What Epstein Was Afraid Of
I guess Ghislaine Maxwell must have given up something juicy enough in her session with Deputy AG Todd Blanche to earn her those new relaxed digs in the minimum-security, open-campus Bryan prison camp in Texas. She is now able to mingle with the more upscale company of fraudulent Theranos bot Elizabeth Holmes and erstwhile Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Jen Shah and banter over prison extracurriculars such as puppy training. This should be a relief to Ghislaine, after watching her back under 24/7 surveillance at the razor-wired, overcrowded hellhole of the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution, where her meetings with the Justice Dept. had reportedly earned her the deadly label of a “snitch.”
As for Ghislaine’s side of the bargain, did she promise Blanche she would erase her own mental videotapes of Trump attending any of the multiple teenage girl sex-fests at Epstein’s soirees in the 90s? Or that she was willing to swear Trump was not the doodler behind that genital squiggle, revealed by the WSJ, in Epstein’s big beautiful 50th birthday book? Regardless, she’s lied about much more before.
As the hailstorm of unconfirmed revelations from every Epstein conspiracy theorist, amateur sleuth, and knowing pundit courses through the heat of summer, occasional vivid details ring the authenticity bell. In one allegation going around, Trump supposedly asked a Jane Doe at a Manhattan party in the early 90s to give him a hand job but she was warned by the host’s minion, “No one touches Mr. Trump’s penis without a glove.”
I can’t vouch for Jane Doe’s credibility, but it feels perfect, doesn't it? There is something about us knowing Trump’s a germaphobe and the hushed reference to that sacred scepter, “Mr. Trump’s penis,” that makes me want to buy at least this one story, which we surely won’t learn from any files released by the FBI.
Art of the Deal
In order to transfer Ghislaine from Tallahassee to Camp Bryan, the Bureau of Prisons would have had to change her “public safety factor” classification, which, as a sex offender, designated her as a danger to the public. According to Craig Rothfeld, a criminologist and prison consultant (one of his clients is Harvey Weinstein), this is unheard of. “No one I know in this world can recall in all their years a time that the Bureau of Prisons had an inmate's public safety factor waived,” he told me.
Declassifying Ghislaine as a risk to the public seems beside the point to me. Surely it’s danger from the public, or, in this case, the other gen pop prisoners. Not everyone at Camp Bryan is overjoyed at the transfer there of Epstein’s madam. One inmate, whose daughter was trafficked, told the Telegraph, “every inmate I’ve heard from is upset she’s here.. This facility is supposed to house non-violent offenders. Human trafficking is a violent crime.”
Inside Job?
Ghislaine knows all about the dangers around every unlit corner in prison, given the number of questionable deaths surrounding Epstein, including his own “suicide” in that now-closed sinkhole, the MCC lockup. It's Craig Rothfeld's opinion that the corruption and violence at the MCC, not to mention the cockroaches, mold, burnt food, and running toilet were all insupportable torments to a former master of the universe. His likely fate as a “chomo” (prison jargon for the hated tribe of child molesters) terminally terrified him. Former inmates told the Daily News in 2020 that Epstein was denied medical attention for his back problems because “he’s a pervert” and staffers “were treating him like crap. They were making him sleep on the floor. They wouldn’t let him sleep on a cot.” Inmates would “slide papers under the door [that said] ‘We’re going to kill you, you rapist, you pedophile.’ ” He was constantly being extorted, ripped off, and was shelling out for protection. The inmates said, “He was giving thousands of dollars. Wiring it Western Union to inmates’ families,” and, “He was saying he’s going to kill himself because the government is trying to kill him anyway.” It was coming at him from all sides.
Rothfeld’s personal theory is that Epstein was presented with two options: Kill yourself or be killed—here’s some extra sheets. This would explain the photo of Epstein’s cell after his death. I have always wondered why it was strewn with so many sheets for a single inmate in a notoriously spartan prison. An ex-inmate himself, Rothfeld is philosophical about how easy such an enabled suicide could be. “There are plenty of blind spots in prison. It's absolutely plausible the cameras weren't working, and also plausible that they were.”
Perp Walks
Epstein and Maxwell, Sean “Diddy” Combs, the retrial of Harvey Weinstein—it’s as if we are relitigating the 90s, that louche age of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky cigar stunts in the Oval Office, OJ trying on bloody gloves in court, Michael Jackson moonwalking away from child sex abuse allegations, the swaggering impunity of alpha oafs like the now pussy-grabber in chief, and the rise of the internet’s first transgressive star, Matt Drudge, who made scandal an intimate minute-by-minute smorgasbord of replenishing revelation. Drudge invented doomscrolling. He was the new Weegee, an unpretentious tipster coughing up the dirt he knew we were all hungry for. Today, we can't keep up with the warp speed of digital disclosure. There’s no time to process the gossip. And what's gossip now anyway? It has no distinction from the news itself. The arid inaccessible young tech titans, obsessively monitoring their ticking billions and manipulating software to puppeteer the world, inhabit lives we can’t even imagine, cloistered in their brainy, bloodless enclaves. Or, in the case of Jeff Bezos and his new wife Lauren Sanchez, it’s all so supersized and grotesque, it’s too exhausting to think about. Is this why we continue to fixate on celebrity felons from an era we could at least half understand?
Because I Can
Ghislaine, Diddy, and Harvey are all convinced they are innocent because, in their self-constructed distortion fields, they are always right. In a justice system in which more than 95% of cases are plea-bargained, they chose to go through the singular hell of long, news-frenzy trials, searching the weary jury pool for that one returning gaze that can bring them back to world mastery, surrounded by enablers. “Mia,” the former Diddy assistant, testified at his trial in May, “I couldn't tell him ‘no’ about a sandwich—I couldn't tell him ‘no’ about anything.” Not when, she alleges, he demanded she work for days without sleeping, not when he threw a computer at her, and not when he sexually assaulted her. We saw the brutal consequences of saying no to Diddy in that hotel security video that, once seen, can not be forgotten, of the offstage thug, Sean Combs, beating and kicking his girlfriend Cassie Ventura on the hallway floor, like the son of the gangster that he is.
In a world designed entirely for your gratification, without resistance from your perk- laden chief of staff, your cowed company employees, your concierge doctors, your private security detail, your NDA’d-up household help, and the pilot of your private plane, whom you yell at to take off in a storm, all critical perspective that challenges, or simply annoys you, falls away.
Everyday asshole behavior becomes a badge of power. On September 14, 2001, Talk magazine executive editor Maer Roshan and I were able to get in to report on the barricaded, cop-crawling site of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. With us was Weinstein, then my partner at Talk and a lifelong news junkie, who wanted to see it with his own eyes. He was itching for the inside track, as if it was a VIP area at a U2 concert. “Get us in,” he commanded Matt Hiltzik, his comms guru and fixer, who could have secured an all-access pass to Kim Jong Un’s private compound in twenty minutes, if that was Harvey’s demand.
It was raining, so the dust stuck to our feet as we tramped past the ghostly figures of ash-covered first responders and gazed up at the anguished, twisted metal that was once the Twin Towers. It was here, in this epic site of tragedy and loss, that I heard Harvey yell at his Afghan driver, “Assan! Get me a Diet Coke!” It arrived, of course, but was deemed “not cold enough.”
Boomerang Time
It’s worth recalling that, in the ’90s, when Harvey, Diddy, and Epstein were gods on the mountaintop, Trump was flailing through his worst era. He had rocketed through the ’80s on the fuel Roy Cohn had pumped into him and, by the time the ’90s dawned, he was making the mistakes you make if you're essentially a hungry Cro-Magnon with a fat bank account. He was throwing away gigantic sums of money trying to turn Atlantic City into a playground for people who shared his dumb-bunny interests, a manic phase of buying, building, and breaking up his marriage to Ivana for a mistress who told—or was told to tell—the New York Post, “It was the best sex I’ve ever had.” He was hopped-up on his own image, but he was failing, failing, failing.
But now, the hourglass has flipped. Trump is the most powerful man in the world and Harvey, Diddy, and Ghislaine are celebs behind bars. As Trump revels in his drawings for a $200 million golden ballroom in the White House (“There’s never been a president that was good at ballrooms. I’m really good.”), fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the disappointing numbers (“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED”), and repositions nuclear subs closer to Russia because he was enraged that Putin sidekick Dmitry Medvedev trolled Trump’s economic saber rattling with a crying laughter emoji, POTUS is showing the deadly disconnect of delusional hubris that comes before a fall. Insulated by sycophancy, Trump, too, lives in a world where he is always right. His advisors and GOP leaders are only too happy to torch the truth. They practically walk backwards when they leave his presence in the Oval Office. And lest we forget, “no one touches Mr. Trump’s penis without a glove.”
With "No one touches Mr. Trump's penis without a glove," Tina has given us an image for the ages. Alas!
Apparently, many have found Mr Trump's very small penis humorous; the glove story is the cherry on top.