Why Trump Doesn't Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path. The copious accretions have even buried Trump’s futile efforts to browbeat MAGA Congress members to vote against the full release of the Epstein files. In a total backflip to avoid the humiliation of a clear loss to his own base, Trump now supports the files pouring forth into the world, and said he would sign the bill if it passes. Trump, the product of legendary reality TV, should have known that he could not kill the Epstein obsession loop. First, because pedophilia is a core MAGA agitant. And secondly, all those videos and photos of Trump and Epstein make for an enduring TV story. That clip of the two of them leering at cheerleaders and models at a louche 1992 Mar-a-Lago party, with Ghislaine Maxwell standing right behind them, looks more like the Zapruder film every day.

Partners in slime (Credit: NBC News)

Michael Wolff, the sour savant of American media who has written multiple bestsellers excoriating Trump, has been caught himself in the river of ooze. Just when he is the ubiquitous go-to source for everyone looking for dark insights into Trump’s hide-and-seek with Epstein malfeasance, last week’s email cache shows Wolff to be another pond eel swimming in the Epstein access estuary. (Cf. the consigliere tone of Wolff’s “You can hang [Trump] in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you.”) Today, Wolff defends his tactic as an attempt to ingratiate himself with Epstein for the eventual blistering story Wolff was sure to write. Perhaps, there, we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He certainly conned Rupert Murdoch’s experienced comms team at News Corporation into giving him an all-access pass to the most powerful man in media, only to violate every agreed-upon ground rule and sell sources down the river. (After Wolff first made nice, then trashed me in New York magazine, I retaliated in the pages of Talk by describing his “baleful masturbatory glare,” which gave me a modicum of satisfaction.)

Epstein consigliere Michael Wolff

One of the biggest hazards of releasing private emails is how much they expose the multiple faces people in high places present to the world. Money, not sex, is often the embarrassing Achilles’ heel. How much was former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers’ sustained digital banter with Epstein really about the world of ideas or just foreplay to secure a handsome grant to his wife’s Poetry in America initiative? (Summers to Epstein: “My life will be better if I raise $1m for Lisa…Ideas?”) Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson used Epstein as a gushing human ATM to cover her mountainous debts for years. But after publicly disavowing Epstein with an “I abhor pedophilia” aria, a leaked 2011 email shows she almost immediately sent him a suck-up mea culpa: “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me. You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.” Exit stage left the erstwhile Duchess of York.

Even Epstein himself, a prolific, typo-strewn e-correspondent, pondered to Summers in 2017: “Interesting argument whether using WhatsApp is obstruction of justice. Deletes after sending?” You wish, Larry. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren called on Harvard to cut all ties with Summers, given that the new emails reveal his “monumentally bad judgment.”

Threat Level

Just as piquant as the emails in the latest dump is an Epstein profile draft in there by Michael Wolff that was never published. At this point, Epstein has been so demonized, if one can use such a word for someone so personally depraved, it’s hard to understand why esteemed figures like Bill Gates, Oliver Sacks, and Stephen Jay Gould did not recoil from Epstein’s advances. Wolff’s piece gives us a glimpse of the other Epstein in action—doing Big Thinks as the philosopher of wealth creation. “It used to be,” Epstein mused to Wolff “that the rich, reaching a certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social-engineering philanthropy, unique….Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality-altering scale.” Epstein did not see that his own wealth had created a personal distortion field that normalized his horrific predations.

Penis Envy

Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill, bipartisan members of Congress, including Reps. Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are hosting a cluster of Epstein survivors for a press conference to “discuss next steps.” I talked with one of them yesterday: Rina Oh, a 46-year-old Korean-American artist, who was groomed by Epstein through a pretend interest in her art. Just as Wolff shows us the intellectual manqué side of Epstein, Rina, now the serene-faced mother of two sons, offers unsettling details about the competitive atmosphere inside Epstein’s sexual ménage. When the pedophile magus made clear to the girls that Maxwell was too old to attract him, Ghislaine’s own jealousy became a toxic force. By 2001, Rina believes, Epstein and Maxwell hated each other. “Their relationship was very awful, very strange,” she told me. “I actually didn’t ever suspect that the two of them were having any type of a romantic relationship. I thought she was an associate of his, especially when I saw them fighting. Ghislaine was snickering at him in that British accent and they were throwing insults at each other.” She recalls, “He took me and another girl to the tennis court at Mar-a-Lago, where Ghislaine was playing. He got her attention…and stood behind me and started humping me through my clothes.…He was shrieking and laughing, making fun of Ghislaine.” She believes Epstein bought Ghislaine the Manhattan townhouse, which sold this year for $18 million, to get rid of her, and that Ghislaine ramped up her role as Epstein’s procuress in the 2000s as the only way she could hang on.

Epstein survivor Rina Oh (Credit: Jackie Molloy/The Sunday Times)

Rina is also convinced that Epstein’s core issue was that “he had an extremely deformed penis.…Some people have described it as the shape of an egg. I think it was more of the shape of a lemon, and it was really small when it was fully erect. It was probably like two inches.” She does not believe he was capable of penetrative sex. Strangely, I had this conversation with Rina right after reading on the Drudge Report about new DNA research on blood taken from fabric from the sofa on which Hitler shot himself, suggesting that the Führer had the genetic marker for Kallman syndrome, which can result in the misfortune of a micropenis.

See what I mean? The angles are endless. Yet Trump still believes he can quash this story.