Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Jeffrey Epstein: Pimp to the Powerful

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Daniel O'Brien to continue discussing Jeffrey Epstein. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 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. Ah, we're back! I'm Robert Evans. This was another terrible introduction. Sophie is ashamed. Dan looks ashamed. He's not making my eyes over the internet here. Now he is, but only because I brought it up. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards podcast. Bad people. Talk about them. This is part two of our episode on Jeffrey Epstein. Don't listen to this if you haven't listened to part one because it will not make as much sense as it should. Daniel, how are you doing literally minutes after we finished the first episode? I'm doing well. I'm learning a thing that I didn't know was true. I thought anytime you did these like two or three part episodes that you would break when I,

the listener, would break. No. I didn't know that you and Jamie Loftus talked about Mark Zuckerberg for like nine straight hours. Yeah, it was too much talking about Mark. Yeah. No. There's never any break. The reason we do it this way is because some amount of deceit to the audience is always necessary. You understand this being a TV. Oh, of course. You have to lie to the people. Oh my God. So this is the lie that we've chosen. And it's a beautiful lie. I also wear a hairpiece, but anyway, let's let's. But not where you'd expect. But not on my head. I love his back. It's like I've got a triple latched onto my spine. Yes. That was a good joke. Okay. Let's talk about Jeffrey Epstein some more.

Yeah. So we're already acquainted with Jeffrey Epstein's illicit child pimping business. So let's take a minute at the start of this episode to talk about his big stupid house. Now, most of the early positive articles you'll read about Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time talking about his mansion in New York City, where you are, Dan. Whoo. Whoo. Now I should note that he does not just own a mansion in New York City. He owns the mansion in New York City. Epstein's residence is the largest private home in Manhattan. It has a 15 foot high oak door, nine floors, and takes up an entire city block. 71st Street between Fifth and Madison is all Epstein's home. If you're curious, here's how Vicki Ward, a Vanity Fair, described being inside

of Epstein's manor. Quote, amid the flurry of men servants, attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone's private zanidu. This is no mere rich person's home, but a high walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings, but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs. These, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting in the manner of Jean Dubuffet. I don't know who the hell that is. But the host coily refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the

nearly twice life-sized sculpture of a naked African warrior. He tells people he bought the house because he knew he could never live anywhere bigger. He thinks 51,000 square feet is an appropriately large space for someone like himself, who deals mostly in large concepts, especially large sums of money. So that's Jeff Epstein's house in Manhattan. Evans, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you to do something that you might not like to do, but you're the only person I know that I can ask to do this. If I ever make a billion dollars, just fucking kill me. Don't let me turn into one of these people. I'm worried that it's, that it's, it's going to happen. So if I ever become like crazy rich, don't assume that I'm

going to be good. Assume they're going to catch whatever disease these, these mutants have, and, and kill me in an environmentally conscious way. Yeah. Yeah. That will, that, and we'll, we'll have this podcast as evidence on the trial. Yes. When I am indefinitely bought to trial for murder. Oh, Evans, you fool, to assume that in the future there will still be trials and laws. No, I'll just wind up like bicycle jousting with your next of kin around the water. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Jeffrey Epstein's big stupid mansion has a gigantic leather lined room dedicated entirely to drinking tea. If you want to make somebody start embracing the

tendency of socialism, you might point out that there are 23,000 homeless children in New York City and the child pimp to the stars has a dedicated room just for tea. Just let that rattle around in your head a little bit. When you think about where the top marginal income tax rate should be. We can't just say like, look, this is what they do when we give them too much money. Yeah. It's very embarrassing. It's very bad, right? And that, I, I, I got to give credit to Vicki, the author of that Vanity Fair article, because that was published at a time before many dark details were known about Epstein. And she was like the first person to really dig into him in a critical way. She definitely hinted at some very bad stuff and did a better job of anyone

else of shining a spotlight on the darker parts of his career. And her article is kind of a master class in journalistic shade throwing. You can tell that she really dislikes this guy as she describes his giant house and all of his fancy things. While she includes, it keeps a pretty fair neutral tone throughout. She includes ample quotes from her subject that present a more damning indictment of his person than any polemic ever could. At one point, he shows her his giant living room rug, which he describes as quote, the largest Persian rug you will ever see in a private home. So big, it must have come from a mosque. Greg's, my carpet's so big, we stole it from someone else's religious building. Jesus, guys, it goes on. I guess I shouldn't be surprised,

but like you could ask a simple question. Or I guess you didn't even ask a question about the rug. No, he just, he just told me. He was like, I bet I can take this from normal to awful in seconds. It's not gonna, I'm not even gonna break a sweat. How much cultural appropriation can I include? It's made of bones. Now, in the article, Vicki notes that most of Epstein's decor has been picked out by a famous French decorator, a guy who worked for prime ministers and royalty around the world. And then she notes that among all this finery, quote, there is one particularly startling oddity, a stuffed black poodle standing atop the grand piano. No decorator would ever tell you to do that, Epstein brags to visitors, but I want people to think of what it means to stuff a dog.

I don't know what that means. I don't, I don't, I don't know what that means. Now, Vicki suggests- Let me hear it one more time. Yeah, yeah, there is one particularly startling oddity, a stuffed black poodle standing atop the grand piano. No decorator would ever tell you to do that, Epstein brags to visitors, but I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog. I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog. What does it mean to stuff a dog? Let's, let's, let's together, let's honor his wishes and- Think about that. Think what it means to stuff a dog. It means you had a dog. Yep. It means the dog is dead. It means you had stuffing around or called a guy. It means you removed the stuff that was

inside the dog and replace it with the stuffing. And then you sewed up the dog so people didn't, so people couldn't see it anymore that it was sewed up. Yep. And then you put it on a piano because your parents made you take the analysis. Okay. I've thought about what it means to stuff a dog and I'm no closer to anything. No. I feel like I did the thing that he wants people to do. Like it doesn't make me feel like, I didn't come away with that thinking like, oh man, he's powerful. Yeah. He's smart. What wisdom. He's handsome. I just thought like, okay, I did, it's like, I, when I think about what it means to stuff a dog, I think of a very workman-like process. What it means, you got to remove some guts. You got to put some stuffing. Yeah.

Gloves are probably involved. You need to understand like embalming and sewing and proper disposal of dog guts. A lot of salt. Okay. I've, I've thought about it, Jen. Yeah. It sucks. It sucks. For what it's worth, Vicki Ward says that she thinks it's Epstein's way of saying he always gets the last word. I don't know why she thinks that, but I'm, she spent a lot of time with him. So I'm going to guess she's privy to some details we're not. I really don't understand it. No, I don't understand. Like the way he says, makes people think what it means to stuff a dog. It's, I feel like I understand that he's trying to conjure up some kind of mic drop moment, as if like, if you walked into my apartment and saw that I had a woolly mammoth

tusk mounted on a wall somewhere, that's a flex. I understand that being a flex because that means I either found a woolly mammoth, killed it, and put its tusk on my wall, broke into a museum, stole a tusk, or had enough money to buy a tusk. Those are three flexes that I understand. Right. As like a power move to show someone a stuffed dog on a piano is not one of those flexes. It's not, I don't know what that means. I don't either. Yeah. And maybe it's just a way to make people feel off balance. The affectation of a flex. Yeah. Yeah. It just, it just keeps, it confuses people. And that was Jeffrey's goal. Yeah. I, I, I, yeah. Mission, mission accomplished you Coney Island sex monster. Coney. That's another good title for the episode. Coney Island sex monster. Okay.

Now, back in 2015, after Epstein's rampant pedophilic pimping was common knowledge, and after he'd been out of prison for several years, Vicki Ward published another article about the man, this one for the Daily Beast. Its title was, I tried to warn you about sleazy billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Now, Ward was more explicit and less guarded in this article, stating outright that Epstein's claims of having made his fortune by managing the wealth of multiple billionaires was quote, a story that no one I spoke to believed. Now, back in 2003, she'd spoken to Haufenberg, his former partner in that Ponzi scheme. Haufenberg had made some allegations about Epstein, but she hadn't really been able to go off on those alone because, you know,

he was a felon in prison for fraud. And Jeffrey Epstein was a rich billionaire. You can't just like accuse billionaires of committing fraud off of the word of a guy who's in prison for fraud. You've got to have more info than that. Okay. Just let me know when we reach the era where I can accuse billionaires of fraud from an uninformed gut instinct level. That is the teen era. When the economy collapses. And that's not a good era either. Okay. So she had done some digging in this time and found proof that Epstein had been chased out of Bear Stearns for committing a violation, which is why we knew that in the first place. She had brought this to Epstein and noted that he seemed almost concerned

about the allegations of financial irregularities and crimes. This had baffled her. She'd been surprised that he'd brushed off these allegations. And in fact, Epstein had mainly brushed them off so that he could repeatedly ask her, what do you have on the girls? Now, according to Ward, quote, What I had on the girls were some remarkably brave first person accounts, three on the record stories from a family, a mother and her daughters who came from Phoenix, the oldest daughter, an artist whose character was vouchsafe to me by several sources, including the artist Eric Fischel, had told me weeping as she sat in my living room of how Epstein had attempted to seduce both her and separately her younger sister, then only 16. He'd gotten to them because of his money. He'd

promised the older sister patronage of her artwork. He'd promised the younger funding for a trip abroad that would give her work experience she needed on her resume for a place at an Ivy League University, which she desperately wanted. So the girl's mom had figured that they'd be safe at Epstein's home. After all, he'd flown around with Bill Clinton, funded tens of millions of dollars in critical scientific research. Most of his friends were physicists. Plus, she knew Gilseyn Maxwell would be there the whole time. The mother later told Ward, quote, At the time I wanted to goad after him. I mean, physically, mentally, you know, in every way, shape and form. And the advice I was given was, you know, he is so wealthy, he can fight you. He can make you look ridiculous.

He can make your daughters look ridiculous. Plus, he can hurt them. And that was the thing that frightened me was that he would know where they lived and could possibly just send somebody when they walked the dog at night or something around the corner. And we'd never hear from them again. So. Yeah. There's a lot there. But uh, most of his friends are physicists is kind of a new, insatiable defense of a person. I wasn't aware of it. It was like, he seems nice. Most of his friends are physicists. Like, I'm not saying that like, it's, it's what I assumed all physicists are bad. I definitely didn't assume they were all good though. I mean, it just seems like an

innocuous thing. It's one thing if it's like, Oh, my teenage daughter is going to be hanging out with a fucking Jeremy Piven, which, you know, is immediately shady. It's another thing to be like, Oh, well, this guy is like a billionaire who funds scientific research and pals around with Stephen Hawking and the like. Like that seems like he's probably an upright citizen. You know? Okay. Yeah. He doesn't seem shady. Like, sure. I can see how it's like, it's one thing, you know, you can throw some judgment on the parents who let their kids hang out with R Kelly when they were 15. And it's like, there's been allegations about R Kelly for a long time. You know, in 2002, nobody was saying anything about Epstein, but that he'd given 20 million

dollars in Harvard for math research. Like, that's, it doesn't sound like stereotypical sexual abuser, although now it does because Jeffrey Epstein pimped to the stars. Okay. So Ward brought the allegations that these young women had made to Epstein, and he denied them to her face saying, quote, just the mention of a 16 year old girl carries the wrong impression. I don't see what it adds to the piece. And that makes me unhappy. Now, after she brought this up to Epstein, he repeatedly called her and Graydon Carter, the editor at Vanity Fair. Epstein took extreme measures to discredit the witnesses, reportedly mailing forged letters from them to Vanity Fair. At one point, Epstein made it somehow made it past building security and into Vanity Fair's

offices. It's unclear exactly what threats he made or didn't make, but Graydon Carter made the call to pull the women's allegations from the article. It came down to my sources words against Epstein's and at the time Graydon believed Epstein and my notebook, I have him saying, I believe him, I'm Canadian. I don't know what the hell Canada has to do with it. Is that like a growing Canada under the bus moment of like, I believed him because we are famously gullible. This is this is before it was like the before that he was charged with crime. Oh, I believed him because I'm, I'm, yeah, this is a sweet guy, sweet guy. Yeah, yeah, that that Vanity Fair article includes no allegations of sex crimes. She had two witnesses

going on record saying Epstein tried to seduce them when they were underage. But her editor talked to Epstein about the allegations against him and made the decision to pull those allegations because he trusted Epstein. Okay, not really saying it's because he's, he's Canadian. He's Canadian. Canadians are trustworthy. Classic, not believing child sex abuse victims. I mean, it just, it's an easier to assemble puzzle than stuff poodle on the end. That it is, that it is. Very fair. Now, Ward claims that during this time when she was writing the article, she became terrified of Jeffrey Epstein and what he might do to her. She says she was frightened enough that he'd probably had some impact on the children that she was pregnant

with at the time. Both of her babies were born premature. Epstein, yeah, Epstein had asked her where her babies were going to be born. And she knew that he had deep connections in the medical community. So she paid for security guards to watch her babies where they were in the NICU. Her 2015 article ends with this line, quote, when they'd been released home some months later, I went out to my first party. There was Jeffrey Epstein sucking a lollipop. Vicki, he said, fuck you, you look so pretty. Epstein. Yeah, it is. We have a couple of different types of bastards on the show. I'm putting the cuffs on when you say you saw him at a party sucking a lollipop. I'm like, no, this guy's done some shit. This guy's a pedophile. I just woke up from

a 30 year coma, walked into a party and I saw this 42 year old billionaire sucking a lollipop, put him in prison, put him in prison. We'll try him later. Something's being broken here. We do, like there's a couple of different kinds of bastards we get. There's the guys like Elrond Hubbard, who like in an objective way, yeah, probably did more evil in the world than Jeffrey Epstein has. If you look at all of the consequences of his actions, but you can't help but kind of like the guy when you read about him enough because his evil is just so like kooky and weird and it's centric and he's like getting people to look for gold on boats in the ocean and stuff. That's fun. Epstein, like there's no fun in him. He's just, it's like Cosby. It's just horrible.

Right. It's just a bad guy with no conscience. Yeah. And is there, I mean, not to make you play armchair psychiatrist or psychologist or anything like that, but that's basically my job. Nothing about what you said about his upbringing made it seem like the seeds of evil were planted there. You brought up no trauma. You say like Connie Allen was rough, but he also had parents that were spending a lot of money to give him a good education. So not that I'm trying to find good in him. I'm trying to find an inception point because the alternative to, it was trauma that caused this moral lapse, not moral lapse, moral implosion for this person. The alternative to that is he was born soulless and evil, which is a thing that I don't really believe in.

I don't think he thinks, like, I don't think he's a mustache twirling villain. I don't think he views these girls. These girls are obviously victims. I want to be clear about that. I don't think he views them that way. I think he probably felt bad when he penetrated that teenager with his penis and she said no, which is why he gave her $1,000. Now, obviously, that doesn't come close to making it right, but I think he viewed most of these as like, well, these girls are getting money out of this and they're getting connections and I'm not forcing myself on them. They're coming into my room and providing this service. It's fine. I'm so smart and evolved in our society's attitudes on when young girls should have sex with 58-year-old men

are behind the times. I'm going to guess that's Epstein's justification, that there's no reason that I shouldn't have sex with a 12-year-old as long as I'm not violently forcing it on her. This is a question that I don't know if you have the answer to or here can answer. What it will do to me, but does he have children? Epstein? Does he ever end up having children? Not even like, like, I don't think so. He probably had children and covered it up, but like, children that he claims as his own and had any kind of fart in raising. I didn't run into any story of that. I don't think he's been married. He was kind of famous in the articulations. Ladies. Yeah, ladies. Like, there was a lot of speculation that Gilsane Maxwell,

that British socialite, was like his lover and stuff, and it turned out she was just, you know, helping him run his pimping empire. Sure. Yeah. So I think he was just like, he had this image of like being kind of this like rich bachelor, like Bruce Wayne type character. Yeah, that's what everyone thinks of. But we have ads. That was good. Do you want to try doing a product, Dan? Do I want to try doing a product? You know my catchphrase? All right, give me one more. Yeah. Okay. Products. That's it. Sophie's giving me a thumbs down, but I think you were great. You need to know that I'm shouting products alone in my apartment.

Dan, I do that every single night of my life. Products. 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 got 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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys 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? 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 podcasts. 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! Those services. Also good. You know, we don't think enough about the services, but without services, products are just half produced.

Yeah, I mean, like anyone could buy a belt or a nice cast for math. You're really hitting on the belts. Also, the services of that like therapy that you talk to on your phone or whatever. We have not got the money for them. That's not a good... You haven't? No, they don't advertise on our show. I don't know. We did have air Emirates advertise on our show once, and people got very angry for me,

because I'd just gotten finished talking about the death squads that Eric Prince operates for the Emirates. It's just randomly slotted ads a lot of the time, if I don't read them. It's tough, because as we're recording this, I have insider information that all of your ads are Jeffrey Epstein speaking tours. It's just, it's the only guy who bought any ad time on this episode. He's given me a lot of money. And he actually demanded this episode be weird guy. He gave me a stuffed poo.

The story, Robert. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the poodle, but I've got it. You thought about it. I think about it every day. Roughly two years after Vicki Ward wrote her first article in Vanity Fair, and had her premature babies, investigators in Palm Beach started talking to young women they believed might have been abused by Jeffrey Epstein. This was 2005. They started pulling his trash, and they found scraps of paper with phone numbers in the names of several young girls on them. Next, they talked to Epstein's butler, and eventually gathered enough evidence to charge

him and two of his assistants with unlawful sex acts with a minor. This led to a larger FBI investigation, which identified some 40 suspected victims. And 40 is just sort of where they stopped. It was clear from the details of the case that many, many, many, many, many more girls have been victimized by Jeffrey Epstein over the years and across the country. Probably hundreds of them. Maybe more than hundreds of them. The two cops most responsible for bringing Epstein down were Palm Beach police chief Michael Ryder and detective Joseph Ricari. They conducted their investigation in the face of overwhelming resistance, both from state-level elected officials, fellow law enforcement officers, and Jeffrey Epstein's formidable legal machine.

And I do want to like, I'm not normally, you know me, Dan, I'm not normally one for the law enforcement side of things, but these two guys are legitimate heroes in my book. It was one of those things where like, they saw something was fucked up and realized that it was going to be a nightmare for them to go after this guy. And they did it anyway, because he was abusing dozens of young girls. And that's not cool. I agree. Yeah. According to the Miami Herald, quote, police reports show that Epstein's private investigators attempted to conduct interviews while posing as cops, that they picked through writer's trash in search of dirt to discredit him and that the private investigators were accused of following the girls and their families.

In one case, the father of one girl claimed he had been run off the road by a private investigator. Police and court reports show. Now Epstein hired a legal dream team in order to defend him from these allegations of sexual trafficking. This dream team included Alan Dershowitz, noted celebrity lawyer of Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, and O.J. Simpson. It also included Kenneth Starr, a man whose investigation of a minor land deal had spiraled into an investigation into President Clinton's relationship with an intern. Now that he defended morality in a battle against the Clinton machine, Starr went to work defending one of Bill Clinton's good friends from charges of serial child molestation. Consistency is important. Now, as we all know,

in any case where a bunch of young teenage girls are accusing a man of means of rampant sexual assault and trafficking, step one of any competent legal defense is going to be to dig into those girls' lives and destroy them in front of a judge. Epstein's team of super good human beings got right to work doing this. First, Alan Dershowitz met with Detective Rikari and shared with him the results of an investigation Epstein had paid for, which revealed one of the girls to be, quote, an accomplished drama student. In other words, Dershowitz is saying she's a liar. According to a letter that Dershowitz wrote the detective, quote, our investigation has discovered at least one of her websites and I'm enclosing some examples. The site goes on to detail, including photos,

her apparent fascination with marijuana. Oh, yeah. In interviews with the Miami Herald, Rikari further recalled, quote, his attorney showed us a MySpace page where one of the girls was holding a beer in her hand and they said, oh, look, she is underage drinking. Well, tell me what teenager doesn't. Does that mean she isn't a victim because she drank a beer? Basically what you're telling me is that the only victim of a sexual battery could be a nun. I like Detective Rikari. Another Epstein victim reported similar behavior from his lawyers, telling the Miami Herald, quote, his lawyers were just in my life inside and out. They asked if I had a baby. If I had an abortion, did you sleep with 30 different guys? Do you think that played a part?

I said, you're going to come at me like that when you represent a guy who is doing this to hundreds of girls. How do you sleep at night? And I hate to say this, young woman, but all of Epstein's lawyers sleep at night on a pile of money, hundreds of feet tall. I don't think, I think it's pretty safe to say that anyone who's ever been asked the question, how do you sleep at night? I think it's pretty fair to say they sleep just fine. Yeah. If you're asking a person that question, if there's not like guilt and shame on their face. Yeah. If they did the thing, then they already don't know why they should be ashamed of it. It's, I mean, I have trouble sleeping at night because these people exist.

The rest of us have trouble sleeping at night, not the sociopaths who exist in the orbit of helping these people not get charged for their crimes. You got rich by ruining people's lives. How did you sleep at night? Easily, comfortably, like really no problem. You guys don't know how good bed technology has gotten. You got your beds out of a box. My bedge was forged in the Himalayan mountains. Yeah. I had like a bed guy come and measure me and then make a bed around my body. It's perfect. Never had a better sleep. It's the only one of its kind. They actually burnt down the forest that made the fibers for the beds that no one else can ever have a similar bed.

It cost a little bit extra, but it's worth it. So, Palm Beach attorney Barry Kirscher and state prosecutor Lana Bello-Lavik seem to have found themselves in a similar situation to Vanity Fair's editor. As the case progressed, Epstein's attorneys made the kind of quiet, technically legal threats that lawyers know how to make, and so the prosecutor and state attorney stopped picking up the phone for Detective Rikari and police chief Ryder. They delayed approving subpoenas for the case. Ryder later recalled, quote, early on it became clear that things had changed. From Kirscher saying, we'll put this guy away for life too, these are all the reasons why we aren't going to

prosecute this. There was evidence of shady donations made by Epstein to the police department. After the beginning of the investigation, Ryder returned at least one of these donations, but it's entirely possible that more money changed hands. Some of Epstein's victims later recalled him bragging that he owned the Palm Beach police department. Both the police chief- Now, both the police chief and the detective became convinced their trash was being sorted through and that they were being followed through about the day by private eyes. When they finally got to raid Epstein's mansion on October 20th, 2005, it looked as if he'd been tipped off. Most of his hard drives, surveillance cameras, and videos had been removed hastily.

Still, they found a lot of damning material. According to the Miami Herald, quote, they obtained dozens of messages patched from his home that read like a who's who of famous people, including magician David Copperfield and Donald Trump, an indication of Epstein's vast circle of influential friends. There were also messages from girls, and their phone numbers mashed those of many of the girls Rekhari had interviewed, Rekhari said. They read, Courtney called, she can come at four, or Tanya can't come at 7 p.m. tomorrow because she has soccer practice. Gross, gross, gross, gross, gross, gross. On the same piece of paper with Donald Trump's phone number. Regardless of the year, it feels like my two friends, Donald Trump and David Copperfield,

It was never a reflection. Oh, yeah. They also found naked photographs of underage girls in Epstein's closet, which means the fact that they still found all this stuff after he'd been tipped off means that before Epstein had his house cleaned, there was so much child pornography and incriminating information that a billionaires team of cleaners couldn't remove at all. Yeah. They didn't check the closet?

Where was he? In his closet, I mean, I assume that there were a lot more naked photographs, and they just missed some because he had so many. I guess. That's what that's got to be what that means. Can you be like, look, you gave us a month, your house is so fucking huge. We got rid of so much illegal stuff from the main wing of it, but I don't know, there's some nooks and crannies we just couldn't get to.

It's a huge house, Jeff, you have a lot of pictures of children. So the case dragged on through 2006 and into 2007. By October, the prosecution was in the hands of Alexander Acosta, the top federal prosecutor in Miami. He met with one of Epstein's lawyers, Jay Lefkowitz, with whom Acosta had worked in the past. The two former coworkers hammered out a deal for the final resolution of Epstein's case. This non-prosecution agreement shut down the ongoing FBI probe into Epstein's crimes.

It also guaranteed that the full nature of Epstein's crimes would be concealed from his victims. In other words, Acosta agreed to give Jeffrey Epstein a plea agreement that no one actually got to see or read, including his victims. Epstein. How long? Yeah. Is that one of the types of legal things that one day will get revealed to the world?

No, no, no, it's a forever. Years at home, you can't tell this because this is again an audio medium, but I am sad visibly. Yeah. Very visibly sad. Sad with a dog in your lap, which is a hard, hard to be. Yeah. Yeah.

Like just crestfallen while getting my, my chin licked by my adorable puppy dog. Yeah. It's still, he is sad too. Yeah. He doesn't know why. He's a sad little guy. But he's sad. Now, Epstein did have to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court.

But his four named accomplices received immunity from their federal charges. The deal also gave immunity to quote any potential co-conspirators, meaning anyone else involved in Epstein's crimes who the government hadn't found out about yet was retroactively declared off the hook. That's the kind of agreement Jeffrey Epstein got thanks to Alexandra Costa. How? I mean, that's such a sweet deal. That's a great deal.

What do you think happened to the guy who gave him that great deal, Alexandra Costa? He's Donald Trump's secretary of labor. You didn't let me guess. I was going to say something good and wholesome. Yeah. Oh, that's so bad. When questioned about his role in letting a criminal network of child molesters off the hook in exchange for giving one guy a slap on the wrist, a Costa said quote, at the end

of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within a prosecutor's office decided that a plea that guarantees someone goes to jail, that guarantees he registers as a sex offender generally and guarantees other outcomes, is a good thing. How long did he go to jail for? Well, we're getting to that. You said he got, okay. Yeah. Well, Epstein was-

Apparently you said he got more than a year. Yeah. Which sucks. Epstein was required to register as a sex offender and pay restitution to three dozen victims. He was also required to admit to committing only one offense against an underage girl. And that girl was labeled a prostitute in the official court documents, although she was 14 at the time. Just so we're clear, there is no such thing as a 14-year-old prostitute.

By law, any 14-year-old having sex with an adult is a rape victim. Any 14-year-old being sold for sex is a trafficking victim. There is no such thing as a 14-year-old prostitute unless you are as wealthy as Jeff Epstein. So the 36 women he had to pay did get sizable chunks of money, but only after enduring multiple years of having their lives torn apart by Epstein's army of private eyes and lawyers. Jenna Lisa Jones, who says Epstein molested her when she was 14, later recalled, you beat yourself up mentally and physically. You can't ever stop your thoughts.

A word can trigger something. For me, it is the word pure, because he called me pure in that room, and then I remember what he did to me in that room. You're leaving air there for me to make a joke, it seems, or to have some kind of comment other than like, I don't know, vomiting or screaming? It's worse than that. It's ad plug time. Oh my god.

I know. What a bad line to lead into ads on. This is why we have trouble, Dan. I hope you're happy to be associated with this. Whatever it is, the name of that company that the culture king is used to buy shoes on, I forget. They haven't advertised on me. They haven't?

Oh, well, they won't now. No. We should get like a guillotine manufacturer or something like that on board. Those are thriving now, huh? Yeah, it's coming back, baby. Okay, well, we'll talk about the exact nature of how much time Jeffrey Epstein did and what his time in jail, not prison, was like. But first, products.

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. Because the FBI sometimes, you've got 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 this hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass 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 podcasts. 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

podcasts. 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! Now, Dan, at the point at which that plea agreement was reached, Detective Rikari said

that he and his team had identified about 50 victims, all of whom told nearly identical stories. The Miami Herald's investigation found more than 80 victims. In 2009, Epstein's former butler, a guy named Rodriguez, tried to sell Epstein's little black book to an undercover FBI agent pretending to be a lawyer. This is illegal, you can't do that, and he served some time in prison. More time than Epstein served for running a child rapering. 14 months is what Epstein did.

And he did not go to prison! Epstein went to a jail, a private luxury jail, basically a country club with bars, the absolute minimum level of security and restriction possible for an incarcerated person. And he didn't even have to stay there all the time. He was allowed out on work release for up to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, which he spent in his own office, taking male and female visitors freely with no oversight by the deputies who sat outside the reception room and waited for him to go home. Also he paid the salaries of those deputies while they were watching him.

Here's the Miami Herald again. In the early reports in July 2008, the deputies referred to Epstein as inmate, but within a few weeks the language had changed and he was called a client. He was occasionally allowed to take a break for lunch by sitting outside in a park, the record show, and they also gave him permission to scout for a new office. While on work release, he was required to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor his whereabouts. So that's something. Now Epstein's work release was approved by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

Because they say he met the criteria for their work release program and there was no factual basis to deny the program to him when any other inmate in his situation would have been eligible. However, an incredibly basic amount of digging, literally reading the department's work release policy, reveals that sex offenders are specifically ineligible for work release. When questioned about this, a department spokesperson first claimed that Epstein was not a sex offender at the time and then clammed up and stopped responding when it was noted that he had been required to register as a sex offender. Also it came out that Epstein was paying the officers who guarded him while he was out

on work release. So that's good. That seems like justice. Now I will say Dan, Epstein's lifestyle certainly took a hit during his time in jail. A report by the smoking gun revealed that his purchases were from the jail commissary. He spent most of his money on teriyaki meat sticks, pop tarts, and little chubb sausages, along with substantial quantities of lubraderm and the finest leather shoes a jail store could provide.

Uh, what are the finest leather shoes a jail store can provide? I haven't been to jail in a while and I don't really know how the market has shifted since. They cost $72, so I'm going to assume it's a serious step down from Epstein's usual leather shoes. That's more than I typically spend on shoes though. Yeah, more than, yeah, yeah. Now during his parole, he spent like a year on parole after he got out of jail, where he was supposed to be confined to staying in Florida, but every time he requested to

travel outside of the state, his requests were granted, seemingly with no resistance. After his parole, in the almost decades since it ended, Jeffrey Epstein has continued to enjoy a life of unbridled excess. He bought a new private jet. He switched his permanent residence to his island, Little St. Jeff, since New York and Florida required him to register as a sex offender. Whatever the truth behind Epstein's rise to wealth and power, it's clear that his financial resources are still seemingly inexhaustible.

He's continued to donate to charities, funding scientific research, and even starting an online TV network, NeuroTV, that focuses on interviews with great thinkers and scientists. His great and good friends seem to have forgiven him his trespasses. Stephen Hawking visited his island in 2006, in 2010, his island, or he hosted Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler, and Woody Allen to a lavish dinner. Woody Allen I get. Yeah. I get why Woody Allen didn't have any issues with this.

Allen Dershowitz, who at age 80 seems to spend most of his free time defending the Trump administration on TV, responds to questions about his representation of Epstein with lines like, I plead guilty to making a deal that was favorable to my client. Kenneth Starr said, I was happy to respond to the needs of a client of the firm. When Daily Beast reporter Alexandra Wolfe questioned theoretical physicist and professor Lawrence Krause about his friend and benefactor, Jeff Epstein, Krause said, quote, as a scientist, I always judge things on empirical evidence, and he always has women aged 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else.

Normally, yeah, that's a troubling quote. Do you ever think about shaking the show up and like doing something that won't bum people out? Is that on your list is like a Christmas episode maybe next year? We did that Christmas episode about Raoul Wallenberg, the guy who saved 100,000 Jewish people during the Holocaust and then got murdered by the Soviets. Okay, and that's your example is like a thing that doesn't bum people out? Yeah, that's that's upbeat for us.

Okay, sure. Oh, now Epstein has, of course, continued to fight his accusers in court over dozens of lawsuits across the last several years. He settled a civil case against him just last December. There's currently a pending suit in Florida that seeks to throw out the entire non-prosecution agreement against him on the basis that it was illegal to make because dozens of Epstein's victims were never given the chance to know about it. So Dan, I will end this on a little bit of an upside note.

It is still possible that some version of justice will be done and that some of his named and potential co-conspirators might finally have to spend time in court. It's not necessarily likely that this will happen, but it is possible. That's the happiest ending I got for you, man. It's unlikely but possible, yeah. Eventually justice might get done. All right, that's the, put that on a fucking bumper sticker and then drive that car right off the cliff.

And Dan, I mean, this is pretty bad, Alexander Acosta was in line to become the new attorney general and then people made a big fuss out of him letting this serial pedophile off and he had to just stay the secretary of labor. That's a bummer for him and his family of goblins. Yeah. And his family of goblins. I bet the health plan isn't as good as secretary of labor. Yeah.

Yeah. Hey man, this sucks. This whole thing sucks real bad. It's a real, real, real soul crush here. Can you tell me what Jeffrey is doing right now? Spending most of his time on his private island, still probably having a lot of sex with very young people. Is he professionally, like, does he run a consulting firm?

Is he still doing schemes? I think he's, yeah. He still manages money, I suspect. If he ever did much of that, like, that's the thing I have to wonder, like the conspiratorial side of me thinks like, yeah, shit, maybe he was just pimping out kids and getting paid by rich people for that. I don't know. It was probably a mix.

He probably did some financial stuff, but like clearly, who knows what he's doing now, rather than being impossibly wealthy and owning a house in Manhattan that could comfortably house 10,000 at least of the 23,000 homeless kids in the city. Sure. I don't know, Dan. Woo! You want to plug your Twitter? No, I don't.

I maintain it pretty strict, I don't plug, like, Twitter or Instagram, so I don't know, it's like my least favorite part of podcasts when it gets to the end, it's like, so where can people find you online? I understand it's good for creators and everything, but just, like as a podcast listener, I hate it. I will tell our listeners. ChildrenoftheNight.org is a great organization. I mentioned that in the last podcast, it's for children rescued from childhood prostitution.

You should support them in any way that you can. I will plug a thing that I was associated with, just because there are other people who work there that aren't just me, so it feels less selfish. I write for a show called Last Week's Night. It requires a lot of work from a lot of people. We have an amazing staff, writers, researchers, producers, footage, people, directors, and they all work very hard and spend a lot of time reading about horrible issues the same way that Evans does.

And then at the end of the week, we try to present that work to you in a 30-minute occasionally funny, attempting to be funny, but always trying to be informative, format lessons and jokes. So check out Last Week's Night if you have HBO. Yeah. Check out Last Week's Night, and I'm going to plug a thing for you. That's probably the worst. I'm going to get fired.

That's probably the worst plug. I am going to plug your book, if you could use a pick-me-up after all of these horrible stories of child molestation, Dan O'Brien has a really fun and entertaining and educational book called How to Fight Presidents. And after this episode, you probably want to fight a couple of presidents. Yeah. Yeah. The main one that you're going to want to fight, the main two that you're going to want

to fight, they're not featured in the book, and I apologize. But you can synthesize some of that information, and maybe this episode we'll get Dan talked to by the Secret Service again. Yeah, sure. That's fine. We're all pals at this point. They got you on speed, Dial. Well I'm Robert Evans.

I also think you should donate to Children of the Night, or volunteer if that is possible in your area. And now I'm going to seamlessly transition to saying you can buy t-shirts and hoodies and stickers from our tea public store behind the bastards. We've got a Raoul Wallenberg hoodie. Save lives. Do crimes. That's my motto.

Not the kind of crimes Epstein did. Are you still doing the nachos one? We do have nachos not Nazis, Doritos not dictators. Doritos has not sued us for using the name of their product, so that counts as a kind of support. That's good. Yeah. Thanks, John Dorito.

Well, you can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram and at BastardsPod. You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com along with all of the articles and sources and stuff for this podcast of horrors. That's all. We'll be back next week with something else that will break your heart and that you'll listen to for reasons that are beyond my understanding. I love about 40 percent of you. 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 Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.