The Daily Beast Podcast - ‘Pretty Close to a Hundred’ New Epstein Accusers

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who helped expose Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, joins The New Abnormal to talk about what’s next now that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s right hand, is behind bars. “There's a lot of women right now that are coming forward a lot and they're talking to prosecutors,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson. “There's pretty close to a hundred, from what I hear.” Meanwhile, a judge is close to unsealing a giant pile of documents related to Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking ring. “I hope somebody is standing in Maxwell’s cell when this happens,” Brown says. A year ago, she notes, when just some of those documents were unsealed, and a few big names were found to be in those papers, “Epstein was dead the next day.” Plus! Why Biden needs to be up 15 points in Florida before you can rest easy; how “Jared is slipperier than an eel in a barrel of KY”; why we’re now in the “most dangerous hundred days in American history”; what is “douchebag entropy”; and how, in Molly’s words, “hell hath no fury like a mediocre man trying to get his hands on my uterus.”  Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, and editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So we had this weekend of these polls that were like, Biden is beating Trump by 10 million voters in every state.

I do not trust this. You should not. Okay, good. Because today, actually, on Fox and Friends, or as I like to call it, the president's hour of, you know, three hours of me time. I just call it Fox infallation, but that's just me. Rona Romney. Rono Romney Trump?

Right. Mitt Romney's niece said that 60% of Republicans do not participate in polls anymore, according to the Cato Institute. So that is my question for you, Rick Wilson. So look, yes, is there a Republican undercount in polls? Sure. Okay. This idea that somehow the Trump demo is going to prank pollsters at scale is absurd. But let me say this. Explain why, because I don't get it. Because pollsters know how to screen. They know how to locate voters. They know how to find people in the sample that are appropriate for that sample. The simple trickery of saying, why, I'm a liberal Democrat.

You know, it doesn't work because these things are pulled out of the voter file. They're pulled out of voter behavior databases. This is not 1985, okay? This is a much different world. And polling is a fairly sophisticated machine. So are there Republicans who lie to pollsters? of course there are. There are Democrats, a lot of pollsters too, but it's not a problem at scale. Okay. Now, I will say this and I say this a lot. I say this until, you know, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

If you believe a national poll and you base your behavior on it, please reconsider everything about your life because you're a damn fool. National polls mean nothing. They show you the broadest 30,000 foot trend. They do not suffice to give you a clear picture of how the election is going to come out. because the election, and I'm just going to go through the boilerplate here, once again, for the audience who hasn't heard it before, this is a battle in the electoral college, whether you like it or not. The only polls that matter are the polls of likely voters in swing states. That's it. Here's what you should think if you're a person who wants to get Donald Trump out of office.

You should wake up every morning and think, oh, fuck, we're 30 points back. What can I do today to talk to people? How can I get out there and hustle? How can I get out there and try to convince people otherwise? How can I get out there and make a difference in this campaign in the swing states? Because a national poll takes in California, naturally. It takes in New York, naturally. It takes in Massachusetts, naturally.

Those states are not in question. We know how those states are going to turn out. We're talking about swing states, which are not as liberal as California, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, etc. It's very important to stay focused on not tricking yourself into believing national service. are meaningful. And in a lot of these states, and I've said this before, too, if you see a survey that says Joe Biden is 10 points up in Florida, that means he's tied. If you believe that he's 10 points up in Florida, I have all kinds of real estate on the waterfront in the flood areas to sell you. Wait, why? Explain why. Well, there's two reasons. One, Florida is a shit place to poll because

it just still has so many landline callers, landline polls. But the main thing is, the Republican Party of Florida, whether you love them or hate them, is really fucking good at elections. Okay? They're really, really, really, really fucking good at elections. The Democratic Party of Florida cannot organize a two-car motorcade. This is a longstanding matter. You think this is a purple state, but Republicans out hustle and outwork and outraise the Democrats on statewide races very frequently. Barack Obama won this state twice because Barack Obama was a tornado. He was a joggernaut. The average Democratic candidate. What do you mean by that? Barack Obama had a confluence of charisma, an excellent campaign. He brought in a great team into Florida and had a couple Florida guys in the lead, but they had to

build it from scratch. They didn't rely on the state Democratic Party to put it all together. And I'm not being critical of Democrats. I'm just stating a historically accurate interpretation or historically accurate analysis of what Florida looks like politically. If you think he's up 10 points, it doesn't matter. That's a tie ball game. I'll rest easy at night for Florida when I see consistent polling in the state where Joe Biden has a 15 to 17 point lead. That I will rest easy. That's a long way off. And this is going to become the battleground in this campaign because Trump has lost Michigan. He is on the way to losing Wisconsin. Arizona is slipping fast. North Carolina is slipping fast. A lot of the blocks that he needs, the building blocks he needs to run a successful

electoral college strategy have narrowed. And they are relying now on some of this wishful thinking stuff. Well, the hidden Trump vote is everywhere. There are certainly shy Trump voters. What they also don't understand is that there are shy Biden voters who still look like Republicans on paper, but are not going to vote for Donald Trump. But Rick, yes. Biden hasn't ever had a boat parade. You know, I believe that boater fraud is going to be a major issue in this campaign, of course. He also doesn't have biker parades. Yeah, I'm concerned. Well, in most polling, I mean, traditionally, I think there was a presentation at A-Port,

the American Association of Public Community Researchers last year on the validity of sampling of boaters. By that dear audience, I mean, there was no such thing. But they're going to do a lot of magical thinking, but there is nothing, nothing can be taken for granted in this campaign. absolutely nothing can be taken for granted. No one needs to, no one needs to wake up in the morning and go, hey, this shit's in the bag, because it ain't in the bag until it's over. Yeah, certainly true. Complacency is your enemy.

Listen, I'm just worried about the boating. That's all I can tell you. And the absentee boating. Absentee boating, boating fraud. That's right. There's endless, endless, endless. I may have to come up with some boater suppression techniques. Yeah, I'm worried about boater suppression.

Let's talk about how the liberal media is ruining the culture, and they're doing it by taking away the most favorite television program of all young Republicans, the age of three to seven, Paw Patrol. Somehow, Antifa has finally infiltrated American television programming. Somehow, their long-running devious plan of cultural Marxism, which springs back to the Frankfurt School, has finally achieved its greatest victory and remove Paul. Patrol, the beloved children's series that teaches the youth about why cops are good. They've removed it from, oh, wait, they didn't. However, your good friend, Kaylee McElell... Nobody knows how to pronounce her last name. That's the joke of it.

Kelly Ma! Mack and her... Right. Kaylee Ma, oh my God. Kaylee Ma sounds like Kalima from the Indiana Jones movie. Kalima... Kaylee who believes that everyone can get a test, who wanted a test, except for the people who need tests.

That woman. Kaylee pretends to believe quite a lot of things. But this idea that Paul Patrol was canceled, this is how the war on Christmas DNA from Fox infested every goddamn thing. I mean, these people, I haven't stared into the void of Twitter about this particular subject, but I guarantee you, there are a gazillion, bagillion tweets from three-star magas saying, Paul Patrol was canceled because Lip-Tard cucks hate it. Kaylee said so. Right. And so we are here to tell you the truth, which is you can rest easy, paw patrol.

has not been canceled. If I had young children, I would breathe a sigh of relief. Yeah, because there aren't 10 million other television programs for them to watch. Right? Right. I mean, young kids in that age should be watching forensic files. That's right. That's right.

Forensic files and Sherlock. Inside the Third Reich as a warning to others. But the point is that Kaylee has no problem lying. Look, the mendacity of the White House spokesbots has been remarkable from the beginning. I mean, Sean Spicer, at least you could sort of once in a while see him trying to blink out the word torture in Morse code from the podium. Let me out so I can do reality television, my true love. But Sarah Huckleberry never hesitated. But Kaylee combines that sort of fox look and feel, that sort of Fox user interface.

Let's put it that way. It combines the prettiness, the blondness, the oppositional defiant disorder, and the raving white-hot weapons-grade mendacity. And also, she has that kind of slipperiness that those women have, where, and men, I think there are men in Trump world who have it, too, that kind of a rapid fire disinformation ability. You have to almost lack a conscience to be able to continually, I mean, Kelly Ann does it too. Remember when Kelly Ann had that argument with the journalist where she said it's controlled and the journalist pointed to all these things? And Kellyan, it's like she couldn't stop. And so the journalist was like, well, maybe I'm wrong about everything I'm right about. Right.

They never blink to the fourth wall, okay? They never consciously say to themselves, man, I am telling the biggest fucking raft of bullshit I've ever heard. And I've got to at least wink and nod. Because look, in the old days in Washington, on both sides of the political fence, there would be people who'd had to gamely march out and say, the president's position on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there would be like a little bit of the reporters would go,

okay. And there would be like a little wink and a nod. Now, it doesn't mean that Trump is more genuine. It means that they just don't have the respect for the American voter because they're not talking to most Americans. They're talking to the Fox audience. They're talking to the people that really believe there's a war on Christmas. They really believe that Sharia gay marriage is coming any second. You know, so she's sort of a perfect avatar of all those things. And she will be on Fox, 0.001 seconds after the Trump administration is over. No, undoubtedly, undoubtedly. I mean, that's sort of, there's like a built-in off-season holding pen that is Fox News. Correct. But here's the thing, if I were Kaylee or anybody else in that world, I would start to think about my Fox deal right now. Tell me why. Well, because there are only so many seats at the curvy couch. There are only so many slots during the day. I can assure you, OANN does not pay like Fox. Oh, wait, it is not a place where you go to make your fame and fortune like Fox. You said something that they're all slippery in their way, and they really are. And this lying and mendacity and fabulism are hallmarks of this administration. That either comes in like the braggadocious bullshitting.

The president invented masks. How dare you suggest he never wanted you to wear a mask? In fact, masks go back to the Trump history, blah, blah, blah. And Jared, of course, is like slipperier than an eel in a barrel of K-Y. He is just like a... That is not an expression. Slippery as an eel in a bottle of K.Y. How would that even happen?

A barrel of K.Y. I'm sorry. Okay, continue. I'm not judging people, Molly. No, I certainly not. I hope not. Very non-judgmental. Jared is that kind of, he and Ivanka both did a slightly different, like, what we're here for is to make it really work under the surface.

So we'd like to present to you this PowerPoint deck about the things we done to prevent the world from plunging into a nuclear apocalypse. And the bullies, you know, the Peter Navarro types and the Larry Cudlow types, they just go out and basically yell at the camera. They all take on like one aspect of Trump, because Trump brings all of it. Trump does all of it. He either blusters or he yells or he walks off and a huff. So one person can only contain so many of the Trump multitude of horrifying traits. Right. I have a question for you about Larry. Hogan. Are you friends with him?

Yes. Larry Hogan is a good dude. Okay, because he's a never-Trump Republican. I wouldn't say he's fully never-Trump. Okay. I would say he is sharply Trump skeptical. Right. And as certainly not on the Christmas card list for the Trumps at this point. He may be on the Gitmo list for the Trumps at this point. He's refused to say he's going to vote for Trump.

Well, as most rational people have come to the conclusion that voting for Donald Trump is the equivalent of sticking your dick in a light socket. That is a logical choice, not only because he is the governor of a blue state who's done by bipartisan assessments a pretty good job. His numbers are very high among Democrats and Republicans. He's had to manage the COVID crisis largely without the degree of federal help that would have probably come to him if he had said, I love Donald. He just, I look at him and I just swoon. He probably could have had a lot more PPE and a lot more gear, but he's had to basically do it on his own, which he's, okay with. He's been fine with it. He's done a good job. He's been a very credible job.

But no, he's not going to vote for Donald Trump. But Hogan has never been on the Trump bandwagon. Unlike Sue Collins, who for the last four years has played Donnie's little helper on days of our Trumps and has constantly done things. You know, she goes home and says, I'm an independent. Well, I don't know. That's a bad Sue Collins accent. I don't have a Sue Collins accent. I mean, I don't know how you do a Sue Collins accent. I think you just keep going. Well, it's, it's hard to do it when your brows are furrowed so often. Exactly. When you're biting a knuckle out of concern,

all these things that she has done in D.C., all the votes she's cast that were not where main voters were. And, you know, your friend Brett Kavanaugh voting to exonerate Trump in the Ukraine matter, there are a million different areas where she assertively went against what main voters would have had her do. And because of that, you know, she's found herself in some political hot water back home.

Suddenly she found Jesus this weekend and said, Right. I'm in a tough election. I can't support Trump. Uh, what? She's been supporting Trump like a workhorse, like a rented mule for the last four years. So you will see, we should probably start a segment called They've Seen the Light or something like that of Republicans who in this year of electoral woe and misery suddenly find out that

Donald Trump has killed their political prospects. Right. Not only for the purposes of mockery, but for correction. By the way, when I said that, you should have imagined me as like, like a stern Jesuit. Yeah. We have a lot of stern Jesuits in New York. That's a thing here.

Wait, can we talk about what Lincoln's up to for two seconds? Sure. What is Lincoln up to? We are continuing to cause great trouble for the president. This week, we're going to be up with about $4 million in a bunch of different states, not only against the president, but against three of his Senate candidates, including our good friend Sue Collins. Nice. And we're going to continue a rollout of more of the psychological warfare media that's worked so nicely against the president because they've spent the last, I don't know, two weeks now trying to burn us down.

And all I can say is that Jared Kushner being in charge of that witch hunt and making Jason Baby Daddy Miller his cat's paw in that witch hunt. Jason, throw me in that briar patch. Toss me right in that briar patch, Jason. We don't even know that Jason Miller listens to this podcast. Jason Miller listens to this podcast, I assure you. Listen, I can't fart in my backyard without the Trump campaign knowing about it right now. Who do you think in the Trump campaign hates you the most? Oh, Jared right now.

Jared's way ahead right now. I kid you not, he literally screamed into a phone on a phone call. I want the Lincoln Project ended. I want them taken out. How could he do that? Could you guys get all sent to Gitmo? Listen, if Jared wants to send me to Gitmo, he can come by himself. I welcome him to drop by any time.

time. I hear our producer, Jesse, making a terrified sound. Let me rephrase that. The prospect of Jared trying to send me to Gitmo is hilarious for a whole host of reasons, but the pampered princeling, the Jared Kushner, who has never had a real job in his life, and who is the son of a felon and a slum lord, a felonious slum lord, in fact, I assure you, Jared Kushner's chances of spending time in a correctional facility sometime in this world vastly exceed mine. So Jared Kusher was also mad about the try something new ad, right? He was very mad about the Yvonk ad. That's what set him off.

Molly, I kind of wonder what Jared would do if the Lincoln Project ran an ad about Jared. Now I'm worried that the Lincoln Project is going to run an ad about Jared. I don't know, Molly. Maybe the audience wants the Lincoln Project to run an ad about Jared. I have a question for you guys, which is... Is it about an ad about Jared? Oh, God. So the president had a big tone change this weekend.

Did you notice the tone change, Rick? You know, as all Donald Trump tone changes are, they last exactly until the batteries on his shock collar fade. In this case, it was a matter of hours after the tone change of the briefings last week, which every reporter in the White House press room wrote the dumb story that Kellyanne planned for them to write. The president changed to a more serious tone where he might finally be taking COVID with the appropriate gravity. It's also five months into it, but yes, continue. Yeah, here's the bottom line about Donald. Trump. And this is what voters are going to have fundamentally ask themselves this year. Do you think

Donald Trump can change? Because we've seen four years in office and a year of campaigning precisely who he is. He never changes except for the worst. There's like a douchebag entropy where he always gets more chaotic and more horrible, but never more ordered, more disciplined, more focused, or more decent in any way. So he's trapped in the amber of his own mind and he cannot change. He cannot discipline himself. Somebody could say, Mr. President, we're about to be attacked by aliens unless you do X for three days. And on the morning of the second day, he'd be tweeting like, no one knows aliens better than me. Fuck them. I'll take on the aliens. We're very strong and powerful. Aliens come up to me and say, sir. Sir. Yes, I've done the very first new

abnormal podcast invitation of an alien. It's, things are really going off the rails here. But yes, fundamentally... Going off the rails. Fundamentally, the president is absolutely... Yes, we're completely screwed. Yeah, Donald Trump is in the most dangerous 100 days in American history right now because he's like a rat in a bucket. He's looking for any escape path.

He's going to bite anything that reaches into that bucket. He's going to go completely crazy for the next 100 days. And he does realize that his only pathway is trying to turn... what's happening in Portland and Seattle and other cities into a civil war, which he will gladly do. And people who underestimate Donald Trump's, the degree to which he will drag this country into war, drag this country into chaos, if they're not paying attention, their level of shock will be even higher. Somebody sent me something from my own book this weekend. I wrote it, and then I sort of lived it every day. In the last chapter of my book, the current book, available on Amazon, I wrote, they'll burn this country to the fucking ground to win.

You'll cry out in horror at what they'll do and how far they'll go. They will ignite a race war, wreck the economy, and abuse their fellow humans to win. They put children in cages for political theater and laughed about it. Never, ever underestimate how much they'll do to survive. So he will not change and he will not get better. There is no better iteration of Donald Trump. There is no better version of Donald Trump. This is the darkness.

And we are going to suffer through the fact that he doesn't have a good set of political options, that his pathway is narrowing, that his party has been destroyed, and that they're going to lose more House seats. And they should, by rights, pick up House seats this time, but they're not going to. And they're going to lose more Senate seats and probably lose control of the Senate. They're going to lose a friend of mine is a modeler who does political forecasting. He anticipates they're going to lose another five to 600 legislative seats across the country. Oh, that's delicious. Which is a nuclear bomb in the middle of the Trump GOP.

Yeah, that's pretty great. They're going to lose those seats. Why is that important? They're going to lose those seats right in the year where redistricting will happen. So, congratulations, guys. What a great deal. You picked Donald Trump. Somebody should write a little piece of dog roll about a snake.

Julie K. Brown is an investigative journalist with the Miami Herald. She's best known for pursuing the sex trafficking story surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. And today, she's going to talk with us about some of the details in that case and maybe make a little news. So, Julie, you're one of the examples of how journalism can change the world. If it weren't for you and the reporting of The Daily Beast and the New York Times, Jeffrey Epstein would still walk free. Can you talk about how you saw this work? It was kind of hard for me to, for the longest time, to really accept, wow, this is, you know, this is what you did because, you know, I never undertook this story with the thought that it was going to have such a big impact. So when that happened, I don't think anyone was more shocked than I was.

And it took a while for it to really set in. In fact, I really didn't believe it until someone with the Justice Department actually called me and told me that it was precisely my story that led them to investigate him. One, it was the women, of course, who were brave enough to talk to me, I think, that made probably the biggest impression on these prosecutors. amazing. You engaged in, you had the latitude to commit journalism, as I like to say, to go out and do a long-haul investigative drill down on this. Well, it's really hard and difficult and tedious and time-consuming and emotionally draining work. I had fortunately, you know, now I'm at the part where I'm writing a book on all this,

so I've had to really look at my career and look at the work that I've done in the past. And in honesty, a lot of what I had done throughout my career led me to this point. This wasn't something that I woke up one day was able to do. It was something that I had really trained and everything that I did up until this point gave me the ability to do this. I mean, when I look back now on how I did this series, it was an incredible amount of work. And, you know, the other thing people often don't realize is I wasn't just working on this project. There were a lot of things happening that I was pulled off for. I mean, the Parkland shootings happened in the middle of this. And of course, I dropped everything

and I helped with the paper's coverage of that, which was a huge story. We had a hurricane in the middle of this in Florida and I was sent over to the west coast of Florida and I was in a boat in Bradington and sloshing through mud. I mean, there were, you know, journalists don't have the luxury anymore of just sitting and working on one story or you do have other work to do in between. And, you know, my editor is pretty unrelenting. So he was always throwing stuff at me, even after the series ran. And I had a feeling that this story was going to explode into something bigger. He was still saying, hey, we have this prison story we need you

to do. I did a story about Jerry Falwell. You know, the cowboy thing. Do you remember that? I remember one of the reporters on that. They pulled me from Epstein. They put me on that. And, you know, I'm trancing around the keys, trying to find out the hotel room that they were hanging out

in the keys. Jerry Falwell's Cabana Boy. Yeah, the Cabana Boy story. So journalism, You know, it's not a vocation. It really is a calling. I mean, you have to want to do it for the right reasons or, you know, it's just a very hard career. I'm sure you know, Molly, to stay on it and make a living at because, you know, it doesn't play very well. And, you know, in my book I go over because I've had to really look at my life. As I said, I go over all the sacrifices that I've made. So, you know, it's been a long haul. It really was to this point. So, Julie, one of the things that struck me in all the reporting that you did on this is that there were two separate standards of justice. And Jeffrey Berman and Alex Azar or Azar seemed to have worked out some sort of this sort of magical thinking arrangement where Jeffrey Epstein essentially lived almost every aspect of his life and continued his predations against young women. But I was curious about how much of that was a shock to you, how much of that informed your reporting?

because this guy just got so many special considerations that no other human being would get. Well, I think the realization of how much special treatment and how much he, quite frankly, how much he and his lawyers manipulated the criminal justice system, I didn't come to that realization immediately. It was through so much painstaking research and reading of depositions and court hearings. And I would be here homeworking, you know, so I could stay. out of the office and focus. And literally there were times when I was reading so much that I would fall asleep in my chair and then I had to put her on my face and go back to the deposition I was

reading. And it was, you know, I kept forcing myself to go through everything because there were just so many little things. You had to read everything to find those little pieces, but there were so many pieces of information that I found that pointed to the fact that Epstein was, I mean, he had his finger on the button of everybody. He knew. all the secrets of every single person, even on his own legal team. I mean, he just is and was the master manipulator and mind fuck, basically. I mean, he met with every single lawyer, even the civil lawyers that were up against him. He wanted to meet them, sized them up. He found out one of them loved chocolate chip cookies, so he would make sure that he had chocolate chip cookies sitting there

when he met with him. You know, he was that kind of just a really a mastermind as far as trying to get into people's heads. I have a question for you about Dershowitz. He seems singularly obsessed with you. It's just really crazy because let me tell you something. This series was not about Alan Dershowitz. I mean, you really look at the series. The only thing I put into that series, because I didn't want to make it about Dershowitz, were things that were all. already in the public record about Dershowitz. There was nothing beyond what everybody already knew as far as Dershowitz was concerned. But I think because this series created such a stir, it brought that information back into

the forefront of the media. And he was probably getting calls and it just got into his crawl and he saw me as the villain that brought this out again. And I think in the course of everything that he's done since then, it has only made it worse for him, quite frankly. He just keeps going at things that don't make even any sense. Well, Alan clearly does not want to talk about Olga. No. I mean, here's the other really important thing, and I get frustrated with the media sometimes for this.

He constantly says in the media, I've proved this. What has he proven? He's never, ever proven things that he says that he has proven. He has not. My editor and I sat with him for hours and hours and hours at his Miami apartment, trying to get him to give up that proof. And he just doesn't want to surrender it. He says, here's all the papers.

They're sitting right here. Here, you could sit here at the desk in my apartment. And I'm talking about these are papers that are, you know, like a conference room table, piled with papers, and they're basically his calendars and the information that he provides from his own books, or, you know, like I said, appointment books. And we were supposed to sit there. Like, it probably would have taken us six days. I mean, we just were, we said, you've got to give it to us so we can authenticate it. No, I can't do that. So, like I said, going back to my point is that he's allowed to keep saying, I've proven this, I've proven she lied, when he really has it. Now, that doesn't mean, that he is an innocent. I mean, he could very well be innocent, but he's attacking it from the wrong perspective, from the fact that he's saying he's proven something that he hasn't. Sure. Well, I think that there's a lot of that protest too much thing going on with Dershowitz in all these interviews that I've seen with him. If I were in a political campaign, I saw a guy doing that,

I would be like, more research, please. If you notice, there's been a, you know, there's a lot of other men that have been accused. Of course, the prince is a whole other story. He did an interview that also didn't go over very well with the public. But it's an understatement. But there's a lot of other men that have... And they're not going after people. They're not going after Virginia every single day and calling her a liar. And they're just, I guess, smart enough to know.

Look, they just say, it's not true. And then that's the end of it. And so it's just baffling to me. He seems to like the spotlight, I guess. And maybe that's... Alan Dershowitz in the spotlight? No. Right. Do we think that what's going to happen with Prince Andrew?

Here's the thing. There's a lot of women right now that are coming forward a lot. And they're talking to prosecutors. And so I think a lot depends on what else they get from the women right now who are brave enough to not only go forward because there's this, now there's this settlement agreement whereby many of them are going to be able to get money from Epstein's estate, which they can continue to do so. without putting their name in the public eye. But now that they're out there, some of them, I think, are talking to prosecutors, so we'll have to wait and see if any of them have more information on other men like Prince Andrew

who may have been, you know, involved with Epstein. How many women do you think, I mean, just ballpark because obviously you don't know, but like how many new accusers do you think there are? I think there's at least, there's pretty close to a hundred,

I think, from what I hear. Wow. Seems like a lot. Well, you know, now they know that there's money there now. They have to go through a process to collect it. But, you know, and they have to have some kind of way of proving it, I guess, just no deal can come forward and say, I met Jeff Epstein and he molested me without having something, you know, whether a diary or friends or I don't even know what all the mechanisms they're going to use to prove. But he was involved with hundreds of women over the years. Wow.

So they were able to unroll his finances? Well, I don't think so. I mean, there is some that the estate admits is there, this $500 million. But I think most people know that there's probably a lot of other money buried offshore or in other places that we may never know about, you know, because he had been doing that for a long time. Nobody really understands we're still trying, journalists are still trying to unravel exactly how he made his money. Right. There's a lot of shenanigans in that one, too. So the arrest of Glenn Maxwell a couple weeks ago, has that rebooted any of the stories?

Has that generated any more sort of churn in the coverage? I had been getting a lot of calls from people on emails, from people saying, oh, my gosh, you know, this case is all going to go away now. They're bad guys are going to win, and Epstein's dead, and that's the end. And I always knew that the prosecutors were going after Maxwell. I always knew that they were aggressively pursuing it. And I think once the public sees and some of the victims sees that they're still going full steam ahead with this case, I hope that there's going to be more people that will come out. Maybe somebody, people with conscience. You know, I always say this story is a story about people who have no conscience.

But I keep hoping that maybe there'll be some people that will come out who knew exactly what they were doing. I mean, I know that, you know, they didn't do this in a bubble. there were a lot of people around them that knew what they were doing. There's a sort of lurid shock value to the whole Epstein story, and it is horrifying on every possible axis. But in some ways, and I keep coming back to this, this is the kind of guy that only gets away with this because of the money. He only gets away with this because of the financial wherewithal he has to buy the right lawyers, to buy off the right people, to influence the right powerful politicians. I think it's an underreported thing. I think you've touched on it

in your stories and today a little bit of just how manipulative and crafty this guy. was, just how much of an actual supervillain he turned out to me. Well, I hope my book's going to detail that more. I mean, certainly it was, I actually feel that most, everybody keeps thinking they think it's the politicians. Of course, I think they were a piece of it.

But it was really a lot of very wealthy people that he insinuated into, you know, whether financially or personally into their lives. I mean, he, you know, he had an long association with Leon Black with Justice Daly, with former J.P. Morgan executive, Glenn Dubon, who had the fastest growing hedge fund in the 2000s, Bill Gates.

I mean, there were a lot of people that scientists, MIT, Harvard, the list goes on and on. And when you put together, which is what I actually have been working on in the past couple of weeks or so for the book, when you put together all these things that he was doing. I mean, he was putting out press releases in 2012. He had publicists almost every. day putting out press releases about him, the science philanthropist, Jeffrey Epstein, a million dollars to melanoma research. He, Jeffrey Epstein starts a youth orchestra in the Virgin Islands. I mean, it was every day. And he just went full court with these academics and these scientists dangling grant money. And just, you know, he just wanted to be. embraced by some of the most brilliant minds in the world because he thought he was one of the most brilliant minds in the world.

Can you tell us about the baby ranch? The baby ranch story, which was actually broken by the times, not by me, because I just couldn't do every story. But I was glad that they did it because at that point I was looking for help because I couldn't keep up with everything. They found out about it through this circle of scientists that he had associated with. We're talking about even people from NASA that he was friendly with and people who needed money for their research projects. And so he would have these salons at his townhouse. in New York and at Harvard University, and he would invite all these scientists and academics and wealthy people in general, and just sort of like talk about these esoteric and highbrow ideas.

He really sort of painted some of these salons as we're going to sit and solve all the problems of the world. We're going to save the world. We're going to come up with a solution for poverty. We're going to have a game plan in the event of a earthquake. or a nuclear attack. We went, everybody to sit at the table and we're going to form panels and we're going to talk about how the country should respond in case of a nuclear attack. It was things like that. So when he was doing all these kind of salons and cocktail parties and things like that, he just would talk about cryogenics and how he thought that maybe he should bottle his DNA and inseminated into women and impregnate them and he could do this in his ranch

in New Mexico and, you know, who knows exactly how serious he was or whether he was just kind of waxing on about these crazy ideas. But he did talk to enough people that, you know, raised a lot of eyebrows. And what's interesting about it is, you know, these scientists knew that some of this stuff was crazy, but they still kind of entertained him anyway. Right. He's a rich guy. All right. This is some rich guy. He's got some crazy idea. You know what? He's got some money. So maybe we should just, you know, Let them talk. Everybody's chasing grant money.

I'm glad we got to talk about the baby farm, though. Just Len, let's just get back to this for a second. What does this open up now? Because I saw that there's a lawsuit that's going to be unsealed and the courts were fighting about unsealing it and they gave her another week. Can you talk about that? Yeah, well, I can really talk about it because it's based on my lawsuit. Basically, what happened was...

Can you talk about your lawsuit first? It's the same thing. What it is actually is when I was doing this series, I found out about this lawsuit that Maxwell and Virginia Roberts had had, well, Virginia had sued Maxwell for defamation. But it was really a lawsuit where they were trying to expose Epstein in a roundabout way through discovery. And I was waiting for the lawsuit to go to trial when I was working on the series. And of course, it never happened because they settled. Virginia got a lot of money as a result of it because they knew from the discovery. in other words, the evidence that they had collected against Gielin and Epstein indirectly through this lawsuit was horrible against them and they were never going to win the lawsuit. So they settled it. During the course of the lawsuit, the judge that presided over it allowed them to seal virtually everything in the case because they got tired of every single thing that was submitted. They kept putting in, well, we want to seal your honor. So just to speed things along, I think in part, the judge just agreed,

seal everything, which you're not supposed to do. And so what happened was initially Alan Dershowitz and a blogger Mike Turnovich. Mike Zernovich, of Pizza Gate fame. They filed a motion to try to get access to some of the documents while the case was still being litigated and the judge rejected it. They didn't ask to open all the documents, only some of them. So what happened was after it was settled that Miami Herald and I, you know, using my name on my behalf as the reporter, filed another motion lawsuit essentially saying that we wanted the entire case unsealed. Initially, the judge who presided over the trial rejected it. We appealed it to the Second Circuit. We got some of those documents released. And those documents were released almost a year ago now. And the day after those

documents were released, which revealed a lot of names of men who had been accused of being involved with Virginia, for one, but also other players in the Epstein saga were revealed as part of this piece of the lawsuit that was released. The next day or that same night, Epstein hung himself. Oh, wow. So what's ironic about this now is... That's what they want you to think. Right. Yeah, I have a question about that. That's another whole thing. But here's the irony of it. We continue to fight to unseal the rest of the case. We've been fighting even all the way up until now. There were objections by, of course, Maxwell doesn't want any of it out. And there were a couple of John Does who didn't want some of it out.

And all this time, you know, the Miami Herald has been paying all these legal fees, fighting for these documents. And so last week it was a real victory for us because the judge, we thought, we're only going she's just going to release a couple things because the docket that was out there said it was going to review 1, 2, 3, X, Y, and Z to see if they would be released. And to our astonishment as we're listening to the hearing, she's just like, released, released, released. So she ordered, it sounds like almost everything released with some restrictions. And we're waiting for, of course, Maxwell has appealed. She has a week. The judge gave her a week to find out whether the Second Circuit, I guess, is going to review the appeal. And if that doesn't happen, then the documents are going to hit the docket.

And that's exactly what happened with Epstein. So I hope somebody's standing in Maxwell's cell when this happens this week for next because, you know, a year ago, when this happened, Epstein was dead the next day. Yeah. Jesus. So do you think they will be released? Yeah, they're going to be released. I mean, Maxwell's going to appeal.

I don't know whether the circuit's going to take it up because they really already did that when we appealed it ourselves. The Herald appealed. And their decision was in our favor to really release everything. So I'm not so sure why they would take it up again. Because in my view, and I'm not a lawyer, they've already decided that these documents should be in the public purview, that they should never have been sealed like they were, which was like a blanket ceiling. I mean, this is a case of important public concern. Our lawyer argued this eloquently before the Court of Appeals, that sex trafficking is a horrible

crime, and there's evidence here that this crime, to some degree, was covered up. And this is why it's important that we get our hands on all the information that we can in this case. Absent, of course, the names of victims who should be protected, personal information about certain people, you know, who are victims. or not related to the case at all should be protected. But other than those kinds of information, all this should now be transparent and the public should finally be able to see exactly what happened and why Epstein was allowed to get away with what he did. So a lot of really powerful men are very nervous. I would think so, yes. Just checking. I mean, I actually kind of think they're probably more nervous about Maxwell than maybe they were even about Epstein. I really, I suspect,

You know, she's not guilty until proven guilty. But I suspect that she probably knows everything. I mean, she ran his household, and I put quotes around household. She just was the one that did everything. Look, he couldn't tie his own shoe laces. He had butlers. He had chefs. He had pilots. He had, I mean, he just didn't do that stuff. He had a lot of people around him that did it for him. And she certainly was one of those people. And she knows everything. Can you speculate? What do you think? Like, just as a guess, as someone who knows a lot about this, how do you think Epstein made his money? I think he was a super duper smart money launderer. Think about it. He wasn't laundering money for your average run-of-the-mill multi-millionaire.

He was probably money laundering for huge countries, you know, royal families, just people that have so much money that you can't even imagine. And if you get like 0.1% of $30 billion, that's a lot of money. And if you do it for a lot of different people, you make a lot, a lot of money. And so to me, when everybody says, well, how do he make his money? And it's this big secret. I sort of, I don't know why. I just don't find it all that fascinating because in my mind, he was just really a super money launderer. As one does. So what is your next step? I'm a journalist. I like to go from one story to another.

So this was a really long, laborious project. And I really had to think, I talk a little bit in the book about how much Emily, I haven't mentioned Emily, but Emily was a big part of this. She's my videographer, a photographer who probably kept me sane throughout this. But there were times that, and especially while doing this book, I call it going into the Epstein darkness, which really is a real traumatic thing, you know, to have to live in this. for, you know, right now, it's probably almost three years that I've been living in this. And it's just been a, you know, just such a journey and so difficult, more difficult than I ever imagined when I first decided, oh, I'll call up some of Epstein's victims. And this will be easy and I'll get the reaction to Labor Secretary Acosta getting nominated. This will be easy. I'll

just call up a couple girls and that'll be the end of it. You know, and here we are. You know, years later, little did I know, how much bigger this story, you know, is like peeling away an onion, you know, and how big it was. Have you been affected by their pain? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's sometimes hard for me not to cry when I see them now. You know, I talk to them pretty regularly. It's like we've lived through something together. You know, I certainly didn't live through the trauma that they went through, but I have to understand it in order to do the story. And, you know, I'm getting cracked up just talking about it really because I've watched from the moment that I interviewed them until now, you know, they've changed and they've just become so much stronger.

And I'm so proud of them, really, for all their courage. And it's just kind of an amazing transformation to have watched, you know. The new Abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks. Starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday. Sunday, but listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these. So head over to New Abnormal.com to join now. Your Beast inside membership helps support the great reporting at the Beast and podcasts like the New Abnormal. Thanks. Rick Wilson. Bollyjong Fast. I have a fuck that guy for today. What? I do. I know. It's the one segment folks that we must do by state, federal,

and local law. It's fuck that guy. Our one segment. Yeah, our one segment. Yeah, our one segment with an actual name. Although I think here comes the sun or they've seen the light. It's going to be our other new segment. Yeah, we have to try to find someone who's not horrendous. We have to brand that appropriately. My fuck that guy is Tom Cotton. And Tom Cotton in the ongoing Trumpian culture war, as part of his plan to run for president in 2024, mark it down, write it up. It's going to happen. The worst. Besides killing the New York Times editorial page, what else has he done? You know, I just like to give you the most apocalyptic vision. So Tom Cotton this weekend, spend a little time defending slavery. Now, he has tried to do a double

reverse walkback with a flip since then by saying, oh, I was just criticizing the 1619 project. I was saying that the founders were, and yes, you know what, Tom's technically correct. Many of the founders viewed slavery as a moral abomination and a horrible compromise in the birth of this country. And many of the founders had profound and lasting writing and speaking about how this was an element of our founding that was going to demand a reckoning, and my God, we've had a reckoning about it that in the Civil War cost 600,000 American lives, and we've got a reckoning about it that we still haven't overcome to this day. But Tom Cotton is not stupid. He knows better. This was, in my view, one of those deliberate provocation, nod and a wink things to try to say, oh, no, no, no, no, it's the Democratic Party that they're racist. It's not us. Trust me, it's not us. And even if I was charitable towards Tom Cotton, which I am not, getting into that ditch, he knew better.

He knew what he was doing. That is a pernicious bullshit lie that he's been misinterpreted and misquoted. No, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was completely, completely trying to churn the Breitbart audience. Yeah, I mean, there's an argument to be made that slavery, when you start defending slavery, you may, in fact, be on the wrong side of history. A little bit. In any possible way.

So you want to hear who my fuck that guy is? I do. My fuck that guy is another young Republican senator who is really just unbelievably awful. Hell hath no fury like a mediocre man trying to get his hands on my uterus. Welcome to fuck that guy, Josh Hawley. What has Holly done to offend you? Vice President Holly, as he likes to think of himself. He won McCaskill seat on Trumpism and whatever else.

And he's very young. And the things, his bills have been very anti-tech. He hates tech. He's worried about, you know, there's a whole, most of his bills have been pretty dumb. But this, I think, takes the cake because he said that he doesn't trust Supreme Court justices and he's going to make sure that from now on, they must promise that Roe v. Wade was decided wrongly. And he's going to make them answer that. You know, for decades, Republicans have held the position that they wanted to simply appoint justices who would interpret the Constitution faithfully and not legislate from the bench. Right. I think that time is over. So what Josh Hawley is saying very clearly is that as part of his 2024 strategy, because he too is actually ambitious to become president, 2024.

You know, it's a combination of nationalist populism and the Handmaid's Tale. Good job. That's a winning strategy for suburban women. Who doesn't want the Handmaid's Tale? I mean, the outfits. You look good in red, right? Yeah. Oh, and a pointy hat. I mean, forget it. So I do think that's fascinating. My question, and I don't know the larger machinations of what these Supreme Court hearings are, what their sort of rules are. But fundamentally, isn't that sort of you're not supposed to ask some questions like that?

That is something that has also been a tradition on both sides, is that you don't ask about the decision-making issues you would be called to hear at the bench. So he is establishing a very bright line litmus test. And I assure you, I mean, look, the Democratic. Democrats have a spoken or unspoken litmus test on the other side, but the case here, he knows that there are cases about Roe and there are abortion-related cases that will be coming forward in the next, you know, six to eight years. And he is looking to make sure that liberal hero John Roberts doesn't have the ability to keep Roe where it is right now in our legislative, political, and cultural climate. And you know what's interesting about this, not to get too geeky here? But a lot of people

think that Roe has issues that are not related to abortion. Yes, there are people who have jurisprudential analyses of Roe that, and I've heard an argument from a very strongly pro-choice person, that she would have much preferred a better case than Roe to codify abortion as a right, because Roe has some mechanical... Privacy issues. Legal flaws in it, right. It depends on too many, it's got too many contingencies, you know, to keep it together. But, look, what Josh Hawley is really saying is, get back in the kitchen, honey. Yeah, exactly. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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