Why MAGA is Right about Jeffrey Epstein
It’s rare that I agree with the MAGA conspiracy theory loonies, but, in the case of the Epstein files, they deserve an answer about why the full folder has not been released. I have never fully believed that Epstein committed suicide and my skepticism grows the more the mysteries accumulate.
Flashback to 2010. During my time as editor of The Daily Beast—thanks to the pioneer reporting of Conchita Sarnoff—we were the first news outlet to break the story of the 2008 sweetheart deal Epstein made with a U.S. Attorney in Florida. Multiple charges of child sexual trafficking were reduced to only state charges and he served only 13 months in a work-release program that allowed him to spend as much as 12 hours a day outside jail.
Sarnoff, a Cuban-American anti-human trafficking activist, stumbled on the Epstein story when interviewing a Mexican child trafficker in the Palm Beach stockade who told her that underaged girls were brought to Palm Beach to service rich older men.
Dimly remembering an item about the arrest of a New York high-roller named Epstein, who once asked her for a date, Sarnoff dug through the Palm Beach police files and was stunned to learn that the department had identified as many as three dozen underage girls who had been trafficked for sex by Jeffrey Epstein, the youngest imported from the Balkans at age fourteen. So, how did this serial predator (the DOJ report says Epstein harmed over one thousand victims) get off with a slap on the wrist—only two counts of solicitation of a minor for prostitution? Spurred by the suspicions of a Palm Beach society lady who lived close to Epstein, Sarnoff brought the story to me and we launched a six-part Daily Beast investigation about the rank perversion of justice enabled by Epstein’s money, connections, and political donations. She revealed how Epstein's crack team of all-star lawyers discredited the young victims, many of whom had been abused previously or came from rough backgrounds. (“The younger, the better,” Epstein instructed a local teenager who was paid to bring girls to his home.)
The Beast stories landed with less impact than they would have seven years later, in the #MeToo reckoning. Epstein was not a big name at the time. He was a Manhattan finance and café society figure, whom I had met several times at the opening receptions of the Clinton Global Initiative, to which he shoveled funding to burnish his philanthropic bona fides. He struck me as a cold-eyed operator, busy working the room.
After we ran Sarnoff’s first piece in July 2010, Epstein called me personally to tell me that “she was a well-known nut case and to cease and desist.” When I barreled ahead anyway, I had a creepy encounter with Epstein a few weeks later. I returned from lunch and was startled to find him sitting in a chair in my glass-walled office in Manhattan’s IAC building. It seems he had managed to blow through front desk security and arrive unannounced.
He was morose and menacing, his snake eyes narrowed. “Just stop,” he said heavily as I stared at him from the doorway. “There will be consequences if you don’t.” I asked him to leave and suggested he talk to our lawyer. “You heard me,” he said in a deadly tone. “Stop.” We did not stop. But there were no more legal flurries from Epstein. It seems he had rightly computed that the story would fade if he didn’t fan it.
Dark Web
If MAGA is obsessed with powerful pedophiles hidden in the Epstein files, Dems hope there is a smoking gun about Trump. Yes, in his man-about-town days, Trump partied with Epstein in New York and Palm Beach, where Epstein was a member of Mar-a-Lago. According to his younger brother, Mark Epstein, Jeffrey—ever the grifter—was constantly asking Trump to “comp” his mother at the Trump casino in Atlantic City.
But teenage girls have never been Trump’s thing. The web of depravity around Epstein has always been hard to unravel because his high-powered network was a mix of those seduced by rides on his private plane (aka the Lolita Express), those looking for murky strategies for evading taxes, those who thought he could cut them into dubious deals or lead them to financial whales, and the serious offenders: big-shot sexual predators to whom he trafficked a ceaseless stream of underage girls. That’s why his Little Black Book is filled with almost every boldfaced name in Page Six.
But I’m with MAGA that there are still too many unanswered questions about Epstein’s death. After he was finally arrested a second time on July 6, 2019, emerging from his private plane at Teterboro Airport after a trip to Paris, an active FBI agent told Sarnoff, who relayed it to me at the time, “Epstein will never make it to trial. There are towels on the inside.” Five weeks later, he was dead, hanging from a knotted noose of towels inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
The multiple coincidences surrounding his end —two security guards posted in sight of his cell falling into a convenient doze, or distracted by online furniture shopping; Epstein’s cellmate, usually a must for a suicide-risk prisoner, being transferred to another facility and not replaced, the confusion around the deleted or compromised surveillance tapes outside the cell—all point to suspicious circumstances, but were finally ruled to be happenstance by the DOJ in 2023.
Bondi’s Bind
When Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has hyped Epstein conspiracy theories for years, released the first batch of Epstein files in February, the promised bombshells bombed, revealing zip we did not know already. She now finds herself in the ironic position of being monsterized by MAGA as a cover-up artist. Bondi claimed on Tuesday that the missing minute in the prison surveillance video was because "Every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing. So we're looking for that video to release that as well, to show that a minute is missing every night.” But, in such a high-profile case, why the hell hasn’t Bondi and her vast team of lawyers not located and released prison tapes from many other nights to prove that the missing minute is the norm? “That's it on Epstein."Bondi said. But it’s not. This is one of those cases, like the death of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, that’s a vortex of layered mysteries.
Conchita Sarnoff reminded me that there have been five fatalities, counting Epstein’s death, all associated with his case and the sad, sordid world that swirled around him.
May 30, 2017 Leigh ‘Skye’ Patrick, who was 16 when she was sexually abused by Epstein and was one of the first victims to file charges against him in 2008, was found dead at age 29 of an accidental drug overdose in a West Palm Beach motel.
August 10, 2019 Jeffrey Epstein was discovered hanged in his cell at the MCC.
February 19, 2022 Jean-Luc Brunel, a close Epstein partner in sleaze whose modeling agency MC2 was a major funnel of trafficked underage girls to Epstein and his circle, apparently hanged himself with knotted bedsheets in his cell while awaiting trial at La Santé prison in Paris for alleged rape of a minor and sexual assault.
May 23, 2023 Carolyn Andriano, a 36-year-old mother of five, was found unresponsive on the floor of a West Palm Beach hotel room. Andriano was abused by Epstein starting at the age of 14, servicing him at his Palm Beach mansion more than 100 times. Her testimony was key to the conviction of Epstein procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.
April 25, 2025 Virginia Giuffre, a 41-year-old mother of three, committed suicide at her family ranch in Neergabby, Australia. Giuffre attained global recognition by winning an unprecedented multimillion-dollar settlement from Queen Elizabeth’s son Prince Andrew, whom she says she was trafficked to at the age of 17 by Epstein and Maxwell for a payment of $15,000. But Giuffre, who became the standard-bearer of other Epstein victims, was unraveling at the end, and in the middle of a divorce from an allegedly physically abusive husband, who won a restraining order against her that banned her from seeing her children for six months. According to her brother, the pain of that loss finally crushed her, but her father, Sky Roberts, said, “Somebody got to her. She was strong. She had too much to live for.”
Of all the broken people left in Epstein’s wake, Giuffre remains the haunted face of Epstein’s unpunished degradations. It is she, not MAGA, who most deserves the full story and the names of all those who enabled him, whether it’s in the unredacted version of Pam Bondi’s files or a DOJ locked safe.
In an era when history is considered what happened before last week, we are fortunate to have your perspective and your willingness to share it. This column is critical in aiding us to understand why this story is important (when, e.g., we're losing health care, medical research, humanities professors, and the establishment clause).
On this one, I’m with MAGA too. The Epstein-Wexner connection hits close to home. Jeffrey Epstein bought and sold property with Les Wexner just two miles from my family’s house off Kitzmiller Road in New Albany, Ohio. It was there, under the polished veneer of Midwest respectability, that Epstein lured artist Maria Farmer with the promise of painting murals. Instead, she was skirted away to a remote location in New Mexico where she was assaulted by Epstein and Maxwell. She is one of the few who bravely went forward with allegations of sexual assault.
In 2024, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Virginia Giuffre named Wexner himself in sexual assault claims. I remember buying my first pair of jeans from Wexner at one of his first Limited "boutiques" at the Town and Country shopping center in Columbus.
Epstein no doubt was attracted to the nubile models of Wexner's business. The story would not be so morally depraved if it weren't for the pretend show of philanthropy. Wexner owns Columbus and the cabal he cavorts with belong in caves.