Ho, right then Moira
In the fall of 2017, shortly after the emergence of the #MeToo movement, Larry Summers, the economist who resigned as the president of Harvard University over statements he made suggesting that women were less intelligent than men, wrote to Epstein to complain that if you “hit on a few women 10 years ago” you “can’t work at a network or think tank”. Epstein also wrote multiple emails to the billionaire venture capitalist and rightwing mega-donor Peter Thiel, including one with the subject line: “that was fun, see you in 3 weeks.” In another email, Epstein offered to introduce Thiel to Woody Allen.
There is no evidence that these men participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s habitual sexual abuse of girl children. But their interactions with him suggest a kind of blithe tolerance of his presence in their midst, a seeming comfort in exchanging intimate – and sometimes lewd – exchanges with a man they must have known to have sexually exploited a child. Many of the emails to and from Epstein are marked by a tone of haughty knowingness, a kind of worldly, smug cynicism I’ve encountered before in people who think that they are smarter than everyone else. Maybe in the haughty world of billionaires and private jets, it is considered provincial to think that adults should not have sex with children. Maybe to them, morality is for the little people.
Can you hear that high horse being clambered upon?