Okay, we are live. Welcome back to Inc. Live, everyone. I'm Anand Giridharadas. We have three people today. Three. We've already had two. Now we got a third. This is a busy day here at Inc. I'm so delighted to be joined by the journalist and author Vicky Ward, who has been at CNN, The Independent, the New York Post, Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere, and has spent much of her career delving into something we've been talking a lot about this week and all the weeks: networks of power, including on most of the major figures of Trump world. And she has been on the Jeffrey Epstein beat. I'm sorry for her. Since, for a long time, I don't even know since when. Profiling him in 2003. Is that right, Vicky?
Wow. 2003. 22 years ago. Covering the earliest criminal complaints against him and being threatened by him for her reporting. You're one of the only people whose name turns up in the Epstein emails in a way that makes you look better rather than worse because you know that they're worried about you. They're worried about you. I'm so glad to talk with you. You reached out in the last couple days after I, many, many years after your initial big into Epstein. I wrote a piece about the kind of social network, and I wanted to start there with, you know, how you, as you covered him, understood him both as a monstrous and awful individual and eventually convicted sex criminal, but also someone who could only be understood in the context of a constellation of powerful people around him.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I thought your piece was absolutely brilliant talking about the Epstein class because I think it is really the only way to really understand actually how he did get away with the sex crimes for so many years. And it was because the people around him had willful blindness. I mean, they were more interested in what Jeffrey Epstein could do for them. And, you know, some of it, as I think you showed, was like smoke and mirrors, and an awful lot of it to somebody coming in landing from Mars or wherever would look like [__]. But it is this world of transactionality that flies at 40,000 feet higher than everybody else, and they're not interested in looking down. I think you had a phrase that was better than that, but this is a level of behavior that goes on on a level, and they're not interested in what happens beneath. And obviously, so, you know, what I got to see when I first reported and met Jeffrey Epstein in 2002 were those two different facets. I got to see, you know, and heard firsthand the stories of his sexual abuse of the two Farmer sisters. I wish I had known about the scale of the operation with Ghislaine Maxwell. I didn't know, but I did have the Farmer sisters, and Annie Farmer was underage when she went for a miserable weekend to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico. Maria Farmer was in her 20s, but she was still a very young woman and went through a nightmare no one should have to go through. And I knew because, you know, he threatened me that even of all the allegations I wound up putting to him after a couple of months of research, including stuff that I knew he wouldn't like about how he made his money, because, you know, I was able to sort of punch holes in the mythology he'd created about having been this wunderkind. You know, in fact, I had legal papers that showed he'd left Bear Stearns in really murky circumstances amid an SEC investigation into insider trading. I was able to show that far from being, you know, a financial advisor to billionaires only, in fact, one of his mentors was a guy called Steven Hoffenberg who'd committed the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history prior to Bernie Madoff and was sitting in jail for 20 years. I was able to show a lot of stuff that Epstein didn't want out there, but the thing that really drove him apoplectic were the Farmer sisters. And that's what got him, you know, out of his chair and into the offices of Vanity Fair behind my back, and obviously got the two sisters removed. But whilst all this was going on, all these people, all these luminaries, all these bold-faced names, all these prominent scientists, you know, some of whom resurfaced in the emails, you know, Martin Nowak, I mean, Dershowitz, they would all leap under the phone. Well, in one case, James Cayne, who's now dead, who was then the CEO of Bear Stearns, unsolicited to tell me what a fantastic, clever, insightful, brilliant man Jeffrey Epstein was. And at the time, you know, there I was in my early 30s, pregnant with twins, and I could not understand why all these people thought Jeffrey Epstein was so brilliant because the guy I was dealing with was a thug. He was a thug who would... he was crude, he was cold, he didn't say anything to me that I thought was particularly clever. He was condescending, and he would end conversations with, you know, lines like, 'And if I don't like this piece, Vicky, well, I'll have a witch doctor place a curse on your unborn children.' And that's off the record. And I just thought he was like a member of the mafia or something.
So go back, take us to how you decided to even profile him because you were, you know, 20 years before a lot of the public and even other journalists in being on this story. How did he first cross your radar?
So because he made this mistake which Steve Hoffenberg told me sitting in his jail cell that Jeffrey had promised to himself and to Hoffenberg he'd never make, which was that he would never draw public scrutiny on him. He would never do anything to attract media attention. But he broke his own rule and he flew Bill Clinton on his plane along with Kevin Spacey and I think Chris Rock and some other people on a philanthropic mission to Africa, and there was a mention of this in the New York Post's Page Six, and it was that single peg that caused Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, to say to me, you know, I had a high-risk pregnancy with twins, and I couldn't, you know, the last couple of pieces for Vanity Fair I'd done, one was about Silicon Valley. You know, I'd been on the road, and he said, 'Well, this should be easy for you. I've been hearing about this guy for years. I have no idea where his money came from. He lives in this mansion in New York. You live in New York. This should be really simple.' Well, it turned out to be the most hideous... Sounds like Graydon Carter's idea of a perfect assignment for a woman with a high-risk pregnancy. It turned out to be, you know, the absolute... it became a nightmare that really never ended because, you know, I've written about this, he did go behind my back. He went apoplectic about the reporting on the Farmer sisters. And even after he'd got them removed from the piece, I knew that he was still angry. And I then gave birth prematurely to my kids, really prematurely. They were tiny and they were in the hospital NICU for two months. And the piece, but they were born before the piece hit newsstands. And we were, you know, my then husband and I were so, you know, worried that Jeffrey Epstein was actually going to try and harm these babies that we had to ask the hospital staff to keep an eye out and have security on them, which is the last thing, you know, you want to be thinking about when you were in a situation like that. And people have, you know, when people have asked me, you know, why did you continue to work for Vanity Fair after that? Well, I got kind of overtaken by events in my own life that were, you know, all wrapped up in this. You know, my priorities shifted, to be honest, to the well-being of my children who were struggling for their lives.
Wow. When you were thinking about it, it seems there's kind of two stories here as you laid it out. There's like the origin story of this guy, and then there's the other people who ingratiated themselves with him, built this network around him, he built them into a network. But that question you mentioned about how he made his money, I continue to get comments from people where there's just this confusion. He was a math teacher at some point. He did some financial jobs, Bear Stearns, places like that. But then he ended up with a level of finances seemingly that is not necessarily common for people with that LinkedIn page. What is your best understanding of... there's a lot of finance bros in New York who are a little crude. Like, what is your understanding of how he went to becoming Jeffrey Epstein?
Well, I think there was a period in the 1980s, so after he left Bear Stearns and before Leslie Wexner took him under his patronage, where, you know, he did go to Europe and he discovered that there were a lot of wealthy people, Europeans, who he was introduced to. And he discovered that when wealthy people lose their money for whatever reason, they don't like to go to law enforcement to get it back. And he was involved, you know, there were some schemes where he was involved in helping wealthy families who'd been swindled recoup their money. But what he then did was, in one instance, he put these bonds back, he flew them to a bank in Switzerland, and then he gave himself control of the bank account in Switzerland. So years later, a Spanish family actually didn't have access to the money, Jeffrey Epstein did. And I think what's interesting about that is, you know, he managed to persuade Leslie Wexner to give him power of attorney. This is an extraordinary thing for one of the wealthiest men in this country to do. And I think that again it begs the question: what was Jeffrey Epstein doing with that money? We don't know still to this day what Wexner's motivation was, but we do know that Epstein ended up stealing from Leslie Wexner, something that Leslie Wexner finally went public with, but only when Jeffrey Epstein was dead. And, you know, there are other stories I did come across in my reporting of wealthy people, one case somebody died and their children told me, again on background because it's embarrassing for them, that their parent had gone to Jeffrey Epstein who'd taken over the family financials, and when their parent died, they discovered, lo and behold, all sorts of money was missing. One of the things he did, you know, he was big on giving advice, offshore advice, and what Steve Hoffenberg, his mentor, told me in jail is that, you know, once Jeffrey Epstein was in control of money that he'd put offshore, only Jeffrey Epstein had the control to bring it back. So, I mean, it's one of the great frustrations to me that all these years later we still don't have a clearer understanding of how he was scamming people, but he was scamming people, including wealthy people. And one of the... actually, I don't know, it's probably a different family, but actually one of the families that occupied quite a number of emails in the email dump that I read through for that piece was with, I think the family is the Spaneles, and I think he's corresponding, and it's a lot of emails actually, there's a significant number of emails in this wider tranche with what seemed to be an older family member who had a lot of money, and the thrust of the emails is, 'Your kids are idiots. They're mismanaging your money. They have no idea of how to use money. Let me set up this family trust for you. Let me set up a family office for you. I'm making up the numbers, but, you know, pay me 40 million a year or whatever it is, and then I'll set up this kind of trust for you.' And he kept denigrating the children of this wealthy person to them.
Yeah. He did that to Leon Black. Those emails surfaced a couple of weeks ago. You know, Leon Black, another of the richest men in the country, and he writes to Leon Black, 'You owe me 40 million dollars. Your children...' he used the word moral... he called his children [__]. And the punchline of all this, I haven't yet seen any emails from Leon Black back to Jeffrey Epstein. I would very much like to read those. But the punchline is that Leon Black paid him the money. We know that he did because he ended up paying Jeffrey Epstein 170 million dollars. And so the question is, why? What is your point? What is Jeffrey Epstein? What are the services he's offering that are so much better than Leon Black could get at JP Morgan? Can you talk about the intersection of the misogyny story and the kind of money and power story? Because at some level they're obviously separate stories, and they intersect very clearly here. And I think it's obviously important to remember, as you have in your work, that at the heart of this is a story of sexual abuse and predation and trafficking and all these things which happened to a certain number of people and involved a certain number of men. And then there's this other thing going on which is about how class functions and how power functions, and they are separate, they can be separated. There, you know, Larry Summers and him transacting, you know, information about business and the Saudis is obviously different from the sexual abuse of children. But I wonder if you could just talk about how the sexual abuse and misogyny story intersects in your mind with the kind of more diffuse but widespread predation of this kind of elite class.
Well, I think on one level it's really simple. Whether these guys were involved in the sexual abuse themselves or not, at the very least, I mean, we know from the birthday book and those lewd messages, and we've seen in the jokes and the email, and even the jokes saying, 'Oh, Jeffrey, you know, you're differential about, you know, his knowledge of women.' I mean, come on. That there is a collective looking the other way, there's a collective forgiveness, you know, which to my mind is misogynistic. And you'll note, by the way, there aren't that many emails. I mean, there are a few women he writes back, you know, Arianna de Rothschild, Katherine Rummler, but by and large these are correspondences with men. I mean, it was a man's club for the most part. And I just think that the very fact these guys were completely prepared to overlook the fact that Jeffrey Epstein had gone to jail for having sex with a minor tells you kind of everything that you need to know. And what's even more troubling is actually the few women who were in on this, because they would have been privy to that knowledge too.
Yeah. I think it, you know, those sometimes you get those medical tests where they put a dye in your blood so they can photograph where things go and where things end up. And this feels like, this story feels like putting a dye in the blood of the American body politic and testing all these powerful people who say they want to get rid of diseases, who say they want to help, you know, steward the economy, who say they want to lead universities and have more women in science and technology and engineering. This story put a dye in the blood, and let's see them. Let's see how these people actually operate. Let's see what they actually think. And then when you're working backwards to say, 'Huh, isn't it so interesting that Obama bailed out the banks and not regular people?' Or, 'Isn't it so interesting that Larry Summers thought women didn't, you know, have the same kind of brain power at Harvard as men?' Or, 'Isn't it interesting?' Well, you're actually seeing in these emails the kind of raw mentalities that explain what until now we had only experienced through the kind of downstream effects.
I think that is 100% right, and I think the other thing that your piece really reminded me of is that on one level, to all these people, these people who are in positions of power and influence, it's all a game. And, you know, I mean, you mentioned in your piece how there was that exchange where he wrote to Steve Bannon, you know, 'Who do you want to have come for dinner? Katherine Rummler?' Because to them it's a game. It's not serious. And I think, you know, I mean, it's... and I think that's what's so upsetting when you see these emails that are not intended for public consumption, because you see how kind of power really does operate in the shadows, and how kind of prime and basic and not... it's the opposite of high-minded any of this is from people we want to... you know, I mean, I think with Steve B, you at least want him to be ideologically... and he's not even that, you know. I mean, it's... I mean, this is... it's just a room. I mean, it's a very big global rolodex all full of transactional chances, and Jeffrey Epstein directing the traffic. I mean, literally directing the traffic, as you pointed out so well. I mean, it's like, 'Where are you in the world today?' And I will, I mean, I think the other thing you got so brilliantly, which I think a lot of people don't get, because a lot of people have said to me, 'Oh my god, it just shows what an idiot Jeffrey Epstein was, the fact that he used poor grammar and he couldn't spell.' And I'm like, 'No, no, no.' Again, it goes back to the game. It's a psychological game. And, you know, very powerful, wealthy people are used to emails that are very differential and therefore that have been spell-checked and have perfect sentences. And so Epstein, I am sure, was playing a game of sort of psychological one-upmanship. He made it look quite deliberately as if he was so busy he could barely be bothered to send the email that he was sending. I mean, at one point it's actually fairly hilarious where the email correspondence when Steve Bannon is stuck at Heathrow and, you know, say he's missing, he's going to miss his plane, and Epstein, you know, sends a typically badly spelled but, you know, email back, and yet he has somehow looked up the next flight that Bannon can get out of... I mean, you know, the double standards here, you know, almost comic actually. I mean, they would be comic if it wasn't such a, you know, there wasn't such a horrific underbelly to all of this.
Well, it's so interesting. It's funny you say that because it was a thing that struck me reading the emails, and I didn't get even so deep into this particular theme that you just said, but the looking up the airplane thing. There's something in Epstein that was... and I think about this as like my family's Indian, like there's a kind of old-worldness in him that actually doesn't feel very American, in both ways, both in ways that are actually positive and ways that are obviously like the darkest things ever. And what I mean by that is there's a kind of attentiveness to, 'Have you had anything to eat? Come by my house, I can feed you.' And I don't think all of that stuff is like a sex ring. Like, I actually think people would land and they'd email him, and, you know, he's the kind of person who's like a wealthy, powerful person who's like, 'Have you had something to eat? Like, I can order something. Like, what's your food situation?' And then that mingles with, as we now all know, this like gruesome predation. And there's something old-world in that kind of... it's not a... I don't know how to explain it. Like, it's not a... he's not like a clinical figure. He's not... it's not like a typical market economy figure. It's almost like a big man, like a kind of mafioso or something like that, where that care and that abuse are so tightly mingled. 'Let me look up your flight,' right? 'But I'm abusing women in the back room.' Like, 'Have you had something to eat?' 'But I'm trafficking.' I wonder if, when you were saying, like, how do you explain that kind of mingling of care and attentiveness to people and then like the worst barbarism?
Yeah. Well, no, I think it's all part of the same. I think he was an extraordinarily brilliant manipulator of all sorts of people. And, you know, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, in her memoir, Nobody's Girl, writes really movingly and honestly, actually, of, you know, what drew her, what kept her as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's sex slave. And the answer was because if you could disassociate, as she tried to do, compartmentalize the abuse, they provided her with the nurturing, caring family that she had never had. And so I think you see, you know, this is what I mean. I do remember when I was dealing with Epstein back in 2002, you know, he was trying... I mean, I found it to just be creepy, but he was looking for ways in. You know, he wondered... you know, at one time, you know, my doorbell went and it was, you know, somebody was delivering this textbook, Math for Dummies, and, you know, he would have his assistant, Leslie Groh, say, 'So Jeffrey wanted you to know, you know, you look so pretty.' When I heard that, I just wanted to throw up. But I think this was his way of like doing it, you know, 'Come for dinner,' you know, to Katherine Rummler, you know, 'Do you want sushi?' It's creating a sort of fake sense of security from which, you know, he can then do whatever he needs to do. I mean, you have to remember this is a guy who managed to get Bill Gates in the room. That's, you know, that's quite difficult.
