“Jeffrey Epstein may have been a terrible criminal. But his particular crimes, the world he built, and the image he cultivated exist on a continuum that includes many of our everyday beliefs and recreations,” writes rkgar
Photo-Illustration: by Preeti Kinha; Photos: Getty Many years ago, when I was a broke graduate student living in Europe, I was asked to organize a “database of women” for an extremely wealthy American businessman.
In each profile, a woman was identified by name, age , nationality, and profession . Some files contained special details or instructions, such as “Lives with mother, have a woman phone her home to avoid suspicion.” Others listed which plastic-surgery procedures had been promised to a given woman, and which super-wealthy client would be footing the bill. These notes did not bother with elegance or discretion; a typical one read: “Mr. X. agrees to do Ms. Y’s boobs.
But no one seriously cared about the women’s career plans. They were simply luxury commodities — barely different from the myriad other valuable objects that floated through this world. That I could have even found myself in that universe helps me understand Epstein’s decades of success. Epstein trafficked not just in underage girls but in the pleasures of vicarious consumption. He’d built himself a fantasy world that held familiar resonance for anyone raised on American success fairy tales.
For weeks now, the media has been asking how Epstein could have gotten away for so long with crimes of this magnitude . After all, there were so many witnesses — employees, pilots, chauffeurs, neighbors, colleagues, party guests, and of course the girls themselves. Surely Epstein could not have hushed up or paid off all of these people. No. It takes a village to make a monster like this. And here’s where our own cultural presumptions play a part.
And so, however reprehensible Epstein’s actions may have been, they were cloaked in the signs and symbols of many beloved American myths about wealth, men, women, beauty, sex, and youth. Naturally, it was hard to notice when this one sociopath stepped over the line into criminality. He gave such great parties! He knew models! So what if his luxury-commodity girls were “on the younger side,” as Donald Trump once said.
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