Jeffrey Epstein's Isle of Perpetual Pedophilia + the List It Begat
Seems like a punchline. Right up until you realize no one is laughing.
Larry was sad. The usually ebullient 40-something had wandered in and his habitual smile was now, upside down, a frown.
“She’s dead.”
“Who?”
Larry had started to explain that a woman he had known had just been found dead. Describing the circumstances of her death, he began detailing a story that seemed strangely familiar to me. She had been found in a steel barrel where she had been stuffed after having been murdered.
It hewed awfully close to a newspaper article I had just read about a sex worker who had been killed in San Francisco making this suddenly more of a delicate ask than not.
“I think I just read about her…”
“Yeah…it’s terrible,” he said in an uncharacteristic burst of what it seemed was a real, heartfelt concern for a fellow human. “I mean where else am I going to find another $50 hooker?”
And there it was all at once: our brave, old transactional world where real value is measured in actual value to me and g-ddamned your feelings.
[N]o matter whose name was on it [the list], it would tell us nothing new about power, men and fucking. That is, nothing we didn’t already know if we really thought about it.
So amidst and amid all of the anticipation of what the list of convicted and now dead pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein would tell us, it dawned on me that no matter whose name was on it, it would tell us nothing new about power, men and fucking. That is, nothing we didn’t already know if we really thought about it.
But as with most other crimes it must be asked, or at least considered, how long did they think they’d get away with this? Because the answer seems to be what it always is when sociopathic narcissists are involved: forever. Right?
However the breadth and width of sociopathic narcissists shocks in its range: Alan Dershowitz, Bill Gates, President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew et al, the list reads like a primer of men, movers and shakers, that seem to be a who’s who of those who should know better.
Something they clearly did not. And, at least in the case of Bill Gates, it clearly cost him not only his marriage but the right to post anything without me adding in a re-Tweet something/anything/everything about underage, and therefore raped, women.
And yet…there seems to be a secret sympathy afoot for these men, since their iD-fueled behavior is probably not too far off of the menu of what most men would do if they had the means and the opportunity. So we elide mention or consideration of the teenage girls, to our own detriment I believe, and are instead amused at the prospect of there being no fools like old fools who steadfastly believe that teenagers are aroused at the prospect of bedding middle aged men with zero game and probably even worse sack skills.
“What I’m asking,” he re-asked, “is: do you hustle?”
I was 16 years old and as described in my memoir, a man with a foreign service background and an Ivy League pedigree, known associate of Andy Warhol’s right hand man Bob Colacello, was bracing me, now moving beyond the previously casually worded entreaties. Straight into asking me if I’d fuck for money. Except as a 16-year-old I understood “hustle” to mean work hard. Or at the outset, given the disco age, the dance itself. That is, The Hustle.
“Yeah,” I said with a certain indignation like I was being accused of being a slacker. “I hustle.”
Dershowitz’s exculpatory statements regarding the fucking of 16 year olds…was, essentially, if you’re old enough to decide to have an abortion you should be old enough to decide whether or not sexing up Dershowitz the Elder is a good career move…
To his credit he could see I still didn’t get it, so he still had to drive the point home. Invitations to parties at Andy’s ensued. To his house. To Fire Island. To weekends skiing. To cash payments offered to drip hot wax on his body. All of which had been designed to impress someone who was open to being impressed by such cornball capitalist lures. Which I wasn’t.
Nor was I impressed that an older man took some interest in me. My relationship with my father was shit but I was not in desperate need for older male tutelage. It was just all the wrong keys for all of the wrong locks and so, for me, just a minor urban curiosity.
Which made me much luckier than Anneke Lucas. Long, horrible story much shorter, Lucas, before she was 11 years old, had been fucked by Belgian cabinet ministers, European heads of state, TV personalities, and members of a royal family. She’d had also seen other sex slaves, children, killed to guarantee her continued silence. She had also been forced to eat feces to amuse older male onlookers.
Her freedom was eventually bartered for by one of her attackers who had grown fond of her, setting her free to later in life tell all of what she knew which, very specifically was that, men are shit. Or maybe, more universally, humans were shit, since it was her mother who had sold her to them and drove her to their “parties.”
So when considering how benign the crimes of Epstein and the men who flew to Epstein’s isle of ritual abuse were — despite Dershowitz’s exculpatory statements regarding the fucking of 16 year olds which was, essentially, if you’re old enough to decide to have an abortion you should be old enough to decide whether or not sexing up Dershowitz the Elder is a good career move — you should consider how powerful these men were and how much they gambled to pursue some teenage fantasy premised on their desirability.
Crazy? Yes, precisely.
And though the Stephen Hawking story about naked midgets trying to solve complex equations on whiteboards that were mounted too high for them may (or may not) be questionable, and comical, his island attendance was not. So now in the midst of a muddle of lawsuits and attempts at some version of restorative justice Epstein, who committed “suicide” and beat the rap that way, stands as silent witness over the scrambling ministrations of men, many more powerful, wondering, like the rest of us, where it all went wrong.
A question that prompted this Substack since out of all of the degenerate things I’ve done none have involved underage “sex workers”, private jets and presidents (Trump and Clinton at last count). So where did it all go wrong?
To paraphrase Dave Chappelle’s take on Rick James, we probably never shoulda gave them fuckers money. For starters. But dirty water under a very filthy bridge. So what do we do now? I guess we’re doing it, Willy Loman style. That is, attention must be paid. So it is, and we are.
And oh yeah: fuck those dirty fuckers. May their names live on in well deserved infamy — extra bonus points for figuring out how many times Clinton went there after the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio. Answers on a postcard please — and may the slow grinding wheels of justice do to them what they did to those girls.
This is my dream. This is my nightmare.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. We need at least 50 reviews. At last count there were 40…so yeah…GET AT IT!!!
Pasolini's Salo, which I've only been willing and able to watch once, seems more and more like a documentary. Memoir bought and will review.