This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We begin today's show looking at the growing scandal around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, both his ties to President Trump and a network of prominent politicians, academics, philanthropists, diplomats, and other public figures. Last week, Congress overwhelmingly voted, almost unanimously, save one congressman, both in the Senate and the House, to compel the Justice Department to release all files related to Epstein, who died in 2019 in prison after he was arrested on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors. President Trump signed the legislation, but has repeatedly described the call to release the Epstein files to be a hoax. Earlier this month, he snapped at a female reporter aboard Air Force One about the Epstein files.
Quiet. Yep, you heard it right. Quiet, piggy, he said to the female reporter. Trump made the comment shortly after House Republicans released 20,000 files from Epstein's estate, putting a new spotlight on the late convicted sex offender's connections with a network of wealthy and powerful figures. For years, survivors of Epstein's abuse have talked about how the scandal is about far more than just Epstein. This is the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre speaking to 60 Minutes in 2019.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre
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I was trafficked to a lot of different men. I was trafficked to other billionaires. I was trafficked to politicians, professors, even royalty. So the circles that Jeffrey Epstein ran in weren't your typical setting of human trafficking, you know, and it was the elite of the world. It was the people who run the world. It was the most powerful people in the world. And those are our leaders. Those are the people that we are supposed to look up to. It's corrupt. It's corrupt to the core.
That was Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2019. She died earlier this year by suicide in Australia. We're joined now by Anand Giridharadas, author of several books including Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, also the publisher of the Substack newsletter, The Ink. His recent piece for The New York Times is titled "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Files." Anand writes, quote, "When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain." Anand, thanks so much for being with us.
It's great to be back with you.
So, talk about looking at the emails, what you looked at, and as you congratulate the women and talk about their bravery for coming forward, you take a very interesting look at who these people are that Epstein surrounded himself with, this elite network, as you talk about the Epstein class.
Look, there is no doubt that at the beating dark heart of this story is one monstrous man, in Jeffrey Epstein, who did monstrous things, as Virginia was very bravely talking about there. But I think there's a lot of powerful people in this country who would like the story to begin and end with one monstrous man. And when these emails were released, I decided, maybe against my better judgment, that I was going to read all of them. And it took me four or five days just going through one after another, making notes. And I was really curious about all these other people, right? And some of them are celebrities and bold-faced names like she was talking about. Some of them are utterly ordinary people no one's ever heard of. Some of them are professors, others. But I was interested in this larger network because these were the people that Jeffrey Epstein had, in effect, chosen to rehabilitate him socially and redeem him after he was a convicted sex offender trying to reestablish himself in society. And I was trying to understand how these relationships worked. And what I found was that it's very convenient for the American power elite to think about this as a story of one depraved man. But in fact, what the emails show, if you actually read them, is that he had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away at what he did, because it was very gifted at looking away over a generation at so much else, so much other abuse and suffering, whether the economic crisis members of that network often helped cause, the wars members of that network helped push fraudulently, the pain of technological obsolescence that members of that network pushed on the American public. So this was a group of people well chosen by Jeffrey Epstein because this American power elite, these circles that he moved in, if they have any superpower, it is the ability to hear the cries of people without power and close their ears.
You write powerfully in this piece. It's a tale of a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much abuse and suffering. And you often talk about them being on both sides of the political spectrum. You talk, and of course, it's not just American. You're talking about a British prince, though he's been stripped of that title, Andrew. You're talking about the Israeli former prime minister, Ehud Barak, and others. How did he manage to do this?
So, you know, a network, as you rightly kind of imply with the question, it needs connectivity. It needs something to hold people together. So that's what I was after as I read the emails. What was holding this together, right? Why would these people be in cahoots with such a depraved person? There's a lot of choices of people out there in the world. Well, as I read the emails, it seemed to me there were a few different things going on. One, this is a group of people who are not really loyal to the communities they come from. Their loyalty is not downward to places and communities and even countries. This is a kind of borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other than to places. And that kind of network actually needs someone who is a connector. So a lot of the emails are, "Hey, I'm landing in New York. Hey, I'm going to San Francisco." And then Epstein would say, "Hey, you should meet this guy in San Francisco. Oh, you need an investor for your startup? Let me connect you with that." It's all about this kind of connectivity. And he was a very good connector. Second, this is a network that thrives on information barter and specifically non-public information. Again, why would they consort with this guy? Well, this guy ended up being not just his own information. He ended up being a kind of convener of these trades of non-public information. Investors want information that'll help them, you know, make trades that other people don't know about. You know, professors want insight about things. People in the business world want tips about things that will be the next big thing. So there was this kind of information network. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, wanted dating advice. There was the Harvard president and the dating advice, he wanted extramarital advice on how to get his mentee into bed.
