Why the rich and powerful couldn’t say no to Epstein

It was one of the big set-pieces in Washington in 2019.

All eyes were on Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was testifying to a House committee about his former boss.

A Democratic member of the committee, Stacey Plaskett, was preparing to question Cohen and was seen on camera texting someone on her phone.

This week, the public found out the identity of the other person in that exchange – convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

According to emails made public by his estate under a subpoena, he was encouraging her to ask about a Trump Organization employee. After Ms Plaskett did so, Epstein texted her back: “Good Work”.

In hindsight, this incident has struck a chord with many, who say it highlights the extent of his influence on America’s elite.

Plaskett has denied she was seeking Epstein’s advice, saying she was texting with many people that day, including Epstein, who was one of her constituents. She says as a former lawyer, she had learned to seek information from all sources – even people she didn’t like.

“I am disgusted by Epstein’s deviant behavior. I strongly support his victims and admire their courage. I have long believed and supported that the entire Epstein files be released,” she said in a statement, sent to the BBC.

She says their exchange occurred before his arrest for sexual trafficking. But it was well after his conviction for soliciting prostitution in 2008.

His private island in the US territory had also been mentioned in a damning investigation by the Miami Herald just a year before as being one of the places he sexually abused several underage girls.

Just six months after her exchange with Epstein, the disgraced financier would be dead in his prison cell – a result of suicide, according to a medical examiner. His death, and the conspiracies that swirled around it, would trigger a reckoning that has caused ripple effects in Washington and Wall Street, and has taken down some of his former friends.

Their exchange was just one of many in the latest trove of over 20,000 pages of personal documents, which revealed Epstein’s ability to maintain elite social circles even after his criminal conviction and the Herald expose.

How and why these relationships survived while other friends cut him off tells us as much about the dynamics of social circles at the very top of US society as they do about Epstein’s influence.

“He was a diabolical monster, but at the same time he was brilliant in a sense that he was able to maintain this incredible network of some of the world’s most powerful individuals,” said Barry Levine, author of The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

“He had a certain charisma attached to himself that put him in a position where people turned to him.”

Epstein considered himself a “people collector” who made connections for transactional purposes, Mr Levine said.

“He would use information that he gained… with the intention at the end of the day that he was going to bank either favours from them, finances from them, or in a darker sense, I think, blackmail from some of these individuals.”

The relationship between Epstein and Labour’s Lord Peter Mandelson has come under particular scrutiny in the UK, with Lord Mandelson ultimately being sacked in September from his role as the UK’s ambassador to the US.

Documents released by Congress show he maintained contact with the paedophile until late 2016, which was before the Herald expose but after his conviction.

In one email from November 2015, Epstein tells him after his birthday: “63 years old. You made it.”

Lord Mandelson replies less than 90 minutes later, saying: “Just. I have decided to extend my life by spending more of it in the US.”

He has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, any wrongdoing, and has expressed regret over their continued communications with him.

The documents released by Epstein’s estate reveal his eclectic social circle of distinguished scholars, business titans and politicians.

Mr Levine said it’s not a stretch that some more casual acquaintances of Epstein may not have known about his abuse, or were impressed enough by his influential connections to look past it.

“People forget things,” he said. “His credentials among power brokers were extremely high, and I think a lot of individuals probably just dismissed the conviction against him.”

Others may have been simply dazzled by his wealth, journalists and those who knew him have suggested.

“A jail sentence doesn’t matter anymore,” David Patrick Columbia, the founder of New York Social Diary, told The Daily Beast in 2011, after Epstein’s first conviction. “The only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty.”

A former US treasury secretary turned Harvard University president, Larry Summers asked Epstein for romantic advice, including an exchange in November 2018 – the same month the Herald investigation was published – where he seemed to forward an email from a woman to Epstein to ask about how he should respond.

Epstein replied: “She’s already beginning to sound needy 🙂 nice.”

Summers’ interactions with his former confidant came back to haunt him last week, leading him to announce he was stepping back from public commitments and stopping teaching at Harvard.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognise the pain they have caused,” Summers said.

Epstein also reportedly used his money skills to help famed linguist Noam Chomsky, with whom he exchanged several messages over the years and invited to stay at his homes.

The flattery went both ways. In an undated letter of support included in the trove of emails, Chomsky raved about Epstein, saying the two had held “many long and often in-depth discussions”.

The 96-year-old previously told the Wall Street Journal that Epstein had helped him move money between his accounts without “one penny from Epstein”.

“I knew him and we met occasionally,” he said.

In the same article, he said: “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to US laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”

He did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Chomsky was one of Epstein’s famous financial clients, many of whom Epstein helped to save billions of dollars, Mr Levine said.

He was able to do so because he “understood tax code and finances to some degree better than maybe the most highly paid people on Wall Street”, Mr Levine said.

Throughout the 23,000 pages of Epstein’s documents, one man’s name appears more than perhaps any other.

Trump did not send or receive any of the messages included in the thousands of documents, having cut off ties with Epstein.

In 2002, Trump described Epstein as a “terrific guy”. Epstein would later remark: “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

But the relationship would eventually sour. According to Trump, they fell out in the early 2000s, two years before Epstein was first arrested. By 2008, Trump was saying that he had not been “a fan of his”.

Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking. The White House has also said Trump kicked Epstein out of his club “decades ago for being a creep to his female employees”.

Mr Levine said there were many people whose messages with Epstein after his convictions will leave them embarrassed, though that does not suggest they participated in any of his crimes.

“Each and every one of course regrets the day they communicated with Jeffrey Epstein or spent time with him,” he said. “It is one of the most unbelievable stories of our time – power, privilege, predation.”

But there was at least one person who said he understood immediately that Epstein was “gross”.

Howard Lutnick, the president’s commerce secretary, was a next-door neighbour of Epstein’s for 10 years. He told the New York Post’s podcast that his first encounter with Epstein was his last.

Shortly after Lutnick moved into his property on the Upper East side in 2005, he says Epstein gave Lutnick and his wife a tour of his large residence.

In Epstein’s dining room, after seeing a massage table surrounded by candles, Lutnick asked him how often he used it.

“He says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like, weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage’.”

Mr Lutnick said he and his wife exchanged glances, excused themselves and left.

“I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he said.