How has Donald Trump escaped the Epstein files?
I was just taking off on a plane after attending the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival when a friend messaged me: “You are all over the new Epstein dump. Seems you were being spied on by a woman called Peggy Siegal.” A moment of panic, seconds before losing my internet connection. Is it possible I could have forgotten a louche night in a bubble bath on Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little St James, with the person formerly known as Prince Andrew, and now was about to face career ruination?
The Peggy Siegal reference was intriguing. The publicist had phoned me in 2010, when I was editor of the Daily Beast, to ask me to a dinner for Andrew hosted by, yes, Jeffrey Epstein, at which other guests included Charlie Rose and Woody Allen. “What the fuck is this, Peggy?” I screamed. “The paedophile’s ball?” She backed off with high-pitched gibbering about the Epstein rumours being exaggerated. This incensed me even more, given that I had published multiple reports on Epstein’s predations by Conchita Sarnoff, a campaigner against human trafficking.
Sarnoff had broken the story in the Beast of the appalling 2008 sweetheart deal between Epstein and Alex Acosta, then US attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Acosta gave Epstein a laughable 18-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from one underage girl, when, as Sarnoff’s reporting revealed, Epstein was a serial paedophile. She even had those now-infamous flight logs of the A-listers who flew with him on his private plane dubbed the Lolita Express.
After a fusillade of legal threats pre-publication, Epstein demanded a face-to-face meeting with me, but dropped that tactic when we insisted this could only happen if everything was on the record. There was, however, another unsettling day when I returned to my Beast office to find Epstein sitting there – I still don’t know how he got past security – and, with a menacing stare, he ordered me to “just stop!”. We did not.
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Back in 2010, Epstein did not have the mythic, dark aura he has assumed today. He was just another of New York’s rich, slippery creeps. But thanks to the latest Department of Justice doc deluge, I now know that, after the Beast stories, Epstein was in a deep panic. And so was Siegal. The files show the two of them were scheming about how to “neutralise” me.
At this point, who cares about any of this? I guess we still are obliged to be shocked by the new photos of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, grinning on all fours over a recumbent woman, that provide yet more evidence, as if we need it, that he’s a mendacious, priapic moron. While I am gratified to learn that I got under Epstein’s skin, just being mentioned at all feels like being splashed by the putrid wash of his venal world. My longtime fake friend Siegal was far from being the only person in Epstein’s orbit exposed by the files. Protesting big shots who said they had straight-up business associations with Epstein were sustaining friendships with him long after his first arrest.
In September, Elon Musk tweeted that “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED.” But the latest release of emails shows that in November 2012, Musk wrote to Epstein asking “what day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
Donald Trump’s stonking-rich commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, similarly claimed in an interview last October that he and his wife had decided in 2005 to “never to be in the same room” as their “gross” former Upper East Side neighbor Epstein. Yet he is caught in the new emails inviting himself and his wife to the paedo’s Little St James Island in 2012.
Other than making the rictus smiles of their wives and exes tauter than usual, pawing through these emails serves only to reinforce what we already know: that mega-wealth so often erodes a moral compass. Epstein’s appeal was an insidious gift of permission. Girls, tax evasion, private places to play. An underground railway of upper-echelon decadence.
Alas, the fact that we are all writing about this yet again shows how successful the latest Epstein email release has been for Donald Trump. He’s found another way to turn danger to himself into danger to others. Hunting for revelations about the occupant of the Oval Office in this email blizzard is a fool’s errand. Trump’s name attached to anything incriminating is redacted. Of the 5,300 files with 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, or Mar-a-Lago, none are direct communications between Trump and Epstein. The US deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, has already said that the second half of the tranche – another two-and-a-half million pages – will never see the light of day.
The Venezuela raid was, in part, a massive kinetic distraction from Maga’s fury at the Department of Justice’s stalling, but now, the release, six weeks late, of a tsunami of Epstein detritus is a typically Trumpian distraction from the abomination by Ice in Minneapolis. Trump no longer fears the Epstein files. While headlines explode with such red herrings as “Epstein’s sex empire was ‘KGB honeytrap,’” Trump’s brownshirts are still swarming the streets of Minneapolis.
Tina Brown is the founder and former editor of the “Daily Beast”. This column first appeared on her Substack,“Fresh Hell”
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