NYT: The Epstein Light Grenade Hits Academia

Couldn't happen to a more deserving institution. But even in the Ivy League, it may still look more like Salem 1692 than actual justice. 

Now that the Department of Justice has published files from all of the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, including a list of notable correspondents and others connected to the sex offender, certain patterns have become apparent. One big pattern is that people like money, and they like to flatter people with money in hopes of getting it for themselves. And who likes money most? 

Well, politicians, but we knew that. Running a close second, however, are university administrators and researchers. It turns out that Larry Summers was hardly unique in Academia, according to the New York Times, although others in the Ivy League may not have asked Epstein for seduction advice:

America’s colleges and universities are chronically searching for money, a reality that brought academic leaders and researchers into both Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit and his inbox. The schools had the prestige to lend him legitimacy. Mr. Epstein had the money to bankroll projects.

It worked well for some, until it didn’t.

Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.

Some schools have spent years trying to distance themselves from Mr. Epstein, donating his contributions and condemning his crimes. But recent document releases from the Justice Department have prompted new recriminations and regrets.

Many academics whose names appear within the Epstein files say they turned to him only because of his money and the possibility that it could underwrite college budgets and research efforts — even if their exchanges came after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Not for the first time, I am reminded of the Light Grenade from the terrible film Mom and Dad Save the World, which makes anyone who picks it up disappear. The actor Jeffrey Jones got professionally disappeared in a context not far removed from the same kind of issues surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, ironically, but that's not the point. The Epstein Files and Epstein's money are the Light Grenades here, and those who attempt to use either or both are now starting to get disappeared too:

Jones' professional cratering was well deserved. So too was Summers', who didn't just engage in fundraising contacts with Epstein but asked a convicted sex offender to help Summers get a young female protegé "horizontal."  However, it's not clear that this is true for all of the academics appearing on the Epstein Files list. Most of them went looking for just the money. While sucking up to a convicted sex offender for funding the education of young adults is questionable, it is not at all the same as participating in crimes.  

There is an element of complicity in Epstein's attempts to rehab his image, however. The NYT notes that Epstein almost certainly used his money to force money-hungry academics to participate in that effort:

Mr. Botstein said in 2023 that Mr. Epstein “enjoyed humiliating and dangling prospects” and had “absolutely strung me along.” Others have wondered whether he luxuriated in conversations with some of the world’s brightest minds. Many also believe that Mr. Epstein sought to leverage academia’s reputation to clean up his own.

For example, a Harvard professor, whose program received millions from Mr. Epstein, greenlit proposals made by the financier’s publicist to feature Mr. Epstein on a university website. In a report Harvard issued in 2020, the university said the requests “appeared to be part of a larger effort to rehabilitate” Mr. Epstein’s image. (The university also noted that Mr. Epstein’s foundation’s website overstated its gifts to Harvard by tens of millions of dollars.)

“Having one of these universities as part of your philanthropic portfolio adds a tremendous amount of credibility, and I think that’s what a university should be worried about: Is an unsavory character using me to whitewash a lifestyle?" said Nicholas S. Zeppos, a former Vanderbilt University chancellor.

Well ... duh. But as Dean Martin (Ned Beatty) said in Back to School, in Harvard's defense ... it was a really big check:

The problem is that not everyone's contact with Epstein was equally malign, or even in the same class as Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton in the Tubba Bubba shot, or even Summers. Most of these were normal business/social contacts among the elites, which certainly can be criticized but hardly warrant professional death penalties. Joe Nocera writes about the Salem 1692 quality of the spiraling public fallout at the Free Press, where even a mention in the files brings assumptions of participation in Epstein's crimes:

 I’ve been appalled by the way so many people in public life—people like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—remained close to him, undeterred by the knowledge of his past conviction. In fact, what is most appalling is the realization that some of these people likely knew what he was still doing, post-prison, with the young girls he solicited for “massages.” Writer Michael Wolff and former Obama administration lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler went so far as to strategize with Epstein in the months before he was arrested in 2019. On Thursday, Ruemmler resigned as Goldman Sachs’ general counsel, a position she had held since 2020. Some Epstein fallout is well-deserved.

But there is also a degree of hysteria that has overtaken the coverage of the Epstein files. Anyone—literally anyone—who is mentioned, no matter what the context, is assumed to be an Epstein friend, and thus worthy of scorn or worse.

Scorn is fine. Professional destruction is another thing entirely. Nocera agrees:

Distinctions between the truly culpable and those who are merely bystanders are being lost in the lust to point fingers. Epstein was a terrible criminal, but not everyone he came in contact with should have their lives upended because they once knew him or Maxwell. It’s time to restore some sanity to the “Epstein fallout.”

Well, why hasn't sanity prevailed all along? Because people want to use the Epstein files in the same way others wanted to use Epstein himself – for their own ambitions and purposes. They have stoked the witch hunt in the expectation that their opponents would get strung up on the figurative gallows, and then act outraged when their own allies end up dangling instead when the trap door springs. 

However, these same elites pushing the Epstein Files also knew the truth, as Barton Swaim wrote last week at the Wall Street Journal. Epstein didn't run a sex-trafficking ring for elites; he just had money, and therefore power, and like Harvey Weinstein, knew how to leverage both:

There was, in the end, no sex-slave ring, no blackmail operation, no cameras recording dalliances for later use, no client list. Just a deeply sick and rich predator with a few enablers.

Yet there was a ring of sorts—a circle of well-connected, wealthy and politically liberal men who looked past Epstein’s taste in girls and remained on friendly terms with this charming, lavishly generous and intellectually conversant epicure. Revilers of Epstein’s pals draw a fine distinction between those who continued to associate with him after the ’08 conviction and those who didn’t. I’m not convinced that’s all-important.

They all knew—just as everybody in Hollywood knew what Harvey Weinstein was up to, claims of ignorance notwithstanding. Some of Epstein’s former pals, now protesting that their dealings with him were “limited”—word of the year—may have accepted carnal favors, though perhaps not criminal ones. Many only enjoyed the parties, business opportunities and social connections.

For America’s liberal VIPs in media, tech and politics, the moment demands self-reflection. The big-timers humiliated by association with Epstein—like the guys disgraced by MeToo allegations—almost all held conventional liberal opinions and gave lavishly to liberal causes and Democratic candidates. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.

Indeed. Epstein aspired to the progressive-elite bubbles in politics, Academia, and Hollywood. It should surprise no one that the connections we now see overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) link to those circles. The Epstein Light Grenade has allowed for that kind of transparency. But let's stick to the people with real complicity in Epstein's crimes when we impose professional death penalties, and put an end to the witch hunt. 

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