For well over a week, the doings of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in a New York prison over six years ago, have dominated the news coming out of the Anglo-Saxon world, The media obsession is fuelled by the almost universal desire to see high-flyers fall down to earth and get covered with dirt. After thanking Epstein for providing them with amenable female companions for an hour or two, many rich and famous individuals are now cursing him as they desperately try to justify their conduct in “the court of public opinion,” where they face stern moralists who are out to make them beg forgiveness for their sins.
This no doubt is why the BBC, The New York Times and other determinedly respectable journalistic enterprises have devoted such an extraordinary amount of time and space to the Epstein saga. After sifting through vast piles of documents and gleaning snippets of trivial information – birthday greetings and the like – they go on to express their disapproval of the goings-on among those associated with the ring-master in much the same way as the so-called yellow press is prone to do whenever it gets a chance to gloat over the misdemeanours of clergymen, police chiefs or minor politicians caught doing something deemed disgraceful.
It would appear that, as far as they are concerned, the behaviour of Epstein and his friends merits far more attention than the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of protesters by the Iranian Islamist regime which, with the Internet blacked-out in the country it rules, soon dropped out of the headlines and the television screens. This sends a useful message to other bloodthirsty tyrants: turn the lights off and you can get away with mass murder.
At first, the media heavyweights made it clear that they hoped the eagerly awaited release of the “Epstein files” would help them bring down that notorious fascist Donald Trump, but apparently his role in the drama was rather less lurid than they had confidently expected. So instead, they have had to concentrate on the involvement of currently less polemical figures, such as the former US president Bill Clinton and his ambitious wife Hillary, the tech mogul turned philanthropist Bill Gates and the theoretical linguist and extreme leftist influencer Noam Chomsky, who is in the process of being cancelled in academia.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the impact of the Epstein files has been far greater than in the US. It could even bring about the downfall of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. At first, it looked as though the hardest-hit by the furore would be the former prince Andrew, who because of his friendship with Epstein was demoted to plain Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and booted out of his royal residence, but the travails of Lord Peter Mandelson, a long-time Labour king-pin who awaits a similar fate by having his title taken away from him would soon become rather worse.
Mandelson’s part in the saga has seriously weakened Starmer who, for some mysterious reason, trusted him so much that he made him his man in Washington. It is a sign of the times that Mandelson assumed that his status as a homosexual with a devoted husband would shield him from the accusations faced by those who are unabashedly straight, but photographs taken in one of Epstein’s establishments of him in his underpants in the company of a young woman suggested he was less choosy than he wanted people to think. In any case, “Mandy” is in deep trouble for handing his friend the international financier supposedly secret information he obtained as a senior member of the British government back when Gordon Brown was PM.
rThough Epstein was a convicted paedophile with a taste for underage girls, which was why he was jailed, media pundits assure us that there is no hard evidence that the others he consorted with did anything that was illegal. Be that as it may, egged on by feminists, commentators have taken to describing the young women involved as “victims” or “survivors” of Epstein’s villainy, insinuating in this way that they were all demure young ladies who were suddenly kidnapped and sent to the financier’s now world-famous sex island where, against their will, they could be preyed upon by lascivious males who would otherwise have had to forego the pleasures they provided. Given the frequency with which elderly multimillionaires marry attractive young women, this does not seem very likely. In any event, as was bound to happen, legions of lawyers lost no time in getting into the game by demanding that the “victims” they managed to locate get compensated with large sums of money. It is reported that some have been awarded succulent out-of-court settlements.
Does anyone benefit from the somewhat unsurprising revelations that have come to light since the US Department of Justice started shovelling out millions of pages of “redacted” texts, hundreds of thousands of photographs and scores of videos in an attempt to dispel rumours that it was protecting powerful individuals? With the exception of those who think Epstein helps viewing figures, the lawyers and female “survivors” who have got some extra cash, few people seem to be any better off than they would have been if the net-working financier had never existed.
Though many surely enjoy seeing prominent and often pretentious men and women grovel, there is nothing particularly new about any of this. The “oldest profession” has a long history and in most societies procurers have managed to make a tidy living by introducing well-off men to obliging women.
What is more, for thousands of years people have relished seeing those who assume a superior air become what W.S. Gilbert called “a source of innocent merriment.” Apart from Mountbatten-Windsor and Mandelson – who have already begun to pay a high price for taking advantage of Epstein’s hospitality – nothing very bad seems likely to happen to those caught in his web. For the spiritual descendants of the Parisian tricoteuses, the women who over two centuries ago took their eyes off their knitting for a minute to watch the guillotine slice off the head of an aristocratic compatriot, this will be disappointing. Many wanted to see a vast conspiracy uncovered and all those guilty of unspeakable behaviour either put to death or sent to a jail like the one in which Epstein ended his life, but to judge from what has been revealed so far, such a satisfying outcome is not on the cards.
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