The Decibel - The Epstein scandal and the Canadians who knew him

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Last week, over 20,000 pages of the late Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, texts and other documents were released. In one email, Epstein – the deceased child sex trafficker with ties to U.S. President Donald Trump – writes that Trump “knew about the girls.” It has intensified the public outcry for the U.S. government to release all of its investigative files on Epstein. And on Tuesday, the U.S. Congress voted to make all of its information public.Today, the Globe’s international correspondent, Nathan VanderKlippe joins the show. He’s been following the rift the Epstein scandal has caused within Trump’s MAGA base, the President’s evolving response, and what the released emails tell us about the Canadians connected to Epstein.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The estate of Jeffrey Epstein recently turned over more than 20,000 pages of emails, texts, and other documents to the U.S. House Oversight Committee. In one of those emails, Epstein writes that U.S. President Donald Trump, quote, knew about the girls. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking minors in 2019. While awaiting trial, he died by suicide in prison. This latest document release has intensified a years-long public outcry for the government to unseal its investigative files on Epstein. And on Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to do that. Today, the Globe's international correspondent Nathan Vanderclip is here. Nathan has been following the rift the Epstein scandal has caused within Trump's base,

how the president's response has evolved, and what the released emails tell us about the Canadians, connected to Epstein. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Nathan. Thanks for coming back in the show. Thanks for having me. So the Epstein case and Trump's connection to him have been in the news for months. And this past week, over 20,000 pages of emails were dropped, which includes some Canadians. And we'll get to that. But before we do, there's a lot to catch people up on.

So first, I want to clarify, because we've heard a lot about the Epstein, files. But what was released was not the Epstein files, right? No, these are documents, largely correspondence, emails, and that sort of thing that were handed over by his estate and have been in the possession of a congressional committee, which released parts and then a large some of them last week. The Epstein files that people have been referring to are the files that were amassed by the Justice Department as part of an investigation into him based on, on his arrest in 2019. And those, those are different. Okay, got it. Nathan, do we know why this release of documents is happening now? The documents were released last week because the House

Representatives finally came back for a sitting and it was clear that there was a vote that was coming to release the files. And so there was an effort to release some of these other documents that the committee had in its possession as it's become clear that the political momentum is moving towards greater release of what exists in terms of the documentary record about Epstein and his correspondence and all of these other things. So, Nathan, what is it about this case that has captured and held the attention to the American public? Well, I mean, I think it's worth remembering that this goes back a very, very long time.

I mean, police first opened a criminal investigation of Epstein after reports from a parent of a 14-year-old girl who said Epstein paid that girl for a massage. That was back in 2005. So we're talking now 20 years ago. And in 2008, Epstein then pleads guilty to two state counts on solicitation of prostitution, solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18. He sentenced 18 months in prison, released after less than 13. It's quite a comfortable prison set up much of the time he's allowed to go out and work and that sort of thing. But there are immediate questions about the deal that Epstein has struck, in particular with prosecutors. There was an immunity deal from federal charges, which was initially kept secret.

That deal was made with the person who was then the top prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Florida, who is Alex Acosta. Alex Acosta in 2017 goes on to become President Trump's Labor Secretary. But even before then, Epstein had already made himself a bit of a fixture of New York society. He owned a nine-story townhouse. That was likely, or at least he lived in a nine-story townhouse. That was likely the largest private residence in Manhattan, 51,000 square feet. He managed money for billionaires. He flew around on a private jet with the likes of Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey.

And so, you know, he has been a subject of public fascination for his social connections, for his access to money and celebrity. for a very long time and a subject to of criminal investigations for a very long time. Yeah. And it's important to point out here that, yeah, it's his connection to all these powerful people. And then in fact, not having these files released that has played into this kind of conspiracy theory around what's going on there. Right. And of course, the conspiracy theory that was augmented by the circumstances of his death in prison before going to trial on the latest charges. You know, his death was ruled a suicide and lots of conspiracy theories about whether that's

in fact, correct. There was a video that was released from inside the prison. It doesn't show everything at one point. It appeared there was a minute missing from the video. And so this has gone back and forth and back and forth. Right. Yeah. So let's turn back to these emails that were released. A lot of what's in these documents are Epstein's personal correspondence. What did we learn about the president? What we learned is some of the things that Epstein was telling other people about Trump. And we've known, I mean, there's pictures of the two of them together. We've known that there was a relationship for some time. Trump has said that that relationship was cut off and they have not been friends for a long time. But I think what the emails make clear is the degree

to Epstein was someone that people turned to to get information about Trump. And it was someone that people in Trump's orbit turned to. There's a fairly extensive record of communication with Steve Bannon, who was pivotal to Trump's first campaign. And we also found out that Epstein saw himself as being in possession of information that could be detrimental, that could be damaging to Trump. And this is, you know, where we have Epstein writing privately that, you know, I want you to realize that the dog that hasn't barked is Trump. He says one of the victims spent hours at his house with Donald Trump. And that's never been mentioned. There's another series of emails with a journalist where Epstein asks, would you like photos of Donald and girls in

bikinis in my kitchen? There's another email in which Epstein says about Trump for 2019. Trump, quote, knew about the girls. Not clear what that means. But it all suggests that Epstein believed that he had damaging information about Trump and about Trump's conduct in his presence, or at least in his orbit. Yeah, it's interesting because these emails have some pretty, it sounds like damning language, but yet we still don't have the full picture, right? No, we don't have the full picture. In fact, we may never have the full picture. But it does appear that we are now moving towards perhaps a fuller picture in the weeks that come. How is the president and the White House responded to what's in these emails?

Well, I mean, there's been an attempt to discredit them. Initially, Trump has gone back and forth and back and forth on Epstein. And, you know, there have been times where he has you know, dating back 20 years ago where he's been willing to say favorable things about Epstein and about their friendship and about what he thought about Epstein on the campaign trail. He said that he would declassify the Epstein files, his own social media account, said that he would declassify the files from Epstein, from JFK, and from September 11. But then more recently, he talked about the Epstein files as being a democratic hoax. This was over the last few weeks.

And then over the weekend, he staged another dramatic turn in which he said they should be released. And at the same time, he demanded that the Justice Department investigate Democrats and people associated with the Democratic Party who are also in those files, including, you know, former President Bill Clinton, the former Treasury Secretary at Larry Summers and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. And so it's difficult to say what Trump's position has been because Trump's position has been basically all of the position. when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. Absolutely. There's a lot of twists and turns going on there. And what's really interesting as well is that the Epstein scandal has caused division in Trump's base. Can you walk me through that?

Yeah. I mean, you know, as I mentioned, he was involved with Steve Bannon and providing advice to Steve Bannon. He was obviously at one point in Donald Trump's social orbit. More recently, we saw sort of him saying that he would release the Epstein files, there was a belief in parts of his base that the Epstein files contained evidence of sort of sex trafficking among Democrats and that sort of thing. And then, of course, after Trump comes into power, there appears to be this reversal in which

he does everything seemingly in his power to prevent their release. And yet some of his supporters, including key supporters, like Representative Marjorie Taylor and Green, said, no, no, no, in the name of transparency, we need to release them. There was evidently a pretty high-level campaign to convince her otherwise, which resulted in a really public falling out over the weekend between Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green. You know, we now have supporters of Donald Trump, some of whom continue to think that these files contain evidence against Democrats, some of whom no longer want to see them release because I think they might contain damage to Donald Trump. And so it's a very, very complex situation. So you mentioned this a bit earlier, but let's talk about what. Trump has been doing this flip-flopping.

So in the aftermath of these emails, Trump's position on releasing the files has changed. He didn't want to release them, and now he does. Do we know why he's changed his mind? We don't know exactly. I think there's a couple of obvious explanations. One is that it appeared he was going to lose that battle, that the House of Representatives was going to vote on a bill to releasing the files. That, of course, still has to go through a number of legislative steps.

including before the Senate, et cetera, but it appears that he lost that and perhaps he was trying to get on the winning side of the equation. But about the same time, we had Trump order an investigation, which as Justice Department very quickly took up, into Democrats. And so perhaps he has also seen that this is a situation

that he can also use to his political advantage in the broader political environment. And so there's a number of things that have happened there. This is also very clearly being something that has dogged his presidency now for months, One could see an argument for trying to effectively rip off the Band-Aid, but we'll see what happens. Okay. There's been also some speculation that Trump's been doing certain things, like, for example, lifting sanctions on some food items,

to draw attention away from the Epstein scandal and his connection to it. Is there any truth to these claims? I mean, it's hard to know. I mean, the Trump administration, of course, does eye-popping things on such a regular basis that it's hard to know. what is eye popping anymore and what is unusual. But I think it's fair to say that much of what his administration has done in the last few months has been seen through the lens of the Epstein files, you know, on any daily basis is what Donald Trump is doing, is it an attempt to sort of move public attention away from what's

in those files or is it part of the normal business of governing? And I think that just speaks to, you know, the fact that that question has been asked so persistently speaks to the political potency of what is contained in these files. And of course, the allegations, let's not forget. I mean, the allegations here is that girls were sexually taken advantage of, were sexually abused by wealthy and powerful men, and that girls, people under the age of 18, were trafficked for sex. I mean, these are genuinely troubling allegations.

We'll be right back. Think you can beat the stock market? Now's your chance to prove it. Get in on the Globe and Mail Tradeoff, a stock market simulation game. Here's how it works. You trade with fake cash, use real-time market data, and learn from the Globe's investing insight to make virtual trades, and you have the chance to win a grand prize of $5,000 in real cash.

Just go to globe and mail tradeoff.com. Rules apply and registration ends on November 24th. Get in the game today at globe and mail tradeoff.com. So this latest release of Epstein documents doesn't just involve Trump or even just U.S. citizens. Nathan, we also learned about Epstein's connection to Canadians. Can you tell me about Lawrence Krause? Lawrence Krause is a physicist. He's born in the U.S.

He grew up in the Toronto area. He studied at Carlton University. He goes on to work at Yale, at Case Western Reserve University, at Arizona State University. and, you know, he is one of these physicists who has kind of positioned himself at the nexus of the sometimes arcane nature of science as well as public communication. He has a podcast. He chairs the Free Speech Union of Canada. He joined as a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation, which is a Calgary-based think tank. And, you know, he's written for public consumption through, you know, another.

articles over the last decade in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The National Post, and in fact, the Globe and Mail. And so he's someone who has maintained a bit of a presence and has sort of maintained connections with really high-level people. I mean, dating back all the way to 2006, he organized a conference of sorts with a number of people, three Nobel laureates, Stephen Hawking, and other sort of high-profile scientists. And so he's being part of that broader sort of high-level scientific milieu for quite some time. Okay. And so before we get into the email correspondence between Epstein and Krause, how and why were Krause and Epstein connected? We don't know exactly how they came to be connected, but we do know that Epstein,

and this dates back to there was a profile of him. was written in 2003 by Vanity Fair. And already there, it notes his interest in theoretical physics, and he sort of made himself into a science philanthropist. And he was a keybacker of a project that Krause was an important part of at Arizona State University. Epstein's foundation contributed $250,000 U.S. dollars to that. One of the wealthy Americans who Epstein worked with also seems to

have contributed some money to that, some of which was subsequently returned. But we've saw this not just with Krause, but with a number of other scientists that came to know Jeffrey Epstein because Jeffrey Epstein was a willing source of funds for scientific work. Okay. So let's talk about the email documents here. What did we learn about the communications between Epstein and Krause from the release documents? Well, like I said, we knew already that the two had a relationship. we knew that Lawrence Krause had invited people to Epstein's island in the Caribbean as far back as 2006. But what some of these emails showed was the persistence of the communication between the two

up until sort of the year before Epstein's second arrest. We saw the ways in which Krause turned to Epstein at a moment when Kraus himself was alleged to have participated in sexual misconduct. Krause denies all of that, but he did turn to Epstein. He copied on Epstein on a draft of his response. He said, could use some advice. Epstein offers some answers. The two men sort of go back and forth over the years. At one point, while Krause is dealing with some of this stuff, he sends what seems like a bit of a lament. You know, Krause writes, I wonder if I will ever really recover. I wish they would indict Trump or something right now, which seems to be an effort to perhaps create some sort of distraction from his own circumstances.

The two in 2015 also exchanged emails, which seemed to suggest that Krause was en route to Epstein's island. You know, in 2018, Krause asks Epstein if he could potentially get a seat on Epstein's jet flying to Europe. And so there was a number of things. And then there's what appears to be a joke, although it's not clear. You know, in 2018, there's email correspondence between the two about a women in the world. Summit. And actually, one of the speakers at that Women in the World Summit is Sophie Gregor Trudeau. And then Krause responds. And again, it's not entirely clear because it's an email. But I mean, it seems at first reading to be tongue in cheek. But he says, let's do a men

of the world conference. Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Woody Allen, all people who have had sort of allegations of misconduct against them as well. And so it's an interesting record that seems to suggest a degree of familiarity between the two men for many years. What has Krause said about the released emails? Well, we sent him in our reporting on this article, a list of detailed questions. He responded. He says, I've never hidden the fact that I need Jeffrey Epstein, interacted with him on several occasions, usually to attend salons, he said, with interesting speakers of scientific meetings.

He says the two men discussed world, science and politics. Krause said Jeffrey had similar relationships with numerous other well-known scientists because he was fascinated by science, and that, of course, we have a pretty rich record of. And Krause also said, in response to questions about seeking advice from Epstein on this, Krause said, I sought out advice from essentially everyone I knew when false allegations about me were circulated in the press. And then he said, none of the communications with Epstein relate in any way to the horrendous crimes he was accused of in 2019. I was shocked as the rest of the world when he was arrested. Okay.

We should mention that there were other Canadians connected to Epstein in these email documents. Can you tell me more about other people we might have heard about? Yeah. And I mean, you know, we have evidence of his connections with Canada going back many years. He at one point dated the daughter of a wealthy Canadian family in New York. He had a longstanding friendship relationship with Mortzuckerman, the Montreal-born media magnate, who own the Atlantic at times, the Fast Company, the New York Daily News, is now sort of an editor-in-chief emeritus with U.S. News and World Report.

And so, you know, the emails don't shed a tremendous amount of light on that relationship, but there are a couple in which Epstein emails Zuckerman over the years, largely to forward to Zuckerman. And it's not clear if he's writing Zuckerman in a personal capacity or in Zuckerman. Zuckerman's capacity as an important publisher and media owner, but Epstein sends what appear to be defenses of his conduct to Zuckerman. We reached out to people close to Zuckerman to request comment and didn't hear back. So, Nathan, we're speaking at about 11.30 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday.

And the House of Representatives is expected to vote on whether to release the Epstein files this afternoon. How likely is this to actually happen? And what are the next steps? We're expecting quite a strong vote in favor of this bill. From there, it has to go to the Senate. And then, of course, after the Senate, it would have to go to the desk of Donald Trump himself. And Trump has said he will sign it.

But, you know, presidents also have veto powers. And so there are a number of steps that have to take place. And then, of course, then we have the question of even if the president signs it, what actually gets released? And in what format does it get released? You know, we now have investigations, new investigations against Democrats that are taking place. And to what degree do those investigations take a claim on the documents saying that they are needed for investigative purposes and therefore cannot be released publicly? These are all questions that have yet to be answered. So there's a number of steps that have yet to take place.

If the files are eventually released by the government, is that the end of it? Like, what kind of impact could this have on Trump's presidency? Well, I mean, it's already, we've already seen what happened with Epstein and this relationship that Epstein and Trump have had, you know, exact a political cost from Trump, even as far as, as a distraction, which of course is his own, you know, claiming attention is its own form of political currency. And so in that sense, these have already proven to be quite powerful. On the other hand, I mean, you know, they call Trump Teflon Don and they've called him that for a reason. I mean, we have seen numerous. allegations of Donald Trump and his sexual conduct that have risen. We've seen court judgments against him. We have seen evidence of his relationship with adult entertainers. We've seen all of this stuff that's come out. And none of it has prevented him from being reelected to the White House. Is this any different? Is there anything in these Epstein files that would sort of dent the support that Donald Trump has seemingly being able to enjoy without any interruption

with a fairly robust segment of the American electorate. I mean, obviously, only time will tell. But history has suggested that that support has remained pretty impervious to some of this stuff. Nathan, thanks so much. Thank you. That was Nathan Vanderclip, the Globe's international correspondent. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.