The Epstein correspondence also shows how, right up to his second indictment, in 2019, some prominent people provided him with counsel or help in trying to burnish his image. After leaving the first Trump White House, in 2017, Bannon, a self-styled scourge of the global élites, offered Epstein P.R. advice and worked on a documentary project that focussed on rehabilitating Epstein’s image. Evidently, the planned narrative was that Epstein was much more than a sex offender. In a text to Epstein that Congress released last year, Bannon wrote, “we must counter ‘rapist who traffics in female children to be raped by worlds most powerful, richest men’—that can’t be redeemed.”
Kathryn Ruemmler, a former White House counsel in the Obama Administration, who was then at the white-collar law firm Latham & Watkins, advised Epstein on how to respond to a question from the Washington Post about his past plea deal, while he provided her with career advice. Although Epstein wasn’t a client of Ruemmler’s firm, she accepted gifts from him, including boots, a handbag, and a watch, and, in one e-mail, referred to him as “Uncle Jeffrey.” She was reportedly present at his arraignment in New York, in July, 2019.
To be sure, Epstein’s reputation before his second indictment and death in custody wasn’t quite as tattered as it is now. But the allegations against him were there: the title for the Daily Beast’s 2010 investigation into Epstein was “Jeffrey Epstein, Pedophile Billionaire, and His Sex Den.” Yet only in 2018, when Julie Brown, of the Miami Herald, published a series of articles highlighting Epstein’s sex trafficking—and the sweetheart deal prosecutors gave him in 2008—did the momentum of events shift against him. And even then some people stood by him.
Brad Karp, the chairman of the big law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, wasn’t officially representing Epstein. But in a March, 2019, e-mail exchange with him he offered to review a letter that Epstein’s legal-defense team was preparing to send to the Times after it published an editorial criticizing the Florida plea deal. “I would love to see and comment on a draft,” Karp wrote. Epstein, for his part, told Karp that he valued his “judgment and friendship.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Karp knew Epstein professionally through his work representing Leon Black, the Wall Street billionaire who paid Epstein more than a hundred and fifty million dollars, supposedly for tax and estate planning. Last week, Karp resigned as chairman of Paul, Weiss, which last year cut a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid losing federal contracts, saying that recent reporting “has created a distraction.” Ruemmler, who is now the general counsel of Goldman Sachs, is still in her job.
Trollope wouldn’t have been surprised at Epstein’s rise and fall. Melmotte, before his financial empire imploded, made it with the connivance of the British establishment, all the way to the House of Commons, as the M.P. for Westminster. In Trollope’s autobiography, which was published posthumously, he lamented the corruption of morality, writing, “If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its comers, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.” Epstein wasn’t merely dishonest: he was, indeed, a monster. But he was also a creature of his age, which is also our age—one in which wealth and ostentation are all too often associated with social status, unchecked privilege, and unaccountability. A world in which money can seemingly buy—or buy off—virtually anything, and ethical qualms are for the weak-minded. In other words, Epstein and what he represents is everybody’s problem, all of us. This was Trollope’s message in the eighteen-seventies. It holds true today. ♦
