong was believed to be a nexus point of this international child slave trade.
The theory has evolved and merged with other conspiracy theories and is now part of the orbit
of the QAnon conspiracy theory. There's a general sense among many in the far right that global
elites are part of a gigantic, satanic, pedophilic conspiracy. They are wrong about that, but they
aren't 100% wrong about the idea that an alliance of powerful people are having sex with underaged
individuals. Because that totally happened and today we're going to talk about the man who's
at the nexus of a real honest to God global child molesting conspiracy. He has nothing to do with
Comet Ping Pong or John Podesta and his victims were teenagers and not the little kids that the
pedogate conspiracy theories tend to focus on. But yeah, today we're talking about Jeff Epstein.
Okay, that's a journey of an introduction there. Yeah, I found a QAnon flyer on my run today
this before coming in this morning. So I've had this conspiracy theory about child molesting
global elites on the brain. Sure. I mean, that's bound to happen. December 4th, bad date, not a
good date. What else happened on December 4th? Is that a real question? Yes. You, me and 25 of
them are closest friends and coworkers. Oh my God, you're right, that was December 4th.
I mean, not as bad as the shooting the pizza place thing, but December 4th, bad date.
No one died in that shooting, so I'm going to say is bad. Okay. We all lost healthcare.
It's good to laugh now. It's good to laugh now. I had forgotten the date because of all of the
drinking. Oh, sure. So Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born on January 20th, 1953 in Brooklyn,
New York. Brooklyn. Brooklyn. Yeah, not the proudest son of Brooklyn.
His wiki currently describes him as an American financier, science and research philanthropist
and registered sex offender. Hey, I have some notes on how Wikipedia orders things.
Is sex offender in the middle or first? I want it first. I think I want it first.
I think you start with research philanthropist, sex offender, financier, science philanthropist.
Yeah, that's, that's my order. I don't want them trying to like
pre make me like it, you know, like the sex matter thing people are going to get,
they're not going to like that. So how can we soften this blow before they get there?
Oh, philanthropist. That's a broadly good word, right? Philanthropist and rapist.
So Epstein was raised in Coney Island. The Guardian describes him coming up in a tough
Brooklyn neighborhood. I'm not sure if that's how you describe Coney Island now, but that's
the, that's how it was at the time, apparently. According to a Vanity Fair article I read,
he and his family were kind of solidly middle class. His father worked for the city's parks
department. His parents saw education as the way out for Jeffrey and his brother.
They put him in piano classes at age five. He was a bright student graduating from Brooklyn's
Lafayette High School with fantastic grades in mathematics and science. From 1969 to 1971,
Cohen started taking college courses at Cooper Union, focusing mostly on physics. He left for
NYU's Corinth Institute after that and took classes on the mathematical physiology of the heart.
Epstein was clearly smart and very interested in a variety of obscure scientific and mathematical
disciplines. He never quite found a subject he could focus on for more than a year or two at a
time though, and he left Corinth Institute without getting a degree. So, so far I'm on board.
That's so, so far pretty good, although I question his parents because like I, I agree that
education being the way out of poverty and into a better life or one of the ways, but
still question like you're on that track. Education is going to save our son,
but it's also throwing him in piano lessons like that. Like how many famous rich piano players
are there? Still just the three? It's still just Elton John and two guys I can't name.
Yeah, Billy Joel and Marshall Ali's character from Green Book, is that?
Feel bad that I forgot Billy Joel. You should feel bad. He's a, I unironically love Billy Joel.
No, I mean, so do I man. It's a good night's Saigon's a great ass song.
You should get him as a guest on this show. I would love to have Billy Joel as a guest on.
He's Antifa now if you didn't hear the interview. Is that really? Yeah, he did an interview with
Vice after the the Charlottesville March where he was like, I don't understand why more people
aren't hitting Nazis. Oh, fuck yeah, Billy Joel. Yeah, he's great. Okay, so in his early 20s,
Epstein got a job teaching physics at the Dalton School, a Manhattan private school. He taught
physics and math to the children of the rich and powerful. A number of fawning articles from before
Epstein's crimes, Republic Knowledge gave glowing accounts of his mysterious backstory. One of those
fawning articles was published by New York Magazine in 2002. Its title, The International Money Man of
Mystery, gets across how Epstein was generally viewed. Here's how it described his transition
from high school teacher to financier. By most accounts, he was something of a Robin Williams
and dead poet society type figure, wowing his high school classes with passionate mathematical riffs.
So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point blank,
what are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street. Why don't you
give my friend Ace Greenberg a call. What year do you say this was? This is, it's kind of unclear,
but it's like 1975, 76 when this is happening. Okay. Yeah. So Ace Greenberg was a senior partner
at Bear Stearns, who you may remember from the whole, that time the economy collapsed.
Yeah, they were bad time. Pretty big part of that. Now Greenberg was a legendary trader in
his own right. And his long made it clear that he basically famous for picking out what he described
as like hungry and brilliant guys. So he liked finding like poor, smart people and then giving
them jobs and trading because he figured that they do better than like rich kids,
which is probably a good strategy. And it worked out for Epstein. In 1976, he joined the firm.
He started off as a junior assistant to the floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. And
according to most accounts, his assent was rapid. New York Magazine quoted former Bear Stearns CEO
Jimmy Kane as saying of Epstein, he was not your conventional broker saying buy IBM or sell Xerox.
Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special products division, where he would
advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain
tax advantageous transactions. He's a very smart guy and has become a very important client for
the firm as well. So most coverage of Epstein's rise to power and wealth are vague about his time
at Bear Stearns. They just say he rose quickly and then left suddenly a couple of years later to
found his own company. Now Vanity Fair published a much better article on Epstein in 2003, which did
a more thorough job of investigating his backstory. According to that reporting, his rise at Bear Stearns
was literally the opposite of meteoric. It looks like Epstein was forced out of the company as part
of an insider trading scandal in March of 1981. Several Italian and Swiss investors were found
guilty and the SEC questioned Epstein over the matter. It's kind of unclear exactly how he's
involved, but he resigned one day after the violation occurred. So yeah, that's the real story of his
time in Bear Stearns. That's good. I like when crimes sort of line up with my level of understanding
them, where everyone's like, we're not exactly, we can't figure out what kind of crime you did,
but it's bad and you have to go away now. We're all certain you're guilty of something
with money. Get out of here. You did something you shouldn't have. You had to pay a $2,500 fine
and it's really unclear to me exactly what he did. It's one of those things where I've read
like three explanations of it and I'm like, okay, finance crime. This is a lame finance crime. Okay,
got it. Now for years up until about 2005, the reporting on Epstein mostly focused on his utter
brilliance as a financier. That Vanity Fair article was titled The Talented Mr. Epstein.
The introduction to the New York Magazine article was even more fawning. So this is the
introduction to Jeffrey Epstein, International Money Man of Mystery. He's pals with a parcel of
Nobel Prize winning scientists, CEOs like Leslie Wexler of Limited, socialite Gisane Maxwell and
even Donald Trump. But it wasn't until he flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to
Africa on his private Boeing 727 that the world began to wonder who he is. So do we need to
just buy association? Do we need to look into Chris Tucker? We might need to look into Chris
Tucker. We definitely need to look into Kevin Spacey. Yeah, I mean, that's like, I know right
now that that plane is full of mostly monsters and Chris Tucker. And so I just is poor Chris
Tucker, just some guy who got caught up with some bad people. Or is he like, this is my crew. This
is we, I ride a plane with my buddies and we all do the same terrible stuff. See, that's one of the
terrifying things of the Jeff Epstein story. Because no matter who you are, someone you
think is awesome has wound up in close proximity to him. And it's impossible to know if they did
something terrible. Oh, that's not great. No, it's really bad. So no one really seems to know how
Epstein went from the guy who got forced out of Bear Stearns for insider trading to the billionaire
who flew Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa as part of a charity in 2002.
We don't really know how that happened. It's kind of a mystery. Epstein became famous starting in
the 1990s as a man who would only work for rich people whose assets were worth more than a billion
dollars. So he basically jumped right from, or at least his claim is that he jumped right from,
you know, Bear Stearns to, I only manage the finances of billionaires and like did that in
the space of less than a decade. And nobody really knows how. So that's, that's the basics of it.
When journalists would write articles about him during this period, they would interview people
who would tell stories about unnamed plutocrats worth 500 million or 700 million, who'd supposedly
reached out to Epstein and gotten turned down for being too small beans. When asked about.
And also, when you say he went from Bear Stearns to billionaires and no one knows how it happened,
this is, I know you're a factual show. I feel like I can say this. There's a zero chance that it was
for good reasons, right? There's a zero chance it was. Zero chance that people are just like,
he's just the sweetest, he remembers my kid's birthday. I kind of feel like that might be
the case with anyone who manages the money of billionaires. No billionaires like, I love my
tax guy because he's so fair. I love my tax guy because he overthrew the government of that one
country that I was using his tax shelter. He blew up the journalist who wrote the Panama papers with
a car bomb. Now, when he was reached out to like asked about how he had sort of turned into the
guy who only works for billionaires and made that into a business, Epstein would say stuff like,
quote, I was the only person crazy enough or arrogant enough or misplaced enough to make
my limit a billion dollars or more. So he would just claim it as like, I was so bold that it like
impressed people and that's why they started giving me their business. Which is again,
it's remarkable how many journalists just ran with this story for like 20 years and we're just
like, I guess that's what happened. He was said in the 90s to manage more than $15 billion in assets,
which would mean he was taking in close to a hundred million a year just in commissions.
He described his job as being like an architect, helping the very wealthy maintain the stability
of their portfolio so they would never wind up not rich ever again. Now, Epstein's claims about
how he got to this point are that in 1982, after leaving Bear Stearns, he opened his own company,
J. Epstein and company, and somehow, despite being new to the industry, he immediately amassed a
stable of billionaire clients. According to New York magazine, quote, there were no road shows,
no whiz bang marketing demos, just this, Jeff Epstein was open for business with those one
billion dollar plus. I want people to understand the power, the responsibility and the burden of
their money, he said to a colleague at the time. As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand
the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge. At Bear,
he had come to the realization that counter-intuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious
you became. For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn't make sense.
So podcast listeners can't tell because this is an audio format, but you're listening at home,
my dog is sitting in my lap and he just did the huge jerk-off motion with his paw for a while
at the sound of poor little rich kids and also the burden of lots of money.
The burden of lots of money. Oh, what a great burden that would be. The burden of going to the
doctor regularly. Yeah, let me check in with those guys. How are you tired? You need some help
with your burden? You need someone to lighten that load for you? I have some suggestions.
Now, the first journalist who actually do a not completely garbage job of writing about
Jeffrey Epstein, where they just repeated all of his bullshit and talked about how nice his house
was, and we will talk about his house a little bit. But the first journalist to actually dig into
it was a reporter named Vicky Ward with Vanity Fair. She actually dug into his finances and found
evidence that for one, Epstein worked with a ton of non-billionaire clients during the 1980s and
90s. She found a 1989 deposition in which he testified under oath that 80% of his business was
not helping billionaires, but helping people find money that had been stolen by fraudulent
brokers and lawyers. They also found a lawsuit against him in 1982, which said that he received
$450,000 from a client worth $4.5 million to invest in oil and promptly lost all of it.
May recognize $4.5 million as less than a billion dollars. I do recognize that, thank you.
Yeah, I know. Math is nobody's strong suit on this podcast. I run the numbers twice.
Uh, now Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward interviewed some people who'd been friends with Epstein
during the 1980s. These people recall that after his Bear Stearns period, rather than jumping
right into billionaire money management, Epstein was a self-described bounty hunter,
recovering lost and stolen money for a variety of clients. He had a license to carry a handgun
in New York City, which is a really hard thing to do, like the hardest gun-related license to get
in this country. You don't get a carry license in New York City unless you're
really rich or the governor. Okay. Or the really rich governor that it currently, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyway. Now, can I just ask what the name of the article that, what is it, Vicky Lord?
Yeah, her article was the Talented Mr. Epstein. Oh, okay. It was a play on the Talented Mr.
Ridley. Right. It's continuing the theme of late 90s movies about Jeff Epstein for some
reason. That was, that was the only way to write a title back then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking
forward to Epstein and Love, been read Epstein. Epstein and Love, Epstein II when nature calls.
That's the story about that flight to Africa. Bam, brought it, brought it around. So it's clear
that Epstein's rise to billionaire financier was not as smooth as he presents it. It's almost
impossible to unwrap exactly how Epstein got so rich and precisely what he did, but we do know
that either in 1989 or 1986, he started up a friendship with Lex Wexler, the billionaire founder
of Victoria's Secret, among other retail companies. By the time people started writing about Epstein,
he managed virtually all of Wexler's money. Now, most coverage at this time focused on his
connection to Wexler as an explanation for how Epstein rose to prominence. Taken that way, his
rise is the story of a brilliant and unorthodox funds manager who proved himself so invaluable
to one billionaire that he soon became the go-to money guy of the incredibly rich.
But there is no hard evidence that this is the case either. Even Epstein's friends at the time,
including Tiffany and company CEO Rosa Moncton, admitted that there was something strange about
Jeffrey's background. So this is what she told Vanity Fair. Quote, he's very enigmatic. You
think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there's something else
extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand. He's a classic iceberg. What you see is not
what you get. So. Can we talk about the mix? This can't be an original thought. When you peel back
a layer of an onion, it's more onion. It is more onion. It's never a surprise. It's the same thing.
It's never like you don't peel an onion and it's like there's seeds and fruit in here. It's just
more fucking onion. Well, Daniel, sometimes you peel back an onion and you find an iceberg.
Okay. Yes. And then behind that iceberg is a different hand of poker.
Right. Yeah. This horse is just the tip of the onion. I get it.
Part of why Epstein was able to remain so enigmatic may have been the fact that he threatened the
journalists who wrote about him. That is at least the allegation made in Vicki Ward's
Vanity Fair article. She notes that a reporter she talked to told her that they were threatened
three times during the preparation of a piece. The threats, quote, were delivered in a jocular
tone, but the message was clear. There will be trouble for your family if I don't like the article.
I'm not really sure how you deliver that in a jocular tone. Yeah, slap on the back and I'm
going to kill your wife. Your daughter's name is Susan, right? Weird how I know that. Look at these
pictures of her school. People who view Epstein as a financial genius tend to say that he was
made by Wexler. Epstein, for his part, is too prideful to give any one person credit for his
rise. He claims he had other rich accounts that he managed before being put in charge of Wexler's
fortune. But Vanity Fair found another Epstein connection that suggests a somewhat less savory
jumpstart to his fortune. Stephen Jude Hoffenberg met Jeffrey Epstein in London at some point in
the 1980s. Hoffenberg was the head of the Towers Financial Corporation, which was, on paper,
a collection agency that bought debts people owed to hospitals, banks, and other institutions.
In reality, the company was a gigantic Ponzi scheme. Hoffenberg used the company funds to pay
off early investors and buy himself mansions and homes, as well as a small fleet of jet planes.
When Epstein and Hoffenberg met, the former had been running a small consulting company out of
his apartment. He'd just been ousted from Bear Stearns and, in Hoffenberg's words, was getting
into trouble. Hoffenberg hired Epstein on as a consultant. At the time the Vanity Fair article
was published, 2003, it was unclear exactly what Epstein did for Towers Financial. But what is clear
is that the SEC came down on the company hard. Hoffenberg was charged with running a $450 million
Ponzi scheme, one of the largest in American history, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
He has more recently claimed that Epstein was behind the entire Ponzi scheme and was in fact
the architect of it, but somehow managed to escape prosecution. But that's only in the
last year or two. Okay. Seems like he made his money from a pyramids scheme. Yeah. That's fine.
At a certain point, when you're dealing with lots and lots of money and people with no conscience,
I can't even understand the crimes that they're doing anymore. I just,
like this person took a lot of money from a lot of other people and lied to people and there were
jets and planes and consulting and I was like, okay, yeah, money, money, money, crime, crime,
crime. That's fine. I will never make enough money to either commit one of these schemes
or be taken in by one of them. So I feel I'm protected there, but it's just,
again, same thing with like Bernie Madoff where I'm just dimly aware that he did a bad thing,
but I can't. Like if you put a gun to my head right now, it was like, give me a five paragraph
essay. Yeah. Bernie Madoff's crimes. And if this was all, he was just a guy who became a billionaire
because he did some insider training and ran a Ponzi scheme and then lied about how he became
a billionaire, he wouldn't be interesting. Yeah. But the fact of the matter is that Epstein,
there was something else going on in this entire period that may be. Are we going to get into
this philanthropy now or what? Yeah, we're talking philanthropy. So we're going to talk about Jeffrey
Epstein's sexual crimes and how they may be tied to the gigantic and possibly inexhaustible fortune
that he still maintains to this day. But first is an ad pivot, Dan. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. Some of
those. All right. Some of those tasty, tasty ads, which I can promise all our listeners are not
Ponzi schemes, although I don't know what a Ponzi scheme is. They could be. Yeah, they could be.
That feels like a crazy thing to promise your listeners. You're right. Yep. I believe that you
spent two weeks reading International Money Man of Mystery and doing lots of research for this
episode. I don't believe that you thoroughly vetted a belt company that's going to advertise on the
podcast. That's not attack the belt companies, Daniel. No, I mean, I don't know what a Ponzi scheme
is. That's all I can say. Oh, boy. This ad pivot has gone off the rail, Stan. Yeah. Product.
During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the
racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,
and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the
little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.
In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in
Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver
hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way.
And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was
trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on
shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal
legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.
And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.
My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.
I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a
match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted
before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the
iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know
me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow
to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,
I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet
astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that
man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved
country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.
This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen
to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back. We still don't know what a Ponzi scheme is or what a belt is because I have worn nothing
but sweatpants for the last six months. That's true.
That's true. Yeah. Sophie's shaking her head because she has not seen me in another pair of pants.
Every year or so, I find a pair of sweatpants that looks just enough like real pants that I feel
like I can get away with wearing them every day. And then I do. They don't. I know everyone knows
I'm wearing pajamas. But yeah, I don't think I've seen you in sweatpants. I've seen you in
pajama pants and I've seen like different weird pants. You got a bunch of weird pants.
I do. That I find alienating.
Eccentric pants. I've had a number of those. Yeah. We all go through stages in our lives.
Nope. You had that whole sleeveless shirt period.
Yeah, it was hot.
It did give me the courage to go suns out, guns out, so I thank you for that, Dan.
Now, let's talk about horrible sex crimes. Jeff Epstein's sex crimes were not public
knowledge until 2005, but he spent the entirety of the early 2000s and probably the 1990s as well
committing them, maybe even further back. We don't really know how far back his crimes go.
But I think now is a prudent time to get into some detail about what exactly Jeff Epstein was up to.
The Miami Herald, which published a massive investigation at Epstein just this year,
describes his activities as a sort of sexual pyramid scheme. And I do know what a pyramid scheme is.
Okay. Is that not a Ponzi scheme? I don't think so, Dan. But I don't know. I didn't do that research.
I know it's shady. Now, Epstein had a team of helpers primarily in Palm Springs,
but all around the world, everywhere he had residences, which included New York City and New
Mexico. These helpers would find young women that they could bring back to one of Jeffrey's
various mansions. And then, well, here's a helpful summary of the scheme by The Washington Post.
Quote, Epstein with the help from several female assistants would recruit underage females to travel
to his home in Palm Beach to engage in lewd conduct in exchange for money. Some went there as many as
a hundred times or more. Some of the women's conduct was limited to performing a topless
or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself. For other women, the conduct escalated
to full sexual intercourse. Now, that's a decent high level overview, but I want to correct one
thing, which is that most of these people were not women. They were girls. The majority of them
were under 18. At least that's what it seems. We don't have, you know, exact evidence, but most
of the people that the police and the FBI later talked to were like between 12 and 16 when he
started. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I do think it's important that we bring in some of the human
stories of the individual young girls who got caught up in this mess. The story of Virginia
Roberts is a good case study. Like many of the literal children that Jeffrey Epstein targeted,
she had a hard childhood. At age 11, she'd been molested by a family friend. By age 12,
she was, by her own recollection, smoking weed and skipping school. By age 14, she was living
on the street. Her family was shit, and she had very little support. She wound up in the clutches
of a 65-year-old sex trafficker named Ron Eppinger. She was abused and pimped out for months
until Eppinger was indicted in 2000. Virginia traveled back to West Palm Beach and reconnected
with her father, who worked as a maintenance man at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Resort. He got her
a job as a locker room attendant at the spa. That very summer, 16-year-old Virginia Roberts
met Gilsane Maxwell, a British socialite and heiress to one of Britain's great fortunes.
Gilsane happened to be a longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Gilsane offered Roberts the
opportunity of a lifetime, get paid to learn to become a massage therapist at the home of a wealthy
billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein. That Vanity Fair article about Epstein, written the same year
all of this happened, but way before his sexual crimes were public knowledge, described the
relationship between Epstein and Gilsane Maxwell this way. Quote,
Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women, lots of them, mostly young. Model types
have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a
familiar face to many of the victorious secret girls. One young woman recalls being summoned by
Gilsane Maxwell to a concert at Epstein's townhouse, where the women seemed to outnumber
them in by far. These were not women you'd see at Upper East Side dinners, the woman recalls. Many
seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely. This same guest also attended a cocktail party
thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian
models. Some of the guests were horrified, the woman says. So that's what people knew before
the sex crimes were common knowledge. Jeff Epstein likes really young girls, there's always a lot
of young women at his parties. Now, it's a certain kind of money or status or whatever it is that
like people can be that public about, yeah, he's known for liking women, a lot of them young.
Yeah, a lot of them. Really young, weird. Like the fact that he is fine with that,
A, with that reputation existing. Yeah. And B, the people who are saying it, fine with
saying it, just like broadcasting this, this, this common secret, like I don't even understand
people. Is that it? I don't understand rich people. Like, I would not like to have a reputation,
like even like, if they're like take the young part out of it. Yeah. People are like, Oh, Dan,
I know, here's what he is known for loving women. I'd rather not be known for that. I'd
much rather like Dan, oh yeah, glasses, runs a lot. Glasses and runs a lot. You don't want to
be known for like, every time I go over to his house, there's a bunch of different strange women
and weird outfits hanging around. Right. That's enough. Enough of a reputation that it's the
first thing people think of about you is bad to me, but everyone there is fine with it. I don't
know. And that's part of why this is like a bit of a leap of a conclusion on my part,
but this is part of why I suspect all of this stuff, even though every, everything we have
details on of his sex crimes dates back to the early 2000s, I suspect it goes back to the 90s
and probably the 80s, because that's everyone who talked to him and those periods of time or
talked about him was like, yeah, he really likes his young ladies hanging around, which is like,
okay, so this has been going on for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And we're, this is the timeline on
this is a little wonky. So we're, we're switching around a little bit, but we're building to something
weird here. So, okay. Cool. Now, Virginia Roberts, again, 16 at that time, yeah, started off giving
Epstein massages and those massages inevitably progressed to blowjobs and other sexual stuff
that we're not going to cover in detail. He raped her because the age of consent in Florida is 18.
So any sex that Jeffrey Epstein had with Virginia Roberts was by definition, right,
I just want to be very clear about that. Epstein's pattern was remarkably consistent among the
dozens and dozens of girls he abused. According to the Miami Herald, quote,
most of the girls said they arrived by car or taxi and entered the side door where they were
led into a kitchen by a female staff assistant named Sarah Kellan, the report said. A chef might
prepare them a meal or offer them cereal. The girls most from local schools would then ascend
the staircase off of the kitchen and up to a master bedroom and bath. They were met by Epstein,
clad in a towel. He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie face down
on a massage table, instruct the girl to strip partially or fully and direct them to massages
feet and backside. Then he would turn over and have the massages chest often instructing them to
pinch his nipples while he masturbated according to the police report. Again, the youngest girls
brought in on this were like 12. So, yeah, yeah, photos of the young girls were allegedly taken
and displayed around Epstein's home. At least one victim accused him of penetrating her with
his penis after she explicitly said no. He apologized afterwards and gave her $1,000. So,
$200 if he just masturbated him, if he like not just statutorily raped you, but other
type raped you, raped you, he'd give you $1,000. That's Epstein's price sheet. Now,
like many of his victims after her first encounter with Epstein, Virginia was asked to help in
essentially feeding more young girls into Epstein's well oiled rate machine. Virginia believed she
eventually became one of his top recruiters. Here's what she said later in a court affidavit.
Quote, Epstein and Maxwell also got girls for Epstein's friends and acquaintances.
Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would owe him.
They would be in his pocket and he would have something on them. I understood him to mean
that when someone was in his pocket, they owed him favors. He, Epstein, would tell the girls,
hey, I will give you a modeling contract if you go have sex with this man.
So you see what we're building to here a little bit?
Yeah, I'm starting to put the pieces together. I know a lot of my role as a guest on your show
is to ask questions and jump in with jokes. Not really loving the setups. Not like in the raw
materials I'm getting here to spin into comedy gold, bro. Yeah, it's more like I've given you
comedy copper and I can keep the rust off of it. When Virginia Roberts turned 19,
she was officially too old for Jeffrey Epstein. She asked him to fly her to Thailand
so that she could take massage training classes and move on with her life.
Now, a man who was actually as smart as Epstein likes to think he is would probably have just
given her some of his unlimited money to set this woman with incriminating information about him
up in a comfortable new life, but he only agreed to pay for her trip to Thailand if she'd agree
to pick up a teenage Thai girl that he'd basically arranged to buy and import into the United States.
Yeah, Roberts did not do this. She apparently met a guy while she was in Thailand. They fell
in love and ran away to Australia together. She kept the paperwork that Epstein had given her though,
including instructions for how to bring this literal child into the United States so he could
pass her around to his rich friends, which is again, some of the mountain of evidence that was
collected by the prosecutors when this finally got investigated. Now, it's impossible again for
us to know how much of this was going on in the late 80s and the 1990s during Epstein's rise to
power and prominence, but if you assume it goes back a long way, well a lot of awful things Vanity
Fair found that were just sort of baffling at the time make an awful lot of sense now. Jeffrey
Epstein was pimping out children to the rich and powerful. If he didn't directly profit from that
by charging them, it got him favors and access that were crucial to the building of his vast
fortune. Many of the lines from that Vanity Fair article and other articles written about Epstein
in the early 2000s sound downright sinister with the knowledge that when they were written he was
actively importing teenagers from foreign countries and recruiting disadvantaged teenagers here in
America, raping them himself and then lending them out to his wealthy powerful friends. Quote
from the Vanity Fair article. Some of the businessmen who dined with him at his home,
they include newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman, banker Louis Reneary, Revlon chairman Ronald
Perlman, real estate tycoon Leon Black, former Microsoft executive Nathan Meyerbold, Tom Pritzker
of Hyatt Hotels, and real estate personality Donald Trump sometimes seem not all that clear.
What? The president? The president? Weird sex stuff that's probably illegal.
That guy who just fucked a flag lamp.
And I hate to say this, but I don't think that flag was 18, Dan.
Oh, damn it. Yeah, I wish he'd done it to a statue because then we could then we could
have had a good statutory rape joke. Yeah, but just another tragedy of this.
It's, uh, I'm sorry if I took the wind out of yourself, you were ramping up to something.
Can I ask a question now? No, no, it's, it's, it's basically people back then, uh, I know it's,
it's, I'm trying not to get too conspiracy theory here because we just don't know that much that's
solid before the early 2000s. But we do know that for decades before it was public knowledge that
he was a child rapist, everyone in the finance industry was baffled by how Jeffrey Epstein got
his money. Um, yeah, here's a quote from New York magazine. Quote, my belief is that Jeff
maintains some sort of money management firm that you won't get a straight answer from him,
says one well-known investor. He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I've also
heard that he manages Rockefeller money, but one never knows. It's like looking at the Wizard of
Oz, there may be less there than meets the eye or a giant child rate machine, uh, which I think is
what was actually there. Uh, I think I can take comfort in the fact that no one will ever about
me say we didn't know where he got his money from or what he spent it on because it was like in 2009,
I could tell if he got a bonus at work because he bought an iPad and that's it. And then he paid
his bills and got groceries. Everyone can see where all of my money went in the tape-covered
Toyota Prius, uh, that I drive to Hollywood to record this show. Can I just ask a question? I
don't know if there, if there's been a study on this or if you have any kind of fringe theory,
the relationship between being rich and powerful and having disgusting sexual tastes, is that can
you even like guess any kind of connection for that? Like I don't want to say, oh, billionaires do
this because like it seems hard for me to buy that maybe Bill Gates is getting on a plane and trying
to, to have sex with a 14 year old child. But if there's enough of them that Epstein knows that
there is a business in specifically connecting rich people with children, I don't know, why does
that market exist? You know, what is the relationship there? I think for God, late wildly. Yeah,
I mean, I think for a guy like Epstein, it's simple enough. I think he's, he's a predator. And I think
like whether or not he got rich, he would have preyed on people. But I think maybe for, maybe
one reason why so many really rich people, uh, wind up in doing this is because like,
I think, I think you could see it starting almost innocuously where just or not innocuously, but
without any sort of predatory behavior on their behalf, just because money and power are so
like valuable in our society. If someone has the ability to get you roles in a Hollywood,
or someone has the ability to get you a job that can set you up for life, then maybe you'll sleep
with that person and like not even a sort of question it. So they get used to that sort of
thing and it kind of spirals out from there. Like, Oh, I just get whatever I want because I have
all this money. And that goes from like, what I want is having sex with these 20 year old models
to like, they get younger and younger and younger and you just stop like taking account of the
ages and stuff. You assume you're above like, I don't know. Um, I could see it. It's just so
confusing to me as someone who grew up lower middle class and has since gotten more money.
And the old and like, I still don't even fly first class. That even feels like an extravagance
to me. Like the things that I would consider like, Oh yeah, I have this amount of money. So I deserve
like a nice meal at a nice restaurant every once in a while. I can't imagine by some strange
twist of fate, we decide comedy is the most important thing in the world. And then I become
a billionaire 10 years from now is a switch going to flip in my brain that like now that I have a
billion dollars, you know, I've always wanted to try like, like, how is it that so many billionaires
want to have want to get on a plane and have sex with children with their fucking
psychopath predator friend, Jeffrey? Well, I'll say this and I didn't prepare the the information
for this podcast, but it's something I've been researching for another project. There is some
scientific evidence on how both wealth and power affect the brain. And it's been described as similar
to a head injury. So one of the things that happens when you have an elevated position of wealth and
power, is that you become separated from the consequences of your actions, which leads to
an increase in impulsive behavior. And again, like that increase in impulsive behavior has
been compared by the scientists doing the neurological research to some of the things
that happen when you have a head injury. So that's could probably part of it is that like you just
like, like, you and I have gotten lucky enough that we've gotten like book deals and stuff and jobs
that paid us better than we expected to be paid. But we still didn't like fly first class because
you look at that and it's like, well, that's $1,200. I could buy a new laptop. And I want that
more than I want to be more comfortable for seven hours or whatever. Someone who has billions of
dollars, money is not a thing. And so like that it just sort of like, I think it just warps your
perspective on everything over time as does power. And so like, you don't like, I'm going to guess
a lot of these people, this is one of the things were like one of the many things were like the
QAnon people and the pedo gate people get it wrong as they assume all these people want to fuck
literal children. I don't think that's it. And from what I've heard, age never came up with the
people that like the kid, the young women that like in the girls that Jeffrey was basically
handing out to his friends, they weren't even checking on the age, they weren't saying, I want
an underage girl. He was just finding girls he found attractive and handing them off to his
rich friends and nobody questioned what age they were, because they were usually on his plane or
on his island and international water. So why would they ask? Like, I think that's what it is
more than anything is this like knowledge that you'll never be accountable for your actions,
whatever they are. And also, because you're so rich and powerful, like nobody asks you,
they just bring you things, right? Like, that's kind of how it is. It's like at the Oscars,
you get a box of fucking iPads or whatever that you don't even give a shit about because it's
like, well, it's $30,000 worth of free stuff because that's what everyone gets at the Oscars.
But like, we're all rich, nobody cares. Like, yeah, it's a different world. And it's a world where
it's easy to accidentally or maybe not accidentally, maybe a lot of these people were like, Hey,
Jeffrey, do you have any 12 year olds? I don't know. I mean, I guess it was probably a mix of
the two, depending on who you're talking about. So hopefully Chris Tucker, and they weren't all
children. So even if Chris Tucker had sex on Epstein's creepy plane, maybe it was with an adult
trying to give Chris Tucker the benefit of the doubt here. I am too, just because I don't,
I've heard nothing bad about him. Yeah, exactly. And that was a charity flight. So maybe that
was one where he didn't do anything shady, but we will talk about that more. It could have been
a case where like, he got, he got there and did charity. And it was like Bill Clinton, Kevin
Spacey, why are you guys so disappointed? We were here for charity. What did you think was
going to happen? You seemed really bummed. The champagne was great. Oh, speaking of champagne,
Daniel O'Brien, it's time for an ad break. And maybe that ad will be for champagne. And I don't
know, I bet it's, I bet it's fucking Mario Lopez talking to you about weird stuff. Mario Lopez
with his dead eyes. Can we say that, Sophie? She's saying we can't talk about Mario Lopez's
dead eyes. Mario Lopez's lively, lust filled heart. Eds. During the summer of 2020, some Americans
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They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.
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We're back, and we're talking about how Doritos hasn't wised up yet.
Yeah, I can't understand it. I mean, I just do it, Doritos. What the fuck?
I know. They're rich and wealth warps your perceptions.
How out of touch with the real world, the mighty are. Mighty like Doritos.
Back before he got rich, John Dorito probably would have recognized what an opportunity this
podcast is. Oh my god, back when we used to call him Johnny D.
Johnny D. Johnny D from up the street. Holy shit, that guy was down for whatever.
He'd just show up at punk shows with a homemade bag of Doritos and hand them out?
Yeah, I remember seeing him at Chateau Marmont, and I was like,
Johnny D from up the street, and he was like, it's John now. I was like, holy shit.
Yeah, that's when the times changed. Now he won't even give this humble podcast a couple
small mid-sized sedans worth of advertising dollars. Heartbreaking.
Fools. Fools. Okay, so I do want to read one other quote from one of Jeffrey Epstein's
famous friends from that New York magazine article back before anyone knew he was a child molester,
or at least back before the public knew he was a child molester.
Right.
Quote, if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges,
I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. Trump booms from a speakerphone.
He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do,
and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
The president. The president of a whole ass country, too.
Yeah, of a whole ass country. Talking at a time when we know for a fact, Jeff Epstein was
essentially pimping out teenagers. Yeah, and forgive me again. When was that interview conducted?
2002. 2002. Okay, so even that is strange to me that anyone listening to him when he's like,
oh, rumor has it, he likes women as much as I do, and some of them young, that no one jumps in to
be like, what do you mean by young? What do you mean some of them young? No doubt about it.
Instead of me just passively writing down what you're saying and be like, he boomed from a
speakerphone, just like a single follow-up question of like, how young? Yeah, well, given our society's
focus for like men on being like smooth and good with them, and I could see someone be like, oh,
yeah, Jeffrey, he loves the ladies, but then like saying, not just he loves the ladies, but
and they're really young. Yeah. Just googling like 2002 movies to see what we were talking about
or thinking about at the time to see if there were any like teachable moments like, oh, it's 2002,
blank movie came out, and we all learned that it's bad for old men to creep on young women.
That was the message of the first Spider-Man movie, right? Yeah. Yeah, more or less.
Donald Trump is not the only president of the United States who spent a lot of time with Jeffrey
Epstein. Bill Clinton spent at least as much time and logged even more flights with Epstein on his
private plane, which some have dubbed the Lolita Express. Hold on, googling to find out if there's
another Lolita who's famous and maybe it was just the one. Just the one famous Lolita. Yeah,
it's not based on anything. Just a fun nickname. Now, Epstein's pilot's log books are a public
domain now, thanks to some of the many, many civil lawsuits around his crimes. Gawker put together
a pretty good write up over how slick Willie fits into all of this. They note that Clinton wrote on
Epstein's plane at least 11 times between 2002 and 2003. Okay, what are the on paper reasons for
writing on Epstein's plane? Oh, is it always going somewhere for charity or is it or? It's sure
not, Dan. Like, what is he telling people? I'm getting on this plane again. What is his out loud
reason? He's not giving an out loud reason. So here's what we have. Quote, in January 2002,
for instance, Clinton and his A Doug Band and Clinton's Secret Service detail are listed on a
flight from Japan to Hong Kong with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and two women described only as
Janice and Jessica. One month later, record show Clinton hopped a ride from Miami to Westchester
on a flight that included Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman described only as one female.
Okay, yeah. Now, I should, I like no one asked like, Hey, Bill, how was Japan? No, what did you get
into there? Any scraps? I found he just, he just flies around on this plane and doesn't explain
himself flies around on this plane with Jeffrey Epstein, the two people who are named in multiple
court documents as procuring women for Jeff Epstein and the people that he pimp those women out to
or girls out to, sorry, and unnamed women. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Seems pretty bad. Seems pretty bad.
Seems like a real bummer, Evans. Bill Clinton might have done something really bad.
Now that 2002 New York Magazine article we've been quoting from was written because again,
you know, Epstein had just made the news for flying Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker,
Gail Smith, and Gail Smith who ended up on Obama's National Security Council to Africa.
Now on that 2002 flight, Epstein's guests were all accompanied by Chante Davis. She's one of the
27 women listed in Epstein's black book, which also got out through a court case under the heading
Massage California. He had 160 names listed as massage artists in six different locations.
Many of those women were underage, but for Chris Tucker's sake, Chante was not. She was 23 at the
time of the flight. So it is possible that even if some prostitution went down on that flight,
it was not necessarily anything terrible. On that specific flight, when contacted,
Chante did not have much to say. So it's possible that Chris Tucker, Gail, and Kevin Spacey were
just using this plane because Epstein offered it very publicly to help out a charity. It's possible
that if they did have any sex, it was with, you know, an adult prostitute. But when it comes to
the case of Bill Clinton, it's a lot harder to exonerate him because 11 times is a lot of times
to fly on Jeffrey Epstein's plane with unnamed women. Yes. It's, I mean, I don't even really
think we need to really get Bill Clinton. He sucks. Did you do a Bill Clinton episode yet?
No, no, but he sucks. You should do a Bill Clinton episode. We'll get to it. There's a long list.
Now, the one upside to the whole horrible Jeffrey Epstein saga is that he might actually be something
we can unite the country behind because no matter who you are and no matter how you identify politically,
someone you admire rode on Jeffrey Epstein's plane and may have raped a trafficked child on it.
Other Epstein frequent flyers include Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who regularly defends Trump
on TV, defended Epstein in court and is accused by name of having sex with an underage child
prostitute. Naomi Campbell. I mean, if you were trying to prove that one of my heroes
rode on this plane and you started with Alan Dershowitz, he was just an A name, Dan, give me
a second. Naomi Campbell, the former supermodel and businesswoman, former treasury secretary
and Harvard president Larry Summers, Stephen Pinker, the Canadian popular psychologist and
author of such bestselling books as Enlightenment Now and How the Mind Works, and Stephen Hawking.
What? Yeah, Stephen Hawking. See, it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein had what the telegraph called
an island of sin. It's an island he owns in the Virgin Islands, Little St. James, unofficially
known to his friends as Little St. Jeff. Hawking actually traveled there in 2006.
Yeah, it's a terrible name. And the women who have accused him of sexual trafficking say that
a lot of the sexual trafficking happened on that island and that they were passed around on that
island. And Hawking traveled there in 2006, a year after the first allegations against Epstein were
made public. Epstein apparently paid to modify a ship so the 61 year old physicist could take
part in a cruise. Hawking is pictured on the island with several young but presumably adult
women enjoying a barbecue. So again, it's really hard to say maybe nothing bad went down with Hawking.
It was really common for Epstein to hang out with physicists. He put tens of millions of dollars
into research projects around the world. He also hung out and flew with luminaries in the field
like Murray Gelman. He was close to Martin Novak, a mathematical biologist and professor at Harvard
University. Epstein put $20 million into Harvard University, much of it to support Novak's work.
Vanity Fair talked to both of these guys back in 2003, quote, when these men describe Epstein,
they talk about the energy and curiosity as well as a love for theoretical physics that
they don't ordinarily find in laymen. Gelman rather sweetly mentions that there are always
pretty ladies around when he goes to dinner at Shea Epstein. So I feel like if Hawking didn't,
a lot of famous physicists probably had sex with underage people and Epstein.
Yeah. And even if Hawking didn't and had no interest in it. Yeah.
If a couple of punks like you and me know these stories about Epstein, Stephen Hawking probably
did. It was probably in the air at that point. And it's very easy to say you're fucking into a type.
No, I don't want to go on your plane. You don't have to go on the Lolita Express
to Little Saint Jeff. Yeah. Like it's very easy to not do that. It sounds so damning when you say it
that way. I'm going to do it again tomorrow. You're not going to get on the Lolita Express
to Little Saint Jeff tomorrow. Every single day I make that choice. That's good to know.
That's good to know. Now, one of the things that's like most common in all of his pre-sex
offender interviews is that Epstein would brag about his contributions to science or at least
the contributions of his money to science. Most of the reporting during the pre-sexual crime
allegations period tended to portray him as an eccentric, mysterious genius. He's another
excerpt from that New York Magazine article. But it is his Kobe of scientists that inspires
Epstein's true rapture. Epstein spends 20 million a year on them, encouraging them to
engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy. They are, of course,
quite lavish in their praise and return. Gerald Adelman won the Nobel Prize for Physiology
and Medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute at Lyala. Jeff is so
extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations, says Adelman. He came to
see us recently. He is concerned with this basic question. Is it true that the brain is not a
computer? He is very quick. I found that really funny for some reason. Now, as smart as he may be,
and that may be pretty smart, Jeffrey Epstein is not as smart as he thinks he is. It seems like,
after who knows how many years of going after impoverished girls, foreigners, and previously
trafficked kids, Epstein got lazy. He started targeting more and more girls from local high
schools in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2004, 16-year-old Michelle Lakata still had braces. She was brought
in to Jeffrey Epstein's mansion to give him a massage in exchange for a couple of hundred
dollars. He immediately asked her to strip, of course. According to the Miami Herald,
quote, Lakata had never been naked in front of anyone else before, but she did what he said.
Epstein put out a timer, set it for 30 minutes, and started fondling her while he masturbated.
She later recalled, I kept looking at the timer because I didn't want to have this mental image
of what he was doing. He kept trying to put his fingers inside me and told me to pinch his nipples,
who was mostly saying, just do that, harder, harder, and do this. Eventually, Epstein ejaculated,
got up and went to the shower. Lakata was sent away, but Epstein's people continued to trawl her
high school, Royal Palm Beach High. Before long, students were talking about, quote,
a creepy old guy named Jeffrey, who was paying between 200 and 300 dollars a piece for massages
that inevitably turned sexual. Not long after her afternoon with Epstein, the Palm Beach police
wound up at Lakata's front door. They'd started an investigation into Epstein that year, 2005,
when a 14-year-old girl, prompted by her parents, alleged that Epstein had molested her in his mansion.
This is what led to the trial that ended with Epstein branded a sex offender and sentenced
to more than a year of prison. The story of that trial, of Epstein's sentence and of everything
that came next, is arguably even more horrifying than what we've discussed today. But you, the
listener, will have to wait until Thursday to hear that. In part two of the Epstein saga,
Jeffrey Epstein pimped to the powerful. But first, it's the end of the first episode,
so you got any pluggables you're going to plug? Oh yeah, the only thing that I want to plug
relevant to my interests and also this episode is this organization called Children of the Night
that I used to volunteer with back in Los Angeles. It's a privately funded non-profit
organization dedicated to rescuing children and young people from prostitution worldwide.
You can find them at childrenofthenight.org. If you have some money to kick their way,
they will always take it. Or if you yourself are in danger, they have a 24-hour hotline
and you can reach out to them and they will find you and they will save you from your
situation if you have to find yourself in this particular situation. And if you're not in this
situation and you don't have any extra money to spend, but you do happen to live in the Los
Angeles area, you could volunteer with Children of the Night through a company called LA Works
and just show up there once a week to meet these amazing, wonderful, brilliant survivors and just
play games, hear their stories, do arts and crafts, whatever you want. It's a great organization.
You should do it. You should support them. You should. We all should. Children of the Night.
That's a great plug, Dan. I pride myself on my pluggsmanship, but that was the finest
plug of the episode by far. Oh, thank you. Well, I feel weird saying you should look up our t-shirts
online, but if you go to T-Public and look up behind the bastards, you can also buy a shirt,
but you should donate your shirt money to Children of the Night. Sorry, Sophie.
All right. I've been Robert Evans. This has been Behind the Bastards. You can find us on
social media at atbastardspod, Twitter and Instagram. You can find all the sources for
this episode on behindthebastards.com. That's all the plugs I got for the end of this episode.
Check back in Thursday, where we will have even more horrifying things to tell you. I love about 40 percent of you.
What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,
hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that
stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler.
Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much
time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went
through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to
go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that
tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck
in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him,
he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the
forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted
pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated
two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.