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Last night I found an incredible archive interview with Jeffrey Epstein, conducted by the New York Times on the eve of his surrendering himself to his 2008 prison sentence. “He said he has taken steps to make sure the same thing never happens again,” the NYT relates. (Spoiler: it happened again.) “For starters, Mr Epstein has hired a full-time male masseur (the man happens to be a former Ultimate Fighting champion). He has also organised what he calls a board of directors of friends to counsel him on his behaviour.”
Dearie me. Maybe that’s what his friend Prince Andrew was doing in the famous photo of them walking in Central Park two years later, bundled up against the New York cold and an approaching tornado of sex-abuse allegations? Although, hang on, because that was the four-day house visit that Andrew said he’d made to break off contact for ever with Epstein. “I took the decision that I had to show leadership,” he boasted to Emily Maitlis, “and I had to go and tell him: that’s it.” As most people wondered of the dim-witted old sleazebucket when that Newsnight interview came out: could you not have done it on the phone instead? But then, of course he couldn’t, because this was not actually the end of contact at all. An email from a few months later has already surfaced, sent from Epstein to what the UK Financial Conduct Authority redact as a “member of the British royal family”, looking to set up a meeting between said royal and the since-disgraced former Barclays boss Jes Staley. The response from the “member of the British royal family” was: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!” Look, maybe it was Princess Anne.
The trouble with being thick and telling this many lies is that you can never remember which one you’ve told. This is certainly the situation Andrew’s former wife, Duchess Fergie, finds herself in this week, as some of her own emails to Epstein have surfaced, and have promptly detonated her 2011 statement to the Evening Standard that, “I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf. I am just so contrite I cannot say.” Fergie promised to “have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again”. We now discover it was just weeks before she was writing privately to Epstein saying she never said all the things she definitely said.
Charities are dropping her left, right and centre, but what else can they do? “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me from what you were either told or read and I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that,” Fergie fawns in one email to Epstein. “You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family. As you know, I did not, absolutely not, say the ‘P word’ about you …” Absurd to find her too prim to even type the word “paedophile”, though not to be supreme friends with someone who had literally been to prison for soliciting minors.
Epstein had given her money, of course. She says fifteen grand. Then again, she says a lot of things. The duchess’s debts were reported to be £5m at the time, because she has always spent money – other people’s money – like water. Has she claimed this longterm trait was a mental illness yet? I wouldn’t rule that out in the coming months. For now, her team are saying of these excruciating Epstein emails: “Like many people, she was taken in by his lies” – a virtual cut-and-paste of Peter Mandelson’s claim a couple of weeks ago that he regrets “being taken in by [Epstein] as many other people do”.
The more I think about this fashionable line of defence, the more bizarre I find it. If I had a wildly rich and incredibly connected friend, and they still ended up going to prison for 18 months – even with the most shit-hot rottweiler lawyers (Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr!); even under the US’s grotesque plea bargaining system – then I would simply assume this friend had done the thing they were convicted of, and most probably much worse. It’s called being realistic. Do we truly believe that stretched local Florida police forces have the time or inclination to confect whole cases, spend years of asymmetric legal wrangling trying to push them over the line, get done over by a plea deal that bumps the case back down to state level and seals it, and do it all as part of some envious conspiracy? No. No way on earth. Any conspiracy ran the other way. “This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation,” the police chief who led the probe said ruefully after the stitch-up. “This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ – and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story.’’
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I’m not saying everyone in the world should have known this about Epstein back in 2008 – so many sex cases, so little time – and there was no reason most people would even have heard of him at this stage. But any close friend of his would have been following the reports. Any of them who didn’t assume the grim reality just chose not to, out of moral cowardice, personal greed, staggeringly wilful blindness or sociopathic indifference. The end.
Epstein obviously cast things differently. In his nutty NYT interview, he “likened himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput. ‘Gulliver’s playfulness had unintended consequences,’ Mr Epstein said. ‘That is what happens with wealth. There are unexpected burdens as well as benefits.’”
Do me a favour. And yet Fergie herself has played a version of this tiny violin for decades, and will again now she has been found out, again. Her victim narrative has been surprisingly durable, even though she has helped burn through more fortunes than almost every other person on this planet will ever see: £20m chalets in Verbier; the £15m mucky mansion; houses she never even moved into; eternal luxury holidays; endless retinues of unnecessary staff … she has pulled in more than some of her charities ever will. How many of her financial empires have fallen, only for a new one to rise again when some Kazakh oligarch/sex Gulliver/other mysterious billionaire conveniently turns up in the nick of time to buy her out or bail her out? The king is still doing it, probably dreading the deeper liability of her being outside the tent. It’s unclear quite how long that will be able to hold if further emails between Prince Andrew and Epstein emerge, as seems a distinct possibility.
Whatever happens, however, this is not victimhood. I’m sure one of Epstein’s actual victims could explain the difference.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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