The Daily Beast Podcast - How Evil Epstein Used Elites to Stifle the Truth

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Tina Brown tells all about her shocking experience being named in the newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein case files, revealing how Jeffrey Epstein and his allies frantically tried to “neutralize” her and shut down The Daily Beast after her explosive reporting with Conchita Sarnoff blew open his web of abuse. In a gripping conversation with Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty, Brown recounts the panic inside Epstein’s circle, the chilling legal threats from powerhouse firms, the duplicity of social fixer Peggy Siegal, and the moral rot of an elite “club” that protected its own even after the truth was in plain sight. She reflects on the pre-#MeToo culture that dismissed victims, the powerful names orbiting Epstein—from Bill Clinton to Ehud Barak—and the industrial scale of exploitation enabled by Ghislaine Maxwell and recruiter Jean-Luc Brunel. It’s a bracing defense of investigative journalism, a warning about the corrosive power of extreme wealth, and a behind-the-scenes look at how close this story came to being buried—so what else is still hidden in the millions of unreleased files? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I thought he was a creepy social climber, was my instant. But at the same time, the more she reported, the more kind of alarming it became because of the people on the flight logs. Bill Clinton is on the flight log. Ehud Barak, from Israeli former Prime Minister, was on the, you know, then you start to think, oh my God, the guy is so hugely well connected. There were all these people who were just in this favourite bank of this elite world,

and they were all there for different reasons. But at the end of the day, they were all ignoring the elephant in the room that they had no business ignoring. because after we published those pieces, there was nothing you could say that was ambivalent about Jeffrey Epstein's conduct. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Docketay.

I'm executive editor of The Daily Beast, and I'm in for Joanna Coles. But this is a reunion episode today, not for me, but for The Daily Beast. I am going to be talking to the legendary Tina Brown. She founded the Daily Beast in 2008, and we're going to be talking about stories from The Daily Beast. But more importantly,

why she's in the Epstein files and the amazing, extraordinary dramatic insights that we have learned from those files about Daily Beast groundbreaking reporting back in 2010 and 2011 and how Epstein tried to keep her and Conchita Sarnoff,

the Daily Beast reporter who broke the Epstein stories silent. Let's get right into it. Welcome, Tina Brown. Tina, it is so great to see you. It's so great to have. have you back in the Daily Beast world, which you, which you founded. And I feel like we are. Anything to, you know, any chance to be in the Daily Beast world is always a roaring pleasure. Well, we are strangely, journalism is usually about the new and pushing forward, but I'm going to

go on a very long trip down memory lane, I think. The Epstein files, which have just exploded over the last few days have been, we, you know, as people will know, we are in them. Yes, indeed. And especially you are in them. And you wrote about this on your substack.

And I'll just say to anybody who has not read Tina's substack, go to substack, fresh hell on substack. And it is just an extraordinary story of what happened with Epstein. And we are, we are, we are now 15 years, 16 years, I should say, later, finding out some of the other side of the story. Yes, it's absolutely fascinating, you know,

to find myself in there. I think my favourite line is Peggy Siegel, the PR personage who was so heavily involved with Epstein, much more than I ever knew, writing to him like how can we neutralize Tina Brown? I sort of love that, I must say, because they weren't able to neutralize me or the Bat Beast, which has gone on, you know, subsequently as well, you know, covering Epstein in every way that it should. But it does give you a sort of an insight into, I mean, he presented it to himself, you know, as this cool,

you know, character who had everything under control. But what you see in the, in the, email exchanges with Peggy Siegel over his, you know, unhappiness about the Daily Beast coverage in that time was his panic. I mean, they're panicked. I mean, and he was like writing to Mort Suckerman, for instance, the real estate billionaire and publisher who was a very close friend of my husband, Harry's, and of mine, saying, you know, when you see, next time you see Tina Brown, can you please tell her to stop this, like, sensationalise coverage that, you know,

It's like he's reaching out to everyone to try to sort of figure out how to shut us down. And, you know, he couldn't. And it really frustrated him. It also, frankly, was a kind of very reptilian feeling to see how Peggy Seale, who always presented herself to me as a kind of fake friend and, you know, a sort of, you know, fighting me to screenings. I mean, she was and, you know, and who had invited me to this, the famous Night of Shame dinner where she called me in the office and asked if I would go for. for dinner with Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew and Woody Allen, which had, you know, when I've told off on the story of how I shouted across the newsroom, you know, what is this, the pedophiles ball?

And yet, you know, she went, she clearly, I mean, she had backed off immediately, of course, when I shouted that and said, you know, oh, no, no, no, this is all so overblown. And I don't really do anything much for Epstein. And I just sort of occasionally helping with dinner parties. And, you know, what you see in the Epstein files is how she was absolutely scheming with him all the time. And she was clearly, you know, in his court, whether she was paid or not, I have no idea. But if she wasn't paid, I don't know why she would be, you know, his constant informer about everything we were doing at the Daily Beast and subsequently newsweek when we also sort of bought Newsweek. So that's a, that that was a kind of unsettling feeling of the sense that, you know, someone could be that duplicitous, frankly.

But it also was just so interesting because you see how panic. he was. One of the things that is amazing, and I should do some scene setting here. You set up the Daily Beast with Barry Diller in 2008, and in 2010,

you published an incredible series of stories by Kanchita Sarnoff, which I would urge everybody to go and read they're still on the Daily Beast. We're very proud that they're there, and they blew open really all of the elements that we've come to know

as the Epstein scandal. The plea deal, the plane, the flight logs, the rich and the powerful, the appalling exploitation of these poor underage girls. It was all there. And one of the many things that are in the Epstein files that I wanted to talk to you about, Tina, is what you said, the panic.

And also the really chilling attempts to shut this story down, that you obviously know some of that and yet some of it was happening behind closed doors as well and there's an incredible amount of documents there's hundreds of references to The Daily Beast there's 45 specific references to Conchita Sarnoff and many people of course

I think everybody searched the Epstein files and sometimes you get you know the website is very unreliable I just tried searching for you to try and work out a definitive number and I've had one that's in the hundreds and one that's not, so I don't know what the accurate number is, but these are people who were really scared of what was going to come out,

and yet here we are 16 years later still talking about them. Yes, it's so interesting because people keep saying, you know, all the credits keep saying, you know, how could these eminent people have gone on meeting with, staying with seeing Epstein after the conviction, you know, in 2000? But that's actually not the point. I feel that the bigger story is, like, why did they go on seeing him after Conchita Sian Saraf's series in The Daily Beast? Because, you know, in 2008, when he was convicted, he was able to tell people and, you know, who were in, who would, let's say, willfully incurious, well, you know, yes, I, of course I did make this over to her to this underage girl.

I thought she was 16 at the time. And, you know, it was just stupid of me. and, you know, he could have blown that off. And some people who were incurious might have been naive enough to kind of think, okay, well, then, you know, that was foolish of Jeffrey, but, you know, and appalling, and it's awful that she was that age and so on, but he didn't really know. But after the Contreat a son-off series in The Daily Beast, it was all laid out. Because the scandal, of course, that she revealed is it wasn't one underage girl at all.

It was multiple girls. And all of their affidavits were sitting. there in the police files. Girl after girl, underage girl after underage girl, terrible stories about, you know, young girls from Eastern Europe, age as young as 14, you know, being flown in and the kind of pipeline between the model agencies and these young, young girls and these sort of traffic from all these places into the Epstein Web with a, you know, with a promise of modeling jobs and all of this. It was all there. And yet it was after those stories that they still went on seeing him.

maybe they didn't sit and read every one of the Daily Beast pieces as they came out. But the slightest Google, if you've been thinking about, you know, would have just turned everything up. So this is what I find more egregious, frankly, is not just seeing him after the conviction, but seeing him after we had published this series. That is why I was so outraged when Peggy Siegel called me to ask me for dinner, because it was almost like my am more proper was wounded. I thought, wait a minute, we've been doing all this reporting on this guy, this pedophile, this terrible abuser of women.

and you are actually calling me to invite me to dinner when you know that I've published this stuff. So that was kind of also, I think that's been sort of under sort of scrutinized essentially, is it wasn't just the conviction. It was the coverage that had followed that made, no one could say they really didn't know he was such a terrible person because it was all there online. And the thing that we definitely know is who knew every word of this coverage was Jeffrey Epstein, because he was, quite frankly, obsessed by The Daily Beast. He was.

One of the most insightful documents is an email that he sent to himself, which listed all the things that he said were, and I'm using his words, libelous. And the things that he said were libelous were that the Daily Beast was calling him a pedophile. We obviously, Tina, you were obviously absolutely right that he was, that he was a child molester, and that he committed sex trafficking.

And he knew this. He knew that we had written this. It was there on Google. Yeah. I know. And I mean, but you see, he didn't sue us in the end. After all the saber rattling, he didn't. Because, you know.

I actually wanted to bring that point up because there was, we, we found in the files, and I know I know you've, you will have remembered this at the time, that his lawyer wrote directly to you, a three-page letter. And I should say it's worth pointing out. to people who maybe don't know, lawyers get to invoice more money the longer they write these letters. I didn't know that.

It might be related. But one of the things he said was that you were committing defamation per se by publishing. When you got that, what was your reaction? Well, I felt so confident of Conchie's reporting.

I mean, you know, we had spent so long. I mean, Edward Felsenthal, who was then my executive editor, really cool former Wall Street Journal, you know, a tremendously judicious editor. You know, this is not somebody, you know, he spent so many hours, you know, overseeing every granular thing in this series, particularly as we knew that there was a very strong possibility that we would be, you know, actually sued by Epstein.

So I was very confident, you know, about the reporting and very confident in Conchie. because she is a very serious person. I mean, she was the last thing anybody could say was a tabloid journalist. She was actually a campaigner against human trafficking who had sort of stumbled on the story in that work. That was what was interesting, is the way she got the story, not because she was a journalist hunting it,

but because she had interviewed a Mexican sex trafficker in the Palm Beach Stockade in the course of her human trafficking campaigning work. And it was this sex trafficker that said, many of my customers are people who live right here in Palm Beach, you know, important business people and that stunned her. And then she'd suddenly had a kind of twig because she'd seen a small item about the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in the local papers in Florida. And Conteater had actually knew Epstein. I mean, she'd actually gone out on a date with him a few years before, you know,

because she was a woman about town at a time when Epstein was a man about town. So she knew Epstein. And very, very resourcefully, she then decided to go and look up the case. really go into the case. And that's when she was hit in the face by, you know, all of these affidavits from these girls. And that's when she then tried to actually, she approached many people. I think she tried to do a book first, actually, but no one was really interested. And she brought it to me because we, at that time, you know, for 10 years, I produced, you know, with my team, the Women in the World Summit, where we had done many, many, you know, great discussions about, you know, the egregiousness of sex trafficking, underage girls, you know, teenage marriage, all of these

things that were very much a concern of the whole Women in the World Summit. And she had, you know, she thought, well, obviously we care about these topics because we're doing that. And that's actually why she decided to really bring it to me, because she thought that I would be interested in the topic because I'd shown interest already by what we'd put on the stage. And indeed, it does interest me and did interest me very much. I mean, I think it is just horrendous, you know, and everything we're seeing since is just increasingly horrendous. I think one of the most awful things that, you know, came in out, I think the last batch was that pathetic picture of Virginia Dufrey at Naomi Campbell's birthday party, you know, in the 90s. And she'd

been dragged there by Epstein and Gilein. And really, you're stunned because you look at all of these kind of big celebrities that are partying around and this boat, you know, with Naomi Campbell. And there's Virginia Jufri. She looks like she's 12. You know, she looks, she's so clearly a child that it's kind of shocking because everybody there must have thought, this is a child. And did nobody say, like, what is she doing here? Like, who did she come with? Like, why is she here? And it seems like nobody did, you know, and that is the sort of sad, heartbreaking thing about all this, really.

And indeed, all the stories of the girls, because, I mean, they're just, they were so, Epstein was such a Satan in the way that he played on their hopes so much. You know, all of these girls, or most of them, nearly all of them anyway. It was about, you know, they wanted to go to college. They wanted to be paid, you know, for their green card, like, whatever, or to get, go to, go to, a lot of them wanted to sort of to go to college, to be paid to go through college or were told that, you know, they could, they could pay for their training and whatever it is that they were trying to do. There was a sense of their aspirations, which is why they were cottoning onto Epstein. It's like, it wasn't just like he was a sugar daddy and a wallet. most of them were kind of aspirational girls, actually, who seemed to kind of feel that, you know, because he was really good at that. I mean, he would say, I'm terribly interested in your artwork, your painting, your, you know, your desire to be a dentist.

I mean, your desire to be an osteopath. I mean, he had all these kind of supposedly paternal interests in all their career. And, you know, and he did give them money and so on. And so they became sort of hooked by their own hope of him being a passport out of the life. didn't realize, of course, that he was the passport into the life. I mean, that they would never get out of the life, really, if they were involved with Jeffrey Opsdee. One of the most heartbreaking pieces of FBI or police, I think,

documentation in there is it's just a table of the promises that he had made these girls and in the course of sexually abusing them. And it's exactly all those occupations and aspirations. And there was one he promised he would buy a second-hand car for. Right. And it speaks, but one of the things we're talking about Conchita Sarnoff, some of the extraordinary documents that are in there as well are her engagement with the US Attorney's office down in Florida in the aftermath of the, well, she was reporting in the aftermath of the plea deal. And the way in which they tried to shut down her inquiries, just before she published, Conchita sent a very incredibly detailed 16.

question request for comment to them. And the internal documentation shows how worried they were. And one who remains an unnamed assistant US attorney writes another. It's stuff pending on this so we can just take the easy way out. Oh, I didn't see that. That's... Yeah. Yeah, wow.

Wow. I mean, you know, I've seen had them all in his web. I mean, you know, apparently he had a mole in the police in the police department as well. I mean, everybody was kind of, there were always people who were on his payroll. I hadn't read that particular exchange, but it is extremely chilling. And was there any explanation there for why they wanted to, quote, take the easy way out? Absolutely not. The response was our position is the investigation is still open and pending.

And this person wrote back, how is it pending? And there it runs out. As we know, of course, there are 3 million unpublished Epstein files. So is the answer hidden there? We don't know. But I think what it speaks to is this incredible barrier that you were able to overcome to get that story published. And the fear and the institutional cover-up that you came up against. Well, I mean, there's nothing like being sort of, you know, aggressive and ignorant at the same time.

I mean, it's like at that point, Jeffrey Epstein was not this kind of mythic demon that he is now, right? I mean, I had met him, you know, in a reception for one of the first Clinton initiative reception in 2005. And, you know, briefly, and he was just one of those rich guys, you know, percolating around and I know who was sort of on the fringes of sort of the action really. I mean, not an outsider, but someone who certainly wasn't a major figure. This is no like Jamie Diamond or someone. He was just a kind of slightly a bit of a kind of user, clearly, an operator. He had these dead eyes that I always found very, I didn't, you know, I thought he was a creepy social climber, was my instinct. I engaged with him for a few minutes, and that was it, and that was the end of that.

So he wasn't, you know, considered this mighty figure, a titan or something in American finance. And, you know, but at the same time, the more she reported, the more kind of alarming it became because of the people on those flight logs. I mean, when you find that the Bill Clinton is on the flight log, that, you know, former Ambassador Bill Richardson is on the flight logs that, you know, Ehud Barak, you know, from Israeli former Prime Minister was on the, you know, then you start to think, oh my God, the guy is so hugely well connected and it was puzzling. But I also know and do, you know, and I think it is true that the interesting thing about

Epstein is the whole sort of melange around him. They were all kind of involved for different reasons in a funny way. I mean, they're the ones who are looking always for the sex and the girls and the fact that he was such a kind of font of just satisfying people's most kind of insidious fantasies, really. And then there are the ones that were just trying to grift in the same way that he's trying to grift on them. He's trying to grift on everybody all the time for information, if not for money. And then there are people who are trying to grift on him. You know, they want to ride on his private plane.

They want him to get their kid into, you know, into a fancy school. There's a case, for instance, Brad Karp, who was the, you know, the erstwhile chairman of Paul Wise, who says, you know, can you get my son, you know, onto, onto a, into a film job like on Woody Allen's, you know. So there were all these people who were just in this favor bank of this elite world that we all know very much is the way the world goes around. And they were all there for different reasons. But at the end of the day, they were all ignoring the elephant in the room that they had no business ignoring. Because after we published those pieces, there was nothing you could say that was ambivalent about Jeffrey Epston's conduct. You were out in that world to some extent at that time. How did people, what did people say to you after you published?

What do you know, as I say, because he wasn't such a big figure, there were quite a lot of people who would say. So that's a really interesting piece about that guy, Jeffrey Epstein. Wow. You know, and it's like I wonder what Clinton's involvement was. Actually, the main interest in the pieces was what was Clinton doing on that plane. And I can't remember why that didn't blow up more than it did. And probably a big news thing happened and people got distracted, as we know. I mean, there are stories all the time and they're sort of writing along in that kind of

slightly under that level of breaking through. And that's where it rode. It rode slightly under the level of kind of bursting out. and didn't get, I don't think, a great deal of TV coverage, which I think would have helped to have it break out. It didn't. It was just, you know, people noted it who were in that world and in that swim and stuff. But it didn't have the same kind of boom that the series by Julie Brown in the Miami Herald had. Because her piece, which was published many years later, happened at the time when Acosta, who was, of course, the Florida prosecutor that she was writing about,

was then nominated for Trump's cabinet. So Acosta suddenly becomes a figure that people are looking at. And secondly, it was post Me Too when I think, you know, things did change after Me Too. I think that people were looking far more closely at the behavior of the rich and powerful. And so those two things kind of, and, you know, Julie did a great job. I mean, she brought many more, you know, additional great reporting to that whole story. So that's, I think, why it sort of stayed sort of swimming underneath the radar as it did. Tina, hold that thought. We will be right back.

And we are back with the legendary Tina Brown. One of the things about being pre-Me two that jumps out of that three-page letter, which on the subject of rich and powerful, was from Kirkland and Ellis, who are well known as being one of the most powerful law firms, and was from J. Lefkowitz, who had worked for George W. Bush before he then went to work for Kirkland-Dillis, became Jeffrey Epstein's defense attorney, But one of the things that he wrote to you was the, that jumps out, was the willingness to attack the victims, to talk about them not being innocent. And that seems like language from another era now, but was obviously part of the way that this wall was put up around Epstein.

Absolutely. I mean, the whole idea was, again, it was sort of pre-Me 2, essentially. And after Me 2, people were going to look at victims of sexual assault. and underage girls and in a different, far more sort of heated lens, if you like, as far more understanding lens. At that time, it was like, these girls, you know, they were sort of semi-sex workers at this point and some of them were sex workers, some of them weren't, but they all knew what they were doing.

Well, I mean, it's insane to say that because they were so young, they had no idea what they were doing, none. And of course, the most horrible thing about it was, and we didn't really get the Jelaine's story at that time. The Jelaine's story was a sort of a later development, which, you know, those initial stories, it was all Epstein focus. But, you know, the fact is that Jelaine, you know, you could argue that he wouldn't have wrapped it up to almost like the industrial level kind of pedophilia that he was doing without, you know, the good offices of Jelaine. Because it was Jelaine's ability and willingness to go cruise around the high schools, spas, you know, bars, all these things. and with her upper-class, kind of cut-class English accent,

disarm the girls who felt not threatened by this attractive upper-class woman saying, oh, do come over, I've got this marvelous friend who wants to give me. You know, they weren't frightened by her. She wasn't some seedy guy on a truck. I mean, she was this very attractive, upper-class woman. And that was, in a sense, part of the horribleness of that whole dynamic, because Epstein could send her out, and she did it with such eagerness. I mean, you know, she made this her mission to bring girls in.

I had the late, Ed Epstein, different Epstein, No Relation, wonderful, investigative journalist, you know, told me that one night, because he was a friend of Jelaine at that time, he used to have dinner with friends. They all went to dinner at Elio's restaurant in Manhattan, and they were all sort of a big group having dinner. And there was a bunch of young girls at the bar. They were sort of clearly sort of, you know, sort of just about maybe some of them even had fake driver's licenses, but, you know, they were young, very young and very attractive. and they were all kind of gathered at the bar. And at one point during the dinner, you know, Jelaine kind of disappeared and like, Ed looked around like, where's Jolene gone? And he said to his, someone at the dinner, like, where's Jolene gone? He said, oh, she's over there by the bar.

She's getting phone numbers for Jeffrey. So she was constantly, you know, vacuuming any space she could find, getting these numbers, following up. I mean, she was demonically efficient, you know, in his web. And that is why she deserved to sit and rot in that prison because it was really but for Jeline, frankly. He would have found it much harder. I mean, he did depend on the sort of underground railroad of his horrible French modelling agent friend

who indeed also hanged himself in prison in Paris. A story, by the way, which I find endlessly interesting because it hasn't really been investigated as to his death in exactly the same way in a Paris prison. I should just say, by the way, that Conchita Sarnoff, original articles, named John Lute Brunel as Epstein's chief enabling companion.

He was. He was. So aside from Jelaine, he was the other way that he got a lot of goals, you know, which was he would get them to come in to quote, model to his modeling agency. And he did, I had a lot of them coming in from Eastern Europe, Russian girls. It seems to be

that, I mean, I think at that period in particular, sort of Russian and Eastern European girls were a big thing, you know, in this whole story, whether or not any of those Russian girls, you know, will turn out to have been Russian assets, who knows, because they certainly penetrated every aspect of society. I mean, we saw, you know, in the Leon Black case recently that there was this, you know, Eastern European woman who accused Leon Black of sexually assaulting her, and that became a massive case. He was also part of the Epstein

network. So, I mean, it's all such a kind of scheme and scheme. you know, knitted together, that it's going to take really quite, and I think it's going to take years to really unpick it all. And, I mean, one of the difficulties that every one of these batches of emails and the people in them is kind of another piece of the plot, you know. I mean, there's so many, so many people involved that it's hard to track down the important ones.

So many of those plot lines are very hard to piece together. Yeah. And partial, and as I said, three millions still unpublished, but we have clues and we have directions and we still don't know, just to use that example of the US Attorney's office, we don't know what happened next. We don't know why they wanted to close it down.

And maybe the answer is in the files. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's in the next set. I know. Well, that's what's so fascinating about it. And of course, the frustration of it because, you know, if this had been a properly prosecuted case,

you know, where two years had been spent sort of organizing all of this evidence in these leads and change. Linder, and prosecuting a live Jeffrey Epstein, we might have had much better route through it all. But at the moment, we're just looking at the absolutely unfiltered product, which is the stuff of, you know, major prosecution investigations. And you've got lawyers who are, have those boards where they're sticking things up and the networks and who people are, you know. But this is now being done kind of piecemeal in real time by every journalist who can get

their hands on and has the time to pour through all these different emails. I want to just talk, one of the things that you now devote time to is encouraging and promoting investigative journalism. Yes. And particularly in the legacy of your husband, who was, you know, the greatest editor of, I was good to say of the generation. That's unfair. Of the 20th and 21st century, Sir Harold Evans.

I haven't think so. He was voted that by his peers, but yes. Well, quite. And, you know, we, you know, we, you know, we at the day of the old. Base following your footsteps and I should just say to those to those watching I am of British origin obviously and I you know grew up on on Fleet Street following in his foot you know following the inspiration and literally the training books that he that he wrote and what a lot of what comes out of the Epstein files that related to the Daily Beast spoke to how the rich and the

powerful attempt to silence the free press It's an extraordinary insight into legal letters, into public relations, and even into trying to fool Google into suppressing results. It's right. It also speaks to the sort of the power of the club, doesn't it? I mean, one of Harry's, my husband's great exposés, when he was the editor of the Sunday Times in London, you know, in the 60s, was, you know, he did expose Kim Filmi, the famous Soviet sports.

spy who was at the top of the foreign office actually on the anti-Soviet desk, you know. And of course it then became a massive story, which we all know. It's been made into films. It's been made into, you know, with the Cambridge spies and all that. But the thing that he came up against again and again in that story was the club, the upper classes. They all protected each other. They were all from the same school.

All from Cambridge. They were Oxford or Cambridge. They were, there was this class loyalty that, you know, they were, you know, they were from Cambridge, protected Kim Filby all that time. Oh, he couldn't be him because of who he was, you know. And I'm afraid that is still true. I mean, that it's maybe less today about what school did you go to, but it's certainly about, you know, where does your yacht berth in some baths? I mean, that group has now become what started as some, you know, unicorn, you know, billionaires has now become an Uber race, right, who they're all protecting each other. The amount of wealth out there right now is so

stunning and they're beginning to kind of forge their own club of morals and lack of them and sort of feeling of entitlement and you know and feeling of everything is below them essentially that other people have to follow them and you really get that sense in the Epstein files I think and even as you mentioned of yachts um Howard Lutnik is indeed among the people who volunteered that he just happened to be sailing past Little St. James and would like to come for lunch. But it was particularly delicious

because of his Oscar performance on that podcast a few months back where he said, you know, I said to my wife, I will never, I will never go to that man's heart. He is gross.

It's like, oh, and the next thing you have is like, hey, I'm going to be in the Caribbean on the 23rd or whatever. Like, can we come for lunch? You know, it was pretty I mean, look, I think, you know, I think Howard Lutnik was just, you know, I mean, I don't suggest in any way that Howard Lutnik was involved in doing anything particularly nefarious. But the hypocrisy, it was quite delicious, actually. But also speaks to what you said, the willful and curiosity. Yes. Yeah, the wolfling curiosity. It's like, oh, we're going to be in the Caribbean.

Let's go take the kids to lunch with Epstein. Wait, what a minute, what about the fact we now all know that he's a multiple pedophile, you know, that he is trafficking young girls, so he is, I mean, what on earth would you want to take your wife and family for lunch somewhere like that? It's just a kind of, oh, well, you know, it's overblown, whatever. I just don't understand that. They certainly wouldn't think it was overblown if it was being done by the super in their building, you know, I mean, there would be like, he's got to be locked up and like what the hell and you know it's purely about the wealth the lifestyle the network we'll just have to take a quick word from the people who pay our bills and we are discussing the Epstein files with somebody who is in them to talk about that that wealth and lifestyle you you've

come up against this for you know for many many years of the powerful the rich how do we well i was going to say how do we as a free press, but how do we as a country deal with what we see in the Epstein files is this sense of the club and also the willingness of the club to protect itself? How can we, what do we do? It's very alarming moment. I mean, we're very dependent on the bravery of lawyers and of individuals who are willing to say no to things. What you discover is there are very few people who, when faced with an enormous amount of money and not going to sort of capitulate or find a way to tell themselves it's okay. You know, whether it's the sort of comedians

going to perform in Saudi or attend, you know, Davos in the desert, which I happen to think is, I mean, I have not forgotten Khashoggi being chopped up, you know, I'm sure an enormous amount of people haven't. But plenty of people are now prepared to forget it. And it's all about the massive amounts of money that are being churned around. So I think the power of money to corrupt is what's really agonizing. But at the same time, You know, what's gratifying is quite honestly, I mean, here's Brad Karp, right? I mentioned him before, you know, who's the head of Paul Wise. He was the first of the lawyers to kind of fold in the face of Trump, you know, when Trump did his shakedown.

And, you know, I mean, it was just he had no need. I mean, you feel like saying, okay, so, you know, when he said like, it was going to affect all their business, etc. I mean, okay, so maybe their bonuses are going to go from seven million a year to four. Is that a terrible sacrifice for, you know, for some kind of professional and moral kind of, you know, rigor? It seems like it was. So it's like the sense that people have become so corroded by this money thing is really what worries me. And of course, it didn't really surprise me that Brad Garp then crops up in the files, you know, asking, you know, for help for this son or whatever. Because the guy's morally elastic.

We know that now. And so, you know, he's now had to step down, which personally I had no regrets about. But it's quite interesting to see who stands up in the face of things. It's very often quite surprising. I mean, you never really know who the people are who are going to sort of stand up. I mean, I'm very impressed with Mark Kelly at the moment. He's really sort of found his voice, you know, in the face of this attempt to shut him down from saying, you know, that the military have to not, you know, fulfill orders that are in.

illegal. I mean... And has just won a pretty significant ruling from a judge as well. He's won a significant ruling from a judge. He's been proved... And a judge who was appointed by George W. Bush so we can assume is a, you know, a rock-robed Republican. Yeah, I agree. But I mean, you know, I always thought he was a pretty good guy. I mean, he was an astronaut. But he's proved that, you know, he's better than that, that he's actually got a red line in the sand where he won't go, you know. And I love it when people kind of declare their red lines and they mean something, right?

I mean, it's something we were all sort of forgetting. I think there is a kind of moral slide, you know, which excess wealth and so on is leading people into. I mean, I look at, you know, what's happened at the Washington Post. And, you know, it's been very distressing, you know, to see Jeff Bezos, who was such a good, you know, honor of the Washington Post for the first few years. But in the time that he's owned the Washington Post, his billions have totally accelerated to the point that he's, I forget the number of it.

It's like, what is it, 200 billion or something now? He's just north of 200 billion. Yeah, north of 200 billion. It's money of such a kind of phantasmagorical like the GDP of countries that, you know, that I honestly believe that, you know, they've left planet Earth, literally. I mean, you know, I mean, they want to go to Mars, but I think they've gone already. I mean, goodbye. They left a couple of years ago, actually, mentally and morally.

So that is what I think is the biggest anxiety now. And I don't know how people without the tools to fight back, and you say, well, not answering the question, how do you fight back? I mean, I think journalism is a critical tool here. And we must back it. You know, we must, I mean, thank God that you're the beast still roars and that you're still doing your good, you know, smart stuff. I think that, you know, thank God that the New York Times has the same.

Salzburg, a family in charge of it. Thank God that Reuters has the Thompson family in charge of it, because they don't have the same, you know, sort of cynical attitude towards truth. But they are dwindling, you know, as a race. And I think unless we do support investigative journalism, rigorous reporting, editing that is really prudent. I mean, we're not asking for sort of rash statements or we're asking for serious, you know, undeterred, you know, investigations that really do get at things that people don't know and tell the truth. Without it, we're absolutely cooked. I mean, we have to support journalists. And the tragedy is how very few people are doing so. You know, they're just not. And it's almost as if they've sort of given up on the idea that

journalism, or feeling that journalism is some kind of optional extra or something, which, of course, it isn't. I mean, it's absolutely critical. And that's why I started the Truth Teller Summit in London, which I do every May when I'm doing it again this May in Harry's name, which is a great convening where we actually valorize the journalists. It's not a kind of what I call media bloviation fest. It's actually saying, meet these incredible journalists from reporting on Maduro from exile in Miami and they'd be doing it, you know, and they're so threatened constantly all these amazing Russian exile journalists who are in danger every day, you know, and they put their lives at risk to just get the truth out. And they're certainly not doing it for money.

There is no money in it, as you well know. As we well know, yes. We all know. I mean, people in journalists have already, you know, they're only doing it because they have a passion for the truth. You know, they're not doing it, you know, to make millions of dollars. It's one of the few professions that these got to attract these people with great, you know, vocational attitudes. to their work. And I love them to death, frankly. And, you know, I have a great passion for journalists, actually, and always have. I mean, I love them as a tribe. I really do. I mean, because they just, I love the way they make trouble. They get into trouble. And they just keep going, you know.

I mean, it's a wonderful thing to see. I do want to say, by the way, something I should probably said earlier, is that among the many correspondences that Epstein sent, he also wrote to IAC, which is the parent company of the Daily Beast, and it's, of course, Barry Diller is the chairman and CEO and basically owner of IAC, and Epstein's lawyers tried to go around you and go above your head or however they saw that, and we, I think, should be very delighted that there was absolutely 100% backing for you, I know, from Barry Dillard. So actually, I interesting, I missed that, but it doesn't surprise me, because I would like to see Epsi Dillard. tried to intimidate Barry Diller.

Barry Dillon knows who he is, what he thinks. He is not a guy who backs down in the face of threats. And he has a moral center, actually. I mean, he does. He doesn't need it. I mean, he is, you know, one of the things that's ridiculous, essentially. I mean, I wrote it in my fresh hell about the JFB. One thing we've learned is, like, we all thought that fuck you money was to say,

fuck you, right? When somebody tried to intimidate you. But it seems like today, fuck you. money is all about getting more fuck you money, right? But I mean, Barry Diller is of the mind and then sort of self-confidence to feel that, you know, he knows who he is and he's made enough money that he doesn't need to be threatened. And he's not out there trying to kind of scheme and connive for every next billion. I mean, he knows how to, he's got a center, you know, and it's not very common, actually. So yes, he's a wonderful person to be owning the Daily Beast. I would very

much like him to buy the Washington Post Barrier, if you're listening. He would be a fantastic owner for the Washington Post. Well, Tina, we, as I've said before, and we at the Daily Beast follow an incredibly big footsteps. And what these Epstein files revealed to us was some of what we couldn't have known about the raw courage that Conchita Sarnoff and you showed, getting this story out there and blowing it open to the world and revealing something that resonates now

maybe more, maybe more every day. It's a crisis. I mean, I think you're doing great work at The Beast now on the story. And I think also that it's wonderful to see the Beast, you know, prospering so much in this, you know, because we have to be successful in order to keep going. So it's great.

I'm so happy that The Beast is still, you know, one of the big voices out there. Well, we are merely following your lead. And Tina, thank you for joining us. Thank you. And hopefully the Epstein files will reveal more of those truths as we can't. Indeed. Thank you, Hugh. Tina, thank you for your amazing insights.

Thank you for being an inspiration. We here at the Daily Beast are relentlessly scouring the Epstein files. They throw up new information and new scandals every day. To keep up, please subscribe here on YouTube and go to thedailybeast.com to find out every update. And please get into the comments. There is so much to discuss from what Tina has revealed, from her opinions on The Powerful. And also, I just want to say that I have been in the comments myself looking at them from the last episode when I spoke to Professor Scott Galloway about his resist and unsubscribe campaign.

hundreds of you are taking up his call to unsubscribe some of the biggest tech companies and try and get some leverage over Donald Trump some people have different views. It's an amazing, fascinating debate. There's even some limericks, which I am not going, I'm afraid, to read out because my Scottish accent does make the delivery sometimes a bit difficult. Thank you to everybody who said nice things about my accent, I will say, and apologies to those of you who are struggling with it. The biggest thanks of all goes to our Bee Beast tier members.

There are so many now we can't read all your names. You are supporting our journalism every day and helping us follow in the footsteps at Tina Brown and Conchita Sarnoff. Thank you to all of our Bee Beast tier members. There are now so many of you, we can't read out all the names. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Please, everybody, remember, as Joanna would say, Be Beast.

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