A Day in Jeffrey Epstein’s Life
Anne Enright on 24 hours in the Epstein emails
In the Review’s March 26 issue, Anne Enright descends into the Epstein archives and, hoping to “capture the feeling of normalized perversion that I sense in his demotic, automated ‘Sorry for all the typos’ tone,” she decides “to spend one day with him, to look at twenty-four hours of his correspondence, and then go offline.”
So Enright scrolls through Epstein’s emails from Tuesday, July 19, 2011, beginning at midnight, when he was at his mansion in New York City writing furiously to contractors at work on his island house, and ending twenty-four hours later at the island house, where he is emailing his staff back in New York about installing a stair runner. In between, Epstein seems never to sleep, instead spending his time writing emails to staff, bankers, friends and family, Ghislaine Maxwell, Soon-Yi Previn, and more. Much of the correspondence is “oddly dull,” although “even the most banal of Epstein’s communications…contain the whole story”: “These bantering, randomly selected emails seem to show that Epstein wasn’t depraved, corrupt, or dodgy some of the time. He was depraved, corrupt, and proud of it all day long.”
Below, alongside Enright’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Epstein, oligarchy, and the depraved lives of the powerful.
At first I am afraid to enter the library. I have arrived at the US Department of Justice website because my attention got snagged by a random post on Bluesky, or possibly X, and I want to see whether it is real. The post showed an email thread between Jeffrey Epstein and a correspondent whose name has been redacted, which Epstein begins:
[redacted] said that she felt gods presence next to her when she was in bed.. she knows that jesus watches over her. and he helped save her life. Whoops.
The reply reads, “You should dress up as him when you see her.” “Of course,” Epstein quips. “The OH jesus Im coming trick.”
If Epstein were an ordinarily unpleasant man, this fragment would have been read once by the two people involved and abandoned as not worth deleting. No one would post it online so I could look at it in revulsion, wondering whether the person discussed had been one of his victims. Nor would anyone notice how a woman mocked for her naiveté is immediately described as a faker and purveyor of “tricks.” There is, on deeper scrutiny, very little about the exchange that is not odd. The woman’s belief that she was watched over brings to mind the rumor of Epstein’s surveillance cameras. God’s presence “next to her when she was in bed” makes us think of Epstein in the same position and of Steve Bannon asking him, in a taped interview, “Do you think you’re the Devil himself?” The image of a woman’s life saved by faith is replaced by one of a life destroyed.
While I stare at the disordered capitalization of “OH” and the blank space before “Whoops,” other people arrive at the library in order to cross-reference and make legible the black oblongs of the two redacted names. It is not publicly known how many people have used the search function here. We can assume the FBI, or its AI, has “read” all 3.5 million files the library holds, but since their release, compassing them has become the work of some maddened hive mind.
The website feels both official and illicit. I click to say that I am over eighteen. I can’t remember what I wanted to find out, consider the white gap of the search bar, and type in the word “girl.” The second item in the search is a legal brief written by the Manhattan district attorney that seems to be about Epstein’s status as a sex offender. It contains fifteen pages of statements from girls who provided massages to Epstein in Palm Beach. “Defendant asked if [redacted] liked that, and she said she did not.” The girls’ ages were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; they were served dinner by his personal chef, driven by his “houseman,” and “on some occasions” paid to have sex with his “female friend.” Epstein often masturbated in the presence of girls; like Harvey Weinstein, he was described as having an oddly shaped penis, one that was “deformed” when erect.
In an email thread on March 2 and 3, 2015, two women, Lesley and Amanda, discuss a request made by another, Eva (I later see this was Eva Dubin, a former girlfriend of Epstein’s), for an apartment needed by a “swedish girl” for ten days. Lesley says they can “accommodate this girl” in 11B, but “she will need to move to 8A…after the girl currently in there moves in the morning.” I wonder at the women’s cheery competency and how they sound so willing and nice.
On the second page of results for “girl” is an undated, context-free series of one hundred screenshots from pornography sites, one of which is called “Dirty Teen Clips.” Despite the black squares and rectangles placed over their faces, genitals, and chests, the girls’ lack of sexual development can be seen and assessed. The viewer’s focus is so skewed and intensified by the blocky redactions that I wonder whether they make the images not just seedier but also more pornographic. I have no idea how to answer this question but have no doubt that there are men in the same online space as me who are reading these files in order to become aroused. I feel it was a mistake to search for the word “girl.”
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archives: Depraved Lives
Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s Epstein problem
Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the mysterious death of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father
Mitchell Abidor on Sade, #MeToo, and Epstein
Tamsin Shaw on the oligarchs behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal
Hugh Lloyd-Jones on Caligula’s capricious cruelty
The disturbing part is not just Epstein. It’s how many institutions needed him to appear respectable.
- Double🆔️