爱泼斯坦档案揭秘:精英阶层的欺骗、依赖与权力网络 New York Times Podcasts 2026-02-10

爱泼斯坦档案:揭露精英阶层的复杂网络

近期,美国司法部公开了超过三百万页与杰弗里·爱泼斯坦(Jeffrey Epstein: 已故美国金融家,因性侵未成年少女被定罪)相关的最新文件,这是迄今为止最大规模的一次披露。这些文件不仅数量庞大,内容也极其混乱,包含了大量照片和视频,甚至出现了一些不应公开的受害者姓名和裸体图像,凸显了此次发布过程中的严重失误。这些资料覆盖了从2005年佛罗里达州首次调查到2019年爱泼斯坦被捕的时期,但其核心价值在于揭示了爱泼斯坦在2009年被定罪并登记为性犯罪者之后,如何继续与全球精英阶层保持着深度且密切的关系。文件的庞大规模意味着对其内容的全面理解仍需数月甚至数年,但初步的梳理已然揭示了其行为模式的严重性和其所构建的权力网络的复杂性。

Original English Source

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is the daily. Another Epstein files dump today. And not just a dump, it was a blizzard of files. More than three million pages are now being posted to the Justice Department website. The latest government release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the single largest release so far has revealed the depth and intensity of his relationship with the global elite long after he became a sex offender. Some of the names mentioned in the files dumped today, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve Bannon. Peter Mandel, a former senior power broker for the governing British Labor Party and an ex-ambassador to the US, exposing intimate communications with the world's most powerful business leaders. Dr. Peter Ayia, the celebrity longevity influencer, appears in the files more than 1,700 times. In 2015, Aia wrote, "The biggest problem with becoming friends with you, the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I cannot tell a soul." top government officials, prestigious academics and renowned experts. Some of the people Nam Chomsky that was like the deal breaker for me. Nam Chsky Deepac Deepac Chopra and in many cases contradicting years of their careful denials about their closeness to Epstein. This is not the end of the Epstein case. This is just maybe the end of the beginning, but this is actually going to drag on for years as people sort through the documents and connect the dots. Today, as the fallout from the new documents ricochets across the globe, I gathered three of my colleagues, Deborah Cayman, Nick Confisori, and Matt Goldstein to talk through what they found. It's Tuesday, February 10th. Deborah, Nick, Matt, thank you to the three of you for being here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Good to be here. All three of you have spent the past week or so reading through hundreds, maybe even thousands of emails from the latest release of Epstein documents. And I want us to begin a conversation with the release itself, the scope of what the government has published, why it's published it now, and what's different about these documents from what was released in the previous batches. So Deborah, can you just start right there? Yeah, I mean, the thing that's most noteworthy about this document release is its sheer size. We're talking about more than 3 million pages of documents. There's also a lot of photos, a lot of videos. In tandem with its size is the amount of chaos that came with this roll out. The release itself was more than a month after the government's self-imposed deadline. And there were a lot of things that went wrong with this release. There were a lot of unredacted names of victims that never should have made it into the public and they did. There were images of women in the nude that the New York Times found and flagged the Justice Department that then had to be pulled back. So in addition to the fact that it's just so much material to comb through in that combing, there's been a lot of things that never should have been found. And Nick 3 million pages strongly suggests that we are just beginning to wrap our heads and our arms around what's here. Absolutely. I mean, look, if we had 50 reporters reading 500 documents a day and it would take us four months to get through all the documents. Wow. And that's just to read them. To make sense of them is actually a lot of work because you have to cross reference who's being referred to. You can sometimes figure out who's been redacted by looking at other emails with similar information. It's a lot of work, but I think we'll be seeing the fruits of this exposure, all this information for months. Matt, what time period do these three million pages cover? And where does that time period line up with our overall understanding of the Epstein story and his criminality? It lines up in theory going back to the initial investigation in Florida in 2005 and then all the way through 2019. But what's important is what you're seeing here is not just things that were directly related to the investigation. It's anything that was on his computer. So when they grabbed his computers and his servers, that's why you're seeing a lot of emails and financial records that wouldn't be directly related to the investigation, but they're related to his life. So we should think of these documents as capturing the point at which Jeffrey Epstein is absolutely an established public figure and one whose behavior is acknowledged to be very problematic. Yeah. Yeah. anything after 2009 when he's already plead guilty in Florida and he's had to register as a sex offender. Anyone who's coming into contact with him, they may not know all the details, but they know they're dealing with a registered sex offender. Gotcha. Okay, that is helpful context. I want to explain to listeners, we asked the three of you in preparation for this conversation to think about themes that you identified in the documents that you've gone through and to bring us examples that illustrate those themes. And so I want to turn to that now. Nick, in terms of the themes, let's start with you and the most important people in this story, the women, the victims of Epstein's behavior and the system that he created. I think for a lot of readers and listeners, the women have been somewhat invisible, right? Because they're victims of sexual trafficking or abuse in many cases. We don't often see them in their own words. And what we see in these documents is his correspondence with many of the women he was trying to bring into his orbit. As soon as he got out of jail in 2009 and possibly before, he was basically building or expanding a virtual harum, a pipeline of young women in their late teens and early 20s who were mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia. He had scouts roving around these places to find him women. And every time he found the women, he would ask them to find him more women.

剥削体系:诱惑、控制与心理操纵

爱泼斯坦的剥削体系主要围绕着诱惑和控制年轻女性展开。他在2009年出狱后,便开始建立或扩大一个由十几岁末至二十出头年轻女性组成的“虚拟后宫”,这些女性大多来自东欧和俄罗斯。他会派遣“侦察员”在这些地区物色目标,并鼓励被招募的女性再介绍更多人。这些女性之所以顺从,是因为爱泼斯坦拥有金钱和影响力,而她们通常一无所有。他提供机票、公寓,承诺支付大学或牙科学校学费,并安排她们去看医生或整形外科医生。最重要的是,他利用“机会感”和“安全感”来诱惑她们,承诺引荐给模特经纪公司、制作人或富豪。

文件中的电子邮件揭示了这些女性在关系中的不同舒适度,有些人似乎接受了这种“性换取金钱、安全或机会”的安排。然而,当一名女性在2011年10月意识到自己并非爱泼斯坦的女友,并对他未兑现的承诺(如安排医生、引荐给摄影师或维多利亚的秘密高层)感到愤怒和背叛时,爱泼斯坦的回应则展现了典型的DARVO(Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender: 否认、攻击、反转受害者与施害者角色)心理操纵模式。他将自己塑造成受害者,指责对方撒谎,并威胁不再提供帮助,以此来维持对这些女性的控制。这种模式在邮件中反复出现,甚至在女性被“抛弃”多年后试图回归时,爱泼斯坦的回复往往是轻蔑的“发裸照”,进一步将她们物化。虽然目前没有证据表明爱泼斯坦将未成年少女贩卖给其他人,但在他出狱后,他确实将目标转向了年龄稍长(18-19岁)但同样脆弱的东欧女性,通过不同的法律定义继续进行人口贩运。这些邮件清晰地揭示了巨大的权力不平等和受害者的脆弱性。

Original English Source

And so you might ask, okay, so why do these women comply? The answer is that he had money and influence and they usually had none. He bought them plane tickets. He provided them apartments. He offered to pay for college or dental school. He sent them to doctors or plastic surgeons. And most of all, he dangled a sense of opportunity and security. He had a place for them to stay. He had people for them to meet. He would make introductions to modeling agencies or producers or richmen. And we can see in these emails these varying levels of comfort on the part of the women. Some of them seem to take the arrangement at face value. They're trading sex for money or security or opportunity. Well, Nick, give us an example that demonstrates Epstein's exploitation of these women's circumstances. So, here we have an example. I'm not going to name her here on the air, but she's a woman who has a relationship with him that goes some ways back. And in October 2011, we are seeing sort of an end point in the relationship. She's had it with him. She's had it because according to her, she realizes she isn't really his girlfriend. In this email, she's saying she spends all her time with them. She doesn't communicate with anybody else. She doesn't see her friends or go on vacations. She dresses like he tells her to. She styles her hair like he tells her to. She has sex with him when he wants, massages when he wants, but she's not getting what she thought she was promised in return. And she's furious and she feels betrayed. She's saying, "I'm fed up with I'm fed up. I've been used. You promised me to organize appointment. This is probably Eastern European or Russian with a doctor. You promised me to introduce to photographers to some people from Victoria's Secret to some celebrity. Words stayed words. Right? She's calling him on his promises. And how does he respond? There's a phenomenon called Darvo in psychology and abusive psychology where the abuser sort of reverses the psychology and makes himself the victim and his victim the aggressor. And that's what he does here. He says, "I am and I have been a friend. I sent you to Moscow, but you cannot lie to me and you lied to me. You lied to me again. So, I will never help you ever again." So, in this one email, we really see how Epstein controls these women and their lives, incentivizes them with promises that he's going to deliver something in order to extract what he's getting in return. And then, it seems in some sense doesn't really deliver it. and then when he's held to account turns things around on them. That's right. He makes himself into the victim. And we see this repeatedly in these emails. I've seen similar exchanges throughout the emails. And along with that, Nick, you often find uh part of the abuse is that it goes on for many years after the women are even sort of essentially discarded by Epstein. And because they're so broken down and felt they had to depend on him, they will try to come back. And you'll see emails with these women will say, "I want to come back." And his first response will be, "Send nudes." I mean, it's this Kurt kind of response. Send nudes, right? Over and over again. And then sometimes they'll send something. It'll say, "Not sexy enough." It's so dismissive of these women as basically purely being objects for him. Matt, the question that always comes up, and I think because Nick just described this dynamic with women, it's the right time to ask it, is do these new documents shed any light on the question of whether or not Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophilic ring that trafficked underage girls to those around him? In short, the answer is no. Basically, the 14 and 15 and 16 year old girls that we've heard about were largely recruited for him. There's nothing that's come up to really indicate that those same girls were being trafficked at the time to any other men. And prosecutors took a look at that in 2019 when he was arrested. And they basically ruled that out. And it's even in a memo that's contained in this latest batch of documents where they said what they looked at and what they did not find was evidence of a pedophile ring. But what's important to understand again, the first time he went to jail in the mid late 2000s, it's on charges that he is soliciting underage girls to get massages. And when he gets out of jail, he appears to change tactics. He seems to decide he's going to be more careful about the law. What we see is a form of trafficking after he gets out of prison that relies mostly on women who were a bit older, 18 and 19 year old women from Eastern Europe than the victims we know about from before he died. I mean, they were a bit older, but they were still equally vulnerable in a different way with a different legal definition. And that's what these emails are so stunning. The vulnerability and the neediness and the disparity in power is very, very clear.

精英磁场:脆弱性、非道德空间与权力交易

尽管爱泼斯坦在纸面上看起来是一个“有毒”的人物,甚至曾入狱,但他却像磁铁一样吸引着世界上最有权势的人。这些新文件揭示了这种吸引力的深层原因:爱泼斯坦擅长收集和策划权力与影响力,并为其他有权势的人提供进入这些圈子的“通行证”,将这种“接触机会”作为一种社交货币进行交易。更令人震惊的是,许多精英在与爱泼斯坦的交流中展现出极度的脆弱和亲密。他成为了一个可以倾诉心声、袒露灵魂的对象,这种“安全感”本身就极具诱惑力。

例如,精神导师迪帕克·乔普拉(Deepak Chopra)曾向爱泼斯坦询问“如何确定自己是永恒的?”;而前安德鲁王子(Prince Andrew)则向他倾诉王室生活的束缚和困难。这些邮件中,爱泼斯坦的回应往往简短而生硬,甚至充满拼写错误,但他扮演了一个“坏男孩朋友”的角色,为这些男性提供了一个可以倾诉在“体面社会”中无法言说之事、无需顾忌道德评判的“非道德空间”。他利用这种角色,将女性引入其圈子,并反过来利用有权势的人来吸引更多女性,形成一个相互利用的权力循环。例如,一份2010年赎罪日晚宴的拟定宾客名单就包括了出版商莫特·扎克曼(Mort Zuckerman)、亿万富翁莱昂·布莱克(Leon Black)和兰姆·列瓦特尼克(Len Blavatnik)、《名利场》编辑格雷登·卡特(Graydon Carter)、设计师汤姆·福特(Tom Ford)和王薇薇(Vera Wang)、以及后来被指控性行为不端的查理·罗斯(Charlie Rose)和哈维·韦恩斯坦(Harvey Weinstein)等40位名流。爱泼斯坦还利用其豪宅中与唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)、穆罕默德·本·萨勒曼(Muhammad bin Salman)、伍迪·艾伦(Woody Allen)、比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)等名人的合影,向年轻女性展示其强大的影响力,既暗示能提供帮助,也警示若不顺从可能带来的伤害。

Original English Source

Deborah, I want to stay with you for a minute. What lots of people who look at these emails end up seeing is behavior that on paper would seem to make Jeffrey Epstein toxic. That's on top of the fact that he's already been in jail. Yes. And yet he's kind of a magnet for the most powerful people in the world. We see that time and time again in this latest batch of documents. You told us that these new emails end up illustrating how and why these powerful people are drawn closer to him even as he becomes a more toxic figure. So, can you walk us through that? Yeah, sure. I mean, one of the things that's so stunning about Jeffrey Epstein as a character is the way that he collected power. He collected influence. He curated it in his life and he created access to these spaces for other powerful, influential people. and he traded access as like this networking currency. And something that really became apparent to me in this latest document dump because there are so many emails is the intense vulnerability and intimacy that people really fall into when they're communicating with him. Jeffrey Epstein was a person that they could open up to, they could bear their soul to in some ways. And that in itself is extremely seductive. It's really stunning when you read these emails to see these people whose names are so recognizable and they're people who have so much power and so much money be so vulnerable and human. Give us some examples of that from these documents. Yeah. So I was reading a couple. There was one from the guru Deepo Chopra and he and Jeffrey Epste were trading these really intense questions and Deepo said to Jeffrey Epste, "How can I be sure that I'm eternal?" I mean he's literally asking him the question about the meaning of life. Um, there were a couple from the former Prince Andrew whose entire life and career and reputation has been brought down by his association with Jeffrey Epstein where he opens up about the restraints of royal life and how difficult it can be to be a royal. And the person that he's opening up to is not his therapist. It's not a family member. It's Jeffrey Epstein. In another email, Jeffrey Epstein is arranging for Prince Andrew or the former Prince Andrew to meet a woman. and he tells him that she's 26, Russian, clever, beautiful, trustworthy, and he responds and he sounds kind of like a high school boy with a crush. He says, "What have you told her about me? And have you given her my email?" And there's just so much raw vulnerability in that response. And it becomes very clear that this too was part of Jeffrey Epstein's power. The way that he hooked people in and made them feel safe enough to show their most intimate parts to him. Well, how do you make sense of that? I mean, what specifically is it about the way Epstein operates that prompts these powerful men and to some degree women to be this vulnerable in his midst and especially in these communications? I mean, it's a great question and maybe Matt and Nick also have a response because it's definitely not his responses in the emails. What's why not? Well, what's staggering is in many of these emails, people are unbburdening their souls and Jeffrey Epstein's response are four or five words brittle the typos and that's it. He's also sort of plays the role of the bad boy friend for a lot of these men that they can say things that they can't say in polite company. Things that they can't say to their friends, that they can't say to their wives, to their partners. It's things that they would never say to their they would not want to be heard saying for whatever reason since Epstein has held himself out as this guy who's like I go against all the rules and he invites them into their world and that's why they feel they can open up and say a lot of these things that they would never say otherwise. He's providing an escape and a kind of amoral space in which to escape to. That's right. He's a con man who has a harum and he's playing these two things off of each other. The women are bringing in these middle-aged men who are powerful in their own spheres. They're powerful in Hollywood or high finance or the royal family or the royal family. But he has girls as he calls them. He has women everywhere he goes. He's surrounded by 19-year-old blondes and he's using the powerful people to bring in the women, right? He's saying, "I can connect you." So he's a connector and a con man and an abuser all at once. Just an example of his network. So there's one email. It's a proposed guest list for a Yam Kapore dinner in 2010, the year after he gets out of prison. Right here. Again, the timeline's important. Now, this is only his proposed guest list. I could not find documents that confirm who actually attended, but this is who he sought to invite. This is at his home. At his home in the Upper East Side in his famous fabulous mansion. And we know that in general he got folks over who he wanted to over the course of his life. So here we have Mort Zuckermanman the publisher and developer. The billionaires Leon Black and Lamb Levotnik. Graden Carter the editor of Van Efair. The designers Tom Ford and Vera Wang. Wow. Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein. Men who in the future will be accused of sexual misconduct. Yeah. Julian Schnabble the artist. Tommy Matlo the record producer. Wow. And the list is is 40 people long. So he could bring these people in a room and then take pictures with them. And remember in his Upper East Side townhouse on that credenza, pictures of him with all these famous people. And so if you are an 18-year-old Russian model and come to his house and you walk past that credenza, you see Donald Trump, Muhammad bin Salman, Woody Allen, Bill Clinton. Wow. You see all these famous people in gripping grins with your host and you think he's powerful. He can help me. And you might also think he's powerful. He can hurt me if I step out of line.

隐形威胁:爱泼斯坦的“黑材料”与权力维持

爱泼斯坦的权力并非仅限于提供机会或非道德空间,他还通过暗示性的“黑材料”(Kompromat: 具有损害性的信息,常用于勒索或政治目的)来维持对这些有权势人物的影响力。虽然没有直接证据表明他曾进行实际的勒索操作,但他会收集人们的秘密,并在必要时以友谊的名义发出隐形威胁,例如“我永远是你最好的朋友,我绝不会向任何人说你的坏话”。这种策略的威力在于其“可能性”——被曝光的潜在威胁。

文件显示,爱泼斯坦曾给自己写下一些备忘录,内容涉及对比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)“不当幽会”的了解,并提及“不希望梅琳达(Melinda Gates: 比尔·盖茨前妻)知道这些事”。他还曾向其主要资助者之一、亿万富翁莱昂·布莱克(Leon Black)建议“也许莱昂应该离婚”。更令人震惊的是,爱泼斯坦写给莱斯·韦克斯纳(Les Wexner: 维多利亚的秘密前负责人,爱泼斯坦大部分财富的来源)的一封信中提到:“莱斯,我们做了15年的‘帮派勾当’(gang stuff)。”尽管“帮派勾当”的具体含义不明,但信中紧接着又说:“我们知道我们不希望你的妻子阿比盖尔(Abigail Wexner)发现这些。”这些信息,无论是否实际发送给当事人,都清晰地传递出一种讯息:爱泼斯坦掌握着足以伤害这些精英的“把柄”。这种潜在的威胁,而非实际的执行,正是他维持权力的关键。

Original English Source

Matt, I want to pick up on something Nick just said about the power that Epstein seemingly held over these powerful people. This is a concept that you have been looking at specifically the way he signaled to people in these documents that he had something on them. Yeah. So, one of the what I call the myths of Epstein is that he had a blackmail operation, too. There's no real evidence of that, that he was blackmailing people, but for better or worse, let's call it compromat. And it was basically that he took the things that people were telling them and also from the work he was doing for some of them, he would claim their secrets. And his whole motus operende was to sort of at some point maybe someone was not doing what he wanted them to do or paying him what he wanted. Right. Not paying him what he wanted or threatening to stop seeing him. He would remind them in messages like I'll always be your best friend. I'll never tell anything bad about you to anyone. He also had this weird thing where he wrote a lot of memos to himself. We don't know how much of this was actually always delivered to the recipient, but there's one to Bill Gates where he talks about the elicit trrists that I know about. And also, we don't want Melinda to know about these things. Gates's ex-wife. You know, there's messages about Leon Black who was one of his big benefactors in the later years, billionaire business. Yeah. He talks about how maybe Leon should get a divorce. And then also Les Wexner, who was head of Victoria's Secret at the time, who basically is where Epstein had got most of his money. Wexner famously cut him off in 2007 after he he he's going to jail. Epste never really got over that because he I think there was a very long relationship there. And there's this letter we found. We're not sure again if it was actually ever sent. He says, "Les, we did gang stuff for 15 years." Gang stuff. gang stuff. Not clear what it means. Is it sexual? Is it something else? And then goes, "Well, we know we don't want Abigail, your wife, to find out about it." Wow. So, he's reinforcing in these messages the friendship, but in a way that says very clearly, "I could become your foe, and we both know I've got the goods to hurt you." Yeah. A final question about this. This is to all three of you. Do we know if FC never delivered on those implied threats? I'm gonna let your wife know. And did he I'm gonna report you to the IRS because I know you're a potential tax fraud. Did he ever follow through? I don't think we do know. I don't think we do. I mean, clearly at times he conveyed it to the people he was he was saying it to, but did he go beyond that? His power was in its possibility. I don't think it was enough to sort of suggest it and obviously these people were aware of what was had on them. But that's one of the challenges with these emails. You can't really see what came before or what came after. And that's one of the challenges of reporting on it. You have to read what's in front of you and make sure you're not inferring too much. But also, we're still trying to put together the pieces as to how all these line up and what the chronology is and what the end result was. It's really difficult to tell, right? This is what it means to be sifting through 3 million documents. We won't know until we get the next one. And I really think we still are very much at the beginning, even though it's been over a week since we got these documents. And just remember, what we see here are his emails and some texts. a few recordings of phone calls. For the most part, we are only seeing a sliver of his communication with all these people. And we can't see what he said one-on-one in a private room, right, or on the telephone most of the time.

公开谎言的破灭与问责的差异化

此次文件披露最引人注目的一点是,许多曾公开否认与爱泼斯坦有密切关系的知名人士,其谎言被无情揭穿。例如,埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)去年9月曾坚称拒绝访问爱泼斯坦的私人岛屿,并将其塑造成一种有原则的行为。然而,文件显示,早在2012年,他曾向爱泼斯坦询问“你岛上最狂野的派对是哪一天?”这与他的公开声明形成直接矛盾。同样,商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克(Howard Lutnick)曾描述自己对2000年代中期访问爱泼斯坦曼哈顿豪宅的厌恶,并声称永远不会再与这个“令人作呕的人”共处一室。然而,文件揭示,七年后他不仅与爱泼斯坦共同投资了一家私人公司,还计划与家人访问爱泼斯坦的私人岛屿,并在访问后收到了爱泼斯坦助理转发的“很高兴见到你”的邮件。

纽约亿万富翁房地产大亨兼政治捐助者安德鲁·法克斯(Andrew Farcus)的案例也如出一辙。他曾试图隐瞒与爱泼斯坦的商业伙伴关系,甚至在爱泼斯坦死后声称“不怎么认识他,只是商业伙伴”。然而,文件显示他们不仅共同拥有一家靠近爱泼斯坦私人岛屿的码头,法克斯还向爱泼斯坦倾诉婚姻结束时的孤独、父亲去世的痛苦等极其私密的情感,甚至在爱泼斯坦被定罪多年后仍建议新的商业合作。面对确凿的证据,法克斯最终不得不承认“后悔与他(爱泼斯坦)的交往”,停止了多年的否认。这些案例表明,精英们曾以为自己发布的“套话”声明可以蒙混过关,但电子邮件等“纸质痕迹”的存在,最终让真相大白。

然而,问责的程度却存在显著差异。在英国,与爱泼斯坦的关联对涉事人员造成了毁灭性打击。安德鲁王子不仅失去了王室头衔和住所,其声誉也几乎尽毁;甚至有报道称,英国首相也可能因此丢掉工作,许多高级官员被迫辞职,仅仅因为他们与爱泼斯坦有联系,或曾提拔过与爱泼斯坦有联系的人。这种“多米诺骨牌效应”在英国社会中,即使是“隔几层关系”也足以让人“有毒”。但在美国,问责力度则相对较弱。保罗·韦斯律师事务所(Paul Weiss)的负责人布拉德·卡普(Brad Karp)因与爱泼斯坦的密切关系曝光而失业,但高盛集团(Goldman Sachs)的首席律师凯西·拉姆勒(Kathy Rumler)却保住了工作,商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克也似乎没有面临失业危险。尤其在科技界,如比尔·盖茨埃隆·马斯克彼得·蒂尔(Peter Thiel)等最具权势的人物,尽管受到公众谴责,但几乎没有受到任何实际影响。

Original English Source

Okay. Well, when we come back after a break, we're going to turn to what these documents are exposing about the very provable lies that people are telling about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and when it ended. We'll be right back. Deborah, Matt, and Nick, I want to turn to the unusual way in which this set of Epstein documents has proven people very publicly to have been dishonest. Nick, you have been focused on this question in particular. Can you tell us what you found? Well, it's hard to find anyone who will ever have admitted that they were close friends with him and liked him. Uh what we instead have found over the years is that all these influential people for whom we knew some fragment of their connection with Epstein would always say, "I never liked him. I caught off contact. I knew him through business. I knew him through a friend." Always minimizing their connection with him. And then all of a sudden 3 million documents come out and we can see the truth of their closeness for all these people. I'll give you an example. Elon Musk. As recently as last September, Elon Musk didn't just deny visiting Epstein's island. He framed his decision as an act of principle. He said, "Epstein, quote, tried to get me to his island and I refused all caps." But back in 2012, these documents show he seemed eager to go and he wrote to Epstein, "What dayight will be the wildest party on your island?" Wow, that is beyond a direct contradiction. Exactly. Here's one more. Howard Lutnik, the commerce secretary, told a similar narrative on a podcast again last year. Massage table in the middle of your house. How often you have a massage? And he says, "Every day." And then he like gets like weirdly close to me and he says, "And the right kind of massage." Lutnik described being so revolted by a mid 2000's visit to Epstein's Manhattan mansion. My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. He even claimed I was never in the room for him socially, for business, or even philanthropy. So publicly claiming 2005 and on nothing. Yeah. Except we see in the documents 7 years later he invests in a privately held company with Epstein. Wow. And he appears to visit Epstein's famous private island. We can see them making travel plans that year for Letic and his family to visit the island, the island on which this guy now is famous for abusing young women. Right. And then after the date of the planned visit, we see an email from an Epstein assistant forwarding a message to Lutnik from from Epstein. Nice seeing you. And we're not just talking emails where they shared nicities. We're talking about, as Nick said, a business deal. Business deals have paper trails. There must have been some sort of calculation in all of these people's heads as these documents started trickling out that they thought, I can just keep denying it and I won't get caught. I mean, that to me is what's so stunning about all the evidence in these documents. It was always there on paper. Another good example is this billionaire New York real estate mogul, Andrew Farcus, who I've been tracking really carefully. Not a household name, but a very big deal. Yes, exactly. not a household name, but a very influential billionaire in New York who's also a very powerful political donor. He's been a huge backer of Andrew Cuomo. He's friends with Donald Trump. He was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for over a decade and they were business partners and he actually went, it appears, to great pains to conceal the fact that they were business partners. He ended up co-owning a marina in St. Thomas, the closest marina to Jeffrey Epstein's private island. And he the one visited. Yes. Exactly. And the closest way to get there on a smaller boat is from this Marina American yacht harbor the two of them owned together. What does Farcus publicly say about the relationship and what's the truth? Well, how far back do you want to go? He never said a word about it that the fact that they were co-owners. It only came out because someone had a deposition in 2018 and Jeffrey Epstein's name came out and after he died in prison, what Farcus said was what a lot of powerful men have said. I didn't really know the guy. We were just business partners. Our relationship never went further than that. And with each document reveal, we've started to see the curtain peel back a bit more. And with this final reveal, it's undeniable. They were very, very good friends. Andrew Farc has opened up to Jeffrey Epstein about his fears of loneliness when his marriage was ending. Wow. About his struggles with the fact that his father was dying, about things that you really only share with a very, very close personal friend. And in addition, not only were they in business in the marina, he was suggesting other business ventures many years after Jeffrey Epstein's conviction in Florida. And what I found particularly interesting in my reporting is the first time I contacted Andrew Farcus about this, he denied it. And each denial got a little more qualified until finally with this last story that I did just yesterday, all he said was, "I regret my association with him." And actually finally stopped denying it because the evidence it's simply too clear. They were very good friends and the business relationship was only a byproduct, not the other way around. What's remarkable about what you're describing is how many people believe that the statements they issued, these boilerplate statements they issued years ago about what they didn't know and that they weren't close to Epstein, that these documents are just obliterating. Yeah. Those statements and email is forever. And the proof here, it's undeniable. When these people were communicating, they clearly never thought these communications would see the light of day, right? And yet accountability has been one of the most distinctive features of the fallout from this latest set of documents. And we're just seeing high-powered person after high-powered person not just being forced to account for how they misled the public about Epstein, but in some cases they're losing their jobs. I would say some Michael. Right. So Brad Karp uh the head of Paul Weiss, he lost his job when it became clear that he was much closer to Epstein big prestigious law firm. But then you take someone like Kathy Rumler who's the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs. Uh she is also revealed to have been much closer to Epstein than her her past comments have suggested. She's still in her job. What we see is that in certain institutions there's more accountability than in others. Howard Lutnik seems in no danger of losing his job as commerce secretary at the moment. We see that in European countries there is a lot more fallout and a lot more damage to men who have been revealed to have been very close with Epstein. Talk about that Deborah. Yeah, I mean the difference in accountability and the sense of the smear that this would give you if you were attached to it when you look at just the US versus the United Kingdom for example is absolutely staggering. I mean, you start with Prince Andrew, who is no longer Prince Andrew. He's now Andrew Mountbat and Windsor because he's not even living in his home. No, he's literally he's lost his title. He's lost his home. He's lost his reputation. I think it's very fair to say he's lost almost everything as a result of his deep relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the fact that it's been shown through documentation and testimony that he abused women as part of his relationship with him. But now we also see that the prime minister of the UK may very much possibly lose his job as a result. and many high-powered people around him have been fired or forced to step down. Some because they were close with Jeffrey Epste and some simply because they were involved in putting people in power who were close to Jeffrey Epste. So we're talking about a domino effect where it's just degrees of separation and that alone is enough in the UK to make people toxic. That is not what we're seeing in the US in certain sectors. Certain sectors that the tech world is one where we've seen almost zero accountability. I mean, there's been some public shaming of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and maybe Peter Teal, but there's been no ramifications to them in any real world. And and quite frankly, these are, if you want to talk about sheer power, the most powerful people in the world based on the value of how much money they have and they've had no accountability.

精英行为的“X光片”:伪善与特权

此次爱泼斯坦文件如同全球精英阶层的一张“X光片”,揭示了他们相互关联、却又与普通社会隔离的运作方式。这些文件证实了多年来被视为“异想天开”的阴谋论,实际上触及了精英们在认为无人监督时行为模式的真实面貌。金钱似乎可以摆平一切麻烦,甚至几乎所有丑闻。一个曾因诱奸少女被定罪的人,在曼哈顿的上流社会中依然是座上宾,出席电影首映、受邀参加奢华活动,并与有权势的人保持亲密关系,这些都未曾引起他们明显的疑虑。

更深层的问题在于,精英社会最终能够轻易地“抛弃”这些年轻女孩,将她们视为“妓女”,认为“如果不是爱泼斯坦,也会是别人”。他们的罪行之所以不重要,是因为受害者被视为“无关紧要的、可随意处置的人”。讽刺的是,这些精英中不乏自诩为“进步主义者”、持有“自由主义”观点并对女性抱有“开明”态度的人,这无疑揭示了他们行为中真实的伪善。爱泼斯坦就像一个“提线木偶师”,巧妙地操纵着这些精英,利用他们生活中最渴望的东西——不仅仅是性,还有他们向他倾诉的各种私密需求。这些精英长期以来都觉得自己“无懈可击”。虽然对其中一些人可能永远不会有真正的法律问责,但目前正在发生一场“公众清算”。《纽约时报》正在公开他们的私密想法、他们从未想过会曝光的照片,以及他们用粗俗语言谈论女性的言论。这些他们以为永远不会被公之于众的“纸质痕迹”,如今成为了他们无法逃避的审判。

Original English Source

We haven't talked about an incredibly important figure in all this, and that's President Trump. What do we learn about him from these documents that we didn't already know? Well, to answer your question, Michael, it is important to keep in mind some chronology here for the listeners, right? Trump and Epstein were very close friends in the late 80s, in the 1990s, and a couple of years into the 2000s. Epste thought he was Trump's closest friend. These documents though come from after they had their falling out in the mid 2000s. So, they aren't friends anymore. M the mentions we have of Trump in these files really come in three categories. It's either Epstein talking about Trump with somebody else, often criticizing him, witnesses in the Epstein investigation who were mentioning Trump, and we'll come back to that. And then tips that came into the FBI in 2019, for example, regarding Epstein that also had some mention of Trump, and those tips are uncooperated for the most part. I think if email had been in wide use in the 1990s and if Trump was a guy who used email, which he's not, we might know a lot more about their friendship. But let's also remember, we already know quite a bit about their friendship. For the better part of two decades, they were very close, and their friendship was based almost entirely on a shared interest in women and sexual conquest. That's what they did together. They chased women. They talked about sex, about women's bodies, about who they had slept with. They bragged they were wingmen at parties and pageantss at Mara Lago in Manhattan in Atlantic City. Trump once groped Epstein's girlfriend in front of him as if it was a game. And Epstein introduced Trump to at least some of the women who would later accuse Epstein of abusing them. Now, we don't have any knowledge that Trump was implicated in any of Epstein's criminal activities, but we know all these other facts, right, about their overlap and their friendship. So, the fact that there's not a ton of new insight from these documents doesn't change and in many people's minds diminish what we already knew about the death of their relationship. I don't think so. The Clintons are at this very moment preparing to testify before Congress about Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton's association with him is reasonably wellnown. I don't know if the three of you have spent a lot of time looking into the Clinton dynamics in these documents, but to the degree you have, what do you know? Well, in terms of Hillary, there's not a lot there. And the fact of her being called to testify is mainly just because she's Hillary Clinton, right? And the Republicans have always been fascinated with Hillary Clinton. There's no doubt with President Clinton, there's evidence now that Gain had a bigger role in helping this set Maxwell setting up the Clinton Global Initiative. This is the president's marquee public philanthropic initiative after the presidency. It was what he did for his job after he left office. Fascinating that Delane Maxwell was central to establishing it. Yeah. I mean, basically with Epstein and and Clinton, it was like going on these trips. There was a famous trip to South Africa where they went and they took people. Then we know there have been reports that there were young women on the plane. There's no evidence of anything any kind of sexual wrongdoing, anything criminally improper. It's more again what we see with so many times of this bad judgment of hanging out with someone who you've been warned about is someone you should avoid. Got it. Well, I think that's where I'd like to end this conversation because here we are talking about former presidents, current and former CEOs, billionaires, ambassadors, law firm chairmans, and they're communicating with Jeffrey Epste. They're relying on him. They're advising him. They're sharing intimacies, Deborah, as you said, with him. And in seeing all of this laid bare, even in these early stages of getting through three million documents, you can see how much, and check me if you think I'm wrong here, the conspiracy theories that we heard about for years and years and years and that were dismissed as, you know, hairbrained, they were scratching at something really real about the way that elites behave when they don't think any of us are I mean, these documents are an X-ray of the global elite. How it's interconnected, how it's isolated, how money buys anything, it buys your way out of any trouble, it buys your way out of almost any scandal. A man who was convicted of soliciting a girl remained the toast of the town in Manhattan for years until he was arrested again. It was no obstacle to socializing, to movie premieres, to invitations to fancy events, or to the intimacy that Deborah and Matt have been talking about with these powerful people. It did not give them any apparent qualms that he was this person. And and can I add to that that what you see here also is I think elite society at the end of the day while they knew he was a registered sex offender and they were aware that he had pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor girl and that's a key part of what they knew. It was easy for them to discard these young girls as basically they were just prostitutes. If it wasn't Epstein it would have been somebody else. Why? His crimes didn't matter because of who the crimes were perpetrated against. because these women didn't matter, right? They were girls that they were girls that didn't matter. They were basically disposable people that they didn't care about. And the irony is a lot of these elites are people who we would call progressives and having very liberal views and supposedly enlightened views on women. And it really shows a real level of hypocrisy. It's also a really interesting look at how these elite people, these extremely powerful people were played by Jeffrey Epstein. the way that he became this puppet master just holding all them on a string. He was able to dangle the things that they wanted most in life, not just sex, but also all the things they open up to him about. And they really felt for so long that they were infallible. And for some of them, there may never be real accountability, but there is some sort of accountability that's happening right now because there's a public reckoning. We are reading their intimate thoughts in the New York Times. We are publishing photographs that they never thought would see the light of day. We're publishing them speaking in vulgar terms about women. Yes, these are things they never thought would be error. They never believed in a million years that this would reach the public. They didn't think they were people who could be touched. But there is a paper trail and now we have it. And they have fallen into that and it is a reckoning of a sort.

持续发酵:未曝光的秘密与问责的未来

爱泼斯坦的长期伴侣吉斯莱恩·麦克斯韦尔(Ghislaine Maxwell: 英国社交名媛,因协助爱泼斯坦性贩运被定罪)在国会作证时援引美国宪法第五修正案,拒绝回答所有问题,这表明仍有许多未曝光的秘密。与此同时,推动公开爱泼斯坦文件的两名国会议员——肯塔基州共和党人托马斯·马西(Thomas Massie)和加利福尼亚州民主党人罗·康纳(Ro Khanna)——在审阅未删节文件后,发现了六名被删去姓名的涉案男性,其中一人据称是某外国政府的高级官员。这进一步暗示,随着对数百万份文件的深入梳理,未来可能还会有更多令人震惊的发现,并引发更广泛的问责浪潮。

Original English Source

Well, Deborah, Matt, Nick, thank you guys very much. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Miss Maxwell, did you and Jeffrey Epstein attempt to surround yourselves with influential individuals to courage favor and shield yourselves from potential scrutiny? I invoke my fifth amendment right to silence. On Monday afternoon, Epstein's longtime companion, Gileain Maxwell, who is serving a federal prison sentence on sex trafficking charges, refused to answer questions during a deposition before Congress. Instead, she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against selfinccrimination in response to every question. Meanwhile, well, that was an interesting experience. A few hours later, the two congressmen who have led the efforts to force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files, Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democrat Ro Connor of California, were given a chance to review unredacted copies of the latest Epstein files. And we went in there for 2 hours. There's millions of files, right? And in a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted who are implicated in the way that the files are presented. Both lawmakers criticized the Department of Justice for redacting the names of six associates of Epstein, who they said appeared to have engaged in criminal conduct. One of them, according to Massie, is a highranking official in a foreign government. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need tonight. And as a doctor, your your message to people about the measles vaccine, take the vaccine, please. We have a solution for a problem. A top US health official is urging Americans to get vaccinated against the measles, issuing one of the strongest endorsements yet from the Trump administration. Asked by CNN about the measles outbreak that is raging in South Carolina, Dr. Meett Oz was far more forceful in calling for vaccination than the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime skeptic of vaccines and we believe our mom is still out there. We need your help. On Monday, the Today's Show anchor Savannah Guthrie issued a plea for the public's help in finding her 84year-old mother Nancy Guthrie, whose disappearance over a week ago is being investigated as a kidnapping. No matter where you are, even if you're far from Tucson, if you see anything, you hear anything, if there's anything at all that seems strange to you, that you report to law enforcement, we are at an hour of desperation. Local police say that blood found on Nancy Guthri's front porch was hers and that a doorbell camera at her home had been disconnected and removed. But so far, police say they have few leads about her location. Today's episode was produced by Mary Wilson, Michael Simon Johnson, and Shannon Lynn. It was edited by Brendan Clinkenberg, and Rachel Quester. Contains music by Chelsea Daniel and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Boro. See you tomorrow.

📌 文中提及的人物和组织

关键字: elite-behavior social-dynamics accountability sexual-exploitation document-leak